TV REVIEW: I watched Midsomer Murders

I love a good old fashioned depraved murder as much as the next guy with a cold heart and a television remote. 

British old-school television show Midsomer Murders really sets the gold standard for people killing off other people in spectacularly perverse and unrealistic ways.  

And there's none of that new world Netflix business where you have to guess the plot because the TV show title is just a bit too clever. There gonna be murders in Midsomer.

There is something about a quaint little chocolate box village that has a tendency for murdering just about everybody who walks its cobblestones.

And as in all loosely based detective narratives, never in the history of the township of Midsomer has anyone ever linked any murder to the one that happened on the show just last week, or the week before that. They are all completely unrelated obviously and why would you even question that?

Here are some of my thought bubbles as dastardly events took place:

• Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Barnaby, the superstar super-detective super detective chief inspector of the show, seems to stay cheery despite the fact his beat is full of innovative sociopaths.

• DCI Barnaby spends much of his shift being accosted by little old ladies who like to spill all the sordid, scandalous personal secrets of the villagers. Which are invariably not relevant to any case he’s working on, but are quite useful for a mental filing of every villager into some sort of alphabetical list of nutters. 

• There's that guy in a hoodie who's been watching him in every scene of this episode. This time he's hiding in the bushes. Now he's on the run. DCI decides to chase him into an abandoned, dilapidated building, still not having called for backup. I'm sure the guy’s harmless.

• It's an old boarded up house and the music is getting a bit hair-raising. DCI Barnaby goes in. Sorry, false alarm, nobody got murdered here.

• This new guy has intricately detailed appointments in his diary apart from this mysterious one that seems to coincide with the time of murder. I'm sure it was a legit appointment. DCI decides there's no need to check it out any further.

• DCI Barnaby returns to the crime scene at night by himself for no apparent reason. A man with no apparent reason to be there yells at him "what the hell are you doing here. You shouldn't have come back". DCI leaves the area. There was no reason to further question the crazy man, apparently. Pretty sure cops would find him a person of interest. What's the point of this scene? As an armchair crime-solving enthusiast, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to weed out the killer/s from all the village nutters.

• By my count, 180 people have being murdered so far in this episode.

Midsomer Murders is based on the real-life village of Midsomer Norton, a cutesy township in Somerset, England, not far from Bath, which is so named because it was quite popular amongst the Romans as the place to conduct their annual cleansing of the body.

Land owners in Somerset should consider themselves lucky they didn’t call their bathing spots jacuzzis.

The writer of Midsomer Murders found Midsomer Norton on a map and thought it sounded quintessentially British and sufficiently murderous. Is Midsomer Norton really like its television twin? 

Well, the crime stats of the real village indicate a boringly average amount of crime occurring in the township, with anti-social behaviour the most prevalent type of criminal activity. 

I’m a little hazy on the actual definition of murder, but I imagine it is certainly a fairly anti-social thing to do, so it may be more similar than we think.

I actually visited Midsomer Norton in July 2014. We were travelling through Somerset, mainly to attend the lovely city of Bath, and our hotel was a couple of miles from Midsomer Norton.

By some extraordinary stroke of luck, we were not murdered or even attacked by anti-social behaviour while walking the mean cobblestones of the pretty high street to get to Sainsburys in Midsomer, but there’s always next episode.

Caffeine: How much is too little?

NEW BLOG POST!  OMG OMGOMGOMGOMG I'M SO EXCITED. I'M SO EXCITED I THINK I'LL WRITE THIS POST ENTIRELY IN HIGHLY ANNOYING SHOUTY CAPSLOCK LETTERS.  My goodness everyone, just calm the heck down.  Me, particularly.

My current spate of mass hysteria is primarily driven by the fact that I've sort of mostly kind of quit most sugar and I've found something new to replace it with.  Great success.  CAFFEINE!  Yes, caffeine!!!  CAFFEINE!!!  It's probably not immediately obviously to the layman that I've consumed any caffeine at all today, but I have.  

They do say you should replace one dubious habit with another.  It's true; I read that on the back of a KFC (yum, so good, stop judging me, I'll do what I want, you're not the boss of me) bathroom door somewhere.

I probably could have turned to water in my hour of need but it's a clear, pompous little fluid, what with its sanctimonious health properties and its dirty detoxy ways.  No wonder all the other beverages despise it.  Except for when it freezes itself - then it'll go after any drink, the little tramp.

I criticise its shady methods, but I am actually also abusing the watery substance in its natural form right now as well - in the manner of about four litres a day - which is fortunate because I am also drinking about half that in caffeine.  It's like the lack of sugar has sent me completely bonkers.  And sleep... what's that?... is that some weirdo dodgy pastime you people do at night or something?...oh, you crazy kids and your shenanigans.

Sight for Blind Eyes

I've realised in the past year or so that university has completely ruined my eyesight.  It can't possibly have anything to do with the fact that I am getting older, because I am barely out of my teens.

