Five things that happened on the way home from the movies.

1. A man talking to himself, then upon meeting us said something we couldn’t make out. He kept muttering louder and louder, until I finally understood his message. It isn’t raining, you can put the umbrella away!
2. A clearly intoxicated man coming from the pub, who we decided to dodge, walking on the right, no, left… wait, right, I mean, left, it’s right, erm, left side of the road.
3. A busload of granmas and granpas on the city at 11PM on a Friday night. What were they doing?
4. A kebab joint with an acronym problem has a website called http://www.fivestarkgb.co.uk (emphasis mine)
5. Three teenage girls discussing the merits of the family name ”Funny” (You’d never be sad) as well as the downsides (But what about marriage? If he really loved you, he’d take the name and all the piss-taking that comes with it.)

It’s funny what you can hear if you keep quiet.

I was just watching Aliens (for me it’s still the ’80s action flick) on Channel 4 but then something went wrong. Whenever there was a muzzle flash, the frame rate fell through the roof. Practically every scene where the guns are fired was unviewable, as the picture stayed still for a long time.

The problem was obviously at the broadcaster’s end, not in our television or reception. There are two weird things about this. First of all this wasn’t your normal digital disturbance – no blocks, just missing frames, like watching a video clip with a large bitrate on a slow net connection. Second, this was a unique situation, and it hasn’t happened before or since. (A documentary about the series was broadcast right after the movie and there the same bits of footage looked okay.)

All this would suggest that there was a problem in the encoding of the movie. Perhaps I oughta email C4 and ask them for a proper explanation. Not much use whining about stuff here posthumously.