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How evil are you?

[Via Suzie Austin, who is evil.]

…and back on the topic of The Arcade Fire, in the hope of being proved right again, I predict with confidence that the track entitled Intervention is the one we shall be hearing on endless adverts and TV trailers in about four months from now.

This morning I was woken by a siren and a repeated recorded announcement. Having been informed by the council that we live in a terrorist hotspot (and, it turns out, just down the road from a school caretaker who randomly posts letter bombs), and remembering the information on our evacuation zone map that mentions public address systems, I naturally assumed that it was armageddon: the terrorists were about to strike and my house was right in the middle of the danger zone. (This is what comes of living opposite a Unitarian church…)

As it turned out, it was a lorry reversing down my road.

But the slightly distressing thing is that when I thought it was a terrorist attack, my inclination was to turn over and go back to sleep. “Sod this,” I thought, “I can’t be bothered to evacuate my house this early. I might die, but at least I’ll die in my sleep.”

If that’s my attitude, does it mean the terrorists have won?

Until today, I thought that The Arcade Fire were an acquired taste which I had yet (if ever) to acquire. Their much acclaimed first album Funeral has never really done it for me.

But today I listened to their new album Neon Bible and realised that they are, without a doubt, the only band who could score a slightly retro acoustic guitar strummy song for full church organ and glockenspiel.

Then bring in strings and a choir without it sounding remotely like Mistletoe and Wine.

Oh, this album is going to be in my CD player for quite some time I think…

In the space of the last twelve hours I’ve had two messages telling me that I was right. Firstly about David Bowie – Marcia, one of the fine singers in my fine choir emailed me to say:

Your recommended David Bowie top ten list has been running on the wishlist of our radiotracker (monitoring something over 1000 radio stations) for exactly 4 weeks now and the only track that came in was Station to Station while 62 of his other tracks were recorded (several times each). The scientist in me likes statistics and proving things right or wrong.

And indeed the scientist in me likes being proved right.

Secondly, about Jason Donovan – John, a vet who has on several occasions been mistaken both for a young Tom Baker and for a tenor, wrote to say:

Jason Donovan is making a come back (as you rightly predicted). He is going to be a judge on “Any Dream will do” – the Technicolour dreamcoat version of “How do you solve a problem like Maria” – on our screens in the near future…

If anybody else wants to prove me right on any issue at all, I’m really enjoying this feeling of self-satisfied smugness so please go right ahead.

I just had to queue in the Post Office for over half an hour. It was like Alton Towers but without the rides.

It occurred to me that in the future, when letters and parcels have been completely superceded by email and transmat or whatever, the only reason people will have to go to the Post Office is to buy Mills and Boon novels.

With the tiny number of staff they had working the busy late-afternoon slot, you’d think it had already happened.

Or LOVEFiLM as we’re probably supposed to capitalise it. I’m updating my rental list at the moment, as I do every so often, and I’m shocked at the number of features that they used to have (or at least the one they gobbled up, ScreenSelect, used to have) that now don’t work.

For instance, although I can still hide a title on the recommendation list, it’s no longer marked in a way that makes obvious sense, so I have to play around to find it. (And I’ll probably forget next time, and have to play around again.)

And worse. Actually, each time I find something that is wrong or missing, it turns out that actually it isn’t missing, it’s just odd and not terribly obvious. And the recommendations system seems completely buggered: it’s recommending the second half of Lost season 1, not on the basis of the first half of Lost season 1, but because I’ve selected 24 (yes, people might like both, but they aren’t remotely similar or indeed terribly overlapping viewerships – are they?). And it seems to prefer making suggestions based on things I’ve expressed some interest in over things I’ve actually rated. Which makes me wonder why they want me to rate things at all.

And when you go back to a page having updated something, using their own buttons to get back to what you were doing before, the page doesn’t contain the updated information. That’s just shoddy. And their web layout is horrible and confusing. And they don’t seem to take account of “please hide this” instructions in sorting out recommendations (with the result that I’m getting kind of tired of saying that I don’t want to rent episodes of The Simpsons). It’s like a service designed by bank managers.

Okay, time to chill out and go to bed. But L0v3f17m sux.

Today I went to Mr Polito’s for a haircut. I favour Mr Polito’s because, although it’s a slightly pot-luck approach to hairstyles (there’s a camp man who does a really stylish cut, and a schoolteacherly middle-aged woman who just lops the whole lot off), unlike many similarly-priced barbers they always make sure that they have a good selection of broadsheets to read and freshly made coffee for you to drink while you wait.

The broadsheets are hung one of those clever wooden brackets where the paper itself is threaded through a wooden holder that sits neatly in the slots provided. As I was having my haircut I watched a clumsy looking student make a protracted attempt to unthread the newspaper from its wooden holder. When my hairdresser politely told him not to do it, he looked up in confusion, said with absolute sincerity “I’m sorry, I thought they were for reading”, and replaced the newspaper in the stand – presumably convinced that Mr Polito chooses to decorate his shop with fresh but entirely ornamental newspapers every morning.

One has to hope that he isn’t a student at Cambridge’s famous academic institution, but in this town there’s every chance that he’s somebody who’ll be running the country in twenty years’ time.

Whilst having my hair cut (and people alarmed by the photo posted with my first podcast will also be relieved to hear that the facial hair was there through laziness rather than a decision to grow a beard, and it is now gone) Jason Donovan came onto the radio and talked about his burgeoning career. And it is worth pointing out that, given the man did an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical then sank into complete obscurity fifteen years ago, he does seem to be doing pretty well for himself. He tours to one of Cambridge’s larger venues in May and – I’m told – it has already sold out.

Not that I’d have bought tickets myself… but I’ve pointed out before that the man and his work were once the obsession of a much younger James Lark, so it’s nice to see that he’s doin’ fine.

I’m especially excited to have discovered his MySpace page which is worth looking at most of all for the profile pictures of his MySpace friends, all of whom appear to be hugging Jason himself in various different places. Clearly he is generous to his fans. He comes across as an enthusiastic, happy celebrity (no less than two of his five blog entries have “wow!” in the title) and, most surprisingly, the new tracks he has put up for people to listen to are pretty good. A bit dirgy, but a cut above your average MySpace fodder.

Take That has recently led a trend for pop comebacks, with The Police and Westlife hot on their heels. Could Jason Donovan be the next faded star on the brink of a once unthinkable return to chart success?

Apologies for the uncharactaristic drying up of blog entries from this quarter. I’ve been trying to combine a complicated social life with a number of creative endeavours and a persistent cold, and writing about them would just have made it all worse.

However, last night I found myself sitting round a table with my housemates and branching out into the exciting media of podcast, which is essentially to radio what blogging is to editorials in the Guardian. I can’t really remember what’s in our first episode, but we laughed a lot at the time, and there’s a section where we try to phone up Priests which I expect you’ll enjoy. Should you be fed up of working with Woman’s Hour in the background, you can listen to me instead on 2 Victoria Street at home.

We wrote a jingle for it and everything.

With sadness: Ian Richardson, RIP. (Via Rabbit Strike.)