PMQs – 16 October 2013

I don't usually feature the Prime Minister's Questions sessions these days, as they have become somewhat predictable (and generally boring) political knockabout with little actual value.

Today's exchange between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition was sufficiently interesting, and fact-laden (though needs proper attention paid to it, as both sides were perhaps too soundbite-conscious so missed out explanatory notes that would have nailed their claims) to warrant putting up, on the basis that an occasional airing helps us keep our thinking correctly calibrated. It seems to have been a day for wagging fingers, but one can put that aside.

Therefore, courtesy of the BBC (on one of those still all too infrequent occasions when they allow embedding of their videos, though even now it involves a huge block of code, necessitating a lot more effort than it should have done to switch off autoplay and make the player size more sensible!) is today's exchange – nearly nine minutes of much hot air, but some interesting facts and figures in the mix too...

Galaco says Hello, How Are You?

...The rest is in Japanese!

I haven't featured this song in almost nine months – and this version is quite distinctive, featuring a new Galaco model by the video's uploader, Danna Akasuna. It's a very good model, with an excellent (and quite expressive) face that is more human-looking than many Vocaloid characters' faces have tended to be.

The motion is really good, though not perfect, and with a couple of technical glitches in the middle section of the video. Also, despite having standard-level High Definition capability, the source isn't sharp enough to take advantage of the HF setting, which is a shame: this deserves it.

With just over two weeks to go before Galaco looks like being permanently deactivated, this seems an appropriate time to post this here, as a (hopefully permanent) reminder of what Galaco was and was capable of becoming, given the chance...

Have I Got A Noose For You, Mehdi

Labelled in some quarters as 'the most vacuous' of political commentators/journalists (indeed, one has claimed to "have a Thermos flask less vacuous"), Mehdi Hasan has been caught out in his duplicity and, frankly, hypocrisy, as I mentioned just recently.

It looks like Hasan has managed to make a noose for himself, in reality...

Inevitably, the tale came up in this week's Have I Got News For You, but despite its predictability it is still worth airing the short clip of it here, lasting just forty seconds (which comes courtesy of Trending Central who have kindly allowed it to be embedded). Ouch indeed...

SeeU says Bye

This isn't the same as the very catchy Goodbye, but an entirely different song – and very nicely done here, despite being at a somewhat low resolution for the current era. Typically (sadly) there are no English subtitles or other sources for words we can understand, so again it is really just a visual and musical experience – though that is plenty to be going on with!

As usual for a Chori-produced SeeU video, the motion is top-notch, feminine and graceful. One cannot escape the feeling that he must love SeeU as much as I and many other fans do, to put heart and soul so obviously and fully into these wonderful works...

SeeU's Umbrella

This is a nice, light song with a snappy dance routine that would almost put Gene Kelly to shame. The model is the oOlchibiOo SeeU (no, I don't know why these creators give themselves such odd monikers!) of which I was aware.

It's a generally very good model, though it does suffer a little from GUMI-like legs which are similarly unrealistic and not a patch on the tourbux models which have superb limb sculpting (if that's the right term for it).

This is a delightful short video nonetheless, and it is great to have SeeU models that can be used by the animation software that most creators have and know...