Ice Cold in Crapchester

I've experienced two blizzards toady, one whilst driving, the second on foot.  Thankfully, none of the snow settled.  Which means that, despite the low temperatures, I'm still in a reasonably good mood - if there's one thing guaranteed to sour my mood, it's snow lying on the ground.  I clearly wasn't in that good a mood earlier this week, judging by the posts I made here, even though there was no snow.  A lot of my bad mood came down to that bloody course I was talking about last time - I'd been dreading it for over a month.  Not just the early start it entailed but also the nature of the exercise - it's one of those things employers insist you do as it checks a box for them in terms of discharging their duty to protect your health and safety at work.  Even though its actual content was pretty much irrelevant to my job.  However, it's out of the way now and I've been doing my best to get back into a better frame of mind.  To that end, I wrote and published an entirely puerile story involving Winston Churchill lighting his own farts over at The Sleaze.  It's less satire than childish character assassination.  But it's good to indulge one's more juvenile sense of humour from time to time.  Besides, I was heartily sick and tired of all those bloody documentaries and TV commentators trying to make out that Churchill was some kind of political and military genius who single-handedly defeated the Nazis.

Changing the subject completely, Channel Five are relentlessly plugging some new reality TV show they're showing next month: 10,000BC.  It's based around the conceit of getting a bunch of random people to live like Neolithic cave people and seeing what happens.  As soon as the trailers started I could see flaws in this plan, namely the lack of suitable wildlife for them to hunt.  I mean, unless they're going to cover a few elephants and rhinos in fur to simulate Woolly Mammoths and Woolly Rhinos, then let the hapless contestants hunt and kill them with spears, then it is hardly going to be realistic, is it?  The same applies to the threat from rival predators: again, can we expect to see a few tigers with false outsized canine teeth pretending to be Sabre Tooths let loose in the vicinity of the contestants' cave?  I think not.  And speaking of that cave - will they have to fight a cave bear (or nearest modern equivalent) for possession of it?  While we're on the subject of authenticity, will the lack of Neolithic medical knowledge be reflected, with wounds being allowed to fester and even minor injuries resulting in death?  Anyway, the trailers all ominously state that 'things didn't go as planned'.  In what way?  Were some of the contestants eaten by a Tyrannosaurus?  After all, that would be bloody unexpected  - not only are Tyrannosaurs extinct, but they never co-existed with cavemen, despite what One Million Years BC might tell us.  That said, One Million Years BC, with all its inaccuracies, is still likely to be more entertaining than any prehistoric reality show made for Channel Five.