Tear him for his bad verses

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

But surely that also applies to those who rage against the review? I know, somebody read this post back to me in a few months’ time...

PS: And look! A respectable reason for non-gynaecologists to read Playboy!

The ambassador's faulty reception

Harry Enfield suddenly finds himself reinvented as the Bernard Manning de nos jours:

These days it seems as if every government, every religious body, every charity has someone on the payroll whose sole purpose is to watch the telly, keeping an eye out for stuff by which they might advantageously be offended. The latest culprit is that monster of depravity Harry Enfield, whose show Harry and Paul has aroused the wrath of the Philippine ambassador to the UK, Edgardo Espiritu, with its allegedly racist depiction of a Filipina housemaid...

Full thing here.

Eeyores of the world unite

There are numerous good reasons to purchase Shaggy Blog Stories: a Collection of Amusing Tales from the UK Blogosphere, the book that Troubled Diva and chums have thrown together in record time. Above all, it should raise a decent sum for charity, under the auspices of the hugely successful Comic Relief brand. Not only that, it contains contributions from many fine bloggers, including wotserface and thingy and oojamaflip and the other one. And, of course, it deserves success simply because of the effort that must have gone into such a project. It's almost a year since I signed the contract for my book (Welcome to the Machine: OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album, and I mention that only as part of my ongoing experiment to track the correlation between online mentions of a book and Amazon rankings, honest) and the bloody thing's still not in the shops yet. Props to The Diva. And respeck. And, um, t'ing.

However, for all the success that will deservedly cascade upon the Shagtastic tome, I worry that it excludes an important, but overlooked minority within the blogosphere. Those of us who aren't blessed with the amusingosity gene; who can only develop a red nose if we leave our antihistamines at home; who know only too well the dreaded Tumbleweed Moment. Just as the blogiverse is blessed with jesters and wits, it also has space for those of us whose talents lie elsewhere: moroseness; complaining; grumpiness; pessimism; decomposing appendages; and, as the lovely Misty so rightly commented here only the other day, cosy, posturing intolerance. Imagine a bound volume containing the finest examples of such ball-aching misery. Could it not shift, ooh, tens of copies?

So, anyone up for it? Sadly, in the absence of an umbrella organisation (anyone for Curmudgeon Relief?) we may have a more uphill struggle on our hands than the chroniclers of jollity and japery. But we're used to such Sisyphean drudgery and frustration. I don't think we can hope to match the industry and enthusiasm of the Shaggy Bloggers - indeed, I reckon such a thing would be rather against the whole spirit of the venture. So, if we're really after a gimmick, perhaps this could aim to be the most ill-conceived, ill-tempered, protracted and ultimately unsuccessful charity blook project of all time.

Although, knowing my luck, I'd probably arse the whole thing up.