When visiting the petrol station in the past, I usually just filled the tank right up. But in the light of fuel price-geddon that has gripped the nation this year, I have switched to aiming to pay a certain round number in the past couple of months.

My chosen amount is £30.00. This is good to fill my tank to about three quarters full — enough for about two weeks of merry driving to and from work.

The problem is that I have only ever managed to hit £30.00 once. Every other time I have ended up paying £30.01.

The extent to which this matters is debatable. It would be pretty embarrassing if I were to pay in the kiosk. And it would be awkward if I had planned on paying in cash, and only had three tenners on me.

But as Aaron Corby pointed out, since I pay by card at the pump, the only person who really knows about my one penny overshoot is me. But my perfectionism does not allow me to accept this state of affairs.

What can you do? When I wrote about this on Twitter, many suggested aiming for £29.99. Easier said than done! In my experience, the figure always jumps.

£29.96
£29.97
£29.98
£30.01 WTF!

It’s like in the old days when you tried to look something up on teletext. You stare at the scrolling page number in the corner, anticipating the point when it reaches your chosen page… when all of a sudden it jumps.

Perhaps the best piece of advice was from Richard Rooney:

My tip? DON’T try to hit round number. Just stop filling whenever. Over lifetime of driving I’ll gain at least 5 mins!

Well we now have the answer, thanks to this video I found the other day. It demonstrates how you should dance to the IDM smash hit Cfern by Autechre.

I will be trying it in my bedroom tonight!

Many times my friends and I have discussed going to see one of Jarvis Cocker’s solo shows. But somehow it has never quite come together.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they will play in Scotland. Only three dates have been announced so far, all at pretty far-flung festivals.

Mind you, I’m not too sure about the way it is being marketed as being “all the original members of the band”. It might be the “classic” line-up that propelled the band to the height of its mid-1990s fame. But it is by no means the “original” line-up.

The band had several incarnations throughout the 1980s until success was reached. Jarvis Cocker is the only common element of them all, although the majority of the band was in place by the mid-1980s.

I was listening to some Pulp from this period the other day. It reminded me of this footage from a 1980s documentary about the Sheffield music scene. The footage is pretty grotty-looking, but it’s great to have this rather rare peek into the band’s early days. This is available on the ‘Hits’ DVD.

Clearly, they weren’t quite the finished product. Masses of loo roll is an interesting choice of stage decoration, and Jarvis Cocker himself does not yet have the commanding stage presence that made him famous.

The band themselves always warn against listening to their earlier material, preferring to think of the 1992 release of ‘OU’ as their year zero. However, I like all of their earlier albums.

Even though their earlier material rough around the edges, there is still a lot of great songwriting and the potential can be heard. Fascinating to listen to with the knowledge of how they turned out to become one of the biggest groups of the 1990s.

Note: This video is probably not for you if you are squeamish about seeing people being flung out of cars at high speed.

It is a shocking but fascinating video from a truly different era of motorsport. As the video keeps saying (as noted by Axis of Oversteer), “no-one was seriously injured”. But of course injury and death was a part of motorsport back then. Indeed it is today, even though great safety improvements have been made in recent decades.

But some of the stuff in this video is shocking. A particular stand-out is the flaming driver-less car free-wheeling around in the pitlane!

It seems that the video is a collection of clips from ‘Shell History of Motor Racing’. From what I gather, it was available on VHS years ago but has not been released on DVD. This is a great shame (even though it seems a bit strange — are the cartoon-like sound effects really necessary?).

You don’t often get the chance to see footage like this, and I find it absolutely fascinating to see the sport I love as it was so many decades ago. How many changes there have been!

It sounded suspiciously like Gorillaz on the cheap, complete with odd psuedo-humorous band member names. A low-budget Gorillaz would necessarily be a bad thing. But it seemed like an odd move for Squarepusher to make. And the music, while clearly the sound of Squarepusher, was shockingly immediate and borderline cheesy.

The one or two tracks that had been released as teasers for the album seemed good. But would a whole album that sounds like a proggy Daft Punk be bearable?

Amazingly, yes. I have immensely enjoyed listening to this album.

In a way, it is a logical next step for Squarepusher to take. Squarepusher has been pushing on with the fantasy-prog sound since his 2004 album, Ultravisitor. This album created a novel half-live, half-studio atmosphere. The follow-up, Hello Everything, dispensed with the live elements, but placed more emphasis on the multi-instrumental talents and a further step towards a futuro-prog sound.

