Live From Brussels

Second Episode of "The IT Crowd"

I just watched the second episode of The IT Crowd, and I loved it.  Much better than the first episode, with fewer stale jokes and some great situation humor.  Loved the 'new emergency number' gag, the fake feet, the guy with the 'obscenity buzzer', the flaming fire extinguisher and of course the 'fire screensaver'.  Oh, and the whole 'e-mail to the fire department' joke.

Definitely a new series to follow...

The IT Crowd

I just watched the first episode of  The IT Crowd on-line.  From the looks of it, this could turn into a very nice sitcom about the lives of some computer nerds in a corporate basement.  I loved the attention to detail in the set design.  I noticed some EFF stickers, for example, and a picture of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Also an RTFM t-shirt.

On the other hand, some of the jokes were quite stale.  Fooling a boss into thinking he has voice control on his computer?  Feh...  A stereotypical geek (glasses, tie, ugly shirt and weird hair) talking technical mumbo jumbo?  Feh...  The old 'person-trying-to-impress-visitor-by-talking-into-unconnected-phone' gag?   Feh...

On the other hand, the digs at Ally McBeal and the Amsterdam hooker stuff was great.  So was the stuff about needing bigger glasses, depending on if something was a plan or a scheme.  And the 'have you turned it off and back on' routine on the phone was great real-life comedy.

I'll keep watching this to see how it turns out next week.

Desperate Housewives metablog

I've never even watched a single episode of Desparate Housewives, despite it being a very popular TV series.  More as an experiment than anything else, I created the  Desperate Housewives metablog.  It has all the latest news about the show, at least the news that is being blogged about.  Basic ingredients: six RSS/ATOM feeds from various feed searching services, and a dash of SuperBlog...  Ready in five minutes, updated every hour.

Blogging about "Het Eiland"

One of the more popular and better written TV shows in recent times on Belgian television has been "Het eiland", a comedy series about a group of office-dwellers and their office-adventures.

As part of my continuing experiments with aggregator software, I present a new site called Blogs over "Het Eiland".  As the name suggests, it tracks posts about this series made by various bloggers...

Surprise Me!

Look what I got in my inbox: Surprise Me! Sent to me by none other than bert.laplasse@cynalco.be , also known as 'Bucky'.

For those of you not into Flemish television, this is a reference to an episode in the second season of 'Het Eiland', more or less a Flemish version of 'The Office', the BBC series about office life.  Bucky is the new department manager who uses all kinds of American-style, management-fad techniques to run things, thus totally wracking the nerves of the new floor-manager, who has just been promoted after years as a regular office clerk, is fairly conservative and doesn't know how to react to all this.  One of the first things Bucky sent him was this enigmatic e-mail, causing all kinds of hilarity later on...

'Het Eiland' in general tells about the adventures of the administrative staff of Cynalco, a company that is making various medical supplies, like screws to heal broken bones.  It seems there even is an official website www.cynalco.be that looks sufficiently real at first glance.

A quick look at the WHOIS data for the domain reveals that it is owned by 'Woestijnvis', the production company that makes the series.

Naam cynalco
Status REGISTERED
Registratie 15 december 2002
Laatste wijziging 23 december 2003 17:19
Licentienemer
Naam Eli Backs
Organisatie Woestijnvis NV
Taal Nederlands
Adres address

(bunch of other info, like phone number and e-mail address snipped)

Battlestar Galactica Blog

Cool, just found out about the Battlestar Galactica Blog, via Boing Boing.  Neatest thing of all, it runs on Movable Type.

Anyway, if you haven't been able to watch the new series of BSG, do check it out, it is way better than the original... erm, at least that's what I've been, eh, told, by erm, people, who saw it, because, like, it is like, not on TV in Belgium yet and, eh, I can't have seen it yet, then, eh, can I?

U.S. Military Clears A-Team Of Charges

Heh: The Onion | U.S. Military Clears A-Team Of Charges (thanks Carlo)