Bravo to Lily Allen for telling Elton John to 'F-off' while they were co-hosting the GQ awards. She seems to be regretting it (her Facebook page says she's 'dying inside'), but it sounds hilarious: Lily guzzling champagne and swearing while announcing winners; Elton becoming increasingly angry about her alcohol consumption, taking her aside for stern words before finally making a waspish comment in front of the audience.

At which point, Lily said: 'Fuck off, Elton, I am 40 years younger than you and have my whole life ahead of me.' Elton spluttered back: 'I could still snort you under the table.' A fine riposte, but it was too late - the former coke/sex/whatever fiend turned self-styled saviour of celebrity souls had finally and most unambiguously been told where to get off. And with all due respect Mr John, not before time.

Admittedly, Lily, who says she and Elton are friends, didn't exhibit the classiest of behaviour, but who does when they're roaring drunk and 23? Anyway, she made a good point. What is Elton if not a prime example of a group I've long identified as Born Again Prims? It's fine for them to misspend their youths in a blizzard of sex, cocaine and debauchery. However, after they've hit middle age and 'reformed', they seemingly dedicate their lives to trying to stop other, mainly younger, people enjoying their own wild years.

It wouldn't matter so much, but Elton, a musical hero of mine, has form. George Michael found himself described by Elton as 'in a strange place [with] a deep-rooted unhappiness in his life' in the respected psychiatric publication Heat magazine. Robbie Williams has told of how 'weird' it felt to be frogmarched to rehab by Elton. Donatella Versace, Pete Doherty and Rufus Wainwright are all alleged recipients of what appears to be the Elton John Rehab Pyramid Scheme.

One has to ask: who do Elton John and his husband David Furnish think they are, mooching about 'saving' people? It's as if they've become the Jehovah's Witnesses of celebrity sobriety, with everyone scared to open the door to them in case they get a fat lecture and a 12-step pamphlet. Imagine how a decadent celebrity's heart might plummet when they see that pair coming round the corner with their Holland & Barrett bags of multivitamins. They probably hide behind the sofa, thinking: 'I've spent all my money on drugs, my career is over, my nose has gone all Danielle Westbrook, but I really must have hit rock bottom if Elton and David want to help.'

Elton is not the only one. Most famously, Madonna has been much given in recent years to opining that daughter Lourdes will not be watching TV, eating ice cream or dating boys before the age of 18. Such moral rigidity, from a woman who once simulated masturbation onstage as a choreographed part of her act and cavorted with her front botty hanging out in the hilarious, much underrated book, Sex

It doesn't have to be this way. Rock band Aerosmith were, if anything, wilder than Elton, but are clean living these days, with group members looking as if they're only held together by very weak Sellotape. They don't nag younger stars about sobriety and rehab programmes, but unfortunately they may be the exception.

The only thing more boring than yet another picture of a 'tired and emotional' Amy Winehouse staggering about in a stained bra and pants buying ice pops at 4.30 in the morning is the thought of the tedious interviews she may give when she finally gets clean, droning away in fluent 'Californian' about 'finding herself, accepting she has a problem, blah blah. I want to warn all young people about the dangers of drugs, alcohol and having hair like a giant backcombed merkin'. The point is that maybe they don't want, or need, to be warned.

Even five years ago, I was thinking there simply can't be a young person in Britain today, in the entertainment industry or otherwise, so thick as to think 'copious amounts of alcohol and class A drugs are a good and healthy choice for me'. Therefore, in 2008, surely any attempt to educate, change or indeed bombard them with censure, disdain and unasked-for advice at an awards ceremony would surely be the height of pointlessness.

This is the great unwritten law of hedonism: listen to yourself, because only you will recognise the moment when you've had that magical amount 'enough'. The rest is just premature middle age forced upon you by elders who, with their pasts, shouldn't be throwing GQ awards in glasshouses. Lily was right the first time - Elton has had his fun, now it's her turn and, from where I'm sitting, she's a damn sight better behaved than he used to be.

