What's got into Radio 4?

We are currently doing scary grown up financial things, and this made me snort in an undignified manner while J was on the phone to the mortgage people:

From The Times: Paxman says Mastermind is Dumbing Down

[John] Humphrys [presenter of Mastermind], who also spoke at the [Cheltenham literary] festival on Saturday, said Mastermind questions were also more difficult than in the past. When told that Paxman disagreed, he said: “Well, deliver this message to him. He’s welcome to test this proposition by appearing as a guest on Celebrity Mastermind.

“We’ll deliberately make the questions a bit easier for him, if he likes. Alternatively, we could have a shoot-out. I could put to him a set of questions chosen at random from the last ten programmes and he could do the same.

Come on, Paxman, if you think you’re hard enough.”

(er...emphasis mine, because that's the bit that made me giggle)

How much would I have loved to have heard him say that? Honestly, what are they feeding them at R4 at the moment?

Usually I know what I'm doing. Mostly.

Does anyone out there understand Linux (Linpus Lite based on Fedora, and I'm fully updated) well enough to explain to me in words of one syllable how to uninstall a programme? My VLC isn't working properly - I get sound, but no pictures - so I want to uninstall it, then try reinstalling, in case that does the trick. But the 'beginners' forums tend to sneer at you if you can't do that. Is it just 'sudo yum uninstall vlc'? My experience with Linpus (*STABBITY*) suggests otherwise... I'm seriously considering switching to a friendlier version of Linux, or even XP, but for now, I'd settle for a working copy of VLC.

Most things have worked just fine, but the lack of picture is seriously irritating and kind of defeats the point of having VLC at all.

GRRRR!

If I'm chatty it's because my husband is talking to the computer instead of me

To be fair, J is actually rehearsing a presentation for a job interview tomorrow, but it doesn't change the fact that the screen's the one getting talked to, not me.

Flushed with soup-making success this evening (easiest thing I've made in WEEKS and utterly nom-worthy), I decided to flick through the flist before washing up, and was reminded of reel_torchwood. I totally, totally, honest to goodness don't have time to write a Torchwood version of a film. But. One of the things I have sometimes felt Torchwood is lacking is 'whole world' AUs. There are lots of fix-it/fork in the road stories, but not so many putting them in totally different situations. Admittedly I went straight from Torchwood to SGA, which breeds AUs like horny bunnies, but still. I decided I would be looking forward to the fics from here, and that I would have a look at the list of prompts, just to see who was writing what (yes, Chrys, I know about yours ;)).

It was all going so well.

Seriously, I am NOT going to write a Cabaret, with Jack as Sally and Gwen as Brian. Ianto is not the MC, definitely not, Owen is not Max and Tosh is not Natalia.

I'm not writing this *whimpers*