Having spent the last few years scaring the shit out of us all by predicting our imminent and painful deaths (e.g. “Bird flu fear: A Melbourne man has been rushed to hospital with suspected bird flu symptoms.” Would those also be the symptoms of that other lesser known disease, regular old human flu?), the Murdoch papers were in a bit of a predicament when, despite Tom’s unending cynicism, something bordering on scary actually happened this week with the terror arrests: How to convey the new seriousness of actual scary rather than pretend scary? I must say I was impressed with the ingenious solution the editors of the Herald Sun and MX came up with. HEADLINES ALL IN CAPITALS. They left themselves a little room to ramp the fear up another notch by keeping the trusty exclamation mark in the bag for now but I bet they have their fingers crossed that someone hurries up and invents electronic paper so they can do flashing red headlines for when bird flu goes pandemic-y.

No one does scary news as well as the Americans, although in their case it is as often unintentional as not. Such as this story about Kansas’ decision to once again change its education rules in favour of intelligent design. Among other things “the board rewrote the standards’ definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena” and is merely a “systematic method of continuing investigation”. Umm… ok. I guess if you can’t get religion taught in a science class, you just redefine science until it includes religion. Personally, I’ve always found the definition of religion as “belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe” a little narrow. I’m not even sure Baoism would make it in, lacking as it is in a story of creation. Any ideas on how to make the definition a little less discriminatory?

It’s that time of year again, where I succumb to temptation and start putting up promotional Doctor Who images. Actually, this should be the only one.

What do you think? Some people hate it. Some people love it. As usual on the net. Personally I think it looks pretty cool but it’ll need to be filmed right. I like how they’ve made it a very 60s style robot and haven’t gone all borg-ish on us.

The press release is on the Doctor Who site

Two assessments down, one to go. Then I’m free! FREE! Free at last! Well, free in the ‘unemployed’ sense of the word but hey. I promise, once I’m done with this crap, to go see some actual movies and review things for Grapefruit that occurred after the beginning of the millennium. And that aren’t television.

Also, I’m meaning to slightly rejig the weblog so we can have footnotes in them. I’m lost without my footnotes. If I could have, this would been a footnote.

Just thought I’d share some advice with everyone. If it’s about 5:30 – 7:00pm, and you get a phone call from a private number, and you say “Hello?” and no one answers for about three seconds, hang up immediately. It’s almost certainly a call from a market research person, probably in India, and if it isn’t then I’m sure they’ll call you back.

This has been a public service announcement from Grapefruit.

Sometimes, the name of a weblog post comes before you know what you’re going to write about. But this was easy. And if we want to keep on going, there’s heaps more Oz book titles to choose from.

We have a terror alert level, did you know/remember? I’d pretty much forgotten, though I vaguely recall some kind of fridge magnet doing the rounds at some point. Anyhow, it’s still at medium, despite our ultra-scary and important specific intelligence concerning a potential threat that Mr Howard kindly told us about yesterday. Now why is that? Probably an oversight I imagine.

Ah, it also turns out that our government has specifically told New Zealand that nothing is actually supposed to be happening soon, however. It must some kind of diversionary measure against the terrorists. Once you get them confused, they’re easier to catch.

Oh, we also didn’t tell our anti-terrorism infrastructure about it. That’ll really confuse those awful men. It’ll be like when you steal someone’s chocolate to get a rise out of them, but they don’t react amusingly and so you grudgingly give it back because you’re bored. I’m sure the bombs will be left, defused, outside Parliament House tomorrow.

So, there’s something bad happening, at some point, in the future, possibly. Very important, but only if you’re an Australian Senator or just an Australian pleb. Now, if group A could just remove group B’s social liberties quickly and neatly? Or, hey, we could just discuss these really important and potentially useful changes without cheap tricks and political sleight of hand. That’d be nice.

My travels are over and I’m back in a country where despite the many apocalyptic events happening throughout the world, a fast horse apparently deserves the first ten minutes of every news bulletin.

The remainder of my time in India went well. As promised, I rode off in to the desert on a camel and returned 24 hours later with a very sore arse. I visited a few more forts and palaces and now know far more than I ever needed to about Rajasthani history. I went to a number of very different cities — Jodhpur which was a nice place whose major claim to fame is that most of the buildings are painted blue, Udaipur which is a beautiful town on the edge of a lake and a good place to relax before I headed on to Ahmedabad, the most polluted city I have ever been to where my eyes were burning after 10 seconds outside and finally Mumbai.

Mumbai was a good place to finish. While still being very clearly Indian, it is India’s most westernised city with alcohol being far more accepted, people more often wearing western clothes and women actually speaking and being spoken to. It also bans rickshaws from most of the city meaning all the would-be rickshaw touts seem to have become drug dealers instead.

The absolute highlight of my time in India was the food which was amazing, particularly for a vegie like me. The restaurants class themselves as either ‘pure veg’, ‘veg’ or ‘non-veg’ and even non-veg tended to have loads of vegie food. It all tasted great, full of flavour and very fresh with my favourite dish being masala dosa — a pancake filled with spicy mashed potato. After such spicy, flavoursome food everything back here is tasting a bit bland.

But its not all bad. It’s great to look at the sky and see blue rather than haze. Driving down a three lane road with only three lanes of traffic moving down it is certainly novel and the sound of silence (rather than car horns) has never sounded so good. Anyway, must go — a newsflash on the highlights of Makybe Diva’s first day of retirement has just appeared on Ninemsn.

There’s lots of different ways to review TV. Over the years, we’ve had group reviews, we’ve had rants, we’ve had letters… It’s not usually hard to come up with something interesting when you’re watching something happen every week.

But when you’re watching old stuff, it’s harder to get an entire essay out. You’re watching it again, you’ve read stuff about it, it’s distractingly old… This is why people write episode guides the way they do. And that’s why now, some of the Grapefruit reviews of old TV will be in a different format to the usual. A more episode-guidey form.

Let me know what you think… We’ve almost made a separate Grapefruit episode guide in the past, but I think this is a better solution. It’s certainly easier.