Rubénerd Blog :)

I’ve been doing far too many of these LivingSocial lists, I fear I may be fuelling an addiction for which I will soon develop such a dependency that I’ll start dreaming about lists to create. Oh, too late, I have been.

This list piqued my interest given it deals with negatives rather than positives: Five things that terrify me! I’d say they’re mostly in order this time:

1. Windows Vista
2. An Empty Coffee Cup (almost went with Cold Coffee)
3. Lighting Stoves (manually lighting gas flames… argh!)
4. Religion (they didn’t have Abrahamic specifically, bummer)
5. Did you get me my Cheese Whiz Boy?

It’s been a while since I filled in another of these LivingSocial Top Five lists I’ve grown so attached to, so this afternoon I created and filled in a new list entitled My Favourite Heathen Tomes!" I figure at best only a few billion people follow each of the major religions meaning the majority of the people on Earth will be going to Hell including me, so there’s no point trying to work against it right? ^_^

• On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• The Portable Atheist, Christopher Hitchens
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris
• The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Bobby Henderson

It seems once again I’ve started a mini-series of posts here completely by random chance! This is opposed to certain chance where the outcome has already been determined and you know what it’s going to be. Does that still make it chance? What a superfluous introduction.

Shortly after I posted my review of LivingSocial’s Facebook application which lets you pick five of your favourite items from lists such as movies, shows, cars and the like, the team introduced a slew of changes and improvements. I was even fortunate enough to get a comment posted here by Adam from the site and @LivingSocial started following me on Twitter. I still find it ironic that a free site like theirs has better customer service than some sites I pay for (certain webhosts, I’m looking at you!)

Since my review they’ve polished up the user interface of their application too

In the comment Adam mentioned that in the future it may be possible to access LivingSocial’s catalogue and our Top Five lists from sites other than Facebook which puts my mind at ease. Sites like Facebook still make me a bit uneasy because given they’re a gated community external sites can’t access material, and there’s no guarantee even you’ll be able to access your content in the future for free if they started charging, for example.

I was also informed on Twitter that my major gripe with LivingSocial’s Top Five lists was solved: it is now possible to delete older lists you’ve either changed your mind on or made a mistake on. This is big news and I applaud them for listening to their users!

The new Delete link under each list

As for new features, they’ve expanded their list of available categories to include Hot Sauces, very cool!

They’ve also slightly modified the way lists are presented; instead of being a generic list of five favourite items, each list is now numerically ordered which implies we now rank items in our lists from favourite to least favourite. This doesn’t affect lists we’ve made before where we may not have been thinking about the order of items, a good consideration.

I look forward to seeing what else these people have up their sleeve :).

The original list from yesterday

As it turns out, shortly after I compiled my list of Favourite British Comedies yesterday I realised I had left some critical shows out which caused me once again to bang my head repeatedly on the table in front of me, causing me further stress.

I have rectified the situation by creating a part two list, which I’m sure is cheating! So that I could include other types of shows and not just comedies I called this list Favourite British TV Shows, Part Two.

The cheating, second top 5 list

• Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister
• Midsomer Murders (I’ve read the books too)
• Jeeves and Wooster (brilliant! And I’ve read the books too)
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie
• SuperTed (the memories…!)

I read on Google Reader that Kelli hadn’t heard of most of the shows I’d listed; I’ve been told that British TV shows are much less popular and well known in the US than in Australia. For me, on the whole I find British shows to be more realistic, more subtle and wittier than shows made in the US, with the notable exception of gems like Arrested Development, M*A*S*H and Boston Legal. If you’ve never seen any before, you’re missing out on a real treat.

In fact, I reckon I can think of more to fill a third list. I don’t have time to be doing this stuff, but it’s just too much fun! Maybe next I need to do a British Drama or Detective list.

This post is partly derived from a list on my Living Social Facebook application, for those of you who were smart enough to have never registered for Facebook but therefore can’t see my obsessively generated lists.

This list is my own top five favourite British comedies, in no particular order. I would have put Monty Python’s Flying Circus on here, but I think it’s safe to say that show is an assumed given for anyone who enjoys British comedy, am I right or am I right?

• Blackadder
• The Brittas Empire
• Keeping Up Appearances
• Fawlty Towers
• Little Britain

If only there was room for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em too. I also love Red Dwarf but I’m saving that for a science fiction show list. And I guess I should attribute Mr Bean as well, I remember laughing so hard when I was a kid that I have fond memories of it, even if most people I know can’t stand it!

A top five list is definitely more difficult to think up compared to a top ten. Everything you chop off is such a hard decision.