Skeet surfing

I can't decide whether this is the best musical parody ever written or the best opening film sequence of all time. Either way, well done Top Secret, you are the king of spoof.

Altogether now: "If everybody had a 12 gauge / And a surfboard too..."

The penknife is mightier than the sword

More macro pics, this time involving my trusty Swiss army knife. I used to be in the Swiss army, you see.

The macro daddy

Stage two of new camera obsession apparently involves taking billions of close-ups of household objects. My old snapper would simply refuse to take if I tried to get it to do this type of stuff, so wahey.

Caught on camera

I'm very excited! I have a new camera! It's ace! It has an LCD screen the size of a house and switches on faster than you can say "Hey, why don't you take a picture of… oh, it's gone."

Basically my old one was a good starting toy, but it was letting me down a bit – there was a lot of tat amongst the Japan pics, which thankfully you lot didn't have to see.

Anyway, I was mucking around with My New Best Friend at home last night and soon become a bit obsessed with the "colour accent" functionality, which basically lets you Schindler's List certain objects. With hilarious consequences! Voila.

The red shoes

Orange squash

A blue toothbrush

Yellow pages

Red vase

What Goes On

More madness from the Daily Star. This just in:

LET IT BE: Playing Beatles in space could spark alien attack
BLASTING songs into space could put the Earth at risk of alien attack

Experts are fuming after Nasa played The Beatles song ‘Across The Universe’ into deep space.

They reckon loud music could attract extra-terrestrials’ attention and earmark the planet for invasion.

Astronomer Barrie Jones said there was an “unofficial embargo” on letting aliens know we are here.

“The chances are slight, but the consequences could be huge – the end of life on Earth,” he said.

Out of Grange

So, Grange Hill has been axed. I’ll pretend to care, but I never really watched it, so whatever, really. I did like this little nugget, though, from former child actor Lee MacDonald, who played poor heroin-addicted Zammo (yeah, even I’ve heard of Zammo) and who sang on the cast's anti-drugs single ‘Just Say No’.

"I remember ‘Just Say No’ was voted in the top 10 worst songs of all time, along with the Orville tune ‘I Wish I Could Fly’, which my brother sang on."

"My mum turned around to us both and said 'I can't believe I've got two sons who were part of two of the worst records ever'."

Old Kent goad

Ah, the arrogance and brilliance of Nick Kent!

That's when I worked with the Sex Pistols, by the way. Maybe you'll wonder why I've kept from documenting my own experiences with the band in a special chapter. The answer is a simple one: they were all ungrateful, back-stabbing bastards. At first they'd been been known as the Swankers and had played old Small Faces songs alongside such unpunk and insipid old sixties pop numbers as 'Build Me Up Buttercup' and 'Everlasting Love'. I changed all that and got them into the Stooges and Modern Lovers.

Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff (Faber: London, 2007)

Lessons learned from... No Country For Old Men

If you want to cross the border, just say you were in 'Nam.

Haiku for yesterday

The Go-Between? It's
A tale of lost innocence
By LP Hartley.

Finished reading it
And my Young Person's Railcard
Expired forever.

Lessons learned from... 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Romanian customer service is bloody awful.