I saw ‘ol scarface live at Portsmouth Guidlhall sometime around 1990 and he was excellent. Gittar geeks will know this song is a wonderful advert for the Gibson Les Paul and a superb lesson in how to disguise mediocre singing with outstanding musicianship.

You had the Silver Fox, ‘David Taylor’ who according to commentator John Virgo got the ladies going, Dennis Taylor, the sensible one with the Ulster accent and weird glasses, Cliff ‘The Grinder’ Thorburn with his ridiculous moustache, Kirk Stevens with his all white tux and fancy leather shoes and of course Big Bill Werbeniuk who liked a pint or two during his playing.

I still just about remember the hushed tones and impeccable dress sense of early 80s snooker audiences. Through the thick fug of cigarette smoke — courtesy of both players and audience — you could just about make out the chunky dicky bows, straining waiscoats and odd glass of something stronger than today’s Highland Spring.

And of course there was Alex Higgins. The man more than anyone else who lived up to his nickname of Hurricane. He played fast, in an idiosyncratic style — every ball was to be attacked, safety was for wimps — and won 2 world championships. He was lucky enought to be around when he was. Five years later give or take a year and Higgins’ style of play would have earned him nada. He won his second world title in ‘82 but by 1990 a new breed of player was emerging. Following on from the discipline of Steve Davis, the likes of Stephen Hendry were focused, cautious and, you suspected, tee-total both during their playing and afterwards.

Higgins engendered deep divisions in snooker’s governing body. Clive ‘voice of snooker’ Everton would tut tut as another horrendously over-powered shot went awry possibly sending the cue ball, red or both into the ref’s lap: “Another typical Higgins piledriver” was a common comment sent down the Everton nose. Co-commentator John Virgo had a lot more sympathy for Higgins though and, I suspect, echoed the view of many who watched in dismay as Higgins got trounced again and again by Davis, Taylor and even the likes of the bouffant Welshman and super slow Terry Griffiths: “Alex needs to settle down and practice. And I’ve told him that” said Virgo once after another dismal showing. But by the end of the eighties nineties it was over for Higgins.

He popped up now and again on the tabloid pages (rarely the front), sometimes covered in blood usually following a fracas like an unpaid restaurant bill or a doing a runner from a taxi in Belfast’s back streets. Ocassionally there would be a sensitive double-page Observer-type spread with a mood-setting black and white photo about how the former champ was reduced to playing all and sundry in dingy clubs for £5 a game. Even rarer than forays into print were the TV interviews. Sometimes chaperoned as on Wogan, almost always pre-recorded, these displays often featured a fraught presenter on tenterhooks wondering if the Ulsterman would collapse, rant or clam up. They didn’t fill you with hope. Now and again embers of the old spirit would glow such as when Michael Buerke spoke to Higgins about his throat cancer: “Can you beat it?” asked the BBC man. Of course Higgins replied, “I’ve got the heart of a lion.”

His descent into pathos was nearly complete when he died this weekend in a Belfast flat. The frail wee non-swimmer who once holidayed in the Caribbean and tied a rope around a palm tree and the other end around his waist so that he could paddle in safety, faded away punch drunk on his own dissipation. There will be tributes and perhaps a docu-drama or two but, to mangle Bernie Taupin, the legend blew out long before the hurricane ever did.

I finally got my wish.

A few months ago I wrote here about how Bill Gates predicted the iPhone (he called it the “wallet PC”) 15 years ago . . . a full 6 years or so before Apple started working on their revolutionary product. I’ve always wondered how Bill felt about that . . .

Well thanks to Robin Lustig of Newshour on the BBC world Service I got an answer. Bill was doing an interview about AIDS (his foundation is one of the biggest campaigners for this disease) and at the end of the interview Robin presents Bill with an aural reminder of the notorious page 74 of The Road Ahead . . .  listen here (it’s at the 29 minute mark):

ROBIN: You wrote 15 years ago that you envisaged the day when we’d all be carrying something you called a wallet PC . . . . you were describing then what we now know as an iPhone. Why didn’t you make it?

BILL: Well Microsoft er, has had good vision, and er, certainly is working in that area. It’s great that other companies er like Apple and others are there and doing well too and you know phones arent’ doing everything that I talked about back then so there’s still opportunity to do something that goes beyond whatever’s popular now and Microsoft ‘ll be there as one of the companies trying to help people out.

ROBIN: But don’t you wish it was you that had made them and not Apple?

BILL: Well certainly there’s room in that business for a lot of success. Microsoft’s had a lot of success and now many others are too and the competition is gonna be a great thing for consumers.

What do you think?

However, in this week’s Spiegel magazine, Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda sees things my way:

SPIEGEL: Do any countries serve as role models for you on the path to becoming a modern state?

Kagame: There are things I admire, for example, about South Korea or Singapore. I admire their history, their development and how intensively they have invested in their people and in technology. It was not so long ago that they were at the same level of development as we are. Today, they are far ahead of us.

Thank you Paul.

Poison. Third rate G n’ R copies or genuine cowboy soul? Discuss. I saw Poison live at Donnington in 1990 and can’t remember much about ‘em but, however cheesy this video is the song is a beaut. I used to go to guitar lessons at Topstring in Gosport and the teacher there was the spit of Poison bassist Bobby Dall.

Macondo, as anyone who tried to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez when they were a teenager will tell you, is the fictional town in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I remember three things about that book — one, I didn’t understand it very well, two some guy dies while urinating against a tree and three, there is a memorable opening sentence:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. . .”

What was the reasoning behind BP’s naming of the well? Did they, like the young boy in Marquez’ novel, marvel at the newness and promise of a substance nobody in his world had ever laid eyes upon? The future of oil is deep and underwater — so it’s no too far a stretch to imagine the wide-eyed wonder with which those early BP explorers regarded the first geological reports from the Gulf of Mexico.

Did someone in BP’s engineering division in an excited babble rush up to Tony Hayward’s office and, spreading the survey out in front of him like Drake sprinkling treasure in front of his Queen, declared in hushed tones that something new and wonderful was ready to be tapped?

Blogger George Glasser reckons the choice of name was something random. . . but I’m not so sure . . . . but like George I can’t help but note the apocalyptic parallels between OHYOS and what’s happening to BP.

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”

Like all good Was (Not Was) tracks this beaut features leftfield lyrics like “You can’t break a burly sailor’s neck” . . and who’s idea was it to get Kim Basinger and Ozzy on the same track? This is admittedly a long way from their best stuff.  “Spy in the House of Love” and the brilliant “Somewhere in America there’s a Street named After My Dad” far surpass this bit of fun but it’s one I come back to again and again.

Verdict: Hit. Gates’s wallet PC is more or less today’s mobile smartphone with voice capability added.

What the Atlantic fail to mention here is that Bill plainly hoped Microsoft would be the one providing that capability. As I pointed out a few months ago .  .  . this is an area in which Microsoft have ceded major ground to the likes of Apple.

What is interesting is point #6, The Internet & The Web . . Bill didn’t even see it comin’!

“I live amongst the creatures of the night. I haven’t got the will to try and fight”. A nice line. Short, sweet n’ snappy . . . RIP Laura