Oh dear. Over the weekend, E4 began showing the current US series of Big Brother. After spending an unhealthy proportion of yesterday glued to the story so far of the antics of these 12 unfeasibly good looking young people (and Jack), I believe Sally and myself are, for want of a better word, hooked. After the new depths of inanity plumbed by the UK version this year, the constant stream of Survivor-style challenges, contests for…

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Mr Armstrong goes to Westminster

Under normal circumstances, the only way you can visit The Houses of Parliament is by writing to your MP and asking them to arrange either for you to take a tour, or to sit in the strangers’ gallery during a debate. Now, I don’t know much about my MP, (the honourable member for Brentford & Isleworth, Mrs Ann Keen). I didn’t vote for her, for a start, and her career in government seems rather undistinguished:…

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Home taping is killing music

Very much enjoying listening to the Kings Of Leon album, which arrived from cd-wow yesterday. I was, once again, disappointed to see that I have received the “copy-control” version of the CD, but then reassured to find that, as with my copy of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief, the copy protection doesn’t work. You just click “cancel” when you put the CD in your PC and it asks you if you’d like a copy-protected or…

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If you can overcome the feeling of being a tourist in your own home (although not literally in your own home, obviously, I mean that would be silly. Unless you’re the Queen or something), then I would thoroughly recommend the Jack The Ripper walking tour that I went on last night. The experience rather reminded me of one of those history programmes you see on BBC2 at about 7.30 in the evening, but without the…

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This week[end], I have mostly been sleeping…

My ability to fall asleep at inopportune moments knows no bounds. Nightclubs, trains, hotels where construction work is taking place noisily outside, the flight path of the world’s largest airport – you name it, and I can probably fall asleep there. On Friday night, it was all I could do to struggle through 30 minutes of Punch Drunk Love before realising that I had spent a greater proportion of that time dozing than I had…

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Two things caught my eye this morning: First, there’s this memo to staff at ebay. Must be a fun place to work. Secondly, some of the ideas on this BBC news page about Ken Livingstone’s offer of £100,000 to anyone who can solve the problem of cooling the underground are fantastic. I vote for the gondolas! Last night I went drinking and eating curry with my old colleagues. I’m still undecided about the whole issue…

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Say what you like about the state of London transport, at least it’s doing its best at keeping me fit. The more consistently unreliable the Victoria line, the more training I get for my twice-weekly evening 100 yard dash from the tube to the overground platform at Vauxhall. If you ever happen to be waiting for a train there just before 7, and spot a tall red-faced chap sprint up the last set of stairs,…

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The Harry Potter Game

As has been widely reported, AS Byatt this week criticised the Harry Potter books, wondering why so many adults were fanatical about them. Byatt said: “It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” For me, one of the strongest indications that she may be correct in saying that would be the story I read in…

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Wow. Six months after I started this thing, I have reached post #100. Not that there is anything particularly significant about that. It is not as significant, for example, as the point that I will eventually reach at some stage in the (distant) future where the database space allocated to Paste Magazine is all used up, and I have to stump up the cash for some more storage space (or find a different service provider).…

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