Leaving aside the merits of the short list for a moment ...

Expecting to have a cosy evening watching NMA on some obscure channel - I see they've promoted it to BBC2 and it's on for half an hour. Half an hour? Half an hour! That's two minutes per album if you leave a bit for the thank-yous at the end. How is that going to work? Am I missing something?

with the randomizing (sorry, tinkerbell). Every time I try this, I get the band of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders or some god-awful yodelling that I ill-advisedly bought on holiday or the Chris de Burgh song (you know the one) that was track no.16 in an Eighties compilation album. But I can walk away from these things, because actually: wife bought the CD / hardly ever play it / was emotional at the time. This will not do - It's time to show some responsibilty:

Your top five most-played songs.

No place to hide, you played them. Also, I propose that anyone listing 5 different artists is trying to impress us with the breadth of their completely non-obsessional musical interests and is therefore fibbing.

OK, I'll start:

1 Beirut: 'Elephant Gun' (Lon Gisland EP) - best video ever
2 Stars: 'Ageless Beauty'
3 Beirut: 'The Penalty' (The Flying Club Cup)
4 Asobi Seksu: 'Thursday' (Citrus)
5 Boo Hewerdine: 'Patience of Angels' (Harmonograph) - also from a previous Word CD

Sunday.
DeVotchKa.
King Tut's.
Oh, wow.

Just wanted to share that with you. Convention dictates that a question is called for , so ... best gig so far this year? Oh, and it has to be someone you haven't seen/(heard) before - let axes remain unground.

Dear Word

All right, first you go pushing all those Beirut tracks on us, so naturally I have to go and buy the albums. But now I've got a bloody ukulele (look, I spelt it right) winging its way towards me (with a gig bag and some felt picks) and I'm sure I'll only be able to play two chords max. Strangely, the missus seems to approve of all this - I suspect she's taken a shine to Zach Condon, you know.

I really blame that Mark Ellen entirely for all this, what with inflaming my weak and foolish desires and all that - you really need to print a health warning on the front cover.