Yaay! Fun and games with stalkers. The track list for this week's show was:

WASP -- "The headless children"
Beholder -- "March of the damned"
Yngwie J Malmsteen's Rising Force -- "Far beyond the sun"
Iron Savior -- "Tyranny of steel"
Motörhead -- "We are the road crew"
Poisonblack -- "Soul in flames"
Hammerfall -- "Man on the silver mountain"
Liquid Sky -- "Echo"
Paradox -- "Killtime"
Amaran -- "Katharsis"
Evergrey -- "Ambassador"
Manowar -- "Guyana (cult of the damned)"

The background music while I'm talking is Scorpions -- "Coast to coast".

If you're interested, I do a radio show for the Bloodstock Open Air festival once every four weeks or so. the latest episode is here.

I've seen them a few times. I was there 17 years ago, and spoke to Joey after the show, where he assured me they'd be back the following year. Yeah right! Since then I've had to travel abroad to see them, but even then, the last time I saw them was in Sweden in 1999. It's been a long time...

Indeed. They're what was once White Wizzard, before the bass played threw his toys out of the pram and sacked the entire band. Again. White Wizzard have now descended into comical farce. They were so bad that I walked out part way through their last show here at the end of last year. But Holy Grail look quite promising. I'm going to see them when they play here in at the end of the month - the day after Manowar!

(It's been 17 years since Manowar last played here, so it's a big deal)

No, you're missing the point. He is a jerk. I doubt even he'd deny that. But I can't fault him for it. Looking at him is like looking in the mirror for me. We're alike in so very many ways. But that aside, congratulations, Jorg. I wasn't aware you'd stopped drinking. But I know that you needed to cut down, and if stopping altogether was the only way to do that, then well done for taking that step.

In 2006, NO ONE would have predicted that Barack Obama could ever come near the nomination, let alone win the Presidency

Are you sure about that? In 2007, I predicted it, and put my money where my mouth was and placed a bet on it. If I can do that from the other side of the Atlantic, I'm sure that plenty of people in the USA will have been able to see it coming the previous year.

But how does any of that help the 50 million Americans without any insurance at all?

I'm on a different continent, so I'm somewhat removed from who's saying what. But I can agree that Huckabee and Romney are very low on my list. But to then claim Palin is better? Yeesh. And you wonder why America has such a bad image in the rest of the world...

Seriously, I am on solid legal ground in this case

I'm not so sure. He hasn't paid you for work you agreed to do for a given salary. That doesn't grant you ownership of the code, that just gives you a right to reclaim the money. Your dispute with him is over the unpaid money. Nothing more. Were you a contractor, the situation would probably be different, but as an employee, I think you're overestimating your rights here. I'm fairly sure that in the UK, a court would merely order him to pay you the money, and appoint bailiffs to collect it if necessary. I'm assuming Canada's legal system hasn't diverged too much from ours.

Therefore, it is a human life form at conception.

Like I said, the problem is largely one of linguistics. I'd call it a proto-human life form at conception. It has the potential to become human. But it is not human by any definition I accept.

Health care in this country will not be destroyed by Democrats after all

An interesting claim. The rest of the world laughs at America because you don't don't have *any* healthcare, let alone something that can be destroyed. So tell me, if Obamacare is flawed (and it may well be, I haven't looked in enough detail to say), what's your alternative proposal? Clearly the pre-Obamacare setup is critically flawed, and can't continue. So what would you do instead?

Feel free to disagree with me. But I think you'll find that rather than proving your point, the science mostly agrees with me. Of course, the real problem is linguistics. The term "baby" means different things to me than it means to you.

What is the density of spiced rum, gin and amaretto, so that I can convert your figures into the sane units used in the rest of the world?

I don't get all this VMS love. We were running it on some VAX clusters back in the late '80s, and I hated it. The multiple filesystem namespaces were a pain to deal with, and the syntax for the commands always felt awkward. The shell was woefully inadequate compared to csh (for interactive use) and sh/ksh (for scripting). The much vaunted help system was a disaster. Sure, documentation for everything was there. But you could never find it unless you knew exactly where in the help hierarchy to look. The versioned filesystem was a nice touch, but even that fell short of proper version control.