"And then he said..."

David Sutch | Eddie Guerrero | Kirsty MacColl | Stuart Adamson | Glenn Quinn

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Saw this today and wanted to pass it on to you all:

Please accept without obligation, express or implied, these best wishes for an environmentally safe, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, and gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday as practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice (but with respect for the religious or secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or for their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all) and further for a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated onset of the generally accepted calendar year (but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures). The preceding wishes are extended without regard to the race, creed, age, physical ability, religious faith or lack thereof, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishee(s).

The downside of being away for a while and largely out of contact with the world is that you miss the things that happen in your absence.

In this case, the awful news of the death of Eddie Guerrero from heart failure at the age of 38 on November 13th.

The Sun's wrestling columnists put it best:

People who don't know wrestling, won't know what Eddie meant to us. But this is our Princess Diana and John F Kennedy moment rolled into one.

Eddie was - until late in his career - an underappreciated overachiever, a skilled showman who finally got the recognition he deserved from management when they could no longer ignore the level of support he got from the crowds (this is an excellent retrospective of his life.).

At one stage in his career he suffered from drink problems and became addicted to the prescription pain-killers he was taking to allow him to work through a series of nagging injuries, but by the time he died he had overcome these demons and was days away from celebrating his fourth anniversary of being “clean”. With horrible irony, it appears that on the died he died he was due to tape a bout that would have ended with him winning a world title for the second time in his career.

Following Wrestlemania XX, where he successfully defended his first title in a match that was at times thrilling, at times dramatic and at times hysterically funny, I pretty much stopped watching wrestling. After watching that show's end, where Guerrero and his long-time friend and colleague Chris Benoit celebrated with their championship belts in the centre of the ring as tickertape and streamers rained down on them, I figured nothing would ever be that good again.

Seems I was right.

Firstly, a public service announcement:

From time to time I've had cause to mention that I'm a fan of the New Orleans Saints - don't ask why, I'm not entirely sure myself.

The Saints (true to form) made a slow start after Hurricane Katrina, with owner Tom Benson initially seeming to see it as an opportunity to carry out what has long been suspected to be an ambition of his: to relocate the team in San Antonio, Texas. (For those more familiar with the British sports scene, what happened to Wimbledon FC / the Milton Keynes Dons over here is a lot more common over there, where sports teams are privately-owned franchises at the mercy of an owner's whim.)

Things have stabilised somewhat after that sticky start, however, and the team belatedly set up a Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. I emailed them a week ago, after making my donation, to ask if they had any graphics that could be used to link to it: no reply. Still, at least it exists and at least it looks like some of the home games will be played in Baton Rouge - I sincerely hope the Superdome is demolished and replaced. How could you ever celebrate a touchdown there again, knowing what was happening on the same spot in the aftermath of the disaster?

Anyway, here's a link. With a graphic adapted by myself from their site, since they couldn't be bothered to email back. Do donate - they take PayPal.

Now, other stuff.

I think I've figured out why I'm writing so much less in this journal than I used to. It's not that I can't think of things to say - I often think 'must blog that when I get a moment'. It's because the work I'm doing at the moment involves writing. In the same way that I lost the enthusiasm for browsing through shops while I was working in one, I can't really find a lot of fun in carefully-honed prose here when I'm doing it at work - even if it is only two days a week. Which is a shame. On the plus side, www.andthenhesaid.com advances in leaps and bounds, after stalling for more than three years while I worked on maintaining people's websites for them. Go figure.

I've been going to the gym most days, and enjoying it. Already I've noticeably lost a few inches, which is good. And I don't come back completely wrecked, unlike how I used to be wiped out for hours after I went running. We've also joined a dance class there, as brilliantly recounts. And I must remember to write a post about it all, provisionally entitled changing room buttocks and dance class Jezebels.

Actually, I fear a mid-life crisis may have visited me a few years early - not only have I joined a gym and bought an iPod, I have also been hoovering up the albums on the Mercury Prize shortlist. Surely there's no hope when you start getting into pop music at my age? (Actually, there's probably no hope when you still use phrases like 'pop music' - I'll be calling people 'daddio' next.)