If your lower limbs are beginning to wither and you're becoming dangerously obese, blame Google

Considering that Google is now 10 years old, how come we don't all hate it? Used by 70 per cent of browsers, worth £75bn, Google seems to have somehow sidestepped the automatic global brand hatred of, say, a Microsoft or McDonald's.

Simple, free, reliable, with adverts subtle enough not to drive you potty, Google is not only a design classic of web technology, but it appears to be our search engine friend. Why, then, do I suspect that it wants to rewire my brain and then eat it?

It's not that there's anything bad or inefficient about Google; on the contrary, it might be too good. The better it gets, the more I seem to turn into a spoon-fed idiot who couldn't survive in the real world. As it is, I can't do much without using Google any more. I've noticed this before: whether it is finding a restaurant, sourcing products or fact-checking, I'm either Googling or I'm lost.

This can't be healthy. Talking of which, I'm starting to wonder if Google may be guiltier than McDonald's of aggravating global obesity. On the one hand, a Big Mac with fries; on the other, barely having to move a muscle while doing things that used to entail days of sweaty exertion. I've just been organising my daughter's birthday party and all I've done is Google internet sites and - ooh, the effort - reach for a bankcard.

Did I used to be this lazy? Well, yes, but only when I could get away with it. Now, because of Google, I nearly always get away with it.

Indeed, I've got a terrible fear that one day I'll get off my chair and just fall to the floor, because my legs will have been rendered evolutionarily unnecessary for my ultra-sedentary Google lifestyle. They'll wither and, in their place, I'll grow two giant forefingers with which to type 'Google', and a flesh version of one of those festival hats with cans and straws. My corpse will be found in years to come, stuck fast to the keyboard, my eyes open, screaming their own terrible story.

Is this Google's fiendish plot, to render us all helpless and dependent, then take over the world? How can we stop them? By Googling 'How to stop Google'? This needs earnestly debating before the next 10 years are up. Where's that nice David Icke when you need him?

Apparently, it's not in their jeans, it's in their genes

Grazia magazine ran a moving story last week about Tanya Rowe, 28, who is suffering from breast cancer and has only months to live. Tanya was trying to be strong and positive, despite her heartache at leaving behind son Charlie and fiance Jason, whom she'd just recently met, but who had asked her to be his wife despite her illness, and even offered to care for Charlie after her death.

Last week, Grazia ran a follow up. Jason's other girlfriend had seen the article and rung Tanya. According to Tanya, Jason's reason for cheating was: 'It's been really tough on me with your illness. You've given me no emotional support.' Quite. It's all 'me, me, me' with these terminal cancer sufferers, isn't it?

Understandably, Tanya does not want to waste the precious time she has left hating Jason, so I thought I'd do it for her. However, just as I was settling into a pleasant daydream imagining Jason being plunged headfirst into a cauldron of boiling oil, amid the flames of a karmic hell, a newspaper article caught my eye.

According to a study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, certain men may be genetically programmed to be unfaithful. In what has been hailed as the 'divorce gene', it's all to with some hormonal bonding thingie called vasopressin being out of synch. So, according to the study, these unfaithful men (not women strangely) are hormonally fated to cheat on their partners and seek sex elsewhere.

The article had some other points about how genetics was never the full story (some unsubstantiated guff about how, nevertheless, there is still personal responsibility for one's actions), but I'm afraid I stopped reading there. It was all too much. I mean, Jason, if you're reading, you tell me: does male suffering never end?

What was the internet like before Google?

When I first logged on to the internet in 1990 at university, navigating it was both easy and difficult. It was easier because it there was just so much less of it. This was before the creation of the world wide web in 1991.

However, life on the internet was also more difficult because you had to do everything from a Unix command line.

In those early days, friends recommended sites such as the FTP servers at sunet.se and wustl.edu. Gopher, an early directory system named after the school mascot at the University of Minnesota where it was created, made it much easier to find information.

In 1993, I used an alpha version of the pioneering web browser, developed by NCSA on the north side of my university, the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana. Even in those early versions, I knew that the point-and-click ease of Mosaic would open up the web to the world.

During the 1990s, traffic on the internet increased by at least 100% almost every year, and the number of sites exploded. Internet users needed some way to find what they were looking for.

