Can you tell I got a new tablet this weekend?

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Police in the Czech republic are trying to find out who stole a 4 tonne railway bridge from a disused stretch of line in the border town of Cheb.

The company which was responsible for looking after the bridge raised the alarm on Tuesday when, ever vigilant, they noticed that the bridge wasn’t there any more.

Martina Hruskova, a spokeswoman for the Czech police, commented: “We are not sure if it was taken for personal use or for its scrap value”.

What “personal use” would that be then? Apparently bridge theft is becoming more and more common in the former Soviet states, with at least two bridges being stolen in Russia in the last six months and a couple going missing from Macedonia last February. Why the sudden rash of bridge theft? Is it the new thing, like cocaine was in the ’80s?

Remember kids: lock your bridge up at night.

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When electronica musician The Flashbulb, (aka Benn Jordan), was approached after one of his gigs by some fans who told him how much they enjoyed his music, he was flattered. When they then went on to tell him that they bought his tracks from iTunes, he was less than thrilled.

Benn Jordan doesn’t have a contract with iTunes and he’s never seen a penny of any track ever sold there.

After investigating the numbers from the label, Benn discovered just how little the artist and label was getting compared to the profits made by the retailer. When he asked the owner of Sublight Records, (his label), about it, he was told to “leave it be”. Everyone else he contacted just ignored his calls and emails.

According to Apple, once a file is in the iTunes system, it can’t be removed or taken down for a year; a bizarre boast considering how flawed that logic is.

“So, who’s the pirate I should go after? A kid who downloads my album because it isn’t available in non-DRM format and costs $30 on Amazon? Or a huge multi-billion dollar corporation that has been selling thousands of dollars worth of my music and not even acknowledging it?”

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The Guinness book of World Records is a marvelous tome, featuring as it does a whole host of human feats, both of endurance and of stoicism. Many of the records feature fantastic heroics by both sportsmen and ordinary people, pushing themselves to the limit and besting everyone else in their chosen field. What we like most though, as the general public, are the ridiculous records. How many people can you fit into a phonebox? How many pegs can you fit on your face? How many baked beans can you eat with a toothpick in the space of one minute?

How many people dressed as Smurfs can you gather in one place at one time?

This is the record the people of Komin, Croatia decided that they could beat. Research on the Internet revealed that they would only have to gather more than two-hundred and ninety Smurfs in one place to clinch the record. The press were notified, campaigns were launched and a date was set. When the time came, three-hundred and ninety-five Smurfs descended on Komin.

Nearly four-hundred men, women and children all painted blue from head to foot, wearing white trousers and floppy white hats gathered together for the record attempt. With over one-hundred more Smurfs than the current record, they were surely a shoe-in.

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That’s right, how else do you try and get past building regulations and planning permission?

Robert Fidler wanted to build himself a mock-Tudor castle, so he did, behind a 40ft stack of hay bales covered by huge tarpaulins. Once finished, he and his family moved there for four years before revealing it to the public in August 2006.

“Mr Fidler claims that because the building has been there for four years with no objections, it is no longer illegal.”

“After building the castle on the site of two grain silos at a cost of £50,000, he and his wife Linda went to extraordinary lengths to keep it secret. That included keeping their son Harry, now seven, away from playschool the day he was supposed to do a painting of his home in class.”

Oddly, Mrs Fidler stated that “We couldn’t have him drawing a big blue haystack – people might asked questions”.

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U2 manager, Paul McGuinness (right) has called upon Internet Service Providers to introduce draconian policies aimed at disconnecting file sharers, music pirates and other ne’er-do-wells. During the International Managers Summit at the MIDEM music conference, McGuinness also urged governments to ensure that ISPs kick back at the little guy.

He blamed the record companise for allowing “a range of industries to arise that let people steal music”, Silicon Valley companies that create marvelous devices but “don’t think of themselves as makers of burglary kits”, and governments who “created a thieves’ charter” by agreeing that ISPs are not responsible for what their customers get up to.

“If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door,” he said. “That’s no different to an ISP, but they say they can’t do anything about it”

Obviously the audience of music managers lapped it up.

McGuinness later went on to say that the majority of people who downloaded Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” probably did it through “illegal” services like BitTorrent and Limewire.

When are musicians and their management going to realise that their glory days are over? I’m not saying that they shouldn’t make money, but there’s making money and then there’s making money. I’m not bothered if they’re scraping together a few pennies for a hot meal and a bath, but when that meal is caviar and that bath is gold plated… then I get a tad annoyed.

I don’t want to be paying for a mansion that will one day be featured on “Cribs” or to fuel some coke-fiend’s habit. Successful, talented musicians make more than enough money to live a normal life; it’s time they realised that if they’re doing it for the money, they’re in the wrong industry.

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