You're Aware Of Miranda, Right(s)?

So, slightly tucked away in an odd-ish slot of the BBC schedules (8.30pm on BBC2), is a bit of a gem: the sitcom Miranda, starring and written by Miranda Hart - a name you might not recognise, but you'll probably know her by sight; look, there she is in the picture on the left there, not enjoying a cup of tea. See, told you that you'd recognise her.

Anyway, as I said to m'Mrs yesterday after watching the second episode, it's an almost classic sitcom - packed with jokes and silly situations, it's just the sort of thing I'd hope to see in the 8.00pm slot on BBC1, really, but I guess the slightly rude nature of some of it is what's pushed it to the channel next door. Bit of a pity, as I think this is the sort of show which deserves wider exposure because (a) it's very funny and (b) I'd rather see this kind of show as the standard, not the exception.

But enough plugging, you're probably so completely won over by my praise that you're wondering how you can go about catching up on the series so far. Well, lucky you, the BBC iPlayer is your friend, and you can read more about the programme, and play catch-up, by clicking here.

And if slapstick's your thing, be aware that she does some of the best falling-over work I've seen in quite a while. What with that and verbal gags, I reckon that makes it pretty much something for everyone.

The Startling Pace Of Technological Advancement

Like many people who'd like to earn their living from writing, I read a lot of books about the business of writing - whether it be for the page or screen or stage or whatever.

Here's a picture of my current reading on this theme:

(I couldn't find a decent-sized picture online, so I took the picture myself - see the trouble I go to for this nonsense?)

The book itself is pretty solid so far, but what I wanted to mention more than anything content-related was the cover; more specifically, the state-of-the-art word processing device pictured at the heart of the cover. Let's zoom in on it, shall we?

That, my loves, is a Smith Corona PWP 7000 word processor, and its inclusion on the cover of the book suggests that at the time of the book's publication, this was something pretty standard (or perhaps slightly aspirational) for writers to have and use.

However, just to see if you're as weirded out by the pace of change as I was when I looked at the copyright details of the book, let me ask you this: what year do you think this book was published? Any ideas?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The book was published in 1994. Fifteen years ago. And that realisation made me feel very old indeed.

Anyway, I'd better get off the internet now, and clamber back into my bath chair. Nursey gets very angry if I stop the other residents using the home computer.

My Advice? Always Pick The Easy Targets

I was interested to see that MP Keith Vaz criticised the recent video game release Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - specifically one bit of it in which undercover soldiers pose as terrorists and are asked to help shoot civilians. He was, apparently, "absolutely shocked" by the violence.

He must, I suppose, be absolutely horrified every time he turns on the TV news or reads a paper, what with their constant reports on the war in Iraq - a war which he voted in favour of. Funny, you would have thought that he'd be against conflicts in which civilians might die, given he's so worried about their welfare.

I'm also a little bit unsure how he got to play the game in question ahead of its release date (he was appalled about it prior to its release on 10 November), but then again, since Keith's expense claims from 2004-2007 include £480 on 22 cushions, £2,614 for a pair of leather armchairs and an accompanying foot stool, £1,000 on a dining table and leather chairs, I suppose it's not too much of a stretch to conclude he's also got a time machine and games console as well. Maybe the expense claims for those items are still in the system.

After all, there's no other way he could have come to an informed conclusion on the issue.

Nothing New Under The Sun? Whatever.

Obviously, it's fun for the papers to pretend that the youth of today invented disaffection and nonchalance (a stance which appears to forget the popularity of, say, Brando in The Wild One), and of course it means you can fill column inches with Why Oh Why Oh Why Are The Youth Of Today Impregnating Each Other And Causing House Prices To Collapse? and the like.

However, the shoulder-shrugging lack of interest which young people are often accused of displaying can be traced back many years - to my father's generation, if not before that; here, for example, is Tommy Walls, a character who appeared in many issues of the classic comic Eagle, including its first edition in 1950:


Like so many of the young people on my television set in modern shows such as Police Camera Action Stop Or I'll Shoot in HD, Master Walls appears to be showing a lack of respec' for the official standing next to him, and he doesn't seem in the least bothered that another member of his gang of street toughs is being put into a police van in the background.

Young people thenadays, eh? Tch.

It's Easy To Mock when You Don't Really Know What You're Talking About. And Often More Fun, Too.

As I mentioned last week, I'm not following The X-Factor, but of course that doesn't mean I won't make jokes about it.

Case in point:

Frequently Asked Questions: Why are the twins known as 'Jedward' when one is called John and the other Edward? Wouldn't it be more fair if John got more than one letter of his name into the merged noun? And why is Edward's name last?

Less Frequently Offered Answer: Because if a more equal approach was taken, their combined name would probably be ArdOhn.

Thanyew, laygennelmen, you're very kind. I'm here all week.

Not Today, Or Next Sunday, Or Even The Sunday After That, But...

That's right, a Sunday many years into the future.

But, as with global warming and the heat-death of the universe, as a species we need to take a step back and think about the long-term view, otherwise a shocking and terrible fate will befall us all.

What fate, you ask?

The boffins at Popjustice have the details.

I don't know about you, but when my time comes, I think the lycra's going to prove a problem. I don't think I could pull it off. In all honesty, I don't think I'll be able to pull it on, either.

This Link Will Self-Destruct In 36 Hours

Thanks to the wondrous BBC iPlayer, one can not only watch TV programmes which you've missed, but you can also listen to radio programmes of interest.

One such programme - if you're interested in writing - is called Write Lines, and was broadcast last week on BBC Radio Oxford. It's the first of four parts, and is hosted by Sue Cook, with contributions from two published authors, a chap from Macmillan New Writing, and other folks who know about it.

Until 10.02pm tomorrow night, you can listen to the first episode here. There's a bit more information about the show itself here.

Caution: Contains an isolated outbreak of Boyzone, but it's an ideal point to make a cup of tea.

It's Not Food On The Table, But...

Over at Dan's Media Digest the eponymous Dan recently ran a competition to win copies of the film Moon, asking people to say, in 69 words or fewer, what they reckoned the best thing would be about living on the moon.

Well, paint my shins and call me Spangles, I only went and won it. I know, I'm as shocked as you are that my wordsmithing could lead to some kind of material (if not financial) gain.

Anyway, you can see my foolish but nonetheless winning entry here. And my thanks to Dan for selecting me as winner.

See? I don't put Dan's site in the link of recommended sites in the right-hand column for no reason - it's very regularly updated, with well-written reviews of TV shows, and interesting snippets of media-related news. Definitely worth adding to your regular haunts, I'd say - and no, I'm not just saying that because he's sending me a DVD.

..though it doesn't exactly put me off.

