After a six month hiatus due to being sent to Israel and the arrival of Chloë, the South West’s worst rock covers band is back in business. For anyone remotely interested, the gigs we’ve got lined up are:

August

• Friday 20th: The Gander, Bournemouth
   

September

• Friday 24th: The Swan, Southampton
   

October

• Friday 8th: The Gander, Bournemouth
  Saturday 30th: Taunton (tbc)
   

November

• Saturday 30th: Finns, Weymouth

Rogerpq3 writes "Yes, this is the official word that [long-awaited PC FPS] DOOM 3 has been code released and has been approved for manufacturing! According to ...

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to be struck down with a mystery virus around the 6th August....

Well, it's been nearly eighteen months but the website for the best band in the world, ever is now back online.

And now a personal plea to Matt: pull yer finger out and get Spirits, Pornography Of Despair and GunSluts released - it's about time you did!

I had a long hard look at the all new 'improved' Napster over the weekend, and I'm terribly disappointed with what I've found.

For a start, it's horribly expensive; I decided to look up an old album I had fond memories of - "The Golden Age Of Wireless" by Thomas Dolby, originally released way back in 1982.

Napster had the album available for download, so I pulled it down. Now, of course all the tracks are DRM protected WMA files, but encoded at a miserable 128Kbps. Individually, the tracks are priced at £0.99, or I could purchase the entire album at £9.95. If I decided to purchase the tracks from Napster, I would then be able to burn them to my own blank CD.

As a matter of interest, I went to Amazon to see how much they would charge me for an original copy of the same CD; they're charging £6.99

On top of this, Napster are charging £9.95 per month for the 'privilige' of downloading DRM crippled tracks in the first place.

So, let's get this right; Napster want me to buy tracks encoded at sub-CD quality, DRM crippled, to burn onto media that I have to purchase separately, with absolutely no artwork/sleeve notes for more than I can legally purchase the original album. Does that make sense to anyone out there?

So who ended up getting my hard-earned cash in the end? I'll give you a clue; the name of the company has a connection to Brazil...

Zak had an unfortunate accident yesterday; he fell over while playing and managed to break off the top of one of his front teeth, and bite straight through his lower lip.

We ended up having to take him to Taunton, where they have a specialist Childrens Ward, and under a general anaesthetic they removed the base of the tooth that was remaining and stitched his lower lip up.

The only part of the entire procedure that he really didn't like was having the IV Cannula inserted into the back of his hand - even though the back of his hand had already been numbed with a local anaesthetic cream, he really screamed at that point.

The whole operation took about half an hour (although it felt like hours to us), and within about fourty minutes of waking up in the Recovery Room he was up and running around again! We were able to take him home a couple of hours later.