I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I last wrote about
Leo Sayer. Someone, equally incredulous, just wrote to me
to say, “I can’t believe you haven’t posted about
Celebrity Big Brother yet,” as if I’m the sort of person who watches much TV besides
darts. I had no idea what the anonymous well-wisher was driving at, until I remembered who one of this year’s contestants was: the former pop star who moved to Australia with the immortal words…

I don’t know how much luck he’s had inspiring the youth of Australia, but he’s been back in the UK trying to engender veneration from the likes of Ken Russell and Face from
The A Team. Sadly, it seems Australia is still a more enlightened place than Borehamwood, because he’s already quit the show, “
after knocking down a door with a shovel.” And he’d run out of clean underpants. Paul McCartney was right about saints. Happy now, Anonymous?

Congratulations on being chosen
Time magazine’s
Person of the Year! Use your powers wisely. And spare a thought for the ad executives about to get fired for
thinking up this ad for Chrysler, after it spent millions of dollars securing sole sponsorship for this issue of the magazine.
Yours sincerely,
Ben.H
Time Magazine Person of the Year, 2006.

Via
Straight From The Tated . If he’s anything like me, God has Prince Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles, a Chinese man in an ambulance, and Elizabeth Montgomery on His fridge.
Meddlesome anorak that I am, I just looked back in on the Wikipedia entry for
Jeremy Bentham to see how
my little edit was going. It’s been re-edited, already. According to whoever violated
my impeccable scholarship, the notorious Auto-Icon really, truly, ruly
is wheeled in to Council meetings. Not being a member of the College, I’ll have to take their word for it.

I have finally made my first edit to a Wikipedia article. Of course, it concerns
you know who…


These have arrived in my corner shop just in time for the end of the World Cup, which I suppose this was supposed to commemorate. More specifically, to commemorate the England World Cup effort – although I expect these were sold in Wales, Scotland etc as well. By ‘effort’, I mean England’s quadrennial ritual of hubris, complacency, whitewash, arrogance, denial, despondency, fingerpointing, scapegoating, infighting, xenophobia and general self-loathing. I’d say it’s a cack to watch but H.M. Government has my passport right now so I’ll keep quiet until they can’t kick me out of the country.
Unfortunately, I don’t think these will get discounted now it’s all over.
Baby Boromir is posing with the credulous snack atop an old paperback edition of Boswell by Stanley Elkin, which I haven’t quite finished yet but it would have to suddenly turn inconceivably crap for me to dislike it.
I spent the end of last week
stuck in Plymouth, testing a new web-based service for my place of employment. This post goes out to the in-house software development guy who left
http://goatse.cx in the browser history of my test computer. Sir, you are a credit to the stereotype of IT staff.
* Ten years ago it would have been either
Tolkien or Douglas Adams, but for obvious reasons both authors are no longer OK.
Experience the Ferocity of a Pyroclastic Flow!, by Translators from the Ukraine.