How do you tell that a company is likely to treat its employees like dirt it's trying to wipe from its shoe? One easy way is that when you call up and the switchboard puts you on hold, you have to listen to three renditions of George Michael's "Jesus To A Child" before they get you back again. The reasons for this are twofold: first, the switchboard is always one of the first areas to be hit by economy measures, so there will never be enough people working there to handle the volume of calls coming in, and secondly, someone somewhere has a slightly grotesque sense of humour when it comes to picking the piped music callers have to put up with.

DUBLIN MAY be Europe's capital of cool, but it has still worked itself into a sweat over tonight's MTV music awards. The sight of white stretch limos is enough to unleash a frenzy that can be hard to negotiate, as the rapper Puff Daddy's driver learned this week: As a horde of teenaged fans roared their admiration, a motorcycle courier slid under the car, breaking his leg in the process.

PUBLIC ENEMY THE FORUM, LONDON

Hype Williams's dazzling videos for the likes of Tupac Shakur and Missy Elliott have reinvented the genre. Now he's made his first feature.

A WEEK after he passed his driving test, my 18-year-old son drove through a red light, hit a taxi and did pounds 7,000-worth of damage to our new car. The fact that at the moment of impact he was simultaneously lighting a cigarette, talking to his girlfriend on his mobile and trying to find a particularly good track on his new Puff Daddy CD may have affected his concentration. The cab driver seemed to think so. I'm all for driving tests being modernised and made longer, harder and more technical, but if you think this will make young men safer drivers, you're wrong.

John Hegley Almeida, N1

Let celebrated singer-songwriter John Shuttleworth be your guide to the special world of the Christmas Number One. You'll wish it could be Christmas every day. With James McNair

Justins, in New York's Greenwich village, is the restaurant that rap built. Owned by the recording star, producer and label boss Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy and named after his son, Justins is a monument to rap's prodigious success in the United States. It is also, of course, Puff Daddy's monument to himself. Although restaurants are often uncertain business ventures, Puffy can afford to take the risk: he was recently given a deal worth pounds 50m by Arista Records, which distributes his Bad Boy label. The payment can perhaps be read as a symbolic "thank-you" note to Combs (written in the language of the high-denomination bills - "the Benjamins" - that he likes best), for masterminding a formula for cross-overs with rock and pop that has enabled rap to dominate the mainstream charts like never before.

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1 (-) No Matter What Boyzone

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Supernaturals: A Tune for a Day (Food, below) The fact that the Supernaturals have an unhealthy appetite for limited-framework, new-wave guitars is just one of the reasons why this debut album so often slides into drabness. The Supernaturals palette is mostly jovial rock, with bounce in the melodies, but the songs belly-flop because they don't have the spark of class that, say, Dodgy found in themselves. An exception to this is the angry gem "Motorcycle Parts", but the Supernaturals are forever destined to lurk at the shallow end of sunny Brit rock. H

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