Don’t sweat the Stray Thoughts (they’re all Stray Thoughts)

1. In case I haven’t made it clear, I’m going to stop apologising for the infrequency of updates, and reassure you it’s the decent craftsman justifiably blaming his tools. In an effort to promote Broadband, my ISP appears to be letting the dial-up facilities just rot where they sit. I frequently get a connection speed of 4.8kps instead of 56K, and for some reason I can’t possibly fathom this makes updating the webstuff tricky. Not to mention trying to sign up online to the Broadband packages which now look so much more convenient…
2. Mission Impossible 3 is a perfectly capable action thriller, and you could do worse than watch it. Not as much Hoffmann or Pegg as perhaps one might hope for, but JJ Abrams does a bot-kick job of the action sequences, and the plot’s suitably twisty.
3. It’s been pointed out to me that I often refer to not doing certain things because they’d be a waste of time. Perhaps I do indeed have an overdeveloped sense of time’s winged chariot drawing up outside and throbbing and waiting, or it may be an attempt on my part to recherche tous les temps perdu, but it’s true; I do see the passing of time as something not to be piddled away. Which makes the fact that I’m expending both words and moments, two of the things I value most, on this, all the more special, doesn’t it?
4. I saw an episode of QI being filmed last week – Fry, Davies, Jupitus, Bremner and Ancona, which will allegedly be the last episode of series 4. Impressively entertaining, and informative, and I pity you poor folks who won’t get to see it in its unedited two-hour-long live glory…
5. Speaking of things I saw, I appear to be collecting Pythons: saw John Cleese in Soho a few years ago, and Michael Palin on the South Bank the other week. Didn’t approach either of them, but hope to complete my Python set over time, though I guess Gilliam and Chapman might prove challenging.
6. Speaking of the Pythons, I can’t help but think that the three whose humour was/is more verbally based (Chapman, Cleese and Idle) generally seem to be less content with their lot than those who delighted in the surreal and just plain silly (Palin, Jones and Gilliam). A terrible oversimplification, to be sure, but I wonder if there’s something about essentially verbal comedy which leads its practitioners to analyse words for their comedic potential to a negative extent. I think it was WC Fields who said ‘I know what makes an audience laugh, but I don’t know why’, and I wonder if seeking to find out ‘why’ is a path down which melancholy lurks…