Review who: Planet of the dead.

Let me start by admitting that I've not done one of these in quite a while, from looking back at the logs it appears to have been July 2007 since the last proper one was done, the following one was a series round up in 2008.

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Episode: Planet of the dead Rating: 9/10
After so long without a good episode I was glad to see this program back on the air. After last year, I'd lost intrest in it a bit, but somehow this episode just drew me in. Admittedly I was Cardiff bay sightspotting, but that was enough for me. I also have a habbit of trying to spot the flaws in the plot/scenery, not that I'm very good at it. As in; Why did the bus go over a bridge and then through a tunnel?
In the episode the faults that I could see were: theres no such thing as the international gallery, only the childrens international gallery, which is on the north side of the thames; There is no route 200 to victoria; if the international gallery was on the north side of the thames, why did the bus go over a bridge, or through a tunnel at all? if it was on the south of the thames why did it cross the river twice; no london tunnels are that posh, as Clarkson puts it, British tunnels look like public conviences.
Otherwise I thought the episode went very well, in that it didn't set up a magical deus ex machina, or anykind of world in appocolipse event. But by far the best character in the episode has to be Lee Evans' Malcom character, naming a unit of something(I wasn't really paying that much attention) Malcom after himself, or Bearnard.

So much so, that I am actually looking forward to the next episode titled: The Water of Mars.

The latest review - Train companies

In typical fashion of lateness, I'm going to review the train companies of Britain. Yes whilst everyone else is joining Twitter, I'm going to return to the good old British blog.

My review of Wrexham & Shropshire, Vs. everyone else.

Now I'll admit that Wrexham & Shropshire (WSMR for short) doesn't exactly have a high service frequency, or fast Journey times, compared to Virgin that is - every hour from Chester. The frequency of trains is not on a per hour basis that other operators have, but a per day basis, that is they run three from Wrexham a day, four from Shrewsbury. But fortunately on a weekday, the trains go at good times, ie earlyish in the morning, and come back late at night. Which for me is a big plus, as I don't like spending the night in London. 

On a weekend is a different matter, I would quite like Journey times that allow me to go shopping down south on a Saturday, without the need to spend two days in a hotel(hotels don't let you stay one night on a Saturday night in London), that costs so bloody much to stay over.

Next their Journey times are about four hours, which is comparable to driving, from the nearby Chester it's just over two hours. Which is Okay seeing as the trains are far more comfortable than those of Virgin, I like my legroom, which Virgin think people don't need. Also Virgin offer mobile/laptop charging points, which WSMR should be offering soon. Onboard there's room to walk about without brushing past people all the time, which is nice when you want a wonder up and down the train to have a look out of a different window. 

There is also a full old school style cafe thing onboard the train instead of just a trolly or crappy little shop, which means that your not limited to hot drinks or microwaved things, so you can get a full cooked meal, or just chips if you wanted(not that I had chips, although I imagine they can do them). Also they have toilet doors with just a lock on them. Now I know there not disabled compatible, but there's something more comforting about a door with a lock on them, rather than a choice of three buttons you have to hope has locked the toilet door.

Lastly all the seats I saw had a big table joined to them - that is four chairs round a table - instead of the cramped airline drop-down table style, so that means if you like to spread yourself out, with a book, something to write, even drawing pictures, you can, as there's a table at every seat.

Recently I've also travelled with Arriva, Mersey rail, and Virgin, all of which are worse that WSMR, for the following reasons, Arriva have old trains that seem to go at 4 mph everywhere, and have the worlds dirtiest, ugly toilets. Mersey rail don't run to enough places, or at a high enough frequency, and have no toilets. And finally virgin trains  randomly breakdown whenever you get on them, there hugely expensive, and take two hours longer to get to CREWE than you expect because they stop at Milton Keynes for almost a hour in the dark. 

Then they tell you you've missed the last train to Wrexham unless you wait for an hour at CREWE and Shrewsbury in the cold and dark, so instead you want to got to Chester so need to change at Warrington and get the bus. Not that I'm bitter, and will never travel by Virgin and the supposedly tilting trains again, of course they tilt, they make you look like your drunk because of it!

STOP PRESS - BREAKING NEWS - STOP PRESS

Just this week Wrexham and Shropshire have announced that they are axing peak train tickets, and only ever charging for off peak tickets on their services.

Buy it, Buy it, Buy it

It's for a good cause, the NSPCC. Although many of you out there think I'm heartless, and hate kids, that's not true. I just hate those who end up where I'm going(supermarket etc.)

