Recently in Misc Category

Remember when you were little, and there was always the annoying kid who had everything? He was the person who'd completed their Panini sticker collection before we'd even stuck in the free pack that came with the album. He had Bigtrak or a ZX81 even when he didn't really like computer programming? He got a shiny new Chopper while you had to make do with a no-brand? He had Adidas football boots while yours were made of Hi-Tec.

Maybe I'm letting a few too many of my own personal "issues" come into the open, but regardless of the generation you were brought up in, you recognise the type. When you complained to your parents that it was "so unfair..." they'd tell you were lucky to get what you had and the other child was spoilt.

Flash forward 30 or more years, and we live in basically the same world. Yesterday Samsung teased a 2 September announcement regarding their latest iPad-style tablet, while "everyone" is excited that Apple is going to announce some new iPods and possibly some other stuff.

And it is Apple and the video game manufacturers that have driven this growing need for rapid consumer satisfaction. They set very clear dates when their products are available to buy, and love the fact that people will queue outside stores to be sure of getting their device first. They worry about whether they'll get their product faster if they pre-order online or queue up.

Is this a healthy state of affairs?

I'd say, it's definitively not.

Perhaps it's my own fault. Should I step away from the tech blogs and news sites that breathlessly report this stuff? Do I eagerly read the review sites when new devices come out, keen to discover what new features this upgrade has?

I wonder if even the electronics industry really likes this state of affairs. While they're probably jealous of the coverage that companies like Apple, Nintendo, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox achieve by releasing their products on a single day, encouraging pre-orders and queues for the devices, having a massive spike at the start of sales is not an easy way to manage inventory - particularly when consumers demand a worldwide simultaneous release. That means a lot of ramped up production to meet initial demands rather than a perhaps more measured production timetable.

It's the materialism and greed of it all that I'm finding more difficult. Should I feel guilty? We hear stories about suicides at Foxconn which manufacturers many of these devices as workers are put under intolerable pressure to meet production timetables.

Am I immune to it? No. I jumped on the phone to order my HTC Desire from Orange on the day it was made available, and I remember pre-ordering my PlayStation 2 for the day of release.

Sorry - this has all been a bit rambling, and I've certainly got no solutions. But this is something I find troubling.

[Note: The genesis of this blog entry is from something I've been thinking about anyway, but was catalised by what could be characterised as a Twitter "tiff" between myself and James Cridland last night - James was disappointed that he wasn't getting his new Amazon Kindle on its promised release date. In retrospect I was probably unfair to castigate him about Amazon's failure to manage their customers' expectations.]

Having read the Londonist review of Tanguera last week, and been vaguely intrigued by the tube posters, on a whim I went to see this tango inspired piece at Sadler's Wells this evening.

It's wonderful. It's a 90 minute simple story told via dance, with several songs, about a young French girl arriving in Argentina and being dragged into prostitution despite having fallen for a waterfront worker.

OK - so the story's not much good. But the dancing is tremendous, and the music is addictive.

I've no doubt that this production has been around the world lots of times, but that doesn't make it any less good, and it's well worth a visit if you enjoy dance. And I freely admit that I don't get to see nearly enough dance myself.

Three exhibitions. One Tate.

That was what I visited today at Tate Britain - a museum that I must admit I've not been to as much as I once did. Certainly not since Tate Modern opened.

Today I was specifically going to visit the Rude Britannia exhibition and also catch Fiona Banner's "Harrier and Jaguar" exhibit. But since it was the final day of their Henry Moore exhibition, I went to that too.

Up in the Duveens Galleries, the two stripped out aircraft completely dominate the galleries. All around, people were taking photos of the exhibits, so I did so too. I overheard one gallery-goer tell another that she'd never seen a piece of art photographed so many times before.

Downstairs I entered the Henry Moore exhibition. There were notices strictly forbidding photography in that part of the museum. But in one room, filled with sketches and paintings made during the Second World War by Moore, an elderly gentleman was photographing a picture depicting miners working somewhere in Yorkshire or Lancashire.

A gallery attendant hot-footed it over to the man and politely told him that he wasn't allowed to take photographs.

"That's a picture of my father," he succintly replied. This left the young gallery attendant non-plussed for a few seconds. But she stood her ground, and the man replied that he didn't want to break the rules.

She went away, but then came back to say that if he wanted a photograph, he should talk the museum in Manchester that owned the piece.

The man seemed happy enough that he'd traced down the work. He had a folder that included pictures of the work and similar pieces. I should also point out that today was the last day of the exhibition.

I've got to say that I really enjoyed Moore modernist pieces, with works like his helmets being particular favourites.

Upstairs, it was very different in Rude Britannia, which had previously been accompanied by a similarly BBC Four documentary series. The exhibition covers cartoons and satire from the sixteenth century or so forwards, including many comic strips and pieces.

In some respects, it was overwhelming, with vast quantities of text to read. But it's well worth a visit before it closes at the start of September. There's a terrific Spitting Image "Maggie" puppet, as well as a great Tony Blair photograph, and a "rude" gallery (that's probably the weakest bit). One of the rooms is heavily Viz influenced with Roger Melly The Man on The Telly introducing many of the works. But I think I liked the room curated by Harry Hill the best, he'd even scrawled messages on the wall as you went around.

On last Friday's Five Live film review programme, with Colin Patterson sitting in for Mayo and Kermode, there was a long discussion about event or location screenings of films. The discussion involved Fabien Riggall of Secret Cinema, and David Cox from Film4. They were talking about their respective outdoor screenings.

Secret Cinema has been running for a couple of years now with attendees booking to see films and experience surrounding events without knowing exactly what they're going to see. I went once and saw Funny Face at the Royal Academy of Arts, and it was an entertaining evening. That said, the room we watched the film in really wasn't suited to a screening, with a significant proportion of the screen not visible to me from my seat.

Today tickets go on sale for their next production. And while last time out's Blade Runner might well have been worth going to £27.50 is an awful lot for something I simply don't know if I'll like in surroundings that may or may not be suited to a screening.

Meanwhile, last weekend I went to one of the Film4 Somerset House screenings. I've been a couple of times before, with some friends. You can take picnics in, but no glass. And of course you have to sit on the hard floor of the courtyard. People bring along cushions and rugs to sit on.

A couple of years ago, we saw Singin' in the Rain there, and it was pretty good fun. Last year, I was going to see something else, but there was torrential rain and few if anybody stayed to watch the film. There are no refunds.

This year we were seeing Manhattan. Now I've hated sitting on the floor cross-legged since I first went to school assembly in primary school, but as I get older, I seem to be spending ever more time sitting down on the floor. Anyway, I decided to try and make it a little more comfortable than before when I'd taken a thermarest inflatable mat. So I brought a Highlander Relax Mat to sit on. It's basically an L-shaped mat that folds 90%. Using a couple of straps it supports your back, but you're no more off the ground than any other mat.

But they really didn't like my mat on the way in. There are always queues to get into Somerset House for these screenings, as security carefully ensure that no forbidden things are taken in. That really means bottles and glass. While you can decant your wines into plastic pint glasses, they really want you spend £20 at the bar for a bottle of £3.99 plonk.

They also questioned my camera. "No professional" cameras seemed to be the rule. I was carrying a Canon G10. I'd argue that it takes pictures as good as, or better, than many cheap DSLRs. But in their world it was a point and shoot, and so I was allowed to keep it (I suspect that I could have taken a Leica or perhaps even a Hasselblad if I'd play my cards right).

However we had a long conversation about my seat. Chairs could only be used at the side it seemed. I was meeting friends who were already sitting in the middle of the square. Having "bagged" a space, they weren't going to be moving now. I pointed out that this wasn't a seat that came off the ground (I quite understand not allowing folding chairs that people use on beaches or on camp sites). It was just to support my back. But the unfriendly security guard said no. It was at the sides only. OK, I said, could I just sit on top of it. I'd not brought another mat, and needed something to sit on. At first that seemed to be OK. But then he though I might sneakily unfold it. If I wanted to go into the middle of the courtyard, I'd need to check the seat into the box office. I argued that it was all I had to sit on. He told me I could buy a cushion from them. I told them I was spending another £10 having already spent £16.50 to watch a film with no seats. Reluctantly I checked my seat in, and sat on the ground.

So sorry Secret Cinema - but you're just too expensive.

And sorry Somerset House - I won't be going to another Film4 screening. It's too uncomfortable, and your security too overbearing and frankly unreasonable.

As for the film? It was great, even if Woody Allen going out with a 17 year old isn't a little disturbing and close to the truth in retrospect.

I see that Somerset House has a series of Glynebourne opera transmissions coming up. Three or more hours spent on that floor is too much to even consider.

Just by way of comparison, a couple of weeks ago I went to Folk by the Oak in the grounds of Hatfield House. As might be obvious from the name, it's a folk festival, and I particularly wanted to see Emily Smith and the utterly wonderful Bellowhead who were headlining.

If you're used to the usual sort of security at major festivals and outdoor events, this couldn't have been more civil. Folding chairs were encouraged, although an area at the front was for people without chairs to sit/stand/dance. Security couldn't care less what I brought in. Wine in glass bottles? Fine. The alcohol wasn't priced at an exhorbitant mark-up on site. You could buy bottles of wine for £10 from a wine bar. Pints of local ale were £3.

It'd be easy just to blame the usual stricter rules on licence requirements and health and safety, but I don't believe that's always the case. Treat adults like adults, and you get a happy environment.

A couple are kissing passionately alongside a train that's about to depart from platform 8 at KIngs Cross sometime around midnight. Another couple, hurrying towards platform 11 observe the scene and discuss it:

Her: "Aah. They're in love."

Him: "No. They've only just met this evening."

Her: "No - they're definitely in love."

Him: "You're so naiive. He just pulled her this evening..."

--

Saturday daytime outside St Pancras. A group of four mostly middle-aged women are wearing black vest tops with "Kim's Hen 2010" emblazoned on the front, and "London, Baby" on the back. I guess that Las Vegas fell through. One of the group is much younger than the rest turns out to be the daughter of one of the other women. This leads me to suspect that this may not be "Kim's" first hen night ever. Could Kim be the mother? And how often does she have hen nights? Are you entitled to one every time you get married?

Sorry. I'm going to return to an evil that I've talked about before.

What bedevilment do I mean?

Why - the standard "ear buds" that come with Apple's products.

Look - I know I can sometimes moan about Apple. They have their closed systems, their sometimes bloated software (iTunes - I'm looking at you), and their prices. But nobody can doubt their flair in the design and implementation stakes.

Like it or not, they've built the portable music business. They banged record company boss heads together until they could launch the iTunes store. And they employ Jonathan Ive, who makes just about everything they manufacture look and feel gorgeous.

But there's an Achilles Heel to many of their products. It's the standard headphones they ship iPods, iPhones and, I daresay, iPads with.

Those white ear buds are awful. Worthless. Terrible. They don't even sit in your ears nicely.

What's worse - they leak sound to the extent that I can often sing along to the song their wearers are listening to on a noisy tube train, while I have my own headphones on! The reason those people are listening at such high volumes is because so much sound is leaking out, that listeners have to compensate by turning up the volume.

Frankly, if you want to carefully rip your CD collection, or buy music mastered in state-of-the-art multi-million pound studios, and then listen to it on inadequate and acoustically awful headphones, then that's your choice. But if those phones are so awful, they cause me distress then it becomes a problem.

I genuinely believe that it'd be fair if I was allowed to carry a pair of scissors, or perhaps some secateurs. If I come across someone listening via those awful things, then a quick painless snip and I'd be improving both of our lives.

A general rule of thumb in the whole portable audio business, is that any bundled headphones from any device manufacturer are awful. The possible exception is Sony. They have a significant headphone business, and they know that if they sell terrible headphones bundled with their devices, then they're not exactly encouraging consumers to upgrade to other offerings in their range.

So why does Apple make a fantastic device like the iPod, and then lumber it with such an awful, yet important accessory? They don't do it with their other products. If you buy an Apple iMac, it'll come with a terrific monitor, their "Mighty Mouse" (which everyone says is great), and an excellent keyboard. Those are all areas, where many PC companies save a bob or two when putting together packages.

Yes, Apple sells a superior pair of headphones, in-ear ones, currently retailing at £61 in the UK. But I don't really think that's their business plan. You can also buy headphones from many other manufacturers at Apple Stores and online.

Apple obviously builds its products to a price (not necessarily a UK price, it should be said). Decisions are made about what components can be included - cameras on iPhones, aluminium, plastic or ceramic finishes, hard or solid state disk drives and so on. Headphones are obviously not an important part of this process. They price up a $199 iPod Touch, and perhaps allow $1 for the headphones. The biggest part of the decision surrounding the included headphones is ensuring that they're white and fit in with Apple's iconic advertising. Sound quality doesn't really figure.

Now there's always been a certain part of Apple which says that it's more about style than substance. And while its pro devices have always ensured that their evident style is also met with the requisite quality, I'm not always convinced that's the case in consumer products. I think the headphones issue supports that assertion.

What's more, Apple continued down this substandard headphone path with first their iPhone headphones with their built in microphone, and more depressingly with their most recent low-end iPod Shuffles. In the latter, they built the controls into the cable meaning consumers are basically forced to use the bundled headphones.

So what can you do if you're still listening to your iPod or iPhone via the bundled headphones?

Frankly you could do a lot worse than head over to Amazon and buy yourself a pair of Sennheiser CX 300-II currently retailing for just £16.09 (They come in white too).

(I was going to say that I don't have any monetary involvment in Sennheiser, but I will admit that I've put affiliate code in those links so that's not entirely true. Buy them somewhere else if you're not happy).

By the way, if you're listening at home, let me heartily recommend Grado 60i headphones which are stunning. They, however, leak an awful lot and definitely aren't for going out and about with. But if you're after a relatively inexpensive pair of headphones for home, go for these. They might look a bit odd, and the cool kids in their WESC or Skull Candy gear might not look up to them, but the sound they produce is amazing.

Whatever you do, if you're still listening with the default Apple ear buds, do yourself and your ears a favour, and buy something else.

Have I mentioned before how much I love maps?

Oh yes, I have.

The latest exhibition at the British Library is Magnificent Maps which opened on Friday. It shows off an enormous range of maps, from a Roman era floorplan engraved on a rock through a reproduction of the Mappa Mundi (recently commissioned by the Folio Society - and a snip at just £745), through maps for political purposes and ending with some very contemporary examples, some of which were partially featured in one of two accompanying BBC Four series recently (Hurry, hurry: The last two parts of The Beauty of Maps are still on iPlayer for a few days, as are all three episodes of Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession).

In some respects, an exhibition such as this can be somewhat overwhelming. The sheer level of detail in many of these maps, be they Venice or London, can mean that you need to contemplate and examine the maps in immense detail.

Some of the larger maps have some clever interactive table-top versions of them. Projected onto a white surface, you can "magnify" areas of the maps by holding a "magnifying glass" over the map's surface.

One particular favourite must surely be The Island which was only created in 2008 by Stephen Walter. It imagines London as an "island" and is enormously detailed across every single London borough. Click through to launch a fullscreen version and be prepared to spend ages looking at the map - at least if you've lived or worked in London anyway.

Elsewhere, it was interesting to see how maps have been used for political purposes over the ages. The octopus theme has been especially well used to express empire-expansion.

The exhibition is supported by a sumptuously illustrated book which I immediately bought. And you can get various postcards and prints of details from the maps.

I think that I may need to pay another visit in a few weeks just to take in some of the maps I couldn't properly take in.

Anyway, if you're at all interested in maps, and live somewhere vaguely close to London, I can't recommend this exhibition highly enough.

I've not been into Fopp for ages so it was very interesting to see their default till message.

I visited River Sounding over the weekend - the audio/video exhibition by Bill Fontana at Somerset House.

He's recorded audio and shot video along the full length of the Thames and then used it in an installation placed in the Lightwells and Dead House beneath Somerset House's courtyard.

There are lots of little rooms and enclosures with projections against the mostly bare walls accompanied with audio.

I wasn't sure if I was allowed to record any audio within the exhibition, and in any case, it wouldn't easily reproduce well - particularly not the bass rumblings that sometimes come from massive speakers more usually found at rock concerts.

Nonetheless, I did record some of the noise of the fountains. What you can hear is me walking through the fountains and getting wet in the process. There's a bit of wind on the microphone as I move.

There are a couple more pictures here.

If things had gone to plan this week, then I could currently be driving a rental car from Los Angeles to San Francisco by way of various national parks. This was after I'd taken photos of a friend's wedding.

Sadly, things didn't happen that way, and instead I'll be back into work this week.

What I have done is watch and read a lot of coverage of Eyjafjallajökull and the fallout it's had on European aviation. And it's an odd story that really has been covered in a largely superficial manner.

I don't doubt that a large number of people are struggling to get home from remote locations, and similar number of people (like me) are being put out by volcanic ash disrupting our plans.

But surely it is a lot bigger than a few people who aren't able to cope too well by themselves abroad. There are industries and businesses that are suffering. We've heard that some fruit and vegetables are going to disappear from supermarket shelves pretty soon. We're so used to eating out of season food, we barely notice the country of origin. And your local florist's selection is likely to be cut back as all those Kenyan grown flowers stop arriving.

News has to personalise everything, sometimes missing out on the bigger picture. We have little enough knowledge of what kinds of products are regularly air-freighted around the globe. And they're also having difficulty juggling this story with the election coverage.

Instead we see families in Belgian hotel rooms moaning that their "holiday of a lifetime" (which they'd had - they got diverted on the way home), which they'd saved for a year for (so that'll be their annual holiday then), was spoilt because they have no nouse and can't even work out how to get themselves to a ferry port. Instead they were being fleeced by some opportunitist hiring a coach. It might also be worth mentioning that there are other rail services that serve ports apart from Eurostar. Calais is busy, but why not try somewhere like the Hook of Holland, Dieppe, Le Havre or Cherbourg?

It'll be interesting to learn how long these flight bans stay in place. We're hearing that various test aircraft have travelled safely, but this volcano is not going to stop spewing out lava anytime soon and could remain active for another two years. In the meantime there's the small matter of Katla, a much bigger nearby volcano that has also erupted the last three times that Eyjafjallajökull erupted.

Do you want to be the test passenger that heads into the skies and hopes that the ash doesn't interfere with modern jet engines?

(No - this isn't even remotely relevant to the above piece).

Yesterday I was out in a local country park, and came across this sorry sight.

Aside from wondering why someone felt the need to dump all their unwanted books and toys in a ditch rather than, say, a recycling bin or even a regular dustbin, I thought this was a bit of a sorry sight.

And that person might have been surprised about what some of this "bounty" would get on eBay.

Various annuals and books from the 70s and 80s dumped in a ditch. A Doctor Who annual peeks out from behind "Sci-Fi Now."

"Proton Pack" tie-in toy from "The Real Ghostbusters" series.

"The Saint" annual with Roger Moore on the cover alongside Rupert the Bear and other annuals.

A single (Columbia), the same annuals as before, and an Airfix box.

The photo quality's not great as they're from my phone's camera. And they were in a ditch. And it was raining which means that they books were all soaked through so not worth salvaging!

But a sad sight.

We really are lacking in decent regular TV programmes about cinema. I noticed that Film 2010 has just ended its latest run, and I'm not sure whether it'll be returning for a final run before Jonathan Ross ends his tenure at the BBC. While I'm sure that someone - Mark Kermode? - will take on that programme's mantle, we really could do with a proper TV series about films.

There were two great TV series that did more to educate me about films and cinema when I was younger. One was the exceptional Moving Pictures, presented by Howard Schuman in the early nineties. Sometimes episodes would be linked to forthcoming releases - I remember clearly an episode around the time of the release of Pulp Fiction - but more often it would introduce you to thematic ideas. So there'd be items on Ken Adam's set designs or Saul Bass's opening title sequences. I remember too, a detailed look at Vertigo.

The other series that came a little earlier was Alex Cox's series: Moviedrome. Each week, Cox would introduce us to some kind of cult film in the BBC2 series. Sometimes you knew - or at least had heard of the films - but other times you hadn't. Cox would tell you why what you were about to see was worth watching and then the film would start. The series ran roughly between 1988 and 1993.

I mention this because a week or so ago, I was reading Alex Cox's website and realised that he has for download copies of the guides that accompanied Moviedrome.

After two or three years' worth of programmes, the BBC published a printed guide that you could send away for. Possibly somewhere in my loft, I still have one of the guides. But in any case, Cox has placed them online.

These guides make a fascinating list of worthwhile films. In the late eighties and the early nineties, unless you lived near an amazing repetory cinema, Moviedrome was about the only way you could see films like these. Your local video shop probably didn't have them. Even if you had a really good shop, like Bath's "On The Videofront", they couldn't really help you if it hadn't been released on VHS. Today, with Amazon and Lovefilm, access to even obscure titles is much better, making this a still invaluable guide.

Cox's website is great by the way. He has a blog, although it doesn't have any proper feeds (I use one of those sites that generates feeds automatically). His currant (understandable) bête noire is the forthcoming Repo Men which is not connected with his previous classic film, Repo Man. Cox has, however, made Repo Chick which sounds interesting and will hopefully get some kind of release somewhere (since it's a BBC Film, it will certainly get an eventual TV screening). Previously Cox kept a blog on the BBC films site which has long since gone. It was a searingly honest examination of how films get made - or don't.

Cox's recent more book X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker is also really worth a read. I need to return to my copy to see if I'm able to get to a couple of locations he mentions in the book during a forthcoming US trip.

Although some of what he talked about on his old blog makes into this book, I'd pay to read some of the other material again in published form.

I also want to read his Creative Commons licenced book, 10,000 Ways To Die, which is also available to download from his site.

Anyway - go and get those Moviedrome guides. They'll keep you busy with at least a few titles that you haven't previously seen.

As everyone looks forward to the new Tim Burton take on Alice in Wonderland, and I wonder whether I can be bothered to see it in 3D, the BFI has put its newly restored version of the first ever version of Alice on YouTube.

Running at just under ten minutes, it's a remarkable document dating from 1903, and one that had very nearly been completely lost.

Read more at the BFI's website which has some detailed background about the film's origins.

How badly do minor celebrities need the cash? Quite badly if the Dale Winton Cash My Gold ad is to be believed. It's mercilessly ripped apart in Saturday's Guardian Guide. Ironically, when I viewed this piece online, the Google ads below served three gold-cashing services up including Cash My Gold itself. £150 for a laptop indeed...

These ads are vile. They prey on the desperate. They're not really just hoping for Elizabeth Duke and TV shopping channel fare. They want your heirlooms. Then they'll send you a cheque with a measly offer knowing that cash in the hand works so well, that in most cases you'll cash the cheque and accept the deal.

In my local shopping centre there's a gold cashing "booth" which is essentially a stand peopled by a couple of surly looking late-teens/early-twenties who sit in front of a laptop staring at Facebook. I'd love to know how much training they've had in basic jewellry valuing. Perhaps they just pop the items in a bag and mail them off themselves?

I was also really disappointed to see that WH Smith has done a deal to place a pile of envelopes outside some branches of its outlets ready for customers to grab.

Gold prices may be quite high at the moment, but what I do know is that you're not getting the best prices from these guys. Survey after survey has shown that you're better off elsewhere. Probably your old-school pawnbroker.

I thinking the gold cashing people have just become my most hated advertisers, just after the loan consolidators and ambulance chasing lawyers (who featured in a fascinating, if shallow, Cutting Edge last week).

What's been most interesting so far, following the news that the BBC might be shutting down, has been the reaction in the "Twittersphere" and online in general.

There were lots of callers on Victoria Derbyshire's programme this morning, with Martin Kelner and John Myers also making appearances (there's feedback throughout, but Kelner and Myers are on at about 1 hour 26 minutes in).

But it's on Twitter that there's really been a reaction. Here are the trending topics on Twitter as of a few minutes ago.

OK - that's in media-luvvy London. What about the UK overall?

And worldwide:

(To be fair, this is before most of the US has woken up. Still a strong showing though.)

The comments are coming in thick and fast.

The Facebook group is going great guns:

And you can add a Twibbon to your avatar:

Then there are all the comments on the various news sites, blogs and forums.

Is all this too much for a station that fewer than 700,000 people listen to on a weekly basis? (Still nearly 200,000 more than The Times sells, as has been pointed out on Twitter, referring to The Times' editorial that said the BBC is closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to.")

Maybe. But almost certainly not. That's the point. It's loved by those who listen. Yes - there's a feeling that if as many people who are already missing it, actually listened to the station, then it wouldn't be facing this threat. In the same way that if as many people who said they missed John Peel after his untimely death actually listened to him on Radio 1, then he wouldn't have been shunted into the small hours.

But any station would kill for such loyal and vocal listeners. How many other stations could genuinely garner such an outpouring?

[Note: As ever, these are my opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]

My mouse trail from a morning at work.

Generated using the fun Mouse Path software as linked to by the NY Times blog.

The earthquake that the people of Haiti experienced nearly a week ago now was horrific, and it's wonderful that at time of writing the appeal launched by the Disasters Emergency Committee has reached over £23 million.

Following the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, UK Radio Aid was a telethon of sorts that took place a few weeks later to raise money from the listeners of UK commercial radio. Most stations in the country took the programming from London, and according to the event's Wikipedia page, more than £3 million was raised.

This morning, following suggestions from various people on Twitter, Radio Today published an opinion piece asking whether it was perhaps time for UK commercial radio to run UK Radio Aid 2.

The piece was written by Justin Kings, a radio consultant. He followed the piece up with an update to say that UK Radio Aid 2 would not be happening.

A polite email from Global's Group News Director and PD of LBC, Jonathan Richards detailed why he felt that it wasn't right at this time. Richards pointed out that Global was running DEC advertisements across its network of stations and that this was helping the DEC's overall success in raising money. Given that Global is such a large part of commercial radio, its participation in a second telethon would have been essential.

Of course Global isn't the only group running the advertisements. Since the advertisements were recorded at the end of last week, most of commercial radio seems to be playing them - voiced by John Hurt. Many stations are also running web advertising. The same is true for most other commercial media outlets who are giving up space and airtime.

I must admit that I agree with Richards and believe that while UK Radio Aid may have had an impact at the time, we wouldn't be repeating it for entirely the right reasons.

It's no secret that I have very mixed feelings about telethons in general. I suppose that I'm happy to put my misgivings to one side if I felt that they make a difference. I think that some of the major television telethons do make that difference. But they're events that tread a very fine line; and sometimes they overstep that line coming across as crass and self-congratulatory.

There was undoubtedly an element of that in 2005 UK Radio Aid, with certain individuals perhaps being a litle bit too happy about being seen to be doing something.

Radio stations should certainly encourage their listeners to part with their cash and support the appeal. But is it really appropriate for a local station to take a service from London featuring "star names" that has little or nothing to do with that station's locality? Even in a radio world of networked centralised programming, I'm not sure that it is.

Then there are the big name guests who might not be directly promoting their latest films or CDs overtly, but are benefiting in some way in kind.

Perhaps it's the British sensibility at play here. In the US on Friday, most major broadcasters, including all the networks, will be airing a two-hour telethon backed by George Clooney. That might well get US citizens to donate when they might otherwise have not, but I'm not sure it'll make a great deal of difference to British citizens.

Again, as regular readers will know, I find plenty of other charity work unsettling and unseemly. Why do we need a charity single? Can we not just give a couple of quid to charity without stroking popstars' egos? Do I really need a badge or a ribbon to show my support? Can't we save manufacturing costs of that t-shirt and just use all my cash?

Returning to radio - many stations do excellent work for their own charities and they fit that in well with their regular output. Listeners appreciate it. UK Radio Aid last time around didn't really do that in my opinion, and stations would be better adopting their own ways to encourage listeners to give.

An aside: this disaster has taken place in January - a month in which many people find themselves short of spare cash following Christmas. Perhaps a campaign to get people to promise to donate once they've received their pay packet would be a good idea? Yes - the money is needed now. But it's also going to be needed for many months and years to come.

If you're like me, when someone tells you something that sounds like an urban myth, you're desperate to do your bit to put the other person right. So you do a quick Google search and end up somewhere where the question has been previously asked. Of course it's an urban myth. Don't be so stupid.

At Christmas I was visiting my family, having warily negotiated the ungritted pavement near where I live, trolley case in tow. There I was told that the reason so few pavements had been cleared of snow - especially in front of shops - was because shopkeepers were worried they'd be sued by people who had accidents if they hadn't cleared the snow properly.

What? This couldn't be true could it?

Well if it isn't it's a widely held belief. So I did some urban myth Googling and - it's basically true.

According to this piece from the BBC News site in 2004:

Clearing snow from pavements outside your home could make you liable to legal action if somebody slips on ice, the government has said.

But if householders leave the snow, the council is liable, Lord Davies of Oldham, for ministers, told Tory Lord Burnham at question time.

--

Labour ex-minister Lord Dubs added: "Something I have done for years every time there has been snow is leaving me liable to legal action."

Lord Davies said: "No householder is at all responsible, providing they do not touch the pavement, which is owned by the local authority."

That couldn't still be true could it?

It is. This piece dates from last year in The Time. Section 41(1A) of the Highways Act 1980 says that councils must maintain the highways, and although someone could go to the magistrates court to order a council to unblock a highway, such actions are unsurprisingly rare.

Private landowners are not obliged to clear snow or ice from the highway, even if the road or pavement passes over their land. Indeed, from a legal point of view it may be risky for private individuals to clear these areas. By sweeping snow from one part of the pavement you can create a danger in another area and if someone is injured, you will be liable for negligence or nuisance.

Furthermore, you do need to make your own property safe under the Occupiers Liability Act 1984 to make sure visitors are reasonably safe.

And thus, that's why when the snow comes, nobody apart from the council is allowed to do anything. None of this would matter were it not for those horrendous ambulance chasing legal companies. You know the ones I mean - they advertise everywhere on a no-win no-fee basis.

In the meantime, thousands of people - especially the elderly - will be slipping and sliding in this weather, especially if temperatures drop and the snow freezes into ice.

I tend to loathe New Year. Forced jolity really isn't my thing.

