Christmassy Thing

I should have posted more over the past few days but I have been sick as dog with some cold virus seemingly everyone in the North of England went down with as well. It also didn't help just spending about 36 hours of this weekend sitting there doing little more than eating Celebrations and drinking cans either. But even I managed to be shaken into some form of stunned lucidity on Christmas Day by seeing Matt Lucas blacking up on my TV screen, running around in Stanstead Airport pretending to be a female Afro Caribbean coffee shop assistant for a mockumentary on a fly on the wall look at an airport (Come Fly With Me BBC 1.). He even did the wacky Jar Jar Binks accent too. I mean actually fucking hell! Naturally this all went down like seven pounds of dog shit in a jacuzzi with critics and viewers.

Great call guys!!!

Information for the New Year, and Transporting Stuff that Was Supposed to be on this Blog to a New One.

I did say a few weeks ago that I would be doing some reviews of several episodes of Sci Fi shows on this blog. However I just don't feel that they "fit" in here somehow. They seem out of place on a broad brush blog that devotes most of the time to currant affairs, popular pseudoscience and taking the piss out of the Daily Mail (all indeed enjoyable pastimes I might add.) I don't know where they fit in on here overall. Now I did say when I started that stuff like that would be put up, but it hasn't really happened. But then again I was just making this whole thing up on the fly, and most of the stuff I still put up is largely spur of the moment stuff that happens to tickle my fancy at a given moment. However the desire to review the episodes of a few sci fi shows close to my heart has never left me, and indeed in 2007 I had some bare bones reviews of the Star Trek spin off Deep Space 9 put to paper, as it was being shown on syndication on Virgin 1 (Channel 1 as it is now known) at the time. Indeed taking a leaf out of the expansion of Chuck Sonnenburgs superb SFDebris reviews to blip TV has spurned me on even more. There is a lot of personal enjoyment for me in mulling over shows that ran through my formative years. So I have decided to put them all together on a separate blog I intend to start up some time in the new year. It makes more sense that way, and not just on a blog seemingly established to picking holes in Peter Hitchens opinion pieces. After all there is no rule to say you can't have more than one blog on the go.

So the shows I intend to review will probably start with Star Trek Deep Space Nine (Seasons 1 to 7 concurrently in viewing order), then the Trek Movies, and Babylon 5 after that. After that, who knows? It's a lot of telly for sure. But I think something like that needs a separate, more specialist blog altogether. I'll start setting notes up at Crimbo, and put the details up on here before everyone is too pissed to be physically capable of reading anything at all as New Years Eve kicks in to gear.

Happy Days.

And Now For Something Completely Differentish

I might change tack a bit this week. There have been a few too many posts devoted to dissecting the stupid / untrue / objectionable stuff (AKA all of it) written in the Daily Mail and Express, it gets a bit depressing sometimes focusing on all the negative shite and stupidity that gets written there. Apparently this week they are griping about how the Germans are stealing our time, and gingerbread men are being banned in case they offend Muslims, and how the armchair generals would have had the old couple kidnapped by Somali pirates - rescued singlehandedly in time for tea and biscuits, as it is easy to do so when you're - oh ... not actually fucking there at the time it all kicked off!

I did mention when Northernbloke kicked off in February, that there would be reviews and similar kinds of stuff alongside the Mail bashing, but I feel this bit is neglected somewhat. I won't say it is because of any circumstances out of my control, more a case of I just forgot, or more likely I was just too lazy to be arsed writing the bloody things in the first place. But as I've been catching up on 4oD on youtube (that explains a dearth of posts) I have a few things I'd like to put up in response to the documentaries I've watched. It's like a break from having to root around the Internet to debunk a Littlejohn story about how a traffic warden bazookad a puppy with a RPG for walking over a double yellow line, the kind of stuff even Smiffy of the Bash Street Kids could instantly detect as 24 carat bullshit. So hopefully the line up should be:

1. Review of Martin Durkins "Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story"

2. Response to a youtube video about the morality of the Prime Directive on Star Trek. (hopefully not as geeky as it sounds.)

3. Review of Ben Steins "Expelled"

And the to do list involves:

1. Reviews of really bad Star Trek episodes.

2. (Possible) Review of Niall Fergusons "War of the World.", not entirely given this the green light.

