It is a good job that Word magazine is not online, because if it were you would have an avalanche of Randroids beating a path to your door.

First of all, I must commend Christopher Bray's article in the current issue. As someone with relatives who have studied philosophy, and have duly had the long drunken arguments thereof, I was taken with his tart view that Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" as someone that could be digested by a child of ten in an afternoon. This must surely explain its "success". Elsewhere it has been suggested that Rand is to philosophy what Scientology is to religion. Some like their philosophy like Gary Cooper and their religion like Star Wars.

I had a go at Ayn Rand's novels in my acne-ridden youth but didn't get very far, mainly because the prose died so horribly on the page, but I kept an eye on the phenomenon ever since, not least because of the Rush connection, which was yet another nail in their coffin for me, and because some our American friends do seem to go so mad for her.

Mr Bray did spend much of his article on the life of the artist, and how she got this reputation as a shrill individualist harpy, and I dare say her defenders would argue that he is playing the woman and not the ball, Still, Rand seems to attract types who regard themselves as rugged individualists, if not masters of the universe. For example Michael Caine, who recently described himself a right-wing socialist , chose "The Fountainhead" on Desert Island Discs, and even named is eldest daughter Domininque after the heroine in that book , who is, correct me if I am wrong , raped by the hero. It all seems very odd. However there is not the same cult of Ayn Rand here that there is in the United States, which I suppose shows up the differences between us.

On the other hand, Rand's premise in "Atlas Shrugged" about what she regarded as the "prime movers" of society holding the world to random did have echoes of the "B" Ark being cast out in the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Strange ideas turn up in strange places.

So, not a usual Word article, but one I was very glad to read. Thank you.

Not usually on my radar, but Silent Witness tonight was startling. A Columbine situation in the middle of what I had down as a bread-and-butter crime show.

Check this if you don't believe me.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qh0cj/Silent_Witness_Series_13_S...

Going nowhere tomorrow night.

Dunno about you, but I loathe Christmas shopping, or more to the point I loathe shopping Christmas shopping in December, which is hell on wheels. Now , the mags are great for Christmas present suggestions, but it is a bit early for that (though I notice Q have nipped in early) so perhaps The Massive can take soundings, perhaps with their children, for the following categories...

Pop : not rock, but pop. Usually singles-led with a lot of filler, but are any of them out there worth listening to and might get played again as late as December 28th ?

Rawk ! : I mean the Kerrang! end of the market, all nose-rings and black hair dye. I realise this might be a challenge to the Massive.

Folk : now, in my view this is golden age for English folk music, and some of my lot will duly get some, but most of us are Scottish or Irish. Ideas ?

And since I'm feeling saucy, classical, in particular English classical, from Gilbert & Sullivan through to Vaughan Williams (not Britten, sadly).

Hopefully you can help me look December in the eye.

Listen to this Podcast

http://www.aspenpublicradio.org/listen_archive.php?prog=wax

and convince me that this is not the greatest pop music of the last fifty years.

And look here, the Doo Wop Box is down to £36.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Doo-Wop-Box/dp/B00000333M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8...

Excuse me, I have stuff to buy. And "The Five Satins" doing "To The Aisle" isn't even on it.

(Ok...terrible video)

No, surely not.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6879475.ece

Would he be under the Tory whip ? If so, then changed days indeed.
I mean, take this performance from 1981.
Why is the guitarist wearing an armband ?
And what is the song about anyway ?
(Allegedly...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catalogue

Not before time either.

Unfeasibly excited. Now, do I get the The Catalogue or Der Katalog. I am over on The Continent tomorrow...decisions, decisions...

Some months ago I bought an iTrip (the iTrip SE to be precise : http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/B000YJ4R6U/ref=dp_image_text_0... )

Now , early on it started cutting out. I thought it was something to do with it having trouble with quiet stuff. However this started getting worse, regardless of whether it was the Word podcast or Physical Graffiti. I contacted Griffin's Technology's Technical Support, who seemed an amenable bunch and who agreed it might have a fault.

