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Last night we watched through the final episode of “Glee”. We’ve now seen all of the first series. I’m not convinced by it to be honest – there are some aspects of the series which I think are odd, and one which I actually find quite uncomfortable.

Also note that this post will contain a few spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Glee but want to, you may want to leave this post until you have seen it.

First things first though, the positive aspects. I do like the music – although I didn’t know all the songs I felt like the ones that they did do were well done. I was quite impressed with the way they covered some of the pop songs such as Queen’s “Somebody to Love”: most of the time I think covers of iconic songs shouldn’t be done, because they rarely do the original justice. But in this instance they made the cover version different enough from the original to make it good in its own right – rather than just ripping off the genius of Queen.

I also liked their characterisation: I mentioned last time that all the characters were essentially pantomime characters. This wasn’t true for the whole series – all the characters (even Sue Sylvester) were made into more 3D characters, and were well portrayed on screen. I particularly liked the relationship between Will, Terri and Emma – I actually thought it was quite untypical for American TV, a lot of the scenes they had were quite simple, without any background music, just them with nothing else to heighten the drama.

That said… there were some aspects of Glee I didn’t like.

The main one was Sue Sylvester. Although the writers did make her character more sympathetic, she was just too pantomime for me. The show had some really nice moments, some good drama, some good humour – but Sue just was completely over the top for me. It seemed like the show was a little schizophrenic about whether to be a comedy or a drama, and it just didn’t quite work for me.

Part of the problem is, Sue was just such an unlikeable character I didn’t see how she couldn’t still have been working at the school without being fired. If I was Will Schuester, I wouldn’t have given her the time of day. If she’d started talking to me, I would have walked off!

I think part of the problem is, everyone was treating her as a ’serious’ character. I compared Glee to Green Wing in my last post, and there are similarities: it has serious moments but it also has some very random, funny moments. (Yeah, that’s about where the similarities end, but still). Alan Statham and Sue White are two examples of characters in Green Wing who are completely bizarre, and yet somehow it seems quite normal in the world they created. It doesn’t seem out of place. Sue Sylvester, on the other hand, seems out of place. Anyway, I’ve rambled on about that for long enough.

The other thing which didn’t sit right with me is the ‘adultery’ storyline (apologies for slightly dramatic language, but that’s what it is): everyone was behaving pretty badly to each other in the show – what with Terri lying to Will, Quinn and Puck lying to Finn etc, but Will’s behaviour really seemed out of order. If you’re married, falling in love with someone else isn’t something which you should really do. It’s not just when you’ve got the feeling you can’t help but do anything about it! It’s just presenting, to my mind, another flawed version of love to the world.

Still, all in all, it was quite watchable and hopefully they’ll improve things a little next season. Who knows! That’s all from me anyway…

Last Thursday it was Phil’s birthday. Her parents came up for the day (Phil had the day off), and then in the evening we all had dinner together. It was rather nice! The first of three birthday meals we’ve had over the past few days… but I’ll come onto that in a minute.

On Friday night we went to 21, as per usual. Then afterwards we headed over to the Three Horseshoes for a drink with Laura, Pete, AJ and Jen. It was cool to be able to spend time with them socially as we don’t usually have time, and we all get on well. So hopefully we’ll get to do it again soon!

On Saturday we spent the morning doing various random things in town. Then in the afternoon we went out for a walk round Castle Park with Jo and Evie. Jo had an ice cream, which I think was rather brave – although it was sunny it was still a bit chilly! We also saw the floor of the Roman house near to the Castle, which is fascinating. It’s the remains of a Roman house – just the flooring is left. It’s lasted pretty well given it’s about 1800 years old! And although we’ve been in Colchester for ages we’ve never seen it before for some strange reason. Afterwards we headed over to Ipswich to have dinner with my parents (birthday meal #2!) and enjoyed that.

Then on Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then out to the Yew Tree at Great Horkesley for lunch. We’ve been there a few times before. This time we had a “buy one main course get another free” voucher (you can get them if you sign up to the mailing list), so we had a relatively cheap and very tasty roast dinner! The service was a bit slow but they were very busy so I can forgive them for that.

Afterwards we headed out to Sunday@6, and then came back to see Jo and Evie for a bit. I played some more of Guitar Hero (Jo has a Wii, and it’s great fun. I wouldn’t like to get one though – I’d probably spend all my time on that rather than learning that actual guitar, which wouldn’t be good). And then we watched ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, which was a nice gentle way to finish the weekend.

So, there you have it! Action-packed, as it were.

This started out as a comment on Matthew’s blog post, but I then hit the word limit and decided that it probably worked better as a proper blog post!

So, if you haven’t already, go and read Matthew’s blog post, and then pretend that you’re reading a comment on his blog. (Except that here it’s not in a really tiny font which you need a magnifying glass to see ;)

Gosh, I didn’t realise you were so judgemental – how awful ;) Seriously though, I do the same kind of thing. I think driving brings out the worst in people – when I’m driving I’m irritable, short-tempered, impatient, selfish etc. Don’t really know what it is, but driving definitely has some kind of effect me on other things don’t!

I think it’s something to do with stress levels – driving is actually quite a stressful experience for me. There’s something about always having to be alert and watching out for all the other idiots on the road which raises the stress levels.

Having said all that, to mention a few of your points… there are good reasons for not doing 70mph, mainly petrol consumption. I think the ideal speed for petrol usage is around 56mph. Although I do sit around 70 on the motorway! I do go faster occasionally, mainly when overtaking (if a car is doing slightly less than what I want to do, I will speed up so I don’t hold up the cars behind me).

I also feel the need to defend my choice of car. I own a Saab 9-3 which has a 2.0 litre turbocharged engine, producing about 154bhp. It’s not exactly a monster, petrol-guzzling engine but it’s probably more than I need. The petrol consumption isn’t too bad if you get going – I reckon around 40mpg on the motorway, 30-35 otherwise. (It usually hovers around 35 on the computer thingum).

So why do I drive it then? Well, because it’s a good, reliable car which will hopefully last. Recent problems aside, Saabs are generally known for lasting a long time – apparently the guy who services my car said he services another similar 9-3 which has done over 400,000 miles!

To my mind it was more environmentally sound to buy a car that had already been made (it was second-hand), almost ten years old, but still had plenty of life left in it – even if it wasn’t quite as efficient as a smaller, more modern car. [Apparently building a car accounts for 1/3 of the carbon emissions of its lifetime!] And it is a very comfortable car, well-designed and made, which despite its age is still in very good condition.

Aaaaanyway. I pretty much agree on all the other points – a pet peeve of mine is people who drive inconsiderately. But yes, I am guilty of being judgemental when driving, and that’s not a good thing :(

I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but over the past week or so there’s been a bit of an outcry about a website called “Marital Affairs”. Well, it wasn’t actually the website itself, it was an advert for the website which as far as I can tell has been posted up nationwide.

Anyway, someone wrote a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about it, the ASA rejected the complaint, someone set up a Facebook group, etc etc. If you’ve not heard it already, you can read the background here.

Anyway, apparently the ASA have now upheld the complaint and taken the adverts down (see the Church Times article). One thing I wanted to pick up on is the ASA’s response after giving in and ordering the adverts to be taken down. They said: “people have the right to choose their own lifestyle” – which presumably is why they didn’t take the adverts down in the first place.

Now, I wouldn’t consider myself ultra-conservative or anything. But that statement strikes me as being a bit odd: Yes, people can choose their own lifestyles. But would you allow advertising that positively encouraged bad traits – such as breaking promises, letting other people down, acting selfishly? Because that’s effectively what they’re doing with the Marital Affairs advert – by allowing it they are tacitly saying, “It’s OK. Go on, have an affair. It’s your lifestyle, after all.”

My view is, when two people get married, they make a commitment to each other. If you get married in a church (specifically CofE, I think the wording is very similar in other churches) you agree to be faithful to each other for as long as you both shall live. I think those are beautiful words, but they are not just words: it’s a promise you make. If you go into marriage thinking that you’re not going to be able to keep that promise, you might as well not bother.