Then came Just A Souvenir, introducing Squarepusher’s fantasy band concept. It was as much about the stories of what this incredible futuristic band could do on stage as about the music.

Shobaleader One and d’Demonstrator appear to take the fantasy band concept and turn it into reality. Squarepusher is promising more Shobaleader One material, and live shows too. Despite my initial doubts, I’m looking forward to seeing what is coming next in the incredible development of Squarepusher’s sound.

It was interesting to see what FOM’s priorities were, following my post a couple of weeks ago criticising the media’s coverage of the Singapore Grand Prix. The focus was on the periphery of the event rather than the racing. It was all about the nice shots of the skyline lit up.

In FOM’s “race edit”, it takes 40 seconds for the first Formula 1 car to appear! That is a quarter of the length of the video!

People of the F1 media: please don’t forget the racing.

After months of uncertainty, it now appears as though the Korean Grand Prix will go ahead, albeit in a facility that is not yet finished. The latest images seem to show that the circuit is finished, but the surroundings are far from perfect.

But as long as the circuit is there, a race can go ahead. The top layer of asphalt has only just gone down though, meaning that the F1 cars will have to cope with a very slippery circuit indeed next weekend. I can see it descending into farce, but it could be just the recipe for an exciting race weekend.

But what if there are still serious problems with the venue? It is unprecedented for F1 to head to a half-finished venue. You can think of Circuit de Catalunya, which held its first race in 1991 with its surroundings not looking in great nick — even though the circuit itself was perfectly usable.

The 1986 Hungarian Grand Prix also had a close shave. There are some incredible pictures of the warm-up races that clearly show the circuit still being worked on just weeks before the first Formula 1 grand prix was due to be held.

The problem is that the Korea International Circuit has not held anything in the way of proper racing yet. The circuit was “opened” on 4 September, with a demonstration run from Karun Chandhok in a Red Bull.

Clearly there was a lot of work still to be done. Multiple inspections have been cancelled. The FIA’s International Sporting Code (PDF), appendix O, article 3.4, states that a Formula 1 circuit must pass its final inspection at least 90 days before the race is due to go ahead. For other international events, the deadline is 60 days.

All of these deadlines have sailed past. An inspection due on 28 September was apparently cancelled by the FIA because there was nothing new to inspect.

Today, just ten days before F1 cars are due to go onto the track, the inspection is taking place. Now all indications are that the race will go ahead come what may. That seems to be because Bernie Ecclestone has decided it will do. To cancel the race now would be a disaster for everyone involved. It probably means cancelling next year’s race too, unless the FIA wants to overlook another of its rules.

I have no doubt that the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone know what they are doing. But surely all of those safety rules exist for a reason. Why have 90-day limits if, come crunch time, the money man decides a 10-day inspection will do the job?

What if something goes horribly wrong? I only ask because Bernie Ecclestone has gone on record during an interview with the BBC saying, “It’s quite dangerous what we’ve done, actually.”

It is true that this was Bernie Ecclestone’s way of giving the grand prix organisers the hurry-up in a public fashion. But to hear him describe “what we’ve done” as “dangerous” was surprising to me. It is a strong word that can be used against him and the FIA.

I know it says on the back of the ticket that motorsport is dangerous. But the FIA is supposed to ensure that dangers are eliminated wherever possible. It has apparently decided that this doesn’t matter in this instance. This is a precedent that surely shouldn’t be set.

Or maybe it’s the break in style compared with the rest of the news bulletin. Weather forecasters have much more freedom to express their personality than news, sport or business presenters do. Whatever it is, some weather forecasters are among my favourite television personalities.

Tomasz Schafernaker

Tomasz Schafernaker has long counted among my favourites. Many will have seen him in the proper news following his gaffe where he accidentally gave the middle finger gesture while on the air.

It is by no means the first time Tomasz Schafernaker has been involved in on-air hilarity. There is, for instance, his reaction to being told about his “frozen ball”.

Most infamously of all, there was his slip-up when he talked about Glastonbury’s “muddy shite”.

Laura Tobin

Laura Tobin came into focus after this astonishing incident.