However then I received the following email (slightly abridged):

"This email has been sent to you by Griffin Technology to help facilitate testing and/or replacement of merchandise.

We assure you that this is our preferred method for handling your return. Since the issue you have has either already been fixed, or the product you're having trouble with is no longer in production, we don't need you to send the product to us for testing. This method will help save you money (shipping costs) and the hassle of having to send the product back to us. It also has the added benefit of helping us to ensure that your unit is truly non-functional.

First, destroy your defective product. Yes, really destroy it. If the defective device has wires, like a charger or headphones, you can just cut those wires so that the device is no longer functional. If the device has a dock connector, like an iTrip or a speaker dock, you can break off the 30-pin connector with a pair of pliers. Also, you may want to use eye protection and protect yourself from any flying debris that may result from this process. This is a great way to take out any aggression, or to be creative.

Second, document the destruction. We recommend taking a digital picture of the destroyed unit while it is laying on a printed copy of this email so that the RMA number and other information are visible. Also, take a digital picture (or scan a copy) of your receipt.

Third, send us the pictures. Just reply to this email and attach the digital pictures of the destroyed product on the printed email and the receipt along with any other pictures that we might enjoy, such as you holding the destroyed product or the town where you live. Of course including the extra pictures is optional but feel free to include them if you want to.

Once we receive the email and verify the photos we will send a replacement to the address that you have provided us below.

Thank you,

Griffin Technical Support
support@griffintechnology.com"

I was something taken aback by this, as you might expect. However
it seems to be on the level, as witnessed by way that their customers take imaginative steps to demonstrate its demise, like so:

http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/24/project-annihilation-death-of-an-itri...

Now I think this is kinda cool, but can any of the Massive vouch for this ?

Those of us in Granadaland are due for the digital switchover on November 4th. I can't help but await this with some trepidation.

Lately the signals from BBC channels have got noticeable worse. No other collections of channels suffer in this way. When I search on blog and forum sites, the line from the BBC and others is the that all will be well after switchover when the transmitters can push their transmission power to digital.

Has this indeed been the case elsewhere, in other regions who have been switched already (as I understand it, the Borders, the West Country and parts of South Wales)? Have the problems indeed gone away, or are the BBC and other broadcasters sweeping them under the carpet ?

Similarly my mother, in the Scottish TV area, lives in a flat, with a collective aerial, and she has never been able to get Film Four or the pop video channels (handy for keeping rascally kiddies at bay) and some others. The public powers-that-be do not seem to surveying the premises for which they have responsibility and checking their readiness for the switchover.

I had an inkling that this issue might be a booby-trap for the government in an election year. Maybe I have a suspicious nature but I do wonder when things seem to be going SO well.

What do we know so far ?

James Murdoch attacks the BBC and the regulator.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/28/james-murdoch-bbc-mactaggart...

A well-timed jeremiad or self-serving bollocks from an uber-capitalist ?

Is the BBC indeed dumping state-sponsored news on us "chilling" , as opposed to, say, Fox News?

OK, I think you guess from I am coming from , but leaving aside the long-standing enmity of the Murdoch clan to the Beeb, does he have some valid points ? Even I wondered why they have bought Lonely Planet.

There has been surprisingly little comment about the proposed switch-over to digital radio and switch-off of analogue radio.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandteleco...

I'm a fan of my DAB radio, Radio 6 wakes me every morning , but I am not totally sure it is the bright shining future yet. For example :

- the quality of the signal and of available equipment is still wildly variable. I had to buy three radios before I got a decent one. Even on this one you have to reprogramme if you travel the country, and so end up with multiple entries in the menu.

- from a green point of point it is very power hungry. Just see how long batteries last. To illustrate, one of those wind-up radios will deliver an hour's listening from one minute's winding. The DAB version will give you six minutes only from one minute's winding.

- similarly, does the government really want 200 million FM radios in landfill overnight ?

- the quality of some DAB stations remains inferior to a good FM signal, and shows no sign of improving. the BBC , for example, offer many channels but its bandwidth has therefore been chopped up into quite small pieces. They did talk about acquiring more but it hasn't happened yet.