Adultery, or marital infidelity, whatever you want to call it, wrecks marriages. Even if the couple manage to stay together things can rarely be the same. It’s not just a broken promise, it’s actually potentially wrecking people’s lives.

And, given how the tabloids react when a famous person gets caught having an affair (for a recent example see Tiger Woods), I think most people would go one further and say that having an affair is actually an immoral action.

So, come on ASA, for goodness’ sake, what the heck are you playing at? Yes, people can choose their own lifestyles, and having an affair isn’t (and shouldn’t be) illegal, but it’s hardly advisable to promote a website which allows people to indulge in such a thing is it?

Here endeth the rant…

I was thinking the other day about artists – particularly in music – who were better off together than they were apart. For example, Lennon and McCartney. Both fine songwriters separately, but when put together they really came up with something amazing. In fact, the Beatles as a band seemed to pull together to form something more than the sum of its parts.

I once heard a story that summed it up. Paul McCartney is a relentless optimist, and I think John Lennon was very cynical. In the song “Getting Better” (from Sergeant Pepper), Paul McCartney was singing it through and got to the line “It’s getting better all the time”. John Lennon walked in, having never heard the song before, and sung “Can’t get no worse” in perfect time to it.

It got me wondering whether truly great art comes from a tension – such as the tension between Lennon and McCartney, between optimism and pessimism. As with many things in life, the truth often lies somewhere in between two extremes.

The other example I thought of was The Smiths: the songs were written by Morrissey and Jonny Marr. Neither of them, to my mind, have done anything quite as good since. Certainly I haven’t really liked Morrissey’s albums so much. Why is that? I think part of the reason is, Morrissey on his own would be too depressing – it was the genius of Jonny Marr’s guitar parts that made it listenable and generally great music.

I wondered if anyone had any other thoughts on great partnerships like that?

So, Phil and I have started watching “Glee”, which is a new American comedy. Apparently Alex and Sarah both really like it, and Alex gave us some episodes to watch through (it’s being shown on Channel 4 at the moment I think).

Anyway, as it started out I didn’t think I was going to like it, but it won me over by the end of the first episode (we’ve only watched the first two episodes, including the pilot). At the moment it seems feel-good comedy, but it seems well written and the musical numbers are very well done. I also like the fact that it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, so when the supposedly amateur high schoolers (who’ve never got anything musically right before) perform a pretty much spot-on version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, it tips a nod to the audience as if to say, “Yeah, we know, it’s just part of the show… enjoy it”.

That said, it does epitomise some of the things I don’t like about American comedy. Namely, characterisation. I don’t know, it just seems that British comedies tend to make it more subtle – you get a more realistic blend of character traits. For example, in Green Wing, even the unsympathetic characters (such as Joanna Clore, Guy Secretan, Alan Statham) you really feel for sometimes. They still have moments of genuine warmth for them.

American characters tend to be much more… well, I would say more pantomime characters. They just aren’t as complex as real life. I don’t know whether this is a difference in my perception or whether there is something objective going on. But I still have to say I prefer British comedies. Perhaps America is just a different place to Britian, and Glee really is reflecting what’s going on in America.

All I can say is, if Glee is an accurate (or at least, based on facts) depiction of what happens in American schools, I’m glad I didn’t go to school there!

This weekend was the 3rd Annual Colchester Winter Beer Festival, held at Colchester Arts Centre. We went along on Saturday afternoon, and met up wtih Alex, Matt, Tom and Alison. In general it was a very good afternoon, as always! Afterwards we headed to the Ashiana for a curry, which I managed most of even after having a few slices of the Pie of Awesomeness from Proctor’s. (The Pie of Awesomeness is a very nice pork pie which we first tried at the Fat Cat. I don’t usually like pork pies but those are … well, awesome).

