Mark Fleischmann

The natural high.

I drink green tea the way some people drink water. I make it in large batches, keep it in the fridge, and guzzle it all day. Such are the dimensions of this innocuous drug habit that I blend teas, often adding a pinch of Butterfly Sencha (with peach and sunflower petals) to a standard Sencha, creating something more subtle than the former and more interesting than the latter. (The Tea Squad may burst through the door to arrest me at any moment.) I do the same with surround equipment. This month, I've deliberately brought together a receiver brand that prides itself on neutrality with a speaker brand that obsesses about the purity and phase coherence of high frequencies. Marantz, meet Tannoy. Tannoy, meet Marantz. What will happen next?

The entertainment industry has always been dead set against home recording. However, in what potentially may be a major departure, the security specs for Blu-ray and HD DVD may soon be altered to allow legal copying under limited circumstances.

The British Broadcasting Corporation has been busy lately. Its iPlayer is about to relaunch following a beta test. It will enable viewers to download single episodes or entire series a month after airing. In other BBC news, an archival project will put a million hours of historic material online for free, according to the Guardian. In this case there's a catch. You'll have to pay the annual BBC license fee to access it. The archives include an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, conducted two days before the shooting, in which they candidly discuss the impact of their relationship on the Beatles. There's also an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., conducted the day before his death, in which he says: "The important thing isn't how long you live, but how well you live."

Blu-ray has reached another milestone. The infant format has attracted its first patent lawsuit, reports GameSpot.