We're through!!!!

It took me a while to catch up witht he news that Liverpool Football Club, like most other things in the world, has been bought by American businessmen. Hopefully it will be good news for the club in the long run. The deal valued the club at £174.1million. Liverpool lose yet again away from home (2-1 to Newcastle) while England make hard work of beating Italy in the Six Nations rugby championship. Johnny Wilkinson becomes the highest scorign English rugby uniion player in the process. Meanwhile Scotland bounce back from last week's defeat by England with a 21-9 win against Wales.

Additional - the The Great Race has been updated yet again, because we have two new contestants - battling each otehr in a different race, to 300 reviews.

UPDATE - Full Time, 2-0 to Liverpool. Nice result :-D

Oh yeah, congrats to Andy Murray who's having a good run in tennis and Birmingham City who have well and truly excised their cup ghosts of last season by thumping Newcastle 5-1! All my Brummie friends are very happy... except of course the Villa supporters! Speaking of sports, I've updated my Sport & Fitness Equipment Reviews page to include a new exercise bike review.

Oh well, forget fotball and read some of my board game reviews instead:

• Checkers (Draughts)
• Chinese Checkers
• Connect Four
• iMAGiNiff
• Monopoly

Well even Liverpool cynics wouldn't have predicted other than a win against Watford, but a 3-0 away win is still encouraging, particualrly after the cup exits at the hands of Arsenal. Now if Aston Villa and Wigan can pull off unexpected wins against Man Utd and Chelsea as well, that would be perfect... (Arsenal losing would be nice, too!! Go Blackburn!)

Warts & All

Best of all, all 85 pagesof poetry are available as a free download Click here to download.

Space Oddity

Prepare to have your synapses severely scrambled!

The Snob, the Blob, and the Mob

Expected release date: April 2007

With the review of Chicken Run, my Claymation page is complete. For now...

A 3-0 win against Bolton means Liverpool leapfrog them into third place int he Premiership, albeit still a massive 14 points behind Manchester United who are setting the pace, and retain the best home record with 9 wins, 2 draws, no defeats, 23 goals scored with only 3 against us. If only we could reproduce that kind of form away from home... maybe one day!

Perhaps foolishly I'm giving Lulu another go (apparently they have a UK-based printery now, which may help) - see this page for more details.

Also the Language Software section has been extended and revamped mightily... pick a language! Spanish - Italian - German - French - Russian - Japanese - Chinese - Arabic - ESOL - Dictionaries.

Also added a site search feature to the homepage.

Might upload some more poetry today, but formatting some of the more visual poetry is a real pain! :-D ** UPDATE ** - some major updates on the page, categorised by poem type, loads of new poems, site total web pages thus increased by about 50% I think!!

A tiny amount of progress on with a designer journal being started.

Yet another update on the Shareware programs page - a couple of these are programs to allow you to make your own screensavers and make your own printable calendars. There's are loads of new language learning programs, games, and other stuff... click on what you're interested in! Language Software, Utilities, Programs for Webmasters, Internet/Security, Business Software, Games

Interestingly esoteric information - on Alexa this site is ranked 4,970,368th, which may sound less than impressive but it's up 1,536,911 places from 3 months ago! I'll be keeping an eye on this stie now - see this page to see the current stats. DARSCOM recently passed 15,000 page views overall, and it seems to be getting steady traffic at about 20-40 page views per day on average. Hopefully this will go up, I guess it just takes one really well known person / site to publicly say that they like your site for it to start going up (or getting top ranking for a generic keyword on Google etc).

Also - I'm revamping the poetry page on this site.

Oddest bit of news I've seen for a while...:

"An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence" - now that's something you don't hear every day!!

58 days to go till my 4th Epiversary, looks like I'm on target for over half a million page views by then (19th January). I still need 40,091 hits to reach the 500,000 mark, but should do it with a couple of weeks to spare. I think...

Additional: - have put some photos of our recent visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Birmingham. Want to see them? Click here!

Yes, it is a slow news day. Though I'd just like to wish Richard Hammond, the Top Gear presenter fighting for his life after a 300mph+ land-speed record attempt crash victim, a speedy recovery. Just to show that I'm a nice person, like.

Work is going on apace (a slow pace) on my first novel. I do actually intend to get it finished this time, which means most of my other writing endevaurs will be put on a back burner. Never mind eh, can't do everything all at once...

In other news, I've finally made it into the top 100 most popular book reviewers of all time on Epinions - whoopedar and all that.

