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1,800-year-old Roman stone sarcophagi found in Newcastle. That's not far from us! I learn from this story that they're apparently building a Great North Museum in Newcastle including antiquities, a planetarium, an interactive model of Hadrian's Wall, a life-size T-Rex dinosaur skeleton, and special exhibitions from London. This could be very ( Read more... )

My birthday yielded The Absolute Sandman, Volume 3 (the kind of gorgeous object of desire that's so heavy, nicely bound and on good quality paper that you'd want to own it even if you weren't interested in the contents). Also Alice in Sunderland, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, unchillfiltered Laphroaig whisky (which I'm sampling as we speak), two ( Read more... )

It's been a fairly hectic weekend all told. By which I mean not even remotely hectic by most reasonable standards, but the kind of weekend which involves constant socialising - very pleasant, but also tiring!

On Friday we went to see Tom McRae and an ensemble of other singer-songwriters at the Carling Academy 2 in Newcastle. ( Lengthy rambling about Tom McRae )

I'm increasingly unimpressed by the docudrama as a medium for... well anything. The BBC's Ancient Rome series being a case in point. I'm very happy to have my historical movies be dodgy bastardisations of the truth with minimal relationship to reality (see: Braveheart, Gladiator, The Patriot), because their primary goal is to entertain and to ( Read more... )

Having now seen the whole first season of Rome (delivered by Mercury Couriers, delivery service to the gods) I can still heartily recommend the show. Even if your wife isn't obsessed with ancient Rome ( Read more... )

Tomorrow sees the debut of the drama series Rome on BBC2, with a first season of 11 episodes (the second season is already confirmed). It's a BBC-HBO co-production, which means that it has a lot of British actors in it but otherwise leans towards the HBO house style in every respect. Although the BBC are trailering it as if it's the next big ( Read more... )

Time for a round-up of my recent TV feasting. I'm keeping my discussion to generalities and opinions so there are no plot spoilers here beyond what you'd learn in the pilot episodes.

( Empire )

Things that annoy Iain1, Volume 1, Chapter 2:

Dear diary

2) Idiot documentaries that assume you haven't seen or retained anything before the last commerical break, and waste achingly long minutes recapping the things they explained in great detail not five minutes earlier. And they do this after every single break. It's like one of those " ( Read more... )