Along with the entire Internet, when I first saw the artwork for Iron Maiden's "Dance of Death" in 2003 I couldn't believe that they were serious. In a rare non-game example of what used to be commonly referred to (by which I mean 'by TV Tropes') as Sonic Syndrome, the wonderfully intricate and detailed painted artwork of their previous albums had been replaced with a polygonal abomination, something which looks like it was thrown together by a drunk Reboot artist at three in the morning. The story goes that it was only meant to be a concept, but the band accepted it as a final piece, and the original artist accepted as long as all references to his name were removed from it.

So it's been a long time since a new album's artwork has made me instantly question whether it was real, but after one of my occasional checks back to their site for news, Heavenly are the ones with the honour of having equalled that reaction. This time, it must be said, it's for entirely new reasons. When I opened the page, I saw that the menacing clawed creature more traditional for the genre that used to be on the front of the site had been replaced with... something quite different.

This isn't safe for work... but if you're worried about that, why are you on this site anyway?

Yes, it appears they've taken the album cover and turned it into a late night Cadbury Flake advert. I can't quite make out the artist's signature, but I don't think it's a name that I recognize - it goes without saying that the quality of artwork is impressive (I thought it was a photo at first), but its subject means that this is something that's now probably wise to leave off my Amazon Christmas wish list for fear of appearing like I'm asking for lesbian fantasy softcore pornography.

Fortunately, a preview track called "Lost In Your Eyes" has also been released and is as incredible as you would expect, keeping the massive bombastic sound that Heavenly have evolved into, but with a more traditional flavour in places (for example, this song actually gets reasonably close to an ABABCB song structure - usually Ben Sotto gets up to at least J). I think they would narrowly make it to be the band that I would actually name as my favourite - this is certainly the style that I've been trying to emulate the most in my own music recently.

Being familiar with Ben's weird and wonderful approach to pronunciation and syllablry by now and not making any overly optimistic assumptions about words starting on the correct emphasis or vowel, I'd like to have a go at transcribing the lyrics.

Have been waiting so long
Ring the best and turning for worn
Can you hear - me - cal-LING the Oreo
I will love - bring my loneliness
A request - no way to get back
Still brave - I've found her a laaost
Can you hear - me - calleeneeaahhleeoooh
I will lovely deewooaaaeeeey

Ride a, ride a, ride across the beef, oh
Ride a, ride a, ride just pretty loud
Ride a, ride a, ride and shine a Beano
So many things <ear splitting scratch> you have done

Fly - fly so hard, blood in the wind
Somewhere for you and I
Close to you, I'm getting lost in your eyes
Lie - up the stairs into your dreams
Forever gits tonight
Come alive when I am lost in your eyes
Lost in to your - highs

Ride a, ride a, ride across the beef, oh
Ride a, ride a, ride just pretty loud
Ride a, ride a, ride and shine a Beano
So many things to give with you have done

Fly - fly so hard, blood in the wind
Somewhere for you and I
Close to you, I'm getting lost in your eyes
Lie - up the stairs into your dreams
Forever gits tonight
Come alive when I am lost in your eyes

AAAA AAA AAAA AAAA AAA ÄÄÄÄ AAA ∀∀∀∀ AAAA ÅÅÅÅ AAA
Lost in your eyes
Lost in to your - highs

Well, his English is definitely improving.

I found out yesterday that the MBTA have started a trial run of an online feed that provides the current location and estimated arrival times of their eternally wayward buses. Only five routes are represented at the moment - the 39, 111, 114, 116 and 117 - but the feed is freely available, so developers can tap into it and use the data to create pages that can make a decent guess at telling you when your bus is going to arrive. I know of two pages that use it so far:

A live Google map that plots the current location of buses

A next bus ETA predictor (by me!)

If anyone reading this uses those routes and can say whether the pages are at all accurate, and if they work from mobile devices like the iPhone, that would really be appreciated - I can't test them myself yet because the buses for the trial run are nowhere near me. I hope it comes in useful to someone - writing it yesterday caused me to have dreadful nightmares about buses.

Also, if you want to see the service expanded to other routes, you could email the MBTA through their contact page and let them know that there's demand for this kind of service - I contacted them myself yesterday in the hope that encouragement might speed the process up a bit. You never know, it might help.

If you're web-inclined yourself, the XML feed and instructions for accessing it can be found at http://www.eot.state.ma.us/developers/realtime/ .

