Unintelligent Design

The Tate Modern's new Turbine Hall exhibition

Interesting. I keep missing these - but this one may be the exception.

...was fun, but I'm a little bit knackered today.

My sister turned up in Coventry on Friday, which called for some sort of celebration. Inspiration failed to strike, so we settled on meeting colfish , blooddoll3 , pope_ant , mister_jack  and Kyle for beer. It seemed to work. :) 

Saturday involved a mob trip (I'm not going to list names; there were a lot of us!) to see a very special episode of Doctor Who. Well, ok, not quite... but, as noted, Love's Labour's Lost was extremely watchable, and David Tennant was nothing if not charismatic.

The set was fairly simple, based around a huge (and slightly stylised) tree at the back of the stage, which various people hid in (or behind) at various points. Costumes were more or less traditional, although a few of the songs had a more modern lilt to them...

...and there was an owl on a string. I liked the owl. There was also a man in a bear suit, but I think I preferred the owl.

Er, and Joe Dixon, playing Don Adriano De Armado, was definitely channeling Inigo Montoya... :-)

It was good. Not sure what I think of the play itself - I like it, and I do actually like the ending, but it's not a play I know well and I'm still puzzling bits of it out in my head. Hmm.

There was a certain amount of fun with transport arrangements - who was driving where, who was parking where etc. This wasn't helped by the mop fair, or by our usual meeting point being disrupted by the building works... but it all worked out in the end.

I definitely need a better ticket-distribution plan before the trip to see Hamlet, though...

There's been a lot of talk about the FSCS and the government's promise to protect savings if any UK banks collapse. Personally, I'm hoping that this is all rather hypothetical.

However, if you're one of the people who's seriously concerned about such things, there are a couple of clauses you might want to be aware of - specifically, amounts owed to the bank are considered before any compensation is paid.

This seems quite sensible for credit cards, loans etc. However, it also means that if you have savings and mortgage with the same bank, any savings will be counted against your mortgage debt, not simply returned under the guarantee...

Four Lions - "terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams"

I'll be very interested to see what he does with this, assuming that the summary here is genuine. I find a lot of his stuff uncomfortable viewing, but he does tend to be brutally (or, at least, plausibly...) accurate when he skewers things...

Sometimes, even on cold grey Mondays, life is good.

BBC - US Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has accused the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, of associating with terrorists

 Sarah Palin seems to be nicknamed 'Sarah Parrot' by some commentators - something which mostly came to my attention via this cartoon.

That then makes me think back to 'Nobody expects the Alaskan Politician!" Palin jokes and wonder... if she starts to struggle during the campaign, how long will it be 'til we see the various  nailed to her perch jokes starting?

Tomorrow is Friday.

I have a plan, cooked up after consulting the likes of sobrique  and mister_jack. It involves visiting a pub, drinking a certain amount of alcohol and talking about... er... stuff, mostly.

The pub will be the Whitefriars, because we're predictable. The ETA is less predictable, as some of us are grabbing a curry first.

(...and now, sleep)

Hmm. Quietly happy with that, I think.

I'd forgotten that I actually enjoy driving. Possibly because I didn't, the first time around. :-)

Bradford & Bingley is to be nationalised - "the Treasury will almost instantaneously sell to a bank or a number of banks".

According to the BBC, this means that every building society floated on the stock market in the past two decades will have collapsed or been sold to a conventional bank. Something about that fact seems a little bit depressing.