Week, Three Kings

This makes the third mention of Stephen King on the blog in a week, I think, which is slightly unusual - but maybe it'll go some way to balancing out the countless references to Twin Peaks, Alan Moore and tea.

Anyway, just a quick note to point you towards the online version of The New Yorker, where there's a new short story from Mr King - specifically, here.

It's called - as you can see from the picture - Premium Harmony, and I think it's worth a look (as are his other stories for the magazine, which you can find via this page).

In Remembrance: Two Minutes' Silence

"But Professor, Isn't There A Danger That It Could Become... Self-Aware?"

Many years ago, there was a BBC series called The Living Soap. It was a short-lived fly-on-the-wall documentary series about students in Manchester (so, fly-on-the-magnolia-painted-wall, then).

This was back in the early 1990s, and it was prescient of a lot of current TV reality fare, in that the students were filmed going about their everyday lives. However, unlike the majority of such shows which you'll see now, the episodes were put out at much the same time as they were being made, which caused it to become a bit self-regarding; if memory serves, people in the show would find out things others had said or done by watching a previous episode and seeing events they'd not been present at, and this information would affect how they behaved. Or people in the street would insult or otherwise engage with members of the 'cast', on the basis of how they'd been portrayed in previous episodes.

Obviously, you can't really aim for or maintain verite in that kind of situation, and the show was pulled earlier than planned. But I rather enjoyed it at the time - I've often found myself interested in programmes showing what happens when people are shoved together in an environment; perhaps because I've lived in a variety of shared houses in the past, both as a student and later in life. Anyway, the main lesson which seemed to be learned from The Living Soap was that you shouldn't broadcast episodes of this sort of show while it's still being filmed, as you end up with a snake-eating-its-tail situation.

A similar show (which started at around the same time) is MTV's The Real World. Sticking together a handful of young people (have I just coined a collective noun there?) in a flat or apartment and filming what happened, this show's one of MTV's biggest successes, and runs to this day. We can pretend that it's a fascinating social experiment or whatever, but really the appeal of the show is a more base one, that of having a good old nose at people's private(ish) lives. I'm not being snobbish in saying that, as I have a great deal of fondness for The Real World, particularly the Seattle-based season.

The production company wisely chose to film all the episodes of The Real World before airing them, which seems to have worked on the whole, but the fact it's broadcast, and has been for many years now, means cast members occasionally have things like "Real World sucks!" shouted at them in the street during filming. But more pertinently to the point I'll get round to making eventually, the long-running nature of the show means that it's become a bit of a magnet for people who want to be on TV or use it as a springboard to other careers.

I'd see this as a problem in production terms, because instead of having a programme about (say) seven average-ish people trying to get along in a flatshare, you end up with a flat containing a number of almost-stereotypes and wannabes: racists are invariably put alongside people of other races, political conservatives are put with liberals, homophobes with gay men, and so on. Add to that the fact that some of the people see the show as their calling card to stardom (despite all evidence to the contrary about such a ploy), and you can end up with an apartment which appears to have been deliberately populated with wannabes from a number of carefully-selected demographics (as The Onion pointed out).

Sure, it's still interesting to watch (that base level of interest I mentioned above still applied), but it's certainly a drift from the original intent, and a more self-regarding one again; perhaps inevitably over time, seeing people arguing over who gets what bed apparently isn't enough, and instead there's an expectation that the audience will want to see an alcoholic bisexual jumping into a swimming pool and losing her bikini top or something (Real World Hawaii, I think). In much the same way, Big Brother's first series featured a mix of people, but by the time the show was facing the axe, the house appeared to have been populated by caricatures whose motivation for auditioning appeared to be either a desire to seek the attention they didn't get in their childhood, or to get a photospread in Nuts, Zoo, or both. No wonder Big Brother's ratings fell, why watch TV when you can see people attention-seeking or disrobing on any High Street in the UK any night of the week?

All of which brings me, circuitously, to the current series of TV singing talent contest The X Factor. I've not been watching this year, instead preferring to glean my information about the show from the front covers of pretty much all print media in the UK over the past month or so; in terms of long-term imprinting in my brain, this is pretty much the same as following it anyway because - let's all be honest - the turnover of 'stars' in this programme makes a McDonald's counter look like a place where people linger. There's a current thing where Simon Cowell's issuing press statements about an act called Jedward (whose schtick seems to be that they're twins with haircuts like Yahoo Serious in Young Einstein) saying how much he hates them and wants them out, which of course makes the oh-so-wilful (though not very perceptive) audience vote for them to remain in the show... that's phone voting, which of course means that money from each call goes into the coffers of SyCo, the production company behind the show, which is owned by, you guessed it, Simon Cowell. I don't know Cowell personally, but I don't know if the best way to show your disapproval and disagreement with him is to give him money. It looks suspiciously like positive reinforcement to me.

The link between the 'reality shows' I referred to earlier and The X Factor, I feel, is that as time has gone on, the latter has similarly had to up the ante; it's become abundantly clear that the venn diagram-style overlap between the viewing audience and the people who'll buy the winner's CDs is pretty slight, so the voting process (with the call-in votes that cost money) becomes the greatest element of the story; fights - verbal and physical - or romances between the contestants fill acres of newsprint, the judges are friends or bitter rivals depending on which day of the week it is, judges issue decrees stating that certain acts are bound to win or should be kicked out, and there's an amazing amount of speculation about who'll get kicked out this week and who'll win, even though that's almost incidental (as the music is, much of the time) to the majority of the viewing audience.

It doesn't seem to be enough that someone with moderate singing ability (and I say 'someone' as opposed to 'some people' because groups rarely win - in fact, has a group ever won The X Factor?) is plucked from obscurity, given some voice training and a new wardrobe and propelled to the top of the charts by a huge marketing and management campaign - a series of events which is rare and unusual enough to surely be of note; it seems we need them to have overcome some personal hardship such as a life-threatening illness or the death of a supportive relative, a vicious bit of catfighting in bootcamp, a bad choice of song in the semi-finals, and then some pantomime slating from one of the judges, before being crowned the winner and releasing some suitably rousing song in time for Christmas. And then they’re promptly pretty much forgotten about for the best part of a year, when they’re wheeled out to ride the (almost identical) wave of publicity and hoo-hah surrounding the new series (unless they don't bother, which sometimes happens; Leon Jackson, for example). The show may be startlingly aware of itself and the need to feign conflict and drama and tragedy, but it’s reliant on the viewing (and voting) public being oblivious to such machinations.

