Baby it's cold outside

By London standards anyway. Brr.

FYI Breaking Bad continues to be excellent - the last couple of episodes have been focusing more on family relationships, and the two main characters' struggles as individuals, which has been a good counter to the crime-caper elements of the opening eps. The cooking should be back next week though, with the stakes a lot clearer in the viewer's mind. We have two characters who both want control of their lives - "a choice", as Walt's brilliant explanation went this week (once he had the Talking Pillow). He wants to choose how to live what life he has left. Jesse wants to choose to Just Say No, but is slipping fast. If you want to catch up on the season so far (we're only a handful of eps in) you can download from iTunes.

I checked out the new season (seven) of Spooks this week. Whilst it's lovely to see the Beeb have permitted Richard Armitage to play a grown-up (with Russian-prison-tats and everything) after all that PVC-clad angsting in Robin Hoody (hey, I hold my hands up: I've seen every episode), the storylines fail to convince any more. Don't get me wrong, when Spooks started (years and years before 24 thank you *very* much) it was lovely dark and edgy stuff. These days though Joe Normal can get the Terror Alert level (red? amber? a nice duck-egg blue?) 24/7 on satellite news. We're all a bit clued up (or as clued up as they want us to be mwahaha) for dialogue basically going "we think the Russians are about to unashamedly attack Great Britain!" "Oh really? Cripes. We need some intel - why don't you go and do naughty things to that oligarch Ros and see if he doesn't tell you everything." Maybe a few more data-sticks going missing might help the authenticity....

On a different note I have already ranted once today about the press coverage on the funding 'crisis' for HE in the UK for next academic year. So I'll just repeat myself:

"Tsk. The media seem to hate universities. They simultaneously object to the 'social engineering' of 50%+ participation in HE by evidencing how badly it all works and is 'dumbing down' education (e.g. no funding, students 'w/o a word of english' all 'sailing through degrees', degrees in Beckhamology etc.), whilst conversely still going for that old chestnut of saying they are still bastions of elitism and unfair practice (Laura Spence -poor girl for becoming an abbreviation for post hoc ergo proctor hoc arguments for unfair admission-, admissions tests, bad statistics on state school participation). Tsk I say. Tsk."

Rant done. I'm sure Mike Baker will do it more justice. He's a sensible, well-informed gent.