All I know is about ten years ago my sight was not too bad at all, now I'm lucky if I can recognise someone I know from 20 metres away.  What the hell happened here? Uni happened, that's what.  I think all those years of reading lecture notes and textbooks by flickering campfire has stuffed them good.  Actually that's an outrageous lie, because I wouldn't go camping if my life depended on it.  Or yours.  Probably especially yours. No offence, cyberbots.

I've been wearing glasses for years for reading, especially when my eyes get tired.  But my main sight issue comes courtesy of my nan's genes.  Bless her, she gave me one long-sighted eye and one short-sighted eye, so my poor depth perception has been a handy life-long excuse for why I constantly walk into and sideswipe cars, walls, doorframes, doors, power poles, pillars, concrete barriers, and the occasional unfortunate person.

I have also been known to flatten side mirrors as I walk through carparks.  And it was a running joke when I was a child how I would manage to walk into a doorframe with my right shoulder and bruise my left inside ankle.

I'm very, very familiar with that instant nauseating pain you get when you hit your funny bone.  Actually none of my bones are off limits.  I often slip on escalators and I don't really care for the gap in elevators that normal people don't seem to think about.

I absolutely hate getting on or off a treadmill while it's vaguely moving, which is just stupid anyway, but I watch people do it at my gym all the time.  And last year at Disney in Florida I spent a lot of time willing myself not to misjudge my step when I had to get on rides that just don't stop. Stress, man.

Driving on roads that are squished between rock faces is a right nightmare and fills me with anxiety.  Ironically, I was pitcher for my high school softball team.  I imagine a lot of my issues could be mediated if I wore my glasses, but I've never been one to do what I'm told.  Plus poor depth perception makes one's life more exciting.

Ramping Up

I haven't blogged for three-ish weeks. What's with that? Let's see, what's happened in that time. I went to Mustique, I got papped on the beach by some boganey bogans, I got called a 'shop window mannequin' by some depressing author who pens books in a novel, publishable-type manner, and then I did this and that and stuff and thing.

I quite frankly can't be bothered to construct complete sentences, but who can blame me, I am a royal after all. Oh, hang on, sorry, I think I'm getting my life muddled with that of Duchess Kate.

In the last three weeks I have been to the dentist. So there, Duchess Kate. Our paths are so eerily similar is shocks me. But shit got weird today. Very, very viard. Everything was just ticketyboo until I accidently drove up a ramp onto the back of the truck. I know. Weird.

Like there aren't enough things to worry about when I'm whooshing around in my Toyota; now I have haphazard ramps to add to the list. Rampophobia; look it up people. If anyone from AAMI is reading this, you're not really in a position to pass judgement, because I've seen your ads. You would insure a tractor-driving monkey if it could afford comprehensive.

Earth bound, fun-sized space junk

NASA have been putting various this and that made of titanium, aluminium, steel and probably candle stick wax into outer space for decades now, but they don't seem to be terribly adept at bringing much of their space junk back down to earth.

Thanks to the efforts of the United States and other rich countries with rocket ships and sputniks, the vast amount of objects in orbit around the earth, a strip also known as Greater Washington D.C. if you ask Washington D.C., is littered with random parts of old satellites, abandoned rocket boosters, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and bits and pieces of broken storm trooper.  Thanks George Lucas.

True to form, the Russians have contributed to the problem, throwing endless empty oversized vodka bottles out of their shuttle windows while entertaining ogliarch after ogliarch in their makeshift supersonic grottos.

The people who research such things say there is so much space junk up there that it resembles peak hour around the Arc de Triomphe.  So it's probably a good thing that NASA are actually bringing down one of their satellites rather than leaving it floating through the world's biggest garbage dump.

NASA's doomed Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is due to 'touch down' to earth early Saturday 24 September 2011, Australian time (EST), but NASA doesn't really know when and it doesn't really know where.  It's all a big mystery to the government department that put man on the moon.  And NASA's Twitter page doesn't fill me with any confidence whatsoever.  They say it won't beach itself in Northern America, which basically tells me that they don't really give a shit where it lands, as long as it's not over Northern America. 

Given the brazillions of dosh that was poured into NASA over the forty year space program, you'd think one of their rocket scientists would think to attach a futuristic GPS tracking device.  I know the satellite has been dead since 2005, and I know that it was launched twenty years ago, but these people are paid to look into the future of space travel and come up with something better than "it's too early to estimate where UARS debris will land, but we know where it won't".  So basically their advice is to duck.

I suppose it doesn't really matters where it lands; it's only 5,900 kilograms.  NASA says the bus-size (which is slightly bigger than a fun-sized Mars Bar) satellite will break apart and "mostly" burn up on the way down, and they estimate these bit-sized chunks, some weighing 330 pounds, will hurtle unconrtollably toward earth, and will hopefully land on something meaningless like the Kardashians.