Extras

I got round to watching Extras for the first time tonight. It's basically The Office with added celebrities, and I found tonight's episode more embarrassing in a bad way than the good way that The Office usually managed to achieve. It had its moments, though, so I'll keep watching it. Also, Rachel out of Grange Hill was in it.

Catherine Tate's new series is just as funny as the previous one, too. She deserves to be much more famous than she is.

Wrote a sort of CV at work today. It's pretty rubbish, really, but Hazel pointed out a fantastic job on the Michael Page website that looks like it would be right up my street.

Okay, I was going to go on about that a bit longer, but I just got an email from Alexis Lemaire, pointing out that Ralf Laue is not fair, and definitively not honest and that Alexis will never take part in a false competition organised by Ralf. As far as I can tell, this comes about because Ralf hasn't allowed one of Alexis's posts on the mental calculations forum, relating to some new world record. Presumably that's the one for adding ten 10-digit numbers in the fastest time possible, because I haven't heard about any other record lately.

But the mental feats aren't really important if you're a spectator of this kind of forum. It's the fun of watching the strange personalities involved in this kind of thing. Alexis holds the record for finding the 13th root of a 200-digit number, a record which as far as I know nobody else has ever attempted. He thought up the rules and regulations himself, and talks about them at length on his own forum, when he's not complaining at length about his many enemies or explaining why it's numerologically plausible for him to be the reincarnation of Christ. He also has a tendency to try to enlist me as an ally in this kind of dispute, which is why I feel entitled to make mildly snarky comments about him here.

I've never met Alexis, but I hope to some day. I try to cultivate the friendship of eccentrics, and anybody who'd devote their life to finding the 13th root (or, on special occasions, the 23rd) of huge numbers has to be the kind of person I'd get on with.