Recently by Andrew Cowen

It's always annoying when somebody steals your ideas.
One ruse I've been bandying around the office is the idea of meat-based drinks. Taking the lead from gravy, it would be a nutritious beverage aimed at blokes and people who find Red Bull a bit too poncy.
Today I discover that a company in America has launched with the same idea and they seem to have the market covered.

i'm not normally a fan of youtube but this has really caught my attention.
It's a fine example of a simple but effective idea.
Virtual Barber Shop is not a video but rather a sound piece.

Nature can be a cruel business and if there's one proper bugger in the bird world, it's the magpie.
The humble pigeon has the reputation of being a rat with wings, but it's pica pica that's the nastiest thing with feathers.
I say this after witnessing an appalling display of bird-on-bird violence on my lawn this morning.

During the weeklong jubilee of creation, the great Googly Moogly must have stopped for a couple of pints midweek and got his wicked cap on.
On that afternoon, he engineered some of the more irksome things on the planet: the pubic louse, the common pigeon, the traffic warden and... the ticket tout.
These scum-sucking leaches were never designed to inherit the earth, but they will flog it on for five times its face value given half a chance.
There's something obscene to me, a lifelong music fan, in seeing the dozens of Sex Pistols tickets already for sale on eBay. Prices have already topped £100 and they'll go much higher in the week the auctions run.
These people are not Sex Pistols fans, they're chancers out to make a fast buck from those who weren't able to get through to the ticket lines or websites.

It's probably the only festival to come close to challenging Glastonbury for scale and quality. We're talking about the V Festival, of course, the annual three-day hootenanny happening on the outskirts of Stafford and in Chelmsford.

The dual sites have swerved the organisers well and now, with only 162 days to go, we have details of the first 39 acts.

You'll need to clear the decks for the weekend of August 16 and 17 and save up the £145 for a weekend ticket. Booking starts on Friday and the event always sells out.

With the calibre of acts lined up this year, expect them to be the proverbial hot cakes.

Mark your calendars for July 11-13 2008, for this year's installment of what Plan B magazine called "the best organised and most wisely curated festival".

We're talking about the Supersonic festival of course.

2008 sees Supersonic, now in its sixth year, go from strength to strength: adding new stages and more opportunities to see bands you've never heard of alongside established performers.

The festival takes place in the urban setting of Birmingham's Custard Factory offering a firm ground underfoot as you take advantage of the Capsule duo (Jenny Moore and Lisa Meyer)'s highly eclectic booking policy.

Along with the critically acclaimed musical side of the festival, there will be more film programming, more art based endeavours, more stalls and more cake.