Sonic Flower Groove

The RBS is our bank...

...I think. The taxpayers have baled it out to the tune of billions. That makes it ours, don't it?

Well, it's one of six banks collectively fined £1.4 billion for colluding and fixing interest rates. On Monday, the busiest internet shopping day of the year, when millions of pounds of transactions are made every second, their IT systems go down. Customers (I suppose they call them clients now) were actually stranded at supermarket checkouts, petrol stations, and virtually stranded at the one-click buy stage on Amazon. It can happen to anyone, anytime, but that's truly awful timing.

Applying Napoleon's approach to generals, if we're going to bale out a bank, and we can't bale out a good bank, how about we bale out a lucky one?

These banks that determine our economic policies and pretty much run the gaff until we get rid of the three main parties and have someone proper running things instead, have been fined a total of about £130,000,000,000.00 since 2007. When supplying drugs to infant school kids cops a couple of quid and picking up some litter, you've got to get up to pretty serious misbehaviour to be on the end of £130 billion in fines. That does not sound as if those claiming to be getting a grip on the dodgy bankers are getting a grip on anything more than a cut of the proceeds.

Late night Ashes

The second test starts tonight. It can't go as badly as the first one did, can it? This means the laptop goes onto Sky Sports on Sky Go all night, with the headphones plugged in, for taking in some bits of cricket between sleeping. Or, if things get exciting, taking in a bit of sleep between the cricket.

The Luminaries

The Booker Prize winner isn't going to get much time, with the cricket and everything. There's a new boy turned up in a New Zealand mining town, and he's unwittingly gatecrashed some sort of meeting where all the local big boys were sorting something out, over some cigars, brandy, billiards and an open fire.

Primal Scream and Sonic Flower Groove

I've not listened to the first two Primals albums in a long time, and I read something about just how the critics panned them, and how they flopped commercially, so I've been listening to them again, and they're not at all bad. With the personnel crossover, there's an element of the third Stone Roses album they never got around to recording, and, in the IF universe, there's few stronger credentials you can boast than having been in The Jesus and Mary Chain.

It was like going back in time...

...struggling to get a decent feed for the Arsenal v Hull game, having to keep chopping and changing between them as they froze and went dead, and for the whole first half having an awful, start-stop, stuttering video and commentary in Lithuanian or Georgian or Ukranian or somesuch.