- in the age of international cooperation, especially among the EC countries, it is surely perverse to abandon FM, which can be used from one end of Europe to another, and take up one version digital radio which is not accepted by all countries who are holding out for a more up-to-date system, and other countries plan not to switching over at all.

I suspect politicians would not dare do it until the TV digital switchover took place and had been pronounced a roaring success, as opposed being an unexpected General Election issue in, say, Granada-land.

What do the Massive think ?

On the back of recent grumpiness about the narrowness of the threads ( http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/not-rock )

Surprised none of you started on this month's feature on the stuff light years ahead. Perhaps not so much learned discussions on The Canon as where you we stopped in your tracks and went off in strange directions, much to the horror of your pals. In other words the step change , which you don't like at all at first, but eventually bends you to its will.

Jazz has probably been done (piles of Miles and The Art Ensemble of Chicago's "Urban Bushmen", if you're interested), but someone mentioned contemporary classical.

I had heard some minimalist stuff first, holy (Gorecki, Part) and otherwise: fun, not to be dismissed (as I am about to do) but not always very challenging, mostly, except of my patience in the case of Phillip Glass, and sometimes you do crave something else. But a series of concerts moved me more towards giving the older but (slightly) spikier end of the spectrum a go :

- Oliver Messiaen's "Vingt Regards Du L'Enfant Jesus". The idea of 20 "peeps" at the baby Jesus for piano sounds will prepare you for all an impressionistic warm bath, but not a bit of it (OK, there is the odd moment). Be prepared to put your head in some very odd places. (and no end of other Messiaen since. Especially like Eclairs Sur L'Au Dela, Quartet For The End Of Time, piles of the the organ music....).

- years ago now I went to a Prom and before Beethoven Ninth was Harrison Birtwistle's strange and beautiful "The Triumph Of Time" which is is this long slow procession with this crazed central section. I was frankly terrified in advance by Birtwistle's fearsome reputation but live it made complete sense.

- the Kronos Quartet doing all sorts, as usual, but including Alfred Schnittke's Second String Quartet, which is this other worldly piece which sounded as if was come from the other side of some strange gauze.

I emphasise that all of these are live experiences. More even than jazz the records only get you so far, and you need to experience the performance first. Which doesn't help you lot ! But if we are talking platters then stuff lately has been

- Ligeti's piano studies (Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing)
- finally getting round to the scary old triumverate of Schoenberg/Berg/Webern (in Simon Rattle's now cheap CD) , and while not exactly Perry Como if you can cope with Radiohead and their influences then it's a breeze, with some notable exceptions...
- most of Pierre Boulez still eludes me but his "Rituel" is just brilliant
- Feldman's "Rothko Chapel" (though I don't much like Rothko...)

Yes, I know most of these are dead, but of the known names James McMillan doesn't do it for me, and I am still waiting for Thomas Ades to grab me. There is Sally Beamish stuff I have liked (viola concertos, mostly), and Judith Weir's stock is rising. I have heard Sofia Gubaidulina that I like but I don't know what it is, and the stuff I know I don't like so much. Go figure. And I am looking out for Galina Ustvolskaya, though where I will hear it is anyone's guess.

In summary, every home should have a copy of "The Rite Of Spring".

Well, you asked for it.

Every so often an MP will proclaim from a public platform that BBC Radio One should be sold off. Of course, he will say,it the exactly the same as commercial radio. Indeed it is unfair competition to it. With scarce BBC resources the money could be better spent. He might not actually listen to it, but its brand of ghastliness would surely flourish in the private sector.

Now, while Word mag is clearly a broad church, surely one article of faith is that R1, for all its faults (hello Mr. Moyles) is a completely different animal from tinpot local radio. Playing new music for a start : outside the capital try finding something you don't know on your local station. Or selected by a sentient being rather than a computer. And R1 does avoid those Stepford DJs created in some lab for the private sector, compared to whom the likes of Edith Bowman are as John Arlott.

But no. Paul Du Noyer, writing from The Spare Room (or is it The Dog House) is happy to see R1 sold off. Are we joining the fogeys ?