Before I completely get my weekend groove on I am going to be serious for a moment. There have been a number of times this week where I have been stopped in my tracks, had to do a double take and leapt towards the keyboard to hammer out 200 words on why the UK has to be softest touch place to be a violent offender. Each time I have resisted on the basis that you'll probably all have seen the UK news this week and picked up on the idiocy that is our legal system. I have just read another one that has pushed me over the edge. Let me see if I can find the links...

1) Raping a 5-year old repeatedly -- 6 years

2) Gang raping a 16-year old then burning her with caustic soda -- 9, 8, 7 years

3) Supplying a gun to someone who shot an 11-year old kid and then perverting the course of justice -- 7 years or less

I could go on.

What exactly do you have to do to have the key thrown away? The way in which our justice system works, were he alive today, Hitler would have just got an ASBO. All the above should be non-negotiable life sentences without any possibility of parole. This is not to punish, but to protect. You could sell me the biggest sob story the world has ever heard in mitigation for any of the above and I would laugh at you and sentence life without parole. There is no rehabilitation for people who are capable of the above deeds. If you catch me on a less liberal day, I could and have argued that they deserve execution, no less. Not because it would save the cost of keeping them banged up, but because there is a finality to that particular scourge. In any world, you cannot repeatedly rape a five year old and expect people to respect your right to live. If you are so conscious of your criminal act that you try to destroy evidence by giving the handicapped victim 50% burns by throwing caustic soda on her, I would happily throw the switch to terminate you. Honest to God. We are a nation of bloody pansies with seriously messed up values. We'll send you to jail for not paying your council tax in a political protest, but hey guys, burglary -- take this community order and be a nice lad.

Okay -- vent over with. I now need to get jiggy with some Friday fun. Where be my iTunes? I'm feeling a tad twittery so no doubt there will be updates all evening.

Allo. Eet ees dooblervay an ah am neut appee.

Mah treep in London deed neut goh seu well. Ah arrave tres bien at ze stasseon een Londres,and ah start mek mah way to ze ceuntest saucisson erropean (deed a seh, mah saucisson ar med weez dook and oss). Beut ze problemm eet ees zat soon ah am die pour un peese. Ah ave menny glass of wahn on ze trann an mah bladdeur eet ees very fool. Ah look aroun ze stret an heureusement ah see zer ees a pissoire zer. Alors, eet ees stahnge peeswar. Eet is pent green weez noh obvious weh for ze peese to dren. Een fuct, eet ees nussing more zan a beeg gren beucks.

So.. a tek out mah proud french ceuk an ah start peesay. Soudainment, zer ees a top. A top on mah sholdeur. Sacre bleu, eet ees eunly a breetesh beuby, weez a tronshon. Eet seem zat ze peeswar ees neut a peeswar at eul beut seum ekeepuhment telephonique. Ow weuz ah seupeuse to neu, ah?

Wel ze beuby zey hond coof me an zey tek me stret back to sent pancreas. Zey poot me stret back on ze trann for paree. Ah mees zee eul of ze contest saucisson erropean an neu mah nem eet is lahk mood on fronce. Ze contest ees won by un saucisson belgique! Ah ahd ma ed in sham.

Mon dieu, ah *ET* ze breeteesh!

I mentioned a while ago that I was starting to warm to Ross Kemp. He started off at the bottom of the compost heap in one of our arse-wipingly-bad soap operas but has since risen through the ranks of TV hell to star in Ultimate Force, which is about as laddish as it gets; SAS being appropriately portrayed as equally hard and sensitive while making sure that the enemy were really dead by shooting anyone at least twice even if they were targets lying down. More recently he has been working for Sky embedded within various units in Afghanistan. I haven't seen any of it because I don't have Sky but I did hear him being interviewed on Radio 5 as I drove home to sit on a conference call that would make your mother cry.

Kemp seems to me to be the kind of guy you would be quite happy spending time with. He has no actor ego, respects the troops like no-one else does, is a defender of our presence there yet is big enough to hurl abuse at our government for not equipping or paying our soldiers well enough. He did the basic training and went out to Afghanistan and was out on patrol within 24 hours of arriving. He was offered a weapon and turned it down. He spent months there on the front line with only the standard body-armor, sometimes no more than a few metres away from people who would have quite happily dispensed him into a hole.

I think it is worth saying that his camera crew were there too so deserve just as much credit.

His interview was well-mannered, pointed at the right moments and showed an astonishingly astute ability to tread the fine line behind the detail of what can be said while still making his personal views on the inadequate provision of kit for our troops very well known. Anything that could be construed as legal ground was deftly avoided. When pushed on the subject of more troops being deployed from the UK, he hit back with measured weight. His view is that we are stretched and that our fellow-members of ISAF should be doing more. He avoided explicitly saying that ISAF were not pulling their weight but intimated that we should be asking more of Germany and France.

Throughout he was balanced. It was not the performance of an actor at all. I was so enthralled at his candid and pragmatic view that I sat in the gas station until the interview was over before I got out and filled the car (maybe 10 minutes). The questions came in asking on his opinions of certain weaponry's weaknesses and he responded with knowledge that could only have been gleaned from serving troops. It was everything that the media would duck.

He explained, within the limitations that he seems to think are morally justified, how the Taleban fight, how their IEDs work and how one of the guys he had been on patrol with died the day after he left Afghanistan and that his funeral was today. It was obvious that he was gutted.

My initial post on the subject of Ross Kemp was whether we approved. I have to say that listening to him, I thoroughly approve. He balances reality, humanity and the greater good. And he doesn't make any apologies for what he thinks to the viewer or the editors. Definitely a top chap despite his crimes of mid-evening horror for God knows how many years.

The one thing that really hit home as he wound up was that when asked about portraying a soldier in the future (as an actor) he said that he would like to think that he would change his style based on what he knew but that he would probably never take that role again, because he is too old and could not even pretend to be a soldier anymore after watching from the front line.

Verdict: I'd definitely have a pint with him. He's a great actor with no self-importance.

--

PS -- I got an email from Dooblervay today. He is back from London and his sausage conference or whatever nonsense it was that he was here for. He is going to post tomorrow. Your guess is as good as mine. Drivel, no doubt. I asked the question as to whether he was striking like the rest of France today and "could you explain to the uneducated how this is different from the normal French working day". He came back with a whole load of Euro-moonbat guff that I might post tomorrow. I would do it now but I have had my dose of reality for today.

As Dooblervay would say after a couple of vin rouge, "Bon Noire".

I have to apologize in advance to Waaarty and Maestro. Tonight's Wigan game was hilarious.

Wigan have one of the most underrated strikers on loan for the year; Zaki, an Egyptian. They have also just signed another Egyptian striker on loan from Middlesbrough, Mido. Liverpool went one up just before half time. Late in the second half the Radio 5 commentary team were in the middle of discussing the pies they had been given when Wigan were awarded a penalty. Mido stepped up and converted it. Before the crowd could even cheer, you could hear the tannoy broadcasting The Bangles' Walk Like An Egyptian. Monitor stainage ensued chez moi. I mean serious shortbread projectiles splatting against expensive Macbook screen and extended FPD.

