Status-Q

If you're unfortunate enough not to have anything better to do at 19.45 on Boxing Day, you can watch me make a fool of myself in front of about 4 million people on BBC2.

I should point out that we were asked to take part in this by the producers; we didn't volunteer ourselves as being particularly skilled at This Sort of Thing! There was also no selection process, such as often takes place in undergraduate teams, to weed out people like me at an early stage. I went along with it, I must confess, mostly because I was reasonably familiar with the old Television Centre in London but had never been inside the new Media City studios in Salford, and I thought this would be a fun way to see them...

Having said that, I was blessed with really excellent team mates, it was great fun, and overall, we didn't disgrace ourselves.

More information on the Christmas series can be found here, and the University Challenge iPlayer page is here.

We were talking at lunch today about the foolishness of that old interview question:

"What would you say is your biggest weakness?"

Several people proposed suitable responses, but my favourite came from Richard. His suggestion?

"Kryptonite"

My quick review of the new Hobbit film: I enjoyed it a lot, though perhaps not as much as the first one. Too much romance, not enough Mirkwood, too many echoes of LOTR, and somewhat excessive use of decapitation, but, it must be said, an exceedingly fine dragon.

Tolkien purists (like Rose) will be furious, but my view is that you have to change even a good book to make a good film. And, if you're going to invent new characters, then you'll get fewer complaints from me if you have them played by people like Evangeline Lilly.

The middle film of a trilogy is always the hardest to do, to which a fair response would be that they were foolish to do it as a trilogy. That, I imagine, was determined by pure economics. It'll be interesting to see whether Peter Jackson can do something really new with part III. In the book, Bilbo misses the whole final battle through being knocked on the head. Somehow, I think the movie may deviate from the canon there...

Meanwhile, I imagine that the entrepreneurs of New Zealand's South Island are already planning barrel riding trips for the spring tourists...

A morning shot from MediaCityUK in Salford, which I thought showed an interesting mix of the components of this somewhat bizarre new creation. Old Trafford is just behind me. The offices on the right are the BBC. The building on the left will contain the set of Coronation Street, which is being rebuilt here. There's some heavy industry in the background, and it's a nice spot for early-morning rowers. Oh, and you can't see the cormorant diving under the bridge.

I'm in Douglas, on the Isle of Man.

MediaCityUK, Salford, by night. Click for larger version.

Some people find these scribblings through Google, others through RSS, Tweets, Facebook or App.net posts. And you lovely readers often write comments, but in all these different places, so only a subset of other readers are likely to see them.

In an attempt to make it easier to post comments here on the site, I've now enabled one of these newfangled social login things, so you can post using your Facebook or Google account if preferred. Other options may come along in due course!

...but on some mornings, it's enough.

If you combine beech trees, autumn, and evening sunshine, it’s hard to go wrong, but Weds was particularly pretty.

More pictures here.

What is it that estate agents really mean when they talk of a "deceptively spacious" property? It's one of their favourite phrases, after all.

If I say that my wallet felt deceptively full before I left the house, doesn't that suggest that later, at some inconvenient moment, I discovered I had less money than I thought? Still, perhaps the operative word there is felt, which implies that I was mistaken?

OK, then, so if a house actually is deceptively spacious, that must mean that it does have a lot of space, but for some reason that doesn't bring with it the characteristics that you'd normally associate with spaciousness. It's a very inconvenient shape, for example, so you can't actually use it as you would expect.

Or there is occasionally some warping of the space-time continuum in that area, so that when you visit, it is spacious, but later on you'll discover it's only suitable for hobbits? As in, "it's deceptively spacious at the moment".

Yes, I guess that must be it. Good of them to warn you in advance.