Nonetheless - if only to force myself to use the nice H2 Zoom audiorecorder I bought a while back - here's a Boo I made earlier:

In today's Standard (I managed to get a copy at Kings Cross - they're never available much beyond 5.30pm at Oxford Circus or Piccadilly Circus), David Sexton pontificates over two pages about why "bloggers" are so hostile towards Ian McEwan.

This is the piece that Sexton is talking about. Following a series of Guardian Book blogs on the best books of each year of the last decade, the author asks for nominations for the worst book of the decade. What the piece is really about is over-praised books, or titles that received good reviews but which weren't all that good.

Sexton finds it astonishing that so much venom can be saved up for McEwan.

Let's take this back a step. Is everything McEwan's written good? No. At least not in my view and I've only read a handful of his books. I loved Atonement but thought that Amsterdam (which won the Booker) was vastly over-rated. I enjoyed Enduring Love, but both Saturday and On Chesil Beach left me wanting. Those are my views and they count for as much or as little as you like.

In the internet world you're always going to find extremes, and just as people like to vent at one another in pubs, they like to write to newspapers. In this day and age, we're able to comment on anything we like and enjoy doing so. Witness then, the nearly 900 comments (at time of writing) accompanying the Guardian's blog.

Is Sexton new to the internet? Is that why the strength of opinion takes him by surprise? Has he never been to a debating chamber where people will happily argue back and forth. A blog's comment section such as this is just such a place. And when you marry that with a subject that we can all easily hold forth on like which book, in our opinion, was given the most undeserved praise, then the comments can fly.

And I take exception to Sexton calling all the commenters "bloggers."

Bloggers hunting in packs never make a pretty sight, of course. By and large, bloggers remain writers who have not been able to find more rewarding outlets for their work and are therefore pre-packed with resentment, whatever subject they address. They rarely come to praise.

First off, you're talking about commenters - the same people who write to your letters page too. Bloggers maintain or contribute to their own sites. There's a subtle and yet fundamental difference, which while it might seem of little import, is relevant to the argument. They're also a wide variety of society.

I love Word magazine, but a story in a recent issue - preceded by a podcast in similar vein - made the same mistake. In that instance it was about the "feedback" that Lily Allen received when she spoke of her beliefs surrounding music piracy (her views were not to everyone's liking).

That Word piece spoke of "the message boards" and those who contribute to them.

In both cases, the people to whom disdain is being shown are a broad church. Speaking of them in a simplistic terminology really doesn't do justice. They're Word magazines readers; they're Guardian and Evening Standard readers. They're not some subspecies who hunt "in packs."

Can unpleasantness occur if we're not careful? Certainly. But that's the same kind of argument that suggests that everyone who watches football is a hooligan.

And I seriously doubt that all those 9000 or so comments come from people who've "not been able to find more rewarding outlets for their work." That's a low, and thoroughly unfair blow.

Sexton might want to look around at the comments under the sister pieces in this series in which commentors praise lots of books from each year of the last decade and recommend titles to one another. It's not all bile you know!

Have you got a laptop? Or perhaps a netbook?

Does it have a webcam?

Seemingly it's Cineworld policy not to allow customers to bring laptops into their cinemas. This is to curtail piracy. This follows a story from a couple of months ago about someone turned away from a Cineworld.

You see that 1.3 megapixel camera on it? Well you might turn around your laptop and point it at the screen and capture the film. Of course you might just as easily (and somewhat more covertly) use your mobile phone. Or if you're actually a pirate, you might be using a video camera - they're pretty small these days.

I'm not condoning piracy for one second. I love watching films on the big screen. For the majority of films it's by far the best way for them to be seen. But what kind of lunacy is this?

At my local cinema, they search bags on entry. I somehow imagine that any pirate worth his salt keeps his video camera in his pocket rather than his bag, but hey - they're employing someone (they might improve their bottom line if they employed a few more people at the concession stand, but that's another matter).

During the film itself, a security guard generally peers in. He doesn't stop any chattering from annoying teens, or the person in front of me who's busily using their mobile phone to check emails or text their friends. No - he's really checking to see if anyone's using a video camera in there.

Sometimes the guard might have nightvision goggles or other technology to spot the pirates. As long as his radio doesn't go off in the auditorium I can just about put up with this.

But here's the thing. I carry a netbook with me pretty much every day after work, and quite a lot at weekends. They're small, portable and very useful. Perfect - in fact - for carrying around.

Cineworld saying that they won't allow people in with laptops means that effectively they don't want my post-work business. I work in the West End and am lucky enough to have a huge choice of cinemas. Any chain that decides that laptops are banned is pretty much ensuring that I can no longer be a customer.

Cinemas - on the whole - don't have secure lockers. I certainly wouldn't trust my local cinema with anything.

It has been reasonably common practice at preview screenings of films for private security companies to collect mobiles and digital cameras. It's a pallaver, and as far as I'm aware pirate copies of films don't tend to come from these screenings (they do however come from DVD "screeners" sent to voters in The Oscars etc). On the plus-side - they do ensure that others in the cinema don't text/email in there.

But nobody tries to employ this in local cinemas.

When all's said and done, customers will vote with their feet, and that's what I will be doing to any chain that employs such a stupid role.

What is this supposed to mean?

Everything's "Content"...

The Oxford Museum of Science is currently home to a great little exhibition on the subject of Steampunk - seemingly the first collection of such artworks ever collected like this in the world.

I've always found steampunk to be an interesting area with the wonderfully creative machines that they built. I suppose my introduction would have been through something like The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but there is more and more fiction about now.

It's a really great collection, and since the it's there until February 2010, you really should visit if you get the chance.

Warning. You are about to read a bit of a rant: if you haven't already stopped reading already that is. It's been a long time in coming, but I feel I have to say something about it.

I loathe content.

The word "content" that is.

I really, really loathe it.

It's a hideous and yet all encompassing word.

At first it was just the by now omnipresent "User Generated Content". But now websites are filled with "content". TV schedules are now packed with "content". Radio stations use "content" to fill the airtime. Newspapers and magazine are stuffed with "content". It's everywhere.

Like many words, it started out as an industry specific word. Marketing types would talk about the content they were producing for their new project. That was frustrating, but marketing is full of nonsense (apologies for causing offence to any marketing professionals reading this - but you know I'm speaking the truth). Yet slowly it's become one of those words that's seeped out of the confines of the marketing universe and has begun to permeate society. "Premium" is a word that has similarly escaped the clutches of the marketing world and broken free into our world. We all now know that a "premium lager" is somehow better than a regular one. The ads are glossier; the image more refined; and the product more expensive. But it's brewed in the same facility in South Wales or wherever. Nobody can actually really explain what's so "premium" about it. They might say that they like it more, but advertising has largely conditioned them to do so. And there are plenty of other examples.

Thus you'll now see consumer-facing websites talking about "content" quite openly - especially if you're invited to upload pictures, audio or video. But you'll also hear the word spoken and used in this sense on television and radio.

Content, I'm reliably informed, is from the Latin, contentum, the neuter past particple of continere meaning "to contain". Google cites something like 1.4bn mentions of the word.

Dictionary.com's definition is probably as good as any:

4. substantive information or creative material viewed in contrast to its actual or potential manner of presentation: publishers, record companies, and other content providers; a flashy Web site, but without much content.

(I'd use the OED's defintion, but it's all behind a paywall).

So why do I hate the word? It's a word that's not easily replaceable in the context in which it's currently used, because it can mean so many things: video, audio, written pieces, or combinations thereof. As a catchall, then, does it not serve a purpose?

Yet that's precisely what really annoys me about the word.

It takes that art out of those things. If I'm writing an essay on a subject, is this a carefully crafted literary piece or is it a piece of "content"? If I'm composing a new song, am I just making some "content"? If I'm making a film with a crew, and some actors, have I really just put together "content"?

In the context of the word's definition, then yes I have. But the word is somehow dismissive. It doesn't consider the thought, time, or creativity (or lack of) that went into producing the work or works. Aqua by Barbie Girl and A Day In The Life by The Beatles are somehow equal because they're both just "content". Saw VI and Lawrence of Arabia are the same. A throw away piece of tittle-tattle from The Sun's Bizarre column is the same as a 1500 word essay in the Times Literary Supplement. It's all "content".

It probably doesn't help that the word sounds a little like "cement", because when I hear someone talk about content - perhaps on a website - then I think about someone trying to shovel oozing piles of something into the website so that it'll quickly set and there's something there for people to read, watch or listen to. It's not a stunning piece of hand crafted masonry. It's a breeze block. There's no real thought about the quality of what's being uploaded or written; just the knowledge that some of it's needed to attract readers, viewers or listeners. There is space or airtime to fill, and on the internet, that space is effectively infinite, while in the broadcasting world you can always start a new channel or stream.

It's simple economics. And of course that's what the media industry is all about. With the exception (perhaps!) of the BBC, all that filler material is just there to turn a buck for the company who has to fill it. That's fine. We live in a capitalist world. But surely we care about how we fill those empty spaces? And that to me is the problem with the word "content." It suggests an attitude that just requires taking the most cost effective way to fill in the gaps.

Am I an idealist? I'm well aware that commissioning editors for daytime TV are just trying to fill the gaps in their schedule as cost effectively as possible. They need a decent audience share to maintain their positions, and reap the maximum value of the associated advertising.

To take an easy example, nobody really hand-crafts an episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show. They don't care. They just know that the network wants x hours of shows a year, and they just churn them out as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Think of that cement mixer again, pulling up at a studio in Manchester and just dumping its load.

Similarly, the producers of Big Brother and Channel 4 know that they have to produce hours of footage to fill out much of Quarter Two and Three's primetime schedule. Yes, they want to maximise the audience - but that's not really the same as caring about the programmes they make. Perhaps in these instances "content" is, then, an accurate word.

Closer to home, commercial radio has to achieve maximum revenues for minimal costs. It does this largely by playing music; in many cases, the same music. The listener is left with soundalike stations across the country. Indeed they're now quite likely to be 100% identical.

But does that mean that we shouldn't at least aspire to greater things?

The reality is that some standards have to be maintained if you want to stand out and make an impact. However dire some of ITV's comedy and drama series might be, I don't believe the makers didn't really care at least a little bit about them (OK - the producers of The Palace last year probably didn't).

That's not to say that slick machines can't operate, producing television programmes by the mile, but maintaining a certain quality threshold. The CSI franchise springs to mind with some excellent production values maintained, even if a few scripts do seem to have jumped the shark. House is now in its sixth series, having made well over 100 episodes, yet the quality of scripts remains impressive. It can be done.

I suppose I get upset when I hear people throwing the word "content" around as though people will come flocking to read, listen or view it, irrespective of what it is. Pile it high and they will come!

And so, every website in the known universe has rushed to include "User Generated Content" in their sites! Sometimes it's very appropriate - Flickr obviously wouldn't exist without its users photos, although YouTube could probably do with a little more user generated "content", and less broadcaster created "content". But mostly it's just another bandwagon that most have failed to climb on.

What I do agree with is that we need a word to use to talk about all this material; preferably a word that doesn't conjour up an image of a builder shoveling cement from a wheelbarrow into a hole to fill it up. Because that's what I picture in my mind's eye when I hear someone discussing how they need content to fill a hole in their schedule/pages/site. Cement is readily available in vast quantities from your local builders' yard.

Please give me an alternative; a word that conveys some care and consideration has gone into what has been created. And in the meantime, feel free to tell me off if I ever use the word.

The usual disclaimer - these are my personal opinions and do not represent those of my employer. And yes, I have, in extremis, used "content" before, quite probably on this very blog. But I try not to. I really do.

What do you do if the supplier to your bar changes lager supplier, but neglects to give you those bar-tap covers to advertise your new brand?

Use your initiative...

Inspired by the ridiculously popular WWII poster, and The IT Crowd.

Personally I think another poster in the series - Freedom Is In Peril - is equally as relevant.

Things that have annoyed me in recent days:

Channel 4 not including a "series link" in their Freeview EPG for Red Riding. It meant I had to look "elsewhere" to find episode 2.
Sci Fi Channel in the US renaming themselves SyFy (this is not a joke).
My computer at work.
Apple releasing an iPod that loses functionality if you don't use their terrible included earphones.
The Coronation Street radio ad - if you've heard it, you'll know why.

Things that have excited me in recent days:

Saturday's stage of Paris-Nice was cycle racing as it's meant to be. And Sunday's stage was pretty good too.
Man United being beaten 4-1 by Liverpool, while Arsenal won and Aston Villa lost.
Radio 3 repeating the Daphne Oram feature.
Pet Shop Boys spending two hours on Absolute Radio.
Radio Sales on Archive on 4.
The new issue of Word magazine is out.

Today saw an entirely expected and predicted fall of snow, and just what chaos it caused.

Many tube lines were shut down. Seemingly, most of the rail lines going south from London were shut down. And most appallingly, the entire bus network was shut down.

There wasn't a red bus in London to be caught this morning. I obviously used the opportunity to get up early and take photos. And I should say that despite several inches of snow locally, First Capital Connect kept all their trains running all day, with few hiccups beyond unavoidable delays (drivers tend to need to slow down and start up a bit slower than usual). The conclusion of my trip into work was via the Victoria Line which was the only unaffected line by virtue of the fact that it's entirely underground (So's the Waterloo & City Line, mind you, but that had weather related problems strangely).

Quite why all the buses were off the streets still isn't completely clear to me, and I suspect that in coming days and weeks this won't be the last we hear of this.

It was "unprecedented" we were told. Buses couldn't leave the depots, seemingly.

I just don't buy this. While it might be quite a while since Londoners received quite such a dumping of snow, I remember equally as bad snow when I used to go to school. It lasted a couple of weeks and while buses and traffic in general ran slowly, they kept running. Shutting down virtually the entire public transport network in a major western city is dreadful. I'm not going to lay the blame directly at the feet of Boris, but he has some questions to answer.

Anyway, I did take a few photos, and the rest are over at Flickr.

You do watch Flight of the Conchords don't you?

What do you mean, you've been meaning to? Stop wasting your time on the internet and either go and look it up on YouTube, or better still go and get the DVDs of the first series right now (and the Radio 2 series, and the album).

As well as Jemaine and Brett, the series features a fantastic set of secondary characters - especially Rhys Darby's manager Murray, and Kristen Schaal's somewhat stalker-ish and not to say psychotic fan, Mel.

Schaal has a wonderful face for some extraordinary expressions, so when I read the other week that she was appearing with fellow comic Kurt Braunohler, I had to get tickets.

What a brilliant night. I really just can't begin to describe the bizarre and eccentric nature of the show. We got a play in reverse chronological order: Double Down Hearts. There was phone sex featuring Pocahontas, and a remarkable song featuring the unforgettable lyric (with accompanying dance): Kirsten Schaal is a horse. There's some terrifically uncomfortable sections, not least the member of the audience who wins a date with Schaal.

All round, it's brilliant. I suspect it's thoroughly sold out, but do see these two next time you have the opportunity. I know I will.

Sky emails me to tell me about the "Exciting New Improvements" they've made to the Sky Player (aka Sky Anytime - but since the success of the iPlayer, everything has to be similarly named). I can now watch if I have a Mac (or "MAC" in Sky-speak - isn't that something to do with WiFi?), and they've added extra channels. They've also removed the previous restriction allowing it to be used on only one PC.

But it's still fairly useless when the single thing that I'd like to be able to do is the one thing I can't - I'm not allowed to stream Sky Sports. Now while I'm not saying that I'd waste valuable work time watching the cricket of Masters tennis, I'd like to be able to make that choice myself thanks. But Sky won't let me unless I either take out a multi-room subscription (I live in a flat on my own so, no thanks), or I take their Broadband Max package. I already pay Sky a considerable amount of money a month, so no thanks.

Of course, I could just go out and buy a Slingbox which would do the job for me, but since Sky is worried that someone would be watching Sky One at home while I watched Sky Sports at work without them seeing any more cash, then I can't. Rubbish.

Meanwhile, wasn't the terrestrial FA Cup coverage poor at the weekend. I don't mean the quality of ITV (or Setanta), but the limited number of games. When the BBC and Sky shared FA Cup coverage, the BBC had three matches while Sky had two. And I believe I'm right in saying that the BBC got first two picks as well. That's clearly not the case with the ITV/Setanta deal where Setanta marginally has the upper hand.

On Saturday ITV had Hartlepool v West Ham at lunchtime and the main pick of the round, Man Utd v Spurs (Man Utd is always a channel controller's pick of the round due to inevitable ratings). But that was it. The second choice fixture was probably the Liverpool derby which was on Setanta, as was the Notts Forest v Derby clash on Friday. Finally, Setanta also had Cardiff v Arsenal. I'd hazard a guess that ITV got first pick, Setanta picks two, three and four, with ITV getting the final choice.

All in all, the terrestrial viewer loses out, and I can assure the folk at Setanta that there's no way I'm taking out a subscription with them - I've heard the horror stories of people who wanted to cancel later (you had to write a letter...).

Finally, yesterday's Observer carried a story saying that culls of geese might be needed around Heathrow where they were causing more of a threat recently. This, of course, following the downed plane in the Hudson in New York a week or so ago.

The number of Canada geese in Britain is expected to rise to more than 200,000 by 2010, according to the British Trust for Ornithology, which monitors bird populations. That compares with just 3,600 in 1953.

and

Some scientists claim that they are now choosing to winter in Europe because of global warming.

So let's see. Global warming causes geese to fly to Europe where they cause a hazard at Heathrow. We cull them, and then... build another runway at Heathrow, thus putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, speeding up global warming... You get the picture.

(But I am quite pleased that my employer will be playing the DEC Gaza appeal on air).

Lots of areas of the media are getting excited about the annual Golden Globes handed out by an organisation called the "Hollywood Foreign Press Association". I've written about this self-appointed, self-elected organisation before - and the fact that it has very little if anything to do with, well, the foreign press.

Now everyone loves a prize, and I suppose that if I was up for one, I wouldn't say no. At the very least, you get a nice dinner out of it. I believe that they raise money for charity too, which is a fine thing.

But, frankly, the awards might just as well be handed out by the Hollywood Nanny's Association and they'd mean as much to me. While the Oscars are voted for by around 6,000 individuals (categories vary), the Golden Globes are voted for by 90 individuals.

At least the forthcoming BAFTAs are handed out by industry peers like the Oscars, and not a self-serving organisation that's not even representative of the industry it claims to represent.

Last Friday was the last in Clive James' current run of A Point of View (Harold Evans takes over this Friday). You have about 24 hours to download the podcast, otherwise you'll just have to read his words.

James got on to the habit of Hollywood actors promoting products that once they'd never have been seen promoting - having probably signed agreements to ensure that the ads were only played in Japan.

Matthew McConaughey is doing commercials for a certain fragrance. I'm sure the extra money he is making is going to a good cause, but there are two questions that I ask automatically whenever I see those commercials. The first question is: Who wants to smell like Matthew McConaughey? And the second question is, doesn't he looks silly?

...

If I could be assured that the certain fragrance doesn't make Nicole Kidman smell different, but instead smells exactly like Nicole Kidman, I would buy a bottle and drink it. But otherwise I'm convinced of nothing except that she looks exactly as if she's hustling for a buck she doesn't need. Even if she does, is this the way to get it? Doesn't she look silly?

Recently two other adverts have started being screened on UK television that makes you question the sanity of those involved, and wonder exactly how big the cheque must have been.

First there's the Aviva ads rebranding Norwich Union to a meaningless international name. Norwich Union was founded in 1797. If the smart marketing folk think that employing Bruce Willis, Alice Cooper, Elle Macpherson and Ringo Starr to try to persuade us that if they hadn't changed their names, they wouldn't have been successful is laughable - especially in Starr's case. [And yes, I'm well aware that I'm employed by a company that's just changed its name - but I don't believe this is the same thing at all].

That, however, is nothing to the truly appalling Swiftcover advert featuring Iggy Pop. You can see it here - I refuse to embed it.

Do you really need the money that much Iggy?

Is anyone fooled into thinking that Iggy cares about British car insurance?

I don't find some of the fragrance advertisements quite as upsetting as Clive James - they're always ridiculous because it's impossible to advertise a smell that costs thirty quid or more a bottle. But car insurance? Online car insurance? Is this what punk rock was all about? It's much worse than John Lydon's butter ad.

I believe that Iggy is due to be touring again soon. There's good money in that, and I've never seen an Iggy show* where he hasn't put his heart and soul into it. He performs for the money. All the more reason why he shouldn't be making ads like this.

*OK - I've only seen Iggy live once - at last year's Isle of Wight Festival. But I've seen him on TV at things like Glastonbury, and he always puts on a show and works incredibly hard.

It's now January, and that means that the films you can see in the cinema are suddenly good. On the other hand, the releases will come and go so fast, that you probably won't be able to see all them.

I both understand and really don't understand why the cinema industry treats films in this way. It's essentially because of awards. It's Oscar season, and Golden Globe season and BAFTA season, et al. The people who get to vote have memories like sieves seemingly, and can't be trusted to remember a film that came out in April by the time the nomination forms come around. So studios hold back films until the last possible minute, give them a limited release (the proper releases often only coming after a film has achieved a few gongs or nominations), and let them stack up on top of one another.

If you're even quite a regular cinema goer, you're going to find it hard to keep up. Of the serious films, this week sees Che: Part One and The Reader. Then coming up we have Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk and Valkyrie. That's just January, and the list probably isn't inclusive.

Still awards season does mean one good thing for the eager film fan - the "For Your Consideration" websites. If nominees can't be bothered to watch the personalised DVDs of these films that drop through their letterboxes (and immediately find themselves released on the internet as a result), then the film companies spend lots advertising in trade magazine and on their websites. They helpfully list all the locations (like Aspen) where you can catch screenings. But of late, they've also started including scripts for films up for writing awards, and it's nice to be able to legally download these.

So here's my list of what's currently available should you also want to read through a few screenplays:

http://www.universalpicturesawards.com/ has screenplays for Frost/Nixon and Changeling.

http://www.miramaxhighlights.com/ has screenplays for Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky and Doubt which I know nothing about.

http://www.paramount2008.com/ doesn't have anything apart from screening details.

http://www.foxsearchlight.com/awards/ has nothing just yet beyond screening details and a note that you should see their films in cinemas as they were meant to be shown - but curiously has a "screener disposal form" to certify that you've duly destroyed the screener that they have in fact sent you. I'm really looking forward to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire next week.

http://www.vantageguilds.com/ has The Duchess, Defiance and Revolutionary Road the new Sam Mendes film.

http://warnerbros2008.warnerbros.com/hfpa/ has The Dark Knight and will have Gran Torino and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

http://www.filminfocus.com/awards08/index.php has Burn After Reading and Milk.

http://www.weinsteincohighlights.com/ has The Reader and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

I hope this helps. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend actually reading the things until you've seen the films, but there's nothing like getting in early is there?

PS Just noticed that there's a script site that helpfully does all this work for you, so I needn't have spent ages trawling about hitting refresh at Variety. They've got loads more!

Well one article and two blog posts really.

First off, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, writes at length about how the media is effectively now unable to examine things like whether corporations are avoiding tax legally. We know that the UK's libel laws are absurd and encourage libel tourism (everything is effectively "published" in the UK either via the internet or through online booksales), but even more scary are the vast sums that journalists must pay tax lawyers to write articles. The piece itself cost "several thousand dollars" just to be cleared to publish. Nobody else followed up Private Eye's stories about Tesco in the summer, not because it wasn't a story, but it's just too expensive (and Tesco is a major advertiser, who nobody's in a hurry to annoy).

Charles Arthur on what a devastating effect Zavvi and Woolie's closures (or imminent closures) are likely to have on the music industry, with the supermarkets taking control of physical sales. Their tastes are somewhat blander than might be liked...

And finally author Max Barry on the stupidity of Warners who have somehow prevented purchasers of The Dark Knight on DVD from playing it on their PC. Such is their concern about anti-piracy, that they make pirates out of honest consumers. Film companies really need a kick up the backside.

If Strictly adopted the US voting system as I'd advocated, then it's incredibly unlikely this weekend's incident would have occurred.

This isn't, of course, important. Votes placed will still go to viewers' favourite dancers. So everyone who's saved the BBC or Ofcom's phone numbers on speed dial to complain at the drop of a hat should probably take a close look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why they actually voted for the programme.

I heard some fool of a woman on the radio saying that she wasn't going to watch the final next weekend because she was so upset!

So she's willing to watch the first 13 weeks, but a 15p vote that will still count is enough to make her not want to watch the show? (And she's so upset, that she got up really early this morning to head to a studio in W12). As William Shatner once said, "Get a life!"

I love it when tube stations are being refurbished and old posters are uncovered before the new LCD panels go up in their place. Yesterday evening I saw this wonderful Abbey National poster from goodness knows when (it looks quite old to me even if the colours are quite vivid).

I suspect that Abbey wouldn't use quite those words today in its advertising.

Yesterday I was about to go into a newsagent, when a couple of kids stopped me just outside. If they gave me the money, would I go in and buy them a packet of cigarettes?

"Sorry, no," I replied.

It's a moral thing - I'm not buying their cigarettes for them. They're under-age, and I'm not helping them out.

The same thought came today, when, in response to a request for present ideas, someone suggested buying the Mamma Mia DVD as a Christmas gift (no names - no pack drill).

Just like I'm not going to help feed some youths' nicotine addiction, I'm not going to support someone's terrible taste in celluloid - even if it's ironic.

I have to have standards. I'd feel dirty just buying a copy. I'd have to explain to the shop assistant that it wasn't for me. I'm feeling a cold shiver down my back just typing these words, and thinking about quite how appalling the film might be.

When I give a gift, however much the recipient desires the gift or has asked for it, the fact that I've given it is a reflection of me and my tastes.

So no Mamma Mia DVDs, no Mariah Carey CDs, no Martina Cole novels, and so on.

Third time lucky - today I finally made it into the Hadrian exhibition. When I'd previously popped in to try to see it, I'd gone on Saturday afternoons when all the tickets for the day had already been sold.

I tried to book online for today, but no luck, so I pitched up early to buy tickets in person. I still had to wait an hour and a half before I could get in, but that's not a problem when you're in one of the world's great museums.

What I hadn't quite realised was that Statuephilia was also on at the museum. This is a collection of five "sculptures" by contemporary artists, placed amongst the museum's other exhibits.

They're quite fascinating - and I decided to take photos of them. Well easier said than done. With four of the five, you can take as many snaps as you like - indeed with a few exceptions, you're free to photograph away inside the museum. The Hadrian exhibition didn't allow it, and although I suspect that the reason was partly to ensure that they sold plenty of £25 catalogues, it was very full and taking photos tends to get in the way of the exhibits for other people.

Taking photos of the exhibits in Statuephilia was also fine for most of the exhibits as I say, but there was one for which photography was expressly forbidden. That, of course, was Damian Hurst's piece. Now as it happens, I did take a photo of his piece. It's not very good, and it was before I read the sign banning it.

I've noticed that it's quite common for Hirst to ban taking photos of his pieces. I was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York last year where he has one of his sharks on display. Once again, the museum was happy for you take photos, but his piece banned it.

Perhaps my feelings on the subject aren't too different from those of some others. The skulls on display at The British Museum really aren't anything to write home about and certainly aren't as clever and involving as Tim Noble and Sue Webster's Dark Stuff which was given plentiful approval from those who I saw it with. The relative merits of the vaguely obscene gold statue of Kate Moss are also in the balance, but it's undoubtedly the most popular piece from the unscientific survey I made today. People were taking photos from every angle. The Hirst piece simply had a woman with her daughter sitting on the floor sketching it, which I assume doesn't break the rules.

A friend mentioned the other day that when BAA were determining their marketing plans for Terminal 5 at Heathrow, post its opening, "...Is Working" probably wasn't what they were hoping to use. But following the initial fiasco, that's what they're having to do to prove you can fly from there.

I wonder if "Planes Still Flying" mightn't be a better option following the collapse of XL, and the possible-collapse of Alitalia.

Congratulations to all in Sheringham today, after Tesco finally lost an appeal to build a massive supermarket in the small Norfolk town of Sheringham.

If you've never visited Sheringham then perhaps you won't understand quite what this means. You probably live somewhere where most of the small independent shops, from bakers and greengrocers to butchers and fishmongers have disappeared. You go to your local supermarket to buy all those things - perhaps out of choice, but most likely because it's simply the only place to buy those things. And of course supermarkets sell far more than just food - books, magazines, clothes, CDs, DVDs, electrical appliances and so on.

Sheringham is a town which still retains all those small locally run indendent stores, adding to the unique charm of the seaside town. Instead of a town centre filled simply with identikit chainstores, all empty lots, it has a thriving variety of retailers selling all and sundry.

And this is more important than just a local planning concern of interest only to locals. There national interest in this outcome since big business usually wins.

Tesco's avariciousness is unbounded, and it's been trying to put a store in the town for years, even going so far as to put a secret deal in place with a previous local council's administration.

But now, finally, they've lost their appeal, and Sheringham won't have a superstore that would leave the town centre bare and bereft as business is lost by the rest of the town.

This is great news because large supermarket groups have much deeper pockets for legal fees that local and district councils. They simply can't always afford to fight these battles.

Now of course Tesco can put in a new application for a different store. And they probably will - supermarkets never seem to let go. But it'll have to be smaller, and better designed to fit in with the local town.

Read the full findings here.

I don't mean to underplay the potentially serious nature of Hurricane Gustav when it hits the US coastline, probably tomorrow. But Bush and Cheney not going to the Republican convention this week, answers a lot of the questions that Carl Hiaasen raises in his column this week.

It's a good get out. Bush gets criticised for over-flying the aftermath of Katrina rather than being down on the ground. So this time he's proactive.

In the meantime, as the media coverage here in the UK escalates, and impending arrival of the hurricane dominates the news, we shouldn't forget that more than eighty people have already died - especially in Haiti. In Cuba, 300,000 people were moved and there are no reports of any casualties. Say what you like about Castro (Raul that is), but the regime does seem to know how to look after its citizens.

And let's not forget that elsewhere in the world, there is plenty of ongoing suffering - especially in Birhir, India, where widespread flooding has left over a million people homeless and a frankly unknown number have died.

While in China, the Sichuan province, still getting over its terrible earthquake earlier this year has suffered a further quake killing yet more people.

For some reason, these natural disasters don't quite merit the on-the-hour coverage from multiple places of events with live satellite two-ways.

