Although I’ve heard the new Bond theme a couple of times on the radio lately, the actual music video for it was premiered on Channel 4 last night. I don’t really know when it was officially released, but I’ll just assume it’s new, so I can write about it.

The song, titled in typical Bond fashion - ‘Another Way to Die’, is performed by the odd but strangely satisfying duo of Jack White and Alecia Keys.

Those of you that watched the Olympics this year may remember a sweaty, old Jimmy Page performing ‘A whole lotta love’ with Leona Lewis at the London handover ceremony. While  everything else was great, Leona Lewis dressed in a gigantic bin bag with stuck on plastic bottles, while Jimmy Page lost two thirds of his body mass in sweat.

It was a combination that just didn’t fit, like putting a square into a circle on those frustrating baby toys we all used to have. I mean, Leona admittedly has an impressive voice and everything, and Jimmy Page is like a god to my uncle, but put the two together and you got a bastard child that needed shot. Initially you would think the Quantum of Solace theme would end up like this, another embarrassing musical fuck up. But it isn’t.

In fact, ‘ Another Way to Die’ is everything a good Bond theme needs. It’s edgy, hard-hitting and dark, it fits in well with the feel of the film, and Amy Winehouse isn’t doing it.

Amy Winehouse was rumoured to make the theme with Mark Ronson, but she was to busy choking in a pool of her own vomit, as you do these days. I’m just glad she hasn’t, because I doubt she’d make a song that would fit the film. Casino Royale showed the film series was taking a new direction. Bond got more violent and agressive, resulting in the film becoming a lot darker than it’s predecessors. The least you want is Amy Winehouse gurgling out an over-extravagant, iconic sixties-sounding track that suits a calmer, more relaxed, ‘Martini-mode’ Bond, like Pierce Brosnan - rather than pissed off, revenge crazed Daniel Craig.

Well here’s the video, I think it’s great - it’s certainly better than Chris Cornell’s instantly forgettable, ’You know my Name’ - but you can make up your own mind. Everyone’s got an opinion on Bond these days.

Or here view here, Another Way to Die video.

Quantum of Solace is due for release in the United Kingdom on 31 October 2008.

Well, as you’ve probably guessed I’m talking about the latter. Those participating in order of importance:

Shaun: Connecting lines together, careful timing required, mashing your “2″ key a must.

Craig: Recording. I sat and used Pamela to record the ensuing entertainment.

Round 1: Lydia and Unknown AKA Mrs. Doyle and Father Ted

This guy is a sound double of Father Ted. Perhaps they set up a call centre for Apple on Craggy Island. Who knows, maybe these two met up at some point and made out. Any future relationship here is courtesy of Ebolacola.

Round 2: George and Darren

Yeah, you’d better go and inform Danny, Darren. You can also bet that Darren here proceeded to cross the call centre and beat the shit out of poor George.

I’m not actually sure what the chances of hooking up two people in the same call centre are, but I’m guessing it’s pretty unlikely. Even less likely to get two people that know each other. So it’s hats off to Shaun for this one.

You’re going to thank me one day for this, you know.

The little spark that set off the inspiration to write yet another potentially rubbish article for Ebola Cola, was a little spider I encountered the other day. Of course, when I say little I mean the size of a small cat. Remember the nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet”? Well my encounter was kind of like that, except little Miss Muffet didn’t shout and imitate a stroke victim when it landed on her shoulder, and scuttled towards her face.

After I cleaned my pants, I was telling the story to one of my little brothers about how I bravely fought it off, readjusted my imaginary tie, and had a martini afterwards. Shaken, but clearly not stirred. My brother, not believing a single word I was telling him and being clearly consumed by blockbuster movies as it is, started to talk about how cool it would be if it bit me, and I had turned into Spiderman. Afterwards he went on to say how I wasn’t cool enough to be Spiderman, and that I’d probably be more apt to being ‘Banana-shaped head man’, or ‘Goof-Boy’, but that’s besides the point. I was stuck with the idea of ‘what if ‘and ‘Spiderman’ and ‘real world ‘ and ‘cool’ - all in the same sentence, at the same time.

Yes. Fantastic start - writing about why you’re writing. At least as a string of characters it makes sense.

Spiderman is pretty cool. I know that it’s typical of a comic book geek to say something like that, but I don’t particularly swing that way. The closest I got to a comic was a Beano club membership when I was 8. Again, like I said, I’m not particularly into comic books. However, If I had known about Marvel or DC back then, Dennis the Menace would be sticking that pea shooter up his arse. What really did Superheroes for me though, and everybody else other than the comic book minority, was the movies.