Anyway. So Saturday was very enjoyable :) On Sunday we went to church in the morning (getting a lift with someone, as I shall explain in a moment), and then in the afternoon we went for a nice walk around Highwoods (through the mud!), then went round to see Jo and Evie for a bit, then watched Lark Rise to Candleford and Rhod Gilbert’s Award-Winning Mince Pie. On our new HDTV. I shall review the HDTV at a later date, suffice it to say at the moment that I am impressed with it! We haven’t yet watched any proper HD content on it (some Blu-Ray discs are coming via LoveFilm so hopefully soon…) and I will give it some more time then.

Aaaaanyway. Back to Rhod Gilbert: he has got to be one of the funniest guys I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely hilarious. The show itself was very clever, the way he drew out one story into all the different strands, and they came together quite cleverly at the end. I would recommend anyone who’s a fan of comedy to see it – you can get a good idea of what it will be like by looking up his Live at the Apollo gig from a year or two ago.

I mentioned the car. We’ve been having a few problems: on Tuesday morning I was driving into work, and noticed the car losing power. It turns out that the car hadn’t just lost power, it was basically dead (the engine pretty much cut out). Fortunately, thank God, I wasn’t going very fast at the time and was just able to coast off the A12 and pull up at the side of the road. (The fortunately is because I’d been spending the previous 20 minutes doing about 2mph, average, crawling along the A12 – I wouldn’t have had enough speed to get off the road! And if I’d been going much faster, it would have been very difficult to stop: the Saab is a heavy car and the brakes didn’t do much without being servo-assisted)

So, I pulled over and called up the AA, who arrived fairly promptly. After doing some tests the AA man decided he couldn’t fix it on the road, and so towed me to Wivenhoe. Being towed was an interesting experience – it was a fixed bar, the van in front of me did all the accelerating / braking. I just had to steer and indicate. It was strange not actually having to use any of the pedals! Anyway, we eventually got the car to the mechanic, and I worked from home that day.

The rest of the week I have been getting the bus into work (not nice – there are limited buses to Chelmsford from Colchester and it takes over an hour… although I guess I should be lucky I can get the bus at all).

It took a couple of days to diagnose exactly what was wrong with the car, but it’s apparently the ignition coil pack. That is … well, suffice it to say it’s a fairly expensive part to replace (in the order of about £400). But again, I should be grateful it wasn’t the ECU – modern ECUs are quite expensive (£1800 or so), so it could have been much worse. The part should have been delivered on Friday or Saturday, so I’m hoping that the car will be fixed today! I think the part is fairly easy to replace from what the mechanic has told me, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be back with me later today (or tomorrow).

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t mention going to 21 on Friday night: I wasn’t able to (the bus doesn’t get back to Colchester until too late), and why we didn’t go to Sunday@6 yesterday. Still, these things do happen! One of the perils of running a car – even newer cars aren’t immune from these kind of issues.

Hah. In “my room” (a/k/a the study) in our house I have a piano, two guitars, and an effects pedal. The piano has the ability to record things, and it also has the ability to pretend to be a bass. The effects pedal has a little drum machine on it. Can you see where this is going? Yep, I’ve just played four instruments simultaneously… sort of. And I did cheat on one – I wasn’t actually playing the drums. But still, it’s fantastic fun. I’ve just spent half an hour rocking out like Led Zeppelin. (Note to self: using the “Jimmy Page” setting on my effects pedal does *not* make me sound like Jimmy Page…)

It does make me think that I would quite like to be in a band though. Sunday@6 is good but it’s only really worship music at the moment. Anyone a bit crap at playing an instrument, like me, who wants to play a few random songs occasionally? ;)

Aaaanyway. Weekend antics. What did we get up to, etc. The usual. 21, shopping, church, relaxing. We watched “Burn After Reading” on Saturday night which is a typical Coen brothers film – a bit weird but quite clever and funny in places. Quite off-beat humour, if you like darker comedies you’d probably like this one.

The other news is, after rambling on about media centres and the like in my last post – and those of you who follow my Twitter feed will know this – we’ve decided to buy a new HDTV. It’s an LG 32″ Full HD model. Apparently, after we bought it the assistant told us it was what he and another one of the assistants had – and they were both really happy with it. Why he didn’t say that before I don’t know, but still, it looks pretty good. It should hopefully be delivered on Friday.

