In just over three hours the Zimbabwean dollar fell from Z$1.2 trillion to Z$1.3 trillion to the £ sterling.  The same meal will now cost more than it did at lunch time.

Zero Tolerance

Today the Zimbabwean dollar stands at Z$1.2 trillion to the £ sterling.  That's Z$ 1,200,000,000,000 to one pound or to put it another way - 10 million per cent inflation.  ...all those zeros and you still can't buy a single meal.

Deadly serious

Zimbabwe has collapsed - the official inflation rate is over 2 million per cent, hundreds have died in political violence, a month's salary won't even buy one meal, the country has no leadership after the single candidate 'election' so what counts as news for The Herald ( the government's propoganda paper)?  Why the government's battle against a plague of red locusts of course! 

For those of you fortunate enough never to have read a government mouthpiece, it's certainly a laugh, even if only for the surreal, head-in-the-sand approach.

The internet is a strange place

The internet is populated by some odd people and they all seem to record their actions for posterity.

Justice for the common people

Love 'em or loathe 'em, celebrities form the background to our lives, taunting us with their perfect bodies and shiny, shiny hair and their impossibly complicated love lives.

Now ladies and gentlemen, courtesy of Photoshop and some creativity, a form of justice can be metered out...

Imagine, if you will, Elizabeth Hurley after a few months in front of the television, eating Doritos...

Less glamorous, international jet-setter and more secretary at the annual office Christmas party.

Mr. Jolie - Brad Pitt, actor and all round hunk becomes Dave, plumber from Essex and white van driver...

There!  Feel better now?

The perils of liking Razorlight and other uncool music

Music, for all it's freewheeling, libertarian image can be a rather narrow-minded, parochial business at times.  Certain music is deemed 'cool' and certain music isn't.  If you don't understand what I mean, try telling a scruffy haired, N.M.E. reading, indie kid that you have a penchant for Celine Dion.  See?

It can be a treacherous and sometimes puzzling path, trying to navigate the line between trendy toons and Dad rock, with no real indicators as to what's what...  Sometimes a band can switch from being cool to being uncool merely because they sell a lot of records.  Look at the case of Razorlight.  Popularity, you see, is Not Hip.  This, however, isn't a hard and fast rule - witness Radiohead's baffling success, for example.

I don't know why it's so, I don't make the rules.

Before we continue, let me state for the record - I love music; many different types of music, both cool AND uncool.  There!  I feel better now that I've got that off my chest.

  

Purchasing terminally unhip music can be more nervewracking than buying condoms as a teenager.  A couple of days ago I was browsing the racks in Zavvi when I came across 'Rhinestone Cowboy - The Best of Glen Campbell' for next to nothing.  Glen Campbell, you see, is Not Cool.  Normally I wouldn't have cared less but the guy at the checkout really was cool.  And hot as hell.  I had to spend the next twenty minutes trying to find something else to buy so that I could sandwich the offending CD between them.  I ended up buying two extra DVD's and spending nigh on £20 instead of the original £3 that the CD cost.

Altogether now...'Galveston oo Galveston...'   

Bad Lines being drawn

The twentieth teenager has died in a fatal stabbing in London this year and the media continues to whip itself up into a moral panic, blaming everything from 'hopelessness' to 'a lack of good role models'.

Maybe popular culture should stop celebrating violence and under - achievement. You can't tell kids that it's cool to be a thug then recoil in horror when they actually become one.