I shall persevere with the McCann Headline Saga until it goes away. But seeing as the headlines are so easy to create as all you need is someone to express an opinion in ‘inverted commas’ and hey presto (but not Fay Presto the transexual megician) instant new story! Today it’s a bit silly:

Surely the Express misses the fundamental point of an incinerator? Whatever next? Are they going to search every wardrobe in Portugal for the portal to Narnia?

I have a scary picture and a song to go with it, on mp3.

I had forgotten how much I love that song.

Tonight I am mostly reading a magazine.

Yes, I am a geek.

See?

McCann Express Front Page Marathon: Day 50!

So are The Express saying that the lack of development in the case is now just a ‘mystery’ and not actually a news-void after all? How will they report on it tomorrow then? I’m so so so so bored of this now but I feel obliged to keep shoving them on here until we get a real headline in the craphole of all crappy tabloids. Still, those naughty foreigns, eh?

I’ve been catching up with my comics, inspired by fishing battered graphic novels out of behind the shelves in that section at work. I thought comicbook nerds respected their precious things but I must be mistooken. Bah!

X-Factor is in fact the best current Marvel mutant book. Oh yes it is.

I forgot to mention a certain person getting an award. Do I mean me or do I mean her?

Or do I mean both? At least French and Saunders will be pleased.

My bus journey today was made bearable by a certain New Zealandy band and their adventures on BBC Radio audio CD. Coming next week: a TV show on BBC Four:

I bet everyone’s sick of the trailers now. Not me.

Oh yeah, the Dave thing?

UKG2, which was UK GOld 2 if I am not mistooken, is coming to Freeview (so chavs like me can watch it) and being rebranded as ‘Dave.’ I am not making this up. Look!

October 15th if anybody cares. More new old comedy.

Moment Of The Day: Explaining the ‘buy one get one half price’ offer to a confused woman who thought buying only one item would lead to a single half price purchase. She happily wandered off to choose a second book, returned to the till and then got bewildered when told the combined price. “I thought it was buy one get one free!” she uttered, before going off to torment another shopkeeper.

I love how useless tabloids can make a headline out of a string of words that someone said to someone else and present it as fact. Take today’s marvellous Daily McCann, sorry, Express:

Hurrah! She is innocent*!

It was back to the poxy public transport hatred today when the morning bus went before it was supposed to and the afternoon bus drove past me just before I got to the stop, 5 minutes before it was due. It was probably full of chavs and ganstas wiv da latest ringtones and my newly-honed death stare would have undoubtedly left a high body count… so it was back to the tube station for a slow journey home with chavs and gangstas wiv da latest ringtones. My death stare proved faulty so no casualties were recorded but can someone please explain why you would pay good money to add a song to your phone that plays when somebody phones you when surely the point of a phone ringing is to answer it? Gangsta Number One kept letting it play for a bit before doing the “yo wassup?” and’ting thing. How very cliched. I bet at least one of the three calls he took in the ten minutes that I was attempting to death-ray him was from his mummy, asking him what he wanted for his tea.**

And meanwhile in the recent past at my conference…

I love Mrs Doyle. I love Pauline McLynn. Completely potty plus lots of free champagne so a great time was had. She has a blog, you know you want to visit it.

Moment of the day: Woman shopper standing near the bottom of the staircase on the lower ground floor (with door leading to the street) shouts rudely “Where are the stairs to go downstairs?” which baffles everyone as there is nowhere of the downstairs variety to go from there (unless my Batcave has been completed). When informed that the only lower floor would be under the ground she looked a bit sheepish but did not apologise for the random shouty interrupty questioning. Maybe she was a mole, or some other woodland creature, dressed as an impatient old woman. Stranger things have happened.

* said somebody to somebody at some point somewhere so it must be true.

**I think it was fish fingers.

A new day, the same old newspaper nonsense…

I think the silly police need to invest in better cases or else their luggage is going to get mucky.

Gordon Brown is giving away my money to the people in the infinite queue for the “don’t panic!” bank? Cheeky!

Can we have some new news please?

I’ve gone all acousticy this week. New albums arrived in the post from Passenger (wobbly dancing man with the stalker song, remember?) and Turin Brakes (who have a song called Stalker). Both very nice, everyone else has already said things about them though.

Turin Brakes: Stalker video that I posted the other week. The one with the scary lady!

Passenger: Stalky song video that I posted the other week too. The one with the wobbly dancing!

I went to another hotel and had another free drinks bonanza and another social whirl. But this time it was for my job and had added comedy icons that I could meet and greet…

I appear to have had a stroke. The shock of meeting Mister Harry?

More on that tomorrow when I have done all the work I have to do at home.

Plane crashes into runway yesterday.

At least 80 people killed.

Surely, thought I, this would knock the newsless McCanns saga off the main Express headline?