In 1993, two years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as graduate computer science students at Stanford University, six undergraduates there created Excite. They used statistical analysis of word relationships to improve search results.

In 1994, two Stanford electrical engineering students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, created a directory of their favourite sites and Yahoo was born. Although more of a directory than a search engine, Yahoo became the map for many in finding their way around the early web.

Search engines came fast and furious in the mid-1990s, but one quickly rose above the others: AltaVista.

AltaVista was a bit of a side project for Digital Equipment Corporation, but it showed off the power of their 64-bit Alpha powered servers. AltaVista was fast and returned lots of results, but it was almost too much of a good thing for the average user returning hundreds of irrelevant results.

Inktomi rolled out HotBot, which generated some buzz because it returned more relevant results than AltaVista. There were of course other search engines, including Ask.com and AlltheWeb, but when Google was launched, internet users quickly flocked to its fast-loading and simple site and excellent results.

Using the almost 250 year-old theories British mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, Page and Brin developed an algorithm to analyse the links to a site, helping to predict what sites were relevant to search terms. The business really was started in a garage – well, after they had to move the first servers out of their college dorm room.

Google hasn't solved search. There is still the so-called dark web, or deep web – terabytes of data that aren't searchable or indexed.

There are an estimated 19m domain names registered, with some 40,000 new domains registered every day. They would probably admit that they still have much work to do in their mission to organise the world's information, but Google made it much easier to find what one was looking for.

I'm sure that there are a lot of internet users who can't remember what life was like before Google.

The opportunity to fill up with petrol for free caused gridlock yesterday after hundreds of drivers queued for up to an hour to get £40 of free fuel.

Computer games publisher Electronic Arts took over a petrol station in Finsbury Park, north London, intending to give away £20,000 of petrol on a first come, first served basis during a stunt to promote Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, a game in which Venezuelan mercenaries fight for control of oil supplies.

But the operation, which started at 6.30am, had to be abandoned at around 11am after police decided the jam was blocking a major junction. Electronic Arts said it had managed to give away around £13,000-worth of petrol before the promotion was closed down.

Word of mouth and radio coverage had much to do with a queue of more than 100 cars developing, causing tailbacks during rush hour and leading to complaints from local residents.

"I just want to get to work," said one commuter after waiting for 10 minutes to get out of his drive.

The company decorated the garage forecourt with oil barrels, camouflage netting and an army Jeep. Petrol pumps were manned by attendants dressed in flak jackets and ammunition belts and carrying plastic machine guns.

Lynne Featherstone, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, called on the firm to apologise for the chaos. "Trying to recreate Venezuelan-style fuel riots on the streets of London is completely irresponsible and downright dangerous. Whilst a lucky few might have got some free petrol, hundreds of local residents have faced misery on their daily journeys this morning. They deserve an apology," she said.

Some onlookers were bemused. Eustachius George, a street cleaner, said: "It's really never this busy. Of all the places to pick. Weird."

Despite the long queues, some motorists were happy to wait. Bobby Weatherly, an electrician who had been queuing for an hour by 10am, said: "Anything for £40. It should last me about a week. I'm late for work but I just phoned the boss, he seems to be OK with it. It's worth it."

As Google prepares to blow out the 10 candles on top of its birthday cake this Sunday, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin can be forgiven for cracking a wry smile as they reflect upon the fire they have just lit under Microsoft.

The conflagration that has the creator of Windows running for the fire extinguisher was caused by Google's launch of its own internet browser. The arrival of Chrome, announced in typically idiosyncratic style through the medium of an online comic strip this week, represents more than just a challenge to Microsoft's market-leading Internet Explorer. It represents a fundamental fight over the future of the computer.

Microsoft, as so many potential rivals have found over the years, has a stranglehold over the market for the software that runs computers thanks to its hugely successful Windows operating system. So Google has taken heed of the old adage that if you cannot win, change the game.