Today, after what feels like distressingly little time, I'm a quarter of a century old. Most of my year at school had birthdays this week, so it's probably easier to say "Happy birthday" to everyone I know and the number of hits will be higher than the misses.

My aunt sent me this. I appreciate the gesture, but I last visited her about twenty years ago and I think she's forgotten that I age... http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/im.....rthdaycard.jpg

What's happened in the last year? Importantly, I didn't die at 24 like I'd seen in a dream, although I made a pretty decent attempt at it< halfway through. And in an example of words coming back to bite you, I've said for a while that I was fine to not have to watch my calories or what I ate as long as I didn't reach 25, the year when everything you've been feeding yourself suddenly starts to matter and you instantly inflate like a rubber dinghy until you start hauling your giant wobbling rear end down to the gym.

Whitney and I held a dessert party yesterday with a couple of people from her work and college, and I made a sticky toffee pudding for it, still the only good thing to come out of Home Economics from the academy. I felt the first sure signs that I was aging then - every time before when I've made it, I've tended to put in a couple of extra scoops of sugar just to make sure it's deadly enough, but this time I was reading through the recipe and saying "Three sticks of butter, are you insane?" There was definitely alarm when we plotted it in Whitney's recipe application and it came out to 34,000 calories, but that was for a double recipe - as it is it's still about 500 to 700 calories per slice, which is about as healthy as diving under a steamroller. And even though she thought we wouldn't have enough, about two thirds of it is still lurking in the fridge - she's going to take it to work tomorrow and hopefully distribute the fat and sugar content among as many people as she possibly can.

Thanks to everyone who's already given me birthday wishes - my own wish is to get better at remembering other people's. I also got a lot of emails at midnight reading "Hello DavidN, We at [forum name here] would like to wish you a happy birthday today!" - including from places I haven't been to in years and can't remember why I even have an account there, like BemaniStyle. It made me realize that I might be online altogether too much.

My brother just sent me this (which was a bit of a surprise in itself, to be honest): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/.....ne/8355287.stm

I was prepared for the worst, especially when it started off by saying that furries had been propelled into the public consciousness of the UK by a court case involving two of them who were planning to kill one of their sets of adoptive parents, but after that things calmed down remarkably - it seems to just describe things objectively and makes a good distinction between some of the different flavours of people who exist in the fandom.

Although there is the cringeworthy glossary of terms... and "Little research has been done on the furry world" makes it sound as if this is a bit of an asteroid that's just fallen off and been left to drift around the Earth, until someone sends a rocket up to it with a group of scientists possibly led by Jeff Goldblum.

And the comments are like stepping into an alternative universe of tolerance compared to the usual Internet reaction, although the signature "Trisha Storey, aka Bitsy the Space Kitten, United Fluffdom" did jump out at me a bit.

Maybe most furries aren't British enough :)

I knew I said the next meme would be somehow worse - http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/973778/ - but I wasn't expecting you to turn the site into Myspace. I can see at least three gurning attempts at artsiness every time I load the front page now - the site's really excelled itself.

Again, thanks to everyone who gave guitar advice - I got the Ibanez in the end, and it's a very nice guitar :) It feels a lot better than my old one already (for a start it doesn't cut your finger when you slide up and down the neck, which is a huge improvement).

At the same time I ordered a Pod X3 which I got... not cheap but mildly less expensive than normal from a distributor on eBay, and it's set up on my desk looking absolutely enormous. I've been playing with it this evening and already have a lot of new ideas just from looking through the presets. :)

Overambitiously I had a go at piecing something together with the new tones - this is a fragment of the intro for the next song in line for upload (which still isn't finished and is creeping over 15 minutes long). I still have a lot to learn about mixing it together to sound at all professional, but I really like what this thing can do so far.

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/mu.....d-fragment.mp3

Just about everyone on my Friends list has posted that they're turning a quarter of a century old over the last few months - I got another couple just now. And I'm going to join them in the middle of the month myself...

As an early present, though, I got the Ibanez in the end - thanks to everyone who gave me advice! It's a very nice guitar - and hopefully I'll be able to use it on more than a few submissions when I get the Pod X3 to go with it :)

I'd better bump the last journal off the front page to prevent getting any more guitar advice - a tidal wave of it came in, but it was all very welcome! Thanks to everyone who responded.

