The best song of the year so far goes to “Blamethrower” by Reuben. An astute mix of shouty rock and lucid vocals, a catchy chorus and riff just this side of immense mark this track as one to get. From their forthcoming second album, “Very Fast, Very Dangerous”, it is available as a download only single from various outlets (I recommend PlayLouder).

As well as joining Reuben on their UK tour this month, Caretaker released new EP “The Sign Of Four”. Featuring some of the tightest time transitions and vocal hooks in recent times, this is a band to be watching.

However, this month was mostly about yourcodenameis:milo. Already marked as one of the UKs best upcoming bands (having won the last Kerrang! Best British Newcomer award), they released a new single, the melodic “17”, and then their debut full length album, “Ignoto”, a week later. On the strength of the three singles (the latest joining previous stunners “Schteeve” and “Rapt. Dept.”), this was always going to be something special. The blistering live pace of songs like “I Am Connecting Flight” and “2-Stone” have made a faithful transition to CD, even if the dampening vocal filters mean that the songs lacks the impact that it could. Why Flood (the album’s producer) chose to apply such an effect is beyond me, since certain songs sound like poor imitations of the earlier demos. Still a great album.

After 10 years or so, The Delgados have split. It’s all amicable and Chemikal Underground will continue as a label run by the band. The reason for the split being that the bass player was leaving and the band felt they’d rather not continue without all of the original members.

EasyTree, the bittorrent tracker site for unreleased bootlegs, was shut down at the start of the month due to record industry pressure on their ISP. Shame though it is, Dime A Dozen“>has already appeared to fill the void.

In a shock move, the excellent Kerbdog have reformed. Unsure as to any official announcement on this, or what is going on with Cormac Battle’s other band, Wilt, but this news is certain. They are playing some dates in Ireland this month and next with the outstanding Fighting With Wire. Excellent news.

Other notable releases in April were Degrassi‘s “Tell Charles I’m On My Way” (looping guitar rock never sounded so good) and Dead Fly Buchowski‘s “Russian Doll”, to which I’m somewhat indifferent but the band continue to show some promise.

From various events that I won’t try to explain, I started pondering the age old question of how to figure out if someone is a robot or not. I present my findings (with discussion from outside parties).

• Use a magnet: Cheap and easy, but won’t work unless large machine parts are involved.
• Go upstairs: Again, cheap and easy but only effective on Daleks. And they tend to be easy to spot anyway.
• See if they like microchips: A dead cert to work, but really just a bad joke.
• Have a Voight-Kampff Machine handy: Turing tests at the extreme, but pretty handy. Problems: they don’t exist and if they did you might find out that you are an android.
• Hand them a knife: If they start slamming between their fingers at an alarming speed, then they’re Lance Henriksen and should be killed immediately.
• Cut them in half: Only works if there are large numbers of machine components. So, cut in quarters. Or, just keep cutting until you see wires. If you’re wrong, then they’re not going to complain. Downside: potentially murderous and fairly time consuming.

Those are my methods. If anyone has any better, I’d like to hear it.

I’m a man who knows a lot about Vin Diesel (having clocked up at least 15 hours in the last week refreshing the Vin Diesel fact page) and I think he would be angered over the sequel to his ground-breaking work in xXx. Who can forget the bike that somehow hit a ramp with a 2 degree incline and got about 40ft of air? Or that boat? Or the bit with the great acting?

Let’s start with the name: xXx2: The Next Level. Christ in a glove, how can they pack the title with any more hyperbole? First there are 3 bloody X characters (the X is for eXtreme). Attention grabbing. Then there is a 2. On the posters I believe the 2 is actually superscript, so that’s xXx squared: giving, if my maths hasn’t failed me yet, 9 X’s. When you think “Goddamn, that name is just eXtreme enough”, they throw in a colon and a subtitle “The Next Level”. Wow. What a load of shite.

Second, Xander Cage is dead? Like Vin is actually killable. My arse. Ice Cube plays the new xXx who is apparently “more extreme, more angry, more black” than his predecessor (I’m fairly sure that Sammy Jackson says that in the trailer).

Finally, it’s advertised as being by the director of Die Another Day. Honest to Bob (Hope, that is), why would any sane person mention that someone who touched Die Another Day had gotten within 50 miles of filming? Didn’t they spend months hunting that fucker down and found him in a hole begging for his life? Wait, that was Saddam but it should’ve been him, dammit! DAD was easily the worst Bond film in years. Stupid bad guy (diamond face), satellite plot nicked from Goldeneye (a fantastic Bond film), poor swordplay (no-one has ever had a real sword fight that went on more than 2 minutes), invisible car (oh fucking dear), bland Bond girl (who the hell was it anyway?), face swapping (Face-Off theft), and a shit ending to the imprisonment we see at the beginning. What a pile of crap DAD was. Honestly, I could go on all day about that shit, but we’re here to talk about XXX2:Hardass, Punk Bitches From HELL.

I’m sure it’ll make enough money for the producers to ejaculate in nightly without fear of having to use any of the tained sample to buy a new yacht, but it still looks a bit pish.

Hollywood sequels, eh?

I propose the Grid Computing Drinking Game. The rules are relatively simple and can be played alone (in fact, it is highly unlikely anyone else will want to join in). The only prerequisites are that you need to be doing research or revision into Grid Computing, and you have a bottle of your favourite tipple handy. Rules are as follows:

• Anytime “Ian Foster” or “Carl Kesselman” are mentioned, you take a drink. If they are mentioned together it’s a triple.
• Anytime someone talks badly about Globus, gives you that look or knowing laugh, take a drink.
• Anytime there is a hand-waving definition of a core concept, unfinished specifications or a problem that has no real solution, take a drink. Make it a stiff one.
• Some horrible mish-mash of web services on steroids forced into a tutorial, taking up hundreds of lines of code where every other language since FORTRAN could have done it in one? You know what to do (and you’ll know the tutorial when you see it).
• GWSDL, OGSA, OGSI? One for each letter in the acronyms.

Wow. This studying lark just got more fun.

Tins. I know a man who collects tins. Vinyl. I know people who collect vinyl. Badges. I know a girl who collects badges. Cuddly toys. I know someone who collects bears and other similar stuffed toys. If you ask any one of them why, they can’t give good answers. Most of them “like” what they collect but if asked why they “like” it, they are stumped.

These people are not alone; I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t have a collection of some sort. Some are more traditional than others, but everyone collects something. Why?

What is it that drives us to collect what are largely fairly arbitrary things? Few, if any, collections are necessary in the true sense of that word (we can live without them). So what is it? Consumerism? A feeling of intangible value in that which we collect? I have no idea and it’s long been a question that has bothered me.

It strikes me that money is rarely the motivating factor, often people are to caught up in creating a complete collection to sell. Sometimes it’s not even the objects themselves. How many record collectors have never played their collection and never want to? Instead, it seems like it is the very idea of collecting that is the appeal. Why? I still do not know.