1. Okay, at least the delicious helpdesk seems to be responding fairly quickly the last week or two (helpfully, not sure yet.) On the other hand - is it just me, or is it not normal for helpdesk people to ask you to email them your password and username? Through regular, not-particularly-secure email?

2. Is it just me, or does Pinboard not have any way to view "popular" bookmarks for particular tags? It looks like you can view "popular" for the whole site, or "recent" for a given tag, but I can't figure out how to view "popular" by tag. If you can't do that, there goes 90% of what I used on del.icio.us, out the window, and the remaining zombified skeleton at the AVOS site is still more useful. Does somebody who's been learning pinboard know a way to view popular-by-tag?

3. I have been playing with vidding again (shutup), and I have to decide whether I want to use the original Bonnie Tyler single version of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" or the Westlife cover. (shutupshutup, it's not a proper vid until you've chosen between several deeply uncool artists who've covered the song. The last vid I actually attempted I was stuck between Garth Brooks and the Vitamin String Quartet.)

Pros for Westlife: It has the lyrics of the second verse, which would be fun to have in the vid; it has less instrumental and repetition; the Bonnie Tyler version seems to be eradicated from YouTube. Pros for Bonnie: It's Bonnie Tyler singing, rather than Westlife; it's a tiny bit shorter; I like the emotional progression through the song better. Hmm. Or I could go with the ancient college A Capella cover I have, which has all the pros and none of the cons, except that this vid really requires over-the-top power ballad instrumentation. HMMM.

4. Speaking of bad music, I was looking for some dvds (which I didn't find, bah) and discovered some ancient backup CDs that held my mp3 collection circa twelve years ago, mostly consisting of songs downloaded from college intranets before Napster existing. And I decided that I'm tired of waiting till I manage to fix my old media drive, so my mp3 collection now closely resembles the one I had in 2001. ♥ ♥

5. You may remember me, a few days ago, mentioning BBC Radio 4's new topical comedy/political satire show, Tonight with Rory Bremner. I was attempting to reserve judgement on it, despite the presence of Andy Zaltzman as a regular, but then on last week's show they did a Tom Lehrer cover!

Specifically they re-wrote Who's Next re: the global financial crisis. And whoever sang it didn't do a half-bad Lehrer impression, either! For obvious reasons I needed an MP3 of this track so I went and ripped my own, and figured I might as well share: Rory Bremner & Tonight - Who's Next.

( lyrics, as best I could tell, do not click if current events are a depression trigger for you... )