I called my father who was watching some other crappy game. He lost it. As did my mother. I so wish I had gone to watch it. I live less than four miles away and am more or less guaranteed entry on the basis that my ID has a Wigan postcode.

The result is irrelevant (although Liverpool dropping points is a plus). For pure entertainment, Wigan just rock. Loved every second of it. Absolute classic.

I have been having a look at twitter. I posted a couple of status updates on there and was fascinated to see that there is an API. I say API -- what I mean is that there's a dead easy way to do all sorts of integration work. If no-one stops me, it would take me less than an hour to have my twitter status embedded in the blog. The likes of John and Dr Stu would probably take less than an hour but I think an hour is respectable. They are both major league coding whizzes and I am but a worm that gets by.

Basically all you have to do is use curl in PHP to hit the appropriate URL and give it the right parameters and hey-presto, you have a string containing your twitter in really simplistic XML, so it's just a question of parsing it and spitting it back out to the browser. No-frickin'-brainer. I could actually be kind of stalkery and pull all my friends last twitters too, thereby syndicating them, but I wouldn't do that because that is not playing nice.

Just to be a bit geeky here for a second, when I first started programming it was bloody hell. I wrote C and I was forever messing up with strings. Pointers to this, de-referencing that. Structures here, pointers to pointers to structures there, mallocs and frees -- massive overheads for no gain. It's why I gave it up as a living. And then object-oriented programming hit the scene and my melon was twisted. I thought I would never write code again.

Enter the associative array and XML together with Perl and/or PHP and the world is suddenly my oyster again. Perl and PHP allow fiendishly simple string manipulations that anyone who understands regular expressions to do whatever they like. Better still, PHP contains all the C string manipulation and more, without the hassle of regex. It really is childishly easy. I guess you still need to know how to format things but that's a stroll in the park.

So, you have between now and the start of the football (minus the time it takes me to nuke a Sainsbury's Singapore Noodles and eat it) to prevent my twitters being on the blog. Your time starts now.

Update: Under an hour -- you are too slow.

Güten abend mein lieblings.

Well I swallowed my pride and signed up for Twitter. At the moment, I think I have no followers and I am following Nancy, such is my mass-appeal. I tried to follow MJ too, but she's too busy being hot to Twitter. Who else is out there twittering? Do I need to be following you? Let me know.

My next favorite US journo after the lovely Kyra Phillips has left me taunting messages alluding to the fact that she has signed up to Twitter yet is nowhere to be found. I suspect that this is some cruel mindgame to trick me into taking the plunge.

I've just spent a rather pleasant hour chatting with Foxy man. I suspect there is an unholy alliance to be expected from our acquaintance. I might head over to Cleckhuddersfax soon to finally meet him. Tasha, you are invited but no tape-recorders.

Big day doing big tricks tomorrow so I'm away. Schlaft gut.

I like to start the week off on a moonbat watch. Today's nominees are the ~5000 people who have joined a Facebook group protesting about the planned government über-database that will catch our every thought and provide the government with enough ammunition to pre-emptively arrest us. You can read about the group here.

Here's the deal with this. Anyone who has had any dealings with the Home Office in an IT capacity will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the chances of them actually managing to deploy such a beast are about the same as my chances of becoming Pope Kenny 1st. The first attempt to do it will be a) late, b) over-budget and c) completely wrong. It will then die a death with a cry of "it's all too hard and costs too much".

There are much better things to worry about on a Monday. Like whether the BBC should show the Gaza Appeal or not. Hmmm. Maybe there aren't better things to worry about.

Bloody moonbats.

Peeps, if you live in Wigan and have cable internet access, google my real name and are obsessed by what happened in October 2002, please let me know who you are. It seems like every Saturday night the same person does the same thing. I've no objection to people doing that but it does make me a little paranoid. As far as I can tell, nothing of any import happened in October 2002 -- I appear to have spent an ungodly amount of time watching kids play basketball and doing marcomms (rather than real work).

Also in the news is the story that I have drained the local shop of Mint Aeros. Every now and again I send Tasha some to ensure she doesn't go into hypoglycemic shock. Were one to model the sales of Mint Aeros in my local shop, one would have inexplicable peaks at random times. I like giving statisticians headaches. I need to pick up some Sunday papers too so that Tasha can waste about three days reading about where the best travel deals are at the moment.

Alors, to twitter or not to twitter? I have been debating this for a while. It strikes me as being yet another medium where I can impart tedious detail to the world about whether I am blogging, on Facebook or twiittering. I think I should write a bit of code to do my updates:

switch($site)
{
   case "Facebook":
      $status = "Kenny is blogging";
      break;
   case "Blogging":
      $status = "Kenny is twittering";
      break;
   case "Twitter":
      $status = "Kenny is on Facebook";
      break;
}

Finally, I have a lunch to attend before I start doing some market research.

Laterz.

We appear to have mixed feelings about Saab cars.

Aunty from down under left me this message on Facebook:

"Whooah matey...'good' and 'Saab' should only be used in a context like 'Gee that Saab looks good crushed into a solid metal block.' A GOOD midlife crisis is defined by cars like a Mazda RX8, or perhaps the MX5 at a pinch, not by yawns spelled Saab...sheesh mon, if you're going to have a MLC do it right!"

A tad harsh methinks. I wonder what he drives...

It sounds like Jo has had some issues with hers. Maest owns a Saab and has been a little critical of their reliability. Stan appears to be erring on the side of "no". From what I have read it sounds like up until about 2003, the 9-3s were a bit unreliable and after that they got their act together. I have always said that you should never buy the first model of any new car so that's no big surprise.

The rest of you have either been silently muttering to yourselves that Kenny has blown them again or have been as vocally enthused about the car as I am. Of course, if I was truly having a mid-life crisis, I would be looking at a BMW Mwhatever-they-are and be down to Mad Jack's of a Saturday evening.

In a network premiere style move (complete first), I am going to sleep on it for a couple of weeks. If there is one car with that mileage for that amount of money, there will be others, hopefully without the light colored interior which would not be well-suited to a Kenny. It will give me time to shop around for a decent loan, if indeed anyone is giving them nowadays. If we get into deflation, I might even get a better price. [Those words will have Stan seething.]

In other news, I have been unusually diligent this morning. I was out doing the grocery shopping quite early to avoid the great unwashed. After that I battered the crossword and I have just spent an hour or so preparing for something next week, paying an unKenny-like amount of attention to detail (like how God and Kenny are interchangeable? ;) ). I have an afternoon to kill now, followed by some football, followed by an audience with the Vanquisher.

