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It turns out that, contrary to my earlier claims, a new gas hob will not cost around £100. Instead, because I live in a flat, it will cost substantially more. Due to some obscure regulation passed earlier this year, any gas cooking appliances I buy need to have some sort of safety cut-out thing – house owners are, presumably, deemed responsible and rich enough to dice with death by using a hob without such a device, or maybe creating a giant tyre bonfire in their own living room to cook on should they choose.

And whatever the safety device is, it's expensive: cheapest hob without is around £60, cheapest hob with is exactly £174.

More annoying still, though, is the fact that there's so little information on this new regulation (IGE/G/5) – and, although I've found it on the web (here) it'd cost me a whopping £107 to read the stupid thing, although for some reason amendments are freely downloadable. Gah. Ironically, the upshot of this situation is that we probably won't be able to afford a new hob, so we'll have to stick with the old one. Which is broken. And without any kind of safety cut-off. Brilliant.

Bonus facts: Hafnium can also be used to get smoother coffee*, smoother wallpaper and smoother jazz.

* May cause death, for all I know.

Number somethingorother: the nation has a benchmark cherry tree for measuring blossom. This is going on the list, right after Studio Ghibli and before miso ramen.

Unrelated hyperbole: "Email is my alpha and omega, my file-system and social register, my backup and my memoir". It's this kind of sentence that makes me want to pour tea over the computer and go out loom-smashing.

Furthering their attempts to take over the world, and branching out from previous appearances in magazines published by Dennis, Hunter and Ralph will soon be invading a WH Smiths near you in the CA Ultimate Guide to Easy Website Building. Check them out – and enjoy a special guest appearance by Boris the Myspace Panda – on pages 13 and 14.

Oh, and there's advice on website building, too. Well worth £6, if I say so myself.

Our gas hob is on the blink again, so we're reduced to cooking dishes that require no more than two saucepans or a single wok – it's a bit like being a student again, only without the mouldy milk. Fortunately, gas hobs are relatively cheap (£100ish). Unfortunately you need a plumber to fit them (£as much as they can possibly charge).

Anyhow, while shopping for gas hobs I happened to stumble upon the coffee appliance section of the Sainsbury's website. Check out the Miele CVA4085 – an espresso machine that's a snip at just £1,720. Plus £19.99 for delivery. Or, to put it another way, more than buying a coffee in Pret every day for the next three years. This kind of thing makes me feel better about the possibility of an economic crisis.

Fresh from last week's excursion into high culture at the theatre, I've now descended to the remarkable depths of The Springer Hustle, showing most evenings on whatever MTV's Freeview offshoot is called. It's quite remarkable even if, like me, the last time you saw The Jerry Springer Show itself was back in the 1990s when that bloke and his horse (if you don't know, don't ask) made an appearance.

Essentially a cheap marketing spin-off, the new series reveals the tactics used by producers to keep a fresh supply of half-crazed raging morons for Springer's talkshow. I'd always assumed that the method used to provoke arguments and fights was simple (booze), but it turns out to be a lot more advanced than that. In fact, the producers spend hours coaching each guest and then rile them up just before they exit onto stage. It works a bit like this:

Producer: So, what do you think about (other guest)?

Guest: Well, he tried to steal my truck.

Producer: Could you call them a white trash redneck motherfucker who stole your truck?

Guest: Er, I guess so. But..

Producer, louder: That white trash redneck motherfucker stole your truck! He stole your truck! Call him a white trash redneck motherfucker! Now! Go! Truck! Fuck! Truck! FUCKTRUCK!

Guest, exiting onto stage: YOU WHITE TRASH REDNECK (punches other guest) MOTHER(BLEEEP) etc.

The whole thing is presided over by a guy who looks like a member of the Grateful Dead, who hands down verdicts like Ceasar at the Colliseum, nodding at sufficiently debauched segments and glowering at producers whose work fails to make the grade.

Highbrow television this isn't, of course, but it is remarkably entertaining. Especially wonderful was the segment on one Toby Yoshimura*, a producer, and his quest to get a man from Kentucky, his pig, and his rather angry shaman wife (complete with burning incense and curses) into the studio on time. This might just keep me entertained until Series 5 of The Wire stumbles onto DVD.

* Check out the credits, which include "I'm Happy I Cut Off My Legs! (2007) TV episode (producer) "

Every so often, in the office, a pub, or an airport lounge, I find myself having an argument with someone over London. Or, more specifically, why on earth anyone would choose to live here. Every time it boils down to the same thing: I'm presented with a fairly reasonable list of things that stink about the city (the price of housing, the price of transport, the price of beer, the price of anything else come to think of it, the fact that most of W1 smells strongly of piss until they hose it down at 8am, the tramps, the drug dealers, the crime statistics, etc etc). In return, I offer a couple of good reasons why I like it. Somewhere in the middle of this list, after true 24-hour shopping and transport, the Tate museums, any variety of specialist food / shop you could ever need within 40 minutes, I usually end up mentioning London's many cinemas and theatres.