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my capsule reviews of the ones I've bought:

Employment, Kaiser Chiefs

Thumping great wodge of catchy noise - very difficult to avoid jumping up and down to, which is embarrassing on the Tube. Reminds me of when the Wonder Stuff first appeared. Brilliant.

The Magic Numbers, The Magic Numbers

A bit of a disappointment - a couple of strong songs but the rest start to sound the same and go on forever. Everything's written by the singer - I predict future court cases over royalties.

Eye to the Telescope, KT Tunstall

Her performance of Black Horse and the Cherry Tree on the awards show was mesmerising, and the rest of the album is nearly - but not quite - as good. Reminds me a bit of Tracy Chapman - I wasn't surprised to hear she'd lived in the US for a while.

Arular, M.I.A.

I can't stop listening to this - it's a mix of so many styles, the music is sparse but assured, and the vocals & lyrics stay just on the right side of cocky. Like hearing the Soulsonic Force for the first time, with everything from Kraftwerk to bhangra thrown in for good measure - all served up with an attitude that'll be instantly familar if you live in west London.

X&Y, Coldplay

A self-conscious, constipated dirge of an album. Speed of Sound is a great song, but that's about as far as it goes.

Stars of CCTV, Hard-Fi

Constantly surprising - gives the impression it'll be music by chavs for chavs, but there's a lot more to it than that. Sounds a bit like the Clash in places. A pleasant discovery and rather catchy, but the song called Feltham is Singing Out is factually inaccurate - Feltham doesn't sing, it whinges.

Looking ahead to November, when we plan to withdraw for the entire month and spend it writing, I'm starting to flesh out the plans for my NaNoWriMo entry. (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated - write 50,000 words in a month by ignoring questions like quality. You can always edit them afterwards, the point is to break the mental block about getting words onto paper by not worrying about whether they're any good.)

My effort's going to be about this guy who's on his way back from a fancy dress party, see? And he rescues this girl from attack, right? Only afterwards he realises he knows her and runs off all flustered without being recognised, as you do, but the CCTV and cameraphone pictures just show this mysterious masked man in a cloak coming to the rescue and leaving without saying who he is. So suddenly there's a huge media frenzy about superheroes and costumed crime fighters and the guy thinks, hell, that was kind of fun, why not do it again? But it all goes wrong, 'cause it always does in novels, 'cause otherwise there wouldn't be any point to them, would there? And then -

Well, and then I have to sit down and actually write it. I'm torn between two possible titles - Call Me Mr Happy and I'm Here To Make You Smile. Could be fun. Could be a nightmare, of course. But it could be fun. The possibility exists, right?

And I'll try to write more here, now I know why I'm not.

Despite being a would-be writer, the owner of a Triumph Spitfire, and the possessor of a certain amount of sexual experience, I can honestly say the following comparison had never occurred to me and, even if it had, I certainly wouldn't have been moved to commit it to paper:

Carburetor breast fantasy wins bad writing contest - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Microsoft analyst has won an annual contest celebrating bad writing by comparing fixing carburetors to fondling a woman's breasts.

“As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual,” went Dan McKay's winning entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

McKay, 43, of North Dakota was said by organizers on Thursday to be visiting China “perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.” He wins $250 (142 pounds).

Fortunately, the competition these days attracts spoof writing that's meant to be bad. At least, I hope it does.

The California San Jose State University contest challenges entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels and has attracted entries from around the world for 23 years.

It was inspired by 19th century novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” with the now immortal words, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

San Jose State English Professor Scott Rice said that judging the contest “is a hoot.”

“By and large the entries are submitted by serious readers who have a notion about what is good and bad writing. That is what is heartening,” Rice said.

Heartening it may be, but after that I shall never grease the nipple on my rod end with an easy mind again…

Well, I've read the damn book and am now suffering a severe case of Harry Potter indigestion, to the extent that I don't want to see it or hear mention of it for the next month. At least.

Beloved Other Half, of course, is eager to discuss it in depth.