So Geraldine (Peter Kay) has released a new single, Once upon a Christmas song, and I really want it to get to number one, not just because it's for the good of kids, but so to make Simon Cowell without a Christmas number one. 

Actually I'll now admit two things, One I've just bought the CD from HMV, and two, I don't think there's much chance of it getting to number one, but lets try it.

So go out and buy it.

Buy it

Buy it.

Hypnotoad says BUY IT!

The real effect of the pre budget

Let me start by pointing out I am blatantly no financial advisor, expert, or anything remotely knowledgeable in this particular field. These are simply a set of figures that I have come up with on the back of a laptop. I am only going to focus on the reduction in VAT, which is complex enough on its own.

Lets start with how VAT is a part of prices; say a item costs to make, including labour, material costs, the lot, is one pound, With VAT at 17.5% for anyone to buy it, it would now cost £1.17.5 now nothing ever costs half a pence so it now would cost £1.18, hey lets all make a little profit.

That means that the cost of anything is always 117.5% of which 100% goes to the supplier, 17.5% goes to the government.

Now lets see how the reduction will help consumers; Now if I want to buy a chocolate bar that costs 69p this would now cost 68p Now not a big saving. You'd have to buy 100 of them to notice enough to get more. And what business will cut the price, what with all the headaches of changing prices and new ways of figuring out how much you own the government. 

Maybe a bigger example would help, say you purchase a DVD which currently costs around £20, of which a little under three pound is tax, so with the reduction in VAT would now cost £19.57 Still not really worth it is it? Who is going to notice an extra 43 pence in their pocket? I know I wouldn't. By coincidence, if there was no increase to fuel duty, It'd cost me £1.02 less to fill my car up with diesel, any guesses how much it currently costs to fill my car up?

What about a huge example? If I were to buy a new car that costs £10,000, Alone with no VAT costs £8511 with the new rate of VAT this would cost £9787 a saving of £213. Quite rubbish really. Now these aren't enough to make any difference to me whatsoever.

What if these savings don't get passed on? I'm quite a pessimist, as a result I think businesses will not pass on the savings, lets look at some examples of small, medium, and large shops. A small daily takings could be about £1,000, could save them £21, not much really, but this is where it starts to get interesting. A medium shop could take £25,000 saving just under £532. Now the large shop, the Tesco, asda, etc that take a million a day could save a whopping £21,276.

Bearing in mind these are DAILY figures, a small shop could employ someone for an extra three to four hours a day, the Medium store could take on 23 extra staff four four hours each. The huge store could take on an extra 928 staff for four hours a day.

Now each of these extra jobs would in turn have their money spent in various stores, shops etc. Now if there are just 100 of the huge stores across the country, that is potentially 93,000 new jobs that could be created, in just a single day! which surely is bucking the trend of the recession.

All in all, this move alone could, if used correctly by those with the larger stores, they could immediately turn this recession into the largest boom the country has ever seen. Lets just hope those with the money don't get too greedy.

The rolling TV entertainment machine is back!!

Well it's that time of year again, whereby there is far too much TV available to watch, than can be watched, that and all the good DVDs are out just in time for Christmas. So lets have a quick sneak peek at what I like to watch of an evening, In the form of a list. I like lists.

• Top gear
• X Factor
• TV Burp
• You've been framed
• Charlie Brooker's screenwipe
• Lead balloon (I only just found out)
• Stephen Fry in america
• Heroes
• PMQs
• Question time
• Star wars movies
• The gadget show
• The Colbert report

I'm sure the list will go on.

The X formula

Well once again that time of year is upon us, that's right it's time for the x factor finals, i.e. the live shows. Only in recent years, the formula for each show has become exposed. Perhaps if I explain it to you ...

Each show starts off with a dramatic clip of 2 seconds of last weeks show, inter-cut with each contestants in their own words, "last week was the hardest week so far, only i hope Simon will be nice to me this week". Of course there has to be one contestant that has a bad throat, or some other miniscule scale disaster. "OMG OMG OMG, I didn't notice the bottom step of the stairs and slightly bruised my ankle I hope I can sing this week". I'm like "What the fuck,  you could be in a wheelchair and you could still sing".

After the initial clip has been shown we then have to have a advert break, it's like 120 seconds since the titles were on but protect us Dermot has to let us go for a wee.

After that we go into the songs, which have to be preceded by a clip of the singer complaining about how much more difficult this theme is compared to the last theme. Then we have to see them doing something that isn't related to singing whatsoever, like going paint-balling, jumping out of a plane or seeing some shit celeb who wants their product to sell. Again an overly dramatic visual sequence turning most people in their homes watching into epileptics. 