Over the last couple of weeks I've finally been updating my personal website, to collect together my music, journal and games that I've made, along with anything else that I can throw in. They're all categorized now rather than being all lumped in together, and the new redirect URL is:

http://www.davidn.co.nr/

Give it a look, see if it works in your browser, tell me of any problems if you like. :) Most of the actual text on the page is pulled from my journal or Bandcamp page, so the Internet now is my database and I'm truly one with the Matrix.

With my birthday and therefore an excuse to get over my aversion to buying things for myself coming up, I've been thinking of replacing my current second-hand Strat copy with something new. After some searching around on the Guitar Center site, I think I've picked out the one I'm most likely to choose...

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/im.....nezrg350dx.jpg

This is an Ibanez RG350DX, and seems to come very highly recommended by just about everyone.

The important question is: is this any good? The vast majority of reviews for it say that it's the best guitar they've ever owned and that it's good both physically and... sonically for metal, but on every site that invites comments there is always one review that is about 200% as long and 2000% as pompous as the others saying that everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about and that it's actually terrible unless you replace the pickups with new ones that cost just about as much as the entire guitar. So I'd appreciate any first-hand information, or just advice from anyone who can tell at a glance. If you're at all familiar with my gallery you probably know the style of music I'm going for.

With a remarkable sense of timing I noticed yesterday that my Stealthplug has now reached that stage that audio hardware gets to where it only works if it's sitting at exactly the right angle, the sockets aligned to the nanometre and you hold your head on one side, so I'll be replacing that as well - I have my eye on the Pod XT at the moment, although I'm honestly not entirely sure of the practical difference between any of the bubbly pieces of hardware that you can see along the top row of the site. Again, any recommendations would be very welcome.

I'm going to see if I can try them both out along at the Guitar Center this weekend.

I think I underwent something of a rite of passage today, in the form of my first fur-meet. Not something as large as a convention, but a meetup for lunch that happens to the north of Boston every month, organized through the Bostonfurs Livejournal community. I vaguely knew a couple of the people who post there, so when I remembered that there was one this morning I decided to finally go along.

I was the first to arrive outside, even though I had gone to the bookshop across the road beforehand in an attempt not to be. About a minute later I was joined by  BaronBach (I'm unsure whether to use Matrix names like this in real life or not, but most people didn't mind either way), and we proceeded to wander around separately for a couple of minutes looking at the Halloween decorations and each trying to avoid asking the other if they were there for the same thing, because of the inevitable explanations that would have to follow if they weren't. Eventually he came up with the idea of asking me something about the menu, which prompted me to ask if he was around for the meet, so we were at least actually talking before anyone else came to join us.

 SoreThumb,  sedge and  kiffakitmouse came next and we headed inside - I had thought that it would be quiet at first because of the slow start, but over the next half-hour or so people kept on coming in to eventually make up a table of 22 (though I never ventured down to the other end so only talked to the six or seven immediately around me). I hadn't been sure about the level of costume that people would come in, but only a couple of ears and tails worn by a couple of people gave away the theme common to this gigantic table.

And we talked about artwork, music, Bostonian universities, cycling versus the T, Scottish cuisine and place naming, horrifying teen magazine articles, was told never to lose my accent especially not for a Boston one, and a whole lot of other things over the next couple of hours. Paperclipped to my shirt, I was wearing a printed badge made from the same picture as my icon, though I wasn't sure whether it would make me look a twat or not - but a few others had them as well, and I was very pleased that a couple of people recognized the picture or the name. It served as a place to write down usernames that I'd met - which I needed to, seeing as I was having to learn two new names for everyone I talked to. And in the evening, I think that everyone's watchlist fattened up by at least a couple of people.

 lone_wolf_666,  raymondfrostwolf,  sylrynn,  magwolf11,  silvanoir and everyone else above - it was nice to meet you all in person, and I hope to make it a regular thing :) If I've missed anyone out whose name I got... sorry!

I'm exhausted now, even though the whole thing involved no physical activity. I can only gues that I seem to have tired myself out by talking.

Anyway, nice people. Not like what you see on CSI at all.

I'm back from Mexico, have absorbed enough sun so that I'm no longer perfectly white and I'm exhausted! Our flight back was delayed for a couple of hours because the wind was so high when it was coming out to get us that it had to stop on the way and get some more fuel. I'm so glad I wasn't on it at the time.

