Diana Watch

If I’m honest I have been obsessing with the Olympics most of the week and very little else has entered my radar so I want to start of by congratulating Nicole Cooke, the winner of Great Britain’s medal which happened to be a gold, in the woman’s cycling road race. A fantastic effort in remarkable poor weather. My first small tear of the games was shed.
I do appreciate the irony of watching the world finest athletes for 2 weeks whilst slumped on my sofa drinking tea and snacking.
Did you watch the opening ceremony though? Now that was how you do it. You get a remarkable film director, in this case it was Zhang Yimou who has directed House of Flying Daggers and Hero, tell him roughly what you want and then letting him get on with it. It really was a thing of remarkable beauty and it really laid down a challenge for London 2012. Obviously there was a remarkable amount of hypocrisy in the section of the ceremony about the environment when China has 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities but I’m just being picky now. The section that involved the lighting of the stadiums Olympic flame was incredible with a man running round the inside of the stadiums roof along the massive 30ft high plasma screen that runs along the inside rim of the stadium. This is the best video of it I could find on Youtube, sorry the quality is not great.



And hurray for George Bush who really does have a fantastic sense of irony. Whilst on his way to the games he made a speech in Thailand in which he criticised China’s human right record. Reasonable point you may think and I would agree with you but he made this speech on the same day as Salim Hamdan, Osama Bin Laden’s former driver, was found guilty at Guantanamo Bay by a military tribunal, a system that most people think is unfair. It had also been stated by the U.S. government that what ever happened, i.e. found innocent, he would still remain incarcerated because of the legal definition of the prisoners being enemy combatants and the U.S. claims that it can hold them till the end of the “War on Terror”. So they claim that they COULD hold a man who had been found innocent for as long as they decided for no reason and China is the one with the human rights problems is it President Bush?

I have had a look at the papers this week and great news for the Express with the release of the Portuguese’s police files into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. This has meant that the paper can select a page at random each day and publish sections from it as its headline for that day. Now there are 22,000 pages of information in the file so this could go on for a while. This week they have been reporting some of the alleged sightings of the child and claiming that they were not investigated properly despite the facts and they have never let that stand in their way before. The first alleged sighting was on CCTV and when it was shown to the parents they said that it wasn’t their child, this information was not in the Express’s headline, and the second was by a Dutch woman who claimed a number of things about a child who had been in her shop but the easily disproved part was the fact that the child referred to herself as “Maddie” which the child never did, according to her parents, and it is a construct of the press. No story here then but front page of the Express.

Went to see Batman, The Dark Knight yesterday and it is a great film. The first half an hour is a little hurried and edited by a blind man and in a few places the music is so loud that you can not hear the dialogue but I’m being picky, it’s very entertaining and very violent. Which brings me to it’s classification, it’s rated as a 12a which means that the film is suitable for 12 years and over. No-one younger than 12 may see a ‘12A’ film in a cinema unless accompanied by an adult, thank you to the BBFC website for that definition. At our showing at 2 o’clock in the afternoon were many very young children, so as young as 6 and it is really, really violent, all the way through. Whilst it is within the rules for a 12a because there is no drug taking, swearing or scenes of a sexual nature and most of the violence is implied I feel that they are pushing the boundaries a bit and I wouldn’t want a child of mine to see it until they were 15. Oh and Heath Ledger is pretty good but isn’t in it that much.

Only one award this week,

Advert that most sounds like sexual innuendo,

We have joint winners for this, the muller yoghurt advert with the strap line “Lick the lid of life”, sounds a bit rude to me, and the KFC advert for it’s chicken lollipops which is loaded with innuendo, “hot rods”, “dipping”, come on this is porn, they also come in boxes by the way.