Everyone wants to think that they have a sophisticated taste in music, right? Including me. :P In one of many pointless internet surveys/rankings that don't mean anything at all, you can now check "how mainstream" your taste is. ;) And, of course, everyone is trying to be "not mainstream", right? :P

You need a last.fm profile for this. last.fm records music you listen to and sends the artist/track names to a website that has all kinds of statistics about your music taste. So this website takes your 30 most favorite artists and scores them based on how many other last.fm user listen to those. Finally you get a score in terms of a number, and so far I'm beating everyone at this. :D :P

Rock 'n Roll! You are 5.72 % mainstream!

How to cheat: Rename your favorite songs to "Artist1 - Song1" through "Artist30 - Song30", play them for a while, then check your score. Better yet, change those names to something like "Qz6SioAp91Z - T1zIqmL09r" for a better shot at the title.

Let's be honest, there has never been a really amazing James Bond movie. It's an action packed sequence of short scenes, silly dialogue packed with puns, a cheer for old Britain, and gadgets. But, it stands for something. It's also a comment about high culture, Bond is both elegant and eloquent, but he's also a complete rebel. He's a guy that we as kids wanted to be, he knows how to get away with stuff, he thinks on his feet. He's the guy with the motorcycle and the leather jacket, only cool. At the end of the day it's exciting, it's unpredictable, it's just plain old fun.

The Bond production has had various ups and downs over the years, casting has been trying, the writing hasn't always been very good. But in one way or another every episode has still been Bond, for better or for worse (the Timothy Dalton episodes live on in infamy). Pierce Brosnan has been a breath of fresh air and truly made a strong comeback for Bond, even though in recent years they've been scratching their heads trying to find problems for him to solve, and the stories have been gradually more pathetic.

But then it was time to draw the line and start fresh. Casting for Bond must be incredibly difficult, because they looked high and low for years and came up with Daniel Craig. When I first saw him, I thought he looked like one of the bad guys from old Bond movies.

Casino Royale is not the worst Bond film ever made, it's not even a Bond at all. In the opening sequence, Bond drowns a guy in a men's room, literally drowns him in a sink. The real Bond would just knock him out, but this guy kills him with his bare hands. And for what? The scene is not explained at all, you have no idea what just happened. The opening sequence is very important in Bond, this one just completely blows. That's when I realized it's not Bond I'm watching. If that's not enough to tip you off, watch the opening credits. They've always had an artsy feel to them, with pretty abstract images. This time you actually see cartoon characters in violent hand combat, blood spilling.

Then we come to a long, long scene in Madagascar. A guy is being tailed, that turns into a pursuit on foot, and Bond is chasing him for minutes, again without the slightest idea what the hell for. Eventually he just shoots him in cold blood. The motive? His cell phone. This movie is obsessed with cell phones, Bond is calling people and checking his phone every five minutes, if you came in to see some cool gadgets, you'll be very disappointed.

This new Bond doesn't have any gadgets, he's not charming or witty, in fact he's slow. You know how Bond can always get out of a jam with some spur of the moment idea? Not this Bond, he's always behind, almost a little thick. I mean calling M because he can't figure out how to open a door? Are you kidding? Yes, they gave Pierce Brosnan really stupid lines to say, but this Bond doesn't have anything to offer in the vocal department. "I nicked the door", what kind of hillbilly are you?

Then we come to the focal point of the story. The big poker game. Not only is it the longest and most boring gambling sequence ever. Normally in Bond, gambling is just a way to antagonize the bad guy, but here his whole plan stakes on it. And he loses. Of all the things Bond can't pull off, he can't even gamble anymore. The game seems to last for days. Through all this MI6 is tracking his every move, up until we get a badly needed respite from poker when he gets poisoned. Again, he's completely helpless and outwitted, doesn't even know how to use a defibrilator. The Bond girl saves him.

What is perhaps the most painful about this movie is the many long scenes of chit chat. It's not supposed to be a soap opera. Bond falls for the girl, quits his job, she betrays him, she dies, he says "the bitch is dead", like he's a psychopath. Granted, Bond always had a relaxed relationship to his women, but he had class. Again, this shows what a halfwit this new Bond is, never occurred to him that things may not be what they seem, can't handle it either. He's a complete tool.

