12 posts tagged “2000”

I wanted to find some clips to pay tribute to the late actor, Edward Woodward. Strangely, the day he died (at a time when I did not know he had passed away), my mind kept thinking back to a joke my friend Ann told me (‘If there were no ds in his name, he’d be called Ewar Woowar’). But here is Woodward in his prime, in shows such as The Baron and The Saint, decades before he became a household name in the US in The Equalizer.

Woodward won the Best Actor award in the UK in 1970 for Callan: In 2000, Woodward, still looking quite healthy, recalled his time on the show: And who knew that he could sing? Here he is in Morecambe & Wise:    The last shows I saw Woodward in were CI5: the New Professionals, in which he was hampered by some terrible scripts that kept getting changed so his performances were never polished, and in the last La Femme Nikita season, where he is revealed as Peta Wilson’s character’s father. My heart goes out to Michele, his widow.

One of the best episodes of the Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) remake in the early 2000s guest-starred Hugh Laurie as a villainous doctor. (From memory, the episode was called ‘Mental Apparition Disorder’, and itself was a remake of a story by the show’s original 1960s’ star, Mike Pratt.) I have put clips of this episode up before, but here is Laurie again, interacting with Vic Reeves and Emilia Fox playing Boggle (a terrible game!) while off-set. Bob Mortimer also appears.

If only they showed this in the ’50s about life in 2000!

(Forwarded by Larz Shinobi on Twitter.)
   Man, I need some Soylent Green.

This is probably my favourite scene in Finding Forrester. F. Murray Abraham, as the pompous and somewhat prejudiced teacher, gets what the young people type as pwned, pronounced owned, as Rob Brown, as the student, meets his challenge.

I’m not a huge Friends fan—OK, I’m not a Friends fan at all—but I did see this at the time and thought Bruce Willis gave a wonderfully comedic performance. According to the video, Mr Willis won an Emmy for his guest role. To this day, I still occasionally say, ‘I, too, am a neat guy.’

Hugh Laurie has always had an awful bedside manner as a fictional doctor. This was the first time I saw him playing a doctor, in the Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) remake. One of my favourite scenes in the entire series follows, but unfortunately the whole part about getting Bob Mortimer to relax (like a hypnotist) beforehand isn’t included:

And taken in isolation, the next has its funny moments:    From what I remember, UFO’s Col Virginia Lake—Wanda Ventham—guested in this episode, too, and that Martin Clunes (dare I call him the new Reggie Perrin?) gets killed in the pre-title sequence.

I think we know who the third celebrity to pass away is, after Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalbán. It’s Tony Hart, who passed away today. He had had two strokes and even had to give up drawing last year. RIP Tony. You were an inspiration to all budding artists and graphic designers out there was we watched you on Vision On and Take Hart.

   Here he is meeting Ricky Gervais in 2000. A true gent here, while Gervais acts like a prat.