I didn't have much access to the Internet from the Pacific, but while I was away  IkodoMoonstrife did a nice electronic piano-led cover of Unreality - give it a listen!

And if I haven't done it personally already, thanks to people who watched me while I was away - it's been nice to come back to so many messages out of nowhere.

...and leave some room on the front page for artwork by someone who isn't a total moron. (Spread the word!)

I won't be bothered by it for a while, though, because tonight I'm flying to the other side of America to join my wife's family on a cruise to Mexico, paid for by her obscenely rich grandmother. I'll be back in the middle of the month, by which time the current meme will most likely have been replaced with something much worse.

Seeing  skarrbag's voice submission on the front page this morning reminded me that even though they're annoying when a flood of them pushes music off the front page of the Music section (particularly if it's mine), I meant to get around to doing something like this at some point. And as I feel like getting some attention at the moment, I wanted to take questions from anyone who happens to be watching me rather than going by the normal template.

Go on, ask me anything - about (to list primary interests of mine) Britain, music, games, coding, moving to America, random little things, whatever you like. Anything not too obscene will be answered in the voice submission at a later date :)

On realizing that so many power metal groups seem to write a set quota of songs from a library of specific titles every year, I went through my recent efforts Googling their names with the word "lyrics" to see just how unique my own library was.

Song titles that are unique are bolded (linked), and songs where I could specifically recall another song with that name without even checking (mostly, songs by bands that I really enjoy and probably consciously took the title from myself) are italicized.

Worldcrafter - Original, but a band called Nasum have done one called Worldcraft. This also seems to be the former name of the Valve map editor.
Before the Moon Falls - Done by "The Fall"
The Edge of the World - Emery, Faith No More, Fisher, loads of people
Tears of an Eagle - Original! Didn't turn up a tidal wave of vomit-inducing patriotism as I'd feared
Silicon Dream - Too many to count, including Helloween
With My Unblinking Eye - Original, and I'm glad of it because I really love this title. My brother came up with that one.
Save the Savior - Originalish, also done by what I think is an independent band from Texas
Heart of the Beast - Used all over the place, exact title used by "Brothers of the Baladi"

Hand of Fate - Done by absolutely everyone including Gamma Ray
Open Your Eyes - Taken by (among countless others) Snow Patrol, and to my great consternation, Sum 41
A Thousand Lives - A song by Angry Panda, apparently. "Cindy of a Thousand Lives" is more common. I was actually going to call this one "The Hero With A Thousand Lives" until very shortly before its release, until I decided it was a bit too long. And a bit too silly.
Lazarus - Unsurprisingly everyone, including Placebo
Eye of the Beholder - Metallica (from their good phase, though!)
The Fallen Angel - Going right across the Atlantic, done by Iron Maiden - and this one was consciously an imitation of their style, too.
Forever - Kamelot, probably Stratovarius, many other power metal bands, billions of other people
My Kingdom - Variants are all over the place, but... Echo and the Bunnymen. That's something I didn't expect to come up.

Welcome to the Machine - Pink Floyd, famously, although when I wrote this I hadn't realized that the place that I got the title from had in turn got it from them.
Be More Than Just a Number - Unique! It was about time I had another of those. But I will instead reveal that, shamefully, I actually got this title because it was the name of one of the fairly late on levels from Lemmings. Now you know.
Two Souls, One Mind - First of all I want to mention that I released this about the week before a certain shock video started circulating, which was really annoying. I'm the first Google result for it, but I've since found out that both Sonata Arctica and Vanishing Point have gone for Two Minds, One Soul instead.
Tale of the Cave - I'm the first song result on Google for this, but... you know where this is from.
Temple of Rust - Mine! Also used in the lyrics of a song called "The Desolation Called Niflheim", cheerily enough.
Rule the World - It's a Kamelot song, as  kjorteo told me this about half an hour after I released it. Also one by Take That, distressingly enough.
Wonder - It's difficult to search this one. I'm assuming there must be about a hundred other songs called that.
Invisible - The same goes for this.

Unreality - A load of bands I've never heard of, like Celesty, Sadus and Fading Colours.
The Truth - Unsurprisingly universal
My Children - Also predictably all over the place
This Corruption - Got one again. The "this" is what saves it!
The Machinist - Done by Have Heart as well as the uncomfortably-spaced MyChildren MyBride
Promise - Oh, billions
Ängel Eye - Using a gratuitous umlaut is a nice way to cheat the system. (I promise that there's a very good reason for it, that being that this song started off as a direct mockery of the character of an artist that I know, and I'm really glad that he hasn't yet discovered it). Otherwise, "Angel's Eye" is an Aerosmith song and I don't believe for a moment that I'm the only one to use the singular variation, but it's at least less common.