Many years ago, I went for an interview for a job in Virgin Megastore. The chap asked me what kind of music I liked, and I replied - as I probably would now - that I tended to like bands or artists who had more than one album to them. The chap looked vaguely appalled, and I didn't get the job - only years later did it occur to me that the 'one hit album or single' churn was probably a sizable amount of business for music shops, and by extension the music industry. And in a similar way, I suspect that the production team of The X Factor has realised that the journey (a word which is often used without any kind of self-awareness in such shows) is more important than the destination. You may not be able to convince people to splash out on the Eoghan Quigg CD, but you can issue 'shocking statements' to try to convince them that paying for premium rate phone calls to keep Jedward in the race for first place is worth it. Or pursue any other tactic to keep press coverage running between shows and generate a sense of importance about the whole thing.

I know what you're thinking: John, you think about this stuff waaaaay too much. And you might well be right, but I say this in response: Everything I've said above about The X Factor has almost certainly been thought (if not explicitly stated in meetings) by people on the production team. I'm not a marketing and money-making genius, but you can bet your calls made after this time will not be counted but may still be charged that SyCo has several such geniuses on their payroll.

Anyway, I want Jimmy Nipples to win. He's still in it, right? No? Oh. He must have been knocked the other week or something. See, told you I wasn’t really paying attention to it.

If You Think This Post Is Lame, At Least Give Me Credit For Having Written It All By Myself

Anyone else think this cover makes it look like Alex Cross is having trouble lighting a fag?

Forget The Crossword, Tease Your Sunday Morning Brain With The Following Mensa-Style Test

IS TO

AS

IS TO...

My Prejudices Confirmed, In A Way

When I moved to Yorkshire at the age of ten (well, not on my own, it was a family thing), I heard a lot of comments about what life was like 'in the South', and about the people who lived there.

Which was interesting, because I'd never thought of myself as living in any place with a particular allegiance or whatever, it was just, as a child might think, where I lived, and the people who lived there, just, er, lived there. Living there didn't seem like some kind of allegiance to a patricular way of life, it was, at that age, just what my life was like.

So I was often kind of nonplussed at remarks people made about 'southerners' (though I'd be lying if I pretended that every single remark didn't in some way, inform my growing body of opinions about 'northerners'), particularly the comment that the father of a girl I was seeing in my teen years made about my family having moved to the North so we could have a bigger house. Yes, that'll have been the rationale for the move - embarrassingly, my parents didn't go the whole hog and move to Scotland, where we could presumably have had an estate like something out of Monarch Of The Glen, but hey you can't have it all, I guess.

A lot of these comments were, it has to be said, pretty ill-informed, and I know people who've moved from the city to a more bucolic life only to be on the receiving end of comments about 'townies not knowing the ways of the country' (though apparently people who've grown up on a farm and rarely left the village have some kind of innate understanding of the ways of the urban metropolis and its dwellers).

The point I'm trying - and probably failing - to make is that all too often our opinions of other people and their lives are based more on guesswork and suspicion (and in some cases fear) than actual, material facts. I'm almost certainly as guilty of this as everyone else... actually, I take that back, and point you towards a rather fascinating collation of information:

Depiction of BNP membership overlap with non-white populations in the UK

... now, I'd prefer to think I'm less prone to the 'making up reasons to dislike people without actually knowing if the reasons are true' tendency that this image suggests your average BNP member is guilty of, but I think you can see my underlying point: the vast majority of BNP members, it would seem, hold their opinions about non-white people with only very limited knowledge about what they're actually like. I suspect it's that fear of 'other' that somehow gives rise to the dislike, and creates what is, in the strict sense of the word, pre-judice.

Anyway, the site I swiped that link from is run by a chap called David McCandless. There are many similarly interesting conglomerations of information on the rest of his site, it's worth your time.

But to end this post on a note which is probably less contentious than issues of race or north versus south, and which I found unintentionally very amusing, I'd like to illustrate my general point with a comment made by a friend of mine when were chatting about at school, and which harks back to yesterday's post in a way; he said, and these were his exact words,

"I've never read any books by Stephen King, because they're all shit."

(Simon - or, indeed, Mr K: if you're reading this, I disagreed then, and I still disagree now, okay?)

King Dome, But Not The Hospital

As part of their promotional push for the new Stephen King novel Under The Dome, Hodder and Stoughton are holding a writing competition.

The idea is that you 'take your inspiration from the new novel' (in whatever way you interpret that), and send your creative writing in, and if you win Stephen King will read your writing and you get a signed copy of the book. Not a bad prize, all things considered, and you have until 15 December to send in your piece of 2,000 words or less (they're also running some non-writing competitions, but they close tomorrow).

Details of all the competitions are here, but the writing one in particular can be found by clickety-clicking here.

I have a vague notion of an idea for it, and it's not an onerous wordcount to do in a month or so, so I might have a go... if you enter, let me know how you get on.

Lying In the Gutter, But ...

Spotted in the gutter yesterday, and I was slightly freaked out by it, I have to admit.

But then again, perhaps my career as a war photographer starts here.

He's Cleared The First Hurdle, But What About The Second?

If you're of a writerly mind, you may remember the stuff I posted in September about the open call for submissions to the BBC radio sketch show, Recorded For Training Purposes.

Well, just to prove that I don't idly post these things - and that I wasn't kidding when I said I didn't need the competition - I sent a couple of sketches in, and crikey o'riley if I didn't get an e-mail today saying that I'd made it past the initial sift.

Which made me grin like an idiot, though the e-mail also cautions that there are something like 250 people in my situation, plus all the actual commissioned writers like Senor Arnopp, and they'll probably be wanting about 100 sketches in total. So I shouldn't get too excited quite yet, though it's stoked the fires of my ego to get this far.

Did any of you folks send anything in, and if so, any response? Are you - cripes - one of my rivals for airtime? Do let me know.

You may, of course, rest assured that I'll let you know when I hear more, be it aye or nay (though the e-mail suggests I shouldn't necessarily expect to hear before Christmas). I may not know much, but I understand enough about narrative to know that people usually like some kind of closure on things.

But anyway: colour me pleased.

November Projects - Dare Any Of You Combine Them?

So, it's November and those of us who live near the Greenwich Meridian Line are all rejoicing in the benefits of an extra hour on our hands. So, if you're struggling to find ways to fill your time, and are looking for something to do this month, the following November-based projects may be of interest...

National Novel Writing Month
Slightly misnamed, as it's now very much an interNational thing, but the idea of 'NaNoWriMo', as we hipsters call it, remains the same: to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November.

Obviously, that's a fair amount of writing (over 1000 words a day), and it takes a bit of dedication, but hey, it's getting cold outside, so staying in with a cup of tea and writing is far from the worst way you could spend your time... on second thought, I might well say that at any time of year, but on this occasion there's a whole community of people (both online and in the real world) who'll support you as you aim for 50,000 words. Go to the NaNoWriMo site and see what I mean.