I may be back depending on the footie. In the meantime, I feel a bit of last night's NCIS may be in order. A good fix of Pauley makes any afternoon bearable.

Every now and again, spending so much time blogging is justified. I have developed some great friendships with people I have never met.

Tasha amuses me no end. What started off as an exchange of chocolate at random has become quite the giggle as she drops a gem here and there. Her Facebook status last weekend had me in hysterics for a couple of days. She was always on a winner because she's journo and we all know my love of journos. I am still flattered to death that Tasha and Bryony drop by here.

Someone, who I will not out, has just sent me an email on the car subject:

"23mpg and Insurance Group 15-17.... The moths in this Skoda owner's wallet are definitely experiencing sympathetic restlessness .. the heart says yes, the pensioner's head says no... not the car, but the price, looks a bit cheap. Then again, it is winter and (according to the media) we are in a recession. You may find you owe it to Gordon and the country to buy it for the extra fuel duty alone.... :)...Have been considering a droptop myself last year, when my daughter's partner took us out in one on our wedding anniversary.. but that was a Bentley Continental...

I began looking at the hardtop convertibles, the one that seemed reasonable was a Mitsubishi, I think.... but I gave up as I could not afford to run 2 cars and it was no use for me and my PA and guitars...also, a rag top left on the street seems a bit of a risk..."

This kind of hit me more than he could have known. I don't have guitars to tote around but I do want a piano. Given I have no permanent residence at the moment and I know I need to find one (watch this space), I cannot buy a piano. I can, however, buy an electric piano. I have been in consultation with the Vanquisher on the subject for a number of weeks. I keep sending him links to what I'm liking and he keeps telling me I should shut the hell up and just buy one. I can see his point.

The big problem is that I have a choice: a new car and the associated bills or the electric piano (they are not cheap). I fear I cannot really do both with the added cost of running a house.

That's one to sleep on. I'm out with the Vanquisher tomorrow night, where I am sure he will play the "you're the Sultan of Bryn" card and say such financial woes are the problem of the proletariat. Naturally he is right. But for the time being, I happen to be a member of that club.

Back to the point though: the great thing about keeping your blog going is that people you don't know end up knowing you better than you do and every now and again, they make you think the way you should rather than in the direction you would naturally stray toward.

Thanks Tasha and Z.

The question is now whether I have gone to Stockport. Even I am on edge.

I am a man obsessed.

This is the problem.

I have tried ignoring it all day and have come home to find that I still had it open in a tab. I think love is too weak a word. Nothing says I am approaching middle age and the world is a bit pants more than a convertible hunk of gorgeousness.

My payments wouldn't go up any by buying it although I'm sure my tax, insurance and gas bills would. The alternative cars I would normally be looking at would be an awful lot more expensive on all accounts. This thing is totally ideal. It nearly transcends my love for Fiona Apple; for a start it won't dictate I become vegan.

When I last had a car moment, I turned to the two people I know who I felt sure would be the voices of reason and they let me down. I talked to Pater and once he had seen the car in question, he was all for it. I then called my much lamented estranged mate E because I was sure she would talk me out of it, only to find she had just spent a mint on a brand new car and thought I should aim a bit higher. I am so glad I ignored both of them. I could have been saddled up to my eyeballs in car debt. Instead I have an annoyance of a car loan, and buying this would not alter it significantly.

I have emailed the link to Pater. If he makes the appropriate noise, I will be there this weekend.

Only Maest tried to stop me. If I do this, it's all your fault.

Bonjour mah litteul plooms. Ah op yoo ave enjoy ze rossbeef on seunday weez zee poodinguh from Yorksheer (eet ees neussing lahk a poodinguh! - zey ar very stoopeed een yorksheer. Pah!).

Ah ave ze nouvelles fontastique. Ah ave won ze contest een Caen! Mah saucissons (zey ar med weez dook and oss) ar fammuss een ahl of fronce. Ah am so appee.

Zis meen zat I meust go at Londres next week for ze saucissons contest erropean. Mah saucissons ruhpresont ahl of fronce.

Apres ze contest we ave a beeg meel en celebrasseon. Ah am sat at zee ed of ze tabluh, coze ah am weening. Pour dezerr wee ave les poires la belle helene (per) an ze wetter ee breeng a small joog and ask "deus anniwon won ze soze creme anglaise". Ah say "Non! Tek eet aweh. Eet test lahk ma beuteum. Zee eeglish surly meelk ze little poossy cat to mek ze soze." Eet wahz very foony. Ahl ze restaurant ar laffing.

So ah catch ze trann a Londres next oo-eek. Mehbe ah veeseet ze queen ah? Mebee ah conquer er pour la fronce, lahk noppollion.

A la semaine prochaine mes amis.

Over the years I have not been very pleasant about our French cousins. In my defense, I have usually mitigated any wanton anti cheese-eating surrender-monkey jokes with an explanation of my disdain being aimed at the French quasi-communist government rather than the good people of France.

Dooblervay has emailed me to ask that I show some entente cordiale and allow him to guest post. In the interests of Anglo-French relations, I have reluctantly consented. I have no idea what the mad French bastard will say, whether it will be in English or French, or whether it will even be intelligible.

You have been warned, or should I say vous aurez été prévenu?

Give me one good reason why I should not drive to Stockport on Saturday morning and buy this.

Please.

Sorry I'm a bit quiet at the moment -- some work broke out in between blogging and I have a secret squirrel gubbins on the go. I've not much to say anyway so it would only have been waffle. That said, I have a couple of points to make:

» It is a universal truth that anyone who drives a Seat should have their driving license revoked (sorry Stan -- is your mobile a Seat? If so, you're exempt).

» A smallish, gingerish person from Southish who is part Scouse'ish might be amused by a turn of phrase in Bryony's column today -- "elf and safety". I giggled.

Depending on how this morning pans out, I may be back.

Well it's officially now the 1st of January 0 DO (During Obama). I don't know why but I felt compelled to listen to the inauguration speech on the radio on my way home. Earlier I had tuned in to extensive CNN Live web coverage of millions of people gathered to have a national orgasm in anticipation. It looked remarkably like the physical manifestation of the advice given to the chap in There's Something About Mary about having a pre-match one (if you will) so you're relaxed for the real deal. I know; it is a horrid parallel but my God, from the rampant hysteria Health and Safety must have mandated a pre-inauguration release, just so the emergency services were not overwhelmed by cardiac arrests and all sorts of seizures come the big moment.

I have no doubt that it is a big day for America and a big day for the world. I have no doubt that half the planet is sighing in relief that Dubs is heading back South and that the other half are either republicans or terrorists. I have no doubt that Obama means what he says although, as Bryony says, at times his inauguration speech did have the aura of speaking in tongues.

