Hello there.

Yeah, I know: I've been blogging very little of late, for which I'd apologise if this blog were for you. It isn't, though; it's for me. So no apology, then, but an explanation.

Well, obviously, there's the whole having-a-six-month-old daughter thing, which is going swimmingly, by the way. Daisy's just weaned the last couple of weeks, and likes my cooking, as long as it's pureed. We've been watching lots of TV for very small children, and many of the parents reading this will know what I'm on about when I mention the "We are the sheep" song from Teletubbies. By the way, the BBC's new In The Night Garden makes Teletubbies look conservative, humdrum, and drab. It is completely bonkers and thoroughly excellent.

On top of that, though, I've been rather busy getting a new job, which I have now got, and which is class. My new employers do not require me to be at work till eleven if I don't feel like it, which suits me just fine. And I can get from my desk to the train platform in five minutes flat. And I no longer have to drive to work through bad traffic. And even if I do feel like driving to work now and then, I don't have to do it in the rush hour. And there's a list of perks as long as your arm. And the people are dead nice. And there's a great bagel place round the corner and Burger King is within reach. I'm happy as a pig in a really good job.

Apart from all that, I'm going through one of my periodic bored-of-the-news phases. I mean, is there really any point in blogging all this crap? Someone in a position of power has done something inefficient and/or counterproductive? Really? Well I never. Must tell the world.

And the weather's nice and I've been gardening. Life is good. But I'll try to get a bit of blogging done at some point. Promise.

I'm dead famous, me.

That nice Mr Geras does his weekly Normblog Profile thing, like the Q Questionnaire but for bloggers instead of rockstars, and this week it's me. Brilliant.

A slight problem with definitions.

At Raw ("4 the very latest in lifestyle footwear"), they repeatedly use a sentence that one does not really expect to read:

Please allow 4 weeks for delivery of all items purchased through the Art 2U service, even if you select the "Next Day" delivery option.

Right.

Safety noise.

I heard this advert on the radio the other day. I'm quoting from memory so a word or two will be out of place, sure, but I swear this is accurate:

Nnnnnnnnmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnmnnnnmnnnnnnnnnnmnnnnnn...

This is the sound of a tattoo.

...nnnnnnnnmnnnnnnnnnnnnnmmnnnnnnnmnnmnnnnnnn.

[Silence]

This is the sound of another kind of skin art.

[Silence]

Skin cancer doesn't make a noise.

There was more, but I didn't hear it. Too busy shouting "What?"

Subsidy.

An acquaintance of our family fosters children. She recently fostered a baby for a few weeks, whose mother felt she was unable to looking after him herself. The social workers evidently agreed, and entered the baby into the fostering program.

So what was the big disaster that rendered this woman incapable of looking after her own child for a few weeks and caused the state to intervene? Was she in rehab? Was her boyfriend beating her? Did she have a nervous breakdown or severe post-natal depression?

She was moving house.

A bit of a legend.

If you already know this, then I'm sure it will be utterly uninteresting, but I didn't and it was quite a surprise. Mark Snow, who very famously composed the minimal understated electronica X-Files theme, also composed the lushly orchestrated disco of the Hart To Hart theme and the brass-ridden jumping up and down of the Cagney & Lacey theme, not to mention T.J. Hooker, Crazy Like A Fox, and, er, Pearl Harbor II: Pearlmageddon. Versatile, busy, and, it would appear, quite indiscriminate.

Currently playing on the jukebox in my head.

A few days ago, I was unfortunate enough to witness the BBC children's TV show Boogiebeebies. I strongly suspect that it is a classic case of decision-making by committee. Here's what I think must have happened. (I'm being generous here. The alternative to my committee theory is simply that the program is the product of a badly warped mind.)

Firstly, some bright spark comes up with the idea of teaching kids to dance. Not a bad idea, actually: get them moving, increase their self-confidence and coordination. Good plan. I would not be at all surprised to learn that the original idea involved taking popular chart hits and showing kids how to dance to them. Maybe. Whatever the truth, there is no way on Earth that the initial concept can have been as bad as the finished product.

Because what seems to have happened at a crucial stage in production is that a tiresome git has got involved. Mere dancing to pop-type music was not good enough for them. The program needed to be educational, needed to teach children how to be good citizens, needed to push the state's latest best ideas of What The Kids Must Do. Combining this sort of thinking with popular freestyle dancing has led to something quite, quite awful. It has, in fact, led to a government information advert whose ideas are portrayed through the medium of popular dance. For kids. Amazingly, it is actually worse than that description. And it is the weirdest damned thing I have ever seen on television.

The episode that I saw and am desperately and uselessly trying to erase from my mind was clearly part of the Government's "5 a-day" (or "Why won't the bastard public eat as many vegetables as we tell them to?") scheme.

The show's format involves a very chirpy presenter showing the viewers the moves, taking them through a full routine bit by bit, then performing the whole shebang at the end of the show. He is aided by almost-as-chirpy backup kids. All with a psychedelic background, interspersed with shots illustrating the subject matter of the custom-made pop song — in this case, vegetables and the eating thereof. Mmm.

Here are some of the lyrics:

Take, take the vegetables!
Shake, shake the vegetables!

Because, you see, you shake the water off the vegetables after washing them, prior to cooking them. There is, of course, a vegetable-shaking dance move.

Then there's the line about the difficulties of choosing which ever-so-tasty vegetable to eat:

Ohhhhhh, oh aubergiiiiiine!
And yeeeeeet, I like courgeeeeeette!

The above two lines are accompanied by backdrops, first of giant aubergines, then of giant courgettes. Their respective dance moves involve slowly and lovingly stroking the aubergines upwards, then the courgettes downwards. I may continue to see this image until the day I die.

Don't get me started on Tommy Zoom.

Age concern.

When I was a kid, I used to listen to Beatles records. Even then, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, they seemed kind of old. Following on from this alarming revelation, I have realised something even more worrying.

The Theme From S-Express is older now than even the earliest Beatles records were then.

History.

Don't know if you've seen it, but there's this new commemorative 50p coin doing the rounds. It's a nice bit of graphic design, and it's to celebrate fifty years of the NHS.

Now, I'm positive I'm reading far too much into this, but look. The old 50p: Britannia: she's wearing a helmet, carrying a shield with a Union Jack on it and a rather vicious-looking and downright pointy trident, and she's got a lion. A lion! The new 50p: fifty years of the NHS.

Is that not, right there, the history of Twentieth-Century Britain?

German-Chinese cuisine.

You eat till you're full, then an hour later you're hungry for power.