If There’s Anything I Can Do

John Lewis are using the Beatles song “From Me To You” in their Christmas adverts. The cover of a song is a simple piano and vocal, which slowly adds more singers as the ad goes on. It’s a great song, so a big well done to John Lewis for bringing that song back onto rotation on my iPod! An alarming thing to note though, is that this cover is the FIRST time a Beatles song has been used to advertise anything on British television!! These songs are over 40 years old, it’s amazing that it’s taken them so long to feature on adverts!

LittleBigPlanet

I’ve overseen a renaissance in my Playstation 3 these past few weeks. It’s a machine that I had but used rarely, only turning on every few days to kill some bad guys on GTA IV, as fun as that always is, there are tons more games that are only now coming down to respectable prices. So i got a few pre-owned games from Game, before getting the latest Pro Evolution Soccer, and finally i bought the genius that is Little Big Planet.

Little Big Planet is hard to describe. It’s a 2D platformer with 3D graphics, with realistic use of fabrics (such as cardboard, sponge, glass) and realistic physics. You play as ‘Sackboy’, a little knitted character that is as customisable as the rest of the game. The genius of the game lies in the customization, which lets you create your own levels from scratch, then upload them for the rest of the world to try. Of course, creating a level takes a great deal of time, and anything I get round to doing will be poor in comparison, but its good to know it’s all there for me to tinker with as and when. And the second masterstroke of this game is the online function.

I’ve played games online, and as fun as they are, nothing has pleased me more than playing Little Big Planet online. Whereas in the story mode, you make your way through the game on your tod, online you have the help of up to three more players. Of course, it isn’t to be taken seriously and a good few games on LBP i’ve played in these last few days have all gone a bit silly. This is helped by the Playstation pad’s motion control helping move your Sackboy, so you can move its arms or swing its hips, or indeed hit one of the three other players you’re playing with. And due to its anarchic nature, players invariably die in a variety of silly ways, all of which have made me laugh. In fact (as I now have a camera/microphone) people playing in the same online game as me must be a bit tired of my constant chuckling! But to be honest, i can’t remember a game that has made me laugh so much!

What hasn’t been making me laugh is Argos and Maplin Electronics being shit. Not so much them, more the products they sold me yesterday. I bought a Satellite extension cable, as my television is now the opposite side of the room from the cable, and after setting it all up i find that it doesn’t come with a ‘coupler’, the thing that ties the two cables together! Closer inspection of the Argos catalogue reveals that it should indeed come with one, but rather than fart about in the Customer Services line at Argos, I’ll just get one from Wilkinsons, or indeed any hardware store i find!

And on to Maplins, they were selling a USB Wifi dongle thingy for £12.99. I need one for my PC now that my PS3 is hogging the other wired connection, so at £13 i thought this cheap dongle would do fine! I really should of guessed that it’d go wrong at some point and indeed it did. It installed but wouldn’t recognise me plugging it in any USB port, so off it goes back to the shop today. A side issue of all this is that I’ve found out the DVD drive in my PC doesn’t work anymore, so that’s 40 quid more i need to shell out!!

But it’s not all doom and gloom, England beat Germany yesterday, the German Christmas market opened in Nottingham and of course Little Big Planet is just waiting to be put in the PS3 again!

Go-Bama

Well done to the USA for not chickening out and for voting in Barack Obama. In my lifetime, i don’t recall seeing a more popular president. I can see how a lot of people how taken it upon themselves to believe that Obama is some kind of messiah, hence some of the more hysterical reactions to his election yesterday, but then the situation worldwide regarding the economy, job losses etc. is so hopeless it’s easier to understand why they’ve gone for Obama. I know I’d have voted for him if i was an American.

BUT, i fear anymore news coverage of this election would amount to complete overkill, and make everyone bored and irritated at the media praise of Obama. Which is a shame, because to coin a cliche, this really is a momentous occasion. I just believe that the media (papers, Internet, television) have had these reports stacked away for when Obama wins. For example, I’ve just watched Trevor McDonald on News at Ten talk to various black people throughout the US about their experiences of racism and segregation throughout the years. A news report he obviously did, or had planned, days earlier. Newscasters and Journalists are so keen to report on this ‘day in history’ that they’re overdoing it.

Of course, i don’t expect the coverage of the election to abate, so the best course of action is to not watch the news for the next few days, nor buy any papers to avoid the Obama overkill!

Owned!

I don’t much like F1, but won’t begrudge Lewis Hamilton his world title. Plus yesterdays events threw up one of the television moments of the year, as Ferrari realise they haven’t won…!

Something Nicer

I could go on about the whole Russell Brand/Jonathon Ross affair, but it’s said better elsewhere. The Daily Mail is truly a vile newspaper, whipping up a controversy over something minor. Did the Daily Mail readers realise Andrew Sach’s granddaughter was a burlesque dancer before they phoned up ofcom in ‘complete outrage’?

It’s all a load of bollocks, perhaps proof of how obsessed with celebrity we are in this country. That newspapers and political party leaders can give so much time to this non-story is incredible. US election? crisis in Congo? No! ‘Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross being naughty on Radio 2 – Ten page special inside!’. The Daily Mail has an excellent sports section, but other than that – it’s chip paper!

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I’ve been suffering this week. The dreaded common cold has struck me down! It’s the niggly things that really get me, the constant blocked nose, the tickly cough… My asthma seems to come into its own when i’m ill! I tried some of that decongestant spray to make me breathe easy, but all it succeeds in doing is making my nostrils raw and sensitive. Most uncomfortable!

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I had intended to write a blog style holiday diary about my Malta trip, but once again my laziness took over. I get to the point where I get bored – plus the feeling that people reading this blog don’t much care about how i spent my week! I enjoyed it immensely, a nice change and a different way of life, but i’ve had it before with other people. They say they aren’t bored by your holiday stories but they blatantly are! 

Most people i’ve spoken to about Malta have all said it’s a lovely place to go to, and that’s what I’ll say too. No more, no less!

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Forest played Derby on the telly earlier. I haven’t been to the City Ground this season so far (what a surprise!) so any televisual coverage of my football team is well received here. It was not a great game. Nottingham Forest and Derby County are two average Championship sides. A glimpse at the Man City – Bolton game on afterwards was enough to realise that neither side in this East Midlands derby were no great shakes. Derby maybe edged it, but a draw was a fair result. The referee was abysmal though, the same guy who gave ‘the goal that never was‘ in the Reading-Watford game was at it again. Disallowing an Earnshaw goal, sending off McGugan when a yellow card would have sufficed, and the craziness of the last few minutes…! Well, how this guy justified not giving Derby’s last two goals i’ll never know!

Of course, i’m delighted we came away with a point. We were due some luck after the season we’ve had so far and we may have used it all up here. And also a big well done to Lee Camp, the former Derby player who saved the penalty as well as making a string of excellent saves throughout the match!