With Spiderman, Batman and the wide range of comic book titles bringing the action from the comic books to the big screen, it’s no surprise people like me (representing the common man) think what is essentially a load of balls to be absolutely brilliant. Everybody loves Tobey Maguire, everybody hates Kirsten Dunst, the openings are slick and the action is explosive. It’s not perfect, but for action movie fans it’s not far from it. Which leaves the question: Just how cool would it be to be or to have a superhero in this day and age?

I mean, we’re not exactly short on bad guys: Terrorists, Gordon Brown, Global Warming, Big Brother contestants, America, Imhotept and Fern Cotton’s television presenting skills (curse her) all help to terrorise today’s society. All are undeniably bad. All could do with a big Superhero going over. Be it Batman to send ‘em to prison, or Punisher to shove their heads in a big pot of boiling tomato soup.

Although today’s world is probably the safest it’s ever been, (If you ignore nuclear bombs and developing countries for a moment) what with increased health care, living conditions, security… It still has to be said that out there is still quite dangerous.

Heck, I don’t know if I’ll live ’til next week because of some black hole machine experiment in Switzerland (We did live by the way, because it happened last week and I really need to edit quicker), never mind a potential knife-wielding thug that keeps threatening me for money.

Of course, not all is gloom for the human race. We still do have our everyday heroes in today’s society, like New York firemen, Tom Cruise (Since he’s the only person that can save someone from a car crash), John Smeaton (Because he kicked a man up the arse) and Naomi Watts, not necessarily because she’s done anything, but because I want her picture here.

However, we might have our distinguished heroes who have performed great acts of bravery and duties to society, but John Smeaton can’t fly and he’d make a shit Tekken character (Press ‘O’ to kick) and Naomi Watts just acts and has a pretty face.

What I’d really be interested in seeing though, would be an actual comic book superhero take to the skies. “A bit of a geek’s wet dream!”, I hear the gentleman shout at the back. Maybe so, but that gentleman licks dogs.

Batman would kick ass if he was real. He could easily fix the Ozone layer using Ozone layer bat repellent spray from his utility belt, and schedule a worldwide mute whenever Fern Cotton speaks on television, or even breathes. However brilliant Batman may be, he is also tragically flawed.

What sucks just now is that I can’t make any Jade Goody jokes ever since she got cervical cancer. Batman has that same morality problem. When Batman catches criminals he abides by the law and sends them to prison. This may be fair, and work in the fictional world of Gotham City, but our prisons are pathetic. Last thing I heard they were letting inmates play the latest video games and watch movie’s on HD televisions. I don’t even have a HD television! This isn’t prison, it’s a holiday camp compared to what prison should be. It’s more or less a nice hotel that they’re not allowed to leave.

Prison is meant to rehabilitate but all it does is make people less scared of it. We probably have people going in just because they have Sky television. Rehabilitation my arse, and let’s face it, Batman only sends the bad guys to prison so that the writers can reuse them when they run out of ideas for new characters.

Personally, I’d love to be a superhero. Although, in amongst the occasional gestures of goodwill and contributions to society, I would probably be a complete dick, but how would I gain them in the first place?

Gaining superpowers the traditional way, in which people unwittingly get bitten by poisonous spiders and fall into pits of nuclear waste, like in the comics, is not exactly recommended. In fact, nuclear waste is more likely to get you cancer, but that’s another story. What you can get though, is laser eye surgery and breast enhancements.

While I could really do with a decent eyesight, laser eye surgery doesn’t mean my eyes can shoot laser beams like Cyclops. I don’t really care though, because to be honest I thought Cyclops was a bit of a gimp. On the other hand plastic breasts aren’t so good either. Sure, they may look good in the photographs, but how is that going to save 14 school children from a burning building? Exactly, and don’t even start with your Pamela Anderson ‘Baywatch’ jokes.

Every sane person knows that the closest realistic way of gaining superpowers is through technology. To many, the image of Bill Gates flying around in a Japanese-style Mech - giggling hysterically while performing software audits on unsuspecting companies, is just too much to bear. It’s true though, our knowledge on Biology is just too shit to make people shoot webs out of their eyes yet, so we have to make do with circuit boards and technology to perform specific tasks.

