Much like Tetris or Grand Theft Auto, if you get deep enough into a 24 DVD marathon, your brain starts to interpret the whole world around you in the language of the show.

You're sitting on the tube, you check your watch:

beep, boop, beep

8:51:34
8:51:35
8:51:36

Your world folds into a box and compresses into a corner of the screen. Your empty desk, awaiting you at work, pops in below. Your phone rings the 24-ring.

beep-beep bee-doo-wup

"This is Stokes."

"Is Dan at his desk yet?"

"Not yet."

"He's supposed to be in at nine."

"That's in..." looks at his watch. The little yellow numbers appear at the bottom of the screen.

beep boop beep

8:52:58
8:52:59
8:53:00

"Seven minutes."

"Keep me posted."

"Hey, have you been having any server problems? My computer seems to be running slow."

Split-screen of his computer monitor with a pictorial representation of a snail moving slowly. Every computer in 24-world seems to use some kind of previously unencountered OS that represents absolutely bloody everything pictorially. Like if someone surfs the internet, a surfboard appears onscreen.

"Of course it's slow. You told Dan to reboot Hub 5."

"No I didn't!"

"What the?!?"

beep boop beep

8:58:30
8:58:31
8:58:32

Back on the train. I eye the other other passengers suspiciously. The split-screen allows them to eye me suspiciously back from different angles. 9:00:00 is coming up, something exciting is bound to happen any second soon. Something catastrophic always happens on the hour, every hour. At least, it does to Jack Bauer. Bloody Jack Bauer. Not only does he get three exciting things done EVERY HOUR, he does it all on no food and no sleep. My life revolves around food and sleep, and what did I do this hour? I woke up and got on a train. That's another thing about Jack Bauer- he seems to ignore regular travel times. When they asked him what they should built CTU headquarters next to, he must have said: "Everything." I'd bet I could do as much as he does if I could get anywhere in the city in five minutes, as well.

I check my watch again. Ten seconds left until the exciting cliff-hanger ending to the hour.

beep boop beep

8:59:58
8:59:59
9:00:00

Oh...nothing happened. Must have been the season finale.

The ludicrously lovely Rockit has assigned herself a rather cool little project for her blog, she's IMterviewing various other bloggers and posting the transcripts for your elucidation, the first of which is up now and is with, well, certainly one of my favourite people, me!

I am eagerly awaiting her bound-to-be-upcoming IMterview with The Sev.

You've got good taste in music. Your iPod is looking very respectable. You've whittled away the bad tracks, and come up with a playlist that comprehensively covers all your complex and diverse musical tastes. Whenever you want to hear your favourite song, whatever your mood, you can jump straight to it. You've done well.

But sometimes you get the feeling that you're missing something. That you've heard every song in your collection a few dozen times each and you want to hear something fresh, something suprising, something unique.

May I humbly suggest The Destruct\hour, my online hour of audio awesome? This week's ep is particularly good- we even managed to snag a special guest DJ for extra fun. Get in there!

My brother has a Yuletide tradition of playing It's a Wonderful Life over and over throughout the Christmas season, so I went to never having seen it before to being quite the expert on the whole thing. If you haven't seen it (and really, you should), it's the ultimate American Christmas movie. It's a kind-of retelling of the ultimate British Christmas story A Christmas Carol, in that they both plot the course of one man's life through the eyes of a supernatural being, which then gives the man an opportunity to redeem himself and change his ways.

While being very similar stories, however, they are thematically opposed to each other because where at the end of A Christmas Carol Scrooge realizes he leads an awful life and has to change his ways, at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey realizes that his life is actually really great, and he doesn't need to change anything at all- just be grateful for what he has (which is why, if you didn't get the joke at the time, it seems to rerun on Truman Burbank's TV schedule every time he feels like leaving his little studio-town).

I thought this was a neat little precis of British vs. American ideologies. The British Christmas theme is: "You suck." The American Christmas theme is: "You're totally awesome."

I was pondering this very thought as I dealt with a surly concierge last week. He handed me my keys as though he was doing me the biggest favour in the world, and no amount of apologizing would ever make up to him the immense effort of getting a key off the board and handing it to me. I've had surly customer service before, of course, but a short spell in America, where I had literally five different service-people practically fall over themselves in an attempt to make sure my shopping experience was a good one, I must have been somewhat resensitized to the service experience.

"Are you okay?" I asked him, once I had my keys and there wasn't anything else he could withhold from me if I pissed him off.

"What do you mean?" he said suspiciously.

"I'm just asking if you've had a bad day or something, y'know?"

"Uhm ... no, my day's been okay."

"Oh, okay. I just thought you seemed a bit pissed off." I said and wandered away, wondering if everyone in London was miserable? I mean, I'm not miserable, am I missing something?

I wondered how right I was- maybe people just seem miserable and are secretly happy, or at least okay-ish, and I just don't see it because of the particular surface grimelayer I interact with most strangers on. I was pondering how to establish the truth of the matter when I stumbled across a poll in the Metro saying that 80% of Londoners have experienced stress 'at some point in the last year'.

80%

Who the fuck are this other 20%? I don't know anyone who has not experienced stress in the last year. And I hang out with laid-back people (generally, Sevitz). Surely a little stress is just a natural consequence of existence?

So instead of finding out who is happy and who is not, my new mission is to find out where these one-in-fivers who never experience stress are, and stomp on their toes with my heel.

Check this story out- it's about 'Asbo TV'- residents of shoreditch may soon have the ability to 'tune in' to the local CCTV cameras to scope them out and report any crime-making they see.

?The CCTV element is part curiosity, like a 21st-century version of Big Brother? said Atul Hatwell, of the Shoreditch Digital Bridge project.

Uhm, you said it, pal. Orwellian or Channel Fourlian? The creepy thing is he was saying this in support of the project, and didn't even see the irony. I can't wait until everyone has the ability to tune into any camera in the country- then we can actually follow people around just by switching to the right camera channel. Aside from the more obvious implications of this technology -the article itself notes that criminals could use it to monitor who is home and who is not, and the potential for enhancing local gossip is awesome- I think there's a slightly more important point to make, which is this: it won't make any difference.

There's a saying in the Police force which runs along the lines of: The Police have the ability to solve almost any crime, it's just a matter of applying their resources in the right direction. You think the Police don't know that there is drug dealing and vandalism in Shoreditch? You think having grannies tuned into their CCTV cameras 24/7, calling up the operator every time they see that suspicious bloke with the hat stumbling around outside the pub, is going to make their jobs easier? It's not like they're sitting around waiting for you to call.

Now don't get me wrong: there's something communally nice about this plan, everyone looking out for everyone else. But I quickly gave up calling the Brixton PD every time people were dealing on my front doorstop because thier reaction was generally: "And...?"

Well the gig was ah, a lot of fun, certainly an enormous turnout, the venue had two floors and they both seemed to be packed to the walls (admittedly each floor was about ten square feet but still, it looked impressive). Thanks to all the loverly people who turned up- I hope you experienced even a fraction of the entertainment levels that I did.

Happy New Year, team.

This is the flyer for a gig on Saturday, featuring Grok, the band that I am in. You should ah, come! Cause we're really good. I mean, I think we are. No-one's actually ever heard us play before, so I may be totally fooling myself.

Do come along.

UPDATE:

8 music from the Depressing Crew
8.30 Mathew Sawyer
9.15 GROK
10 James III and the Courtesan
10.45 Bib
11.30 Zerox Teens

and then a crazy disco party into the small hours (fingers crossed)

Depressing will fill the changovers with tunes.