that canadian girl

Category: TV & Music

  • BBC Children in Need

    Tonight is the BBC’s Children in Need fundraiser. They’re hoping to raise more money than last year’s £25 millions, through a huge show involving pop stars and tv personalities.

    Pudsey!!

    What amazes me about this fundraiser is how the entire country is mobilised for the cause. At my work, there have been mini Pudsey pins you could get in exchange for any donation and today there was a baked goods sale. In comparison to many other fundraisers, ours was very minimal.

    I think the main reason why everyone’s ready to put their energy into supporting the fundraiser is that it is, as far as I know, the only one of the year on television. As opposed to the multiple low-budget fundraisers I’ve seen on Canadian tv channels, which people get tired of seeing and just tune out, Children in Need is turned into an exciting event. They don’t keep putting images of beaten up children, trying to get to your wallet through pity, instead we see the good that Children in Need has done over the past 25 years.

    Elton John’s donation was £50,000… Granted mine wasn’t as much, but every little helps, right?

  • The heat is hot in Saigon

    In a month and two days, Andrew and I will be going to Oxford to see Miss Saigon. It’s such a great musical, to see it on stage will be amazing! I’m so excited, just listening to the soundtrack gives me shivers.

    I still haven’t found out who the cast is, but even though nothing measures up to Lea Salonga as Kim, I’m sure I’ll love it! At least, the biggest potential let-down, I’m already aware of — they couldn’t fit a real helicopter in the theatre so they’re using lasers to reproduce the image of it on a screen.

    So soon, I’ll be counting the days till our lovely Oxford weekend 🙂

  • Advertise this!

    I’m still watching the 1970s Office… Love it, love peeling apart their campaigns and yelling at the telly disagreeing (or agreeing, sometimes, rarely…) with Paul Shearer.

    It’s more than a regular reality tv show to me, it’s a kind of assessment of how well I think I would fare in the advertising world. Once I got somewhat comfortable within the team, I think I would be a bit of a Nicole. I would argue my point, yet be shocked if someone told me to shut up the way Paul did.

    I’d need to go to some kind of emotional boot camp to toughen me up. I’m not strong enough to deal with the “constructive” criticism Paul offers them… Sounded rather destructive to me sometimes.

    I’ve found Victor’s ideas generally poor, but what shocks me, is that he is responsible for the painfully annoying elephant.co.uk adverts. I mean, what was he thinking?! Or what were the directors thinking when they allowed those completely unimaginative adverts to go through to tv?

    I guess Paul Shearer is my Simon Cowell! 😉

  • Forgot how much I loved it…

    I dug out my Ani DiFranco – To The Teeth album this morning and I’m getting butterflies in my tummy listening to this album I neglected for a few years.

    I forgot how much I loved it… Yesterday, I was humming “Hello Birmingham” only because of it’s allusion to election day, so I thought I’d pop the cd back out of that dusty binder I should visit more often.

    Mmmm highly recommended.

  • I shouldn't watch tv in the morning

    I was watching Anastacia’s “Left Outside Alone” videoclip this morning, and the deep voice, the need for a corset’ish top and the fake face and eyebrows… I’m convinced she’s a man! Don’t you think?? She seems really tall as well…

    *nods* Thursday morning pop-conspiracies, sponsored by Mukluk Inc. 😯

  • And if you leave me now, you take away the very heart of me…

    Javalicious I’ve got to admit, I’m a bit all over the place today. I’ve done lots of work, but my mind is on Chinese fondue, weekend and some bizarre ads that I’ve been seeing on TV.

    Even after seeing them repeatedly in the past few weeks, I stop what I’m doing every time they’re on. They puzzle me. What’s with the beer-drinking bigger-than-a-car jellyfish?? And WHY OH WHY is the cherry singing Chicago’s “If you leave me now” before being eaten by the little girl??? Does it make any sense to you?

    For the out-of-UK folks reading my blog, you can see the ads on the Three Mobile website. I’m not responsible for you singing “Oooooh no, Baby please don’t go” while having a craving for maraschino cherries all day afterwards though.

    It’s a mad campaign and I’d love to find out who’s behind the creation of those adverts. There has to be an advertising team with balls of steal to go through with the campaign. I’d just fear people would write it off as pure weirdness… but if it gets people talking, it can’t be that bad, can it?

