Quite a bit of nudity in that episode...

... but the prize goes to Jack, who technically was naked for very, very nearly the entire hour.

Not quite as good as yesterday. Just 8/10 instead of 9/10.

Oh, and did anyone else stop to wonder whether the out-of-the-way military base was the same place that Connie used to manage in Spooks?

Via Zeldman I learn that the W3C's XHTML working group is shutting up shop at the end of the year.

What does this mean for XHTML? In terms of standards, XHTML 2.0 is dead, and the only games in town are now the XHTML 1.x family and the XHTML syntax of HTML 5.

Which in practical terms means almost nothing at all. XHTML 2 wasn't gaining any support form browsers, authors or advocates. It wasn't backwards compatible, progress was glacially slow and nobody was talking about it. It was already dead. This move is just the W3C accepting reality.

I rather like the cheeky way that Mark says it in song.

Torchwood was a bit good, wasn't it?

I spent this afternoon giving TanitaTikaram.net, one of my oldest websites, a makeover from this to this.

I decided to use WordPress and to lightly modify an existing theme rather than create my own. I still have a lot of content to migrate but so far the results are looking good. What do you think?

Nicholas Grace used to boast that he was the only Sheriff of Nottingham who ( Spoiler for 1985 and 2009 ). ( Spoiler for 2009 ) and Lara Pulver can now argue over whether they can join him in that claim.

Do you think the casting director told Clive Standen ( Spoiler for 2010? ) Though as a 4th series looks unlikely, I guess he's dodged that fate.

Wasn't Tuck incredibly active for someone who had an arrow in his shoulder at the end of last week's episode?

They shouted "loose" rather than "fire". Possibly the first historically accurate thing in the entire series (to the best of my knowledge people didn't shout "fire" until after firearms were in use).

Today was the 10th anniversary of my first date with Lettice. Back in 1999 we went to see The Matrix in Streatham. Today we had an adventure to celebrate.

First up was the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum. Did you know that it took three people to drive a chameleon?

Then we did a bit of shopping. Lettice bought beads and I bought Doctor Who books.(About Time 3 2nd edition is 500 pages long and has an end note about the Chuckle Brothers, how can you not want it?)

If you missed James May's plasticine garden at Chelsea you can now see it at the Royal Festival Hall.

Then we went on the London Eye. Yes, we live in London. Yes, we work in London tourism. Yes, it's been open for nine years. No, we hadn't been on it before.

Then there was yarn shopping. Followed by Yo! Sushi (between you and me, the County Hall branch is always nice and quiet in the evenings and only a short walk from the heaving, 45 minute wait to be seated, restaurants along the Southbank).

Anyway, I'll do a proper image post either tomorrow or on Monday, in the meantime there are pictures on Flickr.

Via Tom comes this great video for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

I wonder if the staff in my local library think I have trashy tastes as all I ever take out is comics and tv/film tie-ins. Of course I do have some trashy tastes but I'm also a snob 'cos I buy the good quality books but borrow the trash for free.

At work, we've been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I'll be buggered if I'm writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.

I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn't a contest and I can't win? Oh. Sorry.

According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.

Adam and the Ants - Stand and Deliver

I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning's spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you've only heard his old material check out the 1995 album "Wonderful").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Drill Queen - Born Depressed

Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8

Traveling Wilburys - Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad's music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we're lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation

Moxy Früvous - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you'd know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0

Cerys Matthews - Oxygen

I can't sing. I really can't sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg

Pulp - Mis-shapes

The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it's Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh - Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers - Tin Soldiers

Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you're out of luck as I can't find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI

Tanita Tikaram - And I Think Of You

The reason I'm here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn't have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA

Book

Assuming I'm going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I've never gotten around to? I think I'll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography to remind myself of home.

Luxury Item

A brewing kit. Let's see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.

Answers for the 1997 pub quiz I posted last week. ( All 50 answers... )

From tha questions in the old quiz I posted the other day, many are straightforward and a few are devious, I'm afraid that some are a little obscure or badly worded. But some I'm quite proud of, and these tend to have something in common.

Which 1985 film was directed by Steven Spielberg and featured Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey?

Easy for anyone with IMDB or Wikipedia access. But when I set this question it was aimed at undergraduates, most of whom would have been about ten when the film came out. It had been shown on telly (I remembering watching it) but all the same it wasn't likely to spring to mind for most of the participants.

Who were the last nation to win footballs world cup in their own country?

Remember that this quiz is from 1997 so France were still a year away from winning. I'm sure lots of people would get this straight away as there's a fair overlap between pub quizzers and football stat geeks. But for the rest of you, how many tournaments would you go back through before jumping to the 'obvious' wrong answer of England?

These questions are on topics - film, football - that people lots of people are interested in. They're not even about obscure niches within those topics - Steve Spielberg and the World Cup can't be called niche. But they are on the edge of, or just outside of, most people's "comfort zone". And that's what I think makes a good pub quiz question.

The new Star Trek film rocks.

Everything that mattered was right, and many of the things that didn't matter as well (they even did the sideburns).

However, I have a problem with Scotty, it's quite simply that Simon Pegg + scottish accent = Wee Hughie from The Boys and that brings to mind all sorts of very strange crossovers.

Ah, got it now. ARC team = the Doctor and Helen Cutter = Sabbath.

Bring on the Daleks, bugger can't use them, make something up quick, um, how about crystal men?

Which will make sense to the handful of other people in world who read the EDAs and watch Primeval.

So I found this file, last modified 10 June 1997, on a set of back ups and it's a pub quiz that I ran in Balliol bar. In fact considering the date I suspect that this is the night that pink_weasel first clapped eyes on me and thought "nice guy, shame about the jumper".

People on facebook and twitter said that they wanted to see the quiz, so here goes.
( Onwards to the quiz )

I don't normally do the celeb spotting thing, but I'll just point out that today I passed Vic Reeves in Forbidden Planet. And it was only two or three years ago that I sat next to him in Yo! Sushi at Victoria.

Two people who live in London cross paths twice in busy public places. Shock.