So... 8 out of 31 unique ones (counting two halves)? I'm not sure how impressive that is. Still, in the future, "One Perfect Soul", "Find You" and "Carry the Rings" all look happily unique, but that middle one turns up a Jonas Brothers song as the first result so I may be forced to hastily rename it anyway.

Yesterday morning, Whitney used a practiced form of entrapment on me when she came in and asked "Do you want French toast for breakfast?" (the answer to which is always "yes"), and then following it up with "Well, go down to the supermarket, then."

At about ten in the morning it was uncomfortable enough moving around more than five metres away from an air conditioning unit, but it wasn't quite the blazing inferno that Boston's been turned into every day this week. I survived and got a couple of French toast-related items, then headed back. On my way I passed a group of Jewish children being led back from the synagogue, all of whom gave me very strange looks as they came past. I first thought that I must have something on my shirt or had forgotten to put on trousers or something, but it took me until the next corner to realize what had got their attention.

I was carrying a loaf of Challah bread in one hand and a nice big wad of bacon in the other.

I've had a couple of questions about complete album downloads recently - I set up an account at Bandcamp, a rather nice independent band site, and I've uploaded my music from the last few years into album arrangements there.

http://albion.bandcamp.com/

You can freely download them even though the link isn't all that prominent - it's placed at the bottom of the download window - but if you feel like supporting my music, then you can get high-quality complete album downloads for $5 each (or individually for $1 a track if you have no knowledge of mathematics).

For something that I could set up without coding an entire site, it's pretty easy to get something looking very legitimate quickly - I'd definitely recommend it to other musicians here.

I just noticed that I completely forgot to post about this -

 amoloto put up a version of the Natols music from Zero Wing, working from my GP5 tab, last week. Even though it was a quick sight-read submission he's a great guitarist, and it's a complete novelty for me to hear something that I arranged sounding halfway decent - give it a listen and show him some appreciation!

Never, ever eat four-day-old sushi for a quick lunch, not even if it's been in the fridge. But then, you probably knew that, because you're not as stupid as I am.

I've never felt quite so certain I was actually going to die.

My new submissions list had a surprise this morning in the form of a remake of The Truth! This FL Studio-made "Boosted" version was done by  deslacoda, who I got to know at SheezyArt before the music submissions were elbowed aside.

Have a look and let him know what you think of his first FA submission :)

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2228621/

The trouble with having gone with MOD as my music format of choice nearly ten years ago is that almost immediately when I started, it became obsolete and every other popular music package sprang up using MIDI-based formats. Even though you would think that music formats couldn't be all that different from each other, I haven't yet found a MOD to MIDI convertor that does what I need it to (Modplug's own MIDI import and export is particularly awful), which is a problem when I put up tablatures of my songs because I have to convert them all by hand. Often this results in being able to improve on some parts of the original that I might not have got quite right the first time, or introduce a couple of new ideas, but it's the sort of thing that's very programmatic for the most part.

So I invoked my philosophy that the good thing about computers is that you have the tools to automate repetitive tasks on them already at your disposal, and decided that I could at least attempt to get it to lay the groundwork itself and rewrite the drum parts in MIDI for me. So the idea for a new Java project was born in the form of DrumWriter, and the basic plan was simple - find something that could read MOD files, find something that could write MIDI files, and then nail them together into a sort of musical chimera.

Reading a MOD

My first target came in the form of a library called JMOD that seemed incredibly difficult to get hold of even though it came up on a search - the best link I found was to that beta version of it. Almost immediately I came across one of the disadvantages of unfinished open source software, that being that it was unfinished - I spent a while wondering what I was doing wrong while loading my .IT song files until I went in to check exactly what it was doing on loading them, which was to make up 64 completely blank tracks and then return them without so much as looking at the actual structure of the file. I didn't have a way around this because adding that would have required a knowledge of the IT file format, which is what I was using someone else's library to avoid - instead, it's not too much of a bother to use Modplug to save them as the very similar XM files (which JMOD can actually read and not just pretend to) before using them.