After all that talk about media centres and the like, I finally decided to go with a solid state Blu-Ray player. They had a very good deal on them, and I felt like the rest of our needs (iPlayer etc) for now can be handled by my laptop. So, not a very exciting outcome really, but there’s still scope for change!

Anyway, I think that’s all for now. Last night Matthew came and stayed with us, just for one night, because he had a meeting in Maldon this morning. It was nice to see him, albeit briefly, and he was even able to come and play drums at the Sunday@6 music rehearsal last night. Good fun.

Well, that’s about it for now, I’d better stop rambling again!

Well, I think the time has finally come to replace our aging TV. I’m not entirely sure how old it is, it was my Nan’s old TV before she died, but I’m guessing it’s around 10-15 years old.

Anyway, now seems like the right time to be buying a TV: High-Definition (HD) is becoming common, the analogue signal is going to be turned off in a few years – but, more importantly, apart from that I don’t think there are going to be any massive changes over the next few years.

Couple that with the fact that me and Phil do, in fact, watch a fair few DVDs (we’re not avid film buffs but we usually have a DVD out from LoveFilm), plus the fact that most of the TV we watch is widescreen (we usually watch on Freeview. Doctor Who etc. are now widescreen), I think we have a reasonable case for a new TV.

At this point, you might be thinking “Do you really need to justify it?” Well, yes, yes I do. That is the way I am: I may want a new TV, but I won’t actually be able to buy one until I can reasonably justify it to myself. Especially when we have a working TV, albeit a rather old one.

So… this weekend, I think we might be popping up to the shops to have a look at TVs. (And maybe even come away with one!)

But this leads me onto another issue – HD: we don’t have HD freeview at the moment (and most Freeview isn’t HD anyway, to be fair). Virgin do a V+HD box, but I’m not sure about getting cable. We also don’t have a Blu-Ray player, although our DVD player does do upscaling (it’s one of the HD-DVD ones, before HD-DVD was discontinued).

So I’ve been debating what to do: to buy a new Blu-Ray player, plus maybe a cable and V+HD subscription… OR buy a media centre PC which has a Blu-Ray drive and a TV tuner.

The advantages of a media centre PC are obvious to me: you can upgrade it, the software is easily upgradable, you can stream files from anywhere on your network, etc.

But, given my legendary indecision, I’m not so sure now: given these energy-conscious days, I don’t really want to keep the PC on all the time. I’d want to be able to only turn it on when I wanted it, and have it ready in a short space of time. Also, I want something very small and quiet.

I’ve found a good candidate for that – the ASRock ION. But, you hit the slight snag that they’re not really upgradeable: that kind of takes away one advantage. As for streaming stuff over the network… I have a laptop at the moment which has HDMI output. Streaming stuff isn’t really an issue, I can just carry my laptop down to the TV and plug it in. No probs.

So, in general I’m kind of leaning towards getting a Blu-Ray player and perhaps a V+HD box at some point in the future. But hey, this is my, all opinions subject to change… probably in the next 20 minutes.

Quick weekend update: it was pretty standard, except for Friday night. 21 was cancelled because of the snow (apparently all the schools were closed around so it made sense). Luckily for us that meant we were able to go to the Ashiana – for the second time in a week! – with Dan, Tom and Alison as Dan is moving to Cardiff. After the (very nice) meal we went back to Tom’s flat and watched some Father Ted :)

Saturday evening we watched ‘Miss Congeniality’, which is quite a fun, entertaining film even if it’s not Oscar material. On Sunday we managed to get to both church services – we were a bit worried because of the snow, but it turned out that the snow was melting pretty much the whole day.

Anyway. I wanted to mention Dollhouse. It’s an American sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon. Alex has lent us the first series on DVD and we’ve gradually been watching through it. We watched the fourth episode last night, and we’re hooked! It’s quite compelling watching – it does take a while to really get going but it seems that it’s worth the wait.