... Tuesday evening ... watched the Apple launch event, both girls now in the market for iProduct. What better way to witness commodity fetishism in its most seductive guise. However ... realising that any new device is going to require a more sophisticated OS than on the current iMac, I find myself being dragged kicking & screaming into accepting, well, yes, we're going to have to upgrade. And yet ... what do I discover but that the new models are all without DVD/CD drives. So ... is this a surreptitious plot by Apple to get everyone on board iTunes, locked into buying music & films via their store? And what about we Strange People whose tastes fall outside the mainstream? "Buy a SuperDrive!" I hear you say. OK, but i) the current model is not compatible with iMacs and ii) why should I have to she'll out a further 70 or euros? Any thoughts? ...

... driving in on these dark October mornings is brightened by a new set of CDs which come with Geoff Sample's Bird Songs & Calls. It was Clare Balding's Ramblings (Radio 4) that put me onto this book - her ramble last week with Sam West (thespian & amateur ornithologist). The format of the CDs is wonderfully thought out: recordings are spliced together to give the impression you're sitting at a window or wandering along and the various bird calls arise and fade. Meanwhile, Geoff identifies the songs with some further commentary. The juxtaposition of the CD with the early morning traffic flowing out of Brussels is quite disorienting - a whole new genre of sound art. Might not an entire radio station be given over to similar such projects (an hour of waves breaking at Chesil Beach ... weather forecasts which have interludes of actual weather conditions from appropriate locations ((the sound of snow falling in the Lake District, wind blowing from the easy over the South Downs ...))). Imagine. Which is, of course, exactly what such recordings make you do ...