Maybe I'm a tad British about this. I don't believe in miracles and even when presented with hard evidence that something will be shiny, I wait until it is shiny before I gush about it. I think this particularly applies to politics. I guess I just don't buy his rhetoric yet. Bill Clinton came to power with the nation behind him then monumentally cocked it up in the first three months. I'm not saying Obama will (although it would take a work of utter genius to screw things even further into the dust) but there is always the possibility that the messiah might not turn out to be the messiah -- he might just be a naughty boy.

When the French start drawing parallels between Obama and Sarkozy, you have to wonder. I am told Dooblevay has an opinion on this.

I will away and continue to monitor the tantric inauguration day. I suspect a baby boom will be attributed to this day in American history.

You'll forgive me if I don't wave my underwear at the TV. I have standards.

I don't generally post spurious links (shut up!) and I am not a fan of Flash, but this is absolutely bloody amazing. I don't know how anyone has the patience to do that.

It struck me as I was hitting F5 for the umpteenth time this evening, that I have not inflicted any music on you all for a while. This is what I consider Regina Spektor's best tunage thus far.

Utterly batshit. Love it.

Update: Crapola. Reds score.

Update to the update: Kenny is right. Chant it as your mantra. 1-1.

Don't be fooled into thinking I'm writing this because I think you will be in the slightest bit interested. It's a self-indulgent little wallow that might distract Waaarty and Maesti from the fact that they will probably have dropped points this evening.

I can't remember whether I coined the term "the singing marshmallow" about Brian Ferry or whether Waaarty coined it about David Sylvian (ex-Japan and a mind-boggling number of others). Whichever, I followed Sylvian's career up until about 2000 when he fell off my radar.

The Vanquisher is too young. It is his only failing. He wasn't even a twinkle in his father's kneecaps when Japan were new-romanticizing their way around the world but independently of me, he has discovered Sylvian. Indeed he has discovered him to/from the point that I left off. He has lent me a copy of Nine Horses' Snow Borne Sorrow and I am working my way through it. Given that Sylvian is handicapped in my book due to him not being a batshit crazy female pianist, he has done very well because I am very impressed. Sylvian's voice appears to have improved with age. He hits notes with a degree of certainty that he never could as a young whippersnapper. For those of you who have half a clue who I'm on about, the Nine Horses material is very much along the lines of his first solo album Brilliant Trees but much more complicated. It's borderline jazz but not quite there. My only complaint is that somewhere along the line, he has replaced the Japanese flute and pan-pipes with saxophone and trumpet; there was a time that I could handle that, but nowadays it grates on me a little. I'm officially a curmudgeonly old bastard. I do think it is about the best thing he has done in years though. Well impressed.

I am now away to hit F5 for the next 45 minutes. Halftime and it's 0-0 at the Liverpool derby game. I don't want to be too smug too quickly but my prediction of two dropped points is looking pretty good.

Today's news brings the welcome return of Kenneth Clarke to the shadow cabinet. I say welcome not because of any fondness for Kenneth's political ability, but because we are one more step closer to having a Department of Kenneths which, of course, any self-respecting Kenny would endorse as a fundamental necessity in a time of crisis.

I have shamefully ripped the DOK from an old Spitting Image sketch where Margaret Thatcher is addressing the cabinet when Kenneth Williams pipes up. She asks who the hell he is. "Williams sir, department of Kenneths". To this day I audibly giggle when I think of that sketch. A moment of comedy genius.

The question is whether or not Ken Clarke is actually John Prescott in disguise?

I bit the bullet and installed Windows 7 beta. I am shocked to say that thus far I am very impressed. Naturally I have found a few bugs but otherwise, I have to say that this is about the best effort I have seen from Microsoft.

I skipped Vista on my Windows laptop because of the fights that I have had with it on my dad's systems and because from what I had heard, having just 1GB of RAM was not going to cut the muster. We took a quick peak on an old box at work and the amount of memory that the OS used after boot was about 300MB less than Vista (Vista clocks in at a whopping 700MB), so I thought I'd have a bash at installing the 32-bit version on my Toshiba laptop Pentium 4 with 1.2 GB of RAM.

For once in my life, I was quietly comforted by the fact that even though I wanted to trash the XP of old and start from scratch, it wouldn't let me. Instead it backed up everything before it did its worst. Its worst turned out to be nothing more than breezily installing the new stuff without trashing anything.

One of my biggest problems with Vista is that I knew what I wanted to do but could never find where to do it. Windows 7 seems to have fixed that. If you expand the control panel to show everything, you can pretty much home in on whatever you like. For example, I have a tiny little USB Bluetooth adapter which failed to work with XP. I tried to get XP to talk to my Apple Bluetooth mouse and there was a palpable air of futility about the whole exercise. Once I had checked that the Bluetooth adapter had been recognized under 7, I asked it to find my Apple mouse. Bing. Job done. Not only was the job done, but I can use my Apple "one button" mouse as a two button mouse. That was something I completely did not expect. A small victory but we know how Kenny is a big fan of the small victories don't we?

What else?

Well, it may be that I've trashed my old install (while being backed up pretty well) and am yet to clog up the whole shebang with nefarious programs but there is a sense of greater responsiveness. It feels crisper. It certainly looks crisper. I slapped AVG, Firefox and Thunderbird on there without any problems at all. You can see the direction that the designers were looking as they produced it -- Santa Clara County. In some respects they've outdone their Cupertino counterparts. Silly little mouse movements that you would not have ever imagined as being useful have become intuitive within a couple of seconds -- for example, drag a window up to the top of the screen and it maximizes. Very cute.

I have silly real life nonsense to contend with now, but I get the feeling that I will be playing with Windows 7 some more. I'm not going to be swayed back to Microsoft products anytime soon, but I think I give this an eight out of ten so far. I reserve the right to change my mind on the basis that Microsoft are very good at the "fur coat and no knickers".

Firstly, I am dismayed that I am no longer Tasha Kates. I really was enjoying that. When asked by a lass at the pub what my name was, I was just about to say Tasha Kates when the Vanquisher chimed in "What woman? Do you not know who you're addressing? This is the Sultan of Bryn." -- I added "But you can call me Kenny".

The lass in question was very pretty but quickly managed to establish that she had no ethics, no IQ and was generally a self-absorbed tedious oik so I kind of stopped listening as I so obviously do when I get bored. We were then assaulted by a lady who was out on her 50th birthday and had probably drunk her own bodyweight in vodka. She and her husband both worked at a local school dealing with kids at the bottom end of the achievement range. I say that because I have heard the words that they used to describe the function back in the seventies and that is where those words should stay. What I am trying to say here is that we actually interacted with non-party members last night; so much so that I have forgotten who Rob has added to The List. Rob, you'll have to remind me.

Right -- today I am considering installing the beta of Windows 7, just for shits and giggles. What do we think? Should we just do it and be damned?

Just saying...

You know, just in case you missed it.

