What with Gaga vamping "The Lady Is a Tramp" with a tuxed-up Tone-B, Mad Men-mania, the Ocean's Insert Increasingly Large Number Here franchise... the joint would seem to be increasingly jumpin'.

And now even the dance johnnies are at it. "Electroswing" sounds like a joke genre, admittedly, and to some extent it is, insamuch as it's fun and (thankfully) devoid of subtexts or even much meaning other than being what it is. And I like it:

I can't say I'm fully convinced by the "swing" bit of the name, though. It seems to owe far more to Django than to Basie. How about "Lindy hiphop"?

(Filched from someone on Twitter yesterday, lost in the mists of timeline. Alexis Petridis maybe? Anyway, thanks. It's perked up my morning no end.)

I never much cared for T' Eurythmics, but the one song of theirs I completely failed to dislike, despite my very best efforts, was "Here Comes the Rain Again". Nu-folk is by no means my baggiest of bags (mostly because I'm still not quite sure what it is), but I will confess to being partial to Regina Spektor’s "On The Radio" and "Fidelity". And if I was asked to name my absolute favourite then-uncool Sixties record, I'd have to plump for "Can’t Get Used to Losing You" by Andy Williams.

It dawned on me earlier today, for no good reason, that these songs all have one thing in common: they use pizzicato strings in their arrangements. When they're used to mark the offbeat like this, it's a trick that I just can't resist – putty in the producer's hands, I am. (I have no idea why. As a child I suffered no dreadful trauma that could only be assuaged by exposure to Act III of Delibes' Sylvia, put it that way.)

Just me? Too tacky by half? Or does anyone else start slavering like a boxer dog on heat whenever they see pizz. written on a score?

Q: If you could go back to the Fifties, who would be your Fifties girlfriend?

James Ellroy: Julie London.

Q. No hesitation - just "Julie London"?

James Ellroy: A man who hesitates before saying "Julie London" is barely a man at all.

Why wasn't Julie London as famous as Peggy Lee or all the other loungy-jazz singers that Duffy and Adele's publicists instruct them to namecheck in interviews?

And why is this sort of DEFCON-One Sultry so hard to carry off today, even in period pieces? I mean, yes, Christina Hendricks gave it a pretty good shot, but come on... it's no contest, really, is it?

Nurse!

You'll be singing this all week. Possibly.

YouTube clip: Hypobudget (fan-sourced?) commercial for Hartlepool FC's season tickets.

It’s true! European cinema's go-to goatee - the living legend who played the hapless cop in The Day of the Jackal, the unforgettable criminal mastermind Hugo Drax in Moonraker and none other than Monsieur Dupont D’Ivry in Remains of the Day - was born a whole four-fifths of a century ago on this very day. Incredible, eh?

Although the naysayers will no doubt drag out the usual clichés about The Lonz’s creative powers having been on the wane for decades, his influence is as indubitable as it is unmatched, bestriding like a portly colossus the whole expanse of pre- and post-millennial popular culture. For instance, a full 23 years before the absurdly über-rated Downfall, who do we find playing Martin Bormann opposite Anthony Hopkins's bravely Welsh-lilted Führer in The Bunker? Mickey Lonsdale, that’s who. In times of tension, doubt or simple day-to-day inchoate malaise I still find untold comfort in my own copy of that immense work (in the original VHS version, of course - accept no substitutes), as I find it still manages to hits spots that the efforts of lesser Anglo-French character actors somehow never can.

Love him or loathe him, that is of course your prerogative. But there’s no denying that the man – because he is a man, as well as an icon - is one of a kind, a true original. And now he's 80! So let the litany of Lonsdale lore, celebratory playlists, dedicated podcasts and general pant-wetty palaver commence!

Payment terms: In addition to the tickets, in return for taking these choice items off my hands you will receive a commemorative plaque, a street named after you, the freedom of the islands and a lifetime's supply of organic guano, delivered in convenient monthly batches to the address of your choice.

James Burton is 71.

You're from Sevenoaks. You get married. You go to the States for your honeymoon. You nip into a drugstore for some bits and bobs. And...

I think that may even beat Ken Barlow in a lift, Mr H.

We've had all sorts of ultra-grim cover versions by keen underachievers on here recently, but surely this one must prendre le biscuit:

What?

Oh, bugger.

Here comes the sun, bright and yellow
Here comes the... No, no, that's infantile.

Here comes the sun, warmth ensuing
Here... No, that's poncey.

Here comes the sun, UV-laden
Here comes... Oh for god's sake, get a grip.

Here comes the sun, er... dooden-doodoo
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right.

And it certainly was all right.

How many other classic hits contain dooden-doodoos? And is the dooden-doodoo just a cop-out by a laughably limited lyricist or a perfectly valid device because sometimes tunes just need notes, not words?

Hell Harp for Leather, anyone? (Me? I really can't decide.)

