Michael*

Shosanna 11th? Result! Great job Mickiala, thanks for your efforts!

Europe 2.5

Vampire Weekend premiered two of their new tunes at SXSW recently. Disappointingly, 'Ya Hey' is not in fact Outkast's 'Hey Ya' played backwards.

This should be good. In many ways, I felt the third game was less ambitious than the second (which was such a huge step up from the original), but it was still excellent fun. If they return to the wider variety of customisation and drop the idea of selecting missions on your PDA thingy, I'll put the fourth installment down as a winner.

We can't even win when a game is handed to us on a plate. Gifted a numerical advantage for over an hour, gifted a penalty and a let-off for the Rose handball and we still conspire to only draw, barely even troubling the Norwich keeper along the way. I'm seriously beginning to think we might've had it. We're absolutely dire, we deserve everything we get and if we do end up going down, we'll be missed by precisely no-one. I even cheered a Newcastle goal this afternoon in the vain hope that they might do us a favour against Wigan. Urgh, I feel dirty. :yuckky:

Nice to meet you, welcome to BZ!

Benfica-Newcastle in the Europa, eh? I've always dreamed of seeing the black and whites dismantled at the Stadium of Light, but I must say, this isn't quite what I had in mind. Better than nothing though.

And finally (for now), the new video from DIIV, whose album 'Oshin' was one of my favourites of '12.

Also rather liking this lot at the moment. http://youtu.be/ECjRkhsCea0

The Strokes' video for 'All The Time' has started doing the rounds. It doesn't appear to feature any new footage of the band, instead it's made up of scenes from old video shoots and backstage clips from festivals.

What a tremendous draw for Dortmund. The Malaga game will be a cracker, as will Bayern-Juve. The PSG-Barca tie will be billed as Beckham vs. Barca by the English media and Zlatan vs. Barca by sensible people, but either way it's one to look forward to. Last night's game at the San Siro really served to highlight the ridiculousness of the away goals system. If and when a game heads into extra time, the advantage swings so heavily in the away team's favour that I would actually go so far as to say it's unfair. Surely to goodness the rule should be changed so that away goals only count as double in normal time.

Swiss Super League match in 'interrupted by vicious pine marten' shocker.

Hard to say at the moment, I suppose a lot will depend on where we end up finishing. Short is reportedly growing rather frustrated at the lack of progress being made, and understandably so since he’s sunk another 30-odd million of his own money (the Bent and Henderson fees only went as far as bankrolling Bruce’s final spending spree) into the team this year. O’Neill really hasn't done much to help himself either - he's placed far too much trust in Bruce signings who simply aren’t up to it, and his own signings have been a very mixed bag. Johnson hasn’t quite been the flop some have labelled him as, but neither has he been the matchwinner we were expecting. He appears incapable of performing for longer than 15 minutes at a time and his aimless lame-o attempts at stepovers get on my wick. Can’t fault Fletcher, he’s managed to grab us 11 goals despite being restricted to about 14 chances all season by the tamest supply line in the league. N’Diaye, there’s not much to tell. He runs past opponents, they run past him, sometimes they bump into each other. Graham desperately wanted to move back to the north east, did so and then appeared to think ‘well I’m here now, I don’t have to try any more’. I get the impression that he'd have even considered going back to Boro if the money had been right. He looked half-decent at Swansea though and it's still early days, benefit of the doubt and all that. There's a lot of panic going around at the moment and I can't deny that we're in a scrap, but I do think we’ll just about be okay. I'd be surprised if we were able to get ourselves north of the 40 point benchmark with time to spare, though. It’ll probably be another flirtation with the ‘R’ word before we limp over the line again in decidedly underwhelming fashion. Unfortunately, such things just seem to be written into the DNA of the club, it doesn't seem to matter who's in charge, what players we have or how much money we throw around.

I might give it a miss for now, then. The puzzle game allowing you to unlock information about Columbia's history piqued my interest a bit, but I don't particularly care for pre-game boosters.

2 May 2014 (USA) Directed by Marc Webb Writing credits (in alphabetical order) Steve Ditko ... characters Alex Kurtzman ... screenplay Stan Lee ... characters Roberto Orci ... screenplay Jeff Pinkner ... screenplay James Vanderbilt ... story Starring Emma Stone ... Gwen Stacy Andrew Garfield ... Peter Parker / Spider-Man Shailene Woodley ... Mary Jane Watson Jamie Foxx ... Max Dillon / Electro Sally Field ... Aunt May Dane DeHaan ... Harry Osborn Paul Giamatti ... Aleksei Sytsevich / The Rhino Chris Cooper ... Norman Osborn Martin Sheen ... Uncle Ben Brian Haley ... Phil Watson

Milla Jovovich [4] Jessica Alba [0]

And speaking of comeback songs, here's the new one by Austra...

^Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. Quite the change from the Behati you usually see. It was a fun song, too.

So near yet so far for Arsenal. Clearly, they're better than their first leg showings against Bayern and Milan last year, but neither are they as good as the second leg results might suggest. In truth, they're somewhere in the middle. Still, the fans can always cheer on Emmanuel Eboue in the next round, while Man City fans can shout for Roque Santa Cruz.

He certainly did split Milan's defence in twain last night. Great footballers - making mugs out of kneejerkers since forever.

Nice to have you back.

Don, do you think the 'Industrial Revolution' DLC pack would be worth having? It's currently on offer to folks who pre-order, but I'm not sure if it's enough of an incentive for me to bite just yet.

So, 'Revengeance' (cringe) finally landed. Truth be told, I've started to think of it as more of a back burner title than a must-have in recent months, though I'm sure I'll be picking it up sooner or later. Anyone planning to give it a shot?

My copy is winging its way to me as we speak. Can't wait to give it a whirl.