I've had a go at this a couple of times, and whilst it's to my considerable shame that I've never made it over the finishing line (and for the record, you don't have to stop then, you can carry on writing until you feel the story's finished), I liked the feeling that there were other people who were doing the same crazy thing.

The other suggestion I have is slightly more gender-specific, for it is...

Movember
Yes, that's November with an M, for this challenge involves growing a mo...ustache.

Okay, so the name's arguably a bit of a stretch (what were they gonna call it, Philtrum-foliage-February?), but the aim is simple, and the motivation good 'n philanthropic: participants should try to grow a moustache over the course of the month - no sideburns or beard, just the 'tache - and get friends to sponsor you, with the proceeds going to prostate cancer charities. Full details can be found here.

Actually, given that I've met some of you folks face-to-face, perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to suggest that it's only the gents who could grow a moustache... oh dear, I've gone too far, haven't I ? Don't dwell on it, though, check out this link to the manliest moustaches of all time! Grrr, how macho are they? The pictures positively seethe with manly hormones.

In fact, I think - at long last - I can feel puberty coming on.

Something Jolly, But Also Slightly Sinister, For Your Monday : What's In The Jars?

I've mentioned the Adam and Joe 6 Music podcast a number of times before, for they are funny and clever men whose praises should be sung.

But they're not just audio sillymen, no, as the following video featuring Adam demonstrates:



Listen to it twice, and it will play in a loop in your mind forever. For Ever.

Well, all right, until another tune takes over your mental jukebox, but it's a deuced catchy little ditty, wouldn't you say?

For 'Livejournal', Read 'Blog'

If you're not familiar with the webcomic XKCD, I heartily recommend it.

Or, as it's Sunday afternoon, you might prefer to walk around the world instead.

It's Not The BBC iPlayer, But...

You may already have seen it, but I've recently been playing around with Blinkbox, a site where you can watch a variety of TV shows online, for free.

There seems to be a good mix of shows to see for nowt, including some Troughton Doctor Whos, pretty much all of Big Train and The Young Ones, and a goodly chunk of The League Of Gentlemen and Hustle.

You can see details of the free TV shows here, and they also have free films here.

You have to watch short adverts before the things start, but I guess that's how they fund the site, and I have to say they play much more smoothly than, say, the itvplayer thing, which I always find very bumpy and user-hostile.

Anyway, thought it was worth pointing you towards it - if you're looking for some spooky stuff to watch for Hallowe'en, they have a couple of older scary films and TV shows, which might be of interest.

No connection whatsoever, I just liked the fact they have free streaming of TV shows which I enjoy.

They're Just Like You And Me Really

Spotted at a London Underground station this morning, one of the new posters for Habitat, featuring Helena Christiansen.

The version of the image here is, obviously, much smaller than the one I saw on the wall of the tube station, so you probably won't be able to make out the detail, but on the huge version it was amusing to note that the penultimate book on the table next to her (the slim brown-spined one on top of the larger white tome) appears to be a graphic novel - or, as many of us would call them, 'a comic with cardboard covers'.

Specifically, it seemed to be The Little Man by Chester Brown, a collection of his strips from 1980-1995.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it oddly reassuring to think that, at the end of a day's modelling, Helena likes to sit on a sofa and read about a man sitting round in his pants and listening to the radio and picking his nose.

In a way, it probably provides cosmic balance for all the men who sit round in their pants and look at pictures of models in magazines.

Whoever we are, it seems that we're interested in the lives of others. As Sartre almost put it, "L'interest? C'est les autres".

Nine Popular Maxims - Now With Added Experience-Derived Commentary

Better out than in applies to sharing of feelings, not flatulence

If you want to be popular, if you've got it, flaunt it tends to refer to cleavage or a six-pack stomach, not intelligence

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, but if you study it at degree level, don't expect to spend 31 months discussing possession. If that's your bag, you're probably better off doing an exorcism qualification

Revenge is a dish best served cold is most applicable when you're giving your nemesis poisoned gazpacho

Write what you know could be a hindrance if you're a science-fiction (or fantasy) novelist

Charity begins at home, but people who say it don't tend to be charitable at home or elsewhere

Dance as if no-one's watching may get you voted off in week one of Strictly Come Dancing

"It's the exception that proves the rule", when said, usually proves that the speaker doesn't know the origin or true meaning of the phrase

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but not when you're administering insulin to a loved one with diabetes

Not Judging The Book, Just The Cover

As comic creators go, I have slightly mixed feelings about Chris Ware; I've read his Jimmy Corrigan book a couple of times now, and whilst there's no question at all about Ware's talent, I have to say that the slightly formal and mannered nature of the art rather defused the emotional weight of the work for me. Rather like having a song of heartbreak sung in a voice so pure and on-note that it loses the human element.

That said, he's got a terrific eye for design (and indeed general innovation) in print, as is amply demonstrated by his work for the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine - here's the cover:


Inside, there's a four-page strip by Ware too, which you can read by clicking here. Worth the clickage involved, if only to see that not all comics are men in capes punching each other through walls.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Originally found on Graham Linehan's blog. Graham knows his comics, as anyone who's ever seen The IT Crowd will know.

Ironically, It's The Eastern Section Of The US Writers' Guild Doing The Interviewing

I'm currently watching my way through all of The West Wing, and in general it's very good indeed*.

Much of the credit for this, obviously, has to go to writer-creator Aaron Sorkin, and I thought it was worth me pointing you to this link, a 2003 Writer's Guild of America publication featuring a ten-page interview with Mr S, followed by a copy of the pilot script for The West Wing.

By way of taking a look behind the curtain to see how it's done, I'd say it's worth your time.

*I haven't got to the post-Sorkin era yet, so can't voice an opinion on the reported dip in quality once he's gone (though I gather it finds its feet again after a bit).

The Comedy Of Errors Has The Joke Of Two People Looking Like Each Other. Twice.

So I had an idea the other day - yes, yes, I know, it's a real Dear Diary moment, ha de har har - specifically, an idea for a story; I liked the idea, and it seemed to pop into my head fully-formed, and I could see various avenues to it, and how it could be made a bit more real-world than a lot of stories, and I could see myself enjoying writing it, though there was one big hurdle to all this...

It felt like I'd stolen it from somewhere.

Now, I don't know if this is actually the case or not, but the way the idea seemed to (as they say in House) present, with a lot of features already in place, seemed a bit too easy somehow, as if I could only have come up with the notion by nicking it.

