A new natural menace was revealed on last week’s show, titled All Creatures Great and Small: the tree of heaven. It was originally a Chinese tree, but it’s been around in the UK for a long time. Now, though, because our climate is getting warmer, this tree is starting to fruit, and therefore spread itself around, more easily. And it can grow pretty darn fast, too.

As if its rampant growth weren’t enough, the tree of heaven (hell, more like) also uses its own built-in chemical weapons; when rain falls on its leaves, a noxious chemical washes off into the ground where it then kills anything else that’s trying to grow nearby. The tree of heaven looks set to become a botanical nightmare.

Gawd bless the BBC, via it’s Museum of Life show, for alerting us to this beastie.

But wait. Here’s that very same tree of heaven on the BBC’s gardening plant finder page, where it is described as both a ‘beautiful’ tree and a ’stunning shrub’.

So, it’s a beauty in one place and a maniac in another. I guess that’s what the Beeb would call ‘fair and balanced reporting’ then.

This might be a good time to point out, for the benefit of anyone else who is about to purchase the boxed set, that the discs you buy might not be arranged in the best viewing order. In fact, they might not even be packaged in a sensible order at all. So, before you even insert the first disk, go and get the Babylon 5 master list. We cannot guarantee, however, that it will help you to learn to speak Vorlon.

For Christmas, we treated ourselves to a full set of Babylon 5 DVDs — and a DVD player to play them on. Early adopters? Us? No way!

Babylon 5 characters present me with new challenges for 2010. It’s one thing swanning around quoting lines from your favourite shows and pretending (in a slightly camp way, of course) to be DS9’s Chief O’Brien. But as far as Babylon 5’s concerned, unless Londo Mollari undergoes a radical style change as the series progresses, it looks as if I’ll be needing some extra-firm-hold hair gel, and lots of it.

“Last night’s CSI was good,” said Shana. “That Stella is one tough cookie, isn’t she?”

The episode, called The Cost of Living, had included a scene in which crime scene detective, Stella, was attacked. After throwing her down some steps, the attacker then hauled her up and pinned her against a wall.

“Those fights are all choreographed,” I said. “The actress who plays Stella probably had a body double to do the fight scene.”

With our fondness for spoonerisms, it was almost inevitable that the conversation would veer off into the Daft Zone, and today was no exception.

“Or rather,” I continued, ” a ‘doddy bubble’.”

Shana chuckled. “I reckon we ought to have doddy bubbles.”

“Yes. They wouldn’t have to stand in for us in fights, though,” I said. “They could go out to the shops for us instead. Save us from having to venture out into all this freezing cold weather.”

“They’d still have to behave like proper stunt actors, though,” said Shana. “Keep up the illusion that they were on a dangerous mission. A bit like Bodie and Doyle in The Professionals.”

“I can see it now,” I said. “The intrepid doddy bubble reaches the corner shop. Using the familiar two-handed grip like all good gun-toting cops, he holds a small purse containing just enough money for four pints of semi-skilled milk and a wholemeal Nimble. He inches sideways through the shop door. After looking all round the store for any signs of hidden assailants, he then declares the shop ‘Clear!’ before heading off to the milk chiller, all the while turning to see if anyone is trying to creep up on him. When he finally gets to the checkout, he’ll need to show some kind of badge of authority.”

“Yeah!” said Shana, lapsing into the vernacular, “Instead of FBI (or CI5, as it used to be in The Professionals), he could just flash his divi card

“Somehow, I think the staff would already know he was divvy**,” I said.

** Sense 2 of divvy, i.e., a foolish person — and that’s putting it politely! ]]> http://dotsey.com/885/i%e2%80%99m-forever-blowing-doddy-bubbles/feed 0