So, the fifth annual RECORD OF THE YEAR show last night. It's the first to be planned without Jonathan King, currently serving time in jail for his crimes against humanity. The top ten included Three From Pop Idle (Young, Gates, Danesh); Three Songs From Earlier Decades (Junkie XL, Atomic Kitten, Ronan Bleating); Two Women Wearing Very Little (Valance, Shakira); also Iglesias Jr and The Flopstars. Only Junkie XL and Iglesias Jr are offering something other than Standard Pop, and the show really suffers as a spectacle for that.

The voting procedure more than made up for that. All ten songs could take votes for just over two hours, after which the last three (Valance, Shakira, Flopstars) left us. Five minutes later, the next two (Iglesias Jr and Junkie XL) bit the dust, but lines remained open for a few minutes yet. Then the Round The Regions bit, with "spokespeople" "from" each region - actually announcers slotted into place on the set at The London Studios. Four years ago, this was a chance to see each region's logo and a backdrop of the regional town. This year, thanks to ITV's bonkers idea that Centralised Telly is Good, and Regions are Bad, we just get the names. If they're going to go down that path, why not ditch the transmitter-based regions entirely and work on cultural areas?

Anyway, back to the action. Fifteen ITV regions, plus national SMS voting. Atomic Kitten finished last in every region except one, Danesh profited from a strong Scottish vote. The remaining regions ordered Messers Young, Keating, and Gates in almost any order. With two regions yet to declare, we had a three-way tie. Have they got to pull a tie-break procedure from out of their hat? Or would the title be split two or three ways, with the gentlemen concerned all performing their tunes and bugger the schedule? In the event, Mr Gates won by a couple of points, and did his karaoke version of Robson & Jerome's karaoke version of Unchained Melody. (It *is* the same backing track. Trust me.)

Iraq publishes its Full, Frank and Final declaration on weapons of mass destruction. 10NN reports that the 526 MB of data is carried on 12 CD-ROMs. As any geek knows, 526 MB of data will happily fit onto *one* CD-ROM, with enough space left for an MP3 of this year's Eurovision Song Contest (audio only.)

Fame, Set And Match revisits four stars of 1984's Band Aid record. Back in late October, I compared Tory politicians to rock stars. Let's run that one in reverse...

Gary and Martin Kemp, two-fifths of Spandau Ballet. Shiny, sustained their popularity for five years, but kept churning out the same tune over and over again. One of them went on to be a hard man on an all-over-the-schedules bauble opera. Hmm. Let's go for that one-trick pong (or even pony!) of the Tory years,Norman Tebbit.

Sting, clearly talented, had no ability to keep his clothes on, went all maudilin after his years of fame were over, but refused to go away. It has to be the one, the only, David Mellor!

Boy George. From the dizzy heights to hell and coming most of the way back, by dint working his socks off. I can think of two matches - Cecil Parkinson, lovechild to Cabinet minister in six years; and Michael Portillo, lost seat to effective leader in five. Oh, bugger, wasn't meant to say that yet. Sorry, Mike.

Bob Geldof, pop singer turned media mogul and politician. Could be Matthew Paris, former sketchwriter for The Times, but Bob's far more powerful. Could be Robert Kilroy-Silk, but no one would dare shaft St Bob after four weeks of low ratings, as happened to Mr Kilroy-Shaft's game show last year. No, St Bob reminds me of Mrs Margaret Thatcher; headstrong, easily bored, hard to oppose. Unlike Mrs Thatcher, or her love child Mr Tony Blair, Mr Geldof would actually make a decent ruler of the country. All hail President Bob, there's good chaps.

Well, we're past St Nick's day, so up with the Solstice decorations. Or, on this site, tweak to use the Holly Stylesheet. The normal view resumes in four weeks.

The US Republican party is changing its emblem to a condom as it more clearly reflects the party's stance. A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually being screwed.

It's twelve years tonight that the West Midlands had its worst snow in the past twenty years. The first week of December 1990 had been mostly mild, and unusually dry. That all changed on the night of Friday the 7th; I went to watch a flick (Flatliners) at Shep's early evening with a mild wind from the south-west; by the time I made the fifteen minute walk home before midnight, it was swinging round to the north-east and becoming decidedly chilly on my back. But hey, wind on my back both ways is A Good Thing.

We'd had some heavy snow forecast for that night, but there was nothing falling when I reached home. It can't have started much after midnight, and by the time I woke up around 8am, there was a good two or three inches, and it was still falling heavily and wetly. The snow was falling onto the exposed power lines in the area, and we suffered outages on and off from about 9am until about midday. One village a few miles north didn't get back on until mid evening.

By mid afternoon, the snow had eased up enough to allow me to step outside and deliver my Christmas cards. I said I'd deliver them on the first Saturday of December, and six inches of snow wasn't going to stop me. Halfway through the round, the snow started again at a rate of knots, and I remember walking up one hill, into the wind, in a near blizzard. Visibility was measured in feet, and there were no cars around. I saw more pedestrians than moving vehicles.