Anyway, here's the idea:

Two brothers - identical twins. One of them is murdered, and returns to the other as a ghost - as twins, they always had a strong 'connection', and death doesn't seem to have ended that. The ghost twin helps his living brother look into the circumstances of the murder, and it turns out that in fact the wrong twin was killed, due to the similarity of appearance. In investigating all this, though, the living twin would not find people co-operative and willing to let him in to chat, as so often seems to be the case in such tales, but instead would struggle to get people to talk to him at all, as they're still dealing with their grief. And of course, when he discovers that he was the target, the killer, at much the same time, realises that he hasn't finished the job after
all...

Okay, so a couple of obvious touchstones are Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comic character Deadman, and there's a wilful element to the 'difficulty of investigation' aspect that clearly comes from me having seen too many episodes of Murder, She Wrote and similar TV shows, as well as a wish to do something crime-based but not with too much of a standard gumshoe element. So it's just a bundle of influences, I guess, but my sneaking feeling that this is a film or book I've previously experienced is enough to put me off writing it at the moment (in any form other than the summary in the paragraph above, I mean).

I spend a lot of time on this blog posting images I feel are similar - some of them clearly intended to be, others mere chance - but I'm equally interested in the similarity of ideas, and the way that two people can come to similar conclusions, or come up with similar notions, by what seems to be pure chance; granted, there are scientists who do work in specific fields with the same aim, which is perhaps more inevitable, and Charles Fort wrote about what I think he called 'Steam-Engine time', which was the idea that certain ideas or inventions have a 'time' when their creation is almost inevitable; being a pretentious sort, I'm rather reminded of the final lines from Yeats's poem The Second Coming, which ask "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

I always marvel at the inventiveness of musicians, apparently able to create new songs from the limited number of musical notes in the octave, and it's often claimed that there are a limited number of stories - the exact number varies, it seems, but it's rarely more than about a dozen - so I guess I shouldn't really be surprised that the ideas which flit across the landscape of my mind sometimes strike me as pleasing, but at the same time as probably being a swipe.

So anyway, I dismissed the twins story idea (well, scribbled it in the notebook and may do something with it in an altered form in the future, but for now that's much the same thing), and didn't really think anything more about it.

Until, over the weekend, when I was out and about, and I saw a pair of identically dressed identical twin girls. And then, less than an hour later, a pair of identically dressed identical twin boys.

Which wasn't creepy in the least. No, not at all.

Too Late To Be Cool And Trendy - That's How Cool I Am. Oh Yes.

Take a meme that's already past its best, and a piece of news which nobody really cares about, and combine them, and what do you get ?

This.

Interrupt your favourite website by using this choice application.

If You're Going To Do Something Of This Nature, I Guess This Is Probably How You Should Go About It

I'm painfully aware that the following is just a promotional thingy for The Beatles Rockband game, something which I have no interest in whatsoever, but I have to say I think this is really quite nicely done:

The Beatles Rockband Intro from Stephane coedel on Vimeo.

If you can ignore the trying-to-flog-you-stuff aspect of it, I think you'll agree that the animation and attention to detail are pretty impressive.

Sudden thought: is this the first time I've mentioned The Beatles on the blog? Lumme. Anyway, for the record, I think they are really rather good indeed.

A Calendar I Spotted In A Shop In London This Morning

I almost admire their optimism in leaving it on the rack, but if it hasn't sold yet, I don't know if it ever will.

Don't know if you can make out the grey effect at the top of it, but yes, that is dust.

(Talking To) My New Pen

Just a couple of things I wanted to share before they fled my mind (for if there's one thing readers of the blog will be all too familiar with, it's that I can't let a thought - no matter how irrelevant and trivial - pass through my mind without sharing it):

THING THE FIRST: In meetings at work, I frequently find that people will do presentations using either papers or slides projected on the wall, and this often seems to be referred to as 'talking to the paper' or 'talking to the presentation'. My natural instinct in such a sentence would be to use the word 'about'.

I only ever hear this in a work context, so it might well be one of those buzz-word type things, but I find it kind of odd, as it suggests someone is, literally, talking to some bits of paper or Powerpoint images projected on a wall. Then again, it does have a faintly Middle English ring about it, like something out of Gawain And The Green Knight, I guess.

"He didde talke to his presentationne, and didde Powerpoint use", as Chaucer wrote in The Project Manager's Tale.

THING THE SECOND: I've recently started using a new pen, and I rather like it. It's a Pilot VPen, and is a strange mix between a fountain pen (it has a nib) and a gel pen (the ink flows smoothly).

It gives a slightly scratchy interaction with the paper, which I actually find slightly satisfying as it proves to me that yes, I actually am writing, but without the hassles of changing the cartridge or carrying round a bottle of ink... but, yes, there's a but. I'm not any kind of scientist, but as the pen is disposable and has loads of working parts, surely it's a nightmare in environmental terms? Can anyone advise?

Or, to put it another way, can anyone talk to this post?

More Blatant Than Latent

Fragrances, like many other items, often have to sell themselves on the implied suggestion that they'll make you more sexy.

However, some items I've seen recently seem to have forgotten that the sexual undercurrent, like the scent itself, is probably more effective when it's subtle and yet somehow discernable.

You're probably wondering: What the jiggins is Soanes on about now? Where's his evidence? Well...

Say the name of this one out loud:

That's not a fragrance, that's a blatant sexual offer, surely.

And speaking of blatant -

- come on, that can't be accidental. He wants to be careful not to catch himself on that ring, though.

If this post has offended you, please bear in mind it's the perfume makers who are to blame - they started it. And if the filth quotient of the above is lost on you... well, bless your innocence, it's a rare and precious thing in a bitter and jaded world.

This Admission May Connect In Some Way To Me Not Getting Married Until I Was 37 Years Old

As readers with long memories and brain cells to spare may recall, just over a year ago, I got married.

One of the many benefits of this was that I now have (and indeed always wear) a wedding ring - because, obviously, when this cat's on the prowl, the ladies need to be warned that hey, easy, I'm a married man!. Yes, that's definitely the reason. Anyway, bear my be-ringedness in mind while I scoot off at what will appear to be a tangent...

The building where I work in London (which is a very hush-hush-top-secret-oh-all-right-I-admit-it-not-that-big-a-deal-building) has a pass system, as many buildings do nowadays. You use your pass to get in, and on the way out, the method is a bit less hasslesome - on the basis that keeping people out is more important that keeping them in, I guess. So the usual way I leave the building is to press a large button set into a nearby wall, and then open the door.

However, these buttons are usually green (for go, I suppose), and as a pathetic comic reading geek who's aware of the superhero Green Lantern, who recharges his power ring (stop giggling at the back) thus...

... you can probably imagine how I envision myself as I punch the green exit button at work with my left hand.

Several times a day. Smiling to myself every time I do it. Oh yes.

