In any case, there's very little room to put a cloud in, since my blogroll's now so vast that it sometimes pushes the additional matter further south than the last post that appears. Of course, that may be because my recent posts tend to brevity and droll aperçus, rather than the sprawling rants about Deleuze and Douglas Coupland and Classix Nouveau that were once my stock in trade; in fact, this may turn out to be the longest post I've written in months. And I also haven't worked out how to compress the archive into neat little six-month chunks (see above Luddite whinges). Any conceptual cumulus would almost certainly find itself down among last week's posts, with the Technorati (pah!) widget.
In any case, there's little point, because I don't think the most common tags here will come as any great surprise to someone who spends five minutes perusing the site. The big hitters are: Comment is Free (which doesn't give much idea of content, I know, so there's a rough-and-ready cloud for my CiF articles here); music; blogging (ooh, how meta); Thailand; books; film; words; stupidity (hurrah!); TV; writing. Radiohead and Baudrillard both make it into double figures, which I probably didn't expect when I started blogging; neither Morrissey nor Murakami does, which would also have been a surprise back in 2005.
But the real fun comes with the little tags - those that would barely be visible in a cloud. So let's hear it for the stealers of scenes, the stand-in rhythm guitarists, the second assistant dolly grips, the tags that have appeared once and once only on CS:
419; 9/11; aesthetics; Alan Bennett; anagrams; anarchy; anniversaries; anthropology; Austen; bastards; Beatles; birthday; blandness; BNP; Borat; Borges; Brecht; Bret Easton Ellis; bureaucracy; Burroughs; Chasms of the Earth (remember that?); chocolate; colours; consumerism; creationism; creativity; Deleuze; delusion (interesting conjunction there...); design; Diana; DIY; DLT; DNA (even better one); Don DeLillo; drink; drivel; Duchamp; e-mail; editing; embarrassment; existentialism; expat; explosions; fame; fashion; feminism; footwear (thinks of something smartarsy to say about Sex and the City, thinks better of it); freebie; gardening; glue; health; honours; Hornby (middlebrow midlife I think, not trains); hypocrisy; ice hockey; illness; inconsistency; industrial action; Jeffrey Archer; Jimmy the Hoover; jobs; jokes about astronauts; jokes about dentists; knob gag (so there's this astronaut and this dentist, and one of them gets out his...); law; lesbians; log-rolling; marketing; masculinity; maths; memories; mental health; metagoogle; Miles Davis; mime; mistakes; Modernism; money; national identity; Nazis; neoblogs; nephews; nightwear; NIMBY; nocturnal idiosyncrasies; Nordic pop classics; opera; Orwell; pants (possibly my favourite word in the whole world); Pelevin; Philippines; photography; pigging out; pith (fruit? helmet? taking the?); post-hippy self-indulgence; prevalent misconceptions; pudding; questionable taste; quiddity; quiz; quiz shows; recycling; redemption; Russell Brand; Russia; sabotage; Seijun Suzuki; self-knowledge; self-promotion (slightly more abashed than normal); sense of humour failure; shpeech impedimentsh; Situationism; smoking; snoring; social apartheid; spotty virgins with too much time on their hands (trolls, I think); Star Wars; strained Miltonic analogies; strange combinations of racial stereotypes; Syd Barrett; synergy; tat; teacher; testosterone; This Life; Toby Young; Torchwood (was going to make a joke about recycling, redemption and Russell Brand, but this one conjures up a more eye-popping image); towels; trivia; trousers; truth; university administrators with amusing names (the legendary Drummond Bone just got a knighthood, btw); up-its-own-arseness; upgrade; weather; weight loss; Wikipedia; Zadie.
The last of which occasionally has me waking up in the middle of the night wondering over and over: "Talent or cheekbones? Cheekbones or talent?" Neither of which, you will notice, have I used as a tag. Yet.
