I was a TV critic for 13 years and IMNSHO* the second best in the business. The best, by far, was Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian. She’s still doing it, and is as good as ever. Here she is, for example, on the other night’s TV:

One can only deplore the current state of catering in the soaps. In Coronation Street (ITV1), Roy, proprietor of Roy’s Rolls, was ordered out of his own cafe because he was scaring the customers. Distress has, indeed, given him the look of a giant tortoise suffering from SAD disorder. His face falls in perpendicular folds. His cardigan seems to distend as you watch. His customers, never backward in coming forward, are complaining about the size of their organically sourced meals. As Blanche said, “I came in for meat and tater pie. How far the tater’s travelled and the lamb’s dying words are no concern of mine.”

When the heart is in turmoil, the takings go down, and Roy and Hayley’s partnership is under strain. Her long-lost son took the news that she was his father (do try to keep up) very badly indeed. Now Hayley is sitting alone in a late-night cafe as chairs are upended around her, while Roy has a breakdown in Freshco.

*Footnote: In My Not So Humble Opinion

Hmmm…. Some people are claiming that Excel has difficulty with multiplication. (See image above.)

Over the weekend members of the microsoft.public.excel newsgroup reported a serious bug in calculations made by Excel 2007. Initially it just seemed that Excel Can’t Multiply. The bad news is, Excel can’t do other operations correctly either. The good news is, this is only true when the results are within a very specific range of numbers. And the better news is that the Excel team has mapped out the nature of the problem and is feverishly working on an update.

So what went wrong? It all boils down to the fact that you can’t represent an infinite group of non-integer numbers using a finite number of bits. In fact, Excel can store “only” about nine quintillion distinct values. The numbers going into your calculations may be infinitesimally different from the number displayed, and for two calculations that nominally have the same answer the result may be infinitesimally different. Excel generally manages just fine in dealing with these tiny differences, but in exactly 12 instances out of the nine quintillion possibilities it goes completely bonkers.

The Excel team discovered that it wasn’t just calculations involving 65,535 that were affected; those that should come out to be 65,536 were also sometimes wrong (returning 100,001 instead). And they discovered it wasn’t just multiplication. In truth, the operation didn’t matter, only the result. When they work up a fix it will still have to “make its way through our official build lab and onto a download site”, but they expect it to happen soon.

Useful fact: a quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.

The funny thing is that my copy of Excel does not make this mistake (see below).

But then, I’m running Excel 2004 for Mac.

Lovely column by Maureen Dowd on the tempestuous US visit of the fruitcake who is now President of Iran.

First, we break Iraq and hand it over to the Shiites, putting in a puppet who leans toward Iran and is aligned with the Shiite militias bankrolled by Iran. Then, as Peter Galbraith writes in The New York Review of Books, President Bush facilitates “the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia,” with the ironic twist that “there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in Southern Iraq.”

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

New York’s hot blast of nastiness, jingoism and xenophobia toward its guest, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, only served to pump him up for his domestic audience. Iranians felt that their president had tied everyone in knots, including the “Zionist Jews,” as Iranian state television said. The Times reports that Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, was on TV criticizing the rude treatment his president received: “It is shocking that a country that claims to be civilized treats him that way.”

Ms Dowd also solves a problem that had been baffling me: how to remember (and pronounce) the name of the Iranian Prez. Solution: Just say “I’m a dinner jacket”.