The second problem was that the format of the samples within the file wasn't what JMOD was expecting - I'm not sure if this is an oddity of Modplug compared to the original Impulse Tracker or not, but it made it just throw an exception on trying to load them. This was a bigger problem, and I ended up just completely removing all attempts to load any samples from the code and recompiling JMOD into my own patched version, seeing as it was just the song layout that was important to me and I wouldn't actually be using it to play back the file. After those two fairly major obstacles were out the way, I could load in a finished MOD file and run through it to recognize when individual drum samples were played, constructing an internal sort of piano-roll arrangement.

Writing a MID

The second half of the exercise required taking the drum pattern that I'd gathered in the MOD and then writing it out to a MIDI file. My first choice for this was Java's own MIDI library in javax.sound, but I quickly learned that this was not intended for humans to understand - adding notes to a file involves constructing a MIDI message byte by byte and then inserting it manually into a sequence, which isn't the most intuitive of ways to work. (Despite their simple sound, MIDIs are very complex and hold a lot of information - MODs are solid and wonderfully logically laid out by comparison.) After searching for an alternative I quickly came up with JFugue

JFugue uses a rather unusual string notation that isn't at all far removed from ZZT's idea of a music format, a set of characters that together represent notes and durations (though it also has to worry about instrument, channel, and so on). As you can see from the examples, it even provides special methods for writing percussion tracks, inventing the concept of layers to get around some awkwardness that MIDI usually has with this. It's a free library, but gets you by putting a price on the manual for it, so I just muddled through with the Javadoc of it to help me through. And after some hammering, I got it to generate a set of rhythm strings based on the drum patterns I had from the first step (one for each type of drum), convert those to a combined music string using the relevant drum instruments, and export the whole thing to a MIDI file (a step that took me much longer than you'd expect, because it's curiously a method of the Player class and I couldn't find it for ages.)

Results

There was one last oddness that I had to get past, and that was in the import into Guitar Pro 5, which uses its own format but can import MIDI (making the entire chain IT to XM to JMOD to DrumWriter to JFugue to MID to GP5). For some reason, the MIDIs generated by my program come out far too fast when imported - and not just in tempo, it was that the notes are treated as hemidemisemiquavers when they should be rather a lot longer. I got around this by simply making the conversion step with JFugue output notes with the duration of crotchets when they should be semiquavers (therefore four times their intended length), which works when imported, though I'm not sure why.

http://www.clickteam.info/davidn/im.....utodrummer.png

This is part of the result of running it on a song that I'd converted to tab myself previously - the one that I did by hand is the lower score, and the upper score has the same piece of music converted by this new drum writer. As far as the notes played go, they're aurally identical - you can see a slight difference at the end because the drum writer only ever treats anything as a semiquaver (I think Guitar Pro combines long stretches of rests itself), but this doesn't make a difference to the sound because percussion instruments don't have a concept of how long they're played for, and I only ever made them longer in the original version to make the score more readable.

Another problem with its readability is the way that the events on the tab layout below the stave are scrunched up together, without having a line for each drum like I laid them out when I did it myself. This isn't a huge issue because I shouldn't need to edit them a whole lot - it's something that would be nice to correct, but I can't see a way of doing it, because representing drums as a tab is a feature of Guitar Pro 5 that I can't directly save when I output a MIDI, and it seems to just put the drums in numerical order from the top down on every beat.

The other large detail missing is the dynamics, which are generally handled a little differently in MIDI than MOD, but I might be able to just convert them over note by note (GP5 does it this way as well - the more faded a note is on the score, the quieter it is).

Since last night I've also completely misnamed it by extending it to handle melodic instruments in a basic fashion as well - this is - as a special preview(!) - the result of running it on a song that I have in progress at the moment, with just the drums, bass and harpsichord parts turned on. For something automatically generated from a completely different format it's pretty convincing.

Is the most catchily absurd lyric I've ever heard.

And in the power metal field, that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

(Or more precisely, advert for Orangina)

Goodness gracious and indeed lawks a mussy me, and other things like that

As much as it seems to be becoming a catchphrase for me now, I don't really know what to say about this. It starts off reasonably gently and then piles up until your head cracks under the strain. Personally, the moment where I could no longer believe it was the shot of the zebra-women straddling the giant exploding bottles. Subtle or what? Though the transvestite peacocks came a close second.

And if that doesn't hint that it might not be safe for work, then nothing will, but if you're at work, what are you doing here anyway?