The rise of broadband internet access has finally created an environment where applications such as word processors or spreadsheet programs do not need to reside on a computer. Instead they can be run on the internet and the documents created can be stored on web servers so they can be accessed from anywhere a person can get online. In a world where such web-based applications abound, it does not matter what operating system a computer runs because all it needs to have is an internet browser and an internet connection. In that world, a user could even opt for a free operating system.

It's a change that Bill Gates himself foresaw when 13 years ago he wrote an internal memo in which he assigned the "highest level of importance" to the internet and warned his colleagues that it was a potential "tidal wave" that could fundamentally alter the rules.

That memo mentioned then market-leading browser Netscape as having the potential to "commoditize the underlying operating system". That infamous memo was one of the catalysts of the browser wars of the late 1990s, which ultimately saw Internet Explorer crush Netscape Navigator, and it also included a line about ensuring that makers of computers ship their machines with a Microsoft browser pre-installed. That practice landed Microsoft in court and led to the effective split of the company. But by then the damage was done and Netscape ended up in the hands of AOL before disappearing all but completely.

When Gates testified as part of the anti-trust case brought against the company 10 years ago he was asked what that line about "commoditizing the operating system" had meant. He replied: "They were creating a product that would either reduce the value or eliminate demand for the Windows operating system if they continued to improve it and we didn't keep improving our product."

Firefox cub

Ironically, Chrome, which has been roughly two years in the making, builds upon innovations made in browser technology by Microsoft's rival Mozilla, custodian of the Firefox browser, some of whose technological DNA comes from Netscape Navigator.

But the browser wars of a decade ago do not live on just within the technology of Chrome, but in Google's decision to create it in the first place. The search engine's chief executive admitted after the launch that "the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters".

Brin added that "operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky ... We [web users] want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone are shrinking."

That is bad news for Microsoft, which makes a significant chunk of its revenues from its Windows operating system and Office suite of software, both of which sit upon the computer itself.

Google, of course, makes pretty much all of its revenues from online search. It has gone from a doctoral project at Stanford University to the world's largest search engine in 10 years, blasting through the traditional media and advertising industries on the way. It is now one of the world's most trusted and recognised brands.

Over the past few years, the company has moved into online applications and services such as email, word processing, calendars, instant messaging, maps, spreadsheets and even bought the online video phenomenon YouTube.

But ultimately everything it does is about persuading people to do more with the internet. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to search for something and the more likely they are to generate revenues for Google or queries that help improve its search algorithm. So why would it want to dabble with browsers?

Firstly, the sense that Google's executives have given over the past few days is that if the rest of the industry had produced good enough browsers, there would have been no need for them to create Chrome.

Announcing the launch of Chrome - which was leaked after a Google staffer posted a copy of the 38-page comic that heralded the move - the company said on its website: "People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they're doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

"We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

Android attack

Chrome, according to early testers, is certainly faster than many of the browsers already in the market - especially the current version of Internet Explorer - and it has been engineered so that if one website being visited freezes up, the entire program does not crash.

Google has moved into another area - mobile phones - for roughly similar reasons. The creation of its Android operating system for mobile phones - the first device that runs it is expected in time for Christmas - owes much to the fact that the mobile internet has been promised for years but the industry's love of proprietary systems has held back its arrival.

The first gadget to deliver on the promise of the mobile web, Apple's iPhone, owes some of its success to the fact that it is an "open" platform, so anyone who uses common web standards can create applications for it. Android is also an open mobile platform, in the same way as Chrome is an open browser platform.

But Chrome is also a crucial defensive play for Google. If you rely - as it does - on people having access to the internet to make your money you not only want to make it as simple as possible but ensure no one gets in your way.

The new, eighth version of Internet Explorer, which is due out soon, includes the ability to view web pages anonymously. Erasing a user's online footprints would make it harder for Google to collect the data about visitors that it uses to improve search results and serve relevant adverts.

Chrome also has an anonymous browsing mode - which has quickly been dubbed "porn mode" because it hides details of where the user has been from other users of the same machine - but Google will still know what that user has been doing online.

Then there is the fact that browsers increasingly contain search boxes within them, raising the risk that a popular new browser could slowly squeeze Chrome out of the market by signing up with a rival search engine.

Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web's second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal - which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla's revenues - until 2011. Google's toolbar is already standard on Apple's Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.

Chrome has excited the tech world but ultimately it all comes down to money and for Google that means more people searching more often. As Citigroup put it in a note to clients this week: "Given that search has become such a fundamental part of internet usage, anything that impacts overall internet usage is important for Google."

Backstory

Google is either more than 12, nearly 11, exactly 10 tomorrow or not quite 10 years old, depending on which event is taken as its birth. While still at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on technology that would become the forerunner of Google by January 1996. It was called BackRub, because it analysed back links - essentially the links to a site from other sites.

BackRub was "let loose" in March 1996. Brin and Page had created an algorithm that ranked pages by importance - PageRank, which is still at the heart of Google today. The bigger the internet got, they reckoned, the bigger the search engine would get, which led them to name it after googol, the term for the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros. Google was launched in August 1996

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000, making the cheque out to Google Inc, which did not exist. So on September 7 1998 Brin and Page incorporated Google as a company.

Dafydd Thomas, Ant and Dec, Merlin, and Tess Durbeyfield will be on the front line in the battle for viewers this autumn, as figures today reveal the scale of the decline in audiences on mainstream television channels.

Official Barb (Broadcasters Audience Research Board) figures compiled for the Guardian show that although the precipitous decline of recent years has slowed, viewers - particularly younger ones - are continuing to switch off in peak time.

"Event" shows have retained appeal - mainly live entertainment programmes such as X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing but also sport, landmark documentaries such as Planet Earth, and must-see reality formats such as The Apprentice.

Soaps and some mass market dramas have also proved resilient with the likes of New Tricks, Kingdom, Doc Martin and Cranford still reaching big audiences.

But it is the layer beneath the top tier where ratings have collapsed and hit the average peak time share, defined as between 5.30pm and 11pm, of the main channels over the past five years. BBC1's share of evening viewing has fallen from 27% in 2003 to 23.1% in 2008 to date. On ITV1 the decline is more marked - from 28.4% to 21.8% over five years. Among 16-to 34-year-olds it is steeper still. BBC1 fell from 23.9% to 17.1% and ITV1 from 23.6% to 15.6%.

Meanwhile, it has become ever harder to launch new shows. The new ITV1 time-travelling drama Lost in Austen, which received positive reviews and appeared to boast a winning combination of contemporary zip and period bonnets, debuted this week to just 3.8m viewers.

While total viewing hours have remained steady, the range and quality of digital channels combined with the penetration of Freeview, cable and satellite mean viewing has become fragmented. An ITV spokesman said: "Five years ago we were looking at average audiences of 8m at 9pm. Today multichannel penetration means we're looking for programmes which achieve 5m and above."

Figures from the media watchdog, Ofcom, showed that nine in 10 households now have at least one digital set. Personal video recorders have changed habits with more viewers "time shifting". Video on demand via a PC has also started to make inroads, as shown by the success of BBC iPlayer, which served up 100m programmes in the first half of 2008.

Broadcasters believe they are starting to fight back. They have launched spin off channels to capture some of that splintering audience which can now catch up with a programme maybe shown first on BBC1 or ITV1 later in the week.

Today the BBC will announce a new deal to include its online iPlayer on Nokia's new N96 handset and it is encouraging viewers to watch "anytime, anyplace, anywhere". So while internet use has been viewed as a competitor, it is becoming a saviour.

As a result, broadcasters are desperate to find new ways of measuring audiences beyond the overnight ratings figures. The BBC uses its own internal audience appreciation figures, while ITV also measures viewer satisfaction. They also want to find ways of building on-demand viewing into the ratings totals.

Three of the five mainstream channels have new controllers following a spell of executive merry-go-round. The BBC1 controller, Jay Hunt, is looking to build on the successes of her predecessor, Peter Fincham, now director of television at ITV. Fincham is in the unusual position of competing against a string of shows that he commissioned at BBC1. They include a large scale Little Dorrit, a Saturday night family drama, Merlin, a period piece, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the return of Matt Lucas and David Walliams in Little Britain USA, a spin off of their sketch show made for American cable channel HBO.

