Doug

There's a silly game called Yellow Car that was invented - or at least popularised - by the Radio 4 comedy Cabin Pressure. The rules are simple: When you see a yellow car, you say, "Yellow car!". There's a lovely clip of John Finnemore in character as Arthur Shappey explaining the rules in more detail, which is even funnier if you know the character, but still pretty funny if you don't. Provided you like that sort of joke. Which I do.

I introduced this to my kids recently on a car journey, and they took to it like ducks to water, particularly the bit where you endlessly debate and discuss the rules, despite the fact that they are absurdly simple. It's like the opposite of Mornington Crescent. It turns out that I am pretty hopeless at the game itself: when I see a yellow car, I usually say, "Ooh! Yellow car!". As **TODO loves to point out, that's quite wrong: the rules are that when you see a yellow car, you say, "Yellow car!", not "Ooh! Yellow car!".

We've also had a long-running and detailed debate about whether you should say "Yellow car!" continuously while you are seeing a yellow car, or whether once suffices, and if the latter, what period of time and/or what events need to occur between observations of the same yellow car before you say "Yellow car!" again. Sadly, the kids were not interested in my attempt to use this as a teachable context for considering the differences between, say, imperative, functional, and event-driven programming paradigms, and finite state machines. There is as yet no final resolution, but I note that practice has converged away from the strict continuous approach.

Yesterday, we were watching a film for **FIXME's birthday. It was Stormbreaker, a spy adventure film with a 14-year-old boy as protagonist. It's not James Bond but it wasn't complete rubbish. I can see why it appeals to an 11-year-old boy, and it had small but entertaining roles for people like Bill Nighy, Robbie Coltrane and Stephen Fry, and some nice shots of London to keep me diverted. In one scene, the teenage hero is riding his mountain bike in hot pursuit of bad guys in a Transit, and there's a terrifying sequence where he rides against the traffic through central London, repeatedly avoiding a horrifying death under vehicles' wheels at the very last minute. I was finding this slightly hard going - it went on for quite a long time, with repeated jump scares, and bicycle/vehicle conflict is something I worry about in real life, having had several close shaves myself. The stream of dangerous oncoming traffic was beginning to get to the edge of overwhelming.

Then **TODO piped up next to me on the sofa and said, "Yellow car!".