As I paced the West wing of Royal Albert's Hall this morning, I noticed I wasn't feeling myself. I threw cake, cigarettes and coffee at the problem but there was still something not quite right. I felt a bit more aware than usual and had a compulsion to go interview the guy next door. I logged on to Facebook to distract myself and was surprised to find this:

(I guess having my name on there isn't too bad as the search engines won't pick it up).

Problem isolated. I am in fact Tasha Kates. This will explain the need to report on everything and the fact that I feel a lot more intelligent than usual. And I am *hot* and know it.

Poor Tasha must be gutted. Tasha, that funny feeling in your throat can be quelled by sparking up a Silk Cut Silver. However much coffee and sugar there is in your beverage, it is probably not enough. Double it at least. You've left your phone charger at work so don't waste time looking for it. That anxiety is because you haven't backed up your Macbook in a couple of days. You need to call at the gas station and the pharmacy at some point, you need to call Lauren and you're due at the Railway in Garswood later this evening to continue to plan for the revolution. If you feel like emailing Waaarty and Maest today about the continuous/discrete nature of the universe, be sure to make your theory as off the wall as you can. Other than that, have a nice day.

I may not want to go back to being me. I quite like this. I am now going to interview Mrs Albert before I leave.

I love Fridays. I love my local Starbucks even more.

I have just been to get a coffee. At the start of the year they gave me two books of coupons that give me 50p off every day in January. They gave me two because I go in at least twice a day. This morning it is a free extra shot day so rather than my usual vente four-shot cappuccino I have *five*.

Earlier in the week there was some research published by the University of West Anglia's Professor Khnob along the lines that people who drink coffee excessively (deemed 7 cups a day or more) are more prone to hallucinations. I call someone who has seven cups of coffee a day an amateur. I generally have hit that mark by around 10:30 on any given weekday. As for hallucinations, I might concur. For example, I believe that I saw some comments from a Frenchman which, of course, is utterly insane.

I do like a good The Fall reference.

Well, my new year's resolution to at least pretend to be sociable is being realized but three weeks into the new year. Tomorrow I am heading chez the Royal Albert Hall where a fine impression of Pinky and the Brain will play out. Saturday night will see the Vanquisher and I discussing "The List" down in the usual place. I am tabling a motion to add Ian Hislop to the "Pending" section. Rob? Thoughts?

After that, in the next couple of weeks, I will be heading down to the Smoke (Canary Frickin' Wharf) to beat up Muffty. We take turns as to who wins the inevitable fights that break out when we argue whose turn it is to pay for the drinks. It's rather convoluted but it has worked for us since we were 18. I then prove my masculinity by hammering him at pool although it has just occurred to me that I have not played a game in over 2 years so I might have to do a bit of practicing before I descend.

For me, this is being a borderline socialite. Hell, you're lucky to get two words out of me outside of the hours of 8:00-5:00. After that I retire to internalize my pathos and spit forth missives on here.

I'm chirpy this afternoon because of a mixture of smug satisfaction that another one of my cunning little schemes at work has paid off and the fact that I am blindly ignoring a panic button I know I will have to push tomorrow. I have it scheduled for 4:00 when it will be a case of lighting the touch paper and retiring to a safe distance; in this case just under 72 hours. Sometimes I hate my devious oik nature. Others I thank deities that I was blessed with such a gift of being brazenly manipulative.

In stark contrast to the dearth of any kind of victory in the work department today, I am enjoying myself immensely. Those of you who have known me for a seriously long time will also know a one time partner in crime, Muffty. I have just been on the phone with him. He now lives in Canary Wharf and I have just invited myself down there in the next couple of weeks.

I have also added him on Facebook, a process I enjoyed immensely as I had to talk him through the horrors (sic) of the user interface. Is every inhabitant of London so dizzy? If so, I have a great idea for a Facebook tech support line -- I could hire 4 years olds for two rusks a decade and clean up. I particularly loved the part when he read out "you have no friends....in common". I suggested he might want to think about that for a moment. And then I told him that he always has me so he shouldn't feel badly about the nasty Facebook programmatic jibe and that his wife probably tolerated him too.

I am chuffed to bits about being in touch again. He's a top chap and I look forward to seeing him.

Nothing cheers me up more than an old favorite dusting off their air guitar and hitting the airwaves again just after you've written them off for dead. Osama's back. It's been ages since we last heard Ozzie busting rhymes for the masses. It sounds like he's stayed true to his roots with that whole Jihad thing being a central theme. My source in Bora Bora reckons there's an interesting trio of backing goats doing mad dischords in the background.

As usual, I will be queueing outside Woolies Zavvi HMV at midnight tonight. One can only hope that this one is accompanied by another one of those comedy videos.

The British press are reporting some moonbat numbers that involve the freshly minted Manchester City FC and one Brazilian "playmaker" (an Americanism that ranks alongside normalcy and winningest in its utter illiteracy). It is reported that they are to offer AC Milan £91m for Kaka. To put this into perspective, that is nearly twice the price paid for Zinedine Zidane when he moved from Juve to Real Madrid. His projected salary, should he move to Eastlands, is £260,000 per week.

I cannot comprehend it. I was outraged when Utd paid £30m for Berbatov but in the madness that is football, it now seems quite a steal.

To say that a footballer earning a quarter of million quid a week is immoral is an understatement of galactic proportions. If this is "the market" talking, then it is absolutely no wonder that we're all recycling bog-roll in order to stave off the inevitable relegation from being a member of the G8 to being an amateur side in the G250.

I wonder what the die-hard City fans think.

We all know I have the attention span of a pickled newt don't we? I have the uncanny ability to lose a train of thought half way through articulating it. This is why my written skills are slightly better than my verbal skills. This inattention streches to pastimes. I have fads where I am interested in something and devote huge swathes of time to it. Then I drop it like it has never interested me until something reminds me that I am actually still quite interested in it.

The advent of the 1911 census going online has me salivating about genealogy again. I have 48 Gorners listed in Wigan. That is *way* more than my knowledge of them. The really cool thing is that after that date, I know people who are still alive who can fill in the gaps.

I think I'm going to start from scratch and ignore most of the existing data that I have and build backwards and forwards from the 1911 and 1901 censuses. This is going to be one enormous task although it does have the advantage of allowing me to be criminally antisocial while actually accomplishing something.

I cannot wait to get home and get started. This time I am going to use a proper tool rather than the Heath Robinson piece of junk that I used last time. This is going to be fun, fun, fun.

I apologize for the uncharacteristic zeal -- I fully recognize the requirement for me to behave like Eeyore sans enthusiasm.

Lest you wonder.

The List - the top 5 taking FULL priority (in order of importance)

Oddie
Minogue
Winslet
Clarkson
Marple (miss)

Below lies the melting pot of filth.
"Awaiting", if you will, a place on The List.
On a "first come, first serve" basis:

Henry Kissinger
Jonathan Ross
Michelle Malkin
Joan Rivers
Jade Goody
Bill O'Reilly


More to be added after the next meeting with K.

At the request of Kenny I have added the Winslet to The List.

