Interesting to see how the characters are getting on. Actually has pretty much happy endings for the grown children Nelson and Annabelle, which makes for a satisfying ending.

Even so, without Harry himself, the Rabbit-shaped absence doesn't make for a book that's as compelling as the previous four. I think the appeal of the series was seeing how the changes in America since the Fifties affect this one man, and what he thinks of them. Without his point of view, the State of the Union stuff seems a bit disconnected from the events in the characters' lives.

Worth reading if you've read the others though: decent coda to the series.

Theatre
Saw Pornography at the Tricycle theatre. Play's got a lot of attention lately: tells the stories of a disparate collection of Londoners around the time of the 7/7 bombings.

One of them is one of the bombers, but you don't get a lot of insight into his background: just his musings on his final journey.

Pretty interesting, and keeps your attention, but it might have been a little bit overrated. Despite some clever intercutting, it's basically just a group of vignettes with a common hook. Seems to be trying a bit too hard to hit the reviewers buttons, including some pretty gratuitous (male) nudity.

The run's finished now, but though you may have missed a decent play, you didn't miss a life-changing experience.

Independent, Guardian reviews.

What I'm Watching
Saw The Hurt Locker at the cinema: Iraq War movie about a specialist team who make IEDs safe. Good film. Not very heavy on plot, but tense and well acted. Generally seemed pretty realistic except for a couple of scenes especially the odd firefight in the middle of nowhere.

Worth seeing.

What I'm Watching 2
Saw the concluding part of Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One. As good as the first part (you'd expect so since it was filmed as one and split afterwards). Well, the Seventies fashions weren't quite as good. In some disguises Mesrine looked eerily like my Dad used to.

You should definitely see this, but start with the first one.

Annoyances 1
I still keep seeing "Iphone versus Android in smartphone death duel" articles, but I don't really buy it.

It seems to me Apple is only interested in the top end of any market. They like to sell fashionable, premium, heavily advertised products for a nice fat fistful of dollars as profit. They're not interested in the tooth-and-claw struggle at the bottom end of the market to shave off a cent's worth of plastic and turn a two-cent profit into a three-cent profit.

Google on the other hand makes its money by shaving off an infinitesimal profit from a vast number of page hits. If the smartphone market is going to eventually take off and start delivering lots of hits, they want those hits to go them and not Bing. So, Android is worth a punt: build some software, give it to the phone manufacturers for free. Google want as many hits as possible, so they want their smartphones and software to be as cheap as possible. They're mostly interested in the bottom 90% of the market.

So while there's a certain degree of competition at the moment, they're basically going after different sections of market. They could probably coexist indefinitely.

Annoyances 2
After reading a not-terribly-related Carnage4life blog, I started looking at some Google Trends graphs for social networking sites:

It seems to me that Facebook stopped growing about February 2009, Twitter seems to have peaked in July 2009, and MySpace has been shrinking since July 2008.

Basically, the whole social networking fad seems to have peaked.

Just as there came a point where everybody who needed a blog had a blog, I think everyone who wants to be on Facebook is already there. There are also probably some people there who don't need or want to be there, but read in the papers that it was the next big thing.

So really, I wish all the other sites on the web would stop trying to be Facebook.

Like, I check my Yahoo webmail which I've had since the mid-Nineties, and get told a suspiciously attractive young lady I've never heard of "would like to connect with me". Or I log into YouTube to see if there are new videos from my subscriptions, and it tries to tie me in to my Google login.

Really guys, I just want to check my email and look at some wacky videos. If I wanted to be on Facebook I'd join Facebook.

The fad's peaked. The market's mature. The bandwagon's rolled out of town. Stop trying to bug me into joining the last fad.

Web
Random. The Office Kid (via) provides the childless a fake kid to get off work. Careers in Jazz (via fluffy). Places to take your parents in London. Etymology of Henchman.

Economics. Kaletsky reckons recovery worse for Eurozone.

Philosophy. Posted a couple of things to the stoic forum about Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness and History of Western Philosophy.

Video. Indie vs. Independent movies. Water Rocket. Museum of Animal Perspectives includes armadillo. Kush. Vectron, More Mitchell and Webb. Bear-eared nursebot lifts patients out of bed. Another Downfall.

News/articles. Muslim claims he was kidnapped over prayers. Joe Abercrombie on his next book. Transition by Iain Banks is available on Amazon and an abridged version will be podcast free (MeFi)

Articles. Advantages of depression. Thumbdrives sent by carrier pigeon. Book claims crowds become more altruistic in emergencies.