Nigel is promising to be your guy on bonfire night

Snoop has news (or is it a warning?) for any single girls out thereand some suggestions for a romantic wedding.

Long delays are expected on the M25 on 5 November as coach loads of eager women flood into London anxious to be at the head of the queue for the recently unattached industry giant Nigel Taylor, ex-Domark, ex-Emap and currently the project manager of CRN.

But Taylor is unfazed by the prospect of overwhelming pre-Christmas demand. "The Fifth of November is simply the day I'm back on the market," he told Snoop. Secretly, Taylor has been in strict training for the last six weeks, resisting the temptation of a premature release date and preparing himself by reducing lager intake, increasing sleep hours and taking regular baths.

At Christmas what do you give the multimedia PC owner who has everything?

Snoop's answer is the Tecno AO antenna (pictured) from French company Tecnosphere. The Tecno AO is a magnetic oscillator which fits to the side of a monitor and wobbles at 12Hz, apparently in sync with the alpha rhythm frequency emitted from a non-stressed brain. Stop laughing at the back! In tests, a significant proportion of VDU users were found to suffer less stress and increased concentration. OK, so it was tested on chickens, but they were very unstressed concentrated chickens.

Sega's recent offer to sponsor the red and yellow cards that referees are keen on using in football matches has opened up a whole new marketing opportunity for the company. The Ref's Association aren't keen on card sponsorship, but Snoop hears they are now discussing sponsorship of referees' strip and linesmen's flags with Sega.

Laura Howgate and Pete Davis, (pictured) both employees of Preston-based spares distributor Combined Precision Components, delayed their wedding several weeks so they could finish the company's 1997 catalogue. Now is that romantic or what? Let's hope the wedding list wasn't chosen from the catalogue's 2,000 plus pages.

Flicking through the Sun, a Radio Rentals ad caught Snoop's eye. "Buy a PC for only u29.99 a month," read the flashy headline. With Intel telling us that Pentium 120MHz will be the entry-level chip this Christmas, Snoop couldn't believe the Radio Rentals spec, an Olivetti machine built around a 486 25MHz chip with just 4Mb of RAM. Restraining an urge to call the Natural History Museum and a great deal of nostalgia, Snoop worked out that the whole deal - stretched over 39 months - ends up costing the punter u1179.61 when the service charges (needed to bail out frustrated customers when they try to upgrade to Windows 95) are included.

Burning Road heads for top five

Upon reading The Roundup in the last issue of CRN, I was slightly surprised that you only really mention the lowest review scores that Burning Road has received (which in some instances was caused by publications reviewing a beta version, thinking it was the finished disk).

Just to put the record straight Burning Road to date has received at least four scores of 90%, which I think you'll agree makes it a Top 5 PSX title for Christmas.

I'd always expect The Roundup to show a cross section of review scores, but I do think it needs to be representative of the reviews that a title receives.