erhebung

An Institution

I knew The Simpsons had been around for a while, but I was still taken by surprise when I noticed a message (some­thing along the lines of: “thanks for watching; here’s to the next twenty”) at the end of a recent episode. This means, shock­ingly, that all of my students are younger than the show; and that, most dis­tress­ingly, I am now twenty years older (or there­abouts) than I was when I first saw the show in the UK.

When I was in sec­ondary school I felt it was the greatest thing ever produced for American tele­vi­sion; and later, when I was in Olympia, home of Matt Groenig’s alma mater, Ever­green College, I still felt that way; and watching it now, in 2010, a day off my 29th (damn) birthday, the feeling persists, potently. And I do hope The Simpsons con­tinues to be funny and wise long into the future, as I have come to rely on it.

(Amus­ingly, as I was writing this, ‘Way Down in the Hole’ started playing, a track that connects to another truly great tele­vi­sion series produced in the last twenty years; all of which reminds me I need to download some episodes of Homicide. On an uncon­nected note, the new season of 24 is very bad, in many ways, but some of the cast seem to be trying very hard, so I am perservering: foolish, I know.)

The Screen Goes to White

I watched Lost when it first came out, and enjoyed it, but found it frus­trat­ingly paced. I think I stopped watching it reg­u­larly some­where around the middle of the second season (or maybe it was the third). This video has con­vinced me I should probably give it another go:

“Six Minutes to go yet, Control.”

It’s time again for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I don’t think I will ever tire of this superb series, and I say that having seen it dozens of times. I’m hoping that watching it now will ease the soreness of my sore tooth. I should probably read the novel, too. Although maybe I’d be better to wait a week or so: lately I’ve been prom­ising myself I’ll read this or that novel (Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom each come to mind), while not actually getting around to devoting time to any of them. We will see.

(I just read on Wiki­pedia that Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One In, is planning on making a film adapt­a­tion of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: very inter­esting indeed. I need to watch Let the Right One In again, but this time with the English sub­titles turned on — last time Liu Bing was con­cen­trating on it the most, so we were using the Chinese subs, and so I didn’t have much of a clue as to what was happening.)

Not Always a Foreign Country

So, I’ve changed the blog a little, as I men­tioned earlier. And while I was importing the posts from the old blog to the new blog I noticed that it was possible to import posts from Live­journal accounts. Nat­ur­ally I pressed the big button and imported them, as I was curious, and now I have nearly 2000 extra posts here on erhebung. I thought it would let me import them as drafts, allowing me to tweak them or delete them before they went “live” here; but it didn’t, and now they’re all here. I’m going to delete them, gradu­ally, pulling out anything that seems interesting.

One things that seems inter­esting is this post from the 16th of February, 2009:

I’ve recently become semi-​addicted to a computer strategy\shoot-em-up game called ‘Hostile Waters’, and I must say, it’s great fun, if slightly long-​winded some­times (the missions seem to go on, and on, and on…

My cold feels slightly less bad, but I’m still sniffing and coughing a bit.

Irrit­at­ingly, I missed the first bit of West Wing on C4 tonight, after missing all of the first episode of season 3 last week… I couldn’t quite get into it, which is annoying, because I really love it at times…

Addic­tions to computer games, colds, and The West Wing. The past is not always a foreign country. Oddly enough, a day or two ago I found myself looking at the Wiki­pedia article for Hostile Waters after taking a wrong turn while searching for inform­a­tion about the film of the same name. And watching The West Wing again might not be such a bad idea.

Sleeping with Spiders

I was going to post this now, but I think instead I’ll schedule it to post while I’m sleeping:

I’m going to fall asleep listening to the audiobook of Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders. It is a nov­el­isa­tion of a Doctor Who tele­vi­sion story. The original show features Tibetan monks and a race of alien spiders. You can read more about it over on Wiki­pedia, here, or by doing a little light Googling (there is a vast amount of inform­a­tion about Doctor Who avail­able online). I don’t remember it being a scary story, but alien spiders (or were they giant alien spiders?) sound a bit scary. Hope­fully I won’t get nightmares.