Too different, really, but I'll take Occidental or Towers of Dub over anything Orbital did. A better comparison would be The Orb versus Future Sound of London.

The problem with Jolie is that she takes her sexual attractiveness so damn seriously that it becomes a clown nose in every scene.

Am I the only person to whom the presence of Jolie in the cast is almost a guarantee the movie is going to be crap?

Sneakers was better than hackers by a margin.

I always love how in computer movies even gracefully arcing through a 3D representation of the web requires stenographer-speed typing at all times.

Bertolucci deserves a Nobel for his contribution to the science of What Does Eva Green Look Like Naked In Her Prime?

Night-vision goggles.

Thanks for commenting on the hall of mirrors effect. Madonna's fame seems to be based entirely on her fame. The media's feedback loop of indulgence of Madonna seems to have repeated itself with Lady Gaga, but she blew her wad early I think.

Not a Metallica fan, but I can't help wondering how much better something as "raw" or "gritty" or whatever it was supposed to be if it wasn't so absolutely brickwalled. The Loudness War just makes "difficult" music a physically unlistenable shriek of amorphous noise, and not in a good way like, say, Merzbow.

That's great, and takes a lot of the terror out of understanding electronic music. I'm certainly not averse to the form of dubstep, but the extreme dynamic limiting makes it more abrasive and less dramatic.

"Grunge" as an encapsulation of the Seattle sound kind of was Sabbath-era Heavy Metal.

"Dynamically aggressive"? His music has literally no dynamic range at all. -3dBFS all the way through.

I know it's extremely lame to post a link to your blog, but I wrote this years ago and my friends in publishing recommended I bowdlerise it for a newspaper. I stand by what I said here: http://theladyfingers.blogs…

And as far as I'm aware, there are South African shops in most major cities, as South Africa's biggest export is South Africans.

I want Taste Test to track down the South African dried meat called "Biltong". Both the strips and the sausage called "droëwors".

My tastes in stuff tend to be on the challenging side, and so I almost invariably present it to potential partners as being so. Saying "no, you probably won't enjoy that, it's rather intense" sometimes gets ladies who already like me to try in order to see where I'm coming from. This often leads to very, very good…

I'm a disc buyer. I have a large screen and a decent sound system that insists I feed it better quality media. I know it's cool to rag on audio/videophiles, but I don't care, because my home theatre now sounds better than nearly any cinema I've been to. Blu-ray is just shockingly better than DVD or streaming, and…

The weird thing for me about this genre is that as a kid I was intimidated by all the scary cover art and whatnot, and now, after years of enjoying Neubauten, Swans and the like, it all sounds like music for a biker bar scene in a kids' movie.

This is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watc…

What I liked about this show was that for half an hour, every week, my fairly conservative parents and I could sit down together and laugh out arses off at exactly the same thing, which was something missing after Seinfeld went off. The acting was fantastic, the mean-spiritedness of it appealed to my own, and it was…