Hey, I'm just being honest with you. And anyway, they're talking about a Green Lantern film starring Ryan Reynolds, so the character'll probably be like Iron Man in a couple of years. Lunchboxes and pyjamas for the kids, you wait and see... and probably in adult sizes for people like me too, let's face it. The emotionally and intellectually stunted male is a sizable market. In every sense.

This One's For Those Of You Who Were Tiring Of Posts Featuring Pictures And A Handful Of Words From Me Saying 'Hey, Don't These Look A Bit Alike?'

As you've probably seen, a handful of days after the pop singer Stephen Gately died, and even after the coroner had pronounced his sudden death to have been the result of natural causes, the ever-humane Daily Mail printed a column by Jan Moir which had the suspicious whiff of homophobia about it, suggesting Gatey's lifestyle may have been responsible for his death. Classy.

The article has, I gather led to a record number of complaints being made to the Press Complaints Commission - there's a good summary of the series of events here. And though I usually try to avoid writing about topical events too often here on't blog (due to the fact that, all too often, far wittier folks tend to get there before me), I had a few thoughts (on the subject, not in total in my life) which I wanted to share...

Firstly, and because it's always fun to make this clear, I think the Daily Mail is a criminal waste of newsprint; its obsession with house prices and immigrants and cancer make it frankly laughable, and it would be a joke if it wasn't for the fact that so many people seem to take its contents seriously. The paper's aimed at a weird audience, one who believes that young people nowadays are all promiscuous and whorish, but who simultaneously like lots of pictures of Charlotte Church or Cheryl Cole in low-cut dresses in their newspapers. Lord only knows what kind of demographic this is, but they clearly keep on buying the grotty little rag.

Given that the Mail's never been that keen on gay people or their lifestyles, it's probably inevitable that they ran a column in the usual post hoc ergo propter hoc style about Stephen Gately: he was gay, he died suddenly, and therefore his premature death was caused by being gay. Sure, they didn't run a 'being white and female makes you die in a car crash' story when the Princess of Wales died, but of course a picture of Diana on the front page was always a good way to boost circulation, and besides 'white and female' is a substantial chunk of their target readership. I think it's fair to say that they're not keen to court gay readers - though in terms of appealing to the dead, a large number of their readers are probably nearer the grave than the womb, and many of their younger readers may not trouble the EEG machine overmuch.

You may well be wondering why I haven't linked to the article yet, to let you good people make up your own mind about whether it's offensive or not; well, fear not, I'm about to, but I wanted to highlight the way that, once they started getting complaints about the article, the Mail tried to rewrite things so that they didn't look as bad - remember how Russell Brand (and we'll get back to him later) pointed out that the Mail, which had been so critical of him and Jonathan Ross, had, after all, supported Mosely and the Blackshirts, and asked which was worse? The Mail tried to ignore this remark, despite it being an established fact about the paper's history, and in a not-entirely dissimilar way, once they realised that they had a PR problem on their hands with the Moir article, they changed the title of it on their website. Oh the bravery.

So, having originally titled the column "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death", the Mail proudly and heroically renamed it "A strange, lonely and troubling death . . .", and indeed that's the title which now sits atop the page - have a look here. The courage of their convictions is so impressive.

And so there was a fuss - to my delight, catalysed by openly gay folks such as Stephen Fry and Derren Brown - and a semi-reaction from Jan Moir saying that the response had been "clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign ", with lots of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission (as well as people publishing Moir's home address online, which I do feel is going too far). And the Mail is now in an interesting position, because a year ago this week, the paper was very much at the front of the placard-bearing crowd objecting to the phone calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to Andrew Sachs. So, in the face of a similarly orchestrated campaign of complaint, how will they react?

By analogy with the Ross-Brand-Sachs affair, the writer should resign and the sub-editor and editor should be sacked, though I doubt this'll happen; as many people found during World War II when publications had to be recycled as lavatory paper, when it comes to newspapers, the shit just doesn't stick. The Sun may have accused football supporters of raiding the pockets of the dead at Hillsborough (see picture), the Scottish Sunday Express may have written about the frankly teenage lives of teenage survivors of the Dunblane massacre, and every single paper in the world may have been implicated in Charles Spencer's impassioned eulogy for his sister, but the last place you're likely to see these things reported - let alone discussed - is, it seems, a newspaper. Which makes me wonder if newspapers are necessarily in much of a position to criticise when MPs circle the wagons and try to protect themselves (or each other) from criticism or revelations about their lives.

As with the Trafigura situation last week, the newspapers were rather trumped by the internet, as people broke the ludicrous injunction via e-mails, blogs and Twitter, and the same approach has been taken in relation to the complaints about the Gately article (which I think is perfectly fair; I just wish that similarly well-orchestrated campaigns could be run about so many of their other articles). It makes me wonder if the 'decline in respect for authority' which the Mail and other papers lament is in some way directly related to the rise of communication technology - it must have been much easier to hide some wrongdoing in the days when people didn't have telephones to share things they'd heard about (let alone e-mail), and perhaps that lack of evidence of naughtiness in authority was somehow the foundation for the much-vaunted respect that people 'used to have'? Just a thought, but it certainly can't help that when something dodgy's going on in high places, people can have the details within minutes, and pass them on just as quickly.

I wouldn't want to go so far as to suggest that the internet and 3G and the like will directly replace or remove traditional print journalism, but they're clearly having an effect on the way people gain information about the world about them; newspapers have already found their 'source of news' role reduced by the rise of constantly-updated TV and online news, and if the 'campaigning' role is also usurped, is there much left? As Clay Shirky noted back in March,"'You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!' has never been much of a business model", and as we seem to be gradually feeling our way towards some new and as yet uncertain model of newsgathering and reporting, I do think that a lot of papers are going to be shouting that, and sooner rather than later.

In the case of the Mail, though, I'm kind of torn; in moral terms, it's a festering boil in the bumcleft of humanity, but if it goes bankrupt actual real people with families would lose their livelihoods, and as much as I dislike the way they choose to spend their time, a part of me recognises that they're still people.

Then again, I like to think the recognition that people can think differently from me and not have to suffer for it means I'll never be asked to write for the Daily Mail.

Is There A Psychological Condition Which Involves One Seeing Things As Similar All The Time?

If so, I think we can cheerfully label me a sufferer.

Though it does generate material, howsoever questionable.

From A Poster On London Transport Urging People To Be Pro, As Opposed To Anti, Social

I wasn't too taken with his information films for the Inland Revenue, but I hadn't realised that Adam Hart Davis was such a social miscreant.


Still, good to see he's working on his issues.

They Also Serve Who Only Sit And Type

What's that you say? Hmm?

