If there’s one sign of summer that I can’t go past, it’s the Boxing Day and New Year’s Test matches, when Australia trots out another round of punishment and humiliation, back to back, to some team chosen for the ritual sacrifice. I can just imagine all the other test playing nations gathering in a secret location to draw straws for who will go to Australia this year to get their ass handed to them on a platter. ...

You know you’ve been away from the net when… there are 450 unread items waiting for you in your RSS reader, and about 40 emails, when on average you’d get maybe 4 or 5 a day. Also when you haven’t blogged but for sporadic intervals. 2008 then! There’s nothing like looking at the year and thinking “oh crap, not another one. I was quite happy with the last one!” My memory now clearly stretches back 15, maybe 16 years, and that scares me. When you can say “when I grew up,” and there are actual differences with kids growing up now? Yerks. ...

Balls of Fury - bwahahaha! :D Love this kind of movie that doesn’t take itself seriously at all. ★★★★ Rush Hour 3 - Can you ever go wrong with a Jackie Chan movie? Makes the first two Rush Hours look like paragons of plot complexity in comparison, but it is the same old formula and it works, by and large, for a laugh at least. ★★★ You Kill Me - I’d heard practically nothing about this movie until I saw the posters for it around London, but with Ben Kingsley and Téa Leoni (I’ve had a crush on her since Bad Boys), assassins, mafia and a darkly comic atmosphere to it all… err… well, ★★☆ anyway, and it is a bit of a different story. ...

The Bastard Operator from Hell (a.k.a. BOFH): Tales from your friendly Sys Admin that go back to 1995 (!)

There’s something ethereal about a low, thick fog that somehow leaves the night sky mostly clear. The halos of the street lamps contrasted with the bright moon overhead as the chill really set in. It was the shortest day of the year, and I was walking over the Thames, thinking of how I was doing much the same thing 6 months ago on the longest day of the year, too. The contrast was a sharp one - London then seemed almost green, a neo-bohemian city which could cater to any need. ...