I paid £4...

..for the new Radiohead album, 'In Rainbows. I thought that £4 was probably more than the band would get if I bought a CD, or downloaded it from iTunes, but it was less than I would be prepared to pay for a CD. I almost never buy downloaded music, because I hate the DRM schemes that limit the devices on which I can play it. If I buy a CD, I can listen to it in my car, in any one of the 6 rooms in my house that have a CD player or three rooms with a computer, or I can rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player. If I lose my player, or a hard disc, I don't lose my music. I know I can get round the DRM if I can be bothered to do a bit of research on the net, but it is the principle of the thing. So I still buy CDs, usually from on-line retailers now that Fopp is gone.

What about the music? Well, I've only listened all the way through once, but I like it better than 'Kid A', or 'Amnesiac', or 'Hail to the Thief', but less than 'The Bends' or 'OK Computer' - it's rockier than the last three releases without being a return to the dense, complex textures of the earlier stuff. I do wonder how the rest of the band feel - it seems to me that everything they've done since 'OK Computer' has sounded like a Thom Yorke solo project rather than a full band effort. Still, I guess they get a fair share of the cash.

Team Banana

Tense and nervous, waiting for the start.

Racing

A well earned banana for everyone.

It's just garbage

A dead body is just another rubbish disposal problem. If anyone makes a fuss about mine when I'm dead, I'll come back and haunt them (OK, given that I don't expect any kind of afterlife that may be a bit of an empty threat). I simply don't understand why anyone needs a helpline to know whether bits of their relative might have been removed (for pretty sensible scientific reasons) several years ago. I get on fine with my parents, but when they die whatever it is that makes them human will be gone, and the physical remains will have really very little relevance to what or who they were. While I may miss them as people, I won't be getting sentimental over the garbage that's left.

Fruitstock

Just got back from a day at fruitstock with my children. What inspired marketing! For less than the cost of a TV advert, Innocent make a lot of friends,, enhance their cool image, and give a lot of people a good time. As you can see from the picture, it was pretty popular.

Please send money now

For years, I have deliberately avoided skiing, as the last thing I need is another expensive hobby, especially one that also demands large chunks of my annual leave. Then, last autumn, my wife suggested that we share a chalet with some friends. We quickly realised that we'd left booking a bit late but eventually, having got nowhere with internet searches and so-called specialist ski agents, our local travel agency found us a place in Les Deux Alpes for the February half-term week. The most expensive week in the calendar :-(

So that I wouldn't look a complete muppet when I got there, I booked a 'Learn to Ski in a Day' session at the Snowdome in Tamworth. That was well worth the money, and the instructor was excellent. More than can be said for me. My excuse is that my unicyclist insticts are just all wrong for skiing.

Once in Les Deux Alpes, for the first couple of days, I was just crap. I heard what the instructors said, but I just could not make it happen. I lay in bed at the end of day 2 thinking that I had just wasted thousands of pounds (family of 5 in peak week) - I was really quite fed up. By day three, I was just getting the ocasional feeling that I'd got it right and I was feeling better about it. On day 4 I forgot my lift pass and had to miss the lesson, so I got to spend the morning just practising the things that I felt I needed to. That really helped, and by day 6 I'd got it and was hooked. Now my problem is how to find the money to do it at least once every year.

Merry Hell

A BBC News Magazine article entitled Merry Hell talks about the effect evil minority pressure groups, such as the one that caused so much trouble over 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' earlier this year, can have on retailers. Sainsburys and Woolworths have pulled the DVD of the show from their shelves following complaints. It suggests that bloggers and other rational people are capable of writing more complaints than a bunch of nutters. Sounds like a plan...
I was thinking of boycotting them until I realised that it would leave me without a source of food. The supermarkets have pretty much done for the independent retailers around here. I'm boycotting ASDA because of Wal-Mart's atrocious human rights record, both with their direct employees and those of their suppliers, Tescos because I just don't think it is healthy for one company to be so dominant and Waitrose don't have a store that I can get to without burning unacceptable quantities of fossil fuels. So if I refused to shop at Sainsburys I'd get hungry. If only Ocado would improve their site design so that it didn't take longer to place an order than it does to drive round to Sainsburys and just buy the stuff.

Why does Hersheys smell like vomit?

No pretence at social or political significance today. Just a deep philosophical question - why does Hersheys chocolate smell like regurgitated lunch?
I presume that it is possible to buy decent chocolate in the USA, but the stuff we seem to hear about over here is Hersheys. People visiting from America bring Hersheys stuff as gifts for our children. And it smells like vomit, especially Hersheys Kisses. Looking at the ingredients, I can't see that it actually contains any sick, they must just process the cocoa in a special way to achieve the effect.
It's kind of embarrassing that many people probably think that Cadburys Dairy Milk is the pinnacle of British chocolate making, but at least it doesn't smell of sick.

PR firm demonstrates extreme stupidity

Someone trying to promote an amusingly named web design firm called WebXperts posted the surprise news this week that Google returned Dubya's biography when asked to search for 'failure'. They said

This search result dilemma was discovered by WebXperts Design, Incorporated, an Atlanta web development and consulting company. The programmers discovered the anomaly on October 19th, 2005 and reported it to local news agencies.

Given that the BBC reported this back in 2003, this only seems to demonstrate that WebXperts wouldn't know the web from a hole in the ground. In case you too managed to miss this news Wikipedia has a good explanation of what it is all about.