• You Shone Like the Sun — backgrounder and brief interview with Syd Barrett … ‘Then, a sound in the hall. Has he come in from the back garden? Perhaps it needs mowing, like the front lawn – although, judging by the mound of weeds by the path, he’s been tidying the beds today. I knock again, and hear three heavy steps. The door flies open and he’s standing there. He’s stark naked except for a small, tight pair of bright-blue Y-fronts; bouncing, like the books say he always did, on the balls of his feet. He bars the doorway with one hand on the jamb, the other on the catch. His resemblance to Aleister Crowley in his Cefalu period is uncanny; his stare about as welcoming…’ [Related: Metafilter Thread]
• Hoax! [Part 1 | Part 2] — Jon Ronson meets America’s Anthrax Hoaxers … ‘Terry first realised that he was in very big trouble when no less a figure than the US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, made a speech about him in a press conference to the world on October 18. Ashcroft announced that the FBI had “arrested Terry Olson for committing a serious crime in connection with terrorist hoaxes”. “What did they charge you with?” I asked him. “Weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “Life imprisonment.” “You must have said to them that Nesquik and sugar aren’t weapons of mass destruction,” I said.’

Beastie Boys – Sure Shot, Oasis – Stop Crying Your Heart Out, Jeff Buckley – Last Goodbye, Prodigy – Out Of Space, Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down Again, General Public – Tenderness, The Verve – Lucky Man, Samantha Mumba – Body 2 Body, Nelly Furtado – Turn off the Lights, A.O.S. – History (Repeats Itself), Oasis – Stop Crying Your Heart Out, Sophie Ellis Bextor – Murder On The Dancefloor, Oasis – My Big Mouth, Serge Gainsbourg – Bonnie and Clyde, Bryan Ferry – Crazy Love, New Order – True Faith, Ride – Taste, Mint Royale – From Rusholme With Love, The House Of Love – Crush Me, All Saints – Black Coffee, The Monkees – Porpoise Song, Oasis – Whatever.

• The Big Secret — Steven Levy takes a look behind the scenes at the Palladium Project … ‘Palladium is being offered to the studios and record labels as a way to distribute music and film with “digital rights management” (DRM). This could allow users to exercise “fair use” (like making personal copies of a CD) and publishers could at least start releasing works that cut a compromise between free and locked-down. But a more interesting possibility is that Palladium could help introduce DRM to business and just plain people. “It’s a funny thing,” says Bill Gates. “We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains.” For instance, Palladium might allow you to send out e-mail so that no one (or only certain people) can copy it or forward it to others. Or you could create Word documents that could be read only in the next week. In all cases, it would be the user, not Microsoft, who sets these policies.’
• I Told You So — Bob Cringely on Palladium … ‘It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers. This is diabolical. If Microsoft is successful, Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love. ‘
• Palladium Frequently Asked Questions … On MP3’s: ‘With existing MP3s, you may be all right for some time. But in future, TCPA / Palladium will make it easier to sell music, movies, books and other content packaged so that people can play them on their PCs but not copy them. You might be allowed to lend your copy of some digital music to a friend, but then your own backup copy won’t be playable until your friend gives you the main copy back. Quite possibly you will not be able to lend music at all. (It looks likely that the music publisher will be able to make the rules – and to change them at will by remote control.)’

‘…’I’d like to be in a big house in the south of France,’ he decides, staring wistfully up at the stairs that lead towards the pub’s exit, ‘with a deckchair. And the deckchair is outside and I’m in the deckchair just chilling right out. Forever.’ He says he’s looking forward to being 60 in that deckchair in the south of France. Age is not a fear for him. If he’s in that chair outside that house, he says, he won’t even mind going bald. ‘I’ll moan about it, but I won’t be getting a wig. I will not be getting an Elton John. I’ll just get a skinhead and have it large with a goatee, get meself a part in EastEnders where I can shag the barmaid.”

• You can’t diddle with the truth — another interview with Ridley Scott on his film Black Hawk Down. ‘The teams on the ground get lost under fire in Mogadishu’s narrow streets, as directions are relayed to them by the helicopters. “The Black Hawks are orbiting in a pattern, clockwise or anti-clockwise, and they can’t diverge from this or they will fly into each other.” This, in his view, “was the real juice of the film”, the place where plot enacted theme – theme being the complexities of intervention in a country like Somalia. “It was like a three-layer chess game.”‘
• So lonely I could cry — Cameron Crowe writes about his film Vanilla Sky … ‘Within weeks of finishing this screenplay, there we were on Times Square, an early Sunday morning in November. Tom Cruise as David Aames was racing through the most famous geography on the globe. Utterly alone. Watching the shot as it happened on a video monitor, the whole world of Vanilla Sky was still ahead of us. Lonely. Scary. Promising. Inevitable.’
• Interview with Adam Ant — ‘Anyone over 30 belongs to me. Bisexual, male, female, gay, whatever.’
• Ageless, peerless, Douglas — update on Kirk Douglas … ‘I see Kirk Douglas still isn’t dead. Remarkably, he’s preparing his next movie, Smack in the Puss, a family affair starring his son Michael, with whom his relationship has always been fiercely competitive, and the next sprig on the dynastic tree, grandson Cameron. The man will never stop, it seems. These days, at 86, bowed and speech-impaired by strokes, and having collapsed again recently on the golf course, he still radiates that fanatical, spartacist determination to live life right into the last ditch, or at least the last water hazard.’