TV

Moses Jones
Part 3 (of 3)
Series like this are always hard to end -- they're 'gritty' and 'realistic', but how do you turn that into a satisfying Big Climax? Moses Jones makes the usual mistake of letting it all go a bit (for want of a better word) mainstream in the closing minutes. A decent series on the whole, though not without its flaws.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Not Going Out
3x04 Party
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

The Office [American]
3x03 The Coup
Watched the majority of this episode in a seminar. It was very funny, which was nice, and thankfully not as painful to watch as the original version (which is deliberately excruciating to watch much of the time). I'd quite like to see more, in fact.

Articles

Two bits of comedy today...

Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) by Sarah Schmelling
(from Timothy McSweeney)
Spot on, very funny, and very cleverly executed (it uses the whole gamut of Facebook news feed items, not just a slew of status updates).

Oscar Handicapping
(from The Onion)
The ever-reliable Onion helpfully explains what some of those pesky Oscar odds mean ahead of this Sunday's ceremony. "Best Supporting Actor, Josh Brolin, 10-1: There's an outside chance that voters have mistakenly identified Brolin as the dead one."

Poem of the Week: Typo

by Russell Hoban

Unsurprisingly to regular readers, this week's poem is selected from The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse. Upon completing it last weekend I posted a list of my favourite poems from within its pages, calling this one "probably my favourite". An easy choice then.

'Nitgub,' said the typewriter,
and clenched the paper tight.
'Nitgub positively.
It is here in black and white.'
'Nonsense,' I said.
'I typed N-O-T-H-I-N-G;
the word of course was nothing,
simply nothing, don't you see?'
'Nothing may be what you meant,
but nitgub's what you wrote.
I like it,' said the typewriter.
'It strikes a happy note.
It has more style than nothing,
has a different sort of sound.
The colour is superior;
the flavour's nice and round.
Have you plumbed its deepest depths,
its mysteries explained?'
'All right,' I said, 'I'll take it.
Nitgub ventured, nitgub gained.'

As well as being found in the aforementioned anthology, the poem was originally published in Hoban's book The Pedalling Man, which is sadly out of print. However, you could try your luck on AbeBooks.

(As this work is likely still in copyright, I'll just draw your attention to the Poem of the Week copyright page.)