Mixed bag

I can't decide on one specific thing to write about, but feel I ought to make some sort of entry in order to avoid getting featured on one of those "blog graveyard" sites. So here are a few random bullet points.


Feeling Gravity's Pull  - Wonders of the Universe doesn't mess with a winning formula, meaning lucky old Brian Cox once again gets to visit spectacular landscapes the world over from where he delivers his enthusiastic musings on life, the universe and everything.

It's very slow and clearly designed to appeal to the lowest common audience denominator, but let's be clear - any attempt to get people watching hard science on prime time TV is worthwhile, and especially when the quality of the visuals is this good. Even better, last night's episode featured Brian in a gravity simulator, and when it sped up to 4 Gs and beyond, and the immense downward forces made his jowls sag and his forehead crease, for once he looked his actual age. Mind you, the rest of the programme saw him back to his impossibly-youthful, handsome self, the bastard.

I Took Your Name - It's census time. I went online and entered my details in - 5 minutes, bish bosh, job's a good 'un. But wait - some Guardian readers are getting in a right tissy and risking a criminal record by refusing to fill theirs in. Because it's being operated by Lockheed Martin don'tcha know, and by participating you are implicitly endorsing all wars, or something. Oh and of course the Government wants all this information for nefarious ends, and the Yanks are legally allowed access to any of it. And there's a BLANK QUESTION, which must surely be part of some unknowable yet undoubtedly insidious plan to subjugate us all! Etc.

Modern society is fucked up in all sorts of ways. However, I feel quite glad to live in a country which regularly makes the effort to gather basic information about all its citizens, enabling us to know a bit about each other and where we come from. And anyway, they can probably extrapolate a sub-total of wet hippy refuseniks based on all the whinging missives in the liberal press and tack it onto the final results to get the full population figures, to be fair.

The Wake-up Bomb - Talking of war, Libya has become the latest state to be subjected to a Western intervention. The exact definition of what we're doing seems quite sketchy - never mind about how we define "war", at the moment we seem unsure as to whether we're allowed to aim directly at Gadaffi or not (seems somewhat unsporting in many ways). Almost makes one yearn for simpler times when we just piled in to Middle Eastern countries and toppled the dictators rather than faffing around with tedious stuff like international law.

Sitting Still - I actually love Arsenal. I don't support them - that's a totally different thing. But my obsession to see them win stuff has reached worrying levels. Wolves beat Villa on Saturday and yet my excitement was dampened by the fact that the Arse faltered yet again and indeed nearly lost to another relegation candidate (though the fact that it was West Brom didn't help).

I love the way they play football and I love the purity of Wenger's vision (I mean his vision of what a club should be, not his literal, "I did not see ze incident" type of vision), however his sheer bloody-mindedness along with a seeming inability to mentally prepare his side for the big games looks like it's going to kill their dreams of picking up another trophy anytime soon.

Man U and Chelsea winning everything is boring, and Birmingham bloody City winning anything is an absolute outrage. I'd be happy for Man City or even Liverpool to pick up a big trophy just to break the monotony, but I won't be truly happy until Monsieur Wenger and his side raise one aloft, thereby striking a blow for beautiful football and financial prudence. I won't be holding my breath :-(

The End of the World as we Know it - I think it's time for my favourite band to call it a day, at least as far as recording goes. REM's body of work is bulletproof and no new album of theirs can change that, although Collapse Into Now gives it a good go, sad to say. While there's nothing horrendously bad on it, none of the tracks would even come close to getting onto a fantasy REM playlist of mine, however wide I made it. As others have pointed out, they now sound like their own tribute band - Blue is a pale facsimile of E-Bow the Letter, Uberlin is in essence a more upbeat, throwaway Drive, and everywhere there are traces of earlier, better songs.

I'd love to see them keep touring, and these days there's no shame in existing as a pure nostalgia band who go around doing the greatest hits every few years. Hell, they should even do full album shows like more and more bands are now doing (Screamadelica being the best such example of recent times). A Collapse Into Now show, though, would not shift many tickets.

There's been at least one great album so far this year though, and suprisingly (given that her previous work hasn't done much for me) it's PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. The tone is folksy but without the winsome, fiddle-de-dee connotations of that term. It just seems to chime with the zeitgeist somehow, influenced by modern times yet still sounding rather timeless. Bizarrely, it's cheered me up no end during a somewhat downbeat period for me. Hurrah.