Scrubs on DVD.

You are not ‘awaiting response from customer‘. You are ‘waiting for someone from our useless workshy customer service team to read the response that the customer sent nearly 24 hours ago‘. Useless bastards.

James’ site is the most polished and professional looking out of all of them.

Miriam’s site is a bit, well, rough around the edges, and she needs a better photographer because, y’know, she’s kind of hot but just comes across as a bit scary in the pictures here.

Paul’s site is…. special.

Channel 4 did another annoying top [n] [things] countdown programme on Sunday. Albums, this time. Of course, these are just designed to provoke arguments and discussion about why your favourite album (Frengers by Mew) was left out and why such utter toss (anything at all by Abba) managed to score so highly.

Anyway, I’ve got thirteen out of the top 100 albums, although some of them are on tape, stuffed away in a box somewhere.

• PINK FLOYD – Dark Side of the Moon
  A great, legendary album. Proof that prog-rock needn’t be po-faced ridiculousnes.
• COLDPLAY – Parachutes
  Hm. Not so sure. I mean, it’s good and that, but one of the greatest albums ever? Hm.
• THE VERVE – Urban Hymns
  Didn’t like this much when it first came out, but it grew on me. A bit, well, bland, however.
• THE SMITHS – The Queen Is Dead
  I was never a ‘proper’ Smiths fan, although I do appreciate their brilliance.
• RADIOHEAD – The Bends
  Well, I prefer it to OK Computer, but there you go.
• THE PRODIGY – The Fat of the Land
  I thought it was universally accepted that this was the point The Prodigy went boring and commercial? I mean, for goodness sake, they got articles in Kerrang! and Metal Hammer off the back of this album (although that may say more about rock music in the mid-90s than anything else)
• DIRE STRAITS – Brothers in Arms
  The true king of all Dad Rock albums. I make no apologies for liking Dire Straits. They’re bloody great.
• MOBY – Play
  It probably says something that, when I bought this album, I listened to it non-stop for two weeks. Since then, it’s been sitting, out of its CD case, underneath the chair in my old car, and I haven’t heard it since.
• JONI MITCHELL – Blue
  If you could distill emotion and then record it somehow, it would sound like Joni Mitchell, and if you took the very best of those recordings, you’d have Blue.
• PULP – Different Class
  It would be no overstatement to say that this album shaped my sixth form years. Comparisons between my appearance and Jarvis Cocker doubtless helped that, but as an album full of anthems for misfits, geeks and outcasts, you won’t do better.
• MASSIVE ATTACK – Blue Lines
  Everyone knows it’s great – but it’s almost so ubiquitous as to be dull now. Sounds kind of dated, too, which I never really thought would happen.
• PRIMAL SCREAM – Screamadelica
  A defining album of the 90s. Looking back, it’s a bit patchy in places, but it’s still brilliant irrespective.
• PAUL SIMON – Graceland
  If I hadn’t already said Frengers by Mew was the best album ever, this would have a pretty damned good shot at it. There is no good reason not to own this album. Also, it contains some of the best bass playing ever recorded (and I don’t just mean that recorded-and-reversed bit in Call Me Al, either).

The interesting (or not, depending on how you see it) thing, though, is that list is barely representative of my music collection. I think, over the years, I’ve managed to skirt round the edge of the mainstream, occasionally dipping my toes into it, but basically just amassing a load of albums that never make it into any top 100s of anything. And, with reference to the post below, I think I’m probably quite happy about that.

You can probably understand a lot more about me by learning that, in many ways, I envy and almost aspire to the character of Marten in Questionable Content. Maybe it’s just because I identify with things like this, and maybe it’s because he talks about indie music and bands no-one has ever heard of all the time. Either way, it’s a great comic.

Short on ideas and inspired by Sven‘s search-results-that-reached-me post, I figured I’d make with the lazy blogging and do the same thing, only to discover on going through my stats page that it seems the world and his oyster has been visiting me this month.