Ha!

Planecrash takes over the ‘free camper van’ box. McCanns holding on.

Like Sophie Ellis Bextor once sort of sang, it sure is a f**ked up world.

I’m off to a conference “from hell.” *

*in Russell Square actually. That comment might make sense tomorrow.

It’s Monday and I am not here. I’m at that thing which I may tell you about tomorrow. So here’s a meme, via New Planet who probably found it on MySpace as it has questions about crying.

Q: First thing you did this morning?
Ached and swore.

Q: Last thing you ate and drank?
The last of the chocolatey nuts and a cup of tea. So original.

Q: Do you have anything bothering you?
A painful toe.

Q: What’s annoying you right now?
Some meme deja vu.

Q: Do you support long distance relationships?
Yes I am there every Saturday with my scarf and whistle shouting “come on you long distance relationships.”

Q: Is there a person who is on your mind right now?
No more than usual. Why is this question always in these things?

Q: Do you think that that person is thinking of you too?
Probably. Me or cheese, anyway.

Q: Where is the last place you went?
That posh hotel in the countryside.

Q: Do you look like your mum or dad?
I look like the milkman. Or my mum, depending on who you ask.

Q: Do you smile often?
I don’t know. Do I?

Q: Choose one to have (love, beauty, creativity)?
I cannot choose. Oh ok, love. I have that and creativity so I’m not doing too bad.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
I try to be, with people I can be bothered with. I guess I’m rather honest and lazy when it comes to people and my no bullshit philosophy stops me making small talk with people I have no interest in.

Q: What colour shirt are you wearing?
Brown. Not because there’s anything dirty on it though.

Q: What were you doing at 9 last night?
Probably writing this. I don’t do live blogging.

Q: When is the last time you saw your dad?
About six weeks ago. Bloody parents keep going on holiday.

Q: When was the last time you cried?
Crying is the new pants in meme land! I still don’t remember.

Q: Do you get angry easily?
Yes, I am incredibly impatient and intolerant of puny humans. I can’t help it.

Q: What were you thinking about before you went to sleep?
What a nice cuddle I had just had.

Q: What song are you listening to right now?
Nuffink. But I was listening to the CD I just made for work, which included Passenger, Chromeo, Just Jack and Amy Macdonald. We are so trendy, innit?

Q: Rate life as of right now 1-10:
9. I never give 10s.

It’s been another whole week of Daily Express Madeline Headline Frenzy. The situation in Iraq is not important, no foot ‘n’ mouth, nothing about Darfur, no politics, no foreign news, not even an Express Special headline about immigrants stealing your wives. Whatever next?

Free sweets befofe a free main meal? Mother will not be amused!
We saw a man reading an Express yesterday. He looked quite normal. Just goes to show…

Martina Topley Bird (remember her?) has a new album (The Blue God) ready to go… digitally at the end of the year and physically at the beginning of the next. Is that normal these days? Anyway, it’s produced by Dangermouse (no sign of Penfold) and the rather fantastic Rock Sellout has two mp3s for free, see?

NBC have chosen Journeyman to be the new show that they stick on after Heroes (which is on after Chuck) when it returns in a week or so, so I had to watch it to see what all the fuss was about… Dan (Tommy from Trainspotting) keeps having these weird jolts where he ends up confused in the past, does something reasonably important then has another weird jolt back to the present. How, er, weird. His marriage has a load of soap opera baggage as his wife used to be with his brother Jack (Kellerman from Homicide: Life On The Street) but ended up married to him after his original fiancee died. So he jolts back again and interracts with the dead fiancee who doesn’t even notice that he looks ten years older than when she last saw him earlier in that very same day. Ditto for his meeting with brother and wife in a diner in 1997. So far so meh… but then he spots somebody else from his present snooping around in his past. What a time travelling palava! Anyway, he does the things he has to do to save the certain person from a deathly fate and all is well with the time stream (how very Quantum Leap of him), except he caused most of the chain of events in the first place by interfering. Did he not watch Doctor Who? It looks like wifey is going to tell him to sling his hook because he keeps popping off for a bit but a really cheesey plot device redeems him and he gives wifey a big snog just as it starts to rain. These Hollywood couples love a big pash in precipitation for some reason. I have never done such a thing as I would rather be dry. It’s rather schmaltzy do might appeal to enough normal people to keep it on the air but I really can’t be bothered.

It’s going to be shown here on Sky One which I can’t get anyway. Bothered? Not really, no.

One for the Heroes / Veronica Mars geeks, from the Emmys party:

It’s almost time for season 2 of Heroes to hit the rest of the world. I hope Sylar doesn’t get to inspect Elle’s skull but Claire’s brains might be quite hard to locate. And why is Sylar all Michael Caine?

