BRAND NEW WHO

Please tell me this the biggest publicity stunt of all time (well, since Preston and Chantelle hitched a ride to wongaville)? Could it be that “disgraced” Russel Brand* will be taking over as the new tenant of the TARDIS and that this whole dirty calls row is a big PR front?

Okay, no, it’s not … but with David Tennant hanging up his two hearts after three glorious years, the bookies are offering all sorts of odds on all sorts of stars taking up the reigns. Johnson from Peep Show, the brilliant James Nesbitt, Rula Lenska. They’re all in the running. It’s like an intergalactic merry-go-round of period drama fops, cop show chiefs and panto Dick’s.

How great would Brand be as The Geek’s favourite Timelord? Eloquent, funny, good hair. The Doc’s assistant would be up the duff within a parsec, and you could sack the wardrobe assistant immediately – no need for you luv, with Brand already decked out in taffeta scalfs and knee-high hobnails.

With a whole new career in sci-fi, Brand could even bring out last year’s Christmas hit autobiography again, renamed as “My Wookie Book”.

Okay troops, let’s make placards and march on White City. You with me?

* for my international readers, I should explain. Russel Brand is a very funny, dashing, rather dirty, flamboyant comedian. He used to host a show on BBC Radio 2, but quit last night following national outrage from the over 60s, many of who have never actually seen or heard of this “grotesque figure” (© Daily Mail) as they’re too busy listening to The Archers. Why the outrage, you may ask? Well, he and the BBC’s top talkshow host Jonathan Ross left a message on the answerphone of a second rate Spanish waiter from a Torquay hotel, explaining that he (Brand) had slept with his (Manuel, the waiter’s) granddaughter, who just happens to be a rather buxom, burlesque dancer with – it would appear – a penchant for kinky leather sex (well, that’s what the photos suggest anyway). The fact was, Brand HAD slept with this lady, but she, sensing the dirty dollar, decided to make a right old hoo-hah out of it and sell her story to The Sun, raise her profile and bank the cash. I think a TV show may be on the cards for her. Cable, obviously.

IT’S OUR 21st CENTURY MEDIA THAT HAVE HELPED MURDER THE MARKETS

As press pundits the world over speculate why the western world and everything it holds dear continues to crumble around our ears, the answer, I suggest, lies with the very people asking the question.
RBS down 39%. HBOS down 42%. “200,000 Hit By Bank Crash” cries the Evening Standard – available on your mobile, on the web and in your good-old traditional quaint li’l newspaper format.
Just when you think it couldn’t get any bleaker, a leak to BBC News business guru Robert Peston about an emergency meeting between Gordon Bennet, Alistair Dawdling and Mervyn “my crown’s now worth less than my socks” King, and the world’s financial markets go into freefall again.
Financial peaks and troughs are cyclical. The boom of the late 60s followed a bleak 70s bust. Thatcher’s hot-bed of 80s money-stoking was followed by a financial chill in the early 90s. Equally, Blair’s 21st century buy-now-pay-later Britain has finally just woken up and realised that “later” is now hovering outside the door with a knuckle-duster and a scary man called Big Johnny.
But what has made this fall more dramatic and damaging than any that have gone before? Simple: our system of 24-hour global – I gotta fill airtime, webspace, inbox - media. It’s everywhere. I wake up in the morning, it’s on the radio. City AM and Metro scream headlines of “When Will It End?”, “Financial Flatline” and “We’re ALL Going To Die … yes ALL of us”. At work, an innocent search on the internet throws up more woe, and my mobile is constantly bleating like a newly-castrated sheep with the sound of incoming text alerts updating me about the death of global capitalism. On the way home The London Lite and London Paper tell me to sell my house, car and wife by the end of the month or no bugger’s gonna buy them ever again. And finally, as I sit down for dinner, Huw “Bloody” Edwards is giving me the lowdown on which banks have given up the ghost since I last took a crap. And that’s going on 24 hours a day, in every connected country in the world. It’s a non-stop international orgy of wholesale financial slaughter.
One market closes, another opens. The media maelstrom goes on and the markets continue to fall, having had no time to breathe - traders, investors, consumers desperately coming up for air to escape the non-stop bombardment of spiky graphs heading down, down, down. It’s like a panic on the titanic, but there are no life rafts as we’ve sold them all to pay off our overdrafts.
That, Mr Peston, is why I can categorically tell you that this will be the worst financial crisis we have witnessed since this whole financial fakery began. Stick that up your bulletin. Then please shut the * up.

WOZ-TOWN AND THE "Z" BOY

Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak is undisputedly one of the most inspirational – and hairy – men in the technology industry.
Inspirational, because his rare "in-it-for-the-discovery" approach to business is only matched by his unrelenting passion for creating the seemingly un-creatable.
Hairy, because of his whopping great beard.
The Daily Geek was lucky enough to be in the presence of the Wonderful Wizard of Woz today, during a 90-minute speech, in which he detailed how he went from teenage radio ham, to one of the most important people in recent modern history. It was as much personal manifesto as the story of his – and Apple’s – success.
You see, the beauty of “the other Steve” – as he’s unfairly known – is that he still eschews the same values, passion and drive as the Steve Wozniak who single-handedly built the Apple I, the same Steve who snuck into the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre to learn about computers at a time when they were the preserve of businesses and the military, the Steve who told his dad “well, if owning a computer will cost as much as a house, I’ll live in an apartment”. Millions in the bank and a place in history don’t seem to have changed him from the Steve who met his namesake Jobs on a sidewalk one fateful day in the 70s.
Even before he was lucky enough to amass enough wealth to buy at least three iPhones with 18-month O2 contracts, money wasn’t something that drove Woz's world – unlike his more commercially savvy partner. "I was into making the stuff," he explained. "Steve (jobs) kept me away from the buyers!". In the 80s, on the launch of the Apple IPO – which would become the biggest US float since Ford’s – Steve famously hatched The Woz Plan, in which he sold his executive shares (2000 for $5 – bargain!) to the ordinary workers at Apple who, otherwise, would have been unable to enjoy a share in their company and the houses it bought them.
Wozniak comes across as a true child of the Californian Hippie movement. Part modern-day socialist. Part practical philanthropist. Regardless - he's 100% inventor. He’s an engineering genius. It’s what continues to drive him to this day (he’s currently getting all excited about the possibility of photonics while remaining unconvinced by its commercial viability: “I don’t know if it will come to anything or if it will be used for anything - I just want to see what it can do.”)
After the show, The Daily Geek caught up with Woz and got chatting about his trip to the UK. After three weeks in Britain, he says he's missing home, especially his dogs – X, Y and Z. “They’re as much a part of the family as my kids. I love them, they sleep in the same bed as me. They’re our family.” Having gifted members of his family with X and Y, it’s Z he can’t wait to see. “In fact, said Woz, “I’m thinking of calling my next child Z. Or maye even Z-O. , so his name is a palindrome – ZOWOZ. I think that would be cool.”
Proof that engineers are best kept focused on nodes, and wires, and chips, not product naming. Christ knows what he’d have called the iMAC. Even legends have their limits.