It’s hard to do foreign accents correctly. But how about 21 foreign accents? Seattle-born actress Amy Walker has a go at a load including various English, Scottish and Irish accents, German and Czech.
The ones I’m most familiar with sounded very slightly off, but they’re all pretty impressive all the same. How’s that for a viral audition tape?
Today, we’ve two new additions to the blog Hall of Fame: David Tennant and Joanna Page. No big reasons other than it seems odd for them not to be in it.
Anyway, there’s now a little shrine to the blog gods in the sidebar. I’m not sure if leaving fish by the side of your monitor as a sacrifice is a good plan or not, but it’s always worth a try, I reckon.
So that’s seven of the 12 blog gods picked. Who will be the final five? And do you already know them?
She hasn’t asked me to, but seeing as every PR who sends me a press release these days seems to get a look in, I thought mentioning it was the least I can do, since she’s certainly done more round here to improve the place than they have: Marie‘s book, Gods Behaving Badly is now out in paperback.
If you haven’t bought it already, now’s your chance to own a copy. And if you already have a hardback copy, why not order a paperback copy for everyday use or to beat in-flight baggage-weight limits?
For laughs, you could order one now and see if it arrives before her author’s copy…
Regular commenter? Best selling author (number 1 in Canada!)? Got a book out? Then let me know so I can spread the word.
Well, I’ve been round the back with my mallet again, tinkering away with the blog, so there are a few new things to play with.
The Reviews A-Z
As mentioned a little while ago, I’ve set up an A-Z list of all the reviews on the blog. Now, I’ve spent a good few hours renaming a load of old entries and tinkering with the sorting algorithm and pretty much everything is semi-standardised, in proper order, etc. They’re all in one big list, though, so let me know if you want them divided out in audio play reviews, TV reviews, film reviews and DVD reviews, or whether you like them as is. I’ve also updated the banner at the top so you can now access the Reviews A-Z by mousing over the “Reviews” bit in the menu and clicking on “Reviews A-Z” when it appears.
Asides
On the right, you should now be getting pithy little observations that don’t merit blog entries. They’ll be about anything, including the occasional “oops, I was tinkering and now I’ve cocked something up but it’s fixed now” messages, holiday messages, what I’ll be reviewing, etc, over the coming week and so on. Think of it as a sort of Facebook profile status for the blog or a meaningful Twitter. At some point, I’ll get round to setting up an RSS feed for it.
Icons
So you can quickly spot the types of articles you want to read, there are now category icons next to each article on the front page and on their individual entries. You can mouseover the icon to reveal the category as a tooltip or click on it to be taken to the category listing.
Hollywood Reporter news
I’ve added the annoyingly shaped Hollywood Reporter news widget to the bottom of the sidebar so you can see the very latest news all the time.
Popular articles
The Popular tab now includes the top ten entries that people have been reading as well as the most commented entries. The stats only go back a month or so, but it’s interesting to know that people only give a monkey’s about pictures of Stewie Griffin, rather than anything I’ve written.
Commenting
I’ve disabled a couple of anti-spam plug-ins that did more harm than good. That means you’ll now be able to leave comments with as many links as you like in them and they’ll show up immediately, rather than when I’ve got round to approving them. I’ve also enabled the comment confirmation page, which you’ll be taken to when you’ve submitted your comment so you know that your comments haven’t gone into the ether or if there’s been a problem. Let me know if that becomes irritating and I’ll disable it again.
Well, the blog’s been going for a few years (two and a half) now and since a good proportion of it has been reviews, I’ve built up a fair old count: about 500, give or take, including third-episode verdicts, et al.
This can make it a little harder for y’all to find things than I’d like. After all, I do preview and review many new US shows quite some time before they make it across the pond: Dexter, season one, started last Wednesday on ITV1 (it’s already been on FX), a bit over a year after it aired in the US; and Mad Men started on BBC4 last night, six months after it first aired overseas.
There’s the complete archive, the search engine and tagging here, of course. But even if the show’s virile enough to have merited a tag, quite a few articles can get tagged relatively quickly (Dexter‘s chalked up 30 so far, while Mad Men’s chalked up 13), which makes finding the review a bit of a chore.
There have been complaints.
So, after building a rudimentary lathe and after an hour or so of clanging round the back, I’ve put together the Reviews A-Z, a simple index of all the reviews and (almost) nothing but reviews, sorted by title in alphabetical order.
It seems to work all right, although it does make me wish I’d been a bit more rigourous in my naming conventions, a whole lot sooner, but it should be of help. You can always find it at the bottom of the reviews list in the ‘Reviews’ tab to the right – yes, the grey bit under the “Featured Articles” bit and above the “Recent Videos”.
Let me know if you find any problems, or if you hate it. Or if you can’t find it. Oops.
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