Another vintage chart for your entertainment: this week, recall the biggest hits of December 1993 Large things all round, and not just Robbie Williams' ego...

More off the Consumer's Advent Calendar. Things in bold are yet to happen, those in italics just have. Once all these items are ticked off, up goes my Yule Decoration. Will the decoration go up at all? Only if someone plays Greg Lake's classic within my earshot by Tuesday night.

• Christmas decorations seen in any store (done 12 Oct)
• Supermarket puts mince pies on sale (14 Oct)
• Lights go on in city centre (30 Oct)
• Decorations seen in or outside someone's home (26 Nov)
• Decorations up at work (10 Dec)
• Carol singers observed (9 Dec)
• Cards sent (14 Nov)
• Card received (14 Dec)
• Sign saying "So Many Shopping Days" (13 Nov)
• Christmas muzak (generic) (08 Nov)
• Clearly identifiable Christmas record (11 Nov)
• Fairytale Of New York (16 Nov)
• Stop The Cavalry (9 Dec)
• I Believe In Father Christmas
• Chestnuts Roasting... (21 Dec)

Spent a fair bit of the journey home reading the year-end edition of the NME. Best single There Goes The Fear is not a call with which I'll disagree. Best album by Coldplay is perhaps off the mark, I've prefered The Streets, Tori Amos, and Gemma Hayes, but the Play aren't a disaster of a choice.

For my money, the problem with popular music at the moment is the huge gap between what's easily available and what's worth listening to. I've spent most of the last three months listening to speech and classical stations, and precious little to contemporary pop. When I do, most of that is pop from Germany and France, and the rest is the now-defunct Evening Session.

British tv and radio is so utterly predictable at the moment. I don't care for Gagagagareth's anodyne ballads, nor for the antics of the Flopstars. There was a time when I expected to post updates on POPSTARS 2 here, but that fell by the wayside when the first prime-time show turned out to be full of crap. Ditto on SHAME ACADEMY. This sclerosis seems to have spread to the rest of the industry. When the fake punk sounds of The School Bully are the only decent thing in the upper reaches of the "official" chart, we're in huge trouble.

We need a breath of fresh air. We need something to blow away the tedious reliance on over-manufactured bands. I'm not convinced that the NME's current crop of great hopes - bands that begin with "The" - will do the trick. Indeed, this could be the moment when record companies stop mediating the best tunes. Something like 70% of my top tunes of the year won't have been anything close to a commercial hit in the UK. As many as half won't have been released. That says something.

Anyway, I've got four sets of tickets for shows in the new year... January 15, Tori Amos in Wolverhampton ... January 21, Counting Crows / Gemma Hayes at the NEC ... February 21, Stone Sour in Birmingham ... March 25, Beth Orton in Wolverhampton. A gig a month should just about do me fine.

Off to a wedding near Macclesfield. The bride, an annoying and rather spoiled cousin of mine, has this brilliant idea to hold her wedding on the Saturday immediately before Christmas, like a scene out of PRIDE & PREJUDICE. In that book, it snowed. In real life, it was damp and cold and foggy and thoroughly miserable. It also turned out to be on a Friday, coz the church hires out its car park to shoppers on Saturday, and the fee trebles.

And that's just the weather. Groom's side have been through it all before, and it turns out that a much-beloved aunt is very ill. The ceremony goes ahead, but the reception turns into a brief sarnies 'n' tea fest rather than the all singing all dancing feast planned. Which is probably a good thing, though not what cousin wanted.

On the upside, it gets the meeting *that* side of the family done for another year. And if they don't like the clockwork radio I got them, then they should have put some gifts priced below my weekly wage.

Very impressed with a couple of game shows this week. TREASURE HUNT has returned, with Dermot Murnaghan and Suzi Perry filling the lead roles. The show has lost five minutes of playing time, and seems to flow a lot better than the ponderous and over-cryptic C4 classics. It's a hit.

Also good: RAVEN, a fantasy game show on the CBBC channel. Shorn of its trappings and it's a set of short games not a million miles away from The Crystal Maze. The backstory is really well done - James MacKenzie could just about be from mediaeval times, and there's authentic costume. Ultimately, any show that can have me cheering for some kid to jump through a gold hoop, as happened this week, is on to a winner.

Second time around for Once More, With Feeling, the musical episode of BUFFY. The show gains something with the visuals, and the 42-minute cut doesn't lose too much of importance from the plot. Sadly, that means Scrappy's contributions are still included in their entirety. Very good

Search Ahoy!

• abbynormal i don't know her.
• avril lavigne naked er, no thanks.
• interesting and funny facts about gareth gates well, that'll be a short list.
• british legal age of drinking 18.
• facts of traffic jams in vietnam
• pictures of the key symbols of a christmas in china

The department's annual meal out. Usual stuff, usual satisfactory-but-not-brilliant meal, usual slow service, usual rubbish jokes (not only in the cracker,) and the usual squabbles about the bill and general reluctance to settle using plastic. Proof that it's not the eating out, but the company. Next year, will someone *please* remind me not to bother. Thank you.

Two For Today.

1) "Charm Attack" - Leona Naess

In which the bassline used in every decent Manic Street Preachers song encounters someone who sounds a bit like Sinead O'Connor on a good day, and gets thumped by a post-feminist lyric about a charming but rubbish man.

2) "Wreck The Malls" - Bob Rivers Group

In which rampant consumerism is the order of the day, and threats against the smooth running of society are plentiful. Sounds like The School Bully in more ways than one. And it's nine years old.

Pretty short shrift this week: I've a lot of game shows to get through, and a trip home that will take up most of the time from Thursday to Saturday.

Review These! In which Dave Farquhar discusses why Microsoft can't be trusted.

Google Zeitgeist 2002

Mac Nicked!

The Sky Is Falling. A tech research group has speculated that "a major cyberterrorr" event will take place in 2003, which will "disrupt the economy" and "bring the internet to its knees for a day or two." What could this be? Denial of service on key routers? Nope - there was a similar attack this autumn, and most people hardly noticed the push. Physically blowing up key network points? We've had no major problems following the loss of a key point in Twente, Netherlands, and if someone were to blow up Canary Wharf, that wouldn't be a cyberterror attack so much as a waste of good Canadian space. I'll come back next year to review their predictions.

Some combinatorial games links.
Anyone for a game of Amazons? This doesn't involve female warriors hurtling around wearing nothing more than a short skirt - what, no takers? Fine.
Tips for Connect 4? (first, don't play yellow in the Challenge ? break bumpers:)
Includes the very fun and funky Rockslide Javascript game.
But wait, there's more! Click now, and visit the Recreational Maths page as well! For free!
Just send ECU 59.95 to The Usual Address. You'll get nothing, and I'll get rich. Result!