At work a few weeks ago, we had a nice chap come in to talk to us about the consumer behaviour at the moment, in light of the credit crunch and a falling housing market as people tightened their belts. It was all a little gloomy if you work for a company who depends on advertising as I do.

He also talked about who he thought might do well, and obviously internet companies are set to do even better. One of his examples was white goods retailers who have struggled with the internet so far in his opinion.

I've got a couple of recent experiences with white goods retailers to share in light of this.

A few days after I his talk I was due to take delivery of a washing machine, and seeing how strongly retailers had grasped the digital domain was to prove interesting.

First off, I had been expecting the washing machine the previous weekend, but Comet had called me at work to let me know that it'd be delayed a week as they'd run out of stock. Since the particular model I had chosen was a special offer, this wasn't perhaps surprising.

Ordering the machine had been reasonably painless. They'd offered a fitting service and could take away my old machine both at modest additional cost. But since I live on the second floor, this is a useful service to which I had to avail myself. In fact, this had been the main reason for choosing Comet ahead of other retailers. I don't simply want a washing machine to be delivered - they have concrete blocks built into their bases, and my old one isn't going to leave my flat on its own.

As is the way of these things, you get a delivery window - in this instance it was Sunday 8am-12pm. I must admit that offering a Sunday delivery is somewhat surprising, but the four hour window is less so. I obviously had to be up and ready to receive them at 8am, but guess which end of the window they arrived?

I was expecting a call to let me know when they'd arrive, however I didn't get one. This wasn't surprsing because on arriving at the following Monday morning, I discovered a recorded message on my work phone, despite having supplied both mobile and home numbers as well.

Delivery of the new machine and the collection of the old one was painless, and there were two of them so I didn't have to help out. Indeed overall, I'd probably use Comet again despite communication issues.

What I would suggest is that considering I ordered the product online, they should also communicate with me electronically - at the very least sending email confirmations of my new delivery details alongside the phone call. They later emailed me a post-delivery service questionnaire and I told them this.

Then yesterday, I needed to replace a DVD player. My first DVD player was a Samsung and it cost £250. I'd had a £50 voucher, but that still made it pretty expensive.

More recently, with the exception of my very nice Sony Freeview hard disk/DVD recorder, my DVD players have been closer to £20. But then you get what you pay for and my third cheapo failed on me. What should I replace it with? DivX playback is useful (my Sony does this) and obviously it should be trivially easy to make multi-region. I settled on a Philips DVP5980 which ticks all of the above boxes with the added advantage of a front mounted USB socket from which you can play movies, music and JPGs from a memory stick. It also upscales to HD TVs - not much use for me currently, but worthwhile for the future.

It was available in-store from Currys for a reasonable £40. Like the other major electrical firms, Currys allows you to reserve online. Frankly, unless you have serious stock issues, every retailer should allow this. It means that I can go to the store safe in the knowledge that the product I want is in stock. Otherwise, I might as well just buy online. With my confirmation slip in hand, I headed off to the retail park where my nearest Currys sits.

Inside, on a Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon, the place was deserted. This is a sector that's in real trouble. Before making my purchase, I thought I'd check out the other DVD players they had onsale. They had a reasonable range, but curiously, the model I'd come in to purchase wasn't there. I double checked, but no, it wasn't on display anywhere in the store.

I began to worry. Perhaps the computer system had lied to me and they were out of stock. I went to the tills where at least three sales assistants were milling around with little to do (me being the only customer). Much typing on the computer and a failed attempt to get me take out an extended warranty (never!), and I was in possession of a receipt. I simply had to go to the collection point to complete my purchase.

I headed to the back of the store where two assistants were chatting. One immediately took my receipt and disappeared off behind a locked door. The other returned to some administrative computer-based task. Another customer came over and when he approached this second assistant, he was simply told to ring the bell. He, personally, wasn't able to help.

He rang the bell and waited.

We both waited.

I stared at washing machines and fridges to relieve the boredom. Eventually five to ten minutes later, the first assistant appeared with my DVD player, and took the receipt from the other customer to find his purchase. I left the store without much good feeling.

Why was my model not on display? You're not going to sell stock that isn't displayed. Why were the tills over-manned, and the warehouse under-manned? If there's nobody buying anything, at least make the process comfortable and quick for those who are actually contributing to your bottom line. It's just very poor all around.

With Best Buy taking a stake in Carphone Warehouse before it expands into the UK, the whole marketplace is ripe for being thoroughly shaken up in this country. Shopping should be pleasant. If you can do that, then more people will end up going online. At the moment, the big-box retailers still have a bit of an advantage in that they have trained employees who can install a washing machine for me. Much as I love Amazon, that's not yet something I'd give to them. But they can do better. Supermarkets' delivery windows are pretty tight these days - albeit the service they providing is simpler. But it won't take much to improve on what we currently have, and then the retailers will be in big trouble.

No - this isn't yet another post about the release of a new mobile phone. This is far more important. This is about Apple's iPods.

Actually, it's not even really about that. You see love or loathe Apple, broadly speaking the iPod is a great device. It does the job it was designed for simply and effortlessly. It's a joy to use. But it has one fatal flaw - an almost unforgivable flaw. It comes with the most useless headphones imaginable.

How dare you package your pride and joy with such a useless set of audio accoutrements to listen to your music with.

I've owned two iPods so far, and both times I basically threw away the unwanted headphones without even unpacking them. Instead I've bought Sony and Sennheiser earbuds to get decent sound into my head. But it's not actually even the poor quality audio that is the worst crime of Apple (although that's pretty bad).

No, it's the fact that they leak so much!

This is a failure that actually affects non-iPod (or indeed other mp3 or audio devices) more than it does Apple's customers. If you have the misfortune to sit on public transport somewhere near somebody listening to their iPod with the original Apple accessories then you have my pity. It's not fair on us! I listen to my iPod a lot travelling to and from work. But sometimes I don't wear it. Yet if my neighbour is listening to their iPod with their Apple headphones then I'm faced with either singing along to their song (might as well - I can hear all the words), or more likely being forced into wearing my own headphones to block out their racket (you can bet your bottom dollar that the music they're listening to is not to your tastes).

This is your fault Apple. Seemingly you're selling lots of Macs, iPhones and iPods at the moment. So please put some decent non-leaky headphones into their packs or Steve Jobs name goes to the top of my list for first up against the wall come the revolution.

It's June and a nice day. Who wouldn't fancy an ice cream?

I can't help but agree with Roy Greenslade on the subject of London's evening freesheets. They're both still uniformly abysmal with not a single thing to read. The trouble is that even the paid for Evening Standard is woeful with its ridiculous vendetta against Ken Livingstone and Mail-lite features. A bit more news would be nice. I actually have an "Eros" smartcard charged up with enough cash for ten copies and I've still not bought an issue for ages (aside from the day they were giving away a free Nicci French novel).

And while I know that London Underground is paid handsomely to allow distribution of both The London Paper and Metro in its stations, does that revenue really cover the vast cost of clearing up the mess? Despite signs telling people not to, every morning there's a pile of read/discarded copies of the paper at the bottom of central London escalators. These just go on to get jammed into the mechanism of the escalators causing un-needed delays to exiting the station when they go out of service.

[Update: Love this]

Meanwhile in further parochial news from this parish, our local Soho Post Office is closing. Or rather, it's moving to the other side of Oxford Street and into WH Smiths. The net result will be that Soho - home to a rather large media and creative industry - will not have a single Post Office left.

I realise that at least I'm lucky enough to still have a Post Office within walking distance, with many planned closures leaving whole communities without access to one at all. But the Soho Post Office is regularly jammed with people. On a recent trip, my knowledge of Key Stage 3 Science increased enormously as the queue snaked around slowly - I read the only interesting literature on offer whilst for a window to become free.

So there's enormous demand, and yet economics dictate that it's cheaper to sit inside another store where I very much doubt there'll be room for as many counters. Ironically, Soho will still have drop-off points for DHL and FedEx deliveries. Is it any wonder that the Royal Mail struggles?

As you may or may not know, His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films of all time. The film is screwball comedy and was made in 1940, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It was written by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the latter two of which had written the play, The Front Page, on which it was based.

The wonderful Howard Hawks directed it, and it famously has possibly the fastest dialogue in any film ever made. The characters regularly speak over the top of one another, and indeed the final screenplay ran to 191 pages for a 92 minute film. Usually, screenplays run at around a minute a page.

In 1940, you had to record the sound all at once without multi-track capabilities, so a sound mixer had to switch between microphones as the characters spoke the lines.

Anyway, a link on Waxy's Links the other day pointed to a version of the film edited a couple of years by Valentin Spirik which removes all the film's dialogue. The end result is an 8:25 edit of the film. It's also embedded below:

What we're left with is very revealing about the speed of the film with jump cuts aplenty that mightn't seem out of place in a 21st century reality show.

The full original film is in the public domain by the way. That means that you can stream it or download it yourself at the Internet Archive.

The public domain nature of the film means that you'll see plenty of ridiculously cheap DVDs kicking around of it. The problem is that they mostly come from poor prints. So I do recommend the Columbia Classics DVD which is pretty cheap itself and uses an excellent print (ignore the comment that says otherwise at Amazon - I suspect that they're looking at a different DVD - there are many around).

For more on Howard Hawks, I'd also recommend Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy.

I absolutely love this new Banksy image on the side of a building around the back of the Rathbone Place Post Office sorting office.

There were plenty of other onlookers since the painting appeared over the weekend.

More photos via Flickr.

A few weeks ago John Naughton explained some his reasons for not accepting comments on his blog. And I have no problem with that. Although it's a lot easier for me to correct errors if comments are allowed (Photoshop Express is available to people on UK ISPs, although the dropdown when registering is limited to the US for some reason, and you need to know that Shift-2 is where the @ sign is on US keyboards. Photoshop Express is well worth playing with incidentally, and I hear that Flickr will shortly be joining Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket on the affiliated sites list). I would drop John an email noting this, but I don't have his email address, and while I could guess it, I couldn't be certain.

Of course we can all have fun with comments. Yesterday I posted about some poor experiences I'd had at Cineworld when going to see The Orphanage. I had a fairly aggressive commentator as a result - I suspect someone who works for the company. I'm happy to let that comment through and reply to it. But I'm also quite happy to delete comments that I don't want appearing on my site. It's my site and my blog, and I'll determine what appears here!

So the Daily Mail has suddenly become devoted to going bagless - that is, seeing the end of the free plastic bag.

Earlier this week it launched a massive campaign, and by a complete fluke, and in no way pre-planned, the next day Marks & Spencer announced that it'd no longer be supplying free plastic bags for its food shopping. Instead customers would be encouraged to get bags-for-life and later it'd start charging 5p a bag if you still wanted one.

I'm not going to complain about this, as I've desperately been trying to cut down on plastic bags myself. I have a variety of reusable bags now to take with me when I go grocery shopping, and I carry a "fold-up" reusable bag in my rucksack for those unplanned shopping excursions.

At the same time, most retailers are beginning to ask if you want a bag rather than automatically giving you one.

But what I'd like to know is this - will the bulky Saturday Mail and its sister Sunday title begin to start being distributed without their own plastic bags? It's called poly-bagging, and given the number of supplements, leaflets, CDs and DVDs that come with the average paper now, some retailers demand plastic bags around the papers. You especially notice this at supermarkets and train stations.

So I'll be on the lookout this weekend to see if the Mail has the courage of its own convictions.The Mail on Sunday is giving away a Nigel Kennedy CD the weekend after this, so how will it be distributed without a plastic bag? We shall see...

Utterly bizarre. I was just sitting here in my flat at 12.55am, when the sofa started shaking.

I live on a top floor flat, and the light hanging above me was moving while the rather precarious stack of CDs against one wall started to move. It all went on for about ten seconds.

Turning on Five Live reveals that the tremor was felt across the country - as far afield as Rochdale, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, and, well, London.

I've only ever felt one earth tremor before which was in Athens (i.e. very close to the meeting of some of the earth's tectonic plates). That was an aftershock that I felt in a sixth floor bedroom.

I'd say that this was actually quite a similar force. This time I was on a sofa, last time I was lying on a bed. In both instances it felt like someone bouncing on a bed near me.

Anyway, Sky News now has it as breaking news...

[UPDATE] Here it is (thanks to the magic of Twitter) - a magnitude of 4.7.

Well that can be the only explanation. Unless the system is just flaky of course.

Let me explain. I live in London, where the public transport system is divided into circular zones. The further out of the centre you live, the more you pay for your all zone ticket - or travelcard.

A couple of years ago we were introduced to the Oyster Card - a smart card system that removed the need for paper tickets with magnetic strips. Instead of putting your card through a slot, you just swiped your Oyster Card and the gates opened. Magic!

Except I get on an overground station, and although the Oyster system could work there, the fact that the gates to the station aren't permanently manned means that travelers can't use all aspects of the Oyster system.

I get an annual travelcard from my local station and each day I have to use it at least twice to get through barriers - as I say, there are no barriers at my station, otherwise I'd have to use it a lot more. A piece of cardboard being used several times a day is not going to last a full year, so every so often I had to get it replaced. This would happen a couple of times a year. I'd always go to the station at the weekend, because you can't possibly realise how complicated a procedure this is. The assistant has to find my details on the computer system, invalidate my previous card and then issue a new one. He or she then has to print it, and write on it. A bore, but an infrequent bore.

I did once go very early in the morning during the week to get it replaced, and got told off my the ticket assistant for attempting something so rash at such a busy time! The assistant's incompetence meant that it took a full ten minutes to get a replacement issued.

But last year something changed. My ticket stopped working just a week or so after getting it. I got a replacement. That lasted a few days before it again stopped working. When tickets stop working in a station, you have to wander around looking for a station employee to buzz you through the barrier. Often you have to queue behind someone who hasn't paid for their journey, and are arguing their point. It's terribly frustrating.

By now I was convinced my ticket wallet had somehow become magnetised - the tickets work on a paper magnetic strip system. I replaced the wallet. The ticket stopped working again. I got another new plastic wallet, and kept my ticket in a different pocket altogether, well away from my wallet. It stopped again. I removed my photo card (you're supposed to keep it with your ticket) and put the travelcard in its own entirely separate wallet. It stopped working once more.

You can't believe the frustration. I've had perhaps seven or eight cards in less than twelve months, all of which have stopped working. Yesterday it stopped yet again - the card only being a week or so old. As I say, I can only think I have magnetic legs. Is something in my diet giving me too much iron?

People who live in London will probably be laughing and pointing at me asking why I don't get an Oyster Card. Although the pay as you go system doesn't operate in my locale, the annual card system does. The problem is that I still have several months to go with my current card before I need to renew, and I have some serious issues with the Oyster system. You can be tracked quite successfully with it, and I quite like my civil liberties (Yes, I know that by having my mobile switched on, I can be tracked quite effectively enough thank you - check out the recent Google Maps update for an idea of the precision available).

But enough is enough. Come and find me authorities! Next time around it will be an Oyster Card.

There is one additional advantage that the ticket assistant who sold me my last card pointed out (even though he can't sell me an Oyster Card) - you can cancel them. When I first got my annual travelcard, I lost it within a month. The rail company issued a replacement, but sent me a letter explaining that this was the first and only time they'd do this since the lost card was still 'live', and I could be a fraudster (They didn't spell it out in quite these terms, but that was certainly my understanding). They suggested that in the future I might like to look into seeing if my home contents insurance covered any further losses. At least with Oyster Cards, you can cancel them remotely, like mobile phones, ensuring that your personal losses are minimised.

(Yes, I really am on the subscription lists of both these organisations).

You may well have seen the pictures of all the wood that's piled up in places like Worthing beach from the wreck of the Ice Prince which sank a week ago off the Dorset coast.

But the timber's not limited to Worthing. Walking along the Brighton beach front earlier today, I was amazed at the quantity to be found there!

The wood is piled up right along the shoreline.

The local paper has pointed out that the wood is useless since it's been in the sea for a week and therefore won't be too useful if you're planning on decking your garden. And in any event, you can't just go and grab stuff off the beach without filling out a form.

I've got a copy of Bella Bathurst's book on Wreckers in my "to read" pile - and she also fronted a recent Timewatch on the same subject. It'll be interesting to compare and contrast.

I also spotted this sign which might refer to the wood.

But there are some uses for the wood.

I was disappointed recently, when watching the Ewan McGregor/Charlie Boorman series Long Way Down, that they reinforced the nonsense about water going down the plug clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on whether you're in the northern or southern hemisphere. Along the border, there's a few quid to be made perpetuating this party trick to unwitting tourists. Michael Palin got similarly tricked in his series Pole to Pole. But it's not true, and you can see it yourself in your own sink.

Anyway, Long Way Down wasn't a news programme. But over the last few days, we've heard an awful lot about a pair of twins who were said to have unwittingly married following their separation at birth. A judge then annulled the wedding. Now while I can't absolutely prove this didn't happen, I'm really not at all happy with the facts of the case as I've seen them so far, and there's no proof so far that it did happen.

Here's the BBC's version of the story. And here it is in The Guardian.

But the story has actually emerged via Lord Alton during debate over the human fertilisation and embryology bill. He said he'd been told the story by an unnamed High Court judge. Yet that's not far removed from the "friend of a friend" basis of most urban myths.

Now while I wouldn't hold the News of the World up as the bastion of truth, their reporters, obviously sniffing a great story if they could get hold of the couple in question, only seem to have got as far as talking to the judge who's president of the High Court Family Division. He's not heard of such a story despite it surely being a cause celebre if it had happened.

So to me, this is case unproven, and really doesn't deserve the coverage it has received until it's been confirmed one way or another. You'd imagine that the couple would be in for a big payday from the News of the World or Mail on Sunday if they wanted to tell their story. But even if they want to remain anonymous, I think first hand proof positive is essential before we can take this at face value.

Until then, have I told you about the friend of a friend who got mugged in London and woke up in Turkey with just one kidney...?

My local train station - the one I use to get to work every day - doesn't have any barriers. As a result, there's no real ticket check on the way in and out. To avoid ticket evasion, they have ticket inspectors on the trains, and spot checks. If you travel on the train at the weekend, you have about a 50% chance of being checked. If you travel on a weekday in rush hour, you have about a 1% chance of being checked. I'd have thought capturing the commuter who's evading a £1000+ season ticket is probably of more importance than a teenager avoiding a £5 Travelcard. But there you go.

When the train company carries out spot checks, they send a team of ticket inspectors to the station and check tickets on the way in and out, handing out penalty fares to evaders. But it's important to note that they're employees of the rail company.

So this morning I was surprised to see the police checking tickets. While it's an offence to travel without a valid ticket, I was under the impression that the rail company determines that, and only then do any legal ramifications take place - either a fine, a court appearance or whatever. There might be police officers in attendance to deal with unruly customers who won't pay a fine, or try to run off, but the police tend to be upholding the law rather than enforcing a rail company's rules.

In a post 9/11 7/7 world, that's obviously changed.

Once the police had looked at my ticket, I rounded a corner to be confronted by a collapsible machine that looked something like this:

(Picture sourced from Avanti Security.)

Regaled with green flashing LEDs, I took it to be a metal detector. I had to walk through it.

To be honest, I would have stopped to ask, but my train was departing in about 30 seconds and I was running to catch that. Unusually the "detector" didn't stop me, which considering I was carrying money, mobile phone, iPod, various electronic gadgets, a belt and a metal watch, was a little odd.

Perhaps the device is tuned to pick up large knives? Or maybe it's not a metal detector at all.

What on earth was the point? As far as I'm aware, there haven't been a spate of knife attacks on my commuter service. And while I think someone did get shot a few miles away over Christmas, I'm not exactly on the mean streets of Baltimore (sorry - been watching The Wire DVD boxsets recently).

So what was the purpose?

The ticket inspection aspect is fine, but these machines are just supposed to make us feel safer aren't they? We're supposed to believe that the government is doing something about crime. The chances of someone actually being captured for a serious offence is surely remote without prior intelligence.

This report suggests that 50 knives were found when the devices were used in Birmingham. I'd be surprised if much more than a Swiss Army Knife was found in this morning's sweep.

Get your pills here!

I moaned the other day about how Hollywood movie studios seemed more interested in awards than the piracy of their films - hence the existence of "Screener DVDs" which inevitably end up being made available on the internet.

Anyway, one positive side effect of this scramble to win awards is that all the studios put together sites promoting the awards you think their titles should be considered for. And these sites now include PDFs of the films' screenplays. So you can download free and legal copies of most of the big films 2007 (and early 2008 in the UK).

So here are a few sites you might want to visit, although be warned, you don't want to spoil films like Juno or No Country For Old Men by reading the scripts in advance.

Miramax - includes No Country For Old Men and Gone Baby, Gone
Paramount - includes Sweeney Todd and Beowulf
Foxsearchlight - includes Juno and Waitress
Universal - includes American Gangster and The Bourne Ultimatum
Focus - includes Lust, Caution, Atonement and Eastern Promises
Paramount Vantage - includes The Kite Runner and There Will Be Blood
Warner Bros - The Assassination of Jesse James and Michael Clayton (note - Warners don't seem to have scripts or indeed much information beyond screening location details)

I couldn't find a link to Fox's awards website.

A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they're ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comments "...it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do."

But has he read the full article? If he has, then he'll see that engineers and producers aren't happy with this trend. What we're getting are tracks with dynamic range compression to make them sound loud, thus removing some of the subtleties of the original sounds.

When you rip a CD to mp3 or similar lossy compression format, you're losing some of that range. We're often told that this compression simply loses audio beyond our hearing range, but it's really not as simple as that - an mp3 does not sound as good as a CD track when you play it through some decent speakers.

If all you're going to do is listen to your track through your iPod listening via the terrible ear buds that came with it, then you probably don't care. But give the crappy compressed version of the track to people who buy it from iTunes if they're happy with that. I still buy the majority of my music on CD because I want to hear the full range. I've got a rather nice stereo system with big floor standing speakers, and I can very much hear the difference.

Most FM radio stations also use lots of compression to make them sound "louder" and clearer than other stations on the dial. The music suffers.

You really can't just design for the lowest common denominator, otherwise we might as well design music to be optimised for those kids who listen to it from the speakers of their Nokia mobile phones at the back of the bus.

It really is strange that at a time when in the A/V world, we're all being persuaded to upgrade to HD TVs and high end 7.1 surround speaker systems to watch our Blu-Ray movies on, the CD world is going the other way.

But it's not just CDs - there are plenty of other areas where quality is losing out.

In the digital broadcast arena, poor quality seems to be accepted. Look at TV channels on Freeview and compare, say, BBC1 with ITV4. The latter, even with recently made programming looks terrible in comparison because it has a much lower bit-rate. ITV4 is on a multiplex that uses a more efficient compression technology, but it's still significantly worse. What that means is that channels look more "blocky" - something that's especially apparent as we all get larger and larger TVs (you can see a range of bitrates here).

A recent Deloitte & Touche report into the efficient use of spectrum by the BBC even recommended that the BBC should reduce its bitrate to squeeze more channels on. Viewers don't care they claimed. The BBC has promised to look into it.

In the run up to a full digital TV switchover in 2012, we're now looking at the resulting over-the-air pictures being worse than the previous analogue pictures. Yes, plenty of households had ghosting on their sets due to misaligned aerials, or coat-hangers stuffed into the back of their portable units, but that's not a reason to accept lower standards.

Satellite and digital cable are better but have their own issues. There's not a bandwidth shortage (at least for satellite), and those channels that are obviously lower in quality are so because they output in that format, or they're not prepared to spend enough on decent bandwidth on those platforms.

I am surprised that so few channels are broadcasting in widescreen - yes I'm looking at you UKTV and Virgin Media. Just about every TV sold these days is widescreen, yet even when a good proportion of their programming is now originated in 16:9, they persist in cropping it. There really is no excuse in 2008.

I'd love to say that my industry, radio, is better. But it's not is it? DAB can sound fine, but unless you invest in up to date codecs (ahem, Digital One), or don't overcompress, then it really doesn't beat a good analogue signal. Ask a Radio 3 listener or a DAB listener to the mono Radio 7.

The industry would argue that listeners don't care. They'll point to the fact that most DAB sets sold are "kitchen radios" which natively come with a single speaker. So there's no problem if they broadcast in 128k stereo (nearly every station), or even mono. Last Christmas, GCap launched theJazz and it's been pretty successful, in audience terms at least. Yet it's broadcast in mono. Now I'm no jazz aficionado, but surely this was a mistake. Jazz fans that I've met tend to be very particular about their listening environments, and high end kit is part of that. And maybe theJazz isn't really aimed at those hardcore fans (in the same way that Classic FM isn't really aimed at the die hards who prefer Radio 3), but it's telling that they even answer the mono question in their FAQs (and there is some space on Digital One these days...). Stereo was first broadcast in the UK in 1925 yet over 80 years later, we're not seeing greater dynamic range and more channels (5 or 7), but fewer.

If you look at the newspaper industry, they're continuing to upgrade presses to allow full colour on all their pages, and trying to ensure that ink doesn't rub off on your fingers. The technical quality is improving. Your local cinema probably sounds better than ever, and many screens are slowly becoming digital, meaning that we're seeing fewer scratchy old prints, instead getting pristine copies as we tend to see on recent well-mastered DVD releases.

But in so much of the broadcast arena, we're seeing declining quality. I'd argue that it was only recently that TV technology has improved to match a decent tube from ten or fifteen years ago, not displaying motion blur when showing sport, and handling dark pictures with lots of greys and blacks without "jaggies" appearing everywhere.

Quality really does matter. There are still many more stereo CD players in the world than mp3 players. At a time when record companies are facing a bleaker future than ever before, they might want to consider maintaining a quality product.

[UPDATE] Well what do you know? theJazz has just become stereo! Only 128kbps stereo - but that's still a vast improvement! Well done GCap/Digital One for finally getting that sorted.

And while we're talking about DAB - it's a shame today to hear that Oneword is effectively being closed down as Channel 4 pulls out of it. Oneword has always been a troubled station since there was never any real investment. Ironically they did have some decent programming, but it was just packaged badly. There'd be an unabridged adaptation of, say, Oliver Twist, that would run to forty episodes. Nobody is going to follow a series that long apart from one or two very real die-hards. Radio 4 rarely run a daily serial over more than a couple of weeks, and their hour long Classic Dramas tend to be between 1 and 4 weeks with very occasional "epics" that might run 13 weeks. But getting a producer to edit down the readings to more manageable lumps from the original unabridged audiobook versions was obviously expensive. And in any case, they filled time, and filling 24 hours a day with non-music programming is not a cheap thing to do.

There were some good shows like "Between The Lines," which felt almost unique in that it was book programme not presented by Mariella (Open Book on Radio 4, The Book Show on Sky Arts) Frostrop. But sadly it was lost amid the miasma of long form serials.

Of course this is also the problem that Channel 4 Radio is going to have. Widely touted as an alternative to Radio 4, it seems to me that it's bound to be closer to the non sports parts of Five Live. Not for nothing have they hired Five Live's Bob Shannon. They're unlikely to have more than a few serial book readings if they're sensible. Instead, the current affairs phone in is likely to prevail - less adversarial than Talksport perhaps.

I read an obituary about this man the other day, and he's someone I'd never heard of. He was a compatriot of Jesse Owens who ran in 1936 Olympics. Like Owens, he was also black:

John Woodruff, who has died aged 92, was the first black to win gold in Berlin. His triumph in the 800 metres, though overshadowed by Owens' later feats, was one of the most remarkable in Olympic history. To counter the favourite, Italy's European champion Mario Lanzi, Canada's Phil Edwards set an exceptionally slow pace. After 300 metres, Woodruff, an inexperienced 21-year-old college freshman, found himself boxed in. So he stopped. After the field had passed, he restarted in the outside lane, and, within 100 metres, took the lead. A gangly 6ft 3ins, with a 10-foot stride, Woodruff was nicknamed Long John, and though Edwards moved ahead on the back straight, Woodruff strode past him on the final turn, then held off a late charge by Lanzi to win in 1min 52.9secs.

He died a while ago, but his life is certainly one worth celebrating.

Happy Christmas everyone.

I've not exactly sent a lot of Christmas cards this year, so please treat this as your Christmas greeting.

Anyway, I'm off to watch the Doctor Who special, and all those Fred & Ginger films they're showing on BBC Four.

On his newsblog, Nick Robinson links to the emails and letters sent between the NAO and HMRC.

As Robinson says:

The key thing we learn comes not from the detail but the tone of all the exchanges. They demonstrate little concern from either the NAO or HMRC about data protection. The NAO wants, it would appear, simply to reduce the size of the files it is sent. The HMRC is worried about the cost of filtering information in order to send the smaller files the NAO request. What about our privacy and our rights? No mention is made of them.

But arguably even more concerning is what's to be seen on page 6 of the PDF - somebody at Benefits and Credits uses Comic Sans as their email font. Shocking.

Last Thursday I decided that I'd quite like to order a copy of the recent Radio 4 adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Produced by the same production team that made the recent Hitch Hikers' follow-ups, I missed the Radio 4 airing, so thought I'd catch up on CD.

I headed off to Amazon and searched for it. I couldn't find it. All I could see were various new and old editions of the books. I knew for a fact that the CD set was out - it was rush-released the nano-second the Radio 4 series had ended. BBC Worldwide were perfectly aware that this would be a big seller in the run up to Christmas.

Now when I look for audiobooks, I never know whether I should be searching in books or music. My site search had failed so now I searched in music and then books. In books, I found the audiobook section and finding it not-featured on the front page, I looked at Amazon's top selling audiobooks. It must be in there somewhere.

It wasn't.

Now I began to wonder if something strange had happened with the release. Perhaps there was a cock-up and the CDs couldn't be released for some reason. I went to Play, but there they had not only the CDs, but a background video promoting the production - this was evidently a major audiobook release for play.

I went back to Amazon. I couldn't find it. Then I looked for another high-profile BBC audiobook release - Down The Line - featuring Paul Whitehouse et al. This is another massive Christmas comedy release. It too was not to be found anywhere on Amazon.

I emailed Amazon:

I wanted to drop you a note because I'm quite surprised that Amazon doesn't seem to stock an audiobook that I'm after. It's the recent BBC Audiobooks release of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" starring Harry Enfield, and recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I'm pretty sure that in stores it must be one of the bestselling titles currently, yet I can't find it anywhere on the Amazon website.

