American tourists flock to see the village green

There's winners in the Subaru car-touching contest. It turns out I'd missed some details, namely that this year's was a team effort, with pairs of people competing. The winner came at about 5:30 am, when one of the last contestants just sort of found himself pulling his hand back, confused and baffled. They then pushed him in a chair and started spraying water into his mouth; I don't know what happened to his teammate. The winning pair got oversized cardboard keys representing the Subarus they had won, and were sent off for water and sleep. Obviously the best part is these cars have already been touched all over, so they don't have to do it themselves.

Channel 5 is bringing back Police and Thief, the new yet strangely early-80s sitcom about an overly rule-bound Felix Ungeresque policeman, Sergeant Dollah (played by Suhaimi Yusof), and his neighbor and rival, former-smalltime-gang-hanger-on turned hairdresser, Lee Tok Kong (played by Mark Lee). This is a special, though, the ``Police and Thief Crime Prevention Sitcom Special,'' which again seems to be the kind of show just not made anymore. Based on the commercials, Lee Tok Kong is going to get named Neighbourhood Watch chief, and take his charge to show the people of his apartment block just how easily crimes could be committed, driving Sergeant Dollah crazy because despite the episodes they've had in common he doesn't trust that Lee Tok Kong has gone straight. In the end, I'm sure, we'll all learn a little something special about neighbourhood safety.

Personally, it was a long day, with the Internet radio so choppy that I gave up on it and just played the collection of MP3's I copied from my (small) CD collection onto the office iMac. So it got through several Beatles CDs, a Johnny Mercer best-of disc, and both Kinks CDs, and cycled back to the Internet radio, which was behaving much better by then. Go figure.

Trivia: The 1864 Pacific Railroad Act required Union Pacific to complete the first hundred miles of its part of the transcontinental railroad by 27 June 1866. Source: Nothing Like It In The World, Stephen E Ambrose.

Currently Reading: Quiz Craze: America's Infatuation with Game Shows, Thomas A DeLong.