One of Fincham's biggest challenges will be to find the next big reality hit while also reinvigorating drama and comedy. Another big hope for the autumn is Britannia High, a family show described as a cross between Fame and Disney's High School Musical.

Channel 4 is hoping to combine ratings success with public service kudos as it argues for up to £150m in public subsidy to plug a looming funding gap. Its biggest autumn shows include a fly on the wall documentary, The Family, and The Devil's Whore, an English Civil War drama.

Before the crying, lump of peroxide that begged "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" and the Day-Glo, gay Valhalla of Planet Unicorn, "Rick rolling" was the internet viral that kept on giving. Before you could say "Bye bye LOLCATS" people were altered to faked news stories (from "Nasa To Burn Sponsor Logos Into The Surface Of Mars" to "See Paris Making Out With Busta Rhymes!") whose links would be the promo video of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

Boom boom.

Post-April Fool's Day, however, this strange internet phenomenon mutated into various forms with everyone from Hitler to Obama getting their Rick on.

But what does the 80s pop master Mr Astley make of all this? "I suppose it's flattering that I've been chosen to be the butt of this joke," he says, when we catch up with him. "Although Peter [Waterman, songwriter] was trying to work out how much money you get from each YouTube play!"

Rick left the pop star lifestyle behind ("I've just been to IKEA," he drops in mid-interview) but can still be found occasionally venturing out for 80s nostalgia gigs. "When I perform now its almost like I'm impersonating a guy called Rick Astley. It's like it's not me," he explains.

We asked him to talk us through all the Rick rolling that's been a-going on...

Basketball roll

A college basketball match is interrupted when some red haired dude dressed in a suspiciously familiar grey mac stalks the bleachers miming to... Cue lots of ornery looking parents and confused cheerleaders.

Rick: "It's really weird seeing someone impersonating you. But at the same time Vic Reeves' impersonation of me is one of the highlights of my life. I think it's one of the best things ever. I've just been to Manila performing, and there was a guy who was a film star there at the gig. He sang Never Gonna Give You Up with me and he was hilarious. I have fun with my past, I don't carry it around in a bag with me."

Barack roll

Edited footage of his royal Obamaness, dancing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, spliced with bits of his speeches to look and sound as if he's singing the track.

Rick: "I don't trust politicians. I think that by the time they've made it, with the concessions they've had to make in that position, I don't believe they still have the beliefs they had at the root. I think it's going to be interesting because he'll be the first black president. I'd be interested to see what black people in America really see him as - a 'black person' or a democrat who happens to have dark skin. I can't get my head around it. I also have a horrible feeling that he won't last very long. It's kind of depressing."

Fox roll

April Fool's Day came in hilarious spurts for that famously mirthful news network Fox. "Project Virgle" was the name of the first permanent human colony on Mars co-funded by Virgin and Google. It didn't exist of course but was reported by Fox. "Cut to VT" and it actually cut to...

Rick: "Fair play to them for putting it on national TV. The biggest thing I heard on April Fool's Day was that if you went to YouTube every one of the videos on the homepage Rick Roll'd and went to Never Gonna Give You Up. They got in touch with me about that and asked if I wanted to get to do something for it. But I said no thanks - it's been nice to be forgotten."

Hitler roll

A subverted scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel's film about Hitler's last days, Downfall. Here, Hitler is going over possible rap acts that will play his birthday party (Snoop, a reunited NWA). A henchman tells Adolf that Dr Dre has emailed the Fuhrer a link to his latest release. Hitler doesn't find it very amusing.

Rick: "Oh god! That's not as bad as Reich Roll'd though - footage of Hitler giving all his infamous speeches overdubbed with Never Gonna Give You Up. That's pushing it. I'm 42 and I could have had a tangible connection to anything from world war two. For the younger generation though it's ancient history, so it's probably not too distasteful to them."

Scientology roll

Xenu was kicked to the kerb, when a post pointing to a "Scientology Video Channel" was actually... yes you guessed it.

