On the way to pick up JoJo last night, the District Line train I was on got into Victoria at 5:17. Hmm, the train from Victoria is at 5:19, and two minutes isn't enough time to get from the tube to the platform at the main station.

OK, stay on the train and get the 5:35 from Blackfriars (when using public transport in London, always have at least two options). It should get to Blackfriars by 5:30, and I can get from tube to platform there in a minute.

Tube train leaves Victoria. Stops at St James Park. Some people get off, others get on. Train leaves SJP. Stops at Westminster. People get off, including the man with no front teeth standing in front of me, and someone sitting beside me. Others get on.

"Is this your bag?"

Oh no, the person beside me had left her bag – something bland, size of a large handbag.

Of course, someone had to pick the 'push the emergency button' option, and so after five minutes faff, I got off this train and onto one going back to Victoria to minimise how late I'd be.

Sex leads to 200-300 injuries to pets in Sweden each year, say vets. (Link to the story on AVN.com broken.)

"Mandy Rice-Davies applies", from one of the quotes of the Profumo affair in Britain in the 1950s.

When it was put to her that someone had denied her allegations, MR-D said, "He would, wouldn't he?"

For as long as I can remember, it's been a common response on cix to, for example, Geoff Hoon denying anything was his fault, ie total disbelief of what someone's said. But it can also be used when pointing out someone has a (often undeclared) interest in the outcome of something they're disputing.

[cixen: it'd be interesting to do a search to see who said it first and where they got it from.]

Clearly, it's not that common an acronym outside 🙂

While we're mentioning Hoon, anyone want to bet he has the full confidence of Tony Blair in a fortnight's time?

When I wanted to make a particular point to someone here, what leapt into my head was 'MRDA'.

Being good, I checked google to see if it would be easy to look up. 6,810 hits, but none of the top hundred were using it in the sense in which I know it. And only three hits for it and its simplest explanation.

So…

I was looking on imdb for some things I remember from long ago and would like to see again.

There's The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It, a one-off John Cleese TV special done in 1977, two years after Fawlty Towers. Everyone at school saw it. I don't remember it ever having been shown on UK TV again. In part, it's because some of the humour is 'dated' – let's say you could imagine Kilroy co-writing some of the jokes. Turns out it's on DVD in the US. Hmm.

Then there's Death Warmed Up, possibly the first splatter horror film to come from New Zealand. Fab and an undoubted influence on Peter Jackson's early (and more fun) career. Saw it at the London Film Festival that year. I don't think I've ever seen it on TV. Turns out it's on DVD here. Hmm.

Looking for it – all I could remember was the general year and the country of origin – I was browsing horror films when I saw an Italian rip-off ("We can make Zombie 2, but never Zombie 1…") film with a rating of 3.5. "Gosh, I thought, just how bad does a film have be to get that low a rating?"

I nearly fell over when I saw that the third one I was looking for, 1977 Canadian film Skip Tracer has a rating of… 3.5

My ghod! I'm another one who saw this one on TV in the 80s – BBC2 had Canadian movie seasons almost every year.

OK, the acting was ok rather than great and its low budget sometimes showed, but twenty years on, I can still remember how good the script was. If you were looking to remake a film, this would be one to go for. Not available on VHS or DVD anywhere. Disgraceful.

The writer/director went on to do… Friday the 13th, the TV series and other odd TV episodes.. What went wrong?

I use POPFile to help sort my email. It looks at the words used within each email and uses Bayes Theorem to classify it into the categories I've chosen according to what I've taught it.

After a day or two, it achieves over 99.5% accuracy (less than one in two hundred emails needs any corrective action from me) so I was rather surprised when an email offering me 'generic viagra' was in my main inbox just now.

Hmm, look at the header to see what POPFile thinks it is… 'unclassified'??

Open POPFile's control panel to see why… Ah ha!

definitely_spam 0.508370
probable_spam 0.491630

It couldn't decide whether it was 'definitely spam' (deleted on sight by my email program) with slightly more than 50% chance, or just 'probably spam' (stuck in a folder for possible later examination) with slightly less than 50%!

After doing a post about how they were considering it, I forgot to do a VICTORY !!! post when the evil London Mardi Gras (spit) actually decided to give up and go home.

Ken would like a 'high profile' 'world class level' event next year.

So it looks like next year's event will be on 3rd July (ok), be free to attend (yay), cost about £300k to stage (told you so), involves Jason Pollock, the ex-festival director of LMG (hiss)… and looks like being held in Jubilee Gardens (eeek).

Why eeek? Well because of the London Eye, Jubilee Gardens is even smaller now than it was in the mid-80s, when it was just large enough to hold the event. I can remember the fact that Erasure were going to play there one year (1988?) was kept 'secret' to stop hordes of teenage fans attending – there wouldn't have been room for the people on the march and them!

It seems to me that 'high profile', in this location, means almost by definition that it can't be 'world class', not least as the people at the Mayor's consultation forum wanted the community village section to remain too. Last year, that alone would have taken up about a quarter of the space available. Ghod knows how they're going to control entry or how many people will be allowed in.

Perhaps it will be spread along the South Bank? That would roughly double the available space, but it would still be much smaller than any event since 1990ish, when Kennington Park got 100,000 people.

Oh, it looks like Soho Pride wants to become an annual event. 1st August is the date next year, St Anne's Gardens.

And there's a mention of 'North London Pride'. Ghod knows what, who, where and when about that one.

Not worksafe – rude language