I was in a big branch of the French supermarket carrefour in Lille recently and noticed that all the wines they sold had corks. From the cheapest 1.99 euro bottles up to the 100.00 euro-plus bottles and beyond. None had screw-caps.

Most wines available in supermarkets in the UK seem to have screw-caps these days. I don’t know why, it must help the supermarket in some way but I would imagine most people find them cheap-looking and unromantic.

Besides not liking to open a bottle without the familiar pop of a cork, I’ve also long suspected that the dregs of Europe’s wine production are shipped to the UK in bottles with screw caps and passed off as drinkable to a nation with a notoriously indifferent palate.

I think if you know nothing about wine, the simple rule of spending more that £8 and only buying a bottle with a cork, will ensure you bypass 95% of the dross that ends up on sale here.

More: it turns out there's a good ecological reason for supporting the cork...

A visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to normal after being closed due to volcanic ash. 

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

I have seen the future. The future of documentary making that is.

Prison Valley is a documentary you watch online. Only, you don’t just watch it, you sort of play it too. Beyond the short, elegantly shot intro, you must then create an account to proceed.

What happens next is completely engrossing and immersive. As you click around you think this is how documentaries must be made now. It’s like when they added sound to silent movies, the future is here.

It was all done, as far as I understand, with a digital slr camera and some tremendous skill.

More background about the project here…

www.innovativeinteractivity.com

The French duo David Dufresne and Philippe Brault decided to produce a documentary on the issue of incarceration in Colorado. But, they didn’t just throw up a passive, hour-long, badly compressed web video. Instead, the end product became an interactive documentary with user-submission tools throughout and availability on multiple platforms…

Modern life is rubbish, we all know that.

Everything is fragmented now and we don't watch telly anymore because unless it's an app on our iphones were not interested.

Except that isn't the case. We still sit down to watch TV. It's the TV channels that are in a mess, not the audience.

Watching Memoirs of a Geisha the other day on FIVE summed it up for me, and made me realise why I no longer trust the TV to give me TV.

Memoirs of a Geisha tells a huge story.
 
The titular Geisha, who has loved a man since she was a child, has lived through horrors, war, revenge, exploitation and a form of crushing tradition that's hard to imagine, finally comes together with the man her heart always yearned for.
 
It’s a tearful, joyful moment in an enchanted garden. They kiss! And then, as they do, this pops up...

I was so bewildered I paused it and to this picture.

Who wouldn't fall about laughing three quarters of the way into Simon Russell Beale's rather good series Sacred Music after hearing this....? Listen.

Asda. In the future all clothing will work on a buy one get one free basis (already successful with socks)...  

At the news stand in Tesco... In the future all magazines will be distilled into one magazine called Jamie.

Each page will have a flavoured picture of Jamie that you can lick. If you lick it enough, the picture wears away to reveal TV listings showing when the next cookery programme is on.

In the future cookery programmes will be on all the time, meaning the Editor of Jamie can just use the same listings issue after issue, saving time and money. This saved cash will be put to better use buying more page-flavouring.

In the future, after Jamie is dead, licked to death by an obsessive fan presumably, the magazine will fold. That will be the end of the printed word. People won't read anything that doesn't have a flavour.

In the future, Asda will produce a suit that has the shirt, tie, socks, pants and shoes all conveniently sewn in. If you buy one you'll get a second one free. When you get a hole in a sock you just throw it all away or give it to a tramp.

In the Future, tramps (many of them redundant Listings Editors) will all wear suits and ties. The reading material they will sleep under will also be their evening meal.

NEXT, makers of blue, grey and brown clothes, lead the way when it comes to making everyone in the UK look roughly the same.

Well done I say. Having to coordinate colours, if we're honest, is beyond us. Go into any living room in Britain and you'll know this is true.

Limiting clothing to two and half colours is a weight off, frankly.

But the help doesn't stop there. Oh no.

Next have plans for our minds, not just our legs, arms, rude bits and upper torsos. 

Witness Next making big strides into to world of high street, off-the-peg Confucianism (see picture).

Whether you work hard, play hard or both, from time to time we all need to relax.

That's just beautiful, that is. On a packet of three t-shirts they expect you'll sleep in (consecutively, not all at once).

If you analyse this profound message, it breaks down like this: whether you a [where a is any activity] or b [where b is any other activity], or a and b, from time to time you'll need to x [where x is a not-necessarily-related essential bodily function].

So, let's try reworking it with new a, b and x's.

Whether you lick the end of pencils, see visions of death in puddles or both, from time to time we all need to visit the toilet.

A suitable maxim to stick on the packaging of an air freshener, perhaps.

Whether you enjoy touching the surface of your eyeballs, collect things you find on buses or both, from time to time we all need to reproduce.

Actually, I wish I hadn't started writing this.

I mean...if you stop and think about this too deeply you'll dispair.

Grown adults, paid wages, intelligent graduates all, working in teams, and they get out of bed each day and think up a massage to print on the plastic wrapping of a packet of t-shirts.

That's what our ecomony is based on. People doing jobs such as that.

There aren't emoticons to express...

Of course the big question that Political Historians have so far failed to answer is just what would the 20th Century have looked like if Hitler had been a mod?

For a start it’s hard to imagine anyone goose-stepping in bowling shoes. And the Blitzkrieg would surely not have crushed Poland quite so effectively if it had been the Lambretta-krieg.

A more positive hypothesis puts forward the idea that the whole of World War II may have been reduced to no more than a weekend of brawling with greasers and pigs, on the seafront at Brighton.

A bottle of Pepsi, a snog with a local girl and a dance to The Who might have pacified the ambitious young Austrian. I suppose we’ll never know.

The man who first confirmed to me that I was right to loath Tescos and also to mistrust New Labour, and probably the most ardent campaigner for common sense and good values, George Monbiot, made this short film about oil dependency...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment