One Man's Poison...

How can BBC3 go from the genius of The Mighty Boosh to the pointless idiocy of Comedy Shuffle? I know comedy is subjective, but that is just ridiculous...

Live From Las Vegas

Too late in the night, too early in the morning, however you want to call it. Having set the alarm and primed the espresso machine for 4.30 in the a.m., it became clear why Floyd Mayweather looks so good this far into his career, and why Ricky Hatton looks like a backstreet bruiser from Manchester - or should that be Stockport? ;-)

Boxing is such a strange sport to try to defend - and actually, like other blood sports it's almost impossible to do so. I guess the only difference, and the huge distinction between other holdovers from the 18th Century, is that both participants are there from their own free will. But the sight of the fancily coiffured females ringside howling with pleasure as the vinegar strokes took hold was a little bit hard to stomach.

Hey ho. Time for bed.

Game For Anything

So, as you do, I had a couple of roast pheasant carcasses lying around after the weekend. What to do?

Well, on the basis that what's good for the chicken is good for the pheasant ... err, anyway bones were stripped of extraneous flesh, chucked in a pot with celery sticks, onions, bay leaves, peppercorns and covered in water, brought to the boil and simmered for an hour or two. Good thing about game, very little fat, so nothing to skim off.

Following day, softened onion and couple of celery sticks in olive oil/butter. Did the risotto thing with wine then hot stock (a ladle at a time) and chucked in the cooked meat I stripped off the carcass of the bird, and hey presto, an interesting take on a classic risotto. And I can't believe I just typed that last sentence...

Too much information...

Has it got to the stage where too much stuff is coming at us to filter it all out? I think I've just hit overload...

I went into a record shop the other day - and how quaint does that sound in the twenty first century? For clarification, though it's a very good shop, it doesn't sell records, it sells CD's. And coffee. Whatever pays the bills, I guess.

Anyway, while there I noticed two things which, prior to that moment, I wasn't aware even existed - 'Bloom', the new album by former Lamb singer Lou Rhodes, and 'Jack Of Diamonds', the first in a series of unreleased material by former Mamas & Papa's leader John Phillips. Neither had come up on my radar before seeing them on the shelves. Given that Lou Rhodes last album had been nominated for a Mercury, and magazines always like writing about John Phillips because it shows how hip they are to that Californian hippie rock which was very in about six months ago, it's weird that neither of these things had turned up on my radar.

And The Tin Roof Blowdown, the latest Dave Robicheaux novel from James Lee Burke didn't pop up and wave at me until it had been out at least a month. This is something just a few years ago I'd have searched out, made sure it was pre-ordered, and grabbed as soon as it hit the shelves.

It's not as if I'm a hermit when it comes to reading the kind of magazines that feature this stuff. As well as writing for Word, I consume as much music review stuff as I'm able, or have the appetite for, depending.

Admittedly, having kids has changed my relationship with being first to stuff. And maybe as my online buying has become more prolific, so I've at the same time become more dependent on being told what to buy and when. But if Amazon don't know I'm interested in something, which let's face it, is at least possible in theory, then how will I know it exists?

How are we going to manage all this stuff?