The initial gaffe is surreal and hilarious. Her reaction is adorable. But the way she copes with it is the most impressive. If you tuned in five seconds after the bulletin had started, you would never know anything had happened! What a professional.

Rob McElwee

Cool as a cucumber, Rob McElwee would announce the apocalypse with a shrug of the shoulders. He is often so laid back I suspect he has had quite a good lunch! Here he is talking about severe winter weather in his normal unruffled manner.

Francis Wilson

Rob McElwee may sometimes look like he has enjoyed his lunch, but Francis Wilson looks like he has been lunching all day long. He is not a great forecaster though. His tendency to just list a series of consecutive numbers instead of actually giving you a temperature leaves the viewer perplexed as to whether to wear a duffle coat or hot pants.

Still, you can’t fault his personality. Here is a rare clip of Rory Bremner being funny, impersonating Francis Wilson.

Daniel Corbett

But the granddaddy of weather presenting personalities has to be Daniel Corbett. His enthusiasm for any kind of weather event is surely unrivalled, and his descriptions are without question the most entertaining around.

Even Tomasz Schafernaker seems to think Daniel Corbett’s style is the way to go, judging by the way he signed off from this bulletin.

He never returned to the heights of his late 1980s zenith, so I have had to make do with YouTube for my fix of Frank Sidebottom. Although I did buy and enjoy ‘ABC&D’, his best of CD.

I had seen that he was diagnosed with cancer recently, and clearly he was in a very bad way. But it didn’t stop him performing and just last week he released a World Cup song, ‘Three Shirts on my Line‘ (“35 years of dirt, just washed out by me mum”).

His former keyboardist, Jon Ronson, wrote a great article about Frank Sidebottom’s career a few years ago. Fascinating reading, and quite sad too.

I only learnt today that he worked for a few years on Pingu. Via the Cook’d and Bomb’d forum comes this video of an episode of Pingu that he wrote.

Wonderful.

(If you look carefully in the credits, you’ll see that he is even credited as Frank Sidebottom, not Chris Sievey.)

A Twitter campaign to get Frank Sidebottom to number 1 is gathering steam — @MakeFrank1. I think it would be very apt. Because going by the reaction from people today, while Frank Sidebottom disappeared from view somewhat in recent years, it’s clear that many people loved him.

Read on to view a selection of my favourite Frank Sidebottom videos.

A Rare TV Statement from The Aphex Twin by Frank Sidebottom

One of the greatest Frank Sidebottom moments is also one of the greatest Aphex Twin moments!

The Monopoly Song

A fine rendition of my favourite Frank Sidebottom song, ‘The Monopoly Song’, as performed on Channel M’s testcard!

Frank Sidebottom on Granada Reports

An early TV appearance.

Frank Sidebottom’s Proper Telly Show in B/W

Iain Lee guesting on Frank Sidebottom’s Proper Telly Show (shown in black and white so that you don’t have to turn the colour down), on Channel M a few years ago.

This year the voting all went Germany’s way. (So much for all that Balkan and Baltic bloc voting!) They romped away in a similar fashion to Norway last year. Germany’s strategy was to enter a Kate Nash look- and soundalike. Although it did bring perhaps the greatest mockney accent ever, I cannot stand the real Kate Nash, never mind someone who wants to be like her.

Incidentally I recently had the misfortune to watch Kate Nash performing (it wasn’t my idea, honest). She is an utter charisma vacuum.

Adam and Joe had the right idea about Kate Nash. It seems as though the good voters of the Eurovision countries don’t see things the same way, and voted for the Poundland version. Congratulations to Lena Meyer-Landrut though.

As for my preferred option, I began to develop an unhealthy obsession with Russia’s entry, ‘Lost and Forgotten’ by Peter Nalitch and Friends, as the week progressed. I absolutely love that moment when Peter Nalitch is “looking at her photos”. Genius.

My other favourites included Ukraine (who always seem to enter good songs!), Bosnia & Herzegovina (which I disliked at first, but it really grew on me), Belgium (which seemed like an attempt to copy Norway from last week, but I liked it), Greece (OPA!) and Armenia (for which there were two very good reasons).

In fact, the highlight of the night for me was definitely Armenia, and all the absolutely hilarious comments everyone was posting on Twitter about Eva Rivas’s breasts.

Looking forward to next year!