Oh, you say your week won't be complete unless you can see a picture of Brian and Stewie from Family Guy drawn into a field, and viewed from above?

Luckily for you, your wish is my command.

And if you'll forgive me, I have to go and polish the coal scuttle.*

*Not a euphemism, you filthy beast.

Rather Like That Irish Singer Shane MacGowan (Born 1957 In Kent)

For reasons I really don't need to get into, I'm currently working on a 60-minute biopic of singer Chris de Burgh.

I don't know about you, but I kind of thought I knew everything there was to know about him; the early years, The Lady In Red, the affair with the nanny, the angry letter to the Irish Times, and all that, but I'm finding that the more I read about him, the more of an enigma the man turns out to be.

Take, for example, the opening line of the Wikipedia page for Chris:

"Chris de Burgh (born Christopher John Davison on 15 October 1948) is an Argentinian-born Irish singer-songwriter..."

I'm starting to think I may need more than 60 minutes. I tell you, the man's a mystery... wrapped in a thriller.

Curled up inside a romance.

Thanks, Tom. And Now, Here's Damien With The Weather. Damien?

...oh.

You Nearly Didn't Hear About This

It seems that, contrary to years of process and legal precedent, The Guardian newspaper was - until a couple of hours ago - blocked from reporting on Parliamentary proceedings.

Just to add to the rather cloak-and-dagger nature of things, the paper was also been told not to say what they've been prevented from talking about. I seem to recall the Spycatcher affair took a similar turn, with the media at one stage not allowed to mention the name of the author of the banned book... and we all know how well that turned out.

Fortunately, early this afternoon - just in time, one might say - the lawyers responsible for the injunction (perennial Private Eye favourites Carter-Ruck) dropped the claim, leaving the paper free to report the item in question, which I'll reprint here, mainly because I can:

Labour MP Paul Farrelly intends to "ask the Secretary of State for Justice what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura."

So, Carter-Ruck had issued an injunction to prevent a paper reporting a question about an injunction? Crikey, that kind of activity certainly strays close to the zone known as self-parody.

Facetiousness aside, this was a strange legal move, and one which - temporarily - went against freedom of speech issues which had been in place for centuries (and had been, in legal terms, recently* ruled upon by Lord Denning) stating that whatever's said in Parliament can be reported without it potentially being seen as contempt of court. The opposite of Las Vegas, one might say.

Anyway, I thought this was worthy of drawing to your attention as a freedom of the press issue; I hold no brief for The Guardian, and approach their work with much the same narrowed-eye cynicism as I do most of the newspapers, but I think it's getting to a pretty sorry state of affairs when a law firm can take out (and, in the first instance at least, obtain) a gagging order to prevent the centuries-established reporting of a parliamentary question, especially one about a gagging order.

*By which, of course, I mean over 20 years ago.

Simon, You Can Have This Format Idea For A Fiver. Oh, All Right, A Quid.

I see that Saturday's edition of singing talent show The X-Factor featured a guest appearance by Robbie Williams. And previous episodes have featured appearances by Mariah Carey and Beyonce, with the inevitable ratings-grabbing results.

And a notion occurred to me. One which, I think, might have what the folks in the idea biz call 'legs'.

Here it is: instead of going through the hassle of hosting regional singing heats, hiring limos and hotel rooms for judges, hiring venues and risking getting into legal trouble by utilising telephone voting for the final rounds, and then the fuss of recording the first album by the winner and promoting it... instead of all that, why not just get established singers to come onto a TV show?

You could make sure that the format works by only selecting popular singers (or even groups), and maybe link their appearance on the show to their relative popularity in some way; maybe using some quantifiable sales thing like how many CDs or downloads they'd sold that week? You could even structure the show with a crescendo aspect, so the most popular singer or band that week plays at the end - saving the biggest star until last, as it were.

Obviously, there are a couple of less positive aspects to this - there'd be less need to use Craig Armstrong's Film Works 1995-2005 CD for all of the linky bits*, and you'd probably have to make the show a bit shorter (maybe 30 minutes instead of 90 minutes) - but I reckon that you could probably get a pretty good audience with a show like this.

Offhand, I'm not wedded to any ideas of what we'd call such a show, but you want it to be snappy and appealing that sums it up in a few words - maybe something like Hottest Of The Hits? I'm not sure, I'm just spitballing here.

Anyway, if you have an 'in' with any TV production people, feel free to float this idea, and see what they think. I know it sounds simple, but often those ideas have the broadest appeal.

*This is a downside as I think Mr Armstrong is a very talented composer, and I want him to be receive the royalties for his work being used. Because week after week after week after week, his music is used.

From Their Sublime To My Ridiculous

Something I didn't mention in my write-up about the classical music concert on Friday night was that, as the performance of Strauss's Four Last Songs came to an end, I became completely convinced that, were I to nick the conductor's sheet music as an avid fan might steal a band's set list, it would look something like this:

I know: I'm an idiot. I don't deserve culture, do I?

In Which I Demonstrate, Once Again, My Pretentious Ways

Last night I went with my Dad to see a performance of some classical music at the Barbican here in London.

It was a good mixed bill - a bit of Strauss for me, a bit of Mahler for Dad, and some stuff by a chap called Martinu which neither of us were familiar with. And as you can see from the picture here, we got pretty good seats for our £8.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun - particularly the final bit of Strauss, which often sounds like the soundtrack to a cartoon - and lo and behold, the BBC have made it available to listen to via the iPlayer, and you can do so here.

Another very self-indulgent post from me, I fear, but on the other hand this'll provide evidence to both my wife and my mother that Dad and I really were at the concert as promised, and not at a lap-dancing club.

Though Dad did joke about going on to one afterwards. At least, I think he was joking...

Free Copy Of The Bookseller

Well, kind of.

In the light of the current post service strikes, publishing industry magazine The Bookseller has decided to go all high-tech to get round the non-delivery problem, and so has made the latest issue (cover-dated today) available online.

You can read it on your screen, or download it as a PDF, by clicking here.

So, don't go sayin I never gives you nuffink never not ever, awright?

I do apologise, I think living in London's East End is starting to get to me.

I'm assuming they don't make it available this way every week, mind. And as we all know, when I make an assumption, I make an ass of you and umption... hmm, that's not right, is it?

"Does It Come In Black?"

So, Amazon have announced that their Kindle device will be available in an international form from 19 October. Which intrigues me.

I'm currently looking into the possibility of an e-reader for some hefty reference items I have in PDF, and the Kindle seems quite appealing, as it takes PDFs and allows you to annotate items (including, unless you can inform me otherwise PDFs), so that sounds about right. And the price is lower than the Sony ones I'd been mulling over and the like.