Adam

A couple of days later, I got a response:

Thank you for contacting us at Amazon.co.uk.

You could also search our Auctions (http://s1.amazon.co.uk/exec/varzea/subst/home/home.html/) or zShops
(http://s1.amazon.co.uk/exec/varzea/subst/home/fixed.html/) sites to see if anyone is selling a copy of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Down The Line", there.

It went on to explain a bit more about Amazon marketplace.

But it was all a little odd. Could they really be out of stock of an item that only went on sale this month? It's not as though it's a Nintendo Wii for which stock is always low. Why should I have to go to Amazon's marketplace?

I did have a look in my local Waterstones. No sign of Dirk Gently but plenty of copies of Down The Line.

On Sunday evening, all was back to normal. Dirk Gently was back in stock, and I ordered a copy which has just arrived.

Now Amazon may well have run out of stock of this item, but surely all they have to do is say that they can get copies within 4 to 6 weeks or whatever is the default. This item is not likely to go "out of print" for months or even years.

I suppose, in the end, it's more likely to be cock-up than conspiracy, but still not great service.

I wish that there was some kind of London equivalent of UX. Somebody please tell me there is!

For most things, if you opt to download the material rather than get physical media, if there's any difference in price, it's cheaper to download. Think of iTunes v CDs, or software that you can download from many sellers. There's no postage or packaging to account for, and minimal physical production costs.

So it's odd then, that this morning I got an email from Adobe to my work address trying to get me to upgrade to Photoshop CS3, but which gives cheaper prices if I pay for the physical media rather than download a large file. I realise that thousands of people downloading 700+ MB is a significant bandwidth cost. But sending me a big box through the post should not be cheaper.

Try it yourself.

Very odd.

A company called Lionsgate Films has been advertising recently on the tube as well as in newspapers such as today's Metro (Note: I saw the ad over somebody's shoulder - I still don't read Metro).

Here's a copy of the ad:

Lionsgate seems to specialise in offering recent US TV fare on DVD. Now none of the three series in the ad especially appeals to me: I saw The Lost Room and thought it was fairly average; The Dresden Files doesn't appeal, and I wasn't really taken with Weeds.

Nonetheless, the ad offers a free episode download, and I was curious. So I committed the URL to memory (lionsgatefilms.co.uk/viptv - not the easiest URL to remember when you're on the tube and out of internet access range) and gave it a go. As much as anything I was keen to see what format they were offering the downloads in. Windows Media perhaps, or Quicktime? Would I be able to play the episode on a PSP or iPod?

None of those.

A closer examination of the advert shows this:

"Download will be via streaming and will be the first episode of each series."

Huh?

Let me explain for the hard of thinking - download is not the same as streaming. Now I'm not about to go to the ASA to complain, but companies really need to be careful about how they advertise these things.

If something is a download, then I believe I should be able to save it somewhere and play it back later at my convenience without the need to go online. So don't advertise a "Free Episode Download" when it's not. How about "Watch an exclusive episode online" or "See the first episode free"?

In fact, I'm not sure why they don't simply make the episode available as a DRM-free download. If you like what you see, you may well go and buy the DVDs.

Dave Gorman is stopped from taking photos of funfair rides because he might be up to no good and trying to take pictures of children. Even when he shows that he's completely innocent, the police tell him to leave.

The daily newspaper I once worked for, The Bath Chronicle, is becoming a weekly newspaper. It's been around since 1760, although I'm not sure if it's always been a daily. They reckon the weekly will run to 250 pages. That'd make it the Sunday Times of weekly newspapers.

I tried to buy a train ticket for tomorrow earlier on and came across a few difficulties. First of all, I couldn't find an online system that lets you book a cycle reservation, so I had to phone up. But not before I'd first tried to buy my ticket. The system asked me how I'd like to collect the tickets - either same day delivery (not cheap) or through a FastTicket machine (free). I selected the FastTicket option. But they don't have a FastTicket machine in Liverpool Street where I want to depart. One of the small stations near me does have one, but seemingly, one of London's main terminals doesn't have one. Neither does Waterloo come to that! The next problem was the cycle reservation. After being put on hold for several minutes I was told that pre-reserved spaces were full, but that there was always space for walk-up ticket buyers. So, I can take a risk and show up at the station and try to squeeze the bike on, or I just forget about the bike, and go without it.

New sign on Golden Square, originally uploaded by Adrian Fitch.

In the week after The Tour de France hits London and literally millions of people come out on the streets, this sign appears on the railings of Golden Square where I work.

One of Mayor Ken Livingstone's main reasons for getting the Tour to start in London was to pursue his encouragement for more people to cycle to work.

Adrian, who took the photo, cycles in every day, and like many others, has to lock his bike to the railings for lack of anywhere else to put his bike. Most businesses in expensive Soho, do not have space to store bikes inside.

There's one bike stand on the square serving probably over 1000 people. It has spaces for ten a maximum of ten bikes. It's full. If there's nowhere that you can leave your bike, then you're not likely to cycle to work. Joined up thinking at the heart of government there.

This is something I still can't quite get my head around.

If you're an actor, sportsperson, artist or musician, you're probably regularly asked for an autograph. It's something personal, and I understand why people like that personal touch. When I'm buying a book, if there are copies that are signed, then I'm likelier to pick up one of those. This isn't because I've got pound signs flashing in my eyes and I'm about to get on Ebay; it's because I quite like the idea of having something the author has written in themselves. Similarly, I've been known to collect sportspersons' autographs in the past.

So I've no issue with the idea of collecting signatures, although I wouldn't collect them for their own sake.

I also understand that if I'm an actor in a successful TV series or series of films, I'm likely to be asked repeatedly for autographs wherever I go. I guess that depending on circumstances, I'd be happy to either sign or not sign accordingly. But I'd also understand that my success comes in large part from lots of people enjoying my work.

There's the possibly apocryphal story of a film star who used to write cheques instead of paying with cash wherever he went. He knew that most people wouldn't cash the cheques, preferring to keep his autograph.

But what I find truly incredible are fan conventions - particuarly in the SF world - which largely involve people showing up to queue and pay for a signed 10' x 8' photo. I've only ever seen it at first hand many years ago when I saw Dave "Darth Vader" Prowse offering his signature for something like £10 a go on a black and white photo of Darth Vader. Not having ever seen such a situation before, I found it very strange. I understand that colour (or even black and white) photos cost money, so there's something fair about charging for them. But it was clearly the signature that people were paying for. Actually, not that many people were paying for the signature, which made the whole enterprise even sadder.

And it didn't escape me that next to him was a box of cash. This wasn't a cheque or credit card operation. Even in my naivety, I understood the "tax-free" possibilities of such schemes.

But now you have operations like Collectormania which holds large scale events in places like Milton Keynes and Glasgow where dozens actors from "genre" series and films (sometimes with very small parts), gather together to sign autographs over a weekend.

The FAQ notes: "There will be a charge for each actor's autograph. This will generally be between £10 - £25 per signature depending on which guest."

So there's a market there, like everything else, and I guess that your worth as an actor is determined by how much you can get away with charging.

It's a nice little earner for the actors, many of whom will be flying into the UK specifically for this event. When you've factored in the cost of a decent hotel room, first-class flights, and the fact that many events don't charge an entry fee, you can see that there's obviously money to be made. Additional cash can be generated by buying your way into parties, receptions and dinners.

I can't quite put my finger on why I find the whole enterprise quite so squalid, but I do. Maybe if you had a small part in Dr No and the parts subsequently dried up, charging a few Bond fans might help your pension go further. But if you're currently starring in your US network's only breakout hit of the last season, and are on between five and six figures an episode, then do you also need to charge for autographs? Yes, meeting the fans can be fun, and better that than being aloof and dismissive of them. But the whole thing just can't shake that taint of seediness. Showbiz isn't the glitz and glamour that we sometimes think it is, but this industry is just low-rent.

BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian "I counted them all out, and I counted them all back" Hanrahan.

I'm flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis.

Incidentally, isn't it ridiculous that the drivers put on their sponsors' wristwatches before the presentation ceremonies? With that, and the caps that have to have the tyre manufacturers on. And why do they even bother with national anthems any longer? They get the British anthem down to about ten seconds and even then, it sounds like it's coming out of a Binatone cassette player from circa 1983.

Mortified to discover that I managed to chose precisely the same father's day card this year as I did last year! That's what happens when you choose your card from the wide wide selection at your local newsagent. And it wasn't even a "Father's Day" card - just a plain one (Why do so many greetings card feel the need to pre-print some fatuous message? I can write a message with somewhat more meaning myself).

Not sure what's happening to all the Amazon links to books on this website. If it's not righted quickly, then some remedial action's going to be needed by me.

[LATER] It seems that I'm not the only person suffering, and that it's likely to be some kind of weekend Amazon problem. I'll wait until tomorrow to see if it's fixed.

[LATER STILL] And Amazon seem to have fixed it now. But those temporary orange flash things are horrible.

Back in February, I posted a piece about the new style Lynx deodorant cans and said that I thought the design was faulty.

Well, as the comments to that post seem to confirm, I'm not the only person who's noticed the fault. OK - four other people isn't a great deal, but these are people I don't know, and who were so disappointed with the product's design that they Googled to see if anyone else had noticed the fault. There must be plenty more people who've got faulty cans who didn't Google for others in the same boat.

And there are more people who've blogged on it including Mr Biffo (new book out now) and this person here who's a little worried about being sued.

Well I'm not so worried, because it seems to me that the design is flawed. I'm sure that if I complained I'd be sent a replacement can, or a voucher for one at least. Unilever need's to acknowledge this, and redesign their cans.

In the meantime, I've not bought another can of Lynx since the new design arrived, and I'd suggest that you do likewise. Look - I'm not especially in their target market, but a deodorant's a deodorant, but if the can won't work, then I won't buy the can. And a drop off in sales will bring about a redesign in the long run.

I really did get my Google Talk application letting me know that these two emails arrived in fast succession.

Why do we keep getting new versions of TV and film classics adaptations? Every Jane Austen novel has now been adapted on countless occasions and you just know that there'll be more.

Even "definitive" versions of the classics don't stop someone else making the same story again a few years later. So we had a film version of Pride and Prejudice after the exceptionally popular Colin Firth TV adaptation.

There's a film version of Brideshead Revisited coming soon which seems pointless considering the incredible Granada TV adaptation of the eighties simply couldn't be surpassed. Andrew Davies wrote the first draft of this but is reported now not to be still attached - although I too think it's bizarre that they're filming in Castle Howard again.

And now we read that there's a new version of A Room With A View starring Timothy Spall coming, even though the Merchant/Ivory film version practically defined a genre. And the same, very busy Andrew Davies is adapting it and he said at Hay this week that it is a tough task because there was such a good film, but his version will have an "edge" to it.

You could argue that there's always room for another Hamlet, but stage plays are ethereal and there's always a new audience who's yet to experience the play. But films and TV series live on, with DVDs and satellite channel repeats.

New directors always feel that they can bring new visions and ideas to a project and attack the story in a different way, but I always feel that it's a little like deciding that you're going to remake a classic film. When was the last time that worked? Psycho? The Ladykillers? The Texas Chainsaw Massachre?

It's just a pity that we can't either adapt some less popular works in an author's cannon - ideally ones that have never been filmed before. Or perhaps - shock horror - actually commission new stories. I'm sure that someone must have written one, but I struggle to think of a costume drama, particularly a major one, in recent times that wasn't based on an original novel. I suppose there was the recent Lilies (which I didn't see), but the list must be short.

And speaking as someone who loved Andrew Davies' original series, A Very Peculiar Practice, why doesn't he write a few more original stories.

Realising that the reason the woman in front of me exiting the tube this morning is walking so slowly is that she's checking her Blackberry the nanosecond she's back in reception.

(We'll leave aside my Facebook refresh tendencies...)

John Naughton and Sean French are baffled about how someone could put this sequence together of 100 quotes from 100 films counting down the numbers from one to one hundred.

Naughton thinks that it's un-Googleable. Well it's very Googleable. Or rather, with a good knowledge of various sites, you could do it.

It's worth noting that the sequence includes a lot of popular classics. Many of the lines are either familiar themselves, or come from films that have significant fan-bases. Those films have digital scripts and quotation collections to be found around the internet.

IMDB, for example, has a page that lets you search among quotes listed on the site. Using letters and numbers, you could quickly generate a list to get editing from.

As an example, a search for "thirty-seven" brought up Clerks, Men In Black (used in the video), Mission Impossible II, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as well as other films I've not seen.

The editing is, of course, the slow part. But I'd also make use of somewhere like Drew's Script-O-Rama which has hundreds of scripts and transcripts for more searching and for finding where in the various films, the quotes occur.

Of course, if I was doing this, I'd share the load. I'd get a film studies class on the case. 30 students each finding 3-4 clips a piece would soon give me what I wanted.

Anyway, a seemingly impossible job without an obsession like Peter Greenaway, is actually very doable. And the guy who made it, writes about it here.

Excellent news: Uri Geller is being sued (Via Bad Science).

Hey! Every other muppet is launching a range of clothing. Obviously, I have zero designing skills, but I have worn clothes nearly all my life, so I must know something right? I'm not even a singer.

Get queuing now, as my exclusive range of geek-wear will be available from 9am Monday in branches of Halfords, where you'll also be able to pick up my patented engine de-greaser anti-aging cream. Seriously - it works. Some woman on Horizon said so. And it'll all come in my limited edition, environmentally friendly black bin-liner. They're trading on eBay for literally pence.

Coming soon, my childrens' books...

The London news today is that the Mayor is giving away 100,000 free Oyster Cards to people who don't yet have one. This is an attempt by Transport for London to get some of the die hards who've not yet got one, to get around to picking one up.

Ordinarily you have to pay a "deposit" of £3 to get one. Once you have one, you're entitled to discounted public transport tickets... Well I say "discounted", when what I really mean is that, if you don't have an Oyster Card, you have to pay significantly more for your travel.

Why is this initiative limited to 100,000? Why doesn't TfL just make Oyster Cards free for everyone all the time? You see, while I might have "Big Brother" issues with the ability of the authorities to track you around London, I have an even bigger issue with the fact that the really big losers are tourists and visitors to London.

Why should a tourist have to fill out a form, put down a "deposit" for a plastic card, just to travel around London at a reasonable cost? Sure, they can get their cash back at the end of their visit, but who's really going to bother with that? And I'm not just talking about overseas visitors - I'm also talking about those who come from other parts of the UK to visit London. It's just not fair.

I do feel sorry for Kate Middleton. This is Monday's Standard billboard - "Kate Shows Strain: Picture"

And indeed, the front of that day's paper showed a picture of Kate sitting in the back of taxi or similar looking seriously pissed off. That wouldn't be anything to do with photographers following her everywhere she goes would it?

Why are Google press releases emailed so slowly? Given everything else Google does is incredibly fast and efficient, I find it odd that GooglePress mailshots take so long to appear.

At around 14:40 this afternoon, I noticed message posted on the Google Blog, via Bloglines (in other words, it was posted earlier). The message in turn pointed to a press release from Google.

Yet it took over two hours before I got a copy in my inbox of the same email - and I can honestly report that we're not experiencing any email issues here today.

I don't doubt that Google's email list is awfully long, but the press release I finally received at 16:59 is unpersonalised and in plain text. And Google does have an incredible amount of resource to call upon for a job so trivial. Their emails are administered, seemingly, via Google Groups, so there's no real excuse as I get other Google Groups emails in a very timely fashion.

On the right hand side of the Google Press page, we're told we can sign up to get "timely news from Google." Just not that timely...

Do you know the story of the "stolen" biscuits? Two strangers sitting somewhere in public - perhaps at a train station café. One dips into the other's biscuits. Insensed, the other person does the terribly British thing of not saying anything but pointedly helping themselves to "their" biscuits. This continues for several minutes until the packet is finished. Only then does one of the two realise that they'd not actually opened their own packet.

That probably makes no sense. Instead, for a better telling, read Douglas Adams' So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish for a good variant of it. I think that this is where I first came across the story, but in fact it's something of an urban myth.

I mention all this because every few months or so, I like to see what Chloé Micout's been up to. She's a French short film-maker, who I first came across a couple of years ago. One of her more recent films is based around this very tale. It's only a minute long, so go and see it on her site (Go to films, and select Les petits sablés - I can't link directly because it's all embedded in evil Flash. But it does also seem to be available on YouTube.

He's not a massive fan (NSFW language):

Via Waxy links.

I don't quite know why, but I'm really pleased that the House of Lords chucked out Tessa Jowell's super-casino last night.

In the meantime, am I the only person who thinks that the new Ministry of Justice sounds like a cross between something you'd find in 1984 and Judge Dredd?

I found myself not watching a great deal of the woeful Andorra v England (it may have ended 3-0 to England, but it was 0-0 at halftime), and more of Northern Ireland v Sweden last night, with a touch of Italy v Scotland. But by the times the second halves were underway, I wound up watching more of The Apprentice than anything. I know that it's all in the edit, but these people really don't come anywhere near being "16 of Britain's brightest business prospects."

Rumour has it that they're not going to concentrate quite so much on sales tasks this series, since effectively it can just boil down to who can sell the best to consumers. Andy was voted off, but we were given plenty of opportunity to dislike both Tre and Jadine. Tre's probably not bad, but he's a touch arrogant (actually - they all are) and seems to get into hostilities a bit too easily. Meanwhile Jadine's just mad. Thirty-eight minutes into the programme last night, the follwing happened (in the words of Anna Pickard's minute by minute Media Guardian blog with Anna Pickard):

9.38: Oh for the Love of GOD! I've experienced Television hell, please kill me now. Hang on.

I don't know if that's a firing offence, but SURELY there's some kind of health and safety proceedure being breached there.

It was hideous. I turned back to the football unable to watch.

Finally - there's 24. Isn't it absolutely abysmal this year? They're just retreading the same ground over and over again. The episode I saw this week even ended up with exactly the same storyline that was used two or three years ago (I forget which, and quite honestly, can't even be bothered to look it up). I can "buy" unlikely and so-on, but it's just sheer tiredness of the writing. They need to hire new writers pronto, and next year they should lose any presidential aspect to the storyline - much as I despise politicians, they can't all be corrupt. CTU leaks like a sieve, and if I hear one more character use the hackneyed phrase "within the hour" I'll... I'll... well... I don't know what I'll do.

The series has descended into a hunt for one man after another, the next always having some hidden ultimate superior, and so the hunt continues. The writers completely ignore things that happened in previous episodes, and they've completely forgone any pretence at all of how long it takes to travel from a to b around the Los Angeles area.

The real problem is that the terrorists seem to be moving and acting quickly for no discernable reason at all. The bad guy still has a couple of nukes with Jack Bauer et al thwarting him for the most part so far. In reality, he'd lie low for several weeks/months and regroup. What's the rush? He's got a suitcase nuke and can use it anytime he likes!

24 has always been an essentially fun action series not to be taken too seriously. But you have to believe in the story and characters to some degree for it to work. Frankly, I really don't care any longer.

I'm sitting opposite a man.

He's probably in his early forties, and he's one of those commuters who carries no briefcase; no rucksuck; no bag of any kind. He doesn't read a book, or a free evening newspaper. He just toys with his mobile, sending and reading text messages.

His suit screams cheap, and his tie reminds me of something I wore at school rather than something I'd choose to wear.

On the lapel of his suit he wears an oval metal badge. In the middle is a star. Around the edge it reads "Superstar Performer 2006-7."

I silently thank any listening deities that I don't have to work in a job where they hand out badges like that to "Superstar Performers." There's certainly nothing wrong in praising high-achievers and handing out merit awards. My employer hands out "Hero Awards" and "Sales Person of the Month" trophies. Winners accept the acclaim of their co-workers. It's deserved and appreciated.

But really! Having to wear it on a badge, on your commute home?

The other day, before my screening of Blades of Glory, we also saw the trailer to the forthcoming Stardust - based on the Neil Gaiman novel (Admission: I've not read this book... yet). I hadn't quite realised that this was something of an exclusive, but can say here and now that it looks stunning. I don't know if it was a British trailer, but there was a significant amount of Ricky Gervais in it, whereas I didn't think his part was all that big.

Anyway, it may be that we have to wait until October for the film to be released here, but it looks like it'll be very much worth seeing.

Or Mother's Day as some would have it!

I've seen a few different posters over the last few days that have intrigued me. They're all very much campaign-based, almost agitprop. What do they all mean?

Information-Revolution.org - was announced to me on a sign attached to a lamppost outside work. It's the kind of advertising that you normally associate with new (or not so new) bands. That's why they put them up outside radio stations and in the heart of meeja-land. But there were more ads on the tube. "Perhaps," though I, "they're 'flyposting' these ads on top of legitimate tube ads."

But a saunter through their website seems to reveal that no they're not. The people behind this campaign (Profero Ltd - services include 'Viral Marketing, clients include Ask, Yahoo, BBC World, C4) have paid proper money for this campaign. The commenters on the fairly lacklustre website (scrolling text boxes???) seem to have it pretty clear.

We'll leave that one.

Then, in Farringdon I walked past some strange posters with photos of soldiers in Iraq, their heads replaced by Mickey Mouse characters. The posters were entitled Operation Magic Kingdom. That lead me to this site - the CNDP (The Cautese National Postal Disservice). It's basically art, and it's for sale. Slightly disappointing really. Jimmy Cauty - ex-KLF - is the founder of the project.

Finally there are some strange posters that I've seen in Soho and East London which look like they belong on a 1984 film set. The only clue to their origin are the words (I think) "social heuristic." But I can find no obvious reference on the web (let me know if you have any idea), and the posters nearby are there no more, so I can't even get a photo. I suspect that they're also some kind of underground art project. I like the posters though.

So I'm just checking my mobile phone tariff with Orange to make sure that I'm not paying too much. As usual, all the good offers are either only available to either new subscribers (for which read, people who move networks), or me, if I wanted to take out an 18 month contract. I took out an 18 month contract last time for the sake of getting a new phone cheaper, and I won't be doing so again. If the phone's not as great as it might have been (something you can only find out when you're "in the field" using it), you're a bit screwed.

Anyway, I do have the very valuable commodity of an ultra-cheap unlimited data package which I certainly can't match on any tariff Orange offer to anybody at all at the moment, so I'm not giving that up. Similarly, my inclusive minutes package beats any "Core Tariffs" that Orange currently offer, so I'm not going to change that either.

The only thing I was looking at was text messages. I don't text a great deal - it's certainly never hit three digits in a month. But I do pay for each message as I don't have any kind of inclusive texts. So perhaps a text package would be a good idea. But that's where it gets strange. The cheapest package is £3 for 30 texts - except that I already pay 10p a text so that's precisely no saving at all. Indeed it just ensures that if I don't text much this month I pay £3 anyway. The next package up is for 100 texts at £6. That means that it only works out worthwhile if I send 60 or more texts a month. I might occassionally achieve this but not often. So it's not worth my while. Finally, I realise that the reasoning behind the packages is that instead of 10p, texts, which are surely the most lucrative thing in a mobile operator's inventory, are standardly charged at 12p these days unless you have a legacy talk plan.

Much examination of everything leaves my current plan untouched. Oh well - it was worth checking, if only to see what good deals you can get if you become a Panther or Rat or Crocodile or whatever other stupid marketing nonsense Orange are talking about this month.

Now - can I synchronise one Outlook account to two mobile phones? I rather suspect not.

Who knew that the former songstress, former wife of Chris Evans, and now very successful actress, only got around to giving her first interview today?

We had some interesting news at work yesterday.

We also found out where we came in the Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work For.

So I popped around to my local Co-op to pick up a few essentials after work. Outside, a single unseen tinny loudspeaker was blaring out classical music.

Very strange.

I looked up, and thought that perhaps someone in a flat above was enjoying the music.

Then I found out what was really going on. It seems that kids hang out in front of the shop all day, and then come in for a spot of shoplifting. The shop is seemingly unhappy at this ever-so-slightly anti-social behaviour and has installed the speaker and music. Kids, it seems, don't like classical music. It's even louder than the volume that their mobile phones are capable of!

But that's not the half of it. It seems that the audio also contains those high-frequency sounds that only kids are said to be able to hear.

All very entertaining, although I'd have thought that your speaker might need to be capable of playing those frequencies in the first place, and I'm not entirely convinced about the Co-op's audio fidelity in this instance.

I must admit that I'm complete sucker for maps. When in another city, the first thing I want to get hold of is a map. So I finally got around to going to the British Library's London in Maps exhibition this weekend.

It's an exhibition detailing the evolution of London maps from the earliest examples, which were largely detailed paintings taken from the perspective of a high hill over London, through the more detailed surveys which show just how much London's grown over the years. For so long London really wasn't much more than the "square mile" and places like the West End only became developed relatively late in the day.

Then of course there are those outlying parts of London which are now suburbia, but were once separated by farmland from the metropolis itself.

The exhibition isn't on for much longer, ending on March 4, but should you decide to visit, I'd recommend not going on a Saturday afternoon as I did. The big problem with a map exhibition is that the maps tend to require quite close inspection. That means that unlike an art exhibition where everyone can see the paintings as they collectively stand back and admire the works, you're instead trying to squeeze close up to see details. And when the maps are places you live and work in - i.e. London - everyone wants to examine them in yet more detail. That makes it a hard exhibition to really enjoy in much company.

Having said all that, it was fascinating and still well worth a visit if you get a chance before next week.

As you may well have seen in the ads, Lynx (website "temporarily unavailable") has a new style lockable can. You can see it in the picture above.

The idea is that you can twist the cap and rises slightly locking the spray mechanism. It's to stop the cans going off in your bag - something that can easily happen if the lid falls off, adding a pleasing smell to all your bag's other contents.

But can I just say that this new design is absolutely terrible. Maybe I've just got a duff can, but there are two major defects in the cans as far as I can see. First, the lockable section has an annoying habit of rising back up as you're using it sending the spray into the cap and not onto your body. Second, my can at least has now developed a fault and the spray's mostly going into the cap even with it fully open, and then trickles down the side of the can and onto my hands. Again, not onto my body.

As I say, my can might just be faulty - I bought it in multibuy offer at Boots, so we'll see how the next can works - but it strikes me as poorly thought through. Let's face it, new designs sell deodorant.

Which supermarket do you use? Is it Tesco? The chances are it is. We've all heard that one pound in every eight of money spent in shops, is spent in their stores. Is this healthy?

Last Friday, Shopping the Supermarkets concluded a week of programmes with a detailed examination of Tesco's attempts to get a supermarket into the North Norfolk town of Sheringham - somewhere I know very well.

They've been trying for years to get into the town, although there's a great deal of local opposition to the plans, not least because the town fears that many of the plethora of local shops will be forced to close when Tesco opens. The site Tesco has chosen would also mean that local housing, the fire station and the community centre would need moving. The community centre in particular would be moved much further from the town centre meaning that it's harder for the elderly who use the centre, to reach.

But the really big issue is a secret deal connived between members of a previous council administration and Tesco to ensure that no other supermarket group could use council owned land to build a supermarket. Not only does Tesco want to move into Sheringham, they want to ensure that nobody else is able to. Budgens put a proposal forward for a much smaller development, but it's been thrown out, as it goes against the seemingly legally binding agreement Tesco already has.

Now tonight, Dispatches took a close look at a number of further Tesco issues. Not least their dealings with local councils, who rarely can afford to fight them, their land-bank of space and even their ownership structure and offshore dealings.

While we wait for the Competition Commission's Inquiry to report, just think twice before you automatically next go to Tesco...

We escape Valentine's Day, and this morning an email drops in my inbox: "20% Off Mother's Day Gift Ideas"

It's one after the other...

OK. I've been playing around with the commenting system on this site again. I know that in the past it's been a bit of a pain, and it's down to me to publish comments when I finally get around to seeing them.

I've used a plugin called CommentChallenge by Jay Allen to force you to answer a trivial question - indeed I give you the answer. In my view this is a little better than the average CAPTCHA systems used which tend involve some hideously deformed graphic that you're supposed to read. I hope that screen-readers, for example, can cope with this.

For the time being I've removed "Preview" as an option because it was giving me problems, and I've also removed the need for TypeKey on this blog. Although I liked it for many reasons, I'm no fan of having to register on lots of websites just to comment either. And unfortunately one of the limitations of MovableType is that it seems to insist that only "authenticated" TypeKey users can be "Trusted" and hence publish comments without intervention.

Incidentally, I hadn't realised how good the SpamLookup plugin for MovableType is. There are always a few comments that get forwarded onto me (in the form of an email telling me there's an unpublished message), but SpamLookup has been silently dealing with hundreds of spam postings without any intervention from me.

Penultimately, I don't seem to be able to get "Remember Personal Info" working properly. It's likely to be a Javascript issue that I need to look into a bit more. So apologies in advance for having to retype your name and email address repeatedly.

And finally, thanks to James for pointing out some issues with my RSS feeds. Hopefully they're all sorted now, and if you're reading this in Firefox (you are reading this in Firefox aren't you), you should automatically have a choice of feeds to subscribe to from the icon in the address bar, should you wish to.

In a few months' time, this blog will be five years old, so the time's coming for a complete redesign anyway. Will I attempt to shift from MovableType to WordPress? Who knows. But I will go through a bit of redesign. Time for some fancy new features I say. What I do know is that this website of five years ago still looked better than MySpace looks today. So there.

Think of the two most annoying and irritating people you can. Really, really irritating people. We're talking the kind of people that make you long for the sound of fingernails on a blackboard.

Got them?

Now check out the back of this week's Review section of the Independent on Sunday. Here are the two people you [should have] thought of. Don't bother reading it.

Via Velorution, I loved this short film:

The music's still a temp track seemingly, and there's an ealier cut (in colour) also on YouTube.

It reminds me of a great French short called Argent Content featuring rollerskating bank robbers.

Lots of bullet cam shots and plenty of central London in this video.

You may have noticed it snowed today. At least it did if you live in England or Wales. Here's a photo of said snow that I took earlier.

Anyway, the local news on BBC1 this evening had the usual travel chaos/schools closed story that's par for the course on days like today. But it ended with a scene showing a mum clearing, possibly as much as a centimetre of snow from her bricked drive. On said driveway was parked a Mitsubishi 4x4.