Some may think technology is cheating but it isn’t really. As you know the human species is famous amongst, um, the human species for it’s thinking power, and not it’s physical capabilities. Who cares if technology isn’t really a distinctive superpower, like shooting webs and being stretchy? It worked for Iron man. Of course, we’re not quite on par with Iron man just yet, but who knows what the future holds? Forty years ago or so a computer the size of a house could do less calculations than an abacus. Yesterday we were using MS-DOS on PC’s with screens about two feet square in diameter. Now we can stick screens on walls with bits of blue tac if we really wanted to. And that’s just the evolution of computer technology, never mind engineering and science. At this rate we’ll have Mechs that shoot nukes out of their arse by the next ten years or so (probably).

With technology being the agreed medium of anything capable of performing anything remotely superheroish, we run into problems. Having such powerful technology wouldn’t just be plain-sailing as anyone who has played Metal Gear Solid will know. In this world, and not the superhero world, we have a big grey blob when it comes to morality. In this world, who is good depends on which way you look at it, and in the end the guys you’re rooting for don’t always win. The technology goes to the highest bidder, not the guy with the better ethics. This is because the people who build and design this stuff are geeks, and everybody knows geeks are complete bastards (I know a bunch of ‘em).

For geeks it’s okay I guess, when there’s nuclear devastastion, at least you’ve been paid.

So in a world were Nuclear waste gives you cancer rather than lasers, it’s probably best that flamboyant superheroes were kept to the comic books. Earth is serious business, so fuck off Batman - and keep the metal, circuitry, technology and hopefully the right minds to control them coming, because quite frankly there’s no other realistic way. What a mess this turned out to be, *click publish*.

In order to encourage more discussion and a sense of community, I have created a flickr group for Ebola Cola.

For those not in the know, flickr allows users to share photographs and engage in discussion. You will have to register with flickr before you are able to add your own snaps to our pool.

Right now, the group is empty and we encourage anyone with a flickr account to join us and if you have snaps of anything, feel free to share them. We don’t have a theme or topic, just upload snaps which you think we might love to see. Even if you’re photo-less, we would still love you to stick around!

“Bill O’Reilly announced tonight on his show The Factor that he is calling the FBI and Attorney General on the hackers and liberal bloggers who posted private information on the Palins!”

The Huffington Post today are reporting on a story today regarding Anonymous and their fight against Governor Sarah Palin, you can even read about it on WIRED magazine’s website.

It seems that one hacker took control of her Yahoo account and leaked personal and rather important screenshots to Wikileaks. Wikileaks claim that because Palin was using private email accounts to conduct government business, that she is only dodging transparency laws.

All the screenshots, text files and zips can be found on the Sarah Palin Yahoo Account 2008 article.

The Something Awful forums have become a rather minute national celebrity after British newspaper, The Telegraph decided to report on a game made by a popular forum goon.

The article features inaccuracies such as:”“Gently caress” is internet slang for a common swear word.“.

Yes, really, they said this.

The game is known as ‘Muslim Massacre‘ and was first released on Something Awful forums by a goon known as, Sigvatr who is now ducking from the media. The game’s description is rather crude, stating that the aim is to “ensure that no Muslim man or woman is left alive”. Although I haven’t played it, The Telegraph are experts on the game stating “players progress to later levels where they take on Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and finally Allah“.

The Telegraph also had a Muslim leader respond with his reaction, in which he claimed that games like this cause violence against Muslims and would encourage young people to kill Muslims. It seems now that everyone is an expert in psychology.

Actually, maybe the preaching of violence towards the West that we hear so much about in the media might also encourage violence, just a thought.

What I don’t understand is, even if the creator was just aiming for a game that was fun but edgy in the fact that it was ironically racist, Muslims do not take well to things like this. Didn’t they get hot-headed over some cartoons from Denmark? Didn’t that result in flag-burning and threats of violence?

For anyone wishing to visit the official website, the link is here and anyone wishing to visit the Something Awful forums, hope you got ten bucks.

The release day was one that saw the Internet awash with bloggers and forum-addicts glued to their threads and websites eager to see what the fuss was about. Many people discovered small ‘Easter eggs’ embedded in Google Chrome, such as the messages that are visible when typing ‘about:internets’ and ‘about:crash’ in the address bar. Many of the people I spoke to were amazed at how speedy Google Chrome actually was, from installing the software to browsing the web and loading various applets.

However, certain issues arose. Such as a rather small, but rather important paragraph in Google Chrome’s EULA which explained that Google is pretty much playing Big Brother in everything that goes on inside your web browser.

