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Real pirates carry cutlasses. (Via Bruce Schneier.)

During a visit to Kew at the weekend, I was disturbed to notice that terrorists appeared to have gained control of the London Underground’s announcement boards to issue threats regarding a (presumably unsuccessful) planned attack:

After much inner struggle on the need vs bank balance front, I have finally bitten the bullet and bought a new computer. And it is already a quantifiably successful investment, as I have spent no time over the last couple of days waiting for my computer to stop crashing. (Of course, the many hours this has saved me I have frittered away playing with the exciting nobbly bits on Windows Vista and ringing up PCWorld to try to get them to send me the things they forgot to put in the box, but in theory I’ll eventually get down to work with, like, 200% more efficiency.)

The best bit, though, is this: to get into my user account I don’t need a password. Oh no.

My computer does a fingerprint scan.

This is totally unnecessary and absolutely thrilling. Logging on to check my emails is like entering a secret base in a James Bond film.

Well, maybe not exactly like that, but it certainly makes Torchwood seem pretty cheap and lacklustre. Oh, hang on…

Thank you to all the people who suggested I watch the opener for the new series of Torchwood. It was unmitigated crap, and quite possibly the worst writing I’ve seen in years. Feeble jokes, sex references without any sexual tension, and isn’t science fiction supposed to be at least tenuously based in, you know, science? It’s entirely possible to believe that Chris Chibnall was born in the 1550s, and has never heard of Francis Bacon. The US is producing precisely nothing, and this is all the BBC can come up with?

If the BBC really wants to make it better (and I doubt they do, or they’d have fired the entire writing team from last year, and quite possibly shot half the cast for good measure), they should send Jack Harkness into a black hole (with a copy of Spartacus on a portable DVD player so that, relativistically at least, he’ll be watching it for an eternity), and have the rest of the Torchwood team eaten by something large and slimey, before having a look at one of the other Torchwood centres, in the hope that they’re more interesting. And they could transfer PC Andy to work there because, you know, the world can never have enough of Tom Price (no, not that Tom Price).

That’s 45 minutes I’ll never get back. Plus nearly half an hour to get all the IMDb references right. And this blog entry would have made a better episode. Cast James Marsters as the narrator.

Neither myself nor my housemates would deny that our semi-regular podcast has been wildly inconsistent; however, I feel that we have achieved something in creating a podcast that is almost certainly illegal to listen to in Scotland due to their rather stringent blasphemy laws.

For people who are not interested in going back and experiencing the full indecency of a complete episode (if you are, episode six is the best place to start by the way) we have done a retrospective of the best (and worst) bits of 2007 which you can listen to here. This includes contributions from all manner of special guests, several genuine Priests (and a couple of less genuine ones), a feature on our now-infamous April fool’s day broadcast which convinced no less than three of our friends that one of us had died, and a lesbian re-enactment of the Passion.

The BBC’s unnecessary Christmas adaptation of Oliver Twist was, in spite of some excellent performances, one disaster on top of another; from the line “I’m the Artful Dogder, but you can call me Dodge”, to the conclusion of the plot nearly a whole episode too soon, to the glaring inconsistency of Nancy not being able to read but managing to turn out a wordy letter in copperplate handwriting, to the fact that director Coky Giedroyc clearly doesn’t know what an octave looks like on the piano, it was a sloppy, unintelligent take on a tale that Alan Bleasdale did perfectly well for television only eight years ago.

Neither was it clear why Sarah Phelps, somebody whose biggest previous credit is Eastenders, was chosen to adapt the thing. One suspects it was to “try to make Dickens relevant to people who like Eastenders“, but it was painfuly clear that Phelps’ words are unlikely to weather the test of time as well as those of Dickens (I refer you back to the “call me Dodge” example).

Still, a little part of me hopes that it was simply because somebody wanted to include the line “he ent worth it!”, which was finally improbably delivered to Rose in the final episode by none other than Mrs Bedwin. No doubt Charles would have written it if he’d thought of it…

In a burst of good intention brought on by the start of a new year and the rapid approach of old age, and sustained only by the feeling that if I give up this early in the year I will be a failure of a human being, I have taken to setting my alarm for a reasonably early hour each morning and jogging a few miles.

Far from making me feel like I am a healthier person and filling my body with happy endorphins, this has mostly caused me a short period of agony every day followed by feelings of nausea and exhaustion.

I am also trying to floss my teeth more regularly, and the resulting pain suggests to me that I might as well be pulling barbed wire across my gums.

I can’t help feeling that I was in a much healthier mental state when I was ignoring the need to floss and spending an extra half an hour (or so) in bed. It has also been pointed out to me that the man who popularised jogging in America died of a heart attack at the age of fifty whilst out jogging. I don’t have an equivalent story about flossing but I can’t help feeling there must be one – is there any evidence at all to say that I’m doing myself the slightest bit of good here?

It has been nearly three months since Alastair Bennett last managed to write something on his blog, though I know there are many who, like me, check it regularly in hope of an end to this drought. As a result of his inactivity his nemesis Mrs Gledhill has all but become a household name and I have found myself actually finishing pieces of writing (though I must point out the accountability of several other lazy bloggers for the latter consequence.

But for me the biggest tragedy of Alastair’s silence is that I know he did in fact write a blog entry a few weeks ago, he just hasn’t posted it yet. And indeed may never do so. The reason for this is that what he wrote referred to the fridge magnet poetry in our kitchen, and the poetry in question is so filthy that he is worried about the kind of attention it might draw when unleashed onto the world wide web.

I can sympathise with his dilemma. You may recall that this very blog received the attention of vast numbers of undesirables when James Aylett made an innocent comment about Harry Potter porn (and I occasionally try to tempt back this demographic by dredging up the whole sorry incident, mainly because I’m tickled by the idea of people desperate for some pictures of Hermione Grainger mounting a wizard getting landed with my witty musings instead).

But I would have liked to read Alastair’s thoughts on our fridge magnet poetry, and indeed I would like to see the poetry preserved in the websphere because it really is quite impressive.

I won’t type any of it out myself – we’re already going to be in enough trouble with the Harry Potter brigade. But since they’ve come hunting for porn, I suppose a photograph of our purple prose might satisfy some of their needs and won’t show up as filth in any search engines…

I’m very much enjoying the series of afternoon plays on Radio 4 this week, Nick Warburton’s Witness: Five Plays from the Gospel of Luke (do listen again) which have so far avoided all the usual cliches of gospel dramatisations and are telling the familiar stories in an insightful and fresh way with some well-drawn characters and great acting all round.

But I can’t help hearing shades of Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor Who in Jesus’ Northern tones…and let’s face it, since Russell T. Davies has so unsubtley drawn parallels between the Doctor and Jesus Christ, it’s hardly surprising that there are a few similarities in this very 21st century approach to the story of Jesus.

So I’m kind of hoping that when we get to the resurrection, Jesus will come back with a cheeky cockney accent and perhaps utter words along these lines of “cor, that’s amazing! Easter! I love it!!!”

I also hope there will be a Children in Need special in which a former Jesus, perhaps Robert Powell though I’d hold out for Willem Dafoe if at all possible, meets up with the new Jesus and they do witty banter about how how different Jesus was back in the 80s.