The hot rumour is the ABC has bought The West Wing off Channel 9, who couldn’t have programmed it in a worse manner if they tried.

I’ve been watching DVDs of the series courtesy of my sister. And let me tell you, it’s rivetting. This is political drama at its best.

(Mind you, I’ve heard some of the more conservative Americans don’t like it, evidently because the characters are too small-L liberal. I don’t know if the same people refuse to watch The Sopranos because they don’t like organised crime.)

I watch very little TV nowadays, having become way more discerning in my old age. But this is top of my list right now. If the ABC is intending to run it from the start, in a decent timeslot, it should be a must-watch for anybody into good drama.

The other shows in my regular watch list are: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Doctor Who, MediaWatch. That’s pretty much it at the moment.

Contrary to my claims of last week (who’d have thought a few words on the joys of shopping on foot would attract so many comments?!), on Sunday I found myself grocery shopping by car at Coles at Southland. This is because I’d wanted to look for something at K-Mart. It’s one of those trips that would have been by train… if there was a station at Southland.

Unfortunately the designers have laid out the aisles at Coles Southland in a very irritating manner. They’ve gone for an irregular pattern which means you can’t cover everything with the standard sweeping up and down motion. Instead you end up covering some ground more than once — a timewaster.

At Safeway, they have special bulk 1.2Kg boxes of Weetbix, which proclaim “Only available at Safeway and Woolworths”. What they don’t tell you is that at Coles, you can get 1.3Kg boxes of Weetbix instead. I thought we would run out during the week, so picked up a box.

I reached the checkout, and joined the queue. Then I noticed the box of Weetbix wasn’t sealed. It was open. Now, I’m not an overly paranoid person, but in this day and age, it probably pays not to buy something that’s not properly sealed. While I doubt there’d have been any mischief performed on it, having the box already open doesn’t do much for freshness. Rather than go back for another box and give up my place in the queue, I just popped it in someone else’s disused trolley. I’ll get it some another day.

Then as I unpacked the rest of the trolley onto the conveyor belt, I pulled out some potatoes in bag. The top of the bag was open, so I spun the potatoes around, while holding the top. Turned out the bag had a hole in it. Two potatoes jumped out, bounced to the floor, and went rolling at speed underneath one of the other checkouts.

Oops.

Some have recently suggested that people should be consolidating grocery shopping, doing just one big trip per week, to cut down on petrol usage. I’ve done the opposite — I’ve started doing more trips to the supermarket, on foot. This is helped by the fact that since I’ve moved, the supermarket is only about 5 minutes walk from home. In fact with looking for parking, it would probably take as long to drive as it does to walk. So if I can restrain myself and only buy two (green) bags-worth of stuff each time, I can do it all on foot.

The checkout chicks/blokes don’t know this, of course, so sometimes they pack stuff in such a way that one bag is very light, and the other heavy. A little re-arranging is then necessary to ensure I won’t end up with one arm longer than the other.

Andrew asks what blog posts have been later regretted. I’m struggling to remember, but I think there have been one or two over the years that I’ve edited, deleted, or not quite posted, after realising how cranky or stupid I sounded.

Maybe I’ll regret this post. For I have a deep dark secret.

I’m reading a Dan Brown novel. Demons and Angels. A colleague lent it to me, and while I’m the first to rant about Dan Brown’s popularist theological babble, the fact that his books were in the top ten list for a whole damn year, and that at one stage it seemed like every second person on the train was reading the Da Vinci Code, I haven’t yet thought up a good way of weaseling out and not reading it.

The main problem of course is: what if someone I know on the train spots me reading it? Solution: only read in public when sitting down, so the cover can be held out of view.

First impressions: the writing is thoroughly unchallenging; it’s like reading one of those old kids’ Choose Your Own Adventure books. It spells out everything and leaves nothing to the imagination. I’ve become used to having to think about what I read — not so with this.

The plot is mildly interesting. For now, surreptiously, I’ll keep at it.

It’s 10 minutes walk from home to the station. And 10 from the station to work (unless I go via Flinders Street). All good exercise.

But of course most of the benefits of exercise don’t kick in until you’ve done 20ish sustained minutes. Maybe they should fit treadmills in the train?

I suppose if it’s not too crowded, you could pace the platform and the train, but you’d look like some kind of wierdo.

PS Thursday. On a related note, Beth ponders Excercise Slogans for the Mediocre Athlete.

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend: I’m of the generation who has grown up being about the same age as Adrian Mole, and reading each of them along the way. This is a great read; very very funny. Adrian’s just bought a loft apartment at Rat Wharf. I think my recent thoughts about my mortgage/level of debt may have been partially prompted by his endless cycle of debt. Adrian reaches new levels of hopelessness, but seemingly redeems himself at the end. The book seems to have some closure, so I wonder if it’s the last one? Shame.

I also recently read Accidental Empires — the review is over on geekrant.org.

Mace and Grace, 457 Centre Road, Bentleigh: Ah good, another Friday night dinner option. A mix of cuisines, quite yummy.

(I’ve had numerous comments and emails suggesting places. Thanks for all them; I hope to try the suggestions. Note that the ideal Friday night dinner venue is in Bentleigh itself, not a nearby suburb. Makes the whole get off train / find dinner / have a drinkie with it / stagger home routine effortless.)

The locksmith last week mentioned a product he sells for people who regularly lock themselves out of their house. It’s a locked box that sits in your garden, which requires only a PIN(*) to open. Inside you keep a spare key. A kind of high-tech version of hiding a key under the mat / in a flowerpot / in a fake rock in the rockery.

Personally, I don’t lock myself out. It’s only ever happened once, and that was only because a visitor snibbed a lock that wasn’t meant to be snibbed. So I said thanks, but no thanks. And though I’m unlikely to ever need it, I think a better strategy for me is leaving a spare key with nearby relatives.

I suppose the other requirement of such a product is that you can remember a PIN. Maybe the next step is one that works on fingerprint ID.

(*) It’s a PIN, not a PIN Number. I suppose one could call it a PI Number.