Last night I ventured out amongst the footpads and painted ladies of the city of Bath. My perambulations took me to a converted cinema where I experienced a musical epiphany. Henceforth I shall buy only bluegrass versions of my favourite chansons.

Here is one I heard last night:

I would be interested in other cross-cultural experiments; do the Massive have any suggestions we should share? Dub reggae versions of Jewish wedding songs? Highlife treatments of Norse pillaging anthems? Light Opera in a Rap style?

Anyone have a theory about why Podcast 126 has gone missing? Have the lawyers intervened? Did Fraser accidentally fricassee the tape? Did Mark leave it on the tube? Did Heppo's kids tape over it?

The Massive's imagination runs wild....

...and could only take albums from that label to Valhalla with me when I depart, this would be mine:

How about you?

My neice Ellie is in the new Tim Burton movie, Alice In Wonderland, and appears (hopefully!) in the scenes filmed in Cornwall. The movie is showcased on pages 4 & 5 of your new soaraway, still staple-free Word for February.

The Massive must have lots of similarly unsung family member cinematic appearances, so let's be hearing about them...

May your solos be mellifluous, may your rhythms run deep and your chords progress nicely.
All at the earth send their best wishes for a lovely day of foxy fun.
Don't overcook the sprouts, and be sure to have a Massive time. Chin chin!

Anybody else catch Roger Scruton's marvellous diatribe about the lack of beauty in modern art? It expressed a lot of my own thoughts, and fair made my spirits soar.

What do the Massive make of our Rog?

This young woman went down a storm at the Didmarton Bluegrass Festival a couple of years back.
Here she is playing an old standard in a pretty informal setting (the home studio). She sure can play and sing.

I can thoroughly recommend her albums, and her original material is also superb; she knocks spots off certain rivals in the singer/songwriter stakes.

...wait 'til you see the Crimbo cover!

Do we have any advance nominations for 2010 cover fizzogs?

to discover that John Tracy and evil genius The Hood were the same man!

I was saddened to read today that I'd missed the recent passing of Ray Barrett, who, like Rolf, familiar of this parish, was another sixties Oz import who found a niche here on screen and stage that he filled with admirable aplomb and a good deal of self-deprecating humour.

We were blessed with imported antipodean talent back then, weren't we?

Thanks Ray, for all the fine roles you played, even those when we got nothing of you but that gravelly statement of authority that quickened a youngster's sinews in anticipation of the excitement to come; 'Anything can happen in the next half-hour!'.

I've just had a letter from some bloke called David Heppepworth that's full of spessling mistakes and just LISTSSS ov what's in the current issu of Word magazine.

And what an issue it is. Bloody brilliant. And the thing that really grabs my attention is the accompanying letter, the one full of dashed off mistypings and hurried lists of bits in the mag. Coming from any other publication I'd suspect arch design concepts, marketing ploys and insults to my intelligence. But not here.

Gawd bless you folks, keep up the good Word.

Has anyone else endured the 60 minutes of jaw-droppingly embarrassing television called Design For Life that the BBC is airing weekly at present?

Phillippe Starck's been lumbered with his own mutant hybride version of The Apprentice, in which 12 'Design Students' compete for a six-month placement at his design agency.

Oh dear.

What have they been doing before they came to play in Paris?

They do a very good impression of being a vacuous group of woolly-thinking lazy good-for-nothings who stare at plates all day or stroll aimlessly about the streets with a film crew in order to come up with 'design concepts' which can be illustrated by sketching a square on a piece of paper and mumbling incoherently.

These people include an 'unemployed retail worker' (a.k.a. shelf-stacker?), a 'Brand Manager' and a 'College Lecturer'. Good grief. Given this must have been filmed a while back, have any of these wasters actually been allowed back into the country? If so, why?

Why are we giving les mangeurs de fromage this blatant excuse to mock our educational institutions? More to the point, why are any of us watching it?

Oh shit. It's only me isn't it?

The recent upgrade of an amp, and the enthusiastic employment of the Cambridge Audio volume control has brought the age of my treasured Mission loudspeakers sharply into focus. In other words, they are knackered. I've ordered a re-foaming kit from some hi-fi bods in the Netherlands, but I fancy getting some new speakers really, letting the Missions, once fixed, retire gracefully to the office room.

The retiring Missions are 700s, and their measurements in imperial terms are about 1 ft by 1 ft by 18 inches. When the speakers were new their dimensions were described in terms of cubits and spans.

So here's the challenge: I have about £400 to spend, and I don't want any floor-standing things that look like tower blocks; they won't fit where they need to in the room they're destined for.

The new speakers will have a hard life punching out just as much orchestral or chamber stuff as they will Lee Perry, Little Feat and King Crimson. So all rounders are the order of the day. The room opens onto the conservatory, and they will therefore be made to work at some volume on sunny afternoons (i.e. at least three times a year).

Anyone bought any mid-range speakers recently and been super pleased, or even been drastically disappointed?

Best ever cover, and arrived on the first (proper) day of my extended doss, a.k.a the August silly season, when everyone else is off work, so I might as well stay at home frabit. Splendid work team.

Did anyone else catch Cerys' rather fine programme last night about Celtic poetry, national identity and the humanism inherent in what we think of as traditional verse?

Due to advanced age, domestic chaos and all round general slothfulness, I managed to forget to record the Kate Adie retrospective 'Return To Tiananmen Square' the other night.

I'm wondering if a kind member of the Massive might have a copy?