Read early, read often...

That dear misguided fool Jonn Elledge is the official New Statesman blogger for the 2008 US election (or 'Feeshul Lection Blogger' as shouted aloud by a newspaper vendor in Princes Street).

Go to http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/america-decides-2008 and read/add the feed to your blog reader.

Remember - only Jonn Elledge stands between you, and America placing Sarah Palin one elderly and unwell Republican away from the Presidency.

A lazy code monkey speaks...

Hmm, my last post about Goodnight, Sweetheart seems to have upset Firefox in some way - or at least it doesn't display properly in FF 1.5 (although it's fine in IE6). I could be industrious and hunt down the errant line of code, but I thought I'd settle for lazy and just post this pointless post in the hope that that'll solve the problem.

If it still looks odd can you let me know?

"Home of the brash, outrageous and free"

A couple of the best blog posts from Londoners regarding the events of last Thursday, from Mark and Liadnan.

Nothing need, I think, be added...

Like some kind of pervert photfit

It's just been pointed out to me that the fact that my blog username is ostensibly that of a girl called Iris is, well, a bit dodgy. This is particularly the case, apparently, as I am not in fact a young girl who likes kittens and ponies but a receeding-hairlined, spectacle-wearing 35 year old man who collects Doctor Who books and thinks When the Boat Comes In constitutes great TV. If only I was a long-distance lorry driver or a member of the US Army I would, I'm told, be a poster-boy for internet grooming.

Mybe I should change my username to Big Bad Hank or something...

Blogs are not islands

Well that's a bit strange.

I was thinking on the way home last night how nice it was that you could publish a blog, make all of your innermost thoughts theoretically available to anyone who cared to read them, and then by the simple expedient of sending no-one the link, have the entire thing exist invisibly in public view. The fact that it's written as though there were an audience does, I think, make an invisible blog even more pleasant to write (as an example, the list of lyrics on a t-shirt below contains one lyric from a band I was in so no-one will possibly know it, but that doesn't matter since no-one was ever likely to read it).

Anyhow, having decided that I rather liked the fact my blog was invisible, I came into work today and thought I would indulge myself by writing a fairly pretentious thought I had in the car this morning on my blog - only to find that the little counter thingy claimed that I'd had a dozen different people reading the bloody thing over the past day or two!

Which, of course, makes the entire exercise somewhat different, and means that - as just one example - my pretentious theory regarding the links between Tracy Chapman's song 'Fast Car' and Gwendoline Brooke's poem, 'We Real Cool' will just have to stay under my hat.

I may as well put a link on my own webpage now, I suppose...

Oh, and hello anyone (unexpectedly) reading this

Obi Wan Kenobi visits a car shop

Part of my life away from this blog involves trying to ensure that my website stays at the top of the Google charts for certain search terms, such as Paul Magrs and Iris Wildthyme. Fortunately they're not exactly common names, so it's not really rocket science.

However, over the six months or so the site's been up, I've noticed all sorts of esoteric search terms leading to me, including the following which (I have to assume) led to disappointed readers viewing my non-pornographic, sf-oriented pages and which will now hopefully be directed here instead.

• ice cream tattoo fat
  
• short story murderer inside the house at the end
  
• she squirts
  
• obi wan kenobi visits a car shop
  
• batman robin slash fiction
  
• faking a bus pass
  
• catastrophes of the sixties
  
• neckwear worn by fred from scooby doo
  
• britain france channel tunnel how long
  
• dalek slash robot come
  
• anais nin come as your madness party
  
• significance of beads through the sixties
  
• emma peel slash
  
• spiritual leader beatles sixties
  

I'm particularly taken with the whole concept of Dalek slash fiction...