This is wildly hypocritical for two reasons. For one, I really hate cinemas. Although I walk past the Soho Curzon almost every day, and I'm cheered by its existence, I've never seen a film there and I probably never will. Who wants to watch a film in a room full of randoms with no easy access to a kettle or pause button? Not me. As for multiplexes full of sugar-caned teenagers stuffing week-old popcorn, I'd rather simply not watch the film at all, thanks very much. And the adverts before each screening are annoying. Gah.

As for the theatre: I never go. This is not because I don't like it (I do, and unlike cinema there's no home-based equivalent other than maybe watching drunks row in the street), and not for a want of trying, but largely because it's a) expensive and b) almost impossible to get seats for anything worth watching unless you're organised enough to book far in advance. So, despite living in London for years and working in what's sometimes hilariously dubbed "London's Theatreland" (where's the Hamlet-themed roller coaster?), I haven't been to the theatre since moving here.

Until yesterday, that is. Thanks to some marvellously good luck, good fortune and timing (bank holiday, theatre tokens, me noticing the sign going up at the Gielgud theatre the other week on the way to work, and getting in before the reviews are printed) Helen and I went to see God of Carnage at a preview last night. I won't spoil the plot any more than the website itself does, but here's a three bullet point review:

• Stupid name (and logo, for that matter – it looks like the kid from the Great Ormond Street adverts got hit by a bus)
• Very funny script that doesn't seem to have been wrecked in translation (they/he/whatever left the setting in France, so all the Monsieur/Madame stuff still works)
• It's good. Go see it if you get the chance.

So, that's theatre covered for the next five or so years. Now I'm on a roll I might even get my arse down to see No Country for Old Men at the BFI, if they sell coffee.

F-Secure once produced a Moomin anti-virus product.

This could be the best idea in the world, ever. Sadly, it is no longer available.

Spent a while today trying to find a transcript of a Stuart Lee stand-up routine about Political Correctness. From memory, the punchline went a bit like this:

"In years to come, people will look back at the 1990s and say to one another: do you remember Political Correctness? Wasn't it awful – we had to be nice to one another".

Couldn't find it, but I did find this, which if anything makes the same point, better (from WikiQuote):

"It really worries me that 84% of this audience agrees with that statement, because the kind of people that say "political correctness gone mad" are usually using that phrase as a kind of cover action to attack minorities or people that they disagree with. I'm of an age that I can see what a difference political correctness has made. When I was four years old, my grandfather drove me around Birmingham, where the Tories had just fought an election campaign saying, "if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour," and he drove me around saying, "this is where all the niggers and the coons and the jungle bunnies live." And I remember being at school in the early 80s and my teacher, when he read the register, instead of saying the name of the one asian boy in the class, he would say, "is the black spot in," right? And all these things have gradually been eroded by political correctness, which seems to me to be about an institutionalised politeness at its worst. And if there is some fallout from this, which means that someone in an office might get in trouble one day for saying something that someone was a bit unsure about because they couldn't decide whether it was sexist or homophobic or racist, it's a small price to pay for the massive benefits and improvements in the quality of life for millions of people that political correctness has made. It's a complete lie that allows the right, which basically controls media now, and international politics, to make people on the left who are concerned about the way people are represented look like killjoys. And I'm sick, I'm really sick– 84% of you in this room that have agreed with this phrase, you're like those people who turn around and go, "you know who the most oppressed minorities in Britain are? White, middle-class men." You're a bunch of idiots."

And, personally, I quite agree. Audio here.

From this BBC article:

When Sainsbury's chief executive Justin King recently waved goodbye to his Maserati Quattroporte, he did so in favour of a relatively anonymous-looking limousine whose main claim to fame is fuel efficiency.

I should have thought of this when we last changed cars – in fact, at just over 1,000 words it could have covered 20% of the cost. Example:

When journalist Tom Royal recently waved goodbye to his dodgy Fiat Punto, he did so in favour of a relatively anonymous-looking Renault whose main advantages over the Fiat are not spontaneously overheating and actually starting in the morning.

Still, there are valuable insights packed away later in the article. I particularly like this one:

"I want to be as discreet as possible," Mr King says.

Discreet in this case meaning a vast limousine described in the same piece as "complete with a reclining leather massaging seat and bundles of electronic gadgets". If he really wants something anonymous. Mr King and I should arrange some sort of a swap.

In other news, today's newspapers are packed with an alarming number of abuses of the hideous phrase "shout-out".