Everything melted at quite a rate during Monday - Staffordshire had decided not to close its schools, unlike heavily rural Shropshire to the west, or the city of Wolverhampton to the east. By close of play Monday, Wolverhampton's decision looked rather foolish.

Incidentally, this wasn't the occasion that the entire sporting world shut down, or the "wrong kind of snow" stopped trains. December's fall didn't spread much further south than Banbury, and it took a similar fall in the south on February 7-9 to cause such widespread disruption.

In the years since then, we've only had one really serious winter. A very cold snap over Christmas 95 led to daytime *highs* of -5 C in Wolverhampton, and -15 in Glasgow (yep, enough to freeze the Clyde.) That all ended with a snowfall that turned to rain within six hours on Dec 30. Another heavy fall on 26 Jan 96 led to the postponement of many 4th round cup matches, and the rearranged fixtures for 6 and 7 Feb were again wiped out by another fall. There was yet another drop on 19 Feb, and flurries continued on and off until Apr 1. There were short-lived falls in Nov 94 and Nov 96, just after Christmas 00 and 01, and (er) Good Friday 98. As for Christmas 97 and 98, that's stories for a windy day...

For males, coolness is a masculine thing. What rot. She is coolness personified... she is coolness in a packet.... she is the sound of cool.... and they are also cool. (Except for the televisual equivalent of Jive Bunny.) As for cool blokes, my list is short. Cool is confidence? Perhaps, but better arguments are needed.

Winamp 3? In one word: Crap. In two words: Overbloated crap. Best to stick with Winamp 2, where all the useful plugins (Ogg Vorbis, Tara for Real Audio) work fine and dandy.

Winamp 2 seems to have been pulled from the Winamp site, so links to those useful plugins: Ogg Vorbis... TaRA (Requires the Real Player!) ... and a kickass visualization thingy. (This from the same author looks very promising, I've not yet tried it.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

This afternoon, live coverage of a bank siege in central London on national radio. Host Simon Mayo was talking to a man in an office right by where the robbers were holed up. "What can you see out of your window?" asked the news jock, unwittingly proving that ON THE HOUR continues yet.

And once again, Chiltern Railways shows the way to go. From January, first class becomes a thing of the past.

This extreme premium method of travel accounts for less than 3% of passengers. The Clubman trains used on the Birmingham line give a superior level of seating comfort and at-seat service for all passengers. And every seat has a view of a window, not a plastic pillar. The trains are more reliable, and the fares are still cheaper than Vermin's shoddy apology for a service.

This move means Chiltern brings the best form of socialism to the most conservative parts of Britain. A high quality service for everyone, irrespective of class.

Another of Chiltern's wonderful innovations is the way they make one coach of each Clubman a Faraday cage, by putting a near-transparent metal grille over the windows and connecting it to the train's outer skin. This makes the coach almost entirely impervious to radio signals, making the Handy useless. (It couldn't be used for a third of the journey to Brum owing to the Chiltern hills, but that's another matter.)

Mobile free coaches are good, but it's better to have them by design than by default. Arriva in the North West has put up signs on its buses saying that passengers must switch off their handys when on their buses. The stated reason - on the newer models, phone intereference can cause the electronic control unit to stop the bus!

This surely takes the Worst Design Of The Year award (awarded yearly, on a year by year basis) from Virgin's Pisspoor Voyager trains. It's one thing to have a train come to a stop after a significant water shock; it's a whole other thing to have a bus come to a stop in normal service without any unusualities whatsoever. Use of a cellphone counts as normal service, folks.

A quick gander through Our Friends In Brussels shows that equipment (read: Handys) should not radiate interference, and correspondingly shall reject external interference (read: the temperamental processors.)

Aircraft have an excuse: they move too quickly to allow conventional cellular phones to work.

I tried to review Arriva's website to allow them to put their side of the story, but the s(h)ite is only accessible to Flash and javascript users. They therefore have No Comment.

If the original reason is accurate, how do the in-cab radios work without causing this problem? I think we should be told.

From the "They'd Never Be Able To Show That Here" department: Billy Graham's Truth On TV (ABSuck, 7)

This week's silly searches.

• "darius danesh" shoe size 01 811 8055
• noel edmonds swap shop phone number 10 and a half
• tora bora tomkinson more on the war against tara
• airline high cheerleaders for 2002 -2003
• celebrity who's name begins with d mr donald duck!
• irma or germinating or consoled or unsuccessful or mismatched
• live journal ellison t. aston
• the meeting followed a weekend of hand-wringing at st james's palace

Need someone with an IQ in triple figures to pep up your party? Have a requirement for someone to converse in Proust and Foucalt? Then call Rent-an-intellectual, where the smartest conversation is available for reasonable fees.

