December 2nd

Some say... he likes it when The Great Escape is on. But only because he's in it.

There's today's Stig advent calender fact for you. The chocolate was angel-shaped this time.

Frost, Traffic Lights and Charles Dickens

For a lack of better things to do yesterday in London, I decided to just see some random stuff that had been sitting on my list for a while now.

But first, frost. We got frost overnight. Probably the closest London will get to snow in the whole of December.

For my first stop I trekked all the way into East London to see a work of 'art' that I had been meaning to see for a long time. It's a tree made of traffic lights. You can see it on the top right-hand picture above. On the left was a sun dog that I happened to notice in the sky. More about sun dogs here on Wikipedia.

You can see the whole of the 'traffic light tree' on the right. I find it amusing because it is situated in the middle of a traffic circle in the Docklands. I just wonder if there are any tourists that show up to the traffic circle and freak out thinking that they will have to pay attention to these randomly changing signals... not understanding how a traffic circle works. Heh.

On the left is the Old Curiosity Shop, made famous by Charles Dickens. It is located near the London School of Economics in Holborn, and is now sadly a shoe shop. Pity.

That's about all I have to share with you this week, I'm afraid. While it was sunny outside, the wind was whippingly cold and miserable, and I started to get chilly and therefore retired to head home by about 2 p.m. Today is reserved for laundry and a fair amount of baking. Might throw in a visit to the ducks in the park later today if I feel like getting dressed.

Happy December!

It's December, everyone! And as much as we all agree that it snuck up rather quickly on us, I'm quite chuffed because it means that I get to open my ADVENT CALENDAR!!

And, with my advent calender comes one fun-fact-a-day about Stig. Today's is, if you can't read that rather blurry photo above, is that...

Some say... he thinks ten Lords-a-leaping is just too many...

Giggle.

I'm also munching on a bell-shaped chocolate... yes, for Breakfast. WHAT?!

Today the weather is supposed to be quite lovely (well, sunny... but not warm), so I'm up early and going to make the trek into London to snap some photos and generally be a bum. I'm trying desperately to find something new to do in London, but most of the exciting things happen on the weekends, so there isn't much to do during the week. I'm still researching, so I might yet still find something.

Either way, stay tuned and hopefully I'll have some photos to offer later!

Twilight

Oh dear god. What have I done? I've started a blog post about the movie Twilight. Kill me know.

My flatmate, the sweet thing she is, convinced me to go see the newest movie in the 'saga', called New Moon, with her last night. I reluctantly agreed, and was looking forward to at least attending the movies, which I haven't done in ages.

Many of you LOVE the books/movies. And by LOVE, I mean LOVE. LOVE in capital, bold-faced, italicized font. LOVE in 72pt font. I got it. It's okay. I have that kind of love for other things in life... Twilight, I fear, holds no love for me. The first movie was painful. The acting was painful and the story felt juvenile to me.

I'm happy to report that even though this new movie contained all the poor acting and angst-ridden teenage drama that I'm sad to admit I don't relate to anymore (BUT I DON'T WANT TO GROW UP!), it was more action packed and had a larger budget, which was more pleasing to the eye.

Why is this relevant, you ask? Well, the point of all those well-thought-out paragraphs above was to get to this point. Sitting through the movie and eating an entire bag of candy from Poundland was so that I could direct you to this video:

What is this, a TWILIGHT video? Well... sort of.

Remember Mystery Science Theatre 300? If you don't, SHAME ON YOU! If you do, then there's no further explanation required. The lovely minds/voices from the original series (some of them), have reformed to make Rifftrax, which do the same thing MST3K did with old, crappy movies, but to current, crappy movies. And above is a taste of what they've done to the first Twilight movie. It's pretty humorous. And I think you should watch it.

I won't, however, encourage you to see Twilight: New Moon. I'll leave that life-altering decision up to you.

SkiFree

Many of you read XCKD and love it as much as I do. Many of you don't read it and you should. Go here and read it. Many others don't read it and really then, 99% of it will be irrelevant. Either way, seeing as I clocked many an hour playing SkiFree as a child, I enjoyed their comic strip.

I also remember, as many of you will, the sheer terror that was that %*&#!@ abominable snow monster that got you EVERY TIME!

I never know about hitting "F" until I downloaded it many months ago. Now I always beat the snowman.

If you would like to either catch up on a childhood game or learn a new game, go here and download SkiFree. Many many hours of wasted time await you.

P.S. Season premiere of QI last night was awesome. Everything I wanted it to be. Now if I could only get some tickets to see it live my life would be complete. I'll settle on the BBC iplayer for now to keep me afloat.

QI

In celebration of a new series of QI (Series G), I offer you this preview of the new series:

OMFG. Can't wait another 2 hours for this show to start. Time. Fly. By. FASTER!
In the meantime, enjoy some other QI clips I pulled off of YouTube:

Walking in the Park

Even though the weather turned lovely this morning and made me feel utterly guilty about wanting to sleep in and stay indoors, I pretty much did just that.

I took one small detour down to the park to feed the birds. While the weather looked lovely, the wind whipping off the lake was quite cold, so I didn't last very long. It was quite windy, too, blowing the pigeons around and such.

I'm back at work again tomorrow, for the long stretch, so this will be it for "taken by Leanna" photos for another week or so. Although I will continue to post other things as I find them.

Enjoy.

Snow

I just giggled to myself at the following information:

The average temperature in London, England, for the month of December is between 2 and 6. The record low is -6.

...

-6.

Record.

To compare... the record low in Calgary for any January is -46.

...

And the average daily temperature is between -4 and -16.

Giggle.

More fun posts later, just had to share this fun fact.

Randoms

Well, as I've been working quite steadily over the past week, I don't have much to share with you. Instead, I thought I'd share the following:

First, a funny clip from "Whose Line is it Anyway" from back in the day that I find so very very amusing:

And second, a quote from the show the IT Crowd, which I fully intend to try to work into a conversation in the near future. Bonus points if it's with a customer who has no idea what I'm talking about:

Mos said it, from what I remember, in terms of people having no faith in his new invention:

"Well, prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them, along with this slice of humble pie that comes direct from the oven of shame, set at gas mark egg on your face."

Best. Quote. Ever. I love the "Gas Mark egg-on-your-face". Just love it.

I picked up a shift tomorrow, so I fear I won't have interesting things to post until Wednesday, but stay tuned!

Hugh Dennis

The man on the left (in the giant, yellow, circle) is Hugh Dennis. He's on a funny show called Mock the Week with Dara O'Briain, as well as a comdey called Outnumbered, which I've never seen.

How is this relevant, you ask?

Well, I'll tell you..

HE WAS IN MY HMV TODAY!!! SHOPPING AND BUYING THINGS!!!

And where was I, you ask?

.... on my lunch break, in the back room.

*Facepalm*

What a shame. I don't think any of my work-friends spoke to him in terms of "Hi, you're famous", although he did buy something and then the loss-prevention guys looked at him from the security cameras in the back. We're such pervs.

Bummer. My first non-Stephen Fry, non-event famous person sighting and I wasn't even present! Oh well.

I have, however, reminded Ali, one of our loss-prevention peeps, who also shares my love for Stephen Fry, that if he should ever come into the store, she had better call me out onto the shop floor!

What a day.