Rick: "That's kind of spooky that one. 'Scientology' always makes me think of that movie V where that woman takes off her mask of human flesh to reveal her true, alien self. I know that I'll probably be off Tom Cruise's Christmas list for saying that. Did I see the Oprah couch jump? No it's kind of hard to watch that... You never know if that was a publicity stunt or whatever. But he can do whatever he wants - he's one of the biggest, most bankable stars in the world isn't he?

Station roll

A huge crowd of "real" people get together at Liverpool Street Station in London to sing Never Gonna Give You Up in unison. Lots of camera phones, drunk City boys and missed trains to Wivenhoe.

Rick: "Someone emailed me about this. He'd received a chain email and called me up a couple of days before. It happened on a Friday at 6pm. By the evening it was all over YouTube. I watched those, it was so funny to get everyone in Liverpool Street Station to sing a pop song from 1987."

· See also: KISS get rolled; New York Met fans vote on a new theme... all these and more can be found at tinyurl.com/guiderickrolls

Sexy People
renz-o.blogspot.com
Mullets abound in this collection, including plumbers Mario and Luigi in the real world.

Stand By Your Statue
standbyyourstatue.blogspot.com
Submissions of people imitating statues they're stood next to.

Automotive Monogamy
matteoferrari.net/e/per/01.htm
Photographer Matteo Ferrari revisits snaps of people who have owned the same car for decades.

Photo Cliches
photocliches.com
Some of the millions who pretend to snort Coke or grope a statue.

Souvenirs
tinyurl.com/y8wpgu
Michael Hughes' surreal images of souvenirs of buildings held up in front of the actual buildings.

Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians
menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com
Like Warren Beatty and Robin Williams.

Braid, Xbox 360

Braid looks like a moving oil painting and appears initially to conform to every platform game standard in existence, from killing enemies by hopping on their heads to collecting stuff - in this case, jigsaw pieces. However, beneath its unusual looks and seemingly pedestrian mechanics, beats a heart of pure invention: unlike other platform games, you can rewind time whenever you like for as long as you like. Rather than removing the game's difficulty, this instead opens up a world of exquisitely designed logic puzzles, getting you to thread your way through increasingly ingenious levels in search of those elusive Eureka moments. It's a masterpiece, from its painterly art style to the folk music that perfectly warps and distorts itself around the time-bending action, to the story, which is so oblique and symbolic you're aware that hero Tim's quest to save a princess may actually be a psychotic delusion, let alone trying to decode references to the Manhattan Project. Braid is a beautiful game.

· Microsoft, approx £10.20 from Xbox Live Arcade

Mercenaries 2: World In Flames, PC/PS2/PS3/Xbox 360 (reviewed)

As the antithesis of the thoughtful creativity of Braid, Mercenaries 2 is a game about, in the words of developer Pandemic, "blowing shit up". This means choosing one of three standard-issue action game drones before heading out into the jungles of Venezuela and setting about the troops, buildings and vehicles with an endless supply of small arms, helicopters, tanks and air strikes. Everything is combustible or at least destructible and, while it's nice to be able to bulldoze trees in a tank rather than get stuck behind them, most explosions look flimsily pumped-up, with buildings resembling plywood structures stuffed with explosives. Primitive, largely texture- free graphics match clumsy implementation, with third-person aiming obscured by scenery and your character. A hollow experience.

· Electronic Arts, £29.99-£49.99

Pleo, Robotic dinosaur

Pleo bills itself as manufacturer UGOBE's first artificial life form, a rubbery-skinned baby dinosaur that responds to sounds, surroundings and petting rather than anything as mundane as a remote control. Like Sony's now discontinued AIBO robotic dog, Pleo starts life falteringly before learning about you and your house by gradual exploration. It also coos, chirrups (presumably dinosaur-style), sings, wags its tail and purrs in response to stroking, which Pleo senses on its head, chin, back and legs. Ignore him for too long and he'll make small disappointed noises and hang his little head - it's impossible not to respond. So after a shockingly brief period you start saying "he" and sending back review dinosaurs is like saying goodbye to a kitten you've recently adopted.

· Ugobe, £249.99

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