Year Two.

About   As you may have surmised, I'm going to be spending this month trying on a few of the old clothes to see if they still fit.  In the second year, I hadn't really become desperate enough to start any "blogging projects" and was most mixing a few personal items with link posts and film reviews.  At the time I'd begun a new job at Liverpool Direct, the then council call centre run in conjunction with BT which had an eclectic shift pattern that involved a week of 2pm to 10pm shifts every other fortnight (until we went on strike and they stopped as was reported in the Echo at the time) so much like the previous year, it's amazing that anything was posted here at all.

Blog! was an attempt to provoke a reciprocal link by crowning something Blog of the Day.  There's a few examples here.  Often it worked, like the time Wil "Wesley" Wheaton linked back at the start of his blogging journey (in a post when he was also bitching about not getting a role in Rules of Attraction which is presumably why that post has disappeared from the blog as it is now).  One of the first I linked to was LinkMachineGo which is still going strong and still links here often.  Thanks Darren!

TV  Doctor Who's Evil of the Daleks is coming soon which for my interests means we'll be getting a decent recon of the episodes and a remastered copy of the surviving episode two.  The special features also include a making of and the audiobook recorded by Tom Baker although sadly it's not in character as per Power.  I wonder if it'll include the scenes removed in this 1992 release because they couldn't clear the rights to The Beatles and The Searchers.

Film  Last night I watched Doug Liman's Locked Down, sure to be part of what's seen as a genre of films set in this past couple of years about people stuck in their own homes for months on end dealing with various existential crises.  It's absolutely delightful, a new riff on the old re-marriage screwball genre crossed with a heist.  Anne Hathaway's advertising exec dumped her delivery driver boyfriend Chiwetel Ejiofor just before lockdown and now they're stuck trying to avoid each other in a house which isn't small by London standards, but still too close for emotional comfort.  The firecracker script captures those months perfectly (presumably because they were living through it) including the Thursday night doorstep pan smashing for the NHS.  Locked Down has attracted some exceedingly sniffy reviews most of which accuse it of being disposable which misses the point that it's not supposed to be some profound comment on the pandemic.  Those will come later.

History  The New York Historical Society have unearthed early plans for the World Trade Center which I'd imagine would be a difficult read even for people outside the city.  The posted diagrams are chilling, presenting the stairwells in which people were trapped and the position of the towers within the grounds.  I'm not sure if I was fortunate or not to have been ill from work that day and around to witness the television broadcast or simply realised something was happening when the phones stopped at the call centre.

Science  Obligatory Guardian link and Kevin Smith reference.  Flying car makes successful test run between airports in Slovakia.  Of course what people are expecting is The Jetsons but this should be enough to keep Randall happy for a while.

Also...  over on YouTube ... Brie Larson has announced that she's slowing down the posting frequency to her YouTube channel so she can return to her day job or as the rest of the known universe calls it, acting in The Marvels ... LGR introduces us to a CRT screen from 1991 with a pivot which works with both DOS and Windows 3.1 (and compatible software) ... Techmoan turns a medical surplace printer into a selfie machine ... Study Vibes received her exam results ... finally, Be Kind Rewind has a fascinating video essay about Madonna's classic film influences.