So NBC Mondays is Chuck, Heroes and Journeyman from September 24th ? How very nerdy.

Another weekend, another road trip. This one was to Husband Jamie’s work’s annual meeting with dinner and drinks up near Stratford. The ‘Upon Avon’ one, not the ‘Olympics Nightmare’ one.

We stopped off in Castle Quay which is a shopping centre in somewhere called Banbury and bought some trousers, socks and lunch.

Lovely lovely Druckers, with its lovely lovely paninis and cakes. Lovely. But fecking expensive.

The teeny tiny place named Ettington Park is where the hotel is located.

It’s a bit neo-gothic, what with the stunning architecture and that.

Nice bedroom with too many cushions, where I read my book while The Man had his meeting. Well it was technically a working day. Notice the ‘Cotswolds Life’ magazine under my cup of tea: It was like a spoof, what with all the photos of posh women with their husbands’ names (Mrs Dave Pithington-Smythe and Mrs Bernard Xenophobia-Twit) at polo matches.

Unlike my usual modus operandi, I went for a walk and took photographs in the hotel grounds. It was sunny. So I went back indoors and used the ‘tea and coffee making facilities’ aka the kettle, tea bags and a cup.

For some reason there was a bit of an old church nearby.

Then it got surreal. The dinner was accompanied by a murder mystery thing, chaired by Sherbert Holmes who is in no way a copyright infringement of that other more famous detective.

One of the scary characters had to be told not to be chatting up my husband so we used a baked goods analogy to explain the gay thing to these Victorian types. Batons, not baps.

We looked like shit in all the photos (maybe due to the free drinks) but had a good time. Jamie stayed up til 2:30, talking about routers, coding and Linux, proabably. I went back to the room after 11 and caught the last half of the Eurosong episode of Father Ted on the rather big telly. Then I found a programme that had people doing naughty things to each other in the usual completely unsexy way so I turned it off and went to sleep.

More Madeleine hearsay.
No Diana.
No free camper vans, cookers or illegal immigrants.
No racist soap box. No I don’t mean a bumper pack of Imperial Leather who don’t like that foreign handwash muck.
The saga continues in The Daily Express.

More use of ‘quotation marks’ to put any phrase they want into the headline and get away with it.
More no news newspaper.
Less people buying that shit?

I love Geek Monthly. Well I would if I could actually get it in a shop. After having Dwight Shrute, Veronica Mars, Matt Parkman and Hiro Nakamura on the cover they continue the run of good geeks:

Liz Lemon!
We love her. 30 Rock is coming to (Channel) Five in January. And ‘ting.

And, in random news, we came 4th at the pub quiz. Bah! And there were only 7 teams competing. Humbug! I am off to somewhere near Shakespeare country to be an I.T Wife for an overnighter. Will have to record The (unreal) I.T Crowd on the HDD fing and try not to compare the two Friday night events.

You know how it is. You keep a diary of everything that you do on your Sumer holiday. You write about the sun bathing, what book you read on the beach, the hotel you stayed at, the night you killed your child and hid her body for a few weeks before bundling it into your hire car and hiding it somewhere more permanent…

Erm…

That has to be one of the most ludicrous Express headlines since, er, the one on Monday about the Bible smelling of death. Oh well. And it’s back to normal with a racist shock horror story in the Princess Diana corner. “We Britons strangers in our own country”? Oh yes. I don’t know anybody in Britain at all. How right you are, old dude. Damn those foreigners coming over here and losing their children! Grrrr!

Those Sarah Jane Adventures start on Monday 24th September at 5pm on BBC1. Slitheen! By Gareth Roberts! Part one of two!

Press release:
Sarah Jane Smith, investigative journalist and former companion to The Doctor, is back in a brand-new CBBC drama from the makers of Doctor Who. And in the first two-part story of the series she faces some familiar alien enemies of The Doctor as the Slitheen are back and out for revenge… On their first day at their new school Maria and Luke soon realise that all is not as it seems. There’s a funny smell, the food keeps going off, the teachers keep farting and the new technology block is hiding some dark secrets. With their suspicions aroused, Sarah Jane, Maria and Luke set about investigating, joined by their new friend Clyde. They soon discover that the Slitheen have disguised themselves as teachers as part of a deadly plan which threatens the future of the Earth. But as Maria, Luke and Clyde become trapped in the new technology block in the clutches of the Slitheen and with Sarah Jane under attack from another of the alien monsters, will the gang be able to stop the Slitheen before it’s too late?

Mp3 of the day? Two Hearts by Kish Mauve. That nice mister XO sent me it last week, I’ve been playing it quite a lot, and it’s been covered by a certain small Aussie chick to relaunch her warbling career real soon. Listen/download it here.

It feels like years ago that she started leaking all over the place. No idea what the real tracklisting of that ‘Kylie X’ is. Yet.