1. Rather alarmingly, I heard someone on TV the other day saying she was a ‘would-be WAG’ (that’s Wife and Girlfriend, for those of you who – rightly enough – don’t want to start using journalistese in conversation). So her aim in life was to be the wife or girlfriend (I can see why that acronym’s never caught on), presumably of a footballer or someone in a similar financial position to give her money to spend on clothes and shoes and so on. I say that this is alarming because … well, surely it isn’t a good thing that people are actively planning to be a hanger-on to someone else this way? Is this any kind of goal to have? It sounds much more like a Plan B (well, one would hope Z, really), to resort to only once you’ve actually made an effort to achieve something with your life in your own right, as opposed to just going “ah well, I’ll let someone else give me money in exchange for…” well, exactly. It’s the thin end of a wedge which makes me distinctly uncomfortable.
  2. Recent experiences have suggested to me that Myspace and the like can become horribly incestuous ‘environments’, and in some cases can become a bit too much like a substitute for a phone call or a meet-up with a cup of tea. Oh, I’m not kidding, some people can get seriously daft about it all. And this chap appears to have reached a similar conclusion, really…
  3. Really enjoyed the mixing on DJ Food’s “Raiding The 20th Century”, which is an hour-long music mix containing some frankly unlikely merging of well-known tracks, linked by commentary from Paul Morley (who coined the title in the early 80s as a project for he and Trevor Horn to work on – sadly, it never came to anything). But it’s a fascinating item, especially the Nirvana-Destiny’s Child mash-up (as I believe the young people call such a thing). You can find it at a variety of places on the interweb to download as an mp3 – here’s where I downloaded it, though a quick Google will show you other places. I strongly recommend that you give it a listen – it’s fun, but also feels a bit like a historical document…
  4. Oh look, the first letter of the preceding paragraphs gives us the three Rs – who said that my blog wasn’t educational?