grumpyf1

Hilarious. Yours for 99p. RIP DVD? It’s been a bad week for the shiny 120mm discs, with retailer John Lewis announcing that they are no longer going to sell the players in their stores. As far as the UK goes, the format has only managed to drag itself to it’s 20th birthday, although tech-wizards the Japanese have been spinning the video format since 1995. It was always going to have a troubled existence, with no-one ever really agreeing if it was a Digital Video Disc or a Digital Versatile Disc right from it’s earliest days, when it successfully killed off VHS tapes, in the same way it’s kid brother the CD bumped off audio cassettes. Once found nestling under virtually every TV in the country, the continuing rise of streaming video on demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, along with free-to-air catch-up, mean they’ve been gathering dust for a few years now. I can vouch for that – I moved house six months ago, plugged the DVD player in... and haven’t switched i...

"On the plus side, it'll help the paint dry quicker..." Finger firmly on the pulse of what’s happening as always, here’s some important breaking news from 79 AD. Historians, archaeologists and others of an all-things-ancient leaning have long believed that the Vesuvius eruption, which wiped out nearby Roman city Pompeii, took place on the 24th of August. Being so specific about something that happened a very long time ago is impressive stuff – they weren’t using our current calendar system at that point, and probably didn’t even have pictures of cats above the months either. The level of certainty was thanks to swanky lawyer and author Pliny the Younger, who penned (or, probably, quilled) the details in a letter to Roman historian and senator, Tacitus, covering the death his uncle, Pliny the Elder. PtE bravely sailed towards the erupting volcano to rescue people in danger but never returned, whilst PtY watched the devastation from the safety of the other side ...

Sorry, WHO are you..? Considering she fell out of an exploding TARDIS back in the spring, it’s taken the new Doctor Who a long time to crash onto our TV screens. Jodie Whittaker, taking over the role from Peter Capaldi, certainly did arrive with a bang, crashing through the roof of a train before post-regeneration befuddlement saw her surprised by her new gender and unclear what to call her own tongue. Her dramatic entrance was preceded by a handy introduction to the characters that are set to be The Doctor’s companions on her adventures as the thirteenth incarnation of the two-hearted timelord. If, like me, you were hanging on for a new version of the theme tune and opening title sequence, then it appears you’ll have to wait until this Sunday - The episode ran the full hour before bothering with tune or graphics. Happily the first outing, under the direction of new boss Chris Chibnall, soon helped you forget about the missing theme, with a twisty tale of a tooth-faced alie...

Smile! It's not real! A pensioner in Bedfordshire has attached a very realistic fake speed camera to his house. Fed up with cars speeding past his home on the A1 in Beeston, 72 year old Mike Lacey decided to do something about it, building the impressive bright yellow rig and camera out of drainpipes and guttering, and mounting them on the side of his property next to the dual-carriageway. With his pad just metres away from the busy road, and fed up that there are no speed cameras operational in the area, enterprising Mike took it upon himself to do something about it, with £40 worth of pipes, copious ingenuity, and some bright yellow paint. It seems that, irrespective of whether it makes a difference or not, the local authorities want him to remove his fake camera as they have apparently been informed by the Highways Agency that it is “distracting”. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? They’re painted bright yellow because people are meant to see them. And as Mr Lacey bui...