Since the film she was given the award for is only released on the 30th of January, I believe they will be engaging in more red carpet falderal, especially since the film is getting such ill deserved attention and praise (okay..i'll admit I haven't seen the film nor will I see it when it's released, but Kate Winslet AND Leonardo DiCaprio? they're both asking for a dose of blunt force trauma with a scaled model of the Titanic.)

A red carpet ambush would truly be the way to send a strong message to every other actor out there who wants to turn on the water works, after a few hours of caning the champagne, just because they've won a piece of metal for pretending to be someone else. I know this might seem a tad extreme to some. "It's only an award acceptance!" I hear you cry. But do not be so quick to brush this idea aside. It will only take a handful of the right people and you'll see cultural standards shoot through the roof. Stick with me and Kenny on this, the sooner you accept it, the better off you'll be. If this is where it all begins then 'Revolutionary Road' is a rather fitting title, no?

The Vanquisher

I am happy to say that I have never seen anything with Kate Winslet in it. I am even happier since I heard her nauseating acceptance speech at the Golden Globe awards. Honest to God. That was eye-wateringly bad. I am once again embarrassed to be British.

During a new record low team meeting this morning I described Winslet as "gushing". Mi'learned colleague Fodder thinks that if you write the words Winslet and gushing in the same page, your web server will melt. This is my proof that he is, of course, talking bollocks.

Vanquisher -- add Winslet to the list, above Clarkson but behind Oddie and the Minogue.

I first watched Lost in Translation years ago. It kind of transports me back to my first time in Tokyo. I was in a God-awfully expensive hotel about a couple of miles outside of Lompigi (sp?). It was late, I was jet-lagged, and I had spent most of the night in the hotel bar, throwing back Saporo like it was going out of fashion. I met the most fascinating Australian girl and we whiled away the evening jabbering in a hazy state of fatigue, bewilderment and sake. I never saw her again but she must have had something special about her for me to remember her 15 years later. The people that you meet while traveling are by far the most fascinating part, whether they be locals or others who are as in awe of their surroundings as you are.

The film was a fantastic reminder of why I have wanderlust. Let the flight searches begin...

While I was harkening to Utd battering Chelsea this afternoon, I noticed (midst my ingestion of over a pound of potato pie with suet crust) that Bryony was online. I had to ask her who her team was. The response has crippled every ounce of faith I have in the world. Arsenal.

I have cousins who are Arsenal fans -- I don't speak to them. It will take counseling to get over this shock.

Right, I'm off to finish Lost In Translation. I hope your weekend was less stressful than mine.

I cannot resist pointing out that if Man Utd win their three games in hand, they will be top of the Premiership. Certain Dr Waaarts and Dr Maestros may not read those words with the same amount of glee that I do.

I am now researching tick bites because the Führer is convinced she has been bitten by one. I think we can say tedious is an understatement.

I am horrible.

For the second Saturday on the trot, the day has been more or less consumed by faux medical emergencies. My patience wore too thin. Midst a discussion about a conversation about my father, I lost it. I spend most of my life biting my tongue but occasionally something pushes the right buttons and my blood pressure sky-rockets. I know there is an argument that says you should question everything. I do not have the energy for that. I am happy to believe that in general people might know what they are talking about. Apparently Führer and Pater locked horns last night on the subject of physics. Führer worked two days in her life and didn't like it so never did it again, yet she spends her life becoming an expert on all things thanks to "the chap" on radio 4. "He said...". My father ran gasworks for 40 years; I think he knows his onions when it comes to physics. Apparently there was some dispute as to whether under-floor heating was economical or not. I have no idea what the finer points were but as a guiding rule, I would trust Pater's opinion simply because it is his area of expertise. He returns the respect by not questioning my ability to faff with computers. Führer started quoting "the chap" on the radio and my dad lost his temper. I can understand it because I spend most of my life silently shooting kittens when it comes to any moonbat theory she has to do with the phase of the moon influencing the time the paper gets delivered. I have still never summoned the courage to point out that the "quality" of the gas is absolutely squat diddly to do with the fact that sometimes things cook slower than others or that the same drug manufactured by a different company does not really have the opposite effect to its equivalent.

As with any altercation, there follows a medical emergency. I laughed the spat off this morning because it was too daft to countenance. This brought on the illness again. I called Mater and informed her that I was once again on death-watch. It was only then that I realized how serious the physics debate had become. I must confess that it riled me no end and I let rip. It's an awful thing to have to read the riot act to an elderly relative, especially when she has been so kind to me. Were it not for her, I would have succeeded in self-destructing. I tried to explain rationally that she might want to take my dad's advice when it came to anything to do with physics on the basis that he is the only person she knows who is qualified to any degree. Germanic expletives abounded as I was told that I was just like my father. I explained that insulting someone's professional knowledge is just plain rude; that it was like her telling me how to write code based on some wazzock on the radio's opinion. Needless to say the temperature rose and every frustration we have with each other spewed out. It was not pretty. All I can say in my defense is that I did not swear. I know I can be an arrogant git, but when I do it it's worn with a humility that is a kind of concealed wink. I never, ever believe my own hype; in fact I doubt if anyone doubts me more than I do. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be so uber-confident in your own abilities.

I have now ceased shaking with rage, but I think I may need to head out for the evening. There's a hotel down the road that costs about 20p. You'll find me there.

I have finally prevailed. A couple of weeks ago Apple issued an OS patch. From what I have read, I am lucky that it did not just brick my Macbook. All I got was a complete trashing of my Apache, PHP and MySQL installations. I am not joking when I say it has taken me hours and hours to get it back to the point where I can actually do something obscenely clever (sic) like open a database connection in PHP.

Bless 'em all. I love the MAMP (like LAMP but with a Mac) to bits but as with all things it has its foibles. My pet hate is installing MySQL. Every time I do it I find a new horror. I don't recall ever installing MySQL and having it work without some protracted battle with file permissions. The icing on this particular cake is that you have to be wiley. Permissions are not just at a file level, but directory. One wrong 5 in your chmod and you're stuffed (although I guess that is an OS thing). As for configuration, I am still baffled as to how PHP and MySQL interact. The MySQL daemon appears to be quite happy with one socket while the PHP insists on another. I am beaten by the levels of precedence of the various config files. I am happy to admit defeat because it reminds me that I am just human and should not even bother trying to solve the world's problems.

That said, once you have MySQL installed, it is an absolute joy to use. The Mac GUI that is available is a fantastic admin tool -- much better than the Linux ones I have seen. I never cease to amaze myself when it comes to databases. After I stopped being a developer, I worked at a company that wrote Windows to UNIX integration tools -- terminal emulators, PC X servers and ODBC drivers. Because I used to write X WIndows applications for a living (and because the PC X server was the life-blood of the revenue), I clung onto it at all costs and completely ignored the ODBC drivers. SQL was just a big ball of mental anguish to me. Nowadays I find myself recommending ways to structure databases even though I have absolutely no training in the field (crap pun unintended). Come to think of it, no-one ever taught me how to write code either but that is an aptitude, not a skill. Databases are not science; they are much more closely related to religion. You have to "feel" your way around them. Much like my skills in car diagnostics, everything I ever do is because it feels right rather than it being based on any kind of understanding.

