{"id":136,"date":"2010-11-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2010\/11\/15\/strictly-from-vegas-the-real-one\/"},"modified":"2010-11-15T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-15T07:00:00","slug":"strictly-from-vegas-the-real-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2010\/11\/15\/strictly-from-vegas-the-real-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Strictly from Vegas \u2013 the real one"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps you had the sound muted because Bruce Forsyth was making the funnies but if you caught him contorting a gag about the Las Vegas of the North, please picture me with a cold slice of pizza and a surprised look: I&#8217;m in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas of the, er, Nevada.<\/p>\n<p>Angela and I are here, it&#8217;s a work thing, I&#8217;d tell you but I promise you&#8217;d be bored by the fifteenth paragraph and I&#8217;d be irritatingly giddy, so, you know, enough. The fact that Bruce made this gag that way was disconcerting, that&#8217;s all. No more about me and half-choked, half-cooked pizza.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_qNff_ayROXI\/TODfd3EcGJI\/AAAAAAAAAHU\/oxxdsdStdQQ\/s1600\/strictly.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_qNff_ayROXI\/TODfd3EcGJI\/AAAAAAAAAHU\/oxxdsdStdQQ\/s320\/strictly.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\"><\/a><br \/>Instead, you&#8217;ll also have seen Pamela and James opening their routine typing on computers. Do you want to know what they were doing? They&#8217;d set their Macs in their home office to record Strictly Come Dancing via EyeTV, a teeny Freeview box about the size of a prayer that plugs TV signals into your computer. This EyeTV lark recorded the show for them, it transcoded it into a smaller file size and copied it up for my to my MobileMe cloud space where I was able to pull it down onto the MacBook I brought with me to work on.<\/p>\n<p>If the BBC would just open up the iPlayer to international viewers, I&#8217;d have been able to concentrate on my work instead of figuring all this out.<\/p>\n<p>But then it did also occur to me that this is Vegas: would the glamour of Strictly Come Dancing suddenly appear a bit limp to me? Would I have to hide behind geeking out just for something to say? Might I turn to, I don&#8217;t know, which satellite I bounced the cloud signal off just so I didn&#8217;t give in and rage at you about Ann Widdecombe?<\/p>\n<p>No, if it had come to that I&#8217;d just have told you that The A Team movie is very funny when you watch it on an airplane because all the airplane-blowing-up bits of the plot have been removed. It&#8217;s like watching Casualty when Gold used to show it during the daytime: you&#8217;d get the oh-oh, there&#8217;s trouble, then the oh-yes, it&#8217;s that big railing spike they keep cutting to and there&#8217;d be ominous music if Casualty had a budget, then there&#8217;s the eh-what? as the big accident of the week is deleted.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Ann Widdecombe, I am just bored. I&#8217;m not a fan of the woman anyway, I can acknowledge that she&#8217;s handling all this aplombably but I just want her gone. So Len&#8217;s effectively positioning the judges on her side did not win me over.<\/p>\n<p>Nor did Kara Tointon&#8217;s dance.<\/p>\n<p>But that&#8217;s because I was won over by her last week, I&#8217;m on this woman&#8217;s side, I expect to enjoy her dances and I truly do believe she should win the whole contest this year. We&#8217;ve seen many a good Argentine Tango on the show but this was the first brilliant one danced by a celebrity.<\/p>\n<p>Next week Strictly is in Blackpool, the Vegas of the North, and I am not. Did you spend that boring half hour applying for tickets to each episode of Strictly separately? Every week now I am reminded of that afternoon because the BBC ticket office regularly now emails me to say tough luck but there may be spaces for a hilarious new Radio 3 comedy about ducks.<\/p>\n<p>Still.<\/p>\n<p>I feel a bit bad complaining about never getting to travel to Strictly since I am currently 5,212 miles away.<\/p>\n<p>Right. Sorry about that. I must away to the gaming tables. Someone&#8217;s got to fund this trip, you know.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s okay.<\/p>\n<p>I have a system.<\/p>\n<p>William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps you had the sound muted because Bruce Forsyth was making the funnies but if you caught him contorting a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2010\/11\/15\/strictly-from-vegas-the-real-one\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-2c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}