On April 1st, I made this little spoof BBC News story about the Pope actually having died years ago. I then decided that, actually, that might be slightly poor taste given that it was likely he really was about to die, and didn’t link to it from here. I posted it on one or two forums where I was reasonably sure people would find it funny and not write me stern emails, and then forgot about it.

A little over two weeks later, I find myself as the third result on Google for BBC News Pope and with a little over 1,700 hits to that page alone. My referrer logs show that I’ve been hit by nearly every* forum on the entire internet. This may also explain why my internet connection has been going a little slowly this month.

Anyway. Other interesting searches that led people to my blog this month include:

• hedgehog flavour crisps – Does anyone else remember these? They were ace, in a slightly disturbing sort of way.
• white bengal pics in snowy siberia – I have no clue why this led someone here. I don’t own a white bengal, and I’ve never been to Siberia, except to fly over it.
• fifa street ps2 – Could this be the world’s most chav game? Please stop buying it. You make me want to cry.
• programmers sweets – I don’t know what these are, but I want some now.
• installing foglights on a frod escape – No idea. Sorry.
• can marmite get rid of glandular fever – I sincerely doubt it, but if anyone has any evidence to the contrary, I’d love to hear it.
• pics of sheep shagging – That someone was searching for this I can deal with. That someone saw “home.parm.net – not a blog” in the results list for that and thought “Hey, that sounds like the kind of place you’d get pictures of sheep shagging” concerns me greatly.
• uml based design for seat belt alarm controller – Or, you could do your A-level Computing homework yourself.
• fan parm – Aww, how sweet.
• nurofen bleeding stomach quantity – Here’s a hint. In future, if you require this sort of information, CALL AN AMBULANCE.
• an applet will not compile if it contains a main method true or false – See above about A-Level computing homework.

All the usual suspects are still there, too – people still haven’t figured out that you can’t run Crazy Taxi 3 on a machine with a GeForce 4MX, they still want unlock codes for various bits of software I’ve mentioned and they’re still looking for naked pictures of me, my girlfriend and nearly every person I’ve ever mentioned here.

Finally, holding steady at the top for the million-and-first consecutive month is “parm reading”, which just goes to confirm my belief that there should be some kind of intelligence test before you’re allowed to use the internet.

*might be a lie

I’m not quite sure when it happened, but Newsnight appears to have become the best thing on TV. It’s gone from being a stuffy, dry, tedious news magazine to being an entertaining, clever and at times, fiercely ironic and very, very funny look at current affairs. Of course, Paxman has always been one of the true jewels in the crown of British broadcasting, and it’s still his presenting style that makes Newsnight as brilliant as it is, but it seems they’ve really put a lot of effort into making their election coverage as interesting and relevant as possible.

Of course, this could all go downhill tonight with the news that, against Paxman’s wishes, the fantastic weather forecasts are going and the market reports are coming back. Which just goes to show that, as usual, the Great British Public are still as skilled as ever in failing to know a good thing when they see it.

And the weather for tomorrow: It will be raining, except where it isn’t.

There are just no words to describe how great this is. (flash, needs sound)

Kilroy attacks “Liberal Facism” – it’s not worth ranting about Kilroy these days; he’s a bit like that Ferrero Rocher advert with the Ambassador – you can’t take the piss out of him, because he is a man out of which the piss has already been taken.

He went on to say Veritas wanted a country that was multi-ethnic and multi-creed but added that there should be just one culture – a British culture.

Someone should maybe point out to Kilroy that naming your party in a foreign (and dead) language is probably not the cleverest idea if you’re going to insist that immigrant communities should be conforming to some notion of a “British culture”.

I had a dream last night. No, stick with me. In it, I dreamt, for whatever reason, about Britney Spears. She told me that she really was pregnant, and that she was going to announce this fact in the British press in the morning (ie, today).

How freaked out was I today, at the bus stop, when I saw a guy reading a copy of The Mirror with the headline BRITNEY: I AM PREGNANT on the front cover? I mean, of all the people in the world I could share a psychic link with, does it have to be Britney Spears? At the very least, could it be someone I could have an interesting conversation with? Bah.