Jeremy Beadle

Apparently Jemery Beadle, "second most hated man in England", is dead.

When I said "I don't want to hear any news about Jeremy Beadle ever again" I didn't expect people to take it so far not to tell me that he actually died :( OTOH, it shows just how adpet I became at avoiding celebrity gossip!

Come to think of it, I wonder if there's a service where you can sign up for alerts when arbitrary things happen: say "i want to know when XXXX book is released" or "I want to know when they finally make another _good_ superhero film" or whatever, and then if anyone who signed up sees it happens, they can trigger an email to go to everyone else.

The new Winnie-the-Pooh stories

I read the new Winnie-the-Pooh stories. They were much better than I expected: normally I'd expect any sequel, even if promising, to be something like:

- Nine princes in amber prequels, which tackled the interesting question of how Amber was formed from the shadows by ripping up the cosmology and inventing a different one instead
- Dune prequels which are gratuitously awful
- Disney winnie-the-pooh which features flying motorbikes

They mostly fit in with the style of the original, and were pleasant, and appropriate.

However, the style seemed formulaic in places, and none seemed very memorable, but I don't know if that's because the original actually was better, or just because people only see the glow of fond memory.