This man really IS Canadian

On Sunday we were watching Stargate Atlantis , one of those sci fi shows where all the alien planets are covered in temperate forests sort of like North America and all the aliens speak English. A bunch of earthlings has set itself up on the planet known as Atlantis in an abandoned ancient city that was underwater when they came along. Anyway, while the American military dominates the colony, there's an international flavour to the team and a lot of exaggerated accents.

One of the main characters is a dorky scientist Dr Rodney McCabe played by David Hewlatt. He's quite cowardly a bit like Zachariah Smith on Lost in Space, hopeless with women - actually with most people not just women, very sure of himself technically but kind of cuddly and a genuine genius.

He's meant to be Canadian. I can't actually pick a Canadian accent and over the years have caused a great deal of offence by accusing Canadians of being American so I was idly wondering whether he really was Canadian and what, if anything, making the token Canadian such a neurotic but clever character said about the state of US-Canadian relations.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find that he is quite famous in Canada as a Canadian person.

I was less pleasantly surprised to find that the show is filmed around Vancouver which means that, not only can I not spot Canadians, I also can't spot Canada.

So now I'm wondering if including Canadian local content (not just actors) is a condition for filming dodgy telly shows in Canada. I wish we'd pushed for Australian characters in Farscape rather than condemning years of NIDA graduates to playing aliens.

I'll talk about a book again one day soon

I eventually found out what happened in the last ten minutes of The West Wing by ploughing through a 15 page recap at Television without Pity. Major anticlimax really. [Alan Alda gave the briefcase back to Jimmy Smits who claimed he wasn't maintaining a second family but was making payments to support his niece because his brother was a deadbeat and it wasn't a scandal at all and his wife knew all about it. To which I say "yeah right, why didn't Josh make a big deal about this last season when he was insisting on knowing all the background stuff?" Lousy continuity and lazy scriptwriting.]

Speaking of lousy continuity, I've almost finished Thackeray's Adventures of Philip. Our impoverished and disinherited hero is scrabbling away as a jobbing journalist and an insubordinate sub-editor. I kept wondering why he wasn't trying to get briefs because he'd been admitted to the bar three hundred pages earlier (although this was when he was rich and he'd had no intention of practising). I think old WM remembered this at the same time because lo and behold Philip's problems with his boss are solved by him getting first one brief, then another and so on.

I know these serialised novels are the Home and Aways or The Bills of their time but, even so, it wouldn't have killed him to do some rewriting before publishing the whole thing.

Absolutely, positively the last thing I'll say about the most boring election ever

So last night my Beloved and I sat down to watch The West Wing episodes that had been broadcast on Saturday night. We'd planned ahead enough to realise that the ABC was making the unusual choice of showing three hours of election coverage and THEN two thirds of its usual Saturday night programming. The Bill wasn't on but they did show part 112 of this strange documentary where a man is travelling round the world complaining about the locals making it hard for him to see their national treasures and when he does see them he gushes in an unwatchably embarrassing fashion.

I don't know if this means that New South Wales will be behind the rest of the country in the Sun Hill soap opera but worse things may have happened in the world.

According to the program guide, The West Wing was meant to start at 11:15. We set the recorder with half an hour of padding at the end just in case something went wrong.

And last night we discovered that we'd missed the last ten minutes - just when Alan Alda had a choice between giving Jimmy Smits back the briefcase containing possibly incendiary information or using it to blackmail his way into the White House. Thanks ABC. Almost as bad as something Channel Nine would do.

I simply cannot believe that there was THAT much to say about the election that they had to go forty minutes over time when it seemed to be all over by 7:01. Or the previous week.

Staying out late to watch telly

Some days I feel very idealistic. I dream about reducing my footprint on the earth even further below the Australian average than it already is because I can go weeks without using a car, I live in a flat, I buy Safe toilet paper and I'm too indecisive to buy new clothes very often. (Please bear with me. I realise this assessment is delusional and can't be fixed unless I install a worm farm on my balcony to compost household waste, persuade the cat to live off local insect life, work out how to isolate the air conditioning from my office and convert to green power even though it will double the power bills).

Other days, high faluting principles seem a bit too hard.

One of the principles I've been persuaded to adopt is not to get Pay TV (evil mind numbing commercialism, think how many books you can buy for $50 a month, we watch quite enough dross on free to air etc etc.) This means that the only ways we can see Sydney FC play when they're not at their home ground is to travel long distances to away grounds or find a pub with Foxtel. And I haven't actually kept a running tally of how much we spend on beer in the interests of saving money on pay TV.

Usually finding a pub is ok unless they don't want to swap their tellies over from the cricket or rugby or fashion TV. Usually SOMEONE will agree to show it and, if it's an important game, we can go to proper offical club screenings at the casino. At least they turn the sound up.