How exciting.

No Sign of my Letter.

In my last post, I showed a transcript of a letter I sent to the Bolton News, responding to the idiotic comments of Arnold Harrison about youth unemployment, where he pumped out the usual spiel about most people taking unemployment as a "cushy" option to real work. The kind of stuff that any pub bore who knows naff all about the real state of unemployment, passed off as complete scientific opinion. I sent the letter (well I e-mailed it) off Saturday morning, but it hasn't been printed today, and generally rebuttals to other peoples letters in the Bolton News get printed a day or so after the offending screed. So if there is nothing tomorrow, I doubt it's going to get printed at all, which is a shame as the letters page can be a bit of a bastion of sheer pompous idiocy at times. They could do with a good grenade lobbed in there now and again. It is also a shame, because I took that long dawdling writing the damn thing, the registration time out ooji Mcdoodgey on the e-mail kicked in, deleting the bloody thing completely. Upon which I had to write it again from scratch! Bummer.

Stuff

I've been down to a three day week blog posting. I just have a fair bit of shit I don't really need, that's backlogging (in a metaphorical sense obviously) the output I'd like put on "Northernbloke.", but hopefully we'll get the utterly shameful cover up of child abuse that has recently hit headlines, that has been uncovered under the administration of the Church of Rome, Richard Littlejohns piss awful new book, a movie review and perhaps a few other things posted up.

I Deleted My Post by accident, then my shower broke.

I was supposed to post today, after being away for weekend. But I went and deleted what I was going to post, which is both a ballache, and a very silly thing to do. I was then going to have an evening wash and re-write it, when my shower started leaking water out of a crack on the ceiling of the back room, probably due to the overflow running beyond capacity and backlogging the baggage onto my dining room chair. Brilliant.

Stuff about Blog Layout.

I am in the middle of tidying up and adding a bit more meat to my blog layout. Wouldn't it be nice if it would actually do the changes I want it to make, in the way I want to make them? I don't want my labels of posts at the bottom for GODS SAKE!! This blog hates me. My computer hates me. Everybody hates me.

(Which is just a rant by a frustrated and incompetent user. When in doubt. Blame on the machine, not garbage in and garbage out.)

Introductory post for Northernbloke(TTMM) The new 3 million and twohundred and fifty eigth best thing you'll ever read on t'internet.

Hi my names Northernbloke, and this is my first ever blog posting. An event; in internet terms as epoch breaking as when Dawn off petrol at the Tesco's Extra at Sutton Coldfield tweeted that she thinks that Rod out of "Rod Jane and Freddy" on Rainbow has just left the store after buying 25 quid worth of diesel and a king sized bag of Walkers sensations. Well what is this Northenbloke and what is the point of this dowdy looking blog, you might not unreasonably ask? Well it's a general interest weblog, humourously (I hope!!) reflecting my many laymans interests in a variety of eclectic and slightly worrying topics. Posts will include my take on films and tv, especially science fiction. There will be reviews of these types of things posted as well. I will also be mocking the unending deluge of pseudoscientific and ultra religious fundamentalist bollocks that seems to leak out of every corner of the scienceyinternettysphere. My reflections on philosophy and life, and a look at current affairs in the news in a general way. Lastly I will set aside a number of posts to give an electric jab in the eye to my biggest pet hate of all, the lying, bullshitting, immoral and hateful right wing press we have in the U.K. There isn't enough bandwidth on the web I could devote to telling Paul Dacre and his bell end lackeys at the Daily Mail; what a bunch of fucking morons they are. The gutter press in this country are the uiltimate poster boys for power without responsibility, and even if I can get back at them, and thier lying tossery in this tiny way, than that's okay by me. We shall also look at the stupidest of the letters sent into the paper. The letters page of the Mail is singly the most simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious thing ever created in the entire universe.

So there we are. This is a broad topic blog, designed to be entertaining and interesting (I hope) and not bogged down with pedantry and ubercomplex facts. There's something for everyone! Except for people looking to transfer their mortgage. Or the benefits and drawbacks of a devolved bipartite Belgium, or the tensile anomolies of Boron. Or recritment tips for Al - Quieda. You get the gist.