Now depending on who the judge is they give a different look, if it's Louis, then he's happy, clapping, otherwise he's all grumpy with his arms folded, if it's Cheryl then she'll sit there with her teeth sticking out so far they almost knock people off the stage, she's also squinting, almost to the point that she looks like she's doing a china-man impression, when the camera is on her, she'll squint even more, so much that she looks retarded.

After the songs finished each judge will give some crazy comment such as:

"That was so bad you killed me, but it continued being so bad, I had to rise from the dead just to tell you how shit it was"

"That was so awesome, if you shat whilst singing that you'd sell the most copies of a record ever in the whole universe, in fact it was so good that I cum in my pants, then licked it off, as it was soooo good."

Or at least somewhere in between. Of course if it was bad then the audience would think it was the best song ever. Seriously, I could fart to a tune, and the whole audience would cum in their pants, at the same freaking time!!

Of course that has to be repeated several times until they've all sang. Every other song has to be interrupted by an advert though.

After all acts have sung then they open the phone lines, which rape you for your money. Of course nobody can remember the first guy singing, so we have to see a 7 second clip of each act.

After all that we go to the results show where there's always only just 0.5 votes in it, then in no particular order we go through those that haven't lost. Nothing in the world follows x factor in this fashion, I mean could you imagine Gordon Brown reading out a list of countries that we don't want to invade, "In no particular order" it'd be like:

"In no particular order, France ..... Egypt ..... America ..... Germany ..... India .... remember this is in no particular order .... Canada etc."

Well frigg faces, we want to know the order because we paid to vote in your stupid program, so you at least owe us the right to know how well our favourite has come.

After all but two are safe we have the sing off. Again more out of tune singing whist the audience cums. Then the judges decide. But even if their act is shit, they still put them through. Why? if their going out you don't need to explain to them. Of course if the judge is neutral then they have to say, in their own words, following a groan, which sounds quite errotic:

"Ohh this is the hardest job in the whole world, never mind those who eat shit for a living so that they have somewhere to shit, this is hard"

Of course it's not, it's just a case of picking one of two names, it's easier than tossing a coin.

After all that the loosing contestant starts crying, why? it's not like they lost anything, they just didn't win. Do I cry every time I don't win the lottery? No I don't, even though I've lost several pounds.

Now take that repeat the formula for 12 weeks up until Christmas, and you have 10 million viewers in the bag every week.

James bored strikes again.

Oh yes, it's been two years or so since the last bond film, that means that Sony pictures plc has to knock out another pile of tripe just to prevent the British economy from falling out the crapper.

Again uncle ugly (Daniel Craig) is back, with no gadgets, apart from his stupidly unrealistic phone. That managed to do everything in the film, except automatically arrest the baddies. Not that it would of course, because the entire cast apart from bond and m were baddies at some point. If I didn't know better then I would say the plot had been written on toilet paper about 6 minutes before filming was due to commence. 

The whole film had been shot in a combination of headache filters from a short distance and wobbly-vision. That is when you could see a shot, as the whole thing had edits / cuts every 1.5 seconds, so you can't see the plot being played out on screen at any point because it takes 1 second for your eyes to focus on the screen after every shot. Which wouldn't be too bad if it was between camera angles that swapped over and over again, but no, the same angle wasn't used twice in the entire film. At one point I even closed my eyes, so I could concentrate on the dialogue, but couldn't as Craig only ever whispers his lines.

Before casino royal, they announced that there'd be no gadgets, and no Q, that's a mistake as it's the gadgets that make the film. Which they almost lived up to, except a phone that has features that would make sci-fi writers think "WHAAAAAAT????" because it had:

Ability to photograph entire face, even when the subject is looking away from you.

Mapping features FROM INSIDE A CAR!!

Ability to send and receive pictures whilst on the phone.

Gave a visual trace when someone calls.

Of course that is nothing compared to the stupid MI6 video wall, touch table and follow the phone-call, which doesn't interact with other people unless you want them to.

The major plot hole just stumped me right the way through, as how did bond find out about the apartment where the briefcase was, and then, how did the woman know to let the man with a briefcase into her car, who then was going to kill her?

My major grips though were why a BRITISH secret agent never stepped foot in Britain for the whole film. That and the whole  FORD, FORD, FORD thing. hmm, bond driving  a astin, owned by FORD, a land rover owned by FORD, the new FORD KA, a FORD big black fucker.

Seriously I recomend NOT watching this heap of shite: 2/10 just for keeping me inside.