But last night it was all a bit hard when the team was playing in China. From 10:00pm. On a school night. When I was tired. I couldn't help but wonder why I was hanging on a bar stool when there was a perfectly good telly all on its own at home that could show me the game if we weren't so very PRINCIPLED. And it wouldn't notice if I wore pyjamas.

To change the subject entirely, last week I read a gently wonderful book called The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg. It was about the way people love poetry for different reaons and whether poets' intentions matter and how myths about poets can arise. It's also about finding love in odd places and being brave enough to change the direction of your life. I quite liked the cover (which is this picture above) because all the things on it are important to the plot (and goldfish are cute) but the colleague who lent it to me thought that it had made the book not sell very well. You also learn an awful lot about Emily Dickinson and her work.

Praise be! It's Wednesday!

So annoying to have High Definition telly and NOTHING to watch for the past two nights if you're not interested in ballroom dancing and have already seen all the Oscar frocks online and found out who won what on the news.

I did TRY to watch the red carpet special but Richard Wilkins's hair was so irritating I had to leave the room. My Beloved persisted for another ten minutes but couldn't believe that rich and famous people had to stand there and answer Mr Wilkins's asinine questions of "How long did it take you to get ready? Who made the gown? Do you know anyone here?" I told him that Richard was one of about 50 people they had to be nice to before going in where there wasn't even going to be food.

We're both rather glad we'll never have to bother with all that although the free clothes look nice.

At least there's a reasonable hour or so on the ABC tonight. Exciting inventions and nostalgic music! After that I may be scrubbing the kitchen cupboards because I've been far far too embarrassed to watch more than half of every previous episode of "Extras" and "The Worst Week of My Life".

While ignoring these shows last week, I did read part of an excellent book. It was Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. This was his first novel and published in 1999. He's been nominated for the Booker prize since then and if this pyrotechnic display is a sign of how he would develop I'm not surprised. It's terribly clever but has enough heart to make you not mind the show-offiness of nine sepearate but vaguely related narratives in different genres. Each chapter is in a different voice and place, including Japan, China, Russia, the UK, Ireland and the US. There are echoes of Mishima, that guy who wrote Sputnik Baby, Borges and various SF and thriller writers.

Mitchell seems to have entered alien Eastern cultures particularly well but then I wouldn't really know. Unfortunately the only Australian character is a young woman prone to saying "Oath" so I'm not entirely sure whether to trust him on anything else. Nevertheless, it distracted me from the glowing box for a while.

Two Lessons of the week

Apart from the unprecendented fickleness of telly programmers*, this week I've learnt:

1. If you're going to avoid the opportunism of restaurants' "Valentine's Day Specials" (where all the tables for four, six or eight are split up and separated by 10 cm and you can't help hearing other people's domestics and the menu is limited to "romantic" food involving champagne and heart-shaped desserts) by staying home and sharing the cooking of a gourmet extravangza, don't be surprised if there's an awful lot of washing up.

2. If you've laughed out loud when a colleague said they're moving house on an odd day, say Wednesday, because they reckon the stars are in a particularly favourable alignment (even though it turned out to rain and rain that day for the first time in months), expect to lose some credibility when you later blame the Mercury retrograde for the computers not working.

*Why suck us into another bad day in the life of Jack Bauer with four hours one week only to continue the story at 10:30 the following week? Why fill prime time with rubbish (I mean "Bones"???) and then put "Stargate Atlantis" on at 11:30 at night? Why waste the last series of "The West Wing" by putting episodes back to back over 11 weeks rather than one each for 22 weeks? Aargh, even with HD I'm going to be reading a lot!

Just call me Kath Day-Knight

I haven't read a book for three days.

This is because my Beloved decided he needed to upgrade our perfectly good reasonably-sized much-used telly with something marginally bigger (NOT wall sized) but with a better picture and High Definition (for the two shows a week that have this). In the evenings it now glows in the darkened livingroom with a backlight changing automatically to reflect the level of light and colours on the screen.

It's extremely hard to look away. Even when there's nothing on.

We were trying to watch the cricket last night between rain interruptions. I couldn't stop staring at the added clarity of Glenn McGrath's wrinkles. And the rain looked so good. I could see every drop!

All the ads seemed shiny and new too. I wanted to rush out and buy cars, insurance, fast food, cleaning products. I resolved to make time this week to watch A Current Affair's special reports on what THEY'RE NOT TELLING YOU about something that's probably in newspapers.

There's an episode of Kath and Kim where Kath is hypnotised by the her big screen telly. I laughed then as a watched it on my standard definition 56 cm screen. I'm not laughing now.