I'm rather ashamed to admit that I've just bought a set of so-called "Feng Shui pens" from the bookshop down the road. Someone seems to have been stealing mine, and they didn't have any packs that were remotely normal - most were the kind that cost $25 and are presented in silk-lined boxes that are incredibly over-elaborate for a tube to dispense ink in a semi-organized fashion on to a dead tree.

So I was forced to go for one of the gimmicky "bookmark pen" packets, and the variety that I happened to pick up are decorated with the Chinese characters for Friendship, Peace, Happiness, Wealth, Success, Love, and Health (none of which are fantastically appropriate in this setting - especially that last one, as I came back balancing them on top of a rather giant pizza slice). At least, that's what it says the characters are. They could read "Please punch me in the face, I've just bought Feng Shui pens" for all I know.

Anyway, all of this is irrelevant because as soon as you lift one out of the box (which happens to be a jewel CD case) you discover that the reason they're called Bookmark Pens is that they're unnaturally flat as if they'd been left in the path of a steamroller. Furthermore, they appear to be made out of a mixture of low-grade plastic, Teflon and soap, and have a habit of slipping into the crook of your hand whenever you try to get a grip on the impossibly thin surface, or shooting up towards the ceiling when you press the end on to paper. Far from inviting peace and tranquility, they're performing the impossible feat of making my handwriting even more chaotic and dreadful than it was already.

I just went out to get a biro, and this country confounds me again. I'm sure there's some sort of conspiracy behind all this.

I had had this link for positively ages, but I really had no idea how to start actually writing about it. First of all, I'm not sure if it's been common knowledge for years - however, I certainly didn't hear anything about it in Britain, and it seems like the kind of thing that the Internet would be all over anyway. The second problem is that it's one of those things that you really don't know whether you can laugh at or not - if this were fictional it would be amazing, but in real life it sort of points to someone being tragically pushed to do something unspeakably destructive. However, I feel better about relating it because the only person he killed was himself.

I think it shows some of the main differences that we in Britain perceive about America. In Britain, if your town allows a construction company to move in, which then makes a lot of noise and blocks the way to where we live or work, then we get a bit annoyed about it, mumble among ourselves and write a letter of complaint to the council (and the local newspaper if the situation is really bad). In America, the direct approach is more obvious - you waste no time, and instead build an armored bulldozer and demolish the town hall.

Not just that - rather than go on a shooting rampage like we normally hear about, this real-life supervillain's trail of destruction involved a hit list of buildings owned by people who had wronged him, including several houses and the newspaper office. I suppose it's either that or take them on to The People's Court, which would seem to be a slightly more painful experience. Everyone was evacuated from the buildings he destroyed well ahead of time, as with layers and layers of metal and concrete on it the whole thing could only move at speeds comparable to an improvised vehicle put together by the cast of Top Gear - though it was about as indestructible as a Toyota Hilux, with the stopping power of the local police force unable to make a dent in it. The chaos came to an end when the bulldozer got caught on the side of a building like some useless British Rail attempt, and its occupant shot himself before the police could get in to give him his total score.

There's some helicopter news coverage of the whole thing here - the number of comments hailing him as a true American hero is probably the most disturbing part. But this is Youtube, we're not going to get any copycat rampages from there. The most rebellious thing they're likely to do is fail to hand in their homework on time.

Look, I'm immeasurably grateful that FA has a search feature now, but do we really need the little extras that have been attached to it from an Internet phenomenon now so tired that even the mainstream media has picked up on it?

As you may have noticed, if you make too many requests to it at once - by inadvertently clicking the Submit button twice, or through paging too fast (something that you might likely do, as the form has to be resubmitted if you go back to the page after leaving it) then you're whisked away to the Rickroll video. I can understand it needs protection from hammering, but from that infernal video, you'll have to go back and resubmit the form and re-page through the results to see where you were, all the time remembering not to click too fast in case it blows up again.

And just in case you never experience that, occasionally a search result's thumbnail will be replaced with this hilarious variant. Maybe it's funny once... maybe, but these 'features' are baffling - it's as if the site coders have said "Yes, we're going to implement something that has been requested for years, but we're going to poke you in the side with a pencil every ten seconds if you use it".

I am aware that, as a collective, we as the users are a bunch of whining bastards. But I get the distinct feeling they would find people who are more grateful if this pointlessness was left off.