“Today’s Internet outrage du jour has been Chrome’s EULA, which appears to give Google a nonexclusive right to display and distribute every bit of content transmitted through the browser. Now, Google tells Ars that it’s a mistake, the EULA will be corrected, and the correction will be retroactive.” - Ars Technica.

Fortunately, Google were able to clean up the mess before the fire spread too quickly and the EULA has become retroactive and the chunk of text has been removed from the EULA altogether. It’s actually quite technical.

I can’t criticise Google Chrome too much though, after all, it is still in it’s BETA stage. Although there are a few points that annoy me, such as the inability to cycle back to my homepage. Unlike every single other browser in existance, Google have failed to add a ‘home’ button to Chrome. I’m also unable to press my mouse’s scroll-wheel down for easy-scrolling. Closing my browser does not leave me with a prompt, even with several tabs open. Not to mention the problems with the rendering of PNG files.

Excusing these minor errors, Google Chrome is a fantastic web browser with a lot of pros. For instance, the speed is unreal, the browser does not dominate the screen like some browsers and it’s sleek even in it’s first stages.

Though will it be enough to knock Firefox out of the browser ring? I’m not convinced.

I’ll tell you this right now; the 4300 is a pretty respectable launch in the subnotebook (not compared to the smaller ultraportable line to be later launched) it’s lightweight and discrete; It’s delightfully functional but unpretentious.

For Office Outlook users, (2k3 and greater) there’s an interesting feature very similar to the “MediaDirect”, called BlackTop. For those not in the know, MediaDirect allows home users to play multimedia content (music, pictures, movies, DVDs, etc) without having to boot the full OS. Blacktop is very similar in concept in that it boots outside of windows, but it gives access to email, etc without having to boot the full OS. instead it (apparently) uses a lightweight Linux distro. Confusing, because it has to be initially configured in Windows and you have to have a Outlook 2k3 client or greater to use it.

This 4300 is pretty solid: it boasts a 2.26 GHz dual core, has 2 gigs RAM, 160GB hard drive and runs Vista with no real issues. The ControlPoint software collects all the wireless functionality into an easy to use and interact menu, controlling bluetooth, wireless, and cellular broadband within a mouseclick (or function button).

Pretty sweet, kiddos. Get one of these babies with a CompleteCare warranty and take it on the road. it’s very not bad.

Nestor

Here’s the idea. Human beast presenter Vanessa Feltz shouts herself around a circular room full of idiots. What happens is three idiots with something uncanny about them get shoved into the middle and then get shouted at. That is it. It’s half an hour though, at 2:30AM, we have to remember.

Who do we have today? Who are the lucky three? Tonight’s real lives are: a female paedophile, a woman who breast feeds her 7-year old child (SHE’S NOT EVEN HOT) and a man that drinks his, and others, piss.

I shall give you my take, since the audience are incapable of any opinion whatsoever.

Vanessa Feltz on the right (I didn’t skew the picture, she really is that fat).

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Case #1: Woman had sex with 15 year old boy when she was 31, got into a lot of trouble for it and believes she’s the victim.

For fuck’s sake, It takes two to tango. She knew he was 15, she knew he was underage. The woman must have the intelligence of a plank of wood or must seriously be lacking some. That boy must have thought Christmas came early because he got a turkey. Next.

Case 2#: Woman breast feeds child until 7 years old.

Babies only need the milk at the first stage after birth. Yes, we all know the woman transfers antibodies, we are not stupid. You say you keep the child doing it if it feels like it? Do you let a dog sh** on a rug? No, you punch it in the face and say ‘No’. Of course, prolonged breast-feeding does no harm, but neither does it any real good. It’s unnecessary since the child can now eat a healthy, balanced diet. Hence they cancel each other out to reveal you just do it for the kicks, you sick f***. Next.

Case 3#: Man drinks his own piss, and others piss, ‘cos it’s good for you.

You know, I thought basic high school biology taught us that the reason we piss is to get rid of toxic waste products. If piss was really so nutricious, why would our bodies get rid of it in the first place? Eat or drink something, good stuff absorbed, bad and useless stuff excreted. Thus drinking it does nothing at all since there is nothing to absorb, hence why it got rid of it in the first place. This leaves us with two possible results: the man has been terribly mislead, or, since no one is that stupid, he does it for kicks, mmm delicious. The sick f***.

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I may have given some nice advice (everyone’s a critic) but in the end no one went home with any real advice or change. Then again, you can’t polish a turd.