• Currently watching: Red Dwarf seasons 1-4 (yet again!)
• Currently reading: Wyrd Sisters (yet another Discworld novel) - next up is Dostoevsky!! Just finished Mossflower, a fantasy adventure by Brian Jacques.
• Currently playing: Heroes of Might & Magic 3

Been thinking of what to update on the site when I have a bit more time. Apart from obviously more freeware game reviews, I’ll be putting something up about how DARSCOM came to be, and how it became what it is now. (Click here to see this page now I've vinished it.) Still thinking about putting my novels-in-progress online too, and perhaps some other stuff that is at the moment super-top-secret. To find out what those super-top-secret things are, keep visiting! (Even I don’t know what most of them are yet, that’s how super-top-secret they are….)

Andy Murray in the Top 200 in the ATA tennis rankings eh - well done that man!

In production at the moment: my Top 100 Computer Games of All Time - I've got up to 86 now, just working out the final 14 games to make the list. Loads of true classics from the 8-bit adn 16-bit computers make up the bulk of my list. Look out for it on Epinions in about a fortnight's time.

Recent film reviews:

• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
• The Lake House

Random thoughts:

• I work at a hospital. If I pop outside for some fresh air, all I can smell is cigarette smoke…
• It struck me (again) the other day that there are so many pretty girls around that lose all attractiveness the moment they open there mouth. I always thought “sugar and spice and everything nice” was a myth, but these girls seem intent on proving that they cannot in fact speak a whole sentence without an obscenity.
• The closest I’ve come to culture recently (and most likely the closest culture will let me get to it...) was watching “The Marriage of Figaro” last night on the “Big Screen” event at Chamberlain Square in Birmingham city centre (after a visit to Nando’s of course!). Not such a big screen really and very difficult to read subtitles. The event also attracted all the local cretins to make a lot of noise around us, and a drunk attempt at operatic performance. I was very disappointed that the one bit I do know wasn’t there at all, leading me to believe it must have been in Rossini’s version, not Mozart’s. Oh well…
• Attempting to get back writing reviews but not much inspiration at the moment. Work on my first two adventure games continues, when I’ve got a download available I’ll set up the website, but probably not before. (Though I might put the plot synopses up somewhere if the mood takes me.)
• Yay! Another cheque from Epinions has arrived!! I can afford to eat for another few days... :-D
• So another World Cup campaign ends for England, predictably in a penalty shoot out. Lots of people even seem to care, but somehow I can't bring myself to. Ho hum.

Finished my reviewing of the original Star Wars trilogy today - here they are if you're interested (or, indeed, if you have no interest whatsoever, they are still here: Episode IV: A New Hope, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. (Empire Strikes Back will always be my favourite!)

Watched the original Star Wars trilogy again – still terrific films, pity Return of the Jedi wasn’t quite as good but the first one is still really enjoyable and The Empire Strikes Back is one of my all-time favourite Sci-Fi films. Was reminded exactly why when watching it again. Superb! I feel three reviews coming on… may the force be with them.

My Star Wars parody, “Star Chores” continues as young Luke Whytstalker begins his Jedi training…

Well the diet’s going to pot and not been going to the gym much, but will get back on track soon. Probably. Though remarkably I've actually lost a few pounds since last week - not sure how!

• Scary Movie 4 (Anna Farris, Craig Bierko)
• Alien Autopsy (Ant & Dec, Bill Pullman))
• Firewall (Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany)
• Failure to Launch (Mathew McConoughey, Sarah Jessica Parker)
• Lasdt Holiday (Queen Latifah, LL Cool J)

• Clone Wars Volume 1
• Clone Wars Volume 2
• Batman: The Legend Begins

Captain's Blog, Additional -Liverpool 5 Birmingham City 0... I think it's going to be tears in the blue half of Birmingham tonight!!

Captain's Blog, Additional - Liverpool 7 Birmingham City 0!!! Great result, though you have to feel sorry for Blues... without some bad injury problems they would have at least put up a brave fight (they've beaten us enough times in the last few seasons, as certain people keep reminding me!!).

>Captain's Blog, Additional - forget to mention this yesterday, my Top Ten Movies of 2005 has now been posted. (I thought you'd be excited about that!)

Captain's Blog, Additional -well you can tell Liverpool's success is beginning to upset everyone else because they keep writing off their chances. Benfica in Portugal tonight - 1-0 to the away side, do you think?

Captain's Blog, Additional Additional - gah, they scored 6 minutes from time. We'll still pull it round at Anfield, I'm confident... well, quite confident...

• Liverpool beat Manchester United in the FA Cup!! :-D Great stuff, revenge for the recent league defeat. Not too sure about the next round, though - away to Birmingham, we don't exactly have a great record against them! (As one of my Brummie friends delights in telling me... again and again... and again...)
• Keeping with the sporting theme, muchos congratulations to young Scot Andy Murray for winning his first ATP Tour title, defeating Andy Roddick and Leyton Hewitt on the way! Tremendous achievement. Pity the hype that will undoubtedly surround him for Wimbledon this year will probably suffocate him, but that's the British public for you!