Deep joy There was a previous “complete” Blackadder collection a few years ago, but that only contained the four full series, omitting the essential and quite wonderful Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which has to be the most delightfully subverise and funny take on the familiar Scrooge story[1] ever seen.

So when this collection, which also includes the lovely time-travelling Back and Forth[2] and the quite rarely seen The Cavalier Years[3], I was definitely interested. But not at the original price of around £60, thank you very much. However, Amazon offered it to me for £25, which made it an essential purchase. It’s a wee bit more expensive now, but if you’re a fan of Blackadder, it’s well worth a look.

The only special feature is “Baldrick’s Video Diary”, a quite nice behind the scenes thingy.

[1] It involves the white sheep of the Blackadder family being converted to the proper ways of evil…
[2] Originally shown in the Millennium Dome
[3] A short episode for Comic Relief in 1988. I hadn’t seen it before

Oh dear. Having a day off has caused my weight to go up. Well, something like that, I suppose. And as I’m off today as well, this could be bad news…

Update: Readers who are more observant than I was on Tuesday morning will have wondered how I managed to put on such a large amount of weight in one day. I had a bit of a typo in my spreadsheet, which led to me reporting my weight as 241.8 pounds (17 stone 3.8 pounds, 109.7 kg), a wee bit more than the correct figure which is now attached to this post.

Just read this fascinating clause on a Microsoft site:

Prepaid codes cannot be consumed or activated if the user has billing violations or their payment instrument is in decline. The user must first remove any violations before utilizing a prepaid code.

What. The. Photon? I mean, seriously. What kind of idiot could confuse that nonsense with English?   Shirley[1] even the most deranged Microsoft lawyer must have noticed that the wording used there bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way actual humans whose first, second, third, or for that matter fifteenth, language is English speak or write?

This would seem to be some weird Microsoft conspiracy. The grammar checkers in Word 2008 (Mac) and Word 2003 (Windows) didn’t think there was anything at all wrong with that, which is odd because they normally get quite upset about use of the passive voice, even when it makes sense. Mutter.

For the benefit of anyone confused by the legal nonsense, this is what I think they mean:

We will not allow you to activate a prepaid code for the service if your registered credit card has been declined, or if you owe us any money.

It might need tightening up and clarifying to make sure it covers what it needs to, but I think it’s a bit better.

[1] Don’t call me Shirley, etc

It was less than a year ago that I reported a mysterious sighting: the claim that the sound of a real dinosaur had been recorded. Remarkably, the announcement, rather than being all over the news, or at the very least, the subject of a Discovery Channel special, was made on the packaging of a toy T Rex that I spotted in W H Smith in Newcastle. Well, I have now investigated further.  On a routine visit to the MetroCentre yesterday, I once again saw the strange packaging, and as this marvel of modern science was reduced to just £2, I decided to buy it in the interests of silliness. Here’s a reminder of that outrageous claim:

Real sounds!

And here’s the dinosaur:

Dinosaur seen in Gateshead!

It must be authentic – it’s got Natural History Museum logos on the box, and I’m sure they wouldn’t get involved with anything misleading. Or would they?

BBC News reports that the oddly named digital channel Dave is bringing back Red Dwarf for an Easter weekend special.[1] It’s been quite a while since the last series, which personally I thought took a bit of a wrong turn, and lost a lot of the charm of the earlier ones. It was still funny, though. Apparently the new episodes will involve the gang finally making it back to Earth, so they should be definitively final[2].

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Red Dwarf voyages back to Earth

And just to show how quick off the mark BBC News is, how they’ve got their fingers on the pulse of popular culture, and don’t miss a thing, here’s the original, official announcement from the official Red Dwarf site:

New Red Dwarf Specials Confirmed

You’ll notice that the article is dated as recently as 19 September 2008. Only four months ago, which suggests that BBC News is getting quicker to react…

[1] Looks like my V+ box will get a lot to do that weekend, as that’s when the next Doctor Who special is expected to be shown. And I’ll be working. For the whole four-day weekend.
[2] Probably