During the week I grabbed the DVD of The Mist — Frank Darabont doing a different kind of Stephen King story. The film had a very quiet cinema release here, which is a shame. I enjoyed it.

In a nutshell: freakish all-enveloping mist contains nasty creatures and traps a mix of small-town folks in their local supermarket.

The creatures are cleverly designed, most of them more menacing for having almost human-like heads and faces, and the great design more than makes up for the slightly weak CGI. Most unnerving, though, is the conflict between different people trapped in the store. It starts out as random shouting, leaving me wanting a bit of backstory to explain the conflict, but the main tension is well set up and develops very nicely: the slightly mad pseudo-Christian fundamentalist Mrs Carmody proclaims the end of days, claiming that God has chosen her to lead the faithful in appeasing the creatures with blood sacrifice.

The development of Mrs Carmody’s unhinged interpretation of events, her growing confidence, her gradual winning of followers among the group and the eventual clash with the skeptical few are brilliantly drawn and very satisfying, even if I did spend half the film shouting at her to try reading that Bible she was waving around.

Most memorable, though, is the ending. I won’t spoil it in detail, but it is about as bleak — but excellent — a bit of cinema as I’ve seen.

Sunday 30th November, 2008: the First Sunday in Advent.

My brother has developed a family tradition whereby he will, on roughly this Sunday, haul his fiancee to my parents’ house and put up their Christmas tree. If you haven’t seen my mother’s tree, look out your window :) It stands about seven feet tall in a low-ceilinged room, and I don’t know how many lights are on it — possibly more than are on the tree outside City Hall. (Actually, given the feebleness of that tree, I wouldn’t be surprised.) My father likes to joke that if you listen carefully you can hear the wheel in the electricity meter speeding up.

The evening, including a visit to see my gran in the City Hospital, was a reminder that alongside the liturgy, the longing and the waiting in darkness, this joy and these lights are also true markers of the season, and — if I can say it — offer a little taste of Kingdom. There is room for laughter in the observance, an accompaniment to the hope of the day.

Measuring personality is big business. You can spend a fortune in time and/or money filling in forms, answering puzzles and deciphering unwieldy four-letter acronyms all with the aim of categorizing yourself in an only semi-useful way.

Never having adequately got my head around Myers-Briggs, I hereby propose a new psychometric test:

Which Hitchhiker’s Guide is the best?

Answer the question by selecting a form or an individual book, and find your personality-type below.

The radio show, but only the Primary and Secondary phases.

You're a traditionalist. You know that there are many new and supposedly wonderful things in the world, but it's better to stick with what you know well. You may be of a certain age, and you sometimes miss the carefree days of your youth.

The radio show, the whole thing.

You wouldn't describe yourself as a risk-taker, but your friends will say you've been known to take a chance or two. Of those friends, some will enjoy your sense of humour, while others aren't so sure. You like to see things through to completion, and prefer to make a good go and get it done rather than be paralyzed by a futile search for perfection.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the novel.

You like to know where everything is, and you value simplicity. The people around you have learned that you don't handle surprises very well, but they're perfectly happy to treat you kindly and look out for you.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the novel.

Quality matters to you, but sometimes you'll let it slip in the name of excitement. Similarly, although you tend towards an analytical approach to life, you have been known to jump to some very unusual conclusions. It seems to have worked okay for you so far.

Life, the Universe and Everything, the novel.

You're a little bit surreal in your approach to life, perhaps as a result of an experience with hallucinogens. Nonetheless, you know exactly where you're going in life, even if no-one else does. This knowledge makes you a little bit smug, but in an endearing way.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the novel.

You're a bit of a hippy, and a romantic at heart. You wish for everyone to have a happy ending, but you know deep down that that's terribly unlikely. Still, you hope.

Mostly Harmless, the novel.

The diametric opposite of Type SLATFATF, you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. After all, life is suffering, isn't it? You remember a time when you were less negative about everything, but you're a little bit ashamed of that past self.

The text-based adventure game.

Given to extraordinary bursts of imagination, you still like to suffer. With a tendency to make life difficult for yourself, pain is a strange pleasure to you.

The BBC TV series.

You grew up on Doctor Who and like your entertainment made up in dreary cardboard. Slightly morose, you tend to just get on with things without getting terribly worked up about them. You are very probably English.

The 2005 film.

It's nice to see some young 'uns packing towels. Welcome to the family — just be sure to mind your manners, and don't assume that you know what you're talking about quite yet.

(A note on method: this is based on the forms of Guide that I’m familiar with. Given the uniquely multi-media nature of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed some. You now where the comment form is if you want to expand the test.)

I can’t remember when it was exactly, but at some point over the last year and a half I discovered podcasts. I had been aware that such things existed, but I’d never really seen the point — I tend towards reading to gain information, or reading or watching movies for entertainment. Those are both visual activities. Does that tell something about me? I don’t know.

If you’re not familiar with the term (although I suspect anyone who reads blogs knows what it means) podcasts are regular (or not) audio recordings that you can subscribe to using iTunes or other podcast-aware software, or even any old RSS reader, so that you receive new episodes automagically. The idea is then to listen to them however you like. My preference is while I’m driving (which doesn’t work so well for the video variety, but there’s only one of those that I subscribe to).

As for content, if you can think of it there’s probably a podcast out there. It ranges from something very akin to the ‘radio’ shows my brother and I used to record to cassette and demand our parents listen to, back well before our voices broke, to language resources, content from various radio stations, comedians known and unknown, current affairs, punditry, sermons from the services of countless churches… Masses of stuff. If you use iTunes, I suggest you look up the music store and have a browse.

The ones I listen to are dominated by tech topics: the Guardian’s Tech Weekly is pretty poor, but an easy listen, I’m a big fan of MacBreak Weekly and (slightly less so) of This Week in Tech from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network, various web-y and developer-y shows and some general gadget punditry.

I also track the sermon audio from a couple of churches, and a few of the ‘casts put out by BBC Radio 4 — a tremendous amount of BBC content is available, occasionally marred by rights issues forcing music to be omitted.

I used to subscribe to many more, but I only spend so much time in the car when I can listen. That, plus my relatively recent discovery of audiobooks (something else I dismissed as pointless until I actually tried it), means that I’ve had to dramatically reduce the subscription list.

Even so, I’m always interested in new discoveries, so if you have any recommendations then please let me know.

(An aside on audiobooks: while I love to read, and could accurately be described as being a bit ‘funny’ about books, I’ve discovered that there can be something seemingly more immediate, more visceral, about the text read aloud. It’s worth exploring.)

A while back I had a look through my record collection (or, rather, my iTunes library) and picked out a number of albums that I used to listen to regularly; these are the albums that influenced my listening, mainly as a teenager, and the albums that would make up the skeleton of my future musical taste.

As a sort of ongoing companion to this post, I thought it would be fun to revisit these albums and see if they still stood the listen.

The first is Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette. This disc is at the top of the pile as I suspect that most people who were listening to music around the time of its release have a copy somewhere, and because I hadn’t listened to it at all in a very long time.

When I went back to it, I expected the album to be a great disappointment. My ears and tastes have grown up a fair bit since 1995, so I was ready to be quickly tired of the radio-friendly angry-grrl-rocker bit. And no, it didn’t last, but for a time I was singing along on the motorway.

Jagged Little Pill is track after track of undemanding aural fluff, and sometimes that’s what’s needed, but I don’t expect to return to it again for another spell of years.

More to come…