Good news everyone – he’s back! Tom Baker in a NEW Doctor Who story! Mike Yates (Richard Franklin) of UNIT returns to be re-united with ‘the living ghost’ the best Doctor ever! AND – even better news for our American friends – it’s on the radio. The first episode broadcast was 13th December, and the five-parter will be available on the BBC Radio 4 Extra iPlayer.

In deepest Sussex Yates encounters his old friend after answering a mysterious advertisement. Radio allows us to believe that Baker is, as the characters assert, exactly as he was in the 1970s. When his voice sets up the episode and the old theme tune kicks in, I felt transported! Talk about time travel.

The first episode sets things up very well and both actors carry things off with a sense of great melodramatic splendour. It is a cross between sci-fi and Victorian ghost stories – the best combination for Christmas.

Is Vincent Moon one of the busiest directors in the music industry right now? What’s certain is that he’s one of the most unique. After recent work on DVDs for Arcade Fire and R.E.M., and alongside his normal work on Le Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows, as well as his nomadic existence travelling around the world for his Petites Planetes project, he has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new ATP film project.

ATP (or All Tomorrow’s Parties) is one of the most unique festivals in the UK, set in a holiday camp with weekends of music curated by people such as Sonic Youth, Mogwai, Vincent Gallo, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse and Matt Groening in the past. Vincent has been a regular at the festival, filming lots of fan’s eye view footage of proceedings.

On Thursday of last week I received one of those emails that usually cause me to wince. A colleague had sent me a link to a YouTube video that he wanted me to watch. I was all set to hate it because it was going to be political, or about 2012, or have some kitten frolicking in a cardboard box. But, since I knew he would ask me about it later I clicked on the link. Apparently I did the same thing as almost three quarter of a million people have since.

I will freely confess that initially I thought my associate had sent me the wrong link. The video, made by a fan of the indie music group Bad Lamps, had a bunch of close up shots of what seemed to be TV or movie actresses that looked like they were pulled from some VHS tape circa 1987. I didn’t understand what the big deal was until I started reading the comments. Those hadn’t been actresses I was watching. They were adult film stars.

One half of the Digital Cowboys, Alex Shaw, took recent aim on his show at geek on geek snobbery. In a brief screed against what he perceives as divisions within the geek subculture, Shaw (with his usual passionate but still thoughtfully measured approach) considers the hypocrisy of how folks who feel alienated themselves sometimes all too easily judge others that feel the same sting of ostracism.

For those unfamiliar with the Cowboys, Alex Shaw and Tony Atkins produce a weekly podcast on video games that also sometimes touches on other aspects of geek-related culture.

If Shaw’s rant piques your interest, you can find more of he and co-host Atkins’s musings on video games and video game culture at The Digital Cowboys web site. They are well worth a listen.  Digging in with episodes like their one on death in video games or one on sex in video games would be a good place to start and should give a pretty good idea of what they are all about.  In my estimation, they present some smart, engaging stuff.

Reuters is reporting that Apple has completed work on it’s online cloud service ahead of Google music. There has been long speculation about what Apple has been up to these past few years, after a flurry of activity which has included buying Lala.com, building data farms, and engaging in closed door talks with Sony, EMI, UMG, and WMG. 

The implications of this can be massive, as Google is still spinning it’s wheels trying to get a similar deal worked out with the four majors and will not be able to provide a rival service on their Android device. To date, those talks have not produced a deal, and by many accounts, they are not going to have an agreement in the near future. 

An iTunes locker/sharing service between multiple Apple devices will be a major step forward for the development of “cloud-based” music, bringing them far ahead of Amazon own 5GB locker service and even closer towards the music lover’s fantasy of a celestial jukebox.