andyluke has a very interesting article about the intimidation of the elderly by custom officials here.

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I'll reserve comment on tonight's Red Dwarf until they've all been aired. I missed a lot of it because I'm currently at home, and my stepfather managed to knock his wine glass over and smash it on my dinner plate. The subsequent drama about whether my dinner might have shreds of glass in took quite a lot of family debate and I therefore missed a fair amount of the episode.
(For the record I was happy to risk the glass. My mother, however, would hear of No Such Thing. All was eventually well, however, and everyone got fed)

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Also, we went to see Marley and Me tonight. It was considerably better than I'd expected, despite not being my type of film. Our dog got a lot of fuss when we came home :-)

As an extra-curricular Renaissance seminar today we watched Revengers Tragedy (I really want to put an apostrophe in there, but apparently there isn't one in the film, though there is in the play). It's a futuristic adaptation of a Renaissance play, starring Christopher Ecclestone and Eddie Izzard.

It is amazing. Ecclestone's performance is just fantastic as Vindici, the guy seeking revenge, and the Duke's whole clan of fighting sons (led by Izzard) are bizarrely wonderful. It's such a stylised piece it's difficult to draw comparisons, but I'm blown away by it. It's dark and violent, but it's also frequently very funny - and Ecclestone dances expertly along the line of 'is this funny or just disturbing?'. Not to everyone's taste, obviously, but I thought it was outstanding.

I've just ordered it from amazon. After a few more viewings perhaps my praise will be more coherent. It's just so different from anything I've seen that I don't quite have a handle on it.