Clearly HBO are keeping this quiet, because I have not seen a single US reviewer mention it, but "Flight of the Conchords" is an adaptation of a BBC radio series of the same name (in turn derived from the lads stand-up act).

I've listened to the whole radio series (six episodes), and watched several of the new TV episodes. It's been adapted for America, but it's the same show (not just the same characters). It's repeated most years on BBC7. Check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/.

Cheers,

David

It's not that it "matters" that FOTC was a BBC radio show first. I just think:

a) It's relevant, and odd that it's never mentioned.

b) Fans of the show might be interested in checking out the radio shows, which are great (IMHO better), and are periodically available for free streaming at the BBC7 site I mentioned above.

Cheers, David.

PS. What the hell do you mean by "trial run"???

"didn't trust the Internet, the graphical portion of the World Wide Web". That is completely arse-about. The internet has existed since the seventies, and is a collection of protocols that allow computers to communicate with each other. Other, higher-level, protocols run on top of the internet infrastructure. Some of these, such as SMTP (email), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) for USENET, are well-known, and predate the World Wide Web. The Web's core protocol is HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), and was originally primarily about document exchange, not "graphical".

Also, I'm an Australian, but even I have been well aware of the very funny Maria Bamford for years.

That school, arguably the most famous in the world, is Eton. Was the mispelling "Eaton" in the original German too, I wonder?

@AJCalhoun:

You write:

I notice someone stated that the average IQ in the US is 100 and extrapolated from this unscientific statistic (which is commonly believed but utterly proof proof),

erm... The average IQ is defined to be 100 in modern IQ measurement. Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ

that it meant half the populace (even the part which has never taken an IQ test) has an IQ below 100. An average, brothers and sisters, is the aggregate number associated with any trait, divided by the number of subjects involved.

Yep. That's exactly what the mean is too. There are three commonly used statistical measures of the centre of a distribution: mean, mode, and median. The mean is identical to the average: the sum of the observations divided by the number of observations. The mode is the most common observation. The median is the observation below which half the observations fall.

It is only an average. Were the mean IQ of US citizens 100, then half would be below and half above. The average means almost nothing, since a handful of geniuses could skew it up to 100 and damn near all the rest of us could be virtually brain dead (which appears to be the case).

You are thinking of the median, not the mean, in what you write above. The skew could be important if IQ were measured the way you apparently think it is, but in fact it is defined to be a projection onto a Gaussian distribution with mean 100. A Gaussian is unimodal and symmetrical, so the mean, median, and mode are equal. 50% of the population is below the average by construction.

On the evidence presented in the letters here so far, the word "plagiarism" presents an enormous spelling challenge to many otherwise informed Americans. One wonders how much import an issue will have if most can't spell it, let alone define it precisely.

Hint to the spelling-challenged: start using Firefox. It will spell-check the text you type into forms as you go.

The conditional is a mood, not a tense.

@ aeschylus:

I think the title refers simply to the replacement of science by ... well ... science, with the "science by fiat", which was a feature of Stalin's rule. The most famous example is Lysenko, whose bogus pseudo-scientific theories had a disastrous effect on Soviet agriculture. See the book "The Lysenko Affair" for more (Google Books version linked at my sig.)

Perhaps Kanye West is not quite as pompous as Reynolds seems to think. 'Our work is never over' (motto from his MySpace page, according to Reynolds) is a quote from the Daft Punk song 'Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger' that West sampled (to the extent of simply ripping off, IMHO) in his tune 'Stronger'.

Check out the link at my sig. for an awesome video for the original.

Implying that the (modern, gasoline-powered) automobile was invented in the US is neither debatable, nor a minor point. There is no doubt whatsoever that Daimler/Maybach, and then Benz, were first. It is not minor because this sort of appropriation by the US of the rest of the world's history and achievements is precisely the kind of thing that drives us dirty foreigners wild - and Obama made his knowledge of and reaching out to the world a major part of his campaign.

That wasn't Mark Twain, it was Samuel Johnson. See link at sig. for the full, sexist remark it comes from.

OK. This is great. You have now twisted your position to rest on the claim that per curiam is most commonly used in a non-legal context. What sort of company do you keep? Where is it that Latin tags so populate common discourse that their meaning when used in a legal context is just a coincidence?