The MP for Tottenham, presumably having nothing better to do,* has consulted the brilliantly named Alexander Carter-Silk, of the august and even more brilliantly named law firm Speechly Bircham, and been advised that there is indeed a case to force Spurs to change their name to Stratford Hotspur F.C. if they insist on going ahead with their relocation plans. According to m'larned friend, "the Club's exclusive right to use the name 'Tottenham' Hotspur would be open to legal challenge if the Club continued to use the Tottenham reference when it ceased to have any direct association with the locality."

Now then, now then. Apart from Tottenham, the only London clubs whose grounds actually are where they're supposed to be are Watford and Charlton Athletic. QPR should promptly have changed their name to SBR when they moved to Shepherd's Bush in 1917, while Millwall should be Bermondsey, West Ham United should be East Ham United, and Chelsea and Fulham should be Fulham F.C. and Fulham F.C., respectively.

But outside the Smoke - henceforth to be referred to as "the Smokeless" following a recent court ruling in favour of Boris Johnson's low-emission team – an even greater wrong remains in desperate need of righting, an injustice that is at best forgotten and at worst callously ignored. When Everton moved from their original home in a municipal park, they should have renamed themselves Anfield F.C. – oh how half the city would have loved that - before being forced to change their name yet again, to Walton F.C., after they moved on to Goodison Park in 1892. Yes, as recently as that.

As there is no statute of limitations on offences as heinous as this, may I therefore be the first but hopefully not the last to urge the good people of the Everton district to get their MP firmly behind them, hire a fleet of charabancs and the services of Messrs Speechly Bircham, and stride boldly into the Royal Courts of Justice, so that the full weight of the law might be brought down upon the nomenclatural turpitude of the Toffees. One-hundred-and-nine years of ignominy cannot be allowed to continue without redress.

(* The unemployment rate in the Tottenham constituency is the highest in London.)

I suppose it had to happen. Elton John is starting to speak the way he sings.

How to Speak Eltish 101: (1) Take a bog-standard middle-class Middlesex accent. (2) Replace every "t" with a "d". (3) Sit back in your Alexei Sayle fat-bastard suit and led id all hang oud.

"English people thought the American pressing was bedder; American people thought the Briddish pressing was bedder. It was a kind of inverded snobbery. [...] An explosion that starded with The Beadles, with the kind of experimentation that they put on reckid, that George Mardin helped them with."

From about 1:15 here (whack the volume up to 11, though; the sound's very poor):

Roy Hodgson has berated the Kop for not cheering his lads on enough, on the grounds that they "are not deliberately losing these matches or deliberately not playing to the best of their ability."

Those who watched Liverpool's abject performance against Wolves yesterday from a seat in the Kop (I watched it on TV, and "abject" is the kindest adjective I can think of to summarise it) had paid forty quid a pop for the alleged privilege.

Let's put this in perspective. For £40 you can see Lady Gaga, U2 or Bruce Springsteen at most venues. And tickets for Whitney Houston's dismal comeback tour earlier this year - the one when she was booed at almost every gig - could be had for a lot less than that. What was her manager's response to all the moans about her melismatic meltdown? A whole raft of excuses, that's what (mostly of the "she's got a rather bad cough" type). Compare and contrast with Liverpool's manager, who, rather than apologising, harangued his team's supporters: "Now is the time for people to really try to help us along because it is not through want of trying."

If only this attitude were an out-of-character one-off, but it's anything but. Wayne Rooney's touchline chiding of the England "supporters" (his scare quotes) who had crossed the Equator only to be served four courses of Crewe Alexandra-standard fare by Fab Fabio's eleven Three Lions is just one of many other cases in point. So are these people ever going to figure it out? We're not there to further bolster their already over-bolstered egos; they're there to entertain us. If they fail to do that - or, as with Liverpool last night, if they fail to even attempt to do that - aren't the paying public entitled to express their displeasure as they please?

Or should support for a football team, like love itself, be blind?

Down the farm - Glastonbury now has more people working security than there were punters at the legendary (and free) Glastonbury Fayre in 1971.

At the match - Manchester United won the then-First Division championship in 1966-67 by calling on a total of 19 footballers over the course of the year. Last season, they had 46 registered first-team players. (And came second.)

On the bedside table - John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is 232 pages long. Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire is 602.

At a cinema near you - 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that covers millions of miles of space, aeons of time and multiple dimensions of reality, is ten minutes shorter than The Dark Knight, a film about a man who dresses up as a bat.

On the turntable - The last track on Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run fades out 38 minutes and 23 seconds after the first track started. If we include the two "bonus tracks", U2's latest studio release, No Line on the Horizon, comes in at slightly over an hour.

On the box - The Singing Detective needed only six episodes to tell its story. Lost took a hundred and twenty-one.

Pick whatever popular-cultural item you like, and it's almost certain to be longer, fatter and more unjustifiably unwieldy than its counterpart was back when, as the great sage Taupin put it, "rock was young". How long can the bloat-out continue? Should it? Can it, even?