Sweet Nothings

I've always loved TV quiz- and gameshows. I was reminded of the subject this week thanks to Dave Gorman's Absolute Radio podcast . Dave spent some time lamenting the state of gameshows today, which arguably reached its nadir with Simon Cowell's overblown and utterly vacuous  Red or Black . The decline of TV gameshows is one of my pet subjects and I could quite easily have made this blog entry a lengthy exploration of why exactly they have all but ceased to be a viable prime time proposition. But then I thought I should record my own experience, if only for posterity's sake. And besides, Game Show Death can basically be boiled down to (a) the rise of reality TV and the subsequent proliferation of micro-celebs into every nook and cranny of the schedules, and (b) the success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  since everybody else tried to copy it, and failed miserably. Yes, for a few brief minutes back in 2000 I was a TV star. The show was the sadly-defunct Channel 4 tea...

Arty boat tour shot Top of the Must-See List for Chicago was an architectural boat tour . Although this doesn't sound terribly promising on paper, it lives up to its billing by being an informative 90 minute-lecture on the history of Chicago's most significant buildings - delivered by a genuine expert from the Chicago Architecture Foundation - which doubles up as a pleasant introductory riverbound meander around the downtown area. The tour was certainly a more pleasant journey than the long El ride into the city, which we had to take every day because for reasons of (can you guess?) extreme parsimony we were ensconced in a hotel way out in the northern suburbs. The El (short for el evated railway) is one of those iconic things which turns out to be something of a disappointment. What looks fun and quirky on ER and in the movies is pretty drab up close. The circular section around The Loop - the heart of the City, at least in the financial sense - is quite cool and find...