The good news is that I am just that bit more wiley having fixed my horrors. The bad news is that now I get to put on my coding hat again. Is the world ready?

Well that was one rude awakening. I had great plans for the week in terms of easing myself back into it. No such bloody luck. The latter part of the week has been quite trying although my reasons for thinking some of it was trying are probably vastly different to most of mi'learned colleagues. I would elaborate but then I would have to gun down the whole of my readership, and I'm not really feeling that antsy today. I will take a deep breath, declare it Friday, get some nosebag and head off out with the Vanquisher where I will no doubt bore him rigid with Kenny's latest theory.

It's all very secret-squirrel at the moment -- probably not in the manner that those of you who know me might be thinking. Been there, done it, got the scars. Apparently there is a load of psychological mumbo-jumbo associated with this particular scenario which I have heard time and time again. I feel it is my duty as a human being to point out that the academics have missed out the "hilarity" phase, which unlike my colleagues, I am enjoying. It's not the fact that it is funny. It's more to do with knowing how the endgame will play out. I may be wrong but I'd be surprised (and probably not gutted) if I am.

C'est tout. Ich muss gehen auf der Railway apres le el nosebag.

Was that esperanto or is there not enough Spanish in there? I did try with "el".

I am in a blind panic.

It is the maternal unit's birthday on Saturday and I am completely bereft of ideas. What she really wants is a replacement sheepdog after her faithful yet puddled Evie shuffled off her mortal coil a couple of years ago, but the paternal unit cites the new furniture (along with the knowledge that Evie hated him with a passion) as being anathema to sense, so the dog is out of the question. To be honest I would love for her to get a new canine companion because I love dogs -- probably more than I love most people -- and they have the added advantage of keeping cats out of my way.

The point is that I need to order something from Amazon by 5:00pm tomorrow in order for it to be here on Saturday morning. Shops are not an option; I do not do retail anymore. More problematic is that I cannot really do DVDs or books because I covered those over Christmas. Between me and the rest of the family, we have done sheepdog themes to death. Books, calendars, sheepdog trial DVDs, fluffy toys etc. I even went so far as to order special Christmas sheepdog wrapping paper for her gifts.

I started writing this post a few days ago when I still held on to the belief that I may be inspired. We're now at the eleventh hour and I am still no wiser. I will, however, nick the description of Evie from the first attempt, just because you cannot imagine how mad her last sheepdog was:

"Evie was puddled; comical but demented. She was paranoid, neurotic, bad tempered and totally lacking in any kind of discipline. To give you some kind of idea as to the mindset of this dog, when she was about 12 months old she was out on her regular walk when she came across a discarded bag of chips. Before my mother could stop her, she wolfed down the majority of the chips. For the rest of her life, whenever she walked past that spot, she looked for chips for at least five minutes. Such was the intellect of the idiot. A similar thing happened in reverse. She once walked past a house where the window cleaner was up a ladder and it spooked her. After that she would never walk past that house again and ladders sent her loopy. The puddled git hated anything with wheels, fought with the vacuum cleaner on a daily basis, hated my father etc. If you got your head near hers, she would head-butt you (probably learned from watching me). As dogs go, she was a complete failure but my mother doted on her."

I wrote five paragraphs of why her last dog was a nonce before remembering it was me who rescued her from the home and took her to my mother. I appease myself by saying that I had left home when Evie arrived so I didn't get to train her, hence the appalling behavior.

So, what do you get the woman who wants for nothing other than a Border or Welsh collie? I really am stumped. Some of you know Athletico L (as she is oft refered to) -- any idea at all will be most gratefully received.

My new year's resolution is to be more sociable in a physical sense, rather than sit chatting online and blogging. I have been thrown a curve-ball at the first fence (I know, you all just live for my patented mixed metaphors don't you? Aunty calls them parsed participles.). Friday is the culprit. I could head over for a civilized dinner to see some people I haven't seen in ages. I could (voluntarily!) drive down to the smoke to see someone else I haven't seen for ages. Or I could set the PVR for the new series of NCIS and hit the local with the Vanquisher.

Given that this is the first week back at work, you can see where my instinct is taking me here. For some unknown reason, I have been up at the crack of dawn everyday this week and have been out of the house no later than 06:30. Even though we're still in a lull thanks to the holiday change-freeze, I have found enough to do in terms of background work, which has distracted me from any kind of sociability in the evenings (even online). I've taught myself javascript and dearly wish I hadn't; what a God awful pile of horror it is. Things that should be no-brainers require your mind bending into shapes that previously only ex-wives have managed to attain. I think javascript and I will be divorcing before we have even got to second base. The first date was horrendous and I am starting to feel like I should always stick with my first love, PHP, albeit she's a bit perfunctory.

I think I shall take a view on where to go tomorrow evening, after I have spoken with the Vanquisher. I fear the lad is going through some kind of twenty-something crisis. I received a text from him today asking me whether it was wrong to be strangely attracted to the gumf in IKEA. Naturally, I advised him that it was just his DTs talking and that he should find the nearest exit before he blew any credibility he has. The response came that he could see no exit. I offered the suggestion that he might want to set fire to something because exits always magically appear when something is alight but apparently all the stuff in IKEA is flame-retardant so his options were limited. Two hours later I got a text that implied he must have escaped eventually because he was in PC World lusting after a Mac. Knowing that he has probably got whatever pittance of a grant students get nowadays, I am fully expecting an IM from him saying he has blown a term's grant on the deposit for a Mac.

Alors apologies for the less frequent doses of trivia, but writing javascript and fixing the foobar that the OS X upgrade made of my Apache config has rather absorbed the time where I would normally have been either jonesing for more Alias or blogging. To give you some idea of how many spare minutes I have had over the last few days, I have had Lost in Translation cued up in the DVD drive since Saturday, ready to relive all those fantastic nights where you end up spending them with someone you have never met and will never meet again in your life in a very foreign Asian hotel, but I haven't had the will to push the play button. That is tomorrow evening's task.

It's Bryony day tomorrow and I haven't gushed about her for a while. Depending on how she does, I may well do. Her Facebook status this afternoon read "Bryony Gordon is failing to write. plus ca change.". I'm sure she'll do fine. Let's face it, she could write a whole piece character assassinating Kevin Pieterson and hating Manchester United and I would still give it a "Bless...".

I spent my lunch hour today thinking about automatically rating this backwater of t'interweb on the fly. So if I swear badly, it will rate it 18, mildly 12 and if, in the highly unlikely event, I don't swear at all, it will rate it PG. I have pretty much finished writing it, but I have to do a bit of tricky javascript to do the actual display of the rating in the right place. If I feel like it, I will finish it off tonight.