The kids surrounding her suggested that she was about to embark on the school run. Still it inclement weather, I guess that 4x4s come into their own don't they? I couldn't stop laughing when she then said:

"I have tried to get out of my garage driveway as you can see. But I've managed about six inches and now it's stuck."

I always like to keep abreast of news of my namesake.

(Obviously - that'll have been "national" in the sense of US national - but nevermind)

Every year, the residents of Lawson Way in Sheringham, Norfolk, put ever more elaborate Christmas light displays on in their small cul-de-sac.

See more pictures of their "tasteful" street here.

Wasn't this the most disappointing news of the weekend?

Yesterday evening Five Live aired Fighting Talk: Any Other Business as a kind of broadcast pilot for a current affairs spin-off of the sports show. There's another episode next Sunday. Richard Bacon did a good job hosting it, and alongside him were Stewart Lee, Rod Liddle and someone whose name I've forgotten. Over in the States was The Daily Show's John Oliver, and when Bacon mentioned the Lembit Opik MP story, Oliver knew nothing about it, and actually seemed slightly distressed that a hitherto "good" MP like Opik had strayed.

By the way, did it sound like Stewart Lee really was pissed off that Oliver had got The Daily Show gig after both he and Richard Bacon had also gone for it?

So, on the way home this evening, I'm sitting across the seat from a smart looking gentleman. Except he's munching on a pastie and isn't bothered about getting crumbs all over his black suit. When he does notice them he just brushes them off in any direction - including mine! He's also reading a copy of the Evening Standard... with his fingers carefully running along the words he's reading in that way you last did it when you were eight.

Yes, the office party season has started (we have ours next week)...

Remember Trevor & Simon from Going Live and Live & Kicking? Well if you'd wondered what they were up to these days, I can tell you that Trevor is in a band called Sucker who were playing at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town on Friday night before a friend's band came on.

This song is called, I think, AA Killer - hence the hat.

This is Simon looking on in between taking lots of digital photos. They were very nice and signed autographs!

Sorry about the grainy quality due to using my Nikon 5600 on maximum zoom in a very dark environment.

Following the photo the other day, this time around Westminster council "City Guardians" were leafleting last night at the intersection of Brewer Street and Great Windmill Street in Soho yesterday evening. Nonetheless, just metres away three tourists were being tempted into such a bar by a tall brunette. Evidently there's a concerted effort to close down these places, and while leafleting and putting signs outside the premises are no doubt effective, they're not as good as shutting down these places permanently.

Marks & Spencer's Curiously Strong Mints are just Altoids aren't they? Altoids, although made in the UK (by Wrigleys), are notoriously hard to find here, whereas M&S mints are, well, pretty easy to get. They also tend to be about 6p more expensive.

They both have nice and awfully useful tins though, which makes them much better to get than, say, Trebor's Extra Strong Mints.

Now I just need to peel back the UK label to see what's underneath.

Inspired by Makezine, I tried out my new Speedart Fabric Screen Printing kit this weekend to make an "Ultimate Play The Game" T-shirt. I'm sure Rare will be delighted (You do remember Ultimate Play the Game don't you? They made some groundbreaking games for the ZX Spectrum like Jetpac, Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf in the early eighties before becoming Rare). It took longer than I thought, with a three stage process all requiring long drying periods to just make the screen.

The cap in the picture is a vintage original one picked up at some long-forgotten ZX Microfair at Ally Pally or somewhere, and was used to supply the logo.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. The red version is my favourite although I had to print onto it twice and not getting the two versions quite in line has left it with a slight blurring effect. The t-shirts were 3 for £12 at Burtons.

I read this great extract from Mike Atherton's new book, Luck Be a Lady Tonight: Gambling - A Story of Triumph and Disaster, in the paper this morning. And, yes, that is ex-England cricketing captain Mike Atherton. I may actually have to buy this book.

I've just spent the weekend down on the coast. Yesterday the weather was horrible (this happened just up the coast the other side of The Wash), and completely scuppered any chance of observing the Perseids last night. I took a few pictures today.

I note that the Daily Mail serialised Noel Edmonds' new book "Positively Happy" last week, having first apologised for something they said about it. Edmonds talks about this in an interview with The Guardian today.

All very lovely, but I had a bit of a flick through the book yesterday in a shop. OK - so I'm not exactly going to be a believer of the book "Cosmic Ordering" that's seemingly responsible for his career revival (I mean, that wouldn't be due to an insanely popular gameshow format that was storming the world, was inevitably going to end up in the UK, and one way or another was going to need a television presenter - Edmonds being a television presenter). But even a two-second flick through "Positively Happy" reveals it to be incredibly flimsy.

I've no interest in the content obviously, but it costs £9.99 runs to around 140 pages, and the columns are narrow, and the lines nicely spaced apart. It's the sort of thing you'd do if you wanted to make your essay seem really long for your coursework.

Mind you, if the Daily Mail serialised it over five days, there probably isn't much left to read.

Incidentally, no links to any of these books, because I'd hope that no readers of this blog would ever read such tosh.

If you walk down a central London street like Carnaby Street, most lunchtimes you'll come across in-street charity teams who are very keen to get you to sign up a direct debit order with whoever they're representing that day. It's called "chugging" - charity mugging.

I've known for ages that these teams are not volunteer members or supporters of the charity. Instead they're professional teams who the charity pays for on the basis of each member that gets signed up. But it does all seem to get a little complicated at this point.

I decided to have another look into this, having noticed that the charity t-shirts or waterproofs now tend to have a small logo of the company that actually supplies the personnel. In the street this lunchtime, Mencap was the chosen charity and t-shirts had a small logo for Dialogue Direct. Their website makes for interesting reading. In particular the FAQs. While there's a lot of explanation about why this kind of charity collection is highly cost effective, with long-term donators being found, the money side of things is not that clear.

For example:

How much of the money given in the first year actually goes to the charity?
All the money raised from donations, 100% of it, goes directly to the charity, which in turn reinvests a small part of it in future fundraising initiatives.

So how does Dialogue Direct make money if that's the case? Again, it's not spelt out, but it seems that Dialogue Direct is paid directly by the charity on a per-donor basis.

The charity only pays for the donors they receive, instead of making a speculative spend in the hope that enough people will respond to the ad or mail-shot.

OK. It begins to make sense. But then there's a link to another site funjobs4u.co.uk, which is where you can get a job being a "face to face fundraiser."

Again, it's worth looking at the FAQ section of their site:

Am I paid on commission?
All the donations you sign up go directly to the charity; we do not pay on a commission basis.

So how exactly are the "face to face fundraisers" paid? Is it a per hour wage, with bonuses for each donor they sign up? And what kind of sums are we talking about? It's not obvious anywhere on the site what the answer to this is.

A job on the Guardian's website suggests that someone based in the SW, SE and London might earn between £250-£500 per week.

A piece written by a "chugger" back in 2003 suggests that in fact they get paid on a per hour basis - then £8 - with targets that have to be met.

There is actually an organisation representing all those companies that supply "chuggers" - the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA).

Curiously Dialogue Direct's website features a quote from one Cathy Anderson of Greenpeace:

"DialogueDirect allows Greenpeace to reach new groups of people, people that have not been attracted by conventional marketing. Because of the success of face-to-face recruitment we have over 60,000 new supporters, all giving regular, reliable financial support to Greenpeace.”

Yet a report from The Observer back in 2004 suggested that Greenpeace were getting out of the industry.

The chairman of Greenpeace, Martyn Day, said that what the industry calls 'face to face' campaigning was now having a negative effect on the group's profile and fundraising efforts. Chugging - short for 'charity mugging' - got an increasingly bad name after initial successes led to a flood of charities using young people to ask passerbys to donate by direct debit.

But not everyone is stopping doing it. Indeed some charities are taking it a step further and putting together in-house teams rather than relying on third-party agencies. That same article claimes that 213,000 people signed a direct-debit form in the street last year. If it cost charities as much as £100 per donor, that'd make the industry worth £20m+ a year. That seems a lot, although back in 2002 it was 350,000 so it has fallen back. That may be because everyone is already donating, or it may be because we're all a bit fed up with having to dodge youngsters in colourful bibs and avoid eye-contact at all costs. And just to confuse matters a little further, the PFRA estimate that in fact 690,000 new supporters were found using "chugging" last year.

In the end, this article from The Guardian's Ethical Living column is probably the most balanced. Published last November, so relatively up to date, it says that charities have to pay between £50 and £100 per donor, but concurring with the extracts from various websites, the "chuggers" don't get paid commission.

I've always found it little difficult to fully grasp why some marketing folk who work for charities earn quite as much as they do. Of course charities have to be good marketeers, but it pains me to think that one person's salary might be the equivalent of three hundred people's annual contributions to that charity.

The bottom line is that if you want to support a particular charity, just go online and sign up. Far fewer overheads and no payments to "chuggers". There - you've already effectively "given" the charity another £100!

This news seems to have escaped me. For some reason, from the end of this month, you'll no longer be able to buy your TV Licence from a Post Office. Instead, aside from all the various direct debit options, you'll have to use a PayPoint location. The reasons given include that there are more PayPoint locations than Post Offices, but it's the loss of services like this from the Post Office that's only sharpening their decline.

Somehow I find transactions to be slightly safer at the controlled environs of a Post Office, rather than using one those beaten up yellow machines that your local corner shop has connected to the PayPoint network.

Every company needs a good meaningless motto. Someone at Euro Car Parks obviously liked the Microsoft "Where do you want to go today?" campaign and though they could tweak it just a little bit for a car park company.

Hilarious, just hilarious.

I've spent the last few days in France going to a work thing before travelling on to watch the Tour De France with Saturday's time trial in Rennes.

I travelled via Paris, and got a TGV from Montparnasse station. Here's something I didn't know about TGVs. I thought that their layout was pretty much the same as trains the world over. Outside of first class, pairs of seats together and the occassional two seats facing two. But when I examined my ticket, it looked as though I was in first class. I knew that this was unlikely, unless the late change I'd made to my ticket had necessitated an upgrade. I even asked a guard who laughed at the suggestion, pointing out the price I'd paid.

It turns out that there's a little "salle" just next to the engine and adjacent to first class. It seats eight in four facing four configuration with seats backed against the window as you look across the carriage. The seats are certainly larger than the normal second class ones, and if you were travelling in a group of eight, the area would be perfect. It's a little strange if you're not with little to look at but your fellow travellers: the couple snoozing together, the man who fancies the woman across the way and can't stop looking at her after he's got her attention, the couple who whisper very very quietly.

On Saturday we headed out to a position a little way into that day's stage of the race. The riders were going off at around one minute intervals, and I was using that day's L'Equipe to work out who was arriving when. It didn't help that L'Equipe had printed the data for the wrong stage, but I was able to make do.

That evening, the Tall Ships Race was in St Malo, so I took a few photos:

On Sunday, we were planning to catch the next stage of the Tour, but since France was in the World Cup final, we decided that it was sensible to drive 450km to Paris to watch the final there. The thinking being that if they won, the party on the Champs Elysées would be unmissable.

Paris was up for a party:

(Look at the shirts hanging as a tricolore... Clever huh? Well they don't seem to go for the little flags on cars in France)

But, as we all know, they lost. I captured the moment in a bar full of people who knew less about football than any gathering I've ever come across. This lady, did realise they'd lost though.

I'm sure that no businesses in England at the moment would be concocting clever plans to make many out of England's [relative] success in the World Cup at the moment. You know what I mean, selling Ikea chairs at 1p, offering 2-for-1 on pizzas on England match days at Pizza Hut or offering 10% off on England match days at MUJI - to pull three random examples out of the air.

So I was impressed that the staff of Burger King in Piccadilly Circus were feeling so patriotic yesterday, that they were all wearing white England home shirts. You know, the ones available for £11.99 in Lilywhites across the road.

The one teeny weeny flaw in this patriotic display is that this particular branch is Burger King is renowned for its multi-ethnic non-English staff. Indeed I always think that their recruitment policy must solely revolve around the Spanish press. The majority of their serving staff are not English - they seem to all be Spanish. Indeed, tomorrow sees a massive clash between France and Spain, so I'd expect plenty of red shirts to be in evidence then.

Oh yes, and white probably isn't the best colour to wear when you're working in a busy fast-food environment...

A nice profile of Arnuldur Indriðason in the Guardian Review yesterday.

I've been catching up with the World Cup over the last couple of days - culminating in watching all three matches today. I did get out in the morning spending a pleasant time cycling around Hertfordshire. Here's a nice pub I found:

If you've read any of Le Carré's Karla novels then you'll be familiar with the character of Connie - memorably portrayed by Beryl Reid in the TV versions. She was quite probably based on Milicent Bagot, a real-life spook who's just died aged 90. Read The Times' obit.

The other day, some mindless vandals smashed a window at my local station. But it did allow me to point my camera through what would normally be a relatively opaque window. A couple of long exposure's followed which I rather like. Particularly the second one.

It seems that the Monday Lottery is struggling. I'm not surprised. A dreadful television advertising campaign lead to server meltdown on their first draw night, and then... nothing. The ad money had been spent and consumers quickly forgot about it.

...someone got off the train today carrying a copy of The Secret History by Donna Tartt and with a pre-recorded video in her bag. I thought that maybe I'd gone through some kind of time warp...

...I got in and turned on the radio to hear the Hungarian national anthem being roundly booed by the fans at Old Trafford. These fine specimens are the real fans that the FA is trying hard to get extra tickets in Germany for. The TV sound had a different feed and you couldn't hear the booing...

How long has Doonesbury been in the Independent on Sunday? It always seemed a little weird that The Observer didn't carry it - and now I know why. (Although I think it was probably more a case of nobody else taking it, and IoS deciding that they would).

Don't you love it when the council relay a road, and it's beautifully smooth... only for one of the utility companies to come along a day later and dig it up before the road markings have even been painted!

With a great fanfare (of sorts), the Monday Lottery launches today, proclaiming itself to be "the charities lottery." And there was me, cynically thinking that it was just a commercial operation run by Chariot UK plc...

But let's have a look at that charities connection shall we? Well their website lists 70 charities who, I assume, are all benefitting to one extent or another. And the proud boast is that "30p from every ticket bought goes directly to charity - five times more than on the National Lottery."

Very impressive. Except that if you go to the National Lottery Good Causes website it says that "for every £1 spent on a National Lottery ticket, 28p goes to good causes."

2p less than the Monday Lottery is offering, certainly, but not one fifth the amount. I suspect that the Monday Lottery makes that boast because when some of your National Lottery cash replaces the roof of your local youth club, that's not actual charity work. Similarly, when various promising Olympians are offered lottery cash to continue training in their sports, it can't be argued as being charity work. But the fact is that nearly as much cash is going to good causes as in this new lottery.

But then there's cash to be saved elsewhere. No retailer costs. No equipment costs. No complicated IT infrastructure linking all those machines in a secure fashion back to base. No duty payable. Internet only play keeps the costbase low. The minimum spend level is higher at £5 - you don't have to play it all at once, but they've got your money, and are earning interest.

I think these two charts explain it pretty well:

Source: Lottery Good Causes website.

Source: Guardian/Press Association

That 15p is for the "development of new products and operational costs." Profits are also from that 15p.

Monday Lottery does claim to offer better odds at 501,000:1 to win the jackpot which might be either £100,000 or £200,000. However, I'll leave others to calculate the full "expected win" odds of this game.

Incidentally, can it be a good thing that the Monday Lottery's server is falling over all the time today? A broken website means you can't play the game.

Into town to see The Sultan's Elephant. Only the French could put something on like this. Over four days, a story based on something that Jules Verne wrote, was played out across London. Enacted by Royal de Luxe, the highlight was the aforementioned elephant that stands 40 feet high and is a wonder of mechanisation.

I got a copy of The Elephant Echo to try to understand a little more what was exactly going on, and fortunately, that contains the full story. I haven't read it yet.

An awful lot of effort has been gone to putting this thing on. We wandered down Pall Mall looking for the elephant and found the above "smashed" cars. They're French and the rope (or thread) runs through them very cleverly, right into and out of the road's asphalt.

Having watched the elephant turn up into Haymarket, after performing a three-point turn, we retired to a pub, before finding the elephant in The Mall.

The crowd got regularly doused in water. I did too.

By the end, we'd reached Horse Guard's Parade where there was a rocket ship. The tale would be concluded on Sunday, but I had other things planned.

A great day out - that really is a spectacular elephant. Only the weather let it down.

As an aside, I couldn't help notice that The Guardian's been very supportive with a large picture in the paper, another report piece and a five-star review. I'm not saying that it didn't deserve its five stars, but surely there's a teeny-weeny conflict of interest if the writer of the review has also written the front page puff-piece for the Elephant Echo?

More photos at my Flickr stream.

As anyone who's travelled by train knows, most platform announcements these days are automated. There's nothing especially wrong with this, since the male and female voices are clear and concise. The system at the stations on my regular route are very listenable.

However, we, the passengers, do realise that it's a recorded voice. So when I heard an announcment for a delayed train the other day, the wording really made me sit up.

"I am sorry to announce that the 18.47 train for Stevenage is approximately 13 minutes late.... I am sorry for this delay."

The initial apology is just about bearable, but the end remark, "I am sorry for this delay" is just bizarre. Maybe I need to run a Turing test on the station announcing software. Everyone on the platform realises that some automated software package kicked in to tell us this information - in fact it came a few seconds after a human announcement telling us about the delay. So why include it?

Well I spent at least half an hour on this after work yesterday, and didn't get anywhere. Fortunately, someone else has. Here's the solution.

This is a great story. Mind you, if you thought the whole thing was a big PR stunt for the film, which it wasn't, then this isn't going to convince you otherwise...

There's something terribly dispiriting about consulting your server logs - not something I do very often - to discover exactly why people are visiting your site.

Here, then, are the top three search terms that lead people to my site in the last few months:

1) Ultimate Force - And this was by a long way. And I learn this in the week before this "Ross Kemp as Action Man" series returns for yet another series. I suspect that ITV keeps making it because they turn a profit on it in international sales (although it's not listed on PACT's recent list of best-selling exports). A quick Google search on "Ultimate Force" reveals my review is near the top of page two of search results.

2) The Real Hustle - For some reason, I'm the third entry if you search for this.

3) Hunting Chris Ryan - Dear god. Is this still listed?

There are also various other searches for Ultimate Force listed quite highly.

So what does all this say about me? That I have really crap taste in television? That I have an obsession with the SAS?

Ultimate Force is obviously rubbish, and I don't like it. Hunting Chris Ryan was fatally flawed by the cheating of the production team. And The Real Hustle was so-so. Not nearly as much fun as the real thing.

It's good to know that two legal actions have been rightly defeated:

1) The Mazher Mahmood action has been dropped, although I note that no-one's particularly interested in actually publishing the pictures. In a discussion on Friday's Channel 4 News, the camera quickly cut away when Gorgeous George held up an A4 picture of Mahmood. Jon Snow mentioned that the News of the World asked them not to show his picture. What's that about?

2) The Dan Brown case was thrown out (that may not be the correct legal term), with Brown vindicated and the two Holy Blood authors now face a massive legal bill.

Actually, this entry's title is tautological. All numerology is meaningless.

However, should you live in the States, and happen to be up very early tomorrow morning (i.e. late tonight), you can watch as the time ticks through to:

01 02 03 04 05 06

or to be a little clearer

01:02:03 on 04/05/06

Of course this doesn't work in most of the known world because we follow the somewhat more sensible system of formatting our dates dd/mm/yy.

We get our chance to see this pointlessness in roughly a month's time on the 4th of May.

(Read more here, where it's seemingly within the "Health" section of the paper)

I was mentioning this nonsense to a work colleague who recalled looking at his digital watch in 1989 to see the following time:

01:23:45 on the 6/7/89 - a bit more pointlessly impressive, I'm sure you'll agree.

Still, full marks to Twentieth Century Fox who are opening the remake of The Omen in June this year on 6/6/06...

Coming home from the London Drinker Beer and Cider festival in Camden Hall, Kings Cross, James got very excited when he saw this sign in the Euston Road underpass:

It's a Eurostar sign all ready for when St Pancras opens to Eurostar trains in 2007. Obviously they only wanted to make the sign once.

There's a nice World Cup supplement with this week's Marketing Week highlighting opportunities and thing to steer clear of when you try to link the World Cup with your products this summer.

On the one hand you, seemingly, can't use the following words in your promotional material if you're not a sponsor: FIFA, FIFA World Cup, Germany 2006, World Cup 2006, as well as various slogans and emblems.

Personally, if I ever start to say "FIFA World Cup" rather than plain "World Cup" feel free to put me out of my misery there and then. Of course, there are plenty of other "World Cups", so as long as I don't tie mine in with football, I reckon I'm probably OK with my Munich 2006 Barbeque World Cup.

Entertainingly, the supplement includes the following in its opening paragraph: "28.8 billion people in 213 countries tuned in to watch at least one match on television."

Leaving aside the issue of there actually being 213 "countries", I suspect that the writer has actually missed out the world cumulative...

I don't especially like them, but I was curious about Tesco's strange pricing policy in regard to Cream Eggs. Maybe it's to disincentivise us and thus prevent us making ourselves sick.

So you can buy 3 for 99p:

Get a 3 "pack" for £1.02:

Or if you want 6 it'll cost you £2.07:

Each time, it's more expensive than the last - very clever.

Tonight's Evening Standard had a headline: "Lock Up All Chickens" on at least one edition. Don't they know that most chickens spend all their lives caged up anyway, often in spaces the size of an A4 piece of paper.

A few weeks ago the FA announced that from next season, energy company E.ON would be the sponsor of the FA Cup. For the Standard, in true hyperbolic style, this became "Germans buy the FA Cup."

A bumper weekend is in store this weekend for us collectors of free DVDs.

The Telegraph papers are going "kitchen sink" crazy with Saturday Night, Sunday Morning in the Saturday paper, followed by A Taste of Honey in the Sunday Telegraph (top tip - if you struggle to find the Sunday Telegraph, try looking at the papers that seem to be regional titles. They've cleverly redesigned their paper to look like the Irish Sunday Independent or Yorkshire Post or something).

The Independent continues its quest to educate us in the lesser known lights of European cinema by offering us Il Cielo Cade (The Sky is Falling) starring Isabella Rossellini. (I still haven't learnt French or Spanish via The Independent, and Italian's on the way...)

The Times are offering a Woody Allen "classic" in Take The Money and Run, while the Mail on Sunday offers us the Michael Winner/Robert Mitchum version of The Big Sleep - obviously a poor Philip Marlowe remake and not to be confused the Elliot Gould/Robert Altman Marlowe film The Long Goodbye, which was not re-set in London.

Plenty to keep us busy and ABC circulation figures artificially and expensively boosted.

I mention this because around now, every ecommerce site is busy sending out email explaining how their products make the perfect Valentine's gift, including plenty of pink backgrounds and heart logos in their emails and on their sites.

What could be more romantic, for example, than buying your significant other a Dell Dimension desktop? With free double memory!

Or perhaps you should buy your true love something a little more personal. Like a SavaStore (aka Watford Electronics) Belkin Bluetooth Dongle!

And these emails also reveal the problems with using stock photos to build your ads around. Check out the hi-tech loving woman featured in both emails:

If there's one thing that annoys me on when you're filling out forms on the internet, it's those drop down boxes where you choose a country, and they always helpfully put United States of America at the top before Afghanistan and the rest. The implicit message is "USA gets to the top of the list, everybody else can just scroll."

With us Brits, there's the added confusion of seeing how they've listed our country. Is it "United Kingdom" or "Great Britain"? Perhaps it's just "Britain" or even "England". It's a fun game.

Anyway, this is possibly the best Select Your Country dropdown I've ever seen.

There's no greater feeling than when you reach the train station, late in the evening, ready to embark on the trip home, only to discover that the train's not running the whole way, and you're going to have to get off and change onto a bus.

Great.

You're already tired and just want to get home to bed (or at least check your email when you get in), and now the trip's going to take twice as long.

An average evening may go like this. You disembark mid-trip to change onto the bus service. When you exit the station, there are a couple of coaches waiting, but you're directed to the bus-stop fifty yards away. These aren't your buses it seems, despite the fact that there won't be another train coming through for half an hour.

It's cold, and you're kicking your heels with a bunch of other people who'd missed the sign that was carefully posted on the back of a door somewhere in the station.

A fellow passenger is nearby, harranguing a replacement bus service employee who can do nothing about the engineering work that is scheduled to take place overnight.

Finally, they relent, and decide that one of the comfortable and warm looking coaches can come over and let everyone get on to take them onwards.

As we alight, a fellow passenger, while moaning about the "two grand" he pays a year for his season ticket, tells the coach driver that he's a "fucking muppet". For some unknown reason the coach driver takes exception to this and gets off, announcing that he won't be going anywhere with that passenger on board.

The passenger doesn't get off the coach.

I notice an open Billy Elliot DVD case on the seat in front and wistfully hope that we might be getting in coach entertainment on the way home, even if it is Billy Elliot.

Another bus turns up. This should have been our bus, and another employee comes on the coach to tell us to disembark.

Thank goodness we don't have to worry about any Mexican stand-offs between our work-to-rule coach driver and a pissed-off passenger.

It turns out that the coach with the Billy Elliot DVD is actually a Rail Replacement Replacement coach. It's only function is to come and rescue us if the Rail Replacement bus should breakdown. But now the bus has reached us, the driver can sit back contentedly. He no longer needs to drive to Hertford, unless our bus breaks down. A quick glance at said bus leads me to suspect that this isn't as uncommon an occurrence as one might hope.

We get on the other bus, and look at each other praying that the passenger doesn't call this driver a "muppet" too. He's taking a while to reach this bus, and there is a movement on the bus to get the driver going now before he can cause anymore trouble.

But eventually we're all on and the bus sets off.

This time, it is a bus. If you've ever wondered what happens to buses when they can no longer be used to cary fare-paying passengers on regularly scheduled services, you should know that they're used for Rail Replacement Services. The tell-tale clues are the noxious diesel fumes that seem to pass through some kind of exhaust pipe that's pointed inside the bus rather than out on the road.

The driver takes off apace, following a meandering route that takes in every stop along the way irrespective of whether anyone actually wants to get off.

I'm relieved that I don't need to get out and help the bus complete a seven-point turn around a corner on a particularly narrow street as I once had to.

Eventually, bus-sick and nauseous, we reach my stop, and I jump out.

The other week, HMV Group's chief executive is leaving the company after a disappointing Christmas, citing the growth of the internet etc. as reasons for HMV's poor Christmas period.

There is no way that an outlet like HMV can really compete with the interenet when they have all those leases to pay for in areas full of expensive real estate. But there are some things they could do to make life easier, and still ensure that they have decent, profitable businesses. We don't always want to wait for the post to bring us the things that we want.

Leading the way in this respect is Argos. They let you search online and then choose either to have it delivered or collect it in store, and importantly, they only charge one price. This is important because if you're competing on price alone, then you've got the problem that a Play or Amazon may well have a better price, in which case, the fact that they'll postal specialists probably makes them a better choice for byuing the product.

Argos leads the way because the nature of their business is very computerised and stock control led. You go online, reserve the item you're after, then go to the store and collect it, without the worry of missed deliveries or packages not fitting through your letterbox. Whereas, if you've ever been to a record or bookshop seeking a book, and found their computer system saying that the book or CD is in stock, but a search of the shelves shows that it isn't, you'll know that their systems aren't as foolproof.

But picture this: you can get the new Arctic Monkeys album (they're very hot, I'm told) for £8.49 plus posage online from Amazon, but it's available in store at HMV for £10.99 without a delivery delay. Why don't they simply advertise it as such online, and let you pay and collect it in store? With a decent stock control system, that shouldn't be a problem. As it happens HMV.co.uk sell it for £9.99 with free delivery. So where's the incentive to visit the bricks and mortar store?

And I still stand by the fact that it's easier to browse for things you didn't know you wanted in a physical store than it is online. With Amazon, you're much more likely to jump in and just look at the item you were searching for, and you don't get to wander past lots of racks filled with things to tempt you. So when you reach the physical HMV store to pick up your Arctic Monkeys CD, you may well buy something else at the same time. Free postage on single CDs means that you dive into the website, buy the disc you want, and that's it.

"Adapt or die", is something of a cliché, but then it's called a cliché for a reason.

Am I only the person who sometimes confuses Davos with Davros? Do they, in fact, stand for similar ideals?

Well Sky News broke the story when they went live to their Skycopter (i.e. a helicopter) sometime around midday today. A whale was in the River Thames in central London.

After some initial confusion about the species, it was eventually confirmed to be a northern bottle nosed whale. So come lunchtime, I just had to go and see if I could see it. Sky News, who went totally over to covering the mammal's position, had said that it was near the Tate Britain. But it was still moving, so I got off the tube at Westminster and started walking. And then walked some more.

The fact that there was no sign of a helicopter (providing Sky with the footage) meant that it was not close. On down the river I walked until finally, having nearly given up, I reached the bank near Chelsea opposite Battersea Park.

It's actually quite hard to spot a whale from the riverbank because you lose sight of it between it surfacing. Although a number of small craft were keeping nearby to ensure river traffic stayed clear, you just had to keep looking until it surfaced.

There is something wonderful about cetaceans, and this was certainly bringing out the crowds. The road along the riverbank had completely clogged up by the time I eventually had to leave - well it was my lunch hour and I was already late.

Unfortunately, the only camera I had about my person was a disposable, and without a zoom of any description, it was pretty useless. The professionals who surrounded me were having enough problems with their enormous zoom lenses.

Was it worthwhile? Absolutely. You get few enough chances to see whales, so when one comes to town, I had to go.

Sadly, it remains uncertain whether the story will end in good news. It seems to be notoriously hard to persuade these creatures to turn around and head back towards the sea. As I write, there are reports that it's been spotted somewhere close to Greenwich which suggests that it's heading in the right direction back towards the Thames estuary and the sea. But as night has fallen, nobody really knows where it is. I suspect that Sky will have its helicopter back in the air tomorrow morning searching for the animal.

Lots of stories today talking about the increased security at Sandhurst as a result of Prince William starting his training there.

