For the New Year Dave and Allen came over, for what started as a very civilised buffet we prepared during the day, and rapidly turned into a drunken discussion of great music, Cranium, the relative merits of the old Trivial Pursuit verses the new, and standing to sing Auld Lang Syne for some reason. Incriminating evidence is available if you think you are brave enough.

After Christmas, with my redundancy payment burning a hole in my pocket, I joined the Digital Gang and bought a Canon EOS-300D for the (effective) bargain price of £485. I totally love the camera, as I've had a EOS-300V I felt at home straight away. The quality of the pictures is great and thanks to the 1.6 multiplier on lenses my 50mm f1.8 becomes a pretty nice 90mm portait lens, whilst the 28-90mm from the 300V now goes up to 144mm. All I need now is a bag to put it in and a decent flash. I've started to put some passable photos online in my gallery, which will grow a lot faster now that I don't have to spend time scanning photos.

As some people may have guessed from the title of this article I've recently seen Jerry Springer: The Opera. The magical BBC aired a recording of it on Saturday night, to a chorus of mass complaining and demonstration. Somehow 47,000 people knew, before they saw it, that they would be offended by the blasphemous content and swearing, some reports claiming 8000 expletives in the show. It turns out that this ludicrous number was taken my multiplying the number of expletives in the show by the number of people saying them, so if the chorus swears once that is 27 expletives. And as for blasphemy... yes it satirised Christianity but if an organisation can't take satire then it needs to take a long hard look at itself. To be fair the Church of England publicly stated that it doesn't think JSTO was blasphemous, but that didn't stop people getting carried away, first with TV license burning and now sueing the BBC for blasphemy. Get a grip people. Satire is a form of criticism, albeit in a comedic form. If you can't handle criticism, what are you so worried about? Is Jesus swearing and admitting "I'm a bit gay" really worth all of this?

In other news, I was pleased to see that legal music downloads exceeded single sales for the first time, in the last week of December. Really this isn't a great surprise and was bound to happen at some point: when singles are primarily bought by teenagers, and a song can be downloaded for £0.79 from the iTunes Music Store but costs £3.99 in HMV, it's obvious where the tech-savvy teenagers (that's probably most of them) will go. Even better news is that sales from downloads will be included in the official singles chart. After so much demonising from the record companies, downloading music is finally hitting the mainsteam.

NP: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Herbaliser