The New BullRing

When I lived in Birmingham during my student days, the Bull Ring was horrible. Now they’ve spend £500 million to make a new one. It’s certainly different from the last one, but I’m not sure I like the design of the new Selfridges.

Citizenship

Is it only me that thinks that the Government may have got something right here? As anyone who actually reads this drivel knows, I’m not one of those people who thinks that Tony can do no wrong… To me, the general concept that those people applying for a British passport should know basic English is a good one.

In other news, ?40 for a multi-region DVD player strikes me as a good deal!

BBCi

There’s a good article about the BBC at The Register.

It seems fairly balanced piece and I tend to agree with most of it. What I find most interesting is that having tried most of the commercial news websites, I come back to the BBC because it’s just better at what it does. The redesign recently made it worse, but it’s still better than the guardian’s site or the independents or sky’s!

I’m fairly ambivalent about the license fee tbh as I think that I get very good value for money. ?116 per year to pay for BBCi and Radio 4 is great value and I get BBC TV and Radio’s 1 to 3 for free should I ever wish to use them… Of course I would prefer not to have to pay for them at all! However I can see how it upsets Sky that they can’t dominate the TV arena as from what I can tell the BBC is it’s only competition. Sky would dearly love to be a monopoly for general TV just like it is for serious sports fans (especially football).

The fact that the BBC seems to have enemies in both the Tory and Labour parties strikes me as a good thing too. It’s certainly politically biased, but doesn’t suck up which is a refreshing change to the newpapers…

Lost Something?

This morning, Jon couldn’t find his mini car and so started wandering around shouting “Mini! Where are you?” over and over again! Of course the mini never answered and so Daddy was pressed into service to look for it…

So, if you’ve lost your keys, try wandering around the house shouting “Keys! Where are you?” and see what happens!