Parisians are famous for their rudeness but apparently it can send timid Japanese tourists off the rails. (I daresay it happens in London too)

Here's another weird story: Man banned from touching muscles

while organising my Amazon wishlist in time for Christmas, I came across this bizarre review for the most recent Pet Shop Boys album:

Best new band around, 25 Jul 2006
Reviewer: G UNIT - See all my reviews
Well what can i say? The Pet shop boys are gonna be massive with a sound like that, god knows what they would have sounded like 20 years ago. The lead singer is like a posh rapper man its well random. I also like the way they are a proper lads band they seem to prefer a bunch of five to a bunch of flowers. I think there gonna be massive just watch this space...move over kasabian theres a new band in town!

either someone is having a laugh, or that reviewer doesn't know much about PSB!

today I made another video and uploaded it to Youtube. It's just a crappy thing to get this track heard that I made from mixing two records together, or a "mashup" as the kids are calling them these days. I followed the Youtube instructions on optimising the quality and it still looks like shit. And it doesn't appear when I search for it. Oh well, it sounds okay at least...

yay! I solved v3.0 of grow. Took an hour and a bit though I didn't make a note of how to do it....

Here's an incredibly cute, compulsive and infuriating game. All you have to do is click the ten items in the right order to place them on the cube and make them grow, unlocking some strange steam-powered waterslide type contraption. According to my calculations there are 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2 possible combinations which comes to over 3 million though I think the right combination should be (partially) intuitive judging by watching what happens.... see if you can figure it out, or try some of the other cute/odd games if you've got ten minutes two hours to kill

Jon Ronson writes books and makes TV documentaries in a sort of Louis Theroux style about people that are slightly nutty. They're partly incredibly amusing, documenting the incredible daftness of some peoples' beliefs, but also quite disturbing in the fact that people actually take those beliefs so seriously and form cults etc. Earlier this year I read "the men who stare at goats" which is all about how the CIA had a secret battalion who believed they could become invisible and kill animals with their psychic energy, just by staring at them, and how those same crazy ideas have filtered down and still exist to some degree in the military policies in Iraq and Guantanamo. It did go from incredibly daft to quite disturbing.

Anyway, he's written a fantastic behind-the-scenes article about "Deal or no deal" in the Guardian which is pretty much the same. I always thought Noel was quite odd and the contestants slightly mad but now I think they're all just plain sinister!

Ilovedealornodeal - a fansite (oh dear)

here you can see the new ad for Bravia TVs - it's a follow-up to the one with the bouncing coloured balls coming down the hill. This one's just as good, though it reminds me quite a lot of a Clockwork Orange. The clown is a particularly sinister addition. I bet he's carrying a knife for mugging old people...

a windows virus is found on iPods - and Apple says Microsoft are at fault. Obviously Apple, with all their shiny white goods which transcend mundane technologies and fanatical cult members devotees, are infallible and beyond any kind of criticism....

Have you ever used to Google to track down an MP3 of a track that you just have to hear? I know I have, and most of the time it works. This website which uses special Google searches seems much more powerful at finding what you want. I'm gonna bookmark it!

more here

Asda and Tesco are famous for their super-cheap prices. People enthuse about the bargains they've found but I often (cynically) say that their products are so cheap that it can't possibly be ethical to buy them. And it seems I was right... Seems obvious to me that when you can buy a new kettle for £4, someone somewhere must be being exploited.

today my Mum and Dad bought the Daily Mail, not because they're fans (heaven forbid) but because my Mum wanted the Rosamunde Pilcher DVD. There was an article about a new form of hair transplant where they culture cells from your scalp then inject them back into your bald patch. My mum jokingly showed it to me because I'm losing my hair - I don't mind but I'd like to keep it for a while longer, at least until I'm too old and ugly for it to matter... Anyway we had a laugh at the last paragraph which contains something of a non-sequitur:

"Baldness which affects two thirds of men as they get older, can have a devastating effect on self-esteem. Earlier this year, LibDem MP Mark Oaten blamed his gay sex scandal on the loss of his hair"

Well that's an original excuse. Maybe I'll use that if ever I'm in a tight spot. Typical of the Daily Mail to imply that gayness is an aberration caused by temporary insanity...

Wow, winning laptops is so easy these days. That's a real pop-up btw, not something pinched from Private Eye or Viz. I saw it twice today...

It's not just me that think's the Borat character is cruel and the humour very unpleasant and ugly. It surprises me how much media coverage he's had. It seems to be part of the new trend in acceptable but hateful right-wing thinking which masquerades as comedy (eg. Little Britain, Catherine Tate, Bo selecta etc), which is maybe more sinister than it was in the '60s and '70s when at least it was overt as opposed to disingenuous... Freud once said there's no such thing as a joke.

I probably sound like a loony leftie now (and I hate those too!)

you may have to register to read that article unfortunately

here's a funny page - someone obviously has a lot of time on their hands (well so do I). It's worth it for the music alone...

The singer's partner, Kenny Goss, told The Sun that Michael had nothing to say. "He's fine and I've got him a McDonald's," he said.

I wonder if George had a happy meal

They stand for repetition, as in going round and round in circles. And this much is true: every few years we are given another reason to talk about the fairness of licence fee funding in an increasingly commercial context; every few days we are given another chance to watch old episodes of My Family.

I've not seen these new "circle" BBC 1 idents for which our telly tax was used, but the blogosphere seems pretty unimpressed. The designer/media wankers types in Soho probably care far more about these superficial cosmetic things than most of the viewers. I think they should have a Happy Shopper style testcard demonstrating how little money was spent on something so trivial.