Safe...

I spotted this over on TSiG:

It is reported that 50% of people in London are worried about security and sleep with some form of self-defence to hand, for use against intruders. The 'Safe Bedside Table' has a removable leg that acts as a club and a top that doubles as a shield for self-defence. This is for people who are willing to take on an intruder, providing an extra sense of security whilst in bed.

Fuck the bedside. They should have these in Starbucks... Jess kicked off 2006 by watching the whole of Bleak House in two sittings. As John pointed out, the Beeb made the whole thing nice and digestible in 30 minute chunks, but Jess is greedy for bonnets. I watched bits of it, but I think an over familiarity with the novel stopped me from enjoying it. Seemed pretty good though... I have a low tolerance for literary adaptations. If they can't get Judge Dredd right (and all they really had to do there was keep the helmet on) I'm not going to trust them with Dickens. As good as it was (and as hot as Gillian Anderson is) it just doesn't get any better than this:

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

I've quoted that more than once here before, but it never gets dull right? [Music: Paul Stanley Solo Album]