Briefly noted

After bar review last night, a small splinter-party stopped off at bottom-of-the-barrel bar Timothy O'Toole's for wings before bed. O'Toole's is about as bad as you can get: it's a dive bar without the charm, an underground fortress of warped wood and greasy food with 50 television sets, all playing either ESPN or ESPN2. The music is predictably awful. Wing companion mentions that Good Charlotte is playing and that he likes same. I say nothing.

The next song: Annie, "Me Plus One"

Does that mean that Annie has jumped the shark, or that I'm selling O'Toole's short?

Also, what's the deal with the current mini-craze for taking good but dated songs and subjecting them to the stylings of strung-out European women? Nouvelle Vague seemed like a one-off novelty, since (to paraphrase someone else) "Guns of Brixton" shouldn't be sung by someone who doesn't sound like she's been within miles of a gun or Brixton.

Going through the music I've been downoading over the week, I got to The Concretes' cover of "Miss You."

Let's get this straight, once and for all, before this becomes a full-scale trend:

Quaaludes plus waifs do not equal late '70s urban fear. It's like doing a remake of Taxi Driver with cast-offs from America's Next Top Model playing all the parts.