Week in Shorts

Several assorted notes to clean up from last week - rather than drip-feeding them I'm going to do it in one go to skip over the old news.

Bond & Burgers: Thursday I was due to meet with Chrissi's work for Bond & burgers - as I was on a pseudo-health motivation and had eaten Chinese at lunch, I skipped the former but did join to watch Skyfall. It was rather good - a more brutal, simplistic film than many of the Bond ones are (and better for it - motivations like greed and revenge are far easier to believe than the films based around far-fetched world domination schemes). Judi Dench played a superb major role in this, which was excellently done - although the star for me was the rediscovery of the beautiful DB5 from Goldfinger. I've never seen an audience actually ooh and half-clap in appreciation before like that.

Hunted Update: Saturday saw Chrissi and I catching up with professional hat-wearer Sam Hunter in the fifth of the eight episodes. We should be halfway towards working out what's going on, but are possibly more confused than ever. Hourglass is, it transpires, a shady multi-hyper-national set of corporations trying to control the world and obtain all its riches, which proves that you can set a story entirely on the basis of left-wing conspiracy theories and add nothing else. Having expedited the plot a little by informing us of the above, MI6 section head George Ballard was then promptly murdered - as were several other people, meaning progressively fewer loose ends to tie up by the final episode.

Sam let us down by not wearing any hats this week (disappointing) - but did manage to catch up with one of her non-stop flashbacks. Blank Face Man didn't kill her last week, but instead used a sedative to get her to a hospital so that he could tell her that people were trying to kill her, a fact she was already beginning to suspect. It's still nonsense that makes very little sense, but good fun entertainment all the same.

Merlin: Chrissi and I watch this regularly as well, and it's been a long-standing favourite of ours. Originally I mocked it for its silliness, before realising it was a little more tongue in cheek than I had first noticed. While it is still enjoyable, I am getting increasingly irritated by the fact that the training of Camelot's finest knights seems to be around parrying their opponent's sword thrust so they can kick them. As befits a children's drama, noone actually gets hit with a sword and they're mostly carried for the look of the thing. It gets a little wearing - anyway, this week's episode mostly concerned Merlin moping as to whether or not he should save Mordred and whether or not his actions were fated and whether or not all his moping was in fact fated as well - and which trumps which, Mordred being fated to kill Arthur or Arthur's destiny. Merlin's Mordred-obsessed moping is getting a little wearing, in case you hadn't noticed.

Movember Admin: I mentioned on Thursday I was participating in Movember this year - I've gotten my act together and reinstated my page from last year. Please give generously, either in support of myself or in support of Chrissi in coping with my new upper lip pet.