In a bind because you don't know about BIND? Does ls leave you listless? Think linux is the Peanuts character that carried round a blanket? You need Rent-a-Geek. For a huge fee, you too can have the satisfaction of someone talk to you about computers and not mention the Behemoth once. For an additional consideration, we can arrange a personal appearance by a former Linux Monthly Centrefold.

Want someone to stand quietly in the corner for twenty minutes then slip out and have a curry? You need Rent-a-John-Major. And a life.

Oh, classic comedy from Cleese and Booth. And two Good Grief! moments in as many minutes. First, a *narrowscreen* link. The bloody dancers filling the whole screen in a zoomed-in 4:3 clip shows the age of the show. Then Mr Bernard Cribbins with a dodgy moustache and strange accent.

Thence to St Winnie's Once And Again, showing weeknights at 9 on Hallmark. Superior to FREAKS AND GEEKS.

In a bit of a dilemma about recent visitors to this site? Want to scooter off? Or just interested in which MSCL listie and University Challenger has been egosurfing in? November's monthly stats are up.

78 Voyagers get a modification to overcome sea storms on the line at Dawlish in a one weekend engineering blitz.

The Voyagers were designed to run through sea-spray, but were unable to cope with the exceptional storms that have hit the Devon coast since 8 October. These storms threw thousands of gallons of salt water onto electrical equipment on the train roof, causing the on-board computers to shut the train engines down before the water had time to drain away. [Another example of top quality design from The World's Worst New Trains. This should have been spotted at design time, or proper waterproofing installed in the first place.]

Voyager trains have an engine under every coach, and the solution has been to modify the train software to allow the computers to think "smart" and keep the engines running selectively on unaffected coaches. [If it's so simple, one has to wonder why this wasn't part of the original design spec.] Under the new modification, storm water should only cause an engine to shut down on one or two coaches, whilst the train will continue operating on the remaining engines. Once through the storm area, the computers will automatically attempt to re-start the failed engine(s) without any intervention from the driver.

The changes were propagated in just ten minutes per train by engineers plugging in a laptop with the necessary software instructions. An engineer said "We tried to move the seats so that everyone would have a view of something more than a pillar, but that required more disk space than our laptops have."

There's a bit of a broo-ha-ha about the makeup of the vocal extendors on an ITV promo binge. Right from the start they wanted a band with a certain colour make-up and - horribly crude as it is - a really dark-skinned black girl would have upset the balance and affected the "image" and "marketability" of the group. The game they're playing is about appearances and *nothing at all* to do with talent. In the same way, I doubt a normal weight, never mind a fat, girl would ever have made it into this concoction.

All they ever wanted was a bunch of girls with bimbo looks and passable singing voices that they could market the hell out of for six to twelve months. The "rigorous selection process" - televised nationally and weekly for months on end - is a "getting rid of the uglies" process combined with hours and hours of national television exposure for free.

Look at that panel: Pete Waterman, Louis Walsh, Geri Halibut. What do those 3 people know about true, creative, musical talent? Waterman knows his onions but keeps his lights under a barrel; Walsh brought Ronan Bleating and Westshide to an unsuspecting world, and Haliborange lost her marbles around the time she stopped being Mel C's bitch. (Allegedly.)

Swiped from the j

1. Do you use coasters?
   Most of the time, except when there's a decent tablecloth to hand.
2. Would you ever put a bounty on your best friend's heads?
   Very much doubt it, unless we're playing some sort of party game involving putting chocolate on various parts of the anatomy.
3. Did you know that it's legal in some parts of Missouri to be a professional bounty hunter?
   Is that so? Track down all the chocolate-covered coconut you can eat? Sounds good.
4. Has anyone of the opposite sex ever made you cry?
   Yippers.
5. Does your computer freeze often?
   Not often, and it's yet to go "phut" in linux.
6. Does your computer eat its ice cream too fast?
   Not usually. Thankfully.
7. Have you ever killed a kitten?
   No.
8. Are you sure?
   Final answer, Chris.
9. What's your favorite word in the dictionary?
   Quicnux.
10. If you knew that the answer would be yes, would you ask a random person you met on the street out on a date?
    I'm not that desperate.
11. Oh really? Well, under the same circumstances, would you ask a friend of the opposite sex (or same..whatever) out on a date?
    Depends who the friend is. Some friends are friends, others can make the leap to the, um, ladder.
12. Have you ever considered growing up to be Bond, James Bond?
    Oh, but I *am* the quintissential Englishman.
13. Would you ever have sex amongst a shipping of cut diamonds just to say that you did?
    Nope.
14. Really?! (Because that'd be really cool, in my opinion..)
    Final answer.
15. Cats are so much better than dogs, are they not?
    But of course.
16. Are you a member of the CA/AOC?
    Er, what?
17. Do you know what those are?
    Nope.
18. What color pen do you use most often?
    Blue.
19. Who's the coolest person ever?
    the first lady of cool things
20. Who only wishes they were the coolest person ever..?
    There's a long list. Shall we start with everyone who applied for FAME ACADEMY, POPSTARS, MR RIGHT...