Fame, fame, fatal fame

All right, you tech savants, tell me why my Google strike rate has recently gone from about 890 to nearer 15,000? It doesn't appear to be much to do with this site (although thank you to those who have bigged it up, as the young people say these days). Nor can it be entirely down to the efforts of the only namesakes I've been able to identify: an official of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Vancouver; a Christian musician in Lafayette, Indiana; and a dodgy geezer in Winter Haven, Florida.

I've got a horrible feeling that this sudden upward blip in the online barometer is thanks to a whole load of books and other product that I've written over the last decade having just been exhumed from some mouldy warehouse in Slovenia or thereabouts, and being flogged off by various on-line remainder outlets. That, as has been remarked upon before now, is showbiz. Pick up my legendary Hear'Say biography if you get the chance. It's epoch-defining, and then some.

And, just to tidy up the tattered edges of a disjointed week, in which Small Boo tried to paralyse the iBook with her amusing voltage experiments, and one of the cats chewed the head off a tree snake, we have: some cool pics of the anti-Thaksin demo in Bangkok by Richard Lloyd Parry of The Times, who was decent enough to link to CS in his blog on Thursday; a guide to making your trip to the salad buffet more efficient; dogs dressed as bees; Toby Litt on his Winona crush (but still no clear explanation about why he can't extrapolate his genius for short stories into a decent novel, but that's another thing); The Curve has tagged me, a challenge to which I will respond after a little more agonising; conclusive proof that Americans can't play baseball for toffee; pay-per-view Lennon seance; yet another bloody Smiths not to reform shock horror; on the same lines, Morrissey has a "huge Charlie Brown parade float head", according to Douglas Coupland; and here's a fun piece about the crisis in American cheerleading by Steven Wells, who was the foul-mouthed Trotskysist spleen of the NME in the days when they had one or two readers with a vague idea of who Trotsky was. I wrote him a stroppy letter once (this was in the analogue era), accusing him of plagiarising me in a Channel 4 documentary. He phoned me (slightly less analogue, but still a quaint concept these days) and told me to stop whingeing. Then, as far as I could deduce, he tried to get me to join the SWP. I like him.

God, if there's one thing worse than name-dropping, it's C-list name-dropping. People who used to be NME hacks? People who used to be Tory MPs? Next, I'll be talking about the time Peter O'Brien (who used to be Shane in Neighbours) asked me if I wanted a game of pool. Nah, the self-promotion ends here, with a piece I've done for Alistair Fitchett's sublime Tangents. Alistair's been doing this kind of thing for longer than most of us and, if anything, it's the eclectic passion (Smoosh! Pipettes! bicycles!) and wry melancholy (builders!) of his site that finally persuaded me to get off my tusch and throw Cultural Snow together. So it's all his bloody fault.