michael lambe

School
Good day today. I’ve had a bit of trouble here and there with some students seeing what they can get away with, with the new teacher, so this morning I adopted Leilani’s “give ‘em a good bollocking” approach, and changed the seating plan around too. I’m happy to report the 3rd years are under the thumb. What a relief!

Brown Sheets Up and Down the Land
I have words to say on the new series of Doctor Who (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/). The first episode, “New Earth”, was total pants. The conclusion of the story where the Doctor says “I know a bit about medicine” and produces a miracle cure by mixing up a bunch of vari-colored intravenous drips in a bucket – what’s that?

However, last Saturday’s second episode “Tooth and Claw” was back on form. You can’t beat a good werewolf story and the humor worked better this time too. Although I’m still not sure why 19th century Scottish monks would be so proficient in kung fu, I am sure that the wonderfully grisly sounds of fangs grinding meat, gristle and bone as the wolf mauled and devoured one victim after another gave lots of tiny tots up and down the British Isles horrible nightmares. Hurrah! That’s what we want!

Now for some reason in the next episode they are bringing back the Doctor’s erstwhile companion Sarah Jane Smith and the robot “dog” K9. Why would they bother? I can clearly remember watching Doctor Who in the 70’s and thoroughly despising Sarah Jane Smith. All she ever did was get into trouble and scream and wail and whine and then scream a bit more. Maybe she and Rose Tyler could have a fight. That would be good. Rose could wipe the floor with her. But then she could wipe the floor with me too.

And I’d probably like it.

And K9. Yes lovable K9. K9 was lovable in the seventies but we were young then and it was the seventies. K9 is a robot who can’t climb stairs. Click here to see how far we’ve come: http://asimo.honda.com/inside_asimo_movies.asp

By the way, if you click on this next link and then scroll down the page to where it says “ Watch a clip from the Genesis Of A Classic documentary.” and then click on that, you can see a great clip of Tom Baker being brilliant. Click here first:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/news/cult/news/drwho/2006/03/17/30405.shtml Tom Baker, by the way, hated K9. Great man.

More Links
Now, onto more important things: here are some links to blogs more interesting than mine:

This chap’s in Osaka: http://anenglishmaninosaka.blogspot.com/
This chap’s in Tokyo: http://tokyoblog.livejournal.com/

And here’s a site I thought was kind of dumb at first but after reading a bit I soon found myself hooked: http://www.unphotographable.com/

He sometimes takes actual photographs, which are quite nice too:
http://www.michaeldavidmurphy.com/port/7.shtml

And for those of you who STILL haven’t seen it, here’s that sushi video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4946101556303618610&q=sushi