Boss Radio

It's 'Children in Need' time again over here, when we all sit down in front of the TV to watch famous people make idiots of themselves, scantily clad girls mime to their latest number one download, and have our consciences pricked something cruel until we hand over all our money to charity, in shame.

As a prologue to this there was a "Star studded" concert on TV tonight, and whilst watching it I suddenly had an almost Damascian revelation into what separates those with the 'X' factor from the rest of us.

Firstly let me explain if you don't have a TV show called 'X-Factor' in your neck of the woods. It's what we now call the programme previously called '(Insert the name of your own country here) Idol'. On the bill for this star-studded concert was last year but one's winner, Leona Lewis. Now I'm not denying that Miss Lewis can sing, she's got a big future before her, mainly because she sounds just like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, and indeed she now appears to be almost as white as them (Why is it that black girls spend vast sums on cream to make them look white whilst white girls spend hours under sunbeds to make themselves look black? I think we should be told).

Also in the line-up was Lily Allen. She was an ordinary computer using teen who put videos of herself singing her own songs on Youtube. For some reason, amongst the thousands of such videos posted every day, hers caught the public attention. They demanded more songs and she quickly got snapped up by a canny record company and, as demonstrated by her position in the running order of the show, is now a bigger star than Leona Lewis.

I put it to you, m'lud, that despite winning the TV programme called 'X-Factor', Miss Lewis does not actually have the 'X' factor, she merely sounds like other currently popular vocalists, whilst Miss Allen, having simply been thrust into stardom by the fact that she has an indefinable something about her that people like, rather obviously does have it.

It's one of those ironies. People who do in fact have the 'X' factor have no need to go on to the programme to prove it. The general public know much better than Simon Cowell who has it.

It's a Jimmy Webb song if you were wondering, but as usual it's not the subject of the diatribe that you just know is coming.

Over the last week or so it has transpired that George Brown, the Prime Minister of Great Britain and consequently quite a busy chap, has been going up to his writing room (Or whatever it is in that rather big house we're letting him live in) and sending personal handwritten letters of condolence to the relatives of soldiers killed in action.

He's been doing this since he took over the job and for a while no one bar the recipients even knew he was doing it, but even after people started to notice it was never actually publicised. For people like me the first we knew about it was when The Sun declared it was disgusting.

The reason it was disgusting was that he mis-spelt someone's name and she took such offence at it that she contacted the world's most anti-Gordon Brown newspaper to complain about it. They of course reproduced the whole letter with the "terrible handwriting" and "disgusting spelling mistakes" ringed 'round the way your school teacher used to do.

Brown was, naturally, mortified by this, and telephoned the lady in question to appologise and explain, and this is the point where I become a minority of one, because the woman taped the conversation and passed that on to The Sun as well. Everyone else excuses this because she's lost her son and she must just be thrashing about trying to make some sense of it. Me, I start from the position that she even thought to record the conversation. Why has she got the equipment to do this in the first place? Is she aware that it's illegal to record a conversation without telling the other party (Strange, but true)?

To me the only conclusion that I can come to is that she's deliberately using the death of her son to create an anti-government furure and I don't know about you but I find that kind of disgusting. All my sympathy has dried up like the Sahara on a particularly hot summer's day, all I can see is some hypocrite weighing up the death of her son against the chance to help another party into office. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

In Britain, when you're approaching your 100th birthday, a friend or relative can write to tell the queen and you'll get a congratulatory telegram from her maj herself. The queen doesn't receive the request, it's intercepted long before that and sent to the 100th birthday dept. where a civil servant sends the telegram on the appropriate day. Queenly involvement in all this? None. Everyone knows it, but no one minds.

George Brown was using his own time to personally handwrite message of condolence, and this woman and The Sun criticise him for it? Believe me I'm no fan of Brown, but this makes my blood boil.

Incidentally, The Sun also mis-spelt the lady's name on its website.

She didn't complain to anyone about that though.

This time last year it was snowing.

This year we're basking in really nice warm weather with quite a lot of sun, in fact yesterday I was sitting outside in an open air cafe near the beach on Hayling Island. They would normally have shut for the season nearly a month ago, this time they were so busy they ran out of eggs.

Before I'd ordered my ommelette I might add.

Last time I tried to order an ommelette I was in a pub, and their gas wasn't working so they had plenty of eggs, they just couldn't cook them. I'd cook one myself but I can't seem to make a decent ommelette to save my life. Mine come out thick black on the bottom, and all runny on top. A bit like an upside down beetle really.

But I digress.

Apparently the reason for our good weather is low pressure out in the Atlantic dragging warm weather up from the south. As far south as India in fact. All these years I've been assuming that Indian Summer was something to do with the indigenous peoples of North America.

And all these years I've been wrong.

Back in the 60s I wrote a chirpy little pop tune called Dark Side Of The Moon. You can imagine how possed iff I was when Pink Floyd pinched my title for their new album, particularly since they didn't put my song, or indeed any song of that title, on it.

Well my chagrin was as nothing compared with NASA today.

When man first landed on the moon he celebrated by dropping the lunar lander back onto it as he left.

Much to everyone's surprise the moon reverberated for half an hour afterwards.

Today they repeated the experiment on a far greater scale, and the moon again proved to be a bit contrary. It reacted by doing nothing. No dust, no reverberations, no nothing, and in particular, no water. Now me, I would have imagined that they would have covered the water thing while they were actually on the moon, and I'm not too surprised that the moon was unwilling to see itself declared as wet. Travel Agents would have started selling holidays carrying the tagline 'Swim in the Sea of Tranquility!', and no one wants that.

I suspect they've got the wrong moon. Earth has a second moon, it's rather small but it's there all the same traveling under the moniker of Cruithne, and it's really an asteroid traveling the same orbit around the sun as Earth, but it is more likely to contain water than the big one.

Actually there are currently 6 other moons sharing Earth's bit of space. If the universe is really so big you'd think they could move over a bit. What with all this and the giant ring they've just spotted around Saturn... I think I'm suffering from future shock.

See you on the dark side of the moon.

Any other Linux users out there having problems with Opera 10? Since upgrading I've not been able to fire up Opera, even by going to the file and clicking on the actual program. I know the XP version works, and I quite like it, trouble is the only thing I like about XP itself is that it's not Vista.

Why couldn't they have just kept on upgrading Windows 98? That's what I want to know.

It's a little strange to see how well programs that started life as Linux counterparts of expensive Windows programs are now running on Windows. I wish ports the other way worked so well. I guess the problem is the number of different versions of Linux there are. Windows programmers only have to work on maybe 3 or 4 variations, Linux has splintered into 3 figures, most of which will never really get the support they need. In fact Opera is one of the best at various distribution support.

Well, except when it doesn't work!!!