Ride and Heavy Stereo to reform!

At last. News reaches Avenues and Alleyways that fucking Oasis are to finally split. Well thank fuck for that.

Yes... it was inevitable really. After being mainmen in their own 1990's heyday, Andy Bell and Gem (with a hard 'G' - natch) have decided to reform their own respective '90s behemoths; scene-that-celebrates-itself topsters Ride and NWONW also-rans, Heavy Stereo.

Andy Bell, Mark Gardener, him and the other one with the surname beginning with Q, have remained on good terms since Ride's demise in 1996 so it comes as no surprise that they have decided to cash in on the current boy band reformation scene.

Clearly the most devastating blow in this double whammy is the surprise news that Heavy Stereo will reform. The shock announcement that Gem (with a hard 'G' - natch) is to team up with old Heavy Stereo colleagues Nez, Nick and Pete again has set the music "world" reeling and effectively spells the end of Oasis.

Despite this, even doomed Oasis vocalist, Liam Gallagher, is optimistic. Gallagher is quoted as saying, "Aye. Fookin' Heavy Stereo man. I can't fookin' believe we'll get the chance to hear the fookin' likes of Mouse In A Hole, Worm Brain, Cartoon Moon and Magic Sponge again. This is welcome news. I'm over the fookin' moon, man! I'm fookin' delighted that Heavy Stereo are to reform - it's for the greater good."

One bastard goes in, another one comes out.

Funny people...

...and Adam Sandler.

Sorry, but I couldn't resist that. I've never seen this film and have absolutely no idea who the rest of the cast are. For all I know, Sandler may very well be the funniest person in this film.

I have seen Little Nicky, though. And frankly, that was quite enough for me to have made my mind up about this one already.

We have a technical

They say these things happen in threes... and it's true.

Event 1: My MP3 player bit the dust a fortnight ago right in the middle of Edinburgh's George Street as I listened to Led Zeppelin's Hats Off To (Roy) Harper. I've been dealing with such matters for long enough now to know that the sound of a clicking hard disk officially means... it's fucked. And it is.

I loved that MP3 player. It is (was!) a 30gb Creative Zen and has served me well over the past few years. I found it very user friendly and the sound was much richer than that of an iPod too. I haven't thought about buying a new one yet as I'm on holiday (yes, the usual avoid-the-Festival fortnight!), but I'll need to get something in time for going back to work so I don't have to listen to the dreadfully incessant yapping, coughing and sneezing of fellow Fife-to-Edinburgh commuters - not to mention the sound of them rustling their Metros and the racket coming from their own MP3 players! You may not be surprised to learn that, on the bus, I find everything annoying.

Event 2: The Wii packed in. Luckily, though, I only needed to replace the fuse in the plug. Phew.

Event 3: Then the worst. My main desktop PC went totally tits up.

Since March last year, I have replaced the main internal hard drive, souped up the RAM and installed one serious motherfucker of a graphics card. All was well for a while, but in the last month, I've been getting ever-increasing instances of the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death. In other words, the PC shuts itself down because of some kind of serious error. These errors are usually caused by hardware and/or their drivers so, after a prolonged period of trying to establish and rectify the fault, I thought I had finally succeeded. Except... I hadn't. Last Tuesday, the thing totally crashed and burned; one massive, final BSOD as I listened to Massive Attack's Safe From Harm on WMP11 was all it took. My motherboard was no more. Bereft of life. It rests in peace. Etc.

So here I am - eight days of my life later and about £200 worse off. I've forked out for a USB enclosure for the hard drive so I could access the few files I had not had the chance to back up using my laptop; a new, more powerful, power supply unit; a new cooling fan; a new motherboard; and a new processor chip. All in all, it was a remarkably straightforward operation; the only issue I really encountered was Hewlett Packard's built-in, anti-consumer mechanism - the Code Purple - but even then, I managed to overcome it fairly quickly via good old Google and some techie forums. Touch wood (ooer...), all seems well now.

So, not only have I got (in effect) a brand new desktop PC, but one powerful enough to be able to finally play Grand Theft Auto IV. It has turned out to be the most expensive game I have ever bought. Happy birthday to me.