No geek
is an island

The plan last night was to watch all four hours of The 100 Greatest Cartoons on Channel 4. Due to a scheduling malfunction, I found myself watching The Top 100 Ugliest Comedians.

For anyone who didn’t stay up until midnight, here are the top 5.

5. Justin Lee Collins*
Yeah, the guy off Xfm.

4. Paul Tonkinson
Used to be on The Sunday Show if you remember that.

3. Rob Deering
Pork scratchings, anyone?

2. Simon Donald*
Like Simon Pegg but with all the bits of his face in the wrong place.

1. Rob Rouse
Irritating member of the Friday Night Project gang. He’s the raddled one at the very front.

Your mileage may vary (ugliness is in the eye of the beholder after all), but you have to imagine them dumbly singing cartoon theme tunes and making twenty-year-old comments about Cheetara for the full effect.

I am of course not say that I look great myself. That’s for other people to say.

*May not technically be a comedian, but Chicken Run isn’t technically a cartoon.

I’ve been watching Babylon 5 from the beginning on DVD and have reached the (excellent, I recall) fifth season episode The Fall of Centauri Prime. However, the Region 2 release is missing the pre-title sequence, a pretty vital component as it pays off the cliffhanger from the previous episode and sets up the following scene.

Trawling the net, I found that other people have reported this problem with the UK and Australian releases. It seems that three minutes were cut from the episode in a ham-fisted attempt to remove the “Previous on Babylon 5” sequence. No news yet of Warner making replacement discs available.

This is the second disappointment on “The Complete Fifth Season” set (aside from some of the actual episode content). The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father when originally broadcast had a specially produced Psi Corps title sequence which has been replaced by the standard titles on the Region 2 release. The titles have been remastered once for each season and then put on all the episode of that season, regardless of any variations present in the original broadcast.

Peter Black points out an article about Prince Charles on the <spit> Daily Mail website.

Meanwhile, new questions arose last night over the Queen’s faith in Prince Charles’s ability to succeed her and about her view of Mrs Parker Bowles.

According to Royal sources, she was ‘having to do a lot of deep thinking’ about Charles’s future as King - with a suggestion that the best outcome for the Monarchy would be to skip a generation and for Prince William to be crowned instead.

In the unlikely event that the Queen really is considering this, she would be proposing a massive change to our constitution. In one move the Royal Family would declare that the hereditary principle doesn’t work: that the oldest son of the monarch isn’t, after all, the best person to be king. And once that is established, what justification is there for the hereditary principle to continue at all?

Little though I want to stand up for Prince Charles, I would question the public’s support for Prince William to succeed the Queen. Prince William may not have said or done anything yet to turn the population against him, but he’s only in his early twenties. If you’d asked people when Charles was William’s age how they viewed him, he would have had a glowing report. Charles has alienated people but he has had more than fifty years to do so. For all we know, Prince Williams’ views may be even more curious than his father’s.

Thanks to a nifty package called phpGedView, I’ve been able to put my up-to-date family history research online. The new system should be easier to update than the many HTML files produced by Brother’s Keeper as I only have to upload an exported GEDCOM file.

My genealogy site is at http://www.willhowells.org.uk/gen. At present I’m using one of the provided themes. When I have some spare time (so not for a while) I’ll play with the design a bit. The phpGedView system allows me to set up users who can log in and see more detailed data - one of many features to try out in the future.

Just a bunch of stuff I’ve liked on the interweb today.

Index on Censorship reminds us the Prince Charles derided the Human Rights Act only to have his impending marriage rescued by it. His 2001 letter is on the Guardian site.

Cage of Monkeys reports possibly the last speech in the House of Commons from Labour MP Brian Sedgemore.

Have we all, individually and collectively, no shame? I suppose that once one has shown contempt for liberty by voting against it in the Lobby, it becomes easier to do it a second time and after that, a third time. Thus even Members of Parliament who claim to believe in human rights vote to destroy them.

(Via doctorvee.)

Via Metafilter, Desperate Houseflies.

Permalinks don’t semm to be working at Honeytom as I type, but he’s saved me a rant about Stephen Green and Christian Voice, those wacky funsters who think it’s OK to intimidate a cancer charity. It’s the February 24th entry and it’s worth reading to the end so you can taste the irony.

Finally, opinionated music lovers could do worse than take part in Troubled Diva’s “Which Decade is Tops for Pops?” Compare every song in the Top 10 with the corresponding from 1965, 1975, 1985 and 1995. The decade with the most votes wins. (Found via New York London Paris Munich.)

Or at least I will be when I finally lose my grip walking on the snow and ice. I don’t have great balance at the best of times but when there’s ice on the pavements I’m pretty much guaranteed to fall over. Last time was during the cold snap in December, within seconds of walking out the front door.

It’s been incredibly cold here and I still haven’t bought any gloves. The campus is looking lovely - all snowcapped hills, sugar-dusted trees and sheets of white over the grassy areas. At lunchtime yesterday, two of my colleagues built a family of snow persons. There hasn’t been a thaw and they’re still there today, albeit augmented with eyes, noses (one each) and buttons down their fronts.