One of the things keeping everyone going during lockdown is bonus quizzing from a variety of sources, and that has reminded me that I have been meaning to do a Mastermind update. I rarely pay attention to the quiz show, as good as it is, but just occasionally they pop up with a subject I love and then I can’t help but share the questions. Previously celebrities have taken on Back to the Future, Friends and The Archers.

It’s that time of year, when offices start going a bit crazy with decorations, Christmas lunches, office parties and goodness knows what else. A trend I have noticed is the Christmas jumper competition, and whilst your snowmen and santas are all well and good, I’ve found a couple of Christmas jumpers that might be slightly more fun to wear. There are loads of good Star Wars ones out there. “I find your lack of cheer disturbing,” is a good one, but I’ve picked the Yoda one, because you know, Yoda knows best.

So, you know that feeling when you’ve loved the soundtrack to a movie for years and years, and then you start listening to more albums and catch up with one that you probably should have already known about, that quickly becomes one of your top ten, and then you realise that one of the artists actually sings on that original soundtrack, one of your favourite songs? Happens to us all, right?

You know, of course, that I’m an insane Back to the Future fan. However, it wasn’t until we watched the incredible Back in Time documentary that I realised I’d missed out on an important part of BTTF fandom - Michael J Fox’s books. I picked up Lucky Man, his memoir chronicling his career and his Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis, and how the two had to fit in his life side by side, and eventually together.

I’m not one that particularly wants a Back to the Future sequel, even though I’m a huge fan of the trilogy. However, anything else we can get that allows us to spend time in Hill Valley is fine by me. I hugely enjoyed the Telltale Games episodic game series that thrust us straight back into the world of time travel and all its many consequences. I drooled over the BTTF lego set, and loved reading the movie line by line in that slightly odd Twitter project.

TV and film does very well on Twitter. Besides live tweeting essential events and posting instant reviews to films you’ve just seen, there are also the endless accounts packed with quotes (I follow some Friends and some Simpsons ones), and those that go a little beyond that. In the past, I’ve seen a few “recreation lists” whereby someone sets up a few accounts to do the back and forth that a play or some dialogue requires.

There’s a new Lego box about to be released, August 1st I think, and I suspect I might buy it. If I only managed to get my hands on the Flux Capacitor I would be happy, but oh how much fun to build a time machine. I really do think there should be more characters though. Biff, Lorraine, George and perhaps the dog, and we could do an actual re-enactment.

Mr C showed me this Tumblr site a good few weeks ago now, and I was instantly in love. In a nutshell, the Movie Barcodes are all the frames of a movie squidged up to make a colourful (or not so colourful) barcode style image. In some cases, they’re offered as prints, and I am sorely tempted to snap some up. Some of them are better than others, naturally, and I find some of those that have been created with fewer images make my brain go a little fuzzy, but the really good ones are so impressive.

I’ve been catching up on some RSS feeds recently (where I am getting down to a reasonable number of unlistened podcasts, my unread items has been creeping up), and I spotted this crazy little item earlier in the month. A DeLorean that is also a boat. It’s cool, and fun, but I took umbridge with the concept almost immediately simply because of this, in the Engadget story where I saw it:

Mmm, Back to the Future. I love to browse the branded t-shirts, but I never really buy them because once I start, I think I would become bankrupt quite quickly. However, I was looking at BTTF related t-shirts recently, I forget why, and these are my favourite five that I stumbled across. Dr. E. Brown Enterprises I like the ones that aren’t supremely obvious, so whilst all Back to the Future fans should get it from the front, it would probably take the back to really make it clear what the t-shirt was all about.