Paperjam

This is the amazing new fourth or fifth design of the paper-jam website. I've lost count now, it's ridiculous. No animals were harmed in the making of this new site, but there was plenty of swearing, believe me.

One thing that was causing particular cursage was updating the structure of the database on the live server without trashing all the data that was there already... the answer was mysqldiff, which works out the structural difference between two databases. I used it to generate the update SQL script; it needed a bit of editing afterwards, but nothing serious.

Hooray for Stephan Skusa who wrote mysqldiff, there'll be a donation winging it's way over to him once my credit card has recovered from the sticky brown mess it's currently in.

Hoho. The new series from the makers of - wait for it - Spooks and Hustle had it's first episode tonight, and they almost managed to keep their hand off the Impossibly Daft Slow-Mo button, right up until our time-travelling hero John Sim and his thuggish boss, played by Philip Glenister, jump over a desk.

In slo-mo.

Well at least there was no hideously embarassing musical number, like in Hustle.

And it was going quite well, too before that, with some sly Back to the Future references (asking for a Diet Coke in a pub, the silly "this flyover! coming soon!"), and his 2006 consciousness leaking through a television set in the form of a hirsute Open University lecturer.

Beyond the set-up, the detective story was dreadfully thin, with a massive leap to finding the bad guy, but it'll be worth a go next week. Mind you, I watched the entire first series of Hustle too...

Have you yearned for a screen saver with the badly-kerned words "paper" and "jam" spinning slowly around, while the wonder of RSS lets you know what is going on around here at the same time.

You have? That's handy. Download the file below and put it in your Screensavers folder (you can find it in the Library), you can then turn it on through the screensaver settings.

Of course this all only works if you have OS X and are connected to the internet in some way, but hey aren't we all?

The file is here, don't worry it is only about 8k

Tiga, the electroclash survivor that apparently spent all of 1996 mourning the death of Tupac Shakir, seems to be everywhere right now, remixing everything in sight. Check his remix of LCD's Tribulations for especially guilty hands-in-the-air disco fun.

Now he's had a go at Depeche Mode's rather mardy 1985 single "Shake the Disease" for release on the upcoming 80s remix compilation "Future Retro " and it's a steely, minimal electro affair, well away from the limp and moany original. It's what it should have been in the first place.

Depeche have been having a good time of remixes at the moment, with the Thin White Duke and Bitstream mixes of "A Pain That I'm Used To".

Also on the compilation is a version of Yazoo's "Situation" (apparently in itself a house classic in it's Francois Kevorkian remix from 1982) by Richard X, which I was all excited about in my pathetic way, but it's bollocks, I'm afraid.

And especially for Jim, who has a soft spot for La Moz, a remix of "Suedehead" by Sparks. Good God. I've not heard this yet, I'd be intrigued...

We've been meaning to write about this for a while, but DVDborn rather beat us to it - there's a fantastic torrent available of a German TV special featuring Kraftwerk at the peak of their powers in 1981.

I haven't watched it all yet, because my jaw dropped and hit the stop button when I saw them doing a version of "Pocket Calculator". They're absolutely going for it, giving it a hundred and ten percent, with maximum jerky dancing, random audience participation and live, hot Stylophone action.

No laughing at the back please, trust me: a Stylophone through a huge PA system sounds raw and rude. There's plenty of bass, believe me.

At the risk of murdering our bandwidth allocation, here's the (rather murky) clip. You'll potentially need the evil Quicktime to make it work...

As every one knows, comics are for kids - and grown men who are still essentially children. With this in mind I can heartily recommend Ex Machina and The Filth to all the rest of you out there.

Ex Machina is very grown up, mixing politics, art scandals and a bit of 9/11 into what is essentially a flawed superhero story.

Meanwhile The Filth (by Grant Morrison who wrote The Invisibles) is a cavalcade of swearing, pornography, violence and general mysteriousness. Like The Invisibles, this is really great to read but a complete nightmare to describe in any concrete way. A whole lot of personal interpretation makes up the experience, which is usually the way with all good books.

As usual, if you are thinking of delving into the world of comics I would recommend first checking out Alan Moore's genius V for Vendetta and Watchmen, both of which are getting the film makeover as I type.

We're more than happy to fan the flames of the PR around the "axing" of the South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet", which won't be shown in the UK because of legal worries.

For those that haven't seen the episode, it starts off with Stan looking for some free kicks 'cos of a lack of ready cash. Some Scientologists promise some free fun, so he gets tested by them and they then presume he's the reincarnation of founder L. Ron Hubbard.

So the episode goes on from there into a real all-guns blazing assault on Scientology, including an eye-opening rendition of the batshit-mad Xenu story, which according to Wikipedia is part of Scientology doctrine. Parker/Stone underline the insanity of the story by flashing up "This What Scientologists Actually Believe" across the screen.

The episode has made headlines over here (Ananova story here) for a (very funny) joke about Tom Cruise going into a closet to hide in Stan's house, and being "trapped" there. John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and R. Kelly all turn up to try and persuade him out, and a news crew stare in the camera and say repeatedly, "When will Tom Cruise come out of the closet?"

The story on Ananova about Tom threatening legal action looks to be complete cobblers though.

> An insider was quoted as saying... "Tom was said not to like the episode and Paramount didn't dare risk showing it again. It's a shame that UK audiences will never see it because it's very funny."

"An insider" saying that "Tom was said not to like the episode"? You could ask anyone that's seen it, they could tell you this much. It's interesting to see something reported over here in the UK based on nothing but a guess. Makes me wonder if Paramount have been trying to put this about to raise South Park's and Cruise's profile.

You can see the episode here.

Feeling a bit down in grey old January? Cheer yourself up with Sixties French pop videos over at YouTube (via ilike).

Even the hardest of techno-loving hearts could not fail to be melted by Sixties teenage babypop star France Gall's hip-swinging "Laisse Tomber Les Filles". I love the stomping "Poupée de cire, poupée de son" which won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1965.

There's also some rare film of Gitane-aholic Serge Gainsbourg not glued to a fag in the pervy-looking "Dents de lait, dents de loup" and "Les Sucettes", and then he's back with the cigs and Brigitte Bardot (toting a tommy gun) in the classic "Bonnie and Clyde". There's plenty of good stories on the indefatiguable Gainsbourg at the Guardian website.

Oh and don't watch "Tous les Gar‚àö?üons et Les Filles" if you've just eaten - Ms. Hardy is lipsyncing on one of those fairground boats and it's all a bit vertiginous.

As mentioned previously the new eight track album from the capital letter-hating bravecaptain aka Martin Carr is available for completely free download from his web site as of today. Thoughtfully, you can also grab the artwork to put in the CD case to make things look nice too.

Haven't had a chance to have a proper listen yet but did bung it on whilst doing some cooking and the first track "whatever happened to the fingertipsaint" is ace, with big organ sounds and very good for chopping up vegetables to. Unfortunately most of the album was then drowned out by the sounds of bubbling saucepans, stir-frying chicken and an extractor fan.

Once the food was ready I had reached the last two tracks, the juddering but tuneful "oh you" and the closer "jerusalem" featuring the politicised rap of Akira The Don, who you can read a onemusic interview with right here if you like.

All sounds good so far. More thoughts tomorrow when I've listened to it on the way to and, more importantly, back from work.