Lets all hope that West Ham manage to secure Matthew Upson from Birmingham by the end of the day. We need him. Oh, and Shawn Wright Phillips from Chelsea would be nice!

Thank you to Shilpa Shetty for galvanising the nation in its fight against bitchy z-list celebrities. And for the £30 I won from placing a small bet on you.

Down The Line - New BBC Radio 4 comedy from Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and Simon Day.

The Kanardo Blog - An amazing collection of design, both web and print, from around the world. You can also check out Infosthetics which has a similar collection.

Smashing Telly - Want a new documentary TV channel? Check out Smashing Telly. This brings you all the best documentaries, films and shows that are available on the Internet.

Brilliant video of the Indo-Dutch rock and roll band The Tielman Brothers on Dutch TV from 1960.

Supermarket Monopoly. Board game with a difference.

The Bumper B3ta Book of Sick Jokes is now downloadable as a PDF. Warning! This contains some very sick humour and you could easily be sacked for looking at this. If you find offensive at anything then I wouldn’t take a look at this at all.

LA Muse - A new ongoinging online graphic novel by Adi Tantimedh and Hugu Petrus.

Running from Camera - Strange collection of photos featuring a man running from his camera.

You’ve got to hand it to Channel 4, another Celebrity Big Brother makes the front page news, is mentioned in an early day motion in the Houses of Parliament and has effigies of the shows producers burnt in a province of India. Looks like the only winners will be Channel 4 themselves and me (who put £5 on Shilpa to win at 5-to-1 last week, Ladbrokes link to your right if you still fancy a flutter).

If you listened to the media you’d think that Jade Goody, Jo O’Meara and Danielle Lloyd were going to set fire to a few mosques when they’re released. Personally I think they’re just a collection of three uneducated ‘celebrities’ who, through their lack of cultural understanding, have joined forces and have started to pick on somebody they don’t like. If there was an attractive Polish film star I’m sure those three would be acting the same. The laugh is on them as on a show like this you can see their careers slipping away in front of your eyes while they remain blissfully unaware, stirring their cauldron. Not that I’ve actually watched any of this as I’ve only seen around 10 minutes of the show (honest), and then just to catch the lovely Cleo Rocos who I probably had my first ever crush on.

The media saturation is so overwhelming yet the voices you hear are generally 90% loud and reactionary. The lack of clarity of thought is the only thing I’m worried about lurking behind the doors of British houses, not a dark underbelly of racism. Now I even turn off the radio if they’re discussing the matter. Same for BBC online news. Read Germaine Greer’s refreshing take on the ‘controversy’. I wonder what would happen if the 22,000 people who complained got off their arses and actually did something about racism in their area? Now that should make the news.

A little bird tells me the next eviction vote is between Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty. Is this a ballot on racism in the UK? If the furore can last till the end of the series I think I’ll win my bet on Shilpa but people are gonna get bored of the news story very soon. I only hoping Shilpa can win this series before the enevitable backlash of balanced thought prevails and the cover of Heat Magazine with Jade saying “I’m not a racist, it was just the way the show was edited,” appears.

Enough of that rubbish. Here’s when Brighton’s West Pier burnt down, speeded up.

Goats on trees.

Every Extra Extend. Brilliant music shoot-em-up by the Japanese maker of Rez.

Video of Market Street in San Francisco filmed in 1905, before the big quake.

Newsreel video of the Hindenburg blowing up.

Vidmeter. Shows you a list of the most watched videos on the net.

Life has consisted of mainly Zelda, The Wire and work this year. No time to find any funny links.

So here’s a clip from The Wire I’ve just uploaded to YouTube. In a rare montage-to-music scene drug dealers Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell and Stinkum enter the Lowrises to see D’Angelo and check that their product is being sold correctly. The Wire is all filmed on location using no sets whatsoever giving it a real air of authenticity.

The music supervisor of The Wire has his own blog at www.tenthousand.org and wrote a small article about the scene above. There’s some great music downloads and mix tapes at his site too so please go and check it out.

As for The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Wii I think I’m about half way through. The video below shows the last boss I finished off a day ago. It’s not me doing the spinning but it’s a good example of the current level of escapism going on at King Mansions. This may act as a small spoiler for those only a short way through the game, and I’m sure I had this baddie down in under 7 minutes:

And as for work well I’m sure I can show you a little of what I’ve been working on here: http://www.audemos.co.uk/redesign/

Ok, here’s some good links:

Ingenious way to kill bees.

The new Burn My Face Off Elmo on YouTube.

No, I didn’t go to see Fat Boy Slim yesterday. There’s some good pictures at The Argus though. Including this famous Brighton face I haven’t seen in ages:

The webstats for KingOfMyCastle during December really skyrocketed. This site had over 80,000 hits and nearly 6,000 unique visitors.

The BBC’s John Simpson looks ahead to World news events in 2007.

I finished watching The Wire Season 1 too and it’s so good I’ve ordered the second box set. Probably the best drama I’ve seen in a very long time. If you skip to the 2:20 in this YouTube video Charlie Brooker gives his opinion of it: