Jonathan Ross made a great TV Series a few years back called Japanorama. Its a classic BBC Documentary well paced, enjoyable and informative - one of my favourite subjects too. The series highlights a few popular Japanese exports and customs and offers nothing more than Ross’ irreverent commentary and a brief introduction- no silly camera work, no ground breaking mysteries for a team to tantalisingly uncover within a loud introduction (then dragged out for 25mins, talking to you Horizon!) just fine TV. Hope the BBC come out with a box-set someday, I’ll buy it.

Meanwhile, Japanorama is available on YouTube and on Guba.com where you can watch all of series two.

BBC Radio 4 are running a series of adaptations from the early novels of John le Carré. The first dramatisation (of Call for The Dead) was on yesterday morning and enjoyed it immensely.

One of the most enjoyable performances I’ve ever heard on the radio was the author reading his own work (Absolute Friends). He sounded like a madman jumping around the recording booth no doubt, doing the accent for little Mustafa and his mother Zara in broken Hungarian then jumping into eurobanker English and back to that lost boy Mundy and his head prefect voice, which lé Carre mimics well, considering he’s the son of a disgraced con-man / social climber. He knows his characters well and obviously cares about their voices beyond the page. Listen to this short interview on Front Row if you’re interested. There’s more lé Carre archived on the BBC’s website- he’s an writer well worth investing some serious time to. Remember this is the author of The Constant Gardener, that bitter melancholic story which was turned into an unlikely Oscar winning film. Much more than simple espionage plots. His new novel A Most Wanted Man does sound interesting.

Here’s a quick fix for a CSS issue that has plagued my K2 installations of the Extended Live Archive (or Better Live Archive as it is now called) plugin. See below, notice all the text is jumbled as if there were no line space between all the items. This appears in Safari / Firefox on the mac, I don’t know why this hasn’t been solved elsewhere.

You need to navigate to the plugin directory in your wordpress install, then under ‘af-extended-live-archive/includes/’ you’ll see a file called ef-ela-style.css open this in a text editor and change the lines:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


to:


#af-ela-post-chrono li, #af-ela-post-cats li, #af-ela-post-tags li {
position: relative;
font-size: 1.1em;
line-height: 1.7em;
height: 1.7em;
display: block;
color: #bbb;
margin: 0 15px;
padding: 1px 20px;
}


Enjoy. Oh, and Meta Comment has an Archive Page again!

Although about as technologically gifted as a gorilla’s bum, The Leither (a local magazine I occasionally contribute to- if only in loud hand gestures and stilted opinions) has signed up to Twitter this month. This is a piece I wrote to celebrate this move. Although technologically akin to turning up late to a student party with three empty bottles of blue nun in a ragged paper bag we’re tweeting…

twitter is the latest online service to be hyped to such a lofty a lofty degree, in a rash of himalayic superlatives, that you could be forgiven for thinking it offers a cure to swine flu, a solution to toxic debt, or the answer to life’s persistent questions. it does not.

twitter (once you’ve signed up at twitter.com) lets you share a few choice words with friends. think: “anyone fancy a film tonight?” don’t think:
“anyone fancy a beer with the editor?” your message is limited to no more than 140 characters known as a ‘tweet’.
tweets can be trivial “i’m at the beach, mmh Seafeild”, or it could be a link to an article you’re reading, a photo of your new puppy. simple stuff you’d like to share. once logged in you can find and add friends near and far (you can choose to ‘follow’ bands, there’s a few celebrities on there… @BarackObama) their tweets will appear on your homepage where you can reply to messages or just keep an eye on what’s happening. friends can choose to follow you by searching your name or through invitation. by connecting with these other twitter users you create a global conversation, accessed easily through your phone, IM, mobile browser, or old- fashioned web. at home at work at play.
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