ENTERTAINMENT
Cirque du Soleil
I first caught this on one of the Sky Arts channels and it's now required viewing. The sheer professionalism of this show is staggering. I used to wonder how a circus could be a circus without the animals...now I'm a believer. But the cirque is not just a circus; it's an absorbing display of what can be achieved by relentless practice, plus an undying quest for perfection. The latter being a commodity sadly lacking in the world at large these days.
THE LOTTERY This used to be called The Lotto! (And maybe it still is) I guess someone within Camelot has strong business links in America. If ever there was an on-going "snouts in the trough" facility, this is it! I'm sickened that the powers-that-be decided to go with Camelot on this, as opposed to Richard Branson, who, though rich, does not seem to be so deeply tainted by his wealth. The Camelot bunch are greed-personified. I guess it comes down to who runs the country - the government or big business? And I don't think there's too much of a mystery there. There can be no doubt that many good causes benefit from the lottery. And no-one can argue with that. But, as always, scrape away the razzamatazz, accepting those obvious benefits, and you reach the crux of the matter. The same applied to the Olympic games. It's happening all the time, all over the world. That beautiful handbag you own was probably stitched together by grubby, starving hands, in a seedy back room out in the third world. But that is not too high on your list of things to think about...right? Especially if you're one of the tiny minority whose numbers have come up in the lottery draw. Sour grapes on my part? I don't know. Maybe. But I hope not. This is not really a grouse about the lottery. It's a grouse about the people behind it, the people who put them there, and the people who keep them there. THE BOX IN THE CORNER Well, ours is more or less in the corner of the room! I'm not sure where this subject is going. I like the tele. It's actually switched on all day. Mostly tuned to a news channel with the sound turned down. I justify this by persuading myself that I like to keep abreast of the weather situation. October 2016 update: This grumble has crept up on me. Adverts! I do realise that without adverts we would probably have no T.V., so we have to endure them. I say "endure", but some of the damned things grow on you - which is exactly what they were designed to do! There are some very clever marketing people out there. So it's not the ads themselves I'm kicking at, it's their frequency. The gap between programme and Ad-break seems to be getting shorter and shorter by the week. I wonder if those clever people have been too clever for their own good? I'm beginning to be turned off by them; flicking through the channels simply to find something that is not an advert. Not easy. They seem to have gotten together to place them all at the same time. I find myself at one or other of the BBC channels, simply to avoid the sheer, mind-numbing repetition of it all. Still, I suppose it keeps me on my toes.