Gay Wedding Ceremony-o-tron

Puzzled by how a gay wedding should be done?  Look no further!

Powered by Irony

Well, this whole comic series is bizarre. God is powered by irony.

Old Testament Idol

Reality TV meets the third commandment.

Spamalot

I went to see Spamalot last night in London.  It was an amazing show, happily sending up everything, especially itself.  I would happily go and see it again.  And again.  And again.

Nina Söderquist made a fantastic Lady of the Lake, the petulant diva of the show (well, along with Lancelot…).  Steven Kynman (Historian, Not Dead Fred, lead Minstrel and Prince Herbert) was also excellent, as was Andrew Spillett, who played Patsy (King Arthur’s “horse”).  Alan Dale, who played King Arthur, was a little wooden.  He was fine, but didn’t blow me away.

A special mention has to go to Ian Waller (”Swing”, which I think means dancers), who was the only person to write his biography in the spirit of the show (it starts “Ian started dancing at 7 but by 8.45 was back in bed thinking up a new career”).  Everyone else is far to serious.

The programme also contains a joke based on the subtitles of the original film.  Buy it and find out…

You Won’t Succeed In Broadway (If You Haven’t Any Jews)  was, I’m sure, a hilarious statement about musical theatre in New York.  However, it doesn’t translate very well to the West End of London.  It’s still a good song, but the joke isn’t that funny.

That said, I had an excellent time (right in front of the stage, on row A in the stalls!).  Go and see it!

openSUSE

I have a reasonably old laptop - an IBM ThinkPad something-or-other. It has a Pentium III processor (just under a gigahertz) and 128Mb of RAM. Basically, it functions as a combined plaything and backup computer. In its capacity as plaything, I install distros and operating systems I want to try out on it - since it has no interesting data on it, I can do this without worrying about data loss.

My latest experiment has been openSUSE. And, I have to say, it’s been a very good experience. I don’t have a lot of experience with graphical installers (my distro of preference is Arch Linux, which is quite bare-bones), but openSUSE outstrips any that I have used to date.

Everything Just Works (TM), or near enough. I had to do some manual intervention here and there, but mainly because of my personal fussiness or, in the case of partitions, because I was starting from an unusual set up that I wanted to scrap. The installer detected everything, and told me exactly what it was going to do (but without using too much technical jargon, which is the sort of thing likely to put off new users).

I haven’t actually used it much, but so far I am very impressed. It’s not replacing Arch Linux on my desktop any time soon, but if I ever wean my mother off Cool Edit and on to Audacity (hence breaking her last tie to MS Windows), then openSUSE is definitely a contender for the distro for her machine. And it’s staying as the distro on the laptop, which sits at home for my parents to use, should they need it, while I’m at university.