I’ve been having a think about the hatchet-job that Gov. Palin is getting, surprisingly, from the Murdoch Press, specifically its Fox News Channel arm. Considering that she was championed by this network after her selection by the party (over Sen. McCain’s own choice of Sen. Joe Lieberman, who even my Democratic friends felt would have been a better choice to win moderate voters), the about-face shows a level of deceit either now, or before, by the media company.
   While there may have been some gentlemen’s agreement over concealing this information till after the election, I don’t think I have seen the Murdoch Press go after a political figure in quite this fashion since Hard Copy did its exposés on Sen. Ted Kennedy in the 1980s.
   To be fair, even Newsweek, on the left, has kept mum about matters till now, and I imagine other media outlets have done the same in order to maintain their access to the candidates.
   We are hearing some things about the Democrats and we now know that Sen. Obama isn’t above swearing, but overall the post-mortem, even in the conservative press, has been relatively muted about the winning side.
   But not against Gov. Sarah Palin.
   It also shows a disloyalty within the Republican Party that is not becoming of it, if it wishes to be seen as a party that was unjustly cheated out of the election this week.
   In 2000, Democrats could point to the recount process in Florida and the alliance between the state’s Attorney-General Katherine Harris and the Republican Party as having taken the presidency from Al Gore.
   This time, the divide that has occurred might leave Republicans thinking that the disunity in the party cost them the election, and they were beaten by Democrats who hid their divisions better. They may fairly and rightly point to the media as being complicit in giving Sen. Obama a free ride, just as Conservatives in Britain could in 1997, but the reality may be that there was something rotten within the GOP.
   I can’t believe campaign aides and workers coming out and breaching a level of trust by revealing such details as Gov. Palin coming to greet them in a towel, and having this make the news pages.
   Even the supposed hatred by Sen. Clinton’s campaigners for Sen. Obama stayed relatively under the radar, either by a cooperative liberal media or by a sense of loyalty to the Democratic Party.
   We’re hearing news of the Governor’s tantrums and that the $150,000 shopping spree may have been more expensive than first thought.
   This is a personal attack on her that shows party workers who can’t maintain any sense of dignity and trust.
   Importantly, you do not see someone of the standing and decency of Sen. John McCain rubbish his running-mate.
   If this division has been inspired by higher-ups in the Republican Party, then Americans might be fortunate that this version of the GOP did not get into power on November 4.
   One may argue that it is our right to know, and maybe it is. But the pace of this so-called knowledge being disseminated points to a party that is acting out sour grapes and playing the blame game a little too soon, and I find it troubling.
   Every party says it will regroup after a loss. It is fair to note that the loss that the Republicans suffered was in fact very small, given how they were outspent by the Democrats to such a degree. At this stage, I do not think there will be much re-evaluation of where it will lead, because I am not sure if the Party itself realizes where it wishes to head. It may need to rebrand much later, but for now, it hasn’t been able to protect its own from this onslaught—and may well have caused it.

The below is from an entry I made at my main blog, based on some very basic maths after reposting a graph from the Historian’s blog.

Just last week I was listening to the radio—one of the foreign-owned stations that seem to populate the FM airwaves (probably Coast)—and the DJ gave one of the less intelligent commentaries about oil prices I had heard. He also referred to ‘gas prices,’ which of course is the incorrect term here where gas refers to gas, not petrol or gasoline.
   Petrol prices in New Zealand rise and fall based on American news—something that is not that relevant when it comes to how much we pay for oil. When there is a rise in the US dollar oil price, but the New Zealand dollar has strengthened over the same period, then that rise should not be felt at the pump as greatly.
   Let’s assume oil prices are at US$120 a barrel and there is no inflation between 2000 and 2008. (Of course, it was less than $120 in 2000 and more than $120 now.)
   In 2000, with the New Zealand dollar at an all-time low against the greenback, we would have had to fork out NZ$300 to get that barrel.
   In 2008, with the New Zealand dollar having gone back to around 1982 levels against the greenback, the equivalent is NZ$154.
   So for a New Zealand company buying oil, it actually costs less.
   However, I am ashamed to note that once you factor in the real prices, we are looking at these figures:

2000 price of crude, US$27·39 (real, not adjusted), equalling NZ$68·48
2008 price of crude, US$134, equalling NZ$171·79

Pump prices—and I know I am ignoring refining costs and a whole bunch of other stuff—are:

2000: NZ$0·97 per litre
2008: NZ$2·14 per litre

This actually means the rate of increase New Zealanders are experiencing is not as bad as the oil prices offshore based on New Zealand dollars, even if our prices are rising more quickly than Europe’s.
   While the Americans, relative to their dollar, are paying four times more, we are paying just under three times.
   Whatever the case, I think it’s worth informing the public—especially on whom we might be able to blame these price rises. And that demand and supply have nothing to do with these high prices, because demand is actually dropping—so we can stop blaming the Americans for their big SUVs and the Red Chinese for buying new cars.
   The targets are most likely the speculators, institutional investors, price fixers, the corporations and the cartels.
   And it seems to lend some weight to isolating a small country from these threats, globalizing where it makes sense—and in other areas, developing a better model in isolation to show the world how things might be done.