I was watching Newsnight tonight – unusual for me, but it was on after The Apprentice – You’re Fired!. I noticed Liberal Democrat Shadow Environment Secretary Chris Huhne quote the phrase “After you, Alphonse” in the context of the developed world not being prepared to tackle climate change until the developing world takes action.

Naturally, my immediate reaction was to get Googling to find out who Alphonse was. Here’s the answer:

Alphonse and Gaston were comic strip characters created by the American cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper (1857-1937). The popular strip ran from 1902-1920’s and featured Alphonse and Gaston, two inordinately polite Frenchmen. Their signature phrase was “After you, my dear Gaston” and “After you, my dear Alphonse.” The two soon became synonymous with exaggerated politeness or deference.

More on Opper at Wikipedia.

Off work today to get broadband and cable TV installed. Our TV reception (analogue and Freeview) was almost unwatchable for some channels, so it’s a pleasure to finally be able to watch terrestrial TV, plus have lots more channels and one of those “catch up” features that let’s you watch programmes from the last week, plus some On Demand stuff (a series of Lost, some Doctor Who etc.) that’s included in the subscription.

In addition, I’ve now got broadband at home. Next step is to get a wireless router and a wireless card for my laptop – any recommendations for a cheap but good router that works with Virgin Media (cable broadband)? The Maplin website looked more expensive than PC World, but PC World didn’t seem to have any of the cheapest boxes in stock.

As the cable guy left, he commented that I was the quietest American he’d ever met. Hmm…

I can’t believe this came and went on Tuesday without anyone in our office knowing. Even if it only lasted three hours, I’m sure we could have made it to Covent Garden in time. We never have chocolate…

Thanks to the marvellous BBC programme catalogue prototype, you can – assuming you’re, er, not too old – see what was on TV on the day you were born, and even, if you know your time of birth, at the very moment you entered the world.

My mum was missing out on Sunday Worship: I, Where Are We Now? on BBC1 and an Open University programme on BBC2.

The link you need is in the format http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd where yyyy is the full year, mm is the month in two digits (e.g., 04 for April), and dd for the day.

From this we can see that the newly-thirtysomething Stephen Tall has the privilege of being born on the day the fourth episode of the fantastic Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang first aired, while today’s birthday boy Duncan had the pleasure of a budget reply party political broadcast from the SDP/Liberal Alliance featuring Roy Jenkins.

Only one of these TV programmes featured a giant rat. I leave you to guess which 🙂