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The exhaustion caught up with me last night and I was dog-tired by 8.30 in the evening. I crashed at about 9.15 and woke up at about 2am. However, rather than get up and play an hour or so on Stars (which I nearly did), I decided to just wallow in the free relaxing time. I got back to sleep until 5am. Excellent.
Curiously, my performance in the gym today was abysmal compared with yesterday, when I was functioning on about two hours' sleep. I hit 23.15 for 5km on the rowing machine on Wednesday, which is better than I can remember doing, er, ever (and I haven't been rowing 5K that much this year, anyway -- sticking to 4km as a rule). This, mark, was after the weight training and 25 minutes on the cross-trainer.
Anyhoo, I wake up at 5am and turn on the morning news on Radio Five. Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but does what happened last night on The Apprentice qualify as news? I'm not precious about this; perhaps it does (if enough people are curious about what happened). But surely, if it does, then the happenings on Big Brother qualify as well? But one of them is covered because it is a BBC programme, while the other is ignored because it is not.
One expects this kind of thing in Sports Personality of the Year, but I happen to think that news values should focus on a bit more than whether the programme was made by the BBC.
+++++
I've had a tough journalistic week, having to put on two very different and unusual hats from my normal world of financial reporting. On Monday I came into work, only to find that a senior insurance executive had been arrested and sectioned after his two-year old daughter was found seriously injured (she later died). Then, on Tuesday, I had a court case where an ex-insurance CEO was up at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to defraud.
Writing about these things is a minefield, with all sorts of conventions needing to be followed if you don't want the courts to throw you into jail for contempt.
+++++
Recent music has included Voxtrot, which is growing on me (think in the mode of Arcade Fire) and is recommended, and Biffy Clyro, whose latest escapade (Puzzle) had me wondering if they had transplanted from Scotland (although not, I suspect, West Lothian) to Austin, Texas, and had hired Avril Lavigne's producer for the record. This was genuine US bubblegum pop for the 2000s. You know the type. Heavy pop chords, shouty anthems. I've only heard it a couple of times, but there seems to be little edge to the music, designed specifically to be shown on one of the Video pop channels, as far as I can see.
Curiously, my performance in the gym today was abysmal compared with yesterday, when I was functioning on about two hours' sleep. I hit 23.15 for 5km on the rowing machine on Wednesday, which is better than I can remember doing, er, ever (and I haven't been rowing 5K that much this year, anyway -- sticking to 4km as a rule). This, mark, was after the weight training and 25 minutes on the cross-trainer.
Anyhoo, I wake up at 5am and turn on the morning news on Radio Five. Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but does what happened last night on The Apprentice qualify as news? I'm not precious about this; perhaps it does (if enough people are curious about what happened). But surely, if it does, then the happenings on Big Brother qualify as well? But one of them is covered because it is a BBC programme, while the other is ignored because it is not.
One expects this kind of thing in Sports Personality of the Year, but I happen to think that news values should focus on a bit more than whether the programme was made by the BBC.
+++++
I've had a tough journalistic week, having to put on two very different and unusual hats from my normal world of financial reporting. On Monday I came into work, only to find that a senior insurance executive had been arrested and sectioned after his two-year old daughter was found seriously injured (she later died). Then, on Tuesday, I had a court case where an ex-insurance CEO was up at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to defraud.
Writing about these things is a minefield, with all sorts of conventions needing to be followed if you don't want the courts to throw you into jail for contempt.
+++++
Recent music has included Voxtrot, which is growing on me (think in the mode of Arcade Fire) and is recommended, and Biffy Clyro, whose latest escapade (Puzzle) had me wondering if they had transplanted from Scotland (although not, I suspect, West Lothian) to Austin, Texas, and had hired Avril Lavigne's producer for the record. This was genuine US bubblegum pop for the 2000s. You know the type. Heavy pop chords, shouty anthems. I've only heard it a couple of times, but there seems to be little edge to the music, designed specifically to be shown on one of the Video pop channels, as far as I can see.
