Well, it’s about bloody time. Though we apparently don’t have any music from Sony BMG, the Australian iTunes Music Store is up and running — with tracks available for $1.69 and albums for (usually) $16.99. Bought me a Sarah Blasko track this morning and it was easy as pie (the greek letter pi! ahem, no, not really).

Ah, but is anything free, you ask? Well, they have a free single of the week (This week it’s ‘Shadowlands’ by Youth Group) and a nice collection of Australian Podcasts too.

So, er, yay. Hopefully we’ll get some TV at some point in the future…

Well, knock me over with a feather. I wasn’t expecting this.

An M-rated spin-off from Doctor Who set in the modern day, starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack. A kind of sci-fi crime show soap thing. Written by Russell T. Davies.

That comes to 27 episodes of Who-ish television per year. I just hope Davies doesn’t do too much writing on Torchwood. I don’t want him burning himself out too soon. When the Doctor starts sending people “straight to hell”, or twenty useless brats join the TARDIS crew, we’ll have our clue.

But, wow.

This India place is pretty hectic. Appartently they have over a billion people here, and I think about half of them have asked me if I want to ride in their rickshaw. After about a week here I am slowly getting in to the Indian swing of things. My first few days were pretty bewildering — Delhi isn’t the easiest place in the world to find yourself in after the relative familarity of London. And after Delhi, Agra was equally challenging. The Taj Mahal is just as astonishing as everyone says it is but inevitably the more tourists there are, the more touts there are and the more aggresively they go about their touting. There I had one rickshaw driver following me around for two hours insisting I wanted to ride in his rickshaw. After that Jaipur has been pleasantly calm. It is still a big city — 2.5 million people (and a proper 2.5 mil city not a ‘somewhere between Melbourne and Adelaide 2.5 mil’) — with eight lanes of traffic trying to squeeze down a two lane road.

My more enjoyable time in Jaipur is in a large part due to Satendra, my new Indian friend and rickshaw driver who will actually take me where I want to go rather than where he will get the most commission. Yesterday he drove me round all the sites of Jaipur — most impressively the Amber Fort — about my fifth Indian Fort but by far the most impressive, nestled away on a hillside with hundreds of rooms to explore, many of which seemed like they hadn’t been found in a century or two, the Monkey valley where I made the serious faux-pas of hitting the bell in the Hindu temple with my head (they don’t plan for people over 5’10” here) which apparently meant the Hindu gods would curse me, and with 30 million of them that can’t be good, and some astronomical observatory built by one of the kings in which he felt the need to include a seven storey high sundial.

Anyway a couple of hours it is on to Jaisalmer, a desert city from where you can go even more deserty by heading on a camel safari out in to the middle of nowhere. If I survive expect another update from India in a week or so…

So, the new iPods are out. As the rumour sites had been alternately predicting and denying, they play videos. The American iTunes Music Store has an arrangement with both ABC and Disney to offer such shows as Lost and Desperate Housewives as 320×240 movies for US$2 each.

So do I get one? To replace the struggling battery on my current iPod would cost me $100; the 30GB iPod is now $403 for a student and the 60GB is $538. And you can get them in black. Hmmm. I was kind of hoping that the iPod would have a widescreen, that would just be a very tall display normally, and then be turned on its side to watch TV. But that would have made it kind of a long iPod. The new ones are quite small, thinner than they’ve ever been before.

The idea of watching my innumerable TV DVDs re-encoded for iPod use on the train is appealing, but having black bars on an already teeny screen seems a waste. I also have a certain reluctance to get the ‘first generation’ of iPods with video.

Meanwhile my lovely iMac was superceded — the new ones come with built in webcams, a remote control (and software to show large-type menu options when using it) and a few smaller additions/subtractions. I’m vaguely jealous, but I’m also aware that this moment of supecession must come to all technology. Imagine how my iPod feels.

So… to iPod or not to iPod?

Over the last week I have found myself walking around London laughing to myself at the ludicrous contradictions of the place. It is one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world but is at times still so very British. Its police have apparently have a shoot-to-kill policy but hardly any of them actually have guns (probably just as well). Its people would probably come second only to the Russians in a drinking competition (and at least they have the politeness to drink their bottles of vodka in the confines of their own home) yet all the pubs must shut by 11 (although this will finally change in a few months time). No one has gone to church in decades yet on a Sunday no shop is allowed to be open for more than six hours.

Whenever anyone asks me where I lived in the UK, I always say London. While this is technically correct, I lived in an outer suburb about as far from everything you would think of as London that you can get. It makes Brighton in Melbourne seem like a buzzing centre of excitement and entertainment, a bohemian, free-thinking metropolis. When we learnt leisure activities in French class, the teacher went round the class doing an oral exercise:

Teacher: Where do you live?
Student: (insert name of home suburb here)
Teacher: What is there to do in (home suburb)?
Student: (list of such activities)

When he came to me and I said Petts Wood, he burst out laughing and answered the second question himself: ‘Rien! Rien! Rien!’. After five minutes of him rolling around on floor laughing it was starting to become a little scary and we were all quite relieved when the bell rang. A few years later when I started learning German with the same teacher I thought it safer to answer Orpington, the very slightly less boring neighbouring suburb. I make a point of going back to visit Petts Wood each time I come to London just to make sure it is still as dead as ever. Somehow it is comforting to know that in this crazy, crazy world of ours, there is such a place even in one of the most vibrant, exciting, interesting cities there is.

As my time in London is rapidly drawing to a close, it is probably time I filed my New York review, so here it is:

New York is the world city. It is after all in the US which, as Copernicus proved, is the centre of the universe. It manages to cram a little piece of all the world’s societies on to one small island (and bar about four hours in not-very-Brooklyny bits of Brooklyn and 1.5 minutes on Staten Island, Manhattan is ‘all’ I saw). Despite the masses of tourists it is very much a worker’s city and, as my aunt pointed out to me, to truly understand its psyche you would really need to be working there. As I said in my previous message it has cleaned up a lot, almost to the point where it has maybe lost a little of what made it special. Regardless, it is still a great city — when you shove 15 million people from all around the world into a space the size of Melbourne you are bound to get something pretty special.

Pros: A little bit of every culture/society all mixed up, good CD shops, good live music, good bars, easy to follow if slightly unoriginal street names.

Cons: For me it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

Score: 7.5/10

(I asked Gisela also to give NY a score out of ten. She asked what the criteria were. I said whatever she wanted them to be. She said that was a fucking stupid idea — giving something a score based on an unknown criteria — and refused to do so. I pointed out that criteria was in fact the plural, criterion was the singular. She punched me. I am therefore forced to give what I think Gisela’s score based on the unknown criteria I believe she would select would be: 9.5/10.)