  • Robbie album sold on Memory Card

    Thought you were hip and happening with your new ipod mini? Well, think again!

    Now, some albums are available on memory cards for phones and PDA’s, I read in BBC News a few days ago.

    It seems to make sense, since we carry our mobile phones with us all the time, it makes one less gadget to lug around. Of course, I can’t imagine you’d have nearly as much music on your phone as you would have on even the ipod mini (4gigs) or the regular ipod (20 or 40gigs), but it can do the job for a train journey to work and back! And why not just get it as an mp3 album from a legal or not-so-legal source and put on an mp3 cd, an mp3 player or a computer? To each user its own platform!

    Talking about the ipod, doesn’t the full-size ipod look ugly compared to the new sleek mini one? I bet in a few months, Apple will come out with a mini-looking full-size-harddrive version. If they do, I’m getting one!

    It’s so cute 🙂 Me wants!

  • 1970s Office

    On Thursday night, before our Sky Plus box crashed, I watched most of the 1970s Office, a new Sky One show.

    Assigned that seventies’ favourite, The Space Hopper, they will work towards their ad campaign pitch. For two weeks, our hand-picked advertising luvvies will be forced to live and work without any of the trappings of the 21st century – luxuries that most of them probably don’t even realise they take for granted. They will have just ten days to complete the pitch before presenting their ideas to a panel of the good and the great in the ad industry.

    It was quite a good show, and some of the ad ideas were better than I expected! I’m looking forward to seeing how the campaigns evolve into a real pitch to present in two weeks. I really recommend the show to anyone who’s in the UK to catch it!

    Edited on 22/11/04: Just for all the people who are doing Google searches and landing on my site when looking for what has happened to the show, please visit the 1970s Office mini-site, click on Chat and check the forums. People are posting updates on when it’s on! I’m still trying to get to the bottom of the story to know why it got changed from Prime Time to middle of the night! Email Sky One to complain if you liked the show too at contact@skyone.com — I’ll change the email address if I get a more direct/precise one.

    For the time being, this is what I found schedule-wise (I hope you have Sky Plus!!)

  • Saturday 27th (or Sunday 28th, got conflicting info) at 2:40am on Sky One

    • Keep a close eye on Sky One Mix as well, as they’ve played a few eps. If anyone knows why the show was slated and shoved to the middle of the night, let me know!

    Edited on 23/11/04: I got an email from Sky One:
    Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, the show has been moved to the late night schedules and the last two shows will now be shown on Saturday 20th November at 4am and Saturday 27th November at 2:40am.

    All the best,
    http://www.skyone.co.uk

  • Music at work

    In the past two days, I’ve been working almost entirely on my own, so I’ve been able to listen to some music at the same time. I’ve really enjoyed it! I’m so much more focused when I have music cutting out the outside noise.

    The albums I’ve listened to so far are:
    Baxter – Baxter
    Baxter – About This
    LTJ Bukem – Logical Progression albums
    Ani DiFranco – Pretty much all the albums + a couple of live shows
    Portishead – Dummy
    Tricky – Maxinquaye
    Jamiroquai – Travelling without Moving
    Goldfrapp – Black Cherry
    Les Miserables & Chicago
    Verdi, Mozart, Schubert & Chopin

    There must’ve been some jazz in there too at some point…

    Either way it’s great to be able to listen to music while working. Some ppl can’t deal with it, but I absolutely love it! Now I’ve got two hours left before I can go home and have a nice glass of cold Villa Maria! MmMmmmmm

  • Up in smoke!

    You know how I said we got Sky Plus a few weeks ago? I sang it’s praises, told everyone about it… Hell, they should be paying me for it!

    Anyways, today, poor little blighter, choked at the end of a recording, and then poof, in a cloud of smoke, its little soul left for electronics heaven (is that where all the calculators go?). Imagine if it went to electronics hell, it would probably sit there in the middle of thousands of NTL boxes!

    So we’ve called the tech support and they’re sending an engineer around on Saturday to replace it. We’ve asked for a new box, so hopefully this won’t happen again!

    Oh the quirkiness of technology!

    … Awaiting your comments, Neil.