Telling it like it is

For the past ten years of living in Utah, summer has been one of those nasty times of year that we have to endure to get to the more tolerable weather of spring, autumn and winter. Endless 40°C days, blast-furnace winds that dry out everything from your skin to your garden and sun so blazing it's just too hot to be outside. But this year, things are looking up - we've had 60 days below average temperature so far and haven't even approached 30°C yet. The hottest days of the year are nearly always around July 24th after which it starts to cool off - that's only 5 weeks away and by this point we're normally dying of heat. The downside of course is that it's still snowing in the mountains, and we still have most of the winter snowpack still to come down which means we're enduring flooding in places. But people's gardens and the parks look beautiful and green for a change. Trees and bushes are thriving, roses and other plants are going gangbusters. I suppose...

Because of a very rain-delayed Grand Prix today, we missed most of it - the timer expired on our DVR. No problem, I thought, BBC will have it on their iPlayer. They do, but because we live in America, they won't stream here, despite it clearly stating in the BBC's own T's & C's that you don't need territorial restrictions or a subscription to watch iPlayer content if it's not live - ie. repeats. The Beeb have clearly invested a lot of money in preventing anyone from watching their shows (no number of VPNs or proxies will fool iPlayer any more) - money that the English license-payer has paid. Sadly, it seems that even though their own terms and conditions allow it, and even though we get the BBC via our satellite subscription, we're being excluded. The BBC need to wake up and follow their own rules. And no, I don't want to know the result - we're going to watch Speed TV's re-run on Tuesday (because Fox bollocksed-up the US transmission over he...