However, whilst carrying round something small and light is obviously more appealing than lugging round a big printed document, or reading a PDF off a screen (I often feel as if I spend about 90% of my waking hours in front of a screen of some sort or other), I'm slightly wary of getting dead-ended into a bit of tech that doesn't last for a good number of years; I still think MiniDiscs are a terrific format, and they were super-useful when I was producing a hospital radio show every week, but now I can only use the MiniDisc recorder for a handful of purposes, and so it languishes in a drawer next to my AAC-format Sony music player.

So I'm not keen to go spending a three-digit sum on something which may prove to be something of a technological dead-end, and I have other reservations - there's a whole DRM hoo-hah about books which you can buy for it, and Amazon recently had to undergo the irony of removing copies of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from users' Kindles. Then again, given the name of the device, it's probably fortunate that it wasn't Fahrenheit 451.

I guess I'll wait until the devices actually start arriving in the UK before I throw my hat (a hat full of money) into the ring, and see if there are positive reviews; I like the idea of wirelessly buying books and magazines, sure, but I don't want to end up with a bit of kit that's duff sooner rather than later.

And besides, to answer my own question, no, it's not available in black. Tch.

If any of you good folks have strong opinions about this subject (and to short-cut the usual comment, no I see it as supplementary to my bookshelf, not replacing it), or experience of using a reading doohickey of this type, please share in the Comments, eh? As is so often the case, I'm just learning my way around the topic, and informed input is always welcome.

"Feed Me! Feed Me All Night Long!" (Song From Little Photoshop Of Horrors)

This makes me laugh, so I thought I'd share.

The story so far: Ralph Lauren put out an ad which is insanely over-photoshopped (either that, or they're employing models who haven't eaten in weeks), and people on the internet rightly took the michael... so Lauren issued a legalese notice, claiming that the use of their very silly image constituted copyright infringement.

So, of course the website removed the image, and apologised. Ah, all right, ya got me - they're doing nothing of the sort, and more power to them.

And yes, you can see the image in question via that link. I'm not including it here because I want to encourage you to follow the link, and enjoy their sarcastic tone.

Besides, the picture in question really freaks me out. I don't want it on my blog.

If You Only Read One Thing On The Internet Today... Well, You've Wasted That Allowance Reading This. What Were You Thinking?

Yes, many other people on t'interweb have linked to it already, but there's a reason for that: it's very honest and sensible and true and many, many other positive adjectives.

Michelle Lipton writes about the path of the freelance writer, and I recommend you read what she has to say.

That's it; anything else I might say will - and I have simply no idea why - look facile and shallow in comparison.

Virgin's First Time

And welcome to all of you who've come here via a search engine; prepare for disappointment.

I know a lot of the regular audience for the blog are involved in writing, though I don't know how many of you, like me, run; anyway, this is one of those occasional posts about running.

The London Marathon has, for a number of years, been officially known as the Flora London Marathon (though it was rarely spoken of as such), because of the sponsorship provided by a leading spreadable product. Prior to that, if memory serves, it was sponsored by Mars, the ever-popular chocolate bar. Nothing, it seems, symbolises health and a stern training regime so much as sponsorship from a foodstuff containing a proportion of fat.

That used to be the case, anyway. As you can see from the logo, and may have inferred from the Google-baiting title of this post, the 2010 London Marathon is being sponsored by Virgin - a firm whose interests are strangely scattered, from credit cards to cola. No, I don't quite understand it either.

Anyway, if you've applied for a place in the ballot for the 2010 Marathon, the decisions are apparently in the post. However, since the UK postal service is currently being affected by strikes (many people have inevitably noted that it's hard to tell the difference), the mailout of the YES and NO notifications has been a bit delayed. But Virgin will apparently be e-mailing people this afternoon to let them know.

If you don't get a place in the ballot (which is the scheme whereby enter a lottery-style system to see if you get a place, and then pay for it), there'll of course be a vast number of charity places available; those of you with unnervingly long memories may remember that I ran in the 2007 London Marathon for just such a charity.

For reasons which kind of escape me in the cold (well, currently more like grey) light of day, I've entered the ballot for the 2010 Marathon, and so I should be receiving an e-mail today to let me know if I've got a place. If I haven't - and I think the odds are pretty slim - then I have, for the sake of my own sanity, vowed not to see about a charity place; in all honesty, the hassle of trying to make sure I reached the target for sponsorship was more of a burden than the physical act of training for, and running, the marathon. So I won't be doing that again.

No, definitely not. Uh-uh, nosiree. Not doing that again.

Oh no, I'm "protesting too much", aren't I? Uh oh...

EDITED at 3.58pm to say: Just had the e-mail to say I didn't get in through the ballot. And that, as I say, means I won't be pursuing any other means of getting a place. That's what I said, and as we all know, what I say goes. Granted, it usually 'goes' by the by within minutes, but let's try for some kind of certainty for once...

The 24 Hour Book Challenge

Just wrapping up in sunny South London is the 24 Hour Book Challenge.

It started yesterday, and a group of writers have been working on a book based around a group of city centre allotments - having started the writing at 10am yesterday and finished it at 10am this morning, a group of volunteers is currently knocking it into printworthy shape and it'll be on sale as of tomorrow. Follow the above link for more details of what sounds to me like a rather interesting challenge.

On the subject of novels written in a brief time - and unlike the above, you can get involved - it's just under a month until the start of 2009's National Novel Writing Month. I don't think I'm eligible to take part as I've already started my book, but are any of you good people intending to have a go?

And They Said It Wouldn't Last

To commemorate my 1001st blog post, I commissioned a pair of special numerically-themed spectacles from noted stylist and creator, Mrs MyWife. Here be the results:

As you can see, they're positively Elton Johnesque, so I intend to spend the rest of the day celebrating as Mr Dwight might (though with fewer tantrums and outbursts, of course).

Thank you for your continued audienceship, especially in the face of ridiculously self-indulgent posts like this one.

To Punish My Sanctimony, There's Probably A Typo Somewhere In This Post...

Remember, if you're going to protest about something - hell, if you're going to say anything at all - you'll make your point far more effectively if people don't need to spend time decoding what you're driving at.

Proof can be found, in appalling abundance, here.

Silly Mount Everest Sketch

As I have an interest in the work of David Cross and in Mount Everest, I was rather amused to find this; I feel it kind of tapers off a bit towards the end (probably an inevitable result of it being sliced from an episode of Mr Show, where I gather the sketches were interlinked), but I like the way the father's reaction rather echoes that of the audience.

It is, of course, just plain silly as well, which I always approve of (remember, kids: silly = good, stupid = bad).

But enough introduction, on with the (Mr) Show...