Foxtrot Oscar

Its the awards season again. The Brit Awards were announced last night, and I always used to get the double CD with all the nominated songs on it, but that has gone by the board for several years now as most of the tunes are on Spotify or other download sites.

The Bafta award nominations came out last week, and yesterday we were greeted by the Oscars. They are led by Netflix 'The Power of the Dog' so SWMBO and I decided we would watch it. We may have got halfway through, maybe a boit less, when we reached the conclusion that it's entertainment levels were almost nil.

It does ask the question of the nominating panel as to whether they do take entertainment quotient into consideration or is it all a bit too lovie. The film Belfast does seem to be worth watching, but I am not sure about the rest.

We also spent time watching The Tinder Swindler and again it was a real struggle to feel we were being entertained by women narrating a story about how they had been conned by some chap on the Internet. we have struggled for two years to watch more than a handful of movies through to the end, and now almost play a game as to who would say ' Is this any good' first.

Hey ho, there are always classics to fall back on, so the actors can have their moment of glory at the Oscars and we can continue to search out the hidden gems which do appear every now and again. That's a wrap....

Groundhog Day

I am not sure why I have used that title as many other days would be closer its meaning than today. Yes, I hav ejust bought my third game of Totopoly from the net, at a really silly price so I am now able to make two world class sets for resale and the best of the rest for the home version, all with lead horses with four legs.

I have been asked what is so special about the lead horses. Well they are proper horses which look a lot like the  CGI versions which were taking part in the virtual Grand National this afternoon. Wasn't that a great idea and for it to be executed as well as it was is a credit to ITV and their technical animation and heuristics team. Red Rum won the Champion of Champions race on the line,  and Potters Corner won the 'proper' race with TigerRoll a gallant fourth, but who knows what would have happened if ASO had not fallen at the second last?

But back to Totopoly. Waddingtons launched the game on the back of the success of Monopoly in the late 1930's. The lead horses were a key feature of the game, but the Second World War intervened so Waddingtons were denied supplies of lead and so reverted to one dimensional paper horses in wooden blocks until supplies of suitable metals were restored. They then had one dimensional metal horses in blocks before introducing one dimensional metal horses with cast bases, which then continued into the future.

The problem with the lead horses was that in the hands of children the legs broke, the jockeys snapped off and the tails got damaged. Finding a good set still intact is, therefore, a joy. Ironically it took me nearly two years to find a good set on e-bay, I have bought the second and third set within a week and for a combined price less than the first set. Watch this space to see what I can turn them round for.

Now on to today's little adventure.  I had planned to replace some security bulbs in our lights, however, when isolating the circuit in the fuse box, the alarm went off and I could not get the blighter to switch off. I know how annoying it is when a neighbours alarm goes off so I prayed for the 20 minute limit to kick in. No such luck. After about 3 hours I managed to find a security engineer to come and fix the problem. A fuse had gone on the main circuit board of the alarm, and the standby battery was not fit for purpose. anyway he sorted it out for me and all is peae and light once more.

The knock on problem is that we now have no power in the kitchen, save for one rogue plug which is powered independent of the ring main. It seems that the circuit breaker for the other plugs is faulty. Our sparks was happy to come over to fix it, but at the moment we can get by and I don't want him making unnecessary journeys when with an extension lead we can just about cope.

So no DIY, and no gardening as by the time the alarm was fixed I had run out of enthusiasm for scarifying  the thatch out of the lawn. I can do that tomorrow.

We weakened and watch a film on Netflix last night, The Hustlers, don't bother it was rubbish so we switched over to Masterchef. I don't know why we watch that either as I have hardly heard of any of the ingredients they use, I just enjoy the torture they go through when something goes wrong!!

It's is due to be warm and sunny tomorrow, lets hope everybody is sensible about their social spacing should they be tempted to venture out. Stay safe everybody and lets hope the reductions shown in the trend analysis today continue.

Party streamers

This has been a strange weekend technologically speaking. For some time now we have had a KODI box, often referred to as 'a dodgy box' connected via the internet to our television in the main living room. It has been used to stream football, rugby and cricket from a variety of sources on the net, and has meant we have not had to subscribe to SKY or BT Sports.

Slowly but surely these organisations have picked away at the sites which host these feeds, closing them down or making the signals encrypted so that people cannot receive them without the correct technology. It's a game of cat and mouse, as people love a challenge and for every roadblock SKY put in front of these illegal streamers, the streamers look for another way to circumvent the restrictions.

KODI boxes themselves, though, are not illegal, so we have just installed a second box in our bedroom, where we are suffering freeview service degradation. The KODI box allows us to watch the mainly ITV based channels which are pixelated in clear view, but has the added benefit of providing on demand services via ITV hub and the BBC iPlayer so we can watch catch-up as well.

We are now, therefore, pretty well full on wired round the house. We can get films from various sources like Netflix and  Amazon as well as Genesis and Pheonix via KODI.
So, you ask, how was the weekend strange?

Well using all the resources at my disposal, I identified via LiveonSat.com that Plymouth Argyle v Fleetwood Town was being shown on a Serbian sports channel on Saturday afternoon, live from Home Park, so I watched that. Then a friend of mine who has a son playing second division rugby in Italy sent me a streaming link, www.retebiella.tv,  to watch his match live on Sunday afternoon. Beiella won 25-0 and Connor kicked 13 points. Happy days.

It's all out there on the web, and in the dark web too if you know where you are looking, but I am sure SKY have their technicians trying to shut off another loophole as I typ.......bugger they got me!!