It's also already clear that the areas of the story we're interested in are wildly different, and I got a lot more satisfaction from the bits I'm interested in that she did from hers. This is likely to colour quite dramatically whether or not we think the book a success.

Oh - and we seem to disagree fundamentally about the true motivations of a particular character. So things could get a bit turbulent here for a while…

Busy night, I suppose. Kingston was a madhouse - the pubs emptying boozed-up lads and short-skirted slappers out onto the street outside the bookshop, while inside gleaming-eyed parents tried to pretend they were only there for their face-painted offsprings' benefit. Endless trollies stacked with the two different versions of the book, the brightly-coloured children's cover and the sombre adult cover. A beaming Borders spokesman braying into a mobile phone about the success of the evening. Small girls in cloaks or Hogwarts uniforms looking tired and - as the night wore on - increasingly fractious. Bookshop staff dressed in wizard costumes that could surely only have been designed by someone who wished them ill. A queue downstairs that snaked away from the tills and then three times around the main body of the store. A queue upstairs that was less frantic, less claustrophobic, and considerably shorter - but far, far slower as there was only one till at the head of it rather than the half a dozen downstairs. And everywhere people clutching green-jacketed books, stopped in their tracks, standing and reading as if hypnotised into doing so.

And since we got home we've read a little, eaten, read a little, stuck photos up on Flickr, read a little - not desperately trying to finish the book in one sitting, but grazing it - taking time to chew it over where last time around we gulped down great chunks of it, until we had each read its 766 pages in a single weekend, but had been left with no clear idea of what we'd just read. Not so this time - we're taking it easy…

There's photos up on Flickr here - I'll add some to this post later, at the moment Flickr's down and I can't.

A busy couple of weeks of work is now over - probably - as the project I was on seems to have collapsed, at least from our point of view. Such is life - at least most of it involved working at home for me, ideal in this weather. I'm not precious about my work, I have no problem with two weeks' worth of writing being wasted so long as I get paid, but I would object if two weeks of commuting went the same way. Even without the bombs.

Plenty of loose ends to pick up on Monday, but until then work goes on hold as we're off on a midnight rendezvous tonight, one which might tie us up for much of the weekend.

Yeah, I admit it, we're joining the middle-of-the-night bookshop queue to pick up a copy of Half Blood Prince. Have to say though, we're not terrible excited about it. Actually, we're very ho-hummish at the moment and if Beloved Other Half hadn't paid for it months ago we probably wouldn't bother.

Dunno why - maybe the bubble's burst?

Went into town last night for a meeting of the London Comedy Writers' Group, which was, as you might expect, a right laugh. First one I've been to in months as the meetings used to clash with my old shiftwork. After a lot of useful training exercises on how to brainstorm new joke and sketch ideas, we fell into discussing whether the TV (and movies) of our youth was actually as good as we remembered it being.

We decided that the new Dr Who had been a resounding success - which the BBC will doubtless be relieved to learn - and that it had struck a valuable blow for writers against the dominance of reality TV. Then we decided that Sapphire and Steel & Dougal and the Blue Cat were still as scary as they'd ever been, but the Tomorrow People had not aged well. However, we failed miserably to reach a consensus on Ghostbusters.

So now I'm off for a week or so in a tent, because we used to enjoy that sort of thing when I was 15 years younger and considerably less creaky. The tent we're using dates back to my days in the Boy Scouts, and may actually be 25 years old. It's so small that I only fit into it diagonally, and if I sit cross-legged on its floor my head pushes up against the ridgepole.

So we should be in for a fun week…

So Mark Owen won Celebrity Big Brother… I'm kind of glad, although I wanted Anne or Sue to win at the start. When they first entered the house, it was like, here are five C-list celebrities and one person you'd forgotten ever existed… and that was Mark Owen.

Once again, that little voice is nagging at me… “Go on… send off for an application form… what harm can it do? You don't have to return it… you probably wouldn't get in… so where's the harm in getting a form?” Nope, I have to be strong and resist :o)

Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said the best way to deal with temptation is to give in to it?