As if to top the whole thing off (not that it needed to be done), David Arnold, who scored the last three Bonds, and did so extremely well, seems to have lost his marbles and the score in this movie is not even worth playing once.

Air travel was once a luxury for the wealthy. Flying as a business was so expensive anyway that they could increase their profit margins by giving you selling you food, drink and entertainment, which only raised the price cost marginally. Then came the age of ever cheaper flights, and gradually they began phasing out everything but the bare essentials: the flight itself.

So an activity that was once about giving you an enjoyable experience, albeit in the confines of an airplane seat, is now nothing more than just transportation. Like taking the bus. Sure, they keep trying to sell you food, but very few people bother overpaying for a sandwich unless the company pays for it. And there's nothing else for you to do, between This is your captain speaking blahblah would you can it already, Sir, would you care for a sandwich *waves them away* and We'll be landing in 45 minutes, the weather is blahblah.

And that's the problem, they keep trying to pretend like flying gives you something to do, but it absolutely doesn't. And people don't believe it for a second, they're trying to just get through it. Is trying to get some rest too much to ask for? Do I really need the pilot talking his standard nonsense right above my head when I'm trying to doze off? Shut up already, I'm tired enough as it is having to get up early to get to the airport and oblige you with the ridiculous "safety" precautions, wait around doing nothing, take the flight, wait 40 minutes to get my luggage, re-check-in to my connecting flight, waste another hour at the damn airport and then listen to you all over again.

I always look to my mp3 player for salvation. Without it flying would be much worse. And recently I listen to audio books a lot. So when I get on the plane, I want peace and quiet, cause either I'll be listening or I'll try to go to sleep. Everything you could possibly say I've heard a dozen times over, please just shut up. I think we should have the stewardess hold up those big signs with everything they want to say written on it, like a teleprompter. That way they can talk as much as they want, the rest of us can get some peace.

I think that reading classics generally comes with a certain expectation, that since this work is so famous and acclaimed, it should be truly captivating in some way. Often this is not the case. Of course, there is to consider the time in which the work was produced, but some works have this timeless quality to them, and some do not.

"Don Quijote de la Mancha" is a superbly influential work, and apparently very "modernistic" for its time. And that is something I would not dispute, it really does have that kind of timeless quality to it. But it still falls short of the kind of work that a classic is expected to be.

The premise of Don Quixote is amusing, but the story is very long and in essence not very much more is said mid way than is said in the first chapter. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are well spoken characters with substance, but their adventures are quite shallow and simplistic. This is amplified by the fact that through the course of their history, they encounter a host of characters whose stories sometimes are near identical.

In fact, one wonders if this is not a children's book, because the structure of the stories is so simple, and so obvious after the first few chapters, that a child could easily follow it.

In the absence of the concentration to finish a decent blog idea, I was browsing the stats of the site and that's always a bit surprising. For instance, when looking at how people found the site through a search engine..

eva mendes 537
fast cars 29
fast and furious 14
eva mendez 9

It's a bit strange that so many looking for Eva Mendes landed here, considering the name has only been mentioned twice, both times in passing. One would think this blog is pretty irrelevant to Eva Mendes, also considering both occurences (to which this will be a third :P ) are from 2005, so not exactly recent. Me thinks there's some sucky search engine out there that keeps sending hopefuls here, only to let them down. What's weird is that this search term has ranked as most popular on this site for months now. It's a shame my stats only go back a year, so I can't see what you were searching for before I ever mentioned Eva Mendes.

Other more relevant search terms were tell me something about your ielts (which I actually blogged about), kruidvat paracetamol (which seems terribly concrete), unethical funds (trying to get rich or doing research for a school paper?), cm97 stadium capacity (someone knowing exactly what they want), i love oslo (yeah, me too), cyclist smoothie (you found it), and utrecht red light district location map -amsterdam (I know where it is, perhaps I should have a suggestion box for people looking for stuff in the area).