Shinier TV

I’m just back from spending a few days with the folks in honour of it being my birthday a couple of days back. Don’t worry – we managed to do the traditional drinking-like-a-fish the previous weekend, and royally so.

Presents included a shiny new DVD player – decadent, perhaps, but it does have one distinct advantage over the current model and that’s DivX playback capability. Yes DVD is “God’s own format”TM but the ability to cram 10 hours of crisp and shiny TV onto a single disk is heaven to a TV-head like me. So whoa, and indeed, hoo!

There were other televisual highlights over the weekend. Chief of which was the opening to the 20th Olympic Winter Games in Turin. Normally sport of any kind is enough to bring me out in palpitations but there’s something about the Olympics which I find mesmerising. Maybe it’s all the ceremonial, anthems and medals which appeals. Congratulations should go to the City of Turin for a mainly spectacular opening ceremony. All the usual bells and whistles were there as well as some very imaginative tableaux. As usual there were the more offbeat segments. In the same way Athens had the pregnant woman with light-up belly, here we had the futuristic ballet dancers followed by the “army of the future”. I have no idea what they were supposed to represent beyond those vague titles. I have suspicions that these parts of the segments are what happens when you promise a place in the ceremony to a particular group before working out how they will fit in. On this occasion it was the ballet and the judo groups. Still we now have a fortnight of watching people throw themselves off hills, and sliding rocks so that can’t be bad.