I’m all by myself tonight as the man is working away so I will probably have eaten every biscuit in the house before bedtime. I had a nice day as the lurgey from yesterday was just a reaction to having completely rubbish sleep for the last few days, what with me sleeping like a baby (i.e. waking up several times in the night. But without the habit of pissing and shitting myself and then wailing. Phew) but a good night’s sleep sorted that all out. Today was a nice day at work as we beat our targets under calm friendly conditions where everyone just got on with it but did it in style with lots of funny moments and not just because of the music of Pizzicato Five, John Barrowman, Cake and The Avalanches being heard throughout the shop. What a weird mix. The good day continued on a journey home that involved, for once, no public transport cock-ups, and it gave me the chance to remember why I love In Our Bedroom After The War by Stars so much. So much in fact that it’s the first of my Pick Of The Musical Year In No Particular Order CD things. So have a look and listen at these clips to get a feel for it…



Odd bittersweet duets are Stars (who are Canadian, fact fans)’ thing and this latest album is a bit like a musical but without the dodgy acting between the songs. How about a couple of mp3s for Facebooky non-embedded video viewers? Click here for one and another here.

More mp3s: click! How odd. A slightly different version of In My Arms off the Taiwan edition of X, with extra vocals by somebody called Jolin. A bit unnecessary but intriguing none the less if you’re one of those nerds.

Right. I have a shedload of HDD stuff to watch, a virtual pile of US TV to catch up with, loads of comics with my name on them (not really. I’m a collector so they’re spotless and individually bagged and filed away) and a real pile or ironing to do. Such a glamorous life.

Meh. And I was having such a nice day.

I am such a geek.

Comic Geek Picture Number One:
I don’t buy it buy I look forward to reading this:

I am sure one of my geeks will buy it and leave it lying around.

Comic Geek Picture Number Two:
It’s New York…

… Watchmen stylee. Oh yes.

In other news, I appear to be playing a lot of Kate Nash. And after all of my complaining about her, circa Foundations, all over the internet. I am such a contrary hypocrite. Or am I? Almost Thursday so almost pub night. It may stop me being so confused what with my erratic season 1 (stop a bad future happening) / graphic novel / season 2 (stop another bad future happening) viewing pattern of Heroes, and the contrasting reading of Dearly Devoted Dexter inbetween watching episodes of series two of Dexter. Which is completely and utterly different. Almost. Like I said, such a geek.

It’s almost December. Fucking hell.

Another day, same old stuff. Except it was Kylie Minogue Day in the bookshop and nothing broke all day. Which was nice.

The latest Rose Tyler rumour looks to be true. That Tardis sure is going to be crowded for next year’s season finale. Maybe we’ll get to see a bit more of the place. They should never have jettisoned the Zero Room.

But more importantly…

New photo alert! Those angels look a bit familiar…

The Madeleine book that The Daily Express are ‘serialising’ every day as if this means any kind of change from their usual collection of non-news stories is now on Amazon. It is published by… Express Newspapers plc! I am so surprised… yet had no idea they had their own publishing company. I thought their other products were just the porno mags their Grand Fromage Richard Desmond also happens to publish, as well as some hideous celebrity tat weeklies. I feel like I have learnt something… and that might be that tat is tat at the end of the day.

Mitchell and Webb are now on Facebook, where the young cool hipsters hang out instead of MySpace, in a fan page. It’s as near to an official group as you will get as David and Robert don’t really do computersing all that often and it has real proper links with people who are involved in the shows. So go there at once by searching for Mitchell And Webb in the searchy box thing.

That last bit was a public service announcement. Good day!

The following picture is not a spoof. Honest. It’s a genuine front page of ‘The World’s Greatest Newspaper’ and it has broken my Express Covers Bingo Equation for the week. And it’s only Monday.

I think I know the answers to the questions today’s headline poses about ‘the new book that everyone’s been waiting for’:

Just what did happen the night she disappeared?
What’s the truth about the mysterious sightings of her?
And who do the police really think is responsible?