Let's see - it's an army base, full of guns and live ammunition, at a training facility for the future leaders of our armed forces. One might just hope that there's already quite tight security in place.

I'll try not to sound smug here, because I know it can happen to any of us, but why do so many people leave it until this morning, the first day fully back at work after the break, to buy their train tickets?

This morning at my local station, where there's one assistant and one ticket machine, the queues were ridiculously long. Everyone should have gone two days ago:

1) to beat the rush
2) to beat the ticket increases that came into play yesterday

As I say, we've all turned up to buy a ticket on a Monday, but unless your firm's season ticket loan cheque only came through this morning, there's really no excuse.

While I'm on a transport theme, I notice that bus prices have also increased to £1.20. Isn't that a 20% 25% increase that's not really been commented on? I know it's much cheaper if you get an Oyster Card (£1.00 or 80p depending when you travel), but that's a bit unfair on tourists and others. Actually, looking at the new fares even people who buy, say, a one-day bus pass, are screwed. The Oyster Card cost is a maximum of £3.00 in one twenty-four hour period, yet someone who buys a one-day bus pass (perhaps they're a tourist or from out of town) is charged £3.50.

The whole Oyster Card thing really annoys me anyway. I have to use a "national rail" station (as we have to call what once upon a time would have been a "BR station"), and they don't accept Oyster Card pre-pay on their routes. They do allow Oyster Card Travelcards. (Note: for those who don't know, you can either pay a fixed amount for unlimited travel - a travelcard effectively, or you can pay per trip, topping your Oyster Card up with credit - like pre-pay mobile phones).

The trouble begins because Transport for London have made pre-pay Oyster Cards very cost effective whilst penalising those who use cash. The minimum trip on the tube is now a fixed £3.00 in zones 1-4 for example.

The reason for my local railway not taking pre-pay is pretty simple: the station has no attendants or barriers. If it did have barriers, then everyone getting off the train would have to swipe their card to show that they'd completed their journey there. But with no barrier, and the possibility of swiping your card at, say, an earlier station, a smaller amount can be charged.

The station will accept "travelcard" payments on Oyster Card because the payment has already been made. No chance of fare-dodging then.

The only long-term solution is for all these stations to be gated, and therefore manned. But that's not going to happen since it'll add a massive cost to running the stations.

Anyway, if you do only travel by tube, then why not try James' Oyster Card Calculator? Just be warned that it doens't take into account any bus trips that you might make on top. But it does highlight the savings you can actually get from pre-pay over and above monthly or even annual travelcards. I think that the big savings can come from travel made after 7.00pm. This can make the difference between going pre-pay or travelcard. All this assumes that you have the choice of course.

I think I must have either have accidentally woken up in Bagdhad or WWIII has just kicked off. It's only a couple of months since Fireworks night, so does everyone in my neighbourhood have to let off fireworks again?

Bah humbug.

New Year? Pah.

Still, there's the New Year's Day Concert from Vienna to look forward to. You'll be just in time for it as you reach home by bus from your New Year's party. It's the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth this year, so among the usual glut of Strauss - Josef and both Johann's - we get the overture of the Marriage of Figaro. Listen out from 10.15, if your ears aren't ringing from some ridiculous "House" party.

Well the snow did arrive. Just not enough.

And I've got to say that I've been a bit diasppointed by the sales this year. I think the best bargain I've had was picking up number 1 of Movie Musicals to get West Side Story for £2.99. And note that it is in full anamorphic widescreen rather than the 4:3 it says on the box.

Actually, I did get Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East for half price in Borders, but even the book sales were profoundly disappointing. If you don't want books by John Peel, Sharon Osbourne, Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver, Trinny and Susannah or Alan Bennett, then forget it.

I've been belatedly reading a bit of the Christmas double (or is it treble) issue of the New Statesman (and yes, I really did accidentally pick it up thinking I was getting New Scientist, with my eyes only reading as far as "New"), and it's worth it for a couple of things. Most surprisingly, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur authors of "Is It Me Or Is Everything Shit?", a book I wouldn't have given more than a nano-second's glance in the bulging Christmas "humour" section of the bookshop, make quite a good fist of moaning about Christmas. Best is "News about the high street" which makes the excellent point that while a couple of weeks ago, we were all being told how important it was to save for the future, we now have to take an interest in how well the shops are doing and how much cash they're raking in during the sales. On TV, Next manages its usual free airtime by simply opening branches at the ridiculous hour of 5am. What a great job it must be working as an assistant for them. In the meantime, IKEA gives away a couple of free beds, and their new Milton Keynes branch gets a full three minute ad..., sorry, "feature" on the local BBC news.

The other thing to look out for in the New Statesman, is Mushrooms of Freedom, a new short story by Andrey Kurkov author of several previous novels that I've enjoyed.

I feel like a kid, but I'm just sitting here waiting for the much promised snow. Where is it? (Free registration reqd)

If you're west of somewhere in mid-Atlantic, then it's already Christmas.

If you're east of that point and somewhere north of Mexico and south of Canada, then it's not quite yet Happy Holidays. Unless you're Target, in which case you wished it was more Happy Christmas than Happy Holidays.

To me it's Christmas. But that's another debate for another time. I know someone who doesn't truly think Christmas is arriving unitl the "Holidays are coming" Coca-Cola lorries appear on TV (and, by the way, the radio ad version is truly awful).

Now where's that snow?

The most serene image of the day was one that faced me on Great Marlborough Street at 7.30 this morning - a line of horses trotting past.

I think it must have been the Household Cavalry or something, but it's really strange seeing so many horses in central London.

Where's a digital camera when you need one?

One of the most stupid things you can do at this time of year is go shopping on Oxford Street. I mean, why would you decide, at this time of year, to go out into the heaving throngs to go shopping in the run-up to Christmas?

Here are some random thoughts - good and bad - that come from a couple of recent excursions in pursuit of Christmas gifts...

• Visit London won't thank me, but there are far too many tourists
• since when have the Salvation Army started playing Careless Whisper by Wham?
• why would someone in Pret A Manger, on spotting a single long queue separating out into each till as a place becomes available, think that he could just walk to the front?
• does anyone ever go into the Gizmondo shop?
• "Sinners & Winners" guy has a new PA - not a megaphone any longer
• I wouldn't want to work on the Evening Standard pitch near "Sinners & Winners" guy
• Argos is a complete bunfight at the collection point
• why does anyone buy any of the tat that's sold as gadgets in clothes shops, eg shower radios from Next?
• none of the clothes shops had the gadget I was after, and I did look
• all those gadgets will be available at half price in less than seven days' time
• as you go higher and higher into Hamleys, the queues to pay for your stuff get shorter and shorter
• wrapping paper is called "gift wrap" everywhere
• several people a day must get killed literally walking in front of buses - does everyone know that Oxford Street isn't actually pedestrianised?
• no matter how busy it gets in the run up before Christmas, there'll still be sales assistants ready to pounce as you enter, far too eager to grab you in mobile phone shops
• lots of sales have already started
• the sales start early every year
• those dodgy "auction" shops have reappeared after a long absence
• the Apple Store is a no-go zone with queues stretching nearly to the door
• the same stuff is available for the same price with far shorter queues in John Lewis
• I was stupid enough to leave my shopping until this week, so I deserve everything I get

Which country consumes the most champagne? It's the obvious answer - France.

But which country consumes the next most champagne? You'd think that it might be America. It's not. It's the UK, and by quite a hefty margin.

Well I was fascinated by this anyway.

So the other night, I went along to Bingo for the first time in my life.

I consider myself fairly well educated with a solid grounding in the practicalities of life and how people live them. But Bingo is something I've never really understood.

I mean, I've always known that there's a caller who reads out numbers, and you mark them off your individual cards. But beyond that, the mechanics have always escaped. It's a whole part of British culture that's passed me by.

I suspect that it's very much a class thing. Although there have always Bingo halls around me, I've never known anyone who plays it (or admits to it anyway).

I'm also well aware that it's very easy to be disparaging about the whole thing, so I'll try to represent my thoughts on it as fairly as possible.

Once you've joined up (it's a form of gambling, but I think alongside casinos, the compulsory 24 hour cooling off period is now a thing of the past and you can join on the door), you go into an area where you buy your bingo cards. They're probably not called "Bingo cards" but that's what I call them.

This area is like a casino in the sense that it's also filled with fruit machines. Lots of them. But through the main doors is where the action really takes place as you enter an enormous main hall. At the front is a stage from where the main action takes place. The stage also has a large screen behind the caller which details the action and advertises future events.

Laid out in front of this stage are row upon row of seats, largely in formations of twos or fours in pairs facing one another across a table. The tables have built in bingo cards with machines on the side. More about this later.

The atmosphere is one of near silence when a game's in progress, with intent concentration across the floor as the numbers are called. The numbers come thick and fast, and although a screen on the tables lets you know what numbers are coming, you need to have your wits about you. Any thoughts you may have harboured about bingo players being elderly and slightly dotty are immediately dispelled once you realise the speed with which you have to play the game.

The games are divided up into a complicated (to me) set of sub-games. At the start of the night, you buy books of games, and then settle down to play according to what you've bought. There are also additional games that are linked between either the bingo chain you�re playing in, or a National Game across, I assume, every hall in the country. These games have some big prizes, and the game played across the chain (Buzz in Gala terminology) has a radio link-up - which at least means that the numbers are read slightly more slowly since they need time for any of the participating halls to shout if they have a winner.

You mark off your numbers anyway you like, although many like to use American-made bingo dabbers - large felt tips that require minimum wrist action to mark off numbers. Fortuitously they're available from nearby vending machines. Considering you only need one pen, I was perplexed to notice a gentleman sitting near me with a selection of half a dozen different colours. Maybe he has "lucky" pens.

The main caller was a guy called Michael, who had a bit of charm about him. He knew some of the players by name, and kept asking us if we were having a good time. "No," was the response on most occasions. Mainly, I guess, because most people don't win most of the time. At one point in the evening he apologised for the lack of disposable ashtrays that evening. If any of us had one on our table but weren't using it, could we pass it on to someone who needed one? He suspected that the shortage was due to ashtrays "accidentally falling" into people's bags.

There are three steps to winning; one line (a horizontal line across one of 6 cards on a sheet), two lines, and a full house (all the numbers). You shout if you win - anything you like. And a checker comes over to read out your serial number. The game all being computer controlled, this information is enough to check whether you've got a winning card. If you do, then an attendant goes over to a small desk in the corner and retrieves your winnings, placing them, in cash, into an envelope.

The night I was there, the non-linked games tended to have prizes of around £100 for a line, £200 for two lines, and £400 for a full house. Prize money is really dependent on how many people are playing. This was a Saturday night, so it was quite busy, although the lure of TV finals of X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing may have meant that it was a little quieter than usual. Even the added incentive of a free 2006 diary may not have been enough to prize people away from their televisions.

The clientele were quite interesting, in the sense that it was a largely female, working class crowd. A good proportion of the audience was smoking. Unlike your average place that has smoking and non-smoking areas - the non-smoking area was very much smaller than the rest of the place. And although people sit nominally in groups, they're quite spread out with little real interaction in the breaks in play.

There's a bar and "diner" where you can get food, but neither were particularly busy. Many seemed to be nursing a pint the whole evening. This isn't especially hard to do when you're so busy checking numbers that you don't have time to even take a sip of a drink.

There are breaks in play, but the nano-second that the main announcer has gone off stage, the built-in board at your table kicks in to play with a mono-tone woman inviting us to play at a pound a time. Many of those there do this, and seemingly play non-stop for upwards of three hours in total. If you need change for the machine you just stick your hand in the air waving your tenner around and someone will change it for you.

These places are non-stop money-makers with, I would estimate, the average person spending £20 on a (Saturday) evening before food or drinks. The prize money is fair, with something like half the stake being returned as prize money, although you'd probably do better in other forms of gaming if money making is your concern. But I guess that during the day, these places are warm, and let you spend time away from your house.

There are various additional prizes such as tea services and boxes of sweets, but cash is king. At the end of the evening, the manager said hello to the one person in our party who'd won anything, urging us to come back and spend the money. You suspect that the bingo industry is trying hard to encourage a younger demographic to come and play the game, while they fight the twin delights of internet and telephone gambling, and lottery playing. Once upon a time, outside of the bookies, the key gambling opportunities would have been the pools and bingo. Now, we can be playing online poker, laying our own bets on at places like Betfair, and buying scratchcards at the Post Office with our pensions. It's a tough game to be in.

A genuinely fascinating place to visit.

The Home Office currently has an advertising campaign highlighting the fact that you can be charged £80 if you're drunk and disorderly in public.

To advertise this, they've got a charming campaign using posters and phoneboxes that cleverly spell out "£80" with vomit. It's quite a ghastly sight. Possibly even worse than seeing a pile of vomit on the pavement yourself, since at least you can look up (whilst trying to avoid it).

Who's smart idea was this piece of creative nonsense?

(I did find a picture of the poster on the web, but I'm not linking to it. And on the Home Office's own site, they just mention that PDF imagery is available to the press. Seems they don't want to pollute their website either.)

Thanks to a very generous host, I've just spent a week in Sweden. Read on below for a detailed, and some might say, exceptionally boring, essay on what I did there.

I'd like to think of it more as a journal of my time. Others might simply conclude that it's "What I Did In My Winter Holidays" without a teacher asking me to write it.

I know that there has been an economic downturn, and high street chains are finding it hard to maintain profits and growth, but is that really an excuse for how busy and messy all these stores now look.

WH Smith has had some notable problems of late, and for a while was torn over exactly what kind of products the shop should be carrying. It seems to have settled wisely on a broad range of best selling books, CDs and DVDs, and is keeping on its magazine range (it would have been fatal to drop its one USP). But does any of that excuse the mess that is instore in this chain these days?

And then look at Boots. To many people, still an "essential" store despite the growth of the healthcare and pharmaceutical sections in the large supermarkets. But you can barely squeeze through the aisles instore now.

The problem in both cases, and others besides, is the introduction of section ends, free-standing dumpbins, special offer stands and many more. The aisles are now completely cluttered, and what stand-out these sections once had is completely lost in a mess of stands that your average village corner shop (there are a few left that haven't become Tesco Expresses I believe) look like a minimalist Bond Street designer store.

There's a very easy rule of thumb to employ in clothes shops - the more free space there is, the greater the prices are. So those chains that have aisle space akin to the average cattle class airline seat's legroom, charge pennies for their Chinese made clothes. While those stores that could easily accommodate a regulation five-a-side pitch between the rails probably has price tags of the "if you need to ask, you're not going to be buying" sort.

It's a straight equation based around revenue earned per square foot of shop-floor space, and the location's rent.

But if you're a parent who has to wheel their pram around these cluttered aisles, or even someone who aspires to live in a minimalist manner that the ads always show us, why would you want to navigate box after box of "Gift Wrap" (it's "Wrapping paper" you morons)? The average out of town Tesco actually has enormously wide aisles, with barely a single obstacle. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to wheel around your gargantuan trolley, loaded with everything from a Christmas tree and underwear, to a new DVD recorder and three months' worth of disposable contact lenses. Oh, and maybe some food too.

Shopping is a necessity, but wouldn't it be nice to keep it vaguely pleasureable too?

You don't know how much of a sense of achievement I had this evening when I'd finally managed to solve a "moderate" Kakuro puzzle in The Guardian. It's the new Sudoku don't you know. I suspect that doing these things regularly is the only real way of solving them easily.

No, I don't mean eating in the supermarkets' cafeteria areas. Although I always feel that if you're eating there, you're probably pretty desperate. And they never have all the menu available.

No, what I'm talking about are those people who start consuming their soon-to-be-purchases before they've actually reached the till. They drive me mad. I was in the queue behind a crisp eater today. He was slowly munching on his Walker Sensations, and I was developing a furious hatred of him. If the bored clerk at the checkout hadn't looked carefully, he could have had black peppar crisps all over him.

It just seems to me to be the height of bad manners to tuck into food in the supermarket. Get it outside at least. And that goes for people who start drinking their purchases too. I guess that I might just about allow parents who have extremely young babies the opportunity to feed them, but overall, cut it out.

Just had to get that off my chest.

Can somebody please write a script that de-Christmases sites like Amazon? All I want is the holly-festooned graphics removed or replaced...

Juicy

While the newspapers continue to spend money on promotions like it's going out of fashion, I'm happy to reap the rewards.

So this weekend, on Saturday there's Like Water For Chocolate in The Independent, which I haven't seen for years, but enjoyed at the time. On Sunday, the Sunday Telegraph has the slightly strange Orlando, which I also haven't seen for years and years.

But most excitingly, The Times on Saturday has the incomparable Hitchcock film Notorious. This is quite easily one of my favourite films of all time with two of cinema's greatest actors, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Ben Hecht wrote the script, the film also features Claude Rains, and the cinematography is fabulous. It features the technically incredible "ballroom staircase" shot where the camera pans all the way down from the balcony all the way down to an extreme close up of Ingrid Bergman's hand as she nervously plays with a key that she stolen from the man she's been told to seduce by Cary Grant.

Finally, there's the scene that Hitchcock put in to deliberately evade the censors of the era - the dreaded Hayes code. Kisses could not go on for more than a few seconds, so to stick two metaphorical fingers up at this rule, Hitchcock has Grant and Bergman kissing one another then pulling their lips away repeatedly all the while carrying out a conversation and even answering a phone. They barely leave each other's arms, and the scene is far more charged and full of eroticism than a long snog would have been.

One way or another, it's worth getting multiple copies of The Times this Saturday.

I don't know why, but it annoys me when generic bird-watchers are described as twitchers. Twitchers are that special breed of bird enthusiast who chases around the country looking for exceptionally rare speicies of birds. They're a relatively rare breed themselves.

Anyway, this is all just an excuse for me noting that there are an abundance of bird-watchers in North Norfolk just now. And I don't think they're all watching out for migrating birds who might be bringing the bird-flu virus into the country.

Out in the distant parts of Norfolk, you often see fighter planes out on manouevres flying low over the landscape and off over the North Sea. But today I saw something I'd never seen before: a pair of fighters, possibly F16s from Mildenhall, but they could have been Tornados, in a mock dogfight over the coast.

I've never seen these planes perform the kind of tight turning manouevres that they were pulling off this afternoon. They were flying very slowly - well under the speed of sound, and pulling 180s like they were Tom Cruise in Top Gun. I wasn't the only person out on the cliffs who stopped what they were doing to watch. These planes were even dropping "coutermeasures" or "chuff" which was lighting up the sky to divert the psuedo heat-seeking missiles that the planes were no doubt "firing" at each other.

Typically I didn't have my camcorder with me, when I've been carrying it around quite a lot recently.

I've just noticed that filmmaker Alex Cox is blogging again.

A while back, he used to write a weekly column for the BBC film website. He kept a weekly update of how his filmmaking was going. But probably due to the political nature that his life tended to take, he was removed, and the diary switched to his own site until back in March last year he stopped it.

Now it's back, although due to the unblog-like nature of his site (no RSS, no calendars to surf around), I don't know how long it's been going on for prior to the start of August this year. There's a re-release of an extras packed edition of probably his most famous film, Repo Man, in the works, so this might to be build interest. But Cox is unlikely to be doing it for such a reason.

Of course, I remember him mostly for his introductions to the BBC2 cult film series, Moviedrome. It showed some great films, both big and small, and acted a real education.

It's a shame that we don't get more introductions to film series like this anymore. I guess that we're supposed to just buy the extras-laden DVDs (and then rebuy our collections in HD-DVD or Blue Ray or whatever). But if you don't know about the film in the first place, you're not going to buy the DVD.

My Rise to Obscurity by a Mexican actor named Del Zamora and If I Don't Write It, Nobody Else Will by Eric Sykes.

Just looking at the logs of this site and a few strange searches show up. In the last month, the most searched term is for "Hunting Chris Ryan". That's because I reviewed it once. But I bet this site disappoints all those who get to it when searching for "Abbie Titmuss"! I misspelt her name (it's Abby), and consequently I'm currently the second site showing up on Google.co.uk. She was at V Festival this year, and I mentioned it... "Kevin Pieterson" also does well and again it's a typo - he's a "Pietersen". I've corrected both entries now.

Pretty terrible.

1. What happened to the Wynton Marsalis concert that was going to be on Radio 3 today? It's in the BBC Press Information pack and was highlighted in at least one TV & Radio guide in yesterday's papers. But there's nothing to let you know why it's been cancelled or rescheduled on the BBC website.

2. Why has the CBS TV show Numb3rs changed its theme away from last year's Talking Heads song Once In A Lifetime? (Yes even though the maths geniuses on this programme discuss stuff very simply, I still enjoy it).

Why is it that while other shops are happy to change their window displays every so often, when there's a new season or whatever, the Casio shop in Carnaby Street in London seems to completely renovate their premises.

The shop's been closed down for the last three or four weeks - for good I thought. But no. They re-open at the weekend.

This comes less than a year after they "re-branded" as Casiology, which also involved shutting the shop down and included an expensive advertising campaign at Oxford Circus.

There's bigger margins in digital watches than you previously realised obviously. (Incidentally, this is the Casio shop that was unable to change the battery in one of their own watches when I went in once. They insisted I needed to send it away to their head office. The bloke in Piccadilly Circus tube managed it in about five minutes.)

While I was shopping in Waitrose (look it's the closest supermarket to me OK?), I was chatting to the woman on the checkout who noticed I'd been in a clothes shop. She went on to share with me her theory that men's clothes are more expensive than women's clothes because women buy far more than men. If we men went shopping a bit more and didn't treat it as a chore, then our clothes would be cheaper.

While I dispute the fact that men hate shopping (I can't think of anything more enjoyable than a trip to HMV or Waterstones), I do agree that men's clothes are more expensive.

I was reminded of this conversation when I saw the posters for Uniglo, the Japanese clothes shop, at Picaddilly Circus this morning. They've just re-opened their flagship store, and they're proudly advertising their cashmere sweaters. Women's ones start at £39 while men's start at £59. Eh? Why the discrepency?

I suppose men are, broadly speaking, larger than women so need more material in their garments. But twenty quid's worth? I think I'd feel agrieved if I was a small man, paying that much difference.

It could be that the women's clothes are more flimsy. Women have more clothes ergo, they don't wear them as often and hence don't need as much wear in them. But women are much fussier shoppers than men, so they'd return inferior products at the drop of a hat.

No, I think it's because men have no idea about how much a cashmere sweater should cost, and are probably just happy to have made the purchase and escaped from the shop intact.

(Of course, not having visited Uniglo since they reopened, I've no idea what the true reason is. Although prior to them closing down for their refit, £59 would have been at the seriously high end for anything they sold in the store. Have they gone "upmarket".)

After reading Ben Goldacre's scathing attack on poor media coverage of science the other week, and then his new Saturday column in the main paper. It was slightly disappointing to read this in The Observer today. It's presented as slightly humourous in that it costs an absurd amount of money. But only in the last paragraph does anyone point out that the premise of the liquid is ridiculous. I trust that these aren't the same people who closed down Penta water...

Last night I was watching a documentary on the 15th anniversary of the Hubble space telescope. I think that it was a BBC re-edit of the original ESA produced documentary, since it was strange that it was presented by Bob Fosbury of ESA, yet narrated by Chris Lintott, who regularly appears on The Sky At Night. I suspect that as a European co-production, each country was left to dub on its narration with just a handful of presenter links left on. That's largely what happens with David Attenborough narrated BBC nature documentaries. Anyway, it was all very informative and a worthwhile enterprise. But I did a double take when I read the "thanks" bit in the credits at the end. After a long list of astronomical associations around the world, it ended (and I freeze framed this to make sure "and off [sic] course: our girlfriends and families".

You are rather left with the impression that ESA's documentary-making arm is peopled with only married personnel, single males and lesbians.

(OK - I suspect that the titles weren't done by someone for whom English is their first language, but it doesn't do the image any good does it?).

It's often occurred to me that shopping channels probably do a fair bit of their business after the pubs close and people stagger back home flick on the telly and suddenly realise that they really do need a Lean Green Grilling Machine or whatever.

I once saw one of the guys from Bid(Up) TV actually letting viewers know that it was no use them witholding caller ID and making drunk purchases as their systems could still get my number. I doubt that this is true, but I've no doubt that being an operator at that time of night is probably an interesting thing. "Interesting" in the sense that being a late night cabbie's also "interesting."

There's an appalling new channel that's just launched called Quiz Call, which joins the multitudes of dubious merit channels scattered across Sky Digital. They usually involve some attractive young woman standing in front of a blue screen on which is projected a computer graphics roulette table or whatever. Maybe they're asking questions so trivial that they'd make even the puzzle setters on GMTV blush at the simplicity. Then they take a caller to air who can surely be the only person in the country not to know the answer.

These channels carry no advertising, and rely on callers phoning on a premium rate number. When they dial, there's no guarantee that they'll be put through to the studio. Indeed with calls to Quiz Call costing 60p each, with, let's say 40p going to the TV channel, they need to have 250 calls before they've earned enough to pay for a £100 prize.

So far, so unextraordinary. Just another case of a cynical corporation getting the poorest and stupidest proportion of the population to hand over more money they probably can't afford in a scheme that's not far removed from straightforward gambling.

But there are a couple of things you should know about Quiz Call. First, it's owned and operated by Channel 4 - the public service broadcasting company. And it's the first of these channels to be "made available" on Freeview. OK, so in this instance the production company involved is "Ostrich Media" - and it's probably as well that it isn't festooned with 4s like E4, Filmfour or the forthcoming More4 - if only because the production values are so amateurish.

The studio sets are fine, but who decided that Impact was a great font to use, and flashing "WIN WIN WIN" on the screen every so often was a good idea. The sound effects are annoying in the extreme, and you've got to actually feel vaguely sorry for a presenter who basically has to talk non-stop, by themselves, for three hours on the trot. All they've really got to say is the phone number and the rules over and over again.

That's before the morality of the whole enterprise. And at no point either on air or online, are the odds of you being put through to the studio given. Just saying that it's "random" is not enough. If I gamble on roulette, blackjack or even poker, I can work out my odds of success. Not in this instance.

I thought that texting in to "text chat" channels was cynical, but at least with them you knew that your text would appear on screen.

Desperate, desperate television.

Anyway, sorry for that rant. What I was talking about was drunk purchases. A nameless colleague from work, let's call him "Matt", recently felt the need of ham late one night. Maybe he had a craving for a ham sandwich. Next morning, when he checked the fridge, he found that he had 25 packs of ham! Fortunately they were freezable, and he does actually like ham. He's down to his last six packs now.

The same "Matt" got into work on Friday morning after a heavy night on the tiles and was a bit disturbed to get an email reading "Booking Confirmation". It seemed that he'd gone online the previous night and booked a holiday for two to Florida in December. The same Florida that he was already heading for on another holiday in January! Working back through his call-history he found that he'd persuaded a friend to come with him at around 1am in the morning. At least he hoped that was the case, as the booking is non-cancellable, and the friend wasn't answering his mobile last time I saw Matt.

I feel lucky now that the worst I've purchased in such a state was a dodgy kebab, and maybe a DVD from the late opening Virgin Megastore. No surprise holidays!

Sony finally launches the PSP in the UK this week, and that's good news for me, because it finally means that I might be able to get a cheap memory stick for my US import.

But there are plenty of stories floating around about the so called success of UMD format films. They're selling plenty in the States at the moment, but can those sales really be sustained? Why would I buy a film on UMD instead of the far more versatile DVD? Do I buy it instead of or in place of the DVD?

I guess some kind of pack that gave me both a DVD and UMD of a film might appeal, but it all seems a bit like pre-recorded minidiscs to me. You could buy them, but then you might as well have bought the more versatile CD, copied it digitally to a blank minidisc, and had the best of both worlds.

Copying a DVD to a memory stick (that'll cost you the thick end of £50 at the moment) might be a bit of a chore at the moment, and not necessarily legal, but it's doable.

As the BBC story suggests, others are doing the conversion for you already. It remains to be seen what format the BBC let their programming be downloaded in, but watching last night's Eastenders (or whatever) on the way into work on your PSP, mobile or PDA does have some appeal.

The UMD thing is all moot for me anyway, since while games remain region-free, films aren't. So I couldn't use a UK UMD disc even if they were given away free.

Former MI5 officer, David Shayler, in Old Street tube station. I assume that this isn't top secret, and no lives are at risk by revealing this information...

Who's the Daddy is a new play by Toby Young and Lloyd Evans, The Spectator's theatre critics, that presents an ever-so-slightly fictionlised version of the goings on at The Spectator last summer.

So we have Boris Johnson and Petronella Wyatt, Rod Liddle and "Tiffany", and most famously Kimberly Quinn and David Blunkett. Add into the mix Michael Howard ("will you fall on your stake after you lose the next election?") and a South American cook (really only there to provide a Peter Mandelson gag), and you have a Ray Cooney-style farce.

Very funny it is too. My knowledge of the facts of that case come exclusively from Private Eye - and it turned out that I was sitting next to an old Eye-hand in Francis Wheen. He wasn't the only "face" in the crowd since our party also included Sun political editor (and hence one of the most powerful journalists in the land) Trevor Kavanagh, and I also spotted Toby Young, co-writer of the play, himself, along with Grub Smith (sometime FHM writer and Bravo TV presenter). OK, so not everyone in the audience was of quite the same calibre, and only one of those people has written two books, both of which I own, yet haven't actually gotten around to reading (Wheen).

The play itself features Michelle Ryan (lately Zoe from Eastenders) as the very attractive Tiffany (an unlikely Guardian undercover reporter), and Sarah Crowe (from the Philadelphia ads and Carry on Columbus - although neither of those two gigs is likely to be at the top of her CV. She plays Petronella Wyatt).

I've got to be honest and say that I laughed the whole way through. I'm not sure that the play is quite going to make it beyond the confines of The Kings Head pub in Islington, because the target audience is a little thin. But I loved it all the same. You can read more from Toby Young on his blog, where he explains all - and links to the many reviews.

And I should explain that Trevor Kavanagh was in our because his son is a friend of ours. I can honestly say that this is the first time I've seen an audience member name-checked in the play I was watching, as happened with the very polite Kavanagh. Of course, I didn't engage him any political issues. The civility may have ended there... (That's twice in one week I've chickened out of confronting a politician). Still it was entertaining to see Francis Wheen next to me lean forward to see how Trevor was taking his mention (for the record, he enjoyed the play and the Quinn/Fortier character seemed to be particularly accurate).

Strangely, this is the second play I've seen set among writers from The Spectator. The fantastic Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell by Keith Waterhouse, and starring Peter O'Toole is one of the best plays I've ever seen in my life, with an outstanding performance from O'Toole - even on a Wednesday afternoon in a half empty theatre full of pensioners in Bath as I saw it, with my cheap student ticket.

I'd love to cycle to work, but given that it's a long way, and we have neither a shower, nor the facility to store bikes, it's a bit of a problem.

But quite a few people have gone out and bought bikes recently due to fears of bombers on the tube. Obviously, this is completely daft reasoning - since you're far likelier to be knocked off your bike as a new cyclist, than blown up on a tube. Not that I want people to stop cycling, but just behave rationally.

The local TV news has just done a piece on the issue, and the lack of devent facilities such as cycle paths and places to lock your bike. Of course having somewhere to lock it is one thing - the chances are it'll get nicked anyway if it's a good bike and it's left on the street. I noticed in Copenhagen that the vast majority of bikes were decidedly dull and not worth stealing at all. They also had very handy little locks that effectively run through the back wheel of the bike making movement impossible. I barely saw an expensive Kryptonite lock the whole time!

One of those things that really irks me is (and I have to be really careful here because I know I'm going to offend someone) people who get Chinese or Japanese lettering as tattoos on their bodies.

Unless you actually speak, and can write, the language yourself, you've no idea what you've got permamently written on you. This is particularly the case if the person who did the tattoo was not of Asian origin (although I'm sure that there are a limited number of white tattooists who can write Kanji perfectly).

So it was entertaining to find out that there's a website - Hanzimatter - dedicated to telling people what their tattoos and lettering really mean. (The link came via Neil Gaiman's site).

It's amusing to think that we all laugh at those Japanese T-shirts that mangle English words because they're put together by someone who doesn't speak the language, or maybe used Babelfish to do the translation. Yet we're equally as bad.

Aside from the fact that I'd never have a tattoo anyway, I'd like to think that I'd want anything I had written in a foreign language to have been written by someone who speaks it, rather than copies it from a book (many of the examples on the Hanzi Smatter website are poorly written rather than just wrong). And even then, you'd always have at the back of your mind, the possibility that they've written "dickhead" or something similarly charming.

Wow - here's a "solution" to a problem I never knew existed. It seems that Pret A Manger have been look to produce a smaller sandwich. It seems that two slices of bread and a filling is just too much!

So they're now producing sandwiches which are made from just the one piece of bread. Brilliant! Half the weight, half the fat, half the calories - er, half the food.

Still we're living in a world where shops sell slices of apple for those who find a whole apple just too much, and sliced and washed carrots - again a chore too far.

Madam Tussauds, the worlds famous, and bizzarely popular waxworks museum, is advertising quite heavily on the tube at the moment using this picture of Robbie Williams to entice us in. I may be a little bit slow today, but can someone explain to me why I'd want to visit the place if the likenesses are quite as poor as this?

(I did recently hear a fantastic story, the veracity of which I cannot say, about The London Dungeons, a waxwork of Mary Queen of Scots bent over in the stocks and a security guard with "urges". I'll let your imagination do the rest, but let's just say that they do have CCTV in the place)

What fun it is to try to visit people using only public transport and wishing to travel on a Sunday. I wanted to pop down to Kent today to see my brother and his family. My dad and sister were also there.

Yesterday I went on the National Rail website to try to use their journey planner. This wasn't just to check out train times, but also in the full knowledge that there are always engineering works going on at the weekend, I wanted to check train times and possible diversions.

The website was down. And, as I type this the following day, it still is. Well, it is if you want to use Firefox, a browser that it's been perfectly happy to accept before. Yesterday it threw me a googly by pretending that it was all something to do with my browser not accepting cookies, which it does.

Similarly, The Trainline was also down. And it seill seems to be now.

So I tried the National Rail Enquiries helpline, which has evidently outsourced its operation to India. Still they were helpful, but the two potential routes I put to them involved several changes and a bus ride. Incidentally, if you visit Say No To 0870 they can give you "local" numbers that avoid 0845 7 numbers which are chargeable on my mobile phone and aren't part of my inclusive minutes.

I spoke to my brother who suggested another nearby station. This time I visited South Eastern Rail's website and perused their timetables. Then I spotted a special timetable that accounted for engineering that was taking place until next weekend.

Aha! So that'll supercede the normal timetable. I found a train departing at 9.46am from Charing Cross. Naturally my local line in this part of north London was also experiencing engineering works, but a bus, train and a couple of tubes later I was walking out onto the concourse of Charing Cross station. It was 9.31, leaving me enough time to buy a ticket and a newspaper.

Except for one small thing. All the trains were starting at Victoria today, a helpful sign told me. 15 minutes to Victoria or an hour's wait! No time for the tube, so an £8 taxi later, I was in Victoria where the 9.46 had changed into a 9.50 train but I jumped on.

I got there of course, and it's true that I "faredodged" because I didn't get a chance to buy a ticket. Well, I only wanted a ticket from the boundary of Zone 5 and they can't do them on trains. But an annual season ticket was enough to impress guards in both directions who failed to spot that it didn't allow me to take this route. But the cost of the journey to me would have been around the same as that taxi fare, so I don't feel too bad about it all. Don't you love public transport? (Still, here's a nice story about travelling to the Arctic Cicrle by train).

It's the same old story - Cliff Richard fans are out camping in a car park to buy tickets to a celebrity tennis tournament which go on sale on Monday. The reason for this excitement is supposedly because it's the last time Cliff will be playing tennis. He's 64.

Cliff Richard fans, as we all know, are completely mad (Well not as mad as Michael Jackson fans, but I'll leave that alone since someone who works not too far away from me is a member of that "community").

Years ago I was travelling home on the tube at around the time of one of Cliff's concerts at Earls Court had finished. Being in that carriage was like being shut up with a large number of your mum's dottiest friends. You could smell the HRT.

But my favourite memory of Cliff fans dates back to 1998 when Chris Evans was on the Virgin Radio breakfast show. Due to some slight or other, followed by a "ban" on playing his records, we had fans camping out on the pavement in front of the station protesting. Virgin put out a statement that spoke about the station banning his records. Of course it played out wonderfully for the PR, since Virgin banning Cliff is a bit like Virgin banning Wagner - completely meaningless. Still you did have to step around the tents on the pavement to get into work, and they did stay out for about a week.

Phil Williams on Five Live asked one of the fans who was queueing this time around when the tournament was being played and she (it's always a she) November. So why were the tickets on sale so early? It's probably so we can queue in the warm, said she. Er no. It's so the promoters have got the fans' cash for six months in a bank account.

Yesterday a Virgin Atlantic plane to New York was forced to divert to Canada when it mistakenly sent out a hijack warning signal. Fighter jets were scrambled and it was forced to land in Halifax where RCMP SWAT teams borded the plane.

All very exciting, but what are the chances that I knew TWO separate parties on board that flight? A couple of guys from work were heading to New York to collect a Webby, and another ex-colleague was off to interview an actress for a film.

For ages it's always seemed ridiculous to me that service providers are more interested in new customers than their existing ones. You get a better deal by switching away than being loyal.

Recently BT and Nationwide have run TV ads explaining that they treat their existing customers as well as their new ones. Now Orange has got into the game. A recently launched series of press ads explains that existing customers are just as important as new ones, and also mentions that those people on Your Plan 120, 200 and 300 can get double minutes and texts free for six months. All I have to do is phone up.

There's a website that says the same - you can see it here.

So I phone up 343 where I get through to an operator who examines my account and... no I can't get the upgrade. It seems that there are some terms and conditions, and that I need to be 9 months into a 12 month contract before I can make use of this deal.

A closer look at the website reveals a tiny Terms and Conditions link at the foot of the page. That page is full of terms and conditions, but the one I need to see is right at the bottom.

I'll have to check again with the newspaper ads to see if all that detail is there, but it does seem more marketing to me to get a customer's hopes up by seemingly offering something, and then producing terms a bit later on. Of course if I'm nine months into a twelve month contract then another six months takes me three months out of contract, when I might be looking around for a better deal.

Look again at Orange's webpage - no asterisk indicating exclusions. How many other customers are bombarding their customer support lines with these calls?

"He who turns his back on faithful customers is asking for a beating" it says at the bottom. Exactly.

In recent years there has been a spate of reports about price fixing replica football shirts.

But now you can buy football shirts relatively cheaply if you shop around - with supermarkets and discount sportswear outlets in retail parks (As a sidenote, I was looking for a bar-bell weight at the weekend for reasons I won't go into now! Anyway, I wandered into one of those places and it was so stuffed full of clothing rails that you could barely move around. And this was in a spacious out-of-town site, not some cramped high street store. They did have England away shirts priced £10 each though).

Anyway, with the Lions tour just getting underway, I thought that it might be nice to get a shirt. But Lions tour rugby shirts seem to be the last bastion of protectionism. Adidas make the shirts, and if you can get them for even a few pence less than the £50 RRP then you're doing well. Lions shirts have always been expensive, but this is ridiculous. It's not as though the quality is exceptional, and you're effectively wearing a bid advert for Zurich insurance.

I did Froogle the shirts, and check Pricerunner, and found a shirt for £30, but it turned out to be for toddlers (sizes 18 months, 18-24 months and 24-36 months. Thirty quid!).

Someone's having a laugh. I think I'll wait for the new Arsenal kit instead.

I've just come back from a sales conference at work in Prague. A good time was had by all, and the people were very friendly. What I didn't realise was that I was arriving in Prague as the country was going through the closing stages of the Ice Hockey World Cup that was being held in Austria.

We arrived at the airport in the middle of a quarter-final game against the USA. Everyone at the airport was glued to the screen. The strange thing was that it was about 5.00pm and that seemed early to be playing a match.

On the coach from the airport, our bus-driver was listening to a radio commentary.

Then when we got a cab from the hotel into town, the driver was also listening to the game. I asked him what the score was and he told me sadly that the US were winning 2-1.

In town we found a bar, and before long a great roar went up all around us. The Czechs had equalised. I really should have gone into the bar, but it was a while later that we heard another roar, and I went in to investigate the TV where a jubilant Czech team could be seen. The Czechs had won on penalties.

A little later, I was helping out in a technical capacity for events later that evening when two drunken and delighted Czechs came into the club that I was working in singing as they went. I established what had happened even though I have no grasp of Czech and they had none of English. But I joined them in a celebratory brandy.

As it turned out, the Czechs went on to beat the Swedes in overtime during a Saturday night semi-final (I was back in the UK by then), and they went on to defeat Canada 3-0 in a Sunday night final. I bet the streets of Prague would have been a good place to be that night!

Some of the sights in Prague are more disturbing, however. I didn't see it myself, but a few colleagues told me that on one of Prague's main streets, they'd seen an old man fondling a young teenager - possibly as young as 14 - right out in the open. Actually, whether it was in the open or not is neither here nor there. But it's just child abuse pure and simple. Prostitution is rampant and open. The sex shows are lurid and everywhere. The city gets over-run by British stag parties (a downside of cheap Easyjet flights), and drug-dealing takes place openly in the streets.

On the otherhand, the buildings are beautiful and the place has an old-world charm. But the Czech authorities really need to clean up their act.

Still loads of other things to write about, but first something terrible that happened at lunchtime, in which I was an unwitting accessory.

I was in a McDonalds near work eating my lunch (yes I know all about Super Size Me), and I was reading my paper in peace having sat down in an unoccupied booth, when a middle-aged woman came over. She didn't say anything but gesticulated in the general direction of the seat next to me.

I couldn't see anything, but was slightly uncomfortable that she was a little close to me for comfort. Being a wary soul, I kept a close eye on my belongings, but my wallet and phone were out of reach anyway.

I lifted my paper and still couldn't see anything. But she continued to gesticulate. Afterwards, I would think it odd that as someone wearing a Canadian lapel badge, she didn't say a word of either English or French. But at that moment, I leaned right over to see that under the table, there was indeed a small black bag. It was obviously a camera. I reached for it, and passed it over smiling to her. She must have forgotten it when she'd left.

I resumed reading my newspaper for another ten minutes or so until two Japanese lads came up to me. One of them spoke good English, and asked me if I'd seen their camera that they'd left under the seat.

I was mortified.

The woman who had claimed the camera was obviously a thief. I'd been eating for a few minutes before she'd come over, but I hadn't seen where she'd come from. She'd quite easily been sitting in the restaurant watching events unfold. She'd noted that the two Japanese lads had left their camera. Then she'd watched me arrive at the same table and sit down. She'd waited a while more in case the Japanese guys had maybe realised their mistake sooner.

Then she'd made her move, and her franticness was probably linked to not wanting to be caught out in case the Japanese guys came back too soon. In the event, her timing was perfect. I was a willing sap, and she had a digital camera.

I told the Japanese guys what had happened. I felt awful. There's CCTV in that McDonalds, so I accompanied the lads to the manager where I told him what had happened. He told them to go the police who would come back. The woman would surely be on camera, although what the police would be able to do is difficult to say.

But she probably does make a living sitting in McDonalds, nursing cups of coffee whilst watching the other patrons until they forget a bag or a purse. It's easy to do.

I related this to someone at work who mentioned another trick adopted is when you've got your mobile on the table. A couple of "foreigners" come over, thrust a map in front of you, covering up your phone. They then get you to give them directions. When they take the map away and head off, your phone's gone.

You just can't be too careful.

I've got loads to write about, and at some point very soon, I'll write it down.

But in the meantime, is everyone else enjoying the Sudoku wars as much as I am? I came across these little puzzles a while ago. Now things are getting out of hand.

Earlier this week, The Guardian became the last of the big four quality nationals to launch their puzzle, with a front page piece explaining how their hand-rendered puzzles were superior to those computer generated puzzles of the papers. They put their puzzle on page 2, giving it similar prominane to the crossword (a puzzle no paper could ever be without unless they wanted to lose readers).

The Independent, meanwhile, has upped the ante, by putting a "Quick Sudoku" on their backpage where once you might have found a quick crossword. Actually, in the old days you'd have found a full cryptic crossword.

Inside they now publish three puzzles a day: beginners, intermediate and advanced.

Most amazingly of all, The Sun has launched it's own "Sun Doku" puzzle, publishing its second one today with a front page puff-piece. It should be noted that The Sun's puzzle seems to have slightly more numbers filled in than the other papers.

Metro meanwhile has some kind of puzzle that involves the numbers 1 to 8, rather than 9. The Telegraph's puzzle has leapt into The Sunday Telegraph. And books a plenty are appearing in the shops with volume 2 of The Times' effort coming soon, and WH Smith publishing their own volume (kind of in association with The Guardian's compilers).

According to this piece from Mediaguardian, the Mail and Express also have the puzzles. I wouldn't know. (Actually, I did buy a Mail on Saturday because they were giving away a free DVD of the not bad Evelyn Waugh adaptation of A Handful of Dust. But you'll be pleased to learn that once I'd retrieved the disc from its polybag, I actually threw away the entire paper unread!).

I'm not sure if I'm pleased or disheartened to learn that Carol Vordemann is a fan (of Sudoku puzzles that is. She may be a fan of the Mail - I don't know). OK - I admit to being chuffed when I can do a particularly tricky numbers game on Countdown.

It's stories like this that make me such a terrible hoarder.

In London, as you may or may not know, they've been phasing out the old Routemasters and introducing bendy-busses. You know - the things that take up twice as much space as the old ones, and that don't let you jump on and off whenever you like.

Anyway, I still don't quite understand ticketing on these things. In Central London, buses don't take cash any longer. If you're an occassional traveller, you should buy your ticket at the machine by the bus-stop. Or you can buy a pre-paid Oyster card. Or you can buy books of tickets in advance which save you a few quid.

But the thing is, the driver is no longer interested in you. We Londoners are used to either the conductor or driver taking an interest in whether or not you have a ticket or cash or a pass. Now, unless you're handing a pre-paid ticket in, the driver doesn't want to know. And you can get in via any door.

If you've got an Oystercard, you're supposed to swipe it past one of the readers throughout the bus, but initially there were problems with these - they didn't know the time, so couldn't be linked through to the central system.

But if you're like me, with an old-fashioned paper pass, you don't show it to the driver, and don't swipe it against anything. You just get on and sit down, and maybe wait for a ticket inspector.

But if I can do that, what's to stop everyone else on these busses doing that?

Su Doku or should that be Sudoku? Whichever, it's the craze that's sweeping the broadsheet-reading nation. And I was completely unaware of it until last Sunday.

That was when I was looking in a bookshop and happened to notice a Su Doku puzzle book that seemed to be in the bestsellers section. A quick flick through revealed some kind of numerical/logical puzzle. Maybe the sort of thing I'd like? I bought the book.

It seems that The Times introduced the puzzles to their paper last November, but that they originate from Japan. The numbers are pretty irrelevant since the puzzles are completely logic based and they could be replaced with letters or symbols. Being logical, they can be a bit more accessible than crosswords - at least to me - and so that's an advantage.

Anyway I completed a few and quickly became hooked. Yesterday's Independent redesign introduced a puzzle to that paper I notice, although with puzzle #1 they presented an example solution (in the place where in future, yesterday's solution will appear), and they managed to misprint it. So it really won't help the novice.

But the Indie isn't the second paper to jump on the bandwagon. That's the Telegraph which quickly appreciated the puzzles' apparent popularity. Now both The Times and Telegraph run daily competitions. With The Times, you can win a bottle of champagne by noon each day, whereas the Telegraph gives you until 9pm when you can win a pair of theatre tickets. So far, the Indie is sticking to doing it for the love of the puzzle.

From what I've now heard either the Mail or the Mail on Sunday is also running a puzzle.

But the rivalry between The Times and the Telegraph is legendary and that's equally the case with Su Doku puzzles. The setters of each paper's puzzles have their own websites (here and here). And the rivalry spills over into the setters. Here's The Times' setter mentioning that other sources of puzzles "might be faulty." And here's the Telegraph on The Times' claims.

Needless to say - there are computer programs around the solve the puzzles for you, although it does seem a completely pointless passtime. Aside from the intellectual exercise of producing such a program that is. (Having said that, I have been known to sit in front of Countdown with a palmtop anagram program, gleefully beating, or at least equalling the scores the competitors get. The numbers game, I'm relatively good at on my own thanks.)

But I'll leave computers alone, and try to get good at these puzzles on my own terms.

The Trocadero must, incredibly, lose more money than anything else in the capital.

Let's see what it has going for it.

1) It's just off Picadilley Circus and is close to Leicester Square in the heart of London's West End.

2) It has loads of space within it.

3) It can be adapted to either hold many different outlets or a single attraction.

But it's mostly empty. In its basement, which directly links to Picadilley Circus tube station, are several permamently failing businesses including money exchange places, barbers and bars. As far as I know, all of these businesses are currently closed.

Some of the exterior places do seem to do OK. The HMV is always busy. There's a popular nightclub - On Anon. And a cafe and casino which probably do OK. There's a UGC cinema which does so so business. And there's Planet Hollywood which is still around, although the downstairs sections and screening room have been made into a separate private members' bar and cinema.

Yet inside it's mostly empty. Where once there was an IMAX cinema, there's now a temporary "Titanic" exhibition. There's a full-size bowling alley or at least there was last time I looked. And plenty of space for games machines. But the internet cafe has closed. And where once Sega had a massive multi-floor gamesworld, there's now nothing at all. McDonalds moved out some years ago. Other attractions have been and gone over the years. Without a doubt there are hundred of square feet of real estate going to waste.

I don't know why nothing's ever worked there. Maybe the layout just doesn't work for anything with little space on each floor, but many floors. But I find it amazing that nobody's been able to make it work.

Having said all that, if you do happen to pass by, there a great "mini-bowling" alley that's much better and more affordable than the full size one. At just a pound a go, you get 10 rounds on a shortened alley with smaller ball and smaller skittles. Great fun, and I can actually win at it (unlike the full-size version). Now where's my Big Lebowski DVD?

Picture yourself. You're two thirds of the way through a journey in deepest, darkest north Norfolk. You're tired. The train leaving London was packed solid due to the fact that it's the first train out of London that allows Saver tickets. So when you arrive at Norwich station and see a chip vending machine, you just have to give it a go!

There are very few things that I know about vending machines, but chief among them is that the contents tend to be pre-packaged. So that's cans and packets. You also have your drink dispensers which basically work by adding hot water to a variety of powders to lesser or greater success. But chips is a whole other proposition. The machine, filled supplied by McCains, is supposedly filled with non-oil cooked chips. Instead hot air seems to be the method of heating the food up. Images of hairdryers pointed at oven-chips came to mind.

The machine's probably been there ages, but I'd certainly never noticed it before.

Anyway, I inserted my pound and waited. As advertised, you got a 45 second countdown as they were prepared. Then you wait for the red light at the bottom to stop flashing before you remove the cup. The red light dutifully flashed before stopping, and I warily looked for a cup. None was to be seen. Then I saw the bottom of a cup in the roof of the dispenser. As I pulled, loads of chips jammed in with the cup came through as well. The cup itself was three cups together, and inside were something like six or seven individual chips at the bottom of the cup, none of which seemed to have been especially heated through.

A pound wasted, and my suspicions about the possibilities of a chip vending machine remain well-founded.

I had a look around to see if anyone else has had some experience with these machines. He
re's a blogger who seemed happy enough with her experiences, and that was back in 2003. Someon
e else mentions satisfaction in passing.

This cached page from 1997 (!) suggests that the machine is that old and has won awards! And apparently there are also Pizza
dispensers...

Back in 1979, we went on a family holiday to the little Suffolk village of Walberswick. This was only our second holiday away. Until then we'd only visited our grandparents in Sheringham on the North Norfolk coast. Since Walberswick was only a little further down the coast from our usual summer haunt it should have felt very similar, but because we were staying in an unfamiliar holiday cottage, it was much more exciting. All the more so, because that summer saw an epidemic of greenflies, and the air was so thick with them as we arrived that the windscreen wipers were on as we drove up in our Renault 12.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, the sometimes juvenile B3TA had an interview with Tim Hunkin. Hunkin, as you may or may not know, was the writer and illustrator of The Rudiments of Wisdom that used to appear in the back of The Observer magazine. Sometimes I read it, and often I didn't, being slightly too esoteric for a child my age. He went on to make a couple of great series for Channel 4 - The Secret Life of Machines. He and his colleague, who's name I forget, would explain how stuff worked. Do you know how a telephone actually works? Well he'd explain it. I still vividly remember his semaphore system for sending a fax.

So Hunkin is an interesting character. In the B3TA interview he talked about these things and others. In particular, he mentioned the machines he builds now, and how many are on show Under the Pier in Southwold. So I resolved that a trip to Southwold was in order.

It's important to know that I don't own a car. If I did things would have been a little simpler. So I consulted Traveline to help me plan my trip. Awkwardly, Southwold doesn't have a station, so it was a question of a train from Liverpool Street to Halesworth from where I'd need to catch a bus.

To give myself a decent amount of time in Southwold I needed to start early. So on Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed early, and headed off out at 6am to get to my "other" local station - that is to say, a mile away from me, from where it was a quick trip into London, arriving there at 7.00am.

The train onwards towards Lowestoft was a surprisingly small three carriage affair. But then this is an unusual route. Unfortunately by the time we reached Witham it was obvious that there was a problem, and we were stuck for around half an hour. As I was in no rush to get anywhere and indeed had been banking on some quality "reading time" I wasn't unduly annoyed, although I was aware that the bus on to Southwold was a connecting service, and any serious delay was likely to jeopardise that connection.

But the delay did allow me to eavesdrop on some of my fellow travellers. In particular, a young woman had boarded at the previous station and now she was making a call on her mobile in quite a nasal voice.

"Hello. It's Kimberley. Unfortunately I'm going to be a little late into Ipswich. Sorry. See you later. Bye."

Then when the delay was prolonged she made a further call, again apologising to a certain degree.

She also made a call to the national enquiries helpline asking about services out of Ipswich later that afternoon and on to a different part of Essex.

Between these calls, she was spending a considerable amount of time topping off her makeup.

Now it's difficult to explain why my mind raced to one inevitable conclusion about what her profession might be. She obviously wasn't calling friends, this was a work call. She might have been a temp, and surely that would have been the natural conclusion of a call made at the start and end of work hours, but this wasn't the thought that went through my mind. I was picturing a working girl who travelled around Essex and Suffolk on trains, unusually servicing her clients during the day.

I never found out, obviously. But I was soon arriving in the small town of Halesworth where, significantly, there was no waiting bus. I was only five minutes after the time the bus should have been there, but a further twenty minutes brought no sign of it. And the next bus wouldn't be along for two hours, along with the next train. What to do?

I didn't have a map, but using my innate natural sense of direction, and thinking that Southwold could be no more than a few miles away, I started walking down the main road out of Halesworth. I'd reached a mini-roundabout that notably had no signs indicating Southwold, when I saw a bus heading to Norwich. Not the direction I wanted then... So much for that "natural" sense of direction.

I tried surfing to Streetmap and Multimap on my hi-tech mobile phone, but with a rapidly failing battery, this was proving to be a lost cause. I trudged back to the station and decided to explore the town centre for another hour until the next bus arrived. Halesworth is quite a nice bustling Suffolk town with few chainstores, but suspiciously did have an Organic Coffeeshop which began to make me suspect that I wasn't "in the country" to the same extent that I thought I was. A quick look in the estate agents' windows confirmed this view.

But it was time for the bus to Southwold, and, being certain to arrive at the bus-stop a good fifteen minutes early, I was soon in Southwold. It turned out to be eight miles away, so if I'd managed to set off in the right direction, and had been wearing appropriate footwear, I'd have got to Southwold in exactly the same time - but knackered.

It was quite a nice day, although not as sunny as I'd hoped, and as it had been in London the day before. But I was soon walking along the promenade, with its brightly coloured beach huts (did I really hear someone talking about them costing £50,000 to buy one?).

The pier is small and not nearly as twee as it could be. The Under the Pier Show, it must be explained, is not actually under the pier. It's about half way down. But the machines are great. The Rent-A-Dog allows you to go on a typical dog walk through Southwold. The Doctor wrote me a prescription, and the Instant Weightloss machine appealed. I also managed to pick up a copy of Hunkin's Experiments, via a vending machine, needless to say. All in all, it's well worth a visit.

Southwold overall is not the cheapest place to live. Aside from tourism, there's a working harbour. And it's also home to Adnams. There's a suspiciously high number of Antiques shops, and the restaurants look slightly better than you find in the average seaside town, with the corollary that there are fewer fish and chips shops. But I did find a real remainder bookshop with actual books that you think have been remaindered rather than printed specifically for that purpose. Needless to say I bought a stackful.

I did head off out to the harbour area where real boat building was taking place, and fisherman probably actually work. I was thrilled to see that the main feature I remember of my holiday was still there - the ferry across to Walberswick. That is to say, a rowing boat that takes tourists and others across about 50 metres of water for 50p if I read the sign right. The incredible thing is that I think it cost 50p when I was last there! The place where inflation stands still? Er, probably not, considering the sort of people who live there now.

My trip back was smoother than my outward journey. Well, aside from the half hour delay on the train. And then there was the unfortunate toilet incident. As I mentioned before, the train was a three-carriage affair, but of recent design, and consequently full allowance had been made for disabled travellers. Indeed by occupying a special seat for disabled people, I got lots of extra legroom. I should hasten to add that had someone boarded the train who actually needed the seat I would have leapt up to offer it.

The onboard toilet had full access, and had a door that slides open in a semicircle so that a mother and pram could get in, or a wheelchair. When I got to it, a mother with a pram and her father were outside it, but they were just sitting in an unfortunate place. I pressed the button to make the door open Star Trek-style, when I realised that there was a woman already in there. I quickly pressed the button again to close the sliding door and looked aghast at the father next to me who was now wearing a toothless grin.

"They should have a lock on these doors," I said.

Fortunately, curbing my embarrassment, the woman inside had been washing her hands. I offered profuse apologies and went in. Inside I realised that you have to press one button to close the door, but crucially, you must press a second button to lock it. Not my fault then. And overall it was less embarrassing than the time I came hurtling along a bridle path in some woods adjacent to a golf course, and rounded a corner to find a female golfer squatting on the path in front of me. Some skilful wheel skills and some fast peddling along with a shouted "sorry" limited any further embarrassment that time.

One of my biggest bugbears is the poor quality of supermarket bananas, and how the inferior "dollar" bananas we do get are doing no end of harm to people who farm small-holdings in the Caribbean.

This long piece from Observer Food Monthly goes through the whole thing in detail and is well worth a read.

Anyway, if you don't read that link, just remember to always buy Caribbean bananas and preferably Fair Trade ones. Apart from anything else - they taste much nicer.

Idea a Day is a website that you subscribe to which sends you a daily brilliant idea submitted by one of it's readers.

OK - so some of the ideas aren't all that brilliant. Here's one I submitted today:

Start an explosives company specialising in timebombs. The USP would be that they would have neither a digital countdown clock, nor make beeping noises, and all the wire in the bombs would be one colour. This will all make it that much harder for heroes to defuse in time since they won't know how long they've got, nor which wire to cut.

My flat basically doesn't have central heating. But it's OK! It tends to be quite warm all year around anyway. But when it does get cold I turn on the big storage heater in the living warm, but there is one small side effect - the warmth tends to send me off to sleep. I lost a good deal of Sunday afternoon due to this.

So last night was pretty nippy, and I'd had a nice meal and was settling down to watch Look Around You. I'd got most of the way through it, I think, when I drifted off. Next thing I know, I wake up, and I'm learning business French on the Learning Zone! I must have slept right through the Masters Snooker where the BBC were pesisting in calling Jimmy White "Jimmy White" and not "James Brown" as he wanted due to a sponsorship stunt with HP Sauce.

Did you know that when you conclude a deal in France, it's ordinarily celebrated with champagne? Well I know I didn't, although I'm not sure that every deal is conlcuded in such a manner. I mean, if I order a box of pencils from my stationery company, that's a deal isn't it? But hardly worth a bottle of anyone's champagne surely?

In utterly unrelated news, I was watching the latest episode of Lost at the weekend and in one of the flashback segments someone Charlie's trying to rip off speaks about her dad being out "buying a paper company up in Slough". A not-really-that-subtle allusion to The Office by J.J. Abrams, one Lost's producers, who had Ricky Gervais guest star in his other show, Alias, last season.

For the last year or more, there have been major refurbishments taking place at Kings Cross (and more particularly, at St Pancras where the Eurostar will terminate when the highspeed link is complete). The underground station has been, and still is, going through major renovations, and this week has seen the introduction of new ticket barriers for leaving the station.

What they've cleverly managed to do, is make the barriers operate more slowly than they did before, particularly if you live on a non-Oystercard part of the transport network and still have to push your ticket into the slot everyday. This means that with the sparkling new ticket machines, it now takes longer to get through than it did before! Brilliant.

I think the designers are probably the same people who oversaw the introduction of full colour cashpoint machines. Back in ye olden days, you'd pop your card into the green-screened machine, punch your PIN, select cash and, say £30, and get your card and the cash back all within 15 seconds or so. Now the machine munches your card slooooooowwwlllly, serves you a few ads for services you don't want, spends an age "processing" it, thinks about disgorging the cash and about an hour later you walk away with the money. How can advancements in science slow this process down?

On a completely unrelated subject, I think I saw the strangest street hawker I can remember at the top of the stairs to the entrance of Oxford Circus station this evening. At first I thought he was one of those guys who sell used Travelcards, or maybe he was selling things to put on your mobile phone that light up when it rings. No. He was selling USB Data Drives! In Oxford Street at a tube entrance in a shifty manner. Is this the new version of the knock-off perfume that they used so sell from those brown bakery trays?

An article on Mediaguardian (free registration reqd.) talks about Bill Gates' ownership of Corbis, the world's second largest picture library. But what's incredible is the bit about the Eiffel Tower. Depending on the time of day you take a picture: by day it's public domain, but at night you have to pay the person who put the lights up! And it seems that although you can see the Hollywood sign from all over the place, you might have to pay someone to publish its image. Even if you're standing in a public street.

If I stray onto private property to get a picture of a building, I can understand that I might have to pay a facility fee, but if I'm on a public road, surely I can publish what I like? In the same way that I can publish pictures of whoever I like that are taken from a public place (that's how the paparazzi make a living).

I was just about to pen an amusing piece about how the whole world (well Western world anyway) has gone plastic/rubber bracelet mad. I was going to point out that since Lance Armstrong launched the Livestrong bracelet last year, we've seen a massive explosion in bracelets including a blue bullying one, a white Make Poverty History one, and most recently a pair of intertwined black and white anti-racism in football ones.

But a bit of a Google search later reveals that a journo at BBC online has just beaten me to it. Bastards. And they've managed to list far more bracelets than I was aware of. I would however add that as far as I can see, the least deserving cause I've come across with bracelets available is the NBC daytime soap loyalty bracelets. If you're a big fan od Days of Our Lives or Passions, you can (or rather could - since I think the promotion's finished) get a bracelet for your show, and then maybe see your name listed in the credits of the show during sweeps month. (Sweep month, incidentally, is the strangely archaic way of getting ratings for the vast swathes of smaller TV stations in the US. Because there are too many to do regular ratings, they do a fuller survey at two points in the year. And since everyone knows the dates that this'll happen, all the networks go hell for leather putting out strong programming through this period to gather as many viewers as possible. Advertiser rates are then set based on this short period, irrespective of the fact that everyone's pulled enormous stunts to get viewers watching. Radio in the UK was once the same with the biggest survey happening during the second quarter of the year. So it was in this period that every station spent the bulk of its marketing budget and put on its biggest promotions. Remember "31 Days In May" on Radio 1?).

Returning to my original theme, it's worth noting that I own no bracelets for three reasons:

1) They're really jewelry and I don't like wearing any jewelry aside from a wristwatch. I'd find a bracelet severly irritating.

2) They're too much of a fashion accessory. Do charities that had previously adopted ribbons now feel as though they have to move on to bracelets? Do something original and stick to it, like Comic Relief's red nose, and the Royal British Legion's poppy.

3) There's no "end date" on these campaigns. I prefer acknowledging charities at certain times of the year. Both Comic Relief and the British Legion fulfill this by having days associated with them. A couple of weeks beforehand is enough. It's not as though any of us are continuing to give to the charity beyond the date we bought the badging device. So permamently wearing your Aids ribbon or whatever, almost says that you're "milking" that initial donation for months afterwards. And if you do give a Direct Debit, then excellent, but do you really need to keep broadcasting the fact that you give "to chariddee mate, but I don't like to talk about?" Remember those cars that used to keep their Comic Relief noses on for a full year or so beyond the end of Comic Relief day? Didn't you want to go around and cut them off? Of course charities need your money all year round, but if they all went for permament fixtures on our bodies and clothes then I'd have no space left. With several bracelets, red noses, stickers, pins, poppies and ribbons. I'd certainly be colourful. We end up getting back to deciding which is the more important charity. Is it Tsunami survivors, people who sacrifice themselves to keep our country free, those who're working on cures for some of the world's worst diseases and viruses, or the thousands who die daily due to hunger and suffering brought on by their country's debts and civil wars? I'm not ranking them in order.

There I go again, ranting on about charities which seems incredibly, well, uncharitable of me. But at least I didn't get started on those street hucksters who techniques I simply can't abide to get you to sign up (particularly as many of the people doing the "huckstering" are not the volunteers you see in stations and on high streets with their collecting tins, but paid professionals who get to keep up to the first nine months worth of contributions from your Direct Debits before the charity starts to benefit. Much better that you sign up direct with the charity yourself). I seem to have the sort of face that makes them bound into view when I walk by. And they never even seem to learn that the day before, a completely different charity was working the exact same place in the street, which, if it happens to be on your lunchtime sandwich run, leads to more "no thank yous" than is healthy for anyone.

The other week in a moment of reckless abandon at the football I ordered a drink of Bovril for the first time in about 20 years - seriously! The last time I remember drinking it I was at Enfield FC. I should first of explain that my local Co-op has been accurately described as being something out of Soviet Russia - the choice isn't exactly overwhelming. So when I couldn't find it I wasn't exactly surprised. Next stop was Waitrose where much searching later revealed an out of stock notice adjacent to the Oxo. Never mind - I'll pick one up at the Tesco near work.

So this evening I stopped by and was faintly surprised to find it in stock given that the store's raison d'etre is to sell pre-cooked meals.

As it turned out I was close to missing the train at Finsbury Park so I had to run up the stairs. As I reached the top I heard my train. I ran faster.

Smash!

My carrier bag split and one brand new jar of Bovril hit the concrete in a mix of broken glass and brown syrup. All �2.67 of it.
And I missed my train.

With half an hour to kill I visited a couple of other convenience shops, but the best I could come up with was Marmite.

Am I fated never to taste Bovril again? (Well obviously not, I'll just have to go and buy another jar. But that doesn't make a good end to an entry does it?)

There's lots of complete nonsense being spouted about a survey supposedly listing the world's top brands.

Supposedly Apple is the brand with "the most global impact" in 2004. Complete nonsense. This is followed by Google, then Ikea, Starbucks and Al Jazeera.

These brands are patently the ones that affect a certain type of monied middle-class westerner the greatest deal. But if you're trying to tell me that they're admired by your average Nigerian, Chinese or Indian then I'd say you're very much mistaken.

Apple got in because of the iPod. Fine device undoubtedly. But they've sold something like 10 million worldwide (and for worldwide, read US & Europe) which is a drop in the ocean compared to say, oh, Coca-Cola.

Google is a fine brand, if and only if, you're a member of the minority of the world with online access.

They probably don't all drive over to their local Ikea on bank holidays to buy furniture in Africa.

And the closest African Starbucks franchise is probably somewhere in Kuwait. Indeed I'm not sure that it'd have much impact in South America where they, er, grow the coffee.

Oh, and Al Jazeera doesn't have that great viewing figures around to the world compared to CNN and the BBC, so how does it do so well?

Let's just check the fine print shall we?

A total of 1,984 brandchannel readers from 75 countries voted online between November and December 2004.

A shortlist for each region is provided but readers are given a chance to write in brand(s) to compensate for omissions on the part of brandchannel.

So less than 2,000 people with internet access voted, and chose primarily form a pre-picked list. What that list was, we're not told.

Certainly, the methodology goes on to state that the brands must have been "highly visible" that year. But then which year doesn't Ford or Coca-Cola outspend Apple in advertising? And which global detergent brands aren't more visible?

Still, thousands of column inches, including these ones, will be spent carefully dissecting the list and looking for positive stories, when the whole thing is a complete puff-piece.

Over the years, on more than one occassion, I've bought one of those plug-in air fresheners. The only thing is that it forms such an unimportant purchase that when I next visit the supermarket and decide it'd be a good idea to buy a refill, I can't remember the brand I bought before, and so have to go for the full kit with another plug.

Consequently, I've got a collection of three different brands of plug-in air fresheners, excluding that one being advertised on TV at the moment with a built in fan. However, even with this range, when I went out and bought a refill, it didn't fit any of the models I already had. You'll be pleased to hear that by dint of a little funnel, I transferred the perfume from one bottle to another, switched the "sponge rod" type things which pass the liquid out, and hey presto, my lounge smells like a mountain fjord or whatever. (Actually, it's probably as well that I don't get hayfever at this time of year).

Please feel free not to read a word of this entry. OK - so you're actually free not to read a word of any entries on this site. But this one is particularly unworthy since it's really to get something off my chest - a hideous journey home last night.

I'm out with friends in Clapham and leave at around 10.50pm getting to Clapham Common tube station at 11.05pm. I know this because I'm aware that this gives me plenty of time to reach Kings Cross station for my 00.06 train home.

I glance up at the electronic indicator board to see when the next train is, but for northbound trains it isn't displaying anything. The southbound board does indicate trains, but to be honest lack of information isn't all that unusual, and I stroll down the platform to take a seat. There are very few people there. Pubs are just beginning to close up, and in any case, Clapham's more of a bar sort of place, and they've probably got another hour or so. Indeed when the first southbound train arrives, it disgorges lots of people who look like they're still intent on having fun.

Then the indicator board puts a train up. It's due in 13 minutes. That's a long time. I do some mental arithmetic and realise that I should still reach Kings Cross where I have an overground train to catch, with plenty of time to spare. For a moment it occurs that it might be preferable to head up to the top and jump on a bus towards Stockwell since it's only two stops away and I change lines there. But I don't really know Clapham that well and I certainly don't know which bus I'd need to catch. Anyway, it's 12 minutes now, so it's not so long to wait. A couple more people have joined me on the platform.

I'm passing the time away listening to music, when the indicator board flashes CORRECTION and goes blank. Maybe the train's only a couple of minutes away? More southband trains pull in, empty lots of young people intent on having fun on a Friday night, and pull out.

The board remains blank, and there's no rush of wind, or hint of oncoming lights to show an imminent arrival on my line.

But then the board flashes back into life. 13 minutes! It's groundhog day! It's now 11.15pm, and I now have to wait until half past for a tube. It'll be tight, but I can just about do it. Two stops to Stockwell, jump onto a Victoria Line train and if it looks iffy when I get to Kings Cross, I'll stay on until Finsbury Park where the journey from underground to overground is shorter and I can probably just meet the train. In fact it'll be fine. When the train arrives at half past, I'll still have the better part of 45 minutes to get to Finsbury Park and catch my overland train home. I had been hoping to pick up a takeaway at Kings Cross as I'm famished. But to be honest, the thought of missing the midnight train and having to wait a full hour until the last train is something that really doesn't appeal to me.

But I'm dreaming. I'm still sitting at Clapham Junction and it's now 11.25pm. At least the minutes are now ticking down.

Slowly.

I've just compared my watch with the minutes on the board. And the ones on the board are going slower. What's more, we've seen about six trains head southbound so far, and none have felt the need to return. It's only half a dozen or so stops down there. Surely one of them could have been turned around by now?

The platform's getting really crowded now. Those places that do shut at 11.00pm have cleared out their clientele. And seating is at a premium. There are some "characters" around. I'm trying to remain calm.

Now the board's switched off again with just two minutes to go. But here's the train. It's 11.36pm. It's still doable.

In the carriage it's standing room only but in no time we're at Stockwell where it's a quick trip across the platform to see...

... a Victoria Line train shut its doors and leave.

OK - no problem. The Northern Line was obviously playing up, but it's not midnight yet, so Victoria Line trains should be reasonably regular. The board is saying nothing. Then it pings into life.

13 minutes.

You're kidding? Nope. So another 13 minutes go by as I stroll up and down the platform purposefully. At 11.55pm a train finally rumbles into the platform. Nearly an hour after I started this trip I am precisely two stops away from where I began. I start doing some more mental arithmetic and realise that I'm screwed. There's no way I can make my train from any station. When we reach Kings Cross, the train I wanted to catch has gone about three minutes ago. I went up to check, but it had. There was no way I was going to make the connection further down the line at Finsbury Park. And if I'm going to have to kill an hour somewhere, it's better to do it at Kings Cross than Finsbury Park. Sure, you have a selection of people with interesting lines of employment, but I picked up a copy of The Guardian (with free Groove Armada CD) and settled down to a leisurely Burger King meal.

My 01.06 train departed on time and surely now my horrible evening was over. The trains at that time of night don't stop everywhere so that speeds things along. We pulled into Palmer's Green and stopped. And waited. And, isn't that the driver walking down the middle of the train past me?

After ten more minutes, the driver was back, and talking to us over the intercom (which was more than the station attendants at Clapham Common had bothered with when we'd waited over half an hour for a train). It seems that some of the doors aren't working, and the only way to alert the driver is to pull the emergency cord. He's fine with us doing this, although he does have to reset the cord each time.

In the carriage in which it was pulled.

But my journey very shortly is at an end, because we reach Gordon Hill with no more incident. It's 01.40am. Door to door this trip across London has taken the better part of three hours. But finally I can go home, to bed.

I finally heard a tannoy for Inspector Sands today. I guess that it really should have bothered me a little more - except that I'm sure it was a test...

I'll sit back and not take a view over whether or not having three minutes of silence for those who died in the Asian Tsunami was a good thing or not. I've no problem with remembering the dead, but putting it into the context of the many other disasters and tragedies that have struck - man-made or natural - it's necessity is not absolutely cut and dried.

Anyway, as we would for Armistice day, we got a polite email at work, sent to all staff explaining that everyone would be welcome to observe the three minutes' silence. And I had every intention of doing just that.

But I didn't.

What actually happened was that I was helping out fixing a laptop that had become clogged up, had lost thousands of songs from its Itunes, and then duplicated them all to boot. This was taking a lot longer than I'd planned, and I'd started around 9.30am. You need to know that this isn't my actual job. I was just helping out a friend. As it happens, I sit right outside my boss's office, and he eventually came out of his office, tapped the clock in the bottom corner of my screen, and wandered off.

Why did he do that? Actually, I was acutely aware of why he'd done it. I was spending far too much time doing trivial things and not getting on with proper work. Another colleague threw a look at me, as if to say "you really shouldn't have wasted so much time." I said as much to Pete who I was helping. He apologised on my behalf, but my boss said nothing. We decided that we'd done as much as we could, and called it a day, shutting down the laptop and chatting away all the while.

Then the silence of the rest of the office became apparent, our newsreader came out of the silence, read a brief summary of the rest of the news and we started playing REM's Everybody Hurts.

It clicked. It's just gone midday!

I said to Pete, "We've just chatted through the whole of the three minutes of silence!"

Guilt descended on us, and my colleague who'd thrown the look asked me how much indication I needed. My boss had tapped the clock on my screen - the clock reading 12.00 - and she'd tried to let me know by casting that look.

Because it was silent across the floor, everyone else had been aware that a couple of people at the other end of the office - us - had not been observing the silence.

The shame.

But returning to things that I'm not sure about, I have very mixed opinions about the New Years Day episode of The Vicar of Dibley. I'm not especially a fan of this sitcom, although I was surprised to learn that prior to the two specials shown over the Christmas period, there'd been as few as 16 previous episodes in total - the majority of which were specials themselves. I'd thought that there must have been dozens of episodes made - but since the man carrying the weight of the entire British film industry, Richard Curtis, pens them all himself - they're less frequent than I'd realised. Hence the big noise over these two new episodes.

I didn't see the Christmas Day programme - instead I was enduring my first ever full episode of Midsomer Murders with John "Bergerac" Nettles. But with little to do on New Year's Day evening, I sat down to watch it. The jokes were poor with a plot based around the fact that we're 20 years on from Live Aid, and an entirely predictable sequence where the Vicar goes speed dating. But then at the end, the show took a turn for the unpredictable. The main characters all sat down to have a meeting about writing letters to Tony Blair about world debt. Then the Vicar handed out white armbands (as passed around by the artists at the Band Aid 20 recording) and when they were reluctant to wear them, she showed a video (from this website). It was a very moving piece about African children whose parents had both died of Aids. We saw this video in full. When it was over, all the cast members were wearing their white bands. We then had a brief sequence with each member looking at the camera face on, before the programme ended without credits and the BBC put an action line number for further information.

So what's my problem? The BBC subverted a comedy programme to highlight a very worthy initiative - one that surely I can't have a problem with?

No I don't have a problem with the cause. But it still felt jarring to me seeing it presented as such. Why should this cause get the benefit of a top-rated sitcom over, say, cancer or heart disease charities. Is one cause more worthy than another? It's pointless asking such questions since they are unanswerable. We all have our personal causes that we might support or believe in.

Obviously the BBC do run regular charity appeals - including those for Children in Need, and, later this year, Comic Relief. Then there are the varying gameshows with celebrity specials - The Weakest Link for example - where the winnings go to charities that also get a mention. But in those instance, we know clearly in advance that this is a charity programme.

I know, since he was interviewed on Five Live the other week, that Richard Curtis is heavily involved in the Make Poverty History campaign, and that it is in fact a coalition of many other charities who are all trying to get something done in 2005. But be that as it may, Richard Curtis is undoubtedly using his access to a large BBC audience to push this particular cause. He has the power and influence to get it up there.

If large numbers of my family happened to die of cancer, that cause would be likely to be very important to me. And if I happened to be John Sullivan, and the BBC asked me to write one more episode of Only Fools and Horses, and I got David Jason et al to appear, my question is this: Would I be abusing my position as the writer if it became totally concerned with cancer charities and the worthiness of their work, and I used it as a springboard for launching the Del-boy Cancer Ribbon?

You can see where I'm going with this.

I'll say again that I'm not at all opposed to the sentiment that was being expressed. Just unsure about the manner in which it was introduced unannounced.

If I was really cynical I'd go along with another comment I read on an internet forum somewhere - why doesn't Richard Curtis get together a handful of his biggest stars and make Blackadder the Movie, or Four Weddings Two - something that'd be a guaranteed smash. The cast would do it for free or for cost. The many millions it'd be almost certain to make could all go to the charity, including TV rights, DVD rights and so on. Of course no film is certain to make back its money, although I am of the opinion that in general Hollywood isn't a loss-making enterprise. And putting films together's no easy task - certainly harder than getting forty or so musicians along to a central London recording studio one Sunday in November. But it is a thought...

But returning finally to Dibley, I'd also say that whether or not it was a good idea to include it, it was poorly executed and probably didn't quite do what it intended. It was too heavy handed. And I'm sure that if there'd been the opportunity, they'd have preferred it to not go out at the same time as the British public is embarked on one of its biggest ever charity drives for the Asian Tsunami, particularly as this served as a kind of launch event.

While the Dan Brown phenomenom roles relentlessly on, I was amused to see an advert for the Da Vinci Chronograph. A bargain at just £145, made by an ancient German company or something.

Anyway, I'm not exactly a horologist or anything, but it strikes me that Da Vinci owned no such watch. He died in 1519, and undoubtedly brilliant though he was, he didn't make watches. I've read Longitude and know what a difference John Harrison made some two hundred plus years later. So the idea of a Da Vinci Chronograph has about as much going for it as a Cleopatra Alarm Clock or a William the Conqueror DVD Player.

Incidentally, I came across this ad after reading an article from a recent Observer magazine about Paul McKenna. I'll admit to being interested in pieces about him because I think that while he's genuine, I'm not sure that there's anything much to the whole hypnotism (and by association NLP) at all. Indeed, I believe that it's just suggestable people being easily suggested to! The other reason I like to read something about him is that he went to my school, and it seems that no article can go by without him saying how much he hated it:

Though, in a way, it did intrigue me, because I saw that the Jesuits are a bunch of mind-manipulators and ... I remember reading recently that Hitler had the SS trained on the Jesuit training models ... you might want to check it, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's a highly manipulative doctrine. But really, I think, apart from Catholic school, I had a happy childhood.'

That's not my experience of school in the slightest - but then he seems to have deeper issues with his upbringing and what, if any part, his parents' religion seemed to have on him. I'm pretty comfortable in that regard.

Comments are a bit up the creek at the minute, and I have to moderate them for a bit until I can get this Typekey thing working. But I was getting several hundred comment spams a day, even with the latest version of MT Blacklist. Normal service will be resumed when I can get to grips with it all.

Well behind the scenes I've updated this site to Movabletype 3.12. I think I've got everything broadly speaking working, but if there's something I haven't spotted, feel free to let me know!

Do you get the idea that far too many people are taking the Da Vinci Code far too seriously?

So my cheapo Currys DVD player seems to have died on me. Or rather it's dead when it's in the setup with my TV; every time I move it out to have a look at it, it works faultlessly. Now obviously, if I hadn't spent as little as £29.99 then this might not have happened.

Fortunately, my replacement is even cheaper. Yup, I've found a DVD player from Argos that's going for £24.99, and after failing to secure one in their West End branch, I reserved one at another branch via the internet, only to arrive at the store fifteen minutes after they'd closed last night. So I picked it up this morning, and instead of listening to Arsenal only get a draw against West Brom, I watched DVDs instead. Run Lola Run is a film that I've had kicking around for years without ever finding the right time to watch it. This afternoon was that time finally. Franka Potente's great in it, and both she and the director have made another film, The Princess and the Warrior, which is on BBC4 later this evening. After watching the film, I watched it again with the director's commentary.

I followed this with Lost in Translation which I still love - probably more so now then when I wrote this. The only disappointment with this disc is that Sofia Coppola hasn't done a commentary, but this is made up for to a large extent by a great behind the scenes documentary which is cobbled together from camcorder footage on the shoot, some of which seems to have been shot by Spike Jonze. It's far better than the EPK fare that's usually included maskerading as a "making of" documentary.

Must go and listen to the soundtrack again.

But before I do that I have one other observation for today. The local Enfield branch of Starbucks is closed for refitting at the moment. But as is the way with chain stores, it has a notice in the window letting you know where your nearest alternative Starbucks can be found. It's about five miles from the Enfield one! What's the point of that?

"I fancy a coffee, so I'll pop in Starbucks.... Oh no, it's closed. Never mind, instead of going to another coffee shop locally, I'll jump in my car and drive several miles for a coffee..."

We don't live in the Australian outback here. We wouldn't drive for three hours just to get a pizza or something. If I was an electrical retailer who'd shut down and might have customers with faulty goods that needed help, then of course the sometimes distant next-nearest branch makes complete sense. But tea and coffee are instant gratification snacks. Putting a notice like that would be like my local newsagent shutting down for a bit, but letting me know that he has a cousin in Fulham who also has a newsagent, so why don't I pop in there to get a copy of The Guardian?

Exhibitions and trade fairs inspire mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, there's the excitement of vast halls of interesting stands and exhibits to see and visit. On the other, there's the dawning realisation that unless you've got a pocket full of cash there's not really all that much to see.

Possibly one of the least exciting jobs in the world ever is being a "PR girl" at a trade fair or exhibition. It's your job to smile, be gawped at by lascivious men, and hand out carrier bags of brochures. This, I imagine, can be depressing. And that's why the woman sitting behind the counter at the entrance of MPH '04 was looking particularly mournful, and was happy to let visitors take their own bags of goodies off the counter rather than hand them out herself.

An event like MPH really isn't my sort of thing, but at work we're a part sponsor so some tickets came my way, and with a spare afternoon with nothing else to do, I took myself off to Earls Court to see what the fuss was about.

Years ago, motor shows were notorious for their sexist outlook, with cars literally draped with bikini clad girls - well this was the motor industry. I never went to any of these shows, which tended to be held in places like Birmingham. The closest I ever got, was a Sunday afternoon highlights programme on the telly presented by someone like Noel Edmonds or Mike Smith. MPH, I was told, is different. For one thing, the motor industry for the most part can no longer afford vast stands dedicated to individual manufacturers. And indeed the only major manufacturer I saw with a stand to itself was Suburu. And they're hardly mainstream. Instead, it was the likes of HR Owen, and other major dealers and leasing outfitters who took up the larger spaces. Other stands were mainly occupied by accessories stands - the more expensive kind of accessory. So there were massage chairs (a surprising number of stands offered these), GPS systems, and stands selling holidays to Grand Prix in foreign climes - well we're not guaranteed a GP in the UK yet are we?

The main reason for attending was the theatre show in which we'd see various cars put through their paces in a large ampitheatre. But that wasn't due to start until 3.00pm. I made the mistake of arriving at 2.00pm.

I can't tell you how bored I was. In case you hadn't quite realised yet, I'm really not a "petrolhead." I simply don't get excited by seeing shiny cars that cost more than a reasonable sized family home in North London. I don't want a photo on my camera phone of me standing next to a Ferrari. And since I don't own a Ferrari, I don't want to by a Ferrari T-shirt either. And if I did own a Ferrari (I can tell you here an now, this will never happen), I certainly wouldn't want a Ferrari T-shirt.

The clientelle at the show was, unsurprisingly male. There were a few women there, but I'd not be lying if I said that many of them looked like they spend too much time in the world of motorsports. That is to say, very glamourous and rather disinterested. That's probably a massive slur on an entire sport. Sorry, not sport, hobby. If I may, I should explain that motor racing is a hobby. That's why you'll never see it in the Olympics. At its height, it's an engineering competition. That's why Formula One is so exciting. You see more overtaking at the Lord Mayor's Show.

There was a distinct lack of what I'd call normal cars. Family saloons, small city cars. Well I did see a Smart car, and a mini - but that was a cabriolet. And someday could someone please tell me why I should care so much about Eddie Stobbart. They're a haulage company right? As far as I can tell, their USP is that their drivers wear uniforms. Does anyone collect Exel Logistics toy lorries?

As is the way with these things, I had an initial scout around to see what there was. Then, when I got back to the start, it dawned on me that I'd seen most stuff, and there was now a full 50 minutes before I could at least be entertained in the theatre. A couple of stands had computer games which was mildly entertaining, although there were inevitable queues to play. Bose, that most over-rated and over-priced of hi-fi manufacturers, had a room where they could show off their audio wares. Again, you had to queue. You could also go into the paddock, but do be honest, I'd be happier hanging around my local garage watching MOTs happen than go there.

I nearly gagged when I saw the size of a Hummer. Some tosser was driving one around Golden Square a week or so ago looking for a parking space. His name was Nigel. How do I know? It was on his licence plate. Guess what - Hummers are really hard to park. It's a bit like owning an HGV, except they serve some kind of purpose. Still, if CSI:Miami is to be believed, that's what the Crime Scene detectives in Florida drive around in. The big downside with these is that I've seen Black Hawk Down, and they didn't seem to fair too well in that.

The only moderately interesting stands were those devoted to stuff that had a marginal relevance at the show. So there was a stand devoted to CCTV cameras (well, you've got to look after your vehicles), and most interestingly, another selling small MP3 players. This was some South Korean outfit who I'd never heard of. They were probably doing the briskest business in the hall however, even beating the guy who was selling fake chamois leathers using traditional market stall techniques (for some reason he was using Somerfield No Nonsense Cola for all his demos).

Finally it was time for the show. We all got into queues the 20 minutes early as requested on the ticket and then they made us wait until finally letting us into the ampitheatre. It being a Friday afternoon, this was only two thirds empty downstairs, while the upper tier was not being used at all. Our hosts were Jeremy Clarkson, Tiff Needell and Richard Hammond.

Now I must admit to sneakily enjoying some parts of Top Gear, while at the same time being largely dispirited by it. The banter's entertaining, but I look at those who've trekked to the middle of Northamptonshire or wherever it's filmed and think "why????" Clarkson can be an idiot with his deliberately non-green persona (scrap bus lanes, get rid of the congestion charge etc). But he can be fun. The other week he was quite a revelation on QI. So for something like this he wasn't bad.

The show attempted to present itself as a kind of circus, so we had girls in top hats and tails, and not much more start it off, then a couple of acrobats in streamers. On the ground various cars and bikes did "donuts" and jumps in the relatively small area available. In between this sort of thing, there were semi-scripted bits of banter between our hosts. There were some reasonably spectacular performances from professionals who can turn cars on a sixpence, and perform motorcycle jumps of quite prodigious heights. We got the odd race between a couple of young British rally drivers, and also two of our presenters with special guests: X-Factor/Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell and celebrity restauranteur and mate of Chris Evans, Aldo Zilli. The bit when one of their stunt drivers did a bit of two-wheel driving and went through a small gap was very good, and even better was Tiff Needell attempting the same. First time around he quickly ended up back on four wheels. The second attempt saw him put the car on its roof.

The finale was saw a car being thrown from one side of the stage to the other where it crashed into a caravan that was there solely for that purpose. Quite a spectacular stunt that worked perfectly, which goes to show that with accurate weights, angles and pressure from an air canon, you can very accurately chuck stuff around.

All round the show wasn't bad. Whether it was worth thirty quid (the nominal value of my ticket) was highly debatable, but it was fun nonetheless. Needless to say that with the show over, I scarpered pretty quick.

Today, Sir Christopher Wren's Temple Bar is being reopened in the City of London, 125 years after it was moved out of the city into the grounds of Theobalds Park.

This has got to be a good thing, although one suspect's that it's probably faired better in its wooded home for the last century or so, than it would have done if subjected to car fumes. I hope they've treated it well.

The monument had to be taken down carefully stone by stone, and has taken over a year to complete. There's a