The Clash
I am, and always have been, incredibly suspicious of bands and albums placed onto pedestals, even if sometimes the adoration is justified. Love's wondrous Forever Changes is a great example - always barked on about in magazines, never heard on the radio, and full of charm and creativity and real actual pop. The Clash are beloved of punks-turned-bores in a way that no other band of the era seem to be, when to me their records seem either staid to the point of impenetrability. The exception is London Calling, which sounds (foreboding thunder of the title track aside) like summer, fun, jazzy, lazy, like pop. The Card Cheat came on as I was travelling to work this morning, and it sounded impossibly romantic and wistful. The line "Your lover may not be around... anymore" brought a tear to my eye, but I always get a bit emotional on dark mornings.

Pretty lady, terrible show
There is a tv channel called FX on Sky digital, which I hoped would show vhs rental mainstay FX: The Art of Illusion starring Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy on a continuous loop, but instead shows something both much better and much worse on a continuous loop. What it shows is a show that is called the name JAG. Perhaps this is an acronym for something, but I do not know what. It is about naval lawyers, a bit like Demi Moore and teh Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, and they dress all smart and solve a mystery or confront an ethical dilemma whilst enjoying unspoken sexual tension and sometimes punching someone out. Jag is almost unforgivably awful - almost. You see, the female lead is a lady named (shuffles imdb) Catherine Bell, and she is a goddess beside we hideous mortals. She's tall, lithe, busty and has a perky, Brittany Murphy-ish smile. I haven't been able to bring myself to sit through a whole episode of this nonsense, though Lord knows I've tried, but the spectacle of Ms Bell in starched, ever-so-slightly tight military uniform (which generally does it for me anyway) keeps pulling me back to FX for, frankly, an ogle.

I flicked over last night to discover the whole cast had inexplicably been Quantum Leaped and were now doctors and nurses on a second world war battleship! It was still total bollocks which I managed to endure for all of five minutes, but Catherine Bell as a 1940s nurse was even lovelier than the standard issue.