Is it:

Nobody knows. That’s kind of the point. But why not exploit a tragedy for newspaper sales?
They were all not her and just another way to exploit the tragedy for newspaper sales.
The parents of course. But nobody wants to look mean by saying that.

What a weird day. Moments to remember included squeezing the Scary Manga Monkey Toy that makes the best screaming ever monkey noise (it would scare a real simian) and having to resist doing it again as I really really like it but it’s a bit wrong to be so obsessed, explaining cochineal to a disbeliever, trying to work out why a credit card machine would not work by trying endless cunning plans, Christmasizing a dull card stand by adding tinsel, listening to a reggae version of Sarah McLachlan, discovering the best worst ever Daily Express front cover ever (see above for the horror of The Express publicizing a book about Madeline McCann being serialised ‘all week’ as if that’s any change to their usual made-up tat), not getting delays on public transport for the first time in ages, laughing at a crapper than the usual crap level Hollyoaks, inserting that Kylie CD into my PC and watching it go all funny but loving having those songs in a top quality format at long last, eating another of those packs of Mentos that I bought that may not be totally vegetarian but it’s all so vague, wondering just how exactly we sold out of Al Murray’s Pub Landlord book (even though it was half price, I mean, come on!), eating a pie, tormenting the staff with Christmas music in the shop, and buying things I really shouldn’t but it’s Christmas and I deserve presents, damnit!

So how was your day?

It’s Express Yourself time! How many non-news points has ‘The world’s greatest newspaper’ (well they print that under their logo every day and they never print lies) scored this week? Remember the criteria? One point per MADELEINE banner in red ink, one point for every time they use The Scary Picture (the one of Madeleine McCann that costs them nothing to reprint, the cheapskates) and one point for every time Princess Diana graces the front page because she didn’t wear a seat belt but it was like some kind of conspiracy out of The X-Files really, wasn’t it?



Phew. What a load of crapness.
A full 7 days of red MADELEINE words!
Only 4 appearances by The Scary Picture.
Loadsa Free Shit means only 3 Dianas. Bah.

Total points = 14, beating last week’s 11 by a whole 3 points. And still nothing has happened in the real news except over 3000 dead from a cyclone in Bangladesh, a sinking Antarctic cruise ship, the Australian election, some government data cock-ups, more bad shit in Darfur, bombings in India and Pakistan…

I tried. I really tried. But I just couldn’t watch any more of The Mighty Boosh series 3 episode 2. I had hoped that after the ropey first episode it would improve but it was just not to be, as all of the things that bugged me about it continued to bug. I listed the things on Facebook (as there is apparently no world outside of Facebook any more) and they included the following:

Jazz!

Cockernees!

Big hair!

Shiny suit!

Shit songs about food!

Clumpy shoes!

Synthesizers!

Crows!

Rubbish American friend who they always give work to!

When punks! and scat! jazz! were added to the equation, along with more shit indie band members given cameos I had to do a dramatic leap off the sofa and out of the room. For effect, of course. And it was more of a struggle to get up as I have a bad back. Then I came back in and found the special button on the HDD that those modern Cybermen like so much. Goodbye Boosh!

I think my old mate Christopher Bate summed it up best on Facebook (told you so) with this response in our discussion on the show’s merits. He wrote his own version and here it is:

VINCE
Look at my hair.

HOWARD
Aren’t you outlandish with your all-in-one? I have a pull over, a moustache and a love of jazz so I must be uncool.

VINCE
Everyone knows that this show is about me because I have the most appeal but the lesser talent.

HOWARD
That’s true. I can branch out. I was in Nathan Barley.

VINCE
So was I.

HOWARD
Were you?

VINCE
Yeah, I played, uh, that guy I played. I was wacky.

HOWARD
Hmm.

VINCE
Cheese Monkey! Crab eyes!

HOWARD
You’re so crazy! Isn’t this just odd? Bum Hammers! Where am I?

VINCE
Look what I’m wearing again. I’m vapid but people love me because I’m a bit feminine.

HOWARD
So’s Eddie Izzard but he has talent where as you- Oh, There’s Naboo.

NABOO
Can’t. Act.

HOWARD
Naboo, what’s going on this week?

NