• Clean-cut “youf” operatic quartet G4‘s cover of Radiohead’s Creep is either a crime against music or a post-modern deflation of passive-aggressive indie rock whining. I’m not sure which, but either way I am worried that my sister likes it and that I can’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t.
  • Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?” should be subtitled “…Including This Book“. Imagine two boring blokes from your year at university sitting in a pub, pissed and rambling away to each other in an attempt to make each other laugh and you’ve got some idea of the level of the tired “observational” “alternative” “comedy” packing its alphabetically ordered pages. I wouldn’t put that sort of feeble crap on PooterGeek—and that’s saying something. Interestingly, though, this book is unfunny in exactly the way that Charlie Brooker is funny. He manages to write about the same sorts of things, but his writing prompts snorts of amused recognition and is genuinely quirky and insightful—rather than, well, shit.
  • Take That recorded two-and-a-half very good pop songs—which is as much as a manufactured pop group can hope for and sufficient justification for their revival tour.
  • The Big Sleep has dated to the point at which it is now uncomfortable to watch—but Lauren Bacall’s appearance in the same film hasn’t.
  • iTunes for Windows is still as horrible as I remember it being last year. Why should people have to wrestle with such a frustrating interface just to listen to and copy music they legally own? Why isn’t there a big button that says “rip CD to MP3s on my hard drive”? Why can’t people just plug any old device into a USB port and copy a song? Why? Why? Linux notoriously sucks at multimedia and device driver support and yet I can still do these things trivially on my own machine—and the necessary software is completely free. Gah! Talking of braindead digital media rights management, ladies and gentlemen, I give you The New Yorker!…
  • Digital cameras still suck, but less so.