Once I have done that, I am seriously considering doing an on the fly smart-arse or geek rating.

Andy Burnham is my hero.

Have you noticed that whenever I have been involved in writing code, my literacy level plummets to being that of a 13 year old? It appears to be a common problem -- the Waaart suffers similarly when he is in code-frenzy.

Listen, it's the first day back at work, I'm tired, it took me 2.5 hours to get there and I have a lifetime's worth of bile to expunge, so prepare yourself for utter pathos.

First up, will the people of the UK please stop whining about the weather? It's a bit nipply, 'tis all. Other than having to de-ice the car and watching idiot motorists drive like lunatics, it has no perceivable impact on me. Maybe my time in Minneapolis and Chicago reset my internal thermometer. This is dry cold so it is entirely bearable. The damp is what kills you, not the cold. I had to switch radio 5 off tonight as they sat bemoaning the "arctic" temperatures and abject misery of it all. You'd think we were looking at -30, not -8.

Second, the collapse of a ceramics and crystal manufacturer is not a national disaster. It is not yet another victim of the credit crunch and no tears should be shed other than for the workers. Twelve months ago the company was half a billion in debt. They were bleeding cash at £50m a quarter. One of two things is in play here; either there is no market for such antiquated goods or the company has been mismanaged for years or both. Either way, much like the Woolies demise, the media have gone into apoplexy about the grand institution that is Waterford Crystal and Royal Doulton. Having romantic institutions such as Woolies and Wedgewood Waterfords is akin to keeping fax machines because they are cute; the world moves on and no matter how much we love the notion of a prestigious company, if there is no way to make money, sadly they go the way of many other, probably much more worthy, businesses. I mean would you still buy your music on vinyl? Hell, I almost refuse to buy CDs anymore.

I could go on and on tonight but I suspect some kind of rest would be well advised before I have to go do battle with the great unwashed again. Besides, Keith has just left a highly amusing comment -- it would creep me out if I didn't know him, but I kind of do, so it's okay. I'm just glad my mate Fruitbat doesn't know about the blog, because posting pictures like I have done would further cement, in his depraved mind, the thought that I'm just playing hard to get. And so it goes...

Back to work tomorrow. I wish I had taken some more time off seeing I have oodles of it.

This evening I watched the end of Batman -- The Black Knight. I had no idea that the actor who played the joker so brilliantly was the guy who killed himself not too long ago. Still, those that make millions seem to think their lives are so much more awful than everyone else's; an indulgence only the rich appear to able to afford.

I followed that up with an old Have I Got News For You which showcased the utter brilliance of Paul Merton as he completely leveled Clarkson. The episode scored multiple brownie points because Hislop looked the over-educated idiot that he is. The first time I watched that epsiode, I thought Kate Silverton didn't hold her own but in retrospect I think she did quite well. It must be hard when you're up against Hislop and Merton.

In keeping with the comedy theme, I pulled up Vic and Bob's All New Shooting Stars. If ever I need to laugh, all I need is Vic and Bob. Their humor is the gold standard in Kenny's world. I once met Bob Mortimer in the Star and Garter in Middlesbrough and he was the nicest guy you could ever meet. My old CEO went to the same school as Vic Reeves and his tales of Vic were hilarious.

Genüg. Ich muss schlafen.

To finish, a bit of a video from new year. This is the Flipflop and her brother, Mr Fashionista performing a highly (pun intended) unorthodox version of the Bee Gees. I am sorry to say that the guy to the right waving his feather boa is Pater.

Aunty in the comments below is an old friend of mine from the other side of the world. A long time ago, given that he is in Australia, I took to calling him Aunty (as in Antipodean) and he returned the love by calling me Po. Since those days, we have conversed under many pseudonyms and have probably written a dictionary of bizarre salutations between us. I think I once sent one of his customers a fax that had a sign off of 'Sheppy Whiskers' forgetting that it was not him. I seem to recall the customer/supplier relationship between me and the customer changed somewhat after that. Plus ca change...

Anyway, the addition of my Great Aunt to the commentary should increase the amount of merciless banter at my expense. I must away to sharpen my pins and create a new voodoo doll.

I know, I've not blogged for a couple of days. I bet you're all suffering the DTs (not the Daily Telegraph). In fact, I bet you've had to tune into Australian soap operas to get your fix of banality. Well I'm here to relieve that horrible burden for you all.

It's been quite the busy couple of days. For example, I had to stop watching the final series of Alias for a couple of hours last night to go nourish the Vanquisher. The blood level in his alcohol stream was approaching critical so, ever the good samaritan, I dragged him from his front doorstep to the boozer and poured some medicine down his neck. He protested strongly, but when you're that weak principles fall by the wayside.

More seriously, I have spent a thrilling morning at the A&E in Wigan. I was awakened by a comment that Die Frau Führer was calling an ambulance. I shot out of bed and insisted that I drive her rather than waste tax payers' money but she insisted back that she needed attention now, so I called the ambulance. It arrived and I apologized profusely to the crew. I felt awful that there might be better things for them to be doing. And then I felt awful that maybe the Führer might really need assistance and I was being a bit of a git. And then I felt awful because I knew deep down that this was yet another cry of wolf. And then I felt awful because her BP was 200/115 so there was something wrong. I continued to feel awful as she clumsily tried to articulate to a doctor that she did not feel right yet but could not pinpoint why other than "everything is wrong". She related her medical history in elaborate detail to a doctor who could be no more than 25. She is an awful patient yet expects doctors to magic a diagnosis of something horrendous but treatable and is thoroughly narked when they do all their tests and there is absolutely squat-diddly wrong. I then felt awful that what I had predicted would happen did happen and she was discharged.

For someone who was on death's doorstep this morning, she appears to have recovered remarkably well aided only by the administration of a couple of paracetamol. She had the audacity to ask whether I fancied calling somewhere for lunch. The answer was a resounding no.

I have a couple of issues with the whole deal. The first is that I judge everyone by my own poor standards. I have to be feeling like I'm dying before you get me to see a doctor, although I have become better at it over the last year. If I wandered down to the doctor's every time I had a twinge or headache, I may as well book a bed there. I still have no feeling in my feet and difficulty balancing but do I mention it? No. I don't bother telling anyone on a daily basis because it is tedious for them to hear such self-pity. I only mention it here to prove a point. My attitude to medicine is a tad cavalier but Füher is the opposite end of the spectrum. Somewhere in the middle lies a healthy medium.

I must away to cook her some lunch. I could have avoided this by taking her out for lunch but I'm not rewarding bad behavior You may all now privately or openly declare me an utter bastard for being so heartless.

I will be back.

Kenny has discovered Duffy. This might not be pretty.

No, really, I am *hot*

Tell me you wouldn't...