Friday, November 24, 2006

The sinister bathrooms

More X-Files-style adventures in my dreams recently. This episode –
THE BATHROOMS OF DEATH.

(This dream may have occurred because I recently changed the hot tap on our bathroom sink. Also, the night before the adventure we went to a meal where there was a certain amount of talking about supernatural drama shows through the ages).

A shadowy group of state actors posing as water company officials are planning to poison troublesome people by pumping some kind of deadly water into their showers. But they have been found out by me and my crime fighting team (who I can’t remember, except that Penny was doing all the driving).

We have tracked them to their base after some car chases through the city (well done Pen). Their base appears to be a normal suburban house but with a gigantic globe of the world in the front garden. This globe also has sculpted human features on it.

We crash into the house kicking doors down and that kind of thing. We catch them red handed, playing about with bathroom fittings. I single out the ringleader, a business-suited woman near a shower cubicle. A superb flying kick from me knocks her into the shower and I turn the water on. How ironic, your own doomsday weapon used on yourself, mwa ha ha. The rest of the baddies seem to lose the will to fight, so we start wrapping things up and taking them outside.

One of my team suggests going out the back way to avoid the public gaze. He opens the side door and lets me through first. But no-one follows and the door slams behind me. It’s dark. My eyes adjust, I am in a deserted corridor. I look up, the ceiling is covered in shower heads. There’s no escape for me as the water starts spraying out. NOOOOO!!! Betrayed by my own team! They’ll pay for this when I miraculously come back to life in another dream, the fools!!

Lost - Series Three

Series Three of Lost has just started showing on Sky One. After the revelations and cataclysmic events at the end of Series Two, I was really looking forward to the new series.

I have to say that the first two episodes were a bit disappointing. Apart from a seemingly endless game of capturing and escaping ping-pong, and a flimsy premise to show Kate getting sweaty in an even flimsier sundress, nothing much seemed to happen. I know some people don’t like Lost because things take a long time to get explained and even then don’t seem to make sense. Even so, the story (bizarre as it is) always progressed and there was always lots of things happening. That just wasn’t the case with these episodes.

I have no problem with the absurd side of Lost, in fact I rather like it. It reminds me of Twin Peaks which also made little sense, but I still found totally absorbing.

I am hoping it will pick up the pace soon – in fact I am sure it will. I’m not ready to kick my addiction just yet.

P.S. One strange continuity thing at the start of episode one – when the woman puts on the CD, I immediately recognised the inlay as “Speaking In Tongues” by Talking Heads. So why does “Downtown” by Petula Clark start playing?? Sorry, that was extremely geeky. It doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does…. This is Lost after all!

London Underground notices

On Monday morning I don’t know what was worse - the actual delays on the Underground, or the pain of having to read the information about the delays. They had managed three spelling errors in one sentence. The message read:

DUE TO OVERUNNING ENGINEERING WORK’S, THEIR IS NO CITY LINE SERVICE FROM WIMBLEDON

Now I know I am pedantic about this sort of thing, but that’s just ridiculous. Although I'm not sure it takes the crown from another London Underground message I saw a while ago on the Central Line, which remains the worst public information sentence I have ever seen. It was a warning against buying tickets from touts:

BE AWARE OF BUYING TRAVEL CARDS OTHER THAN A TICKET WINDOW

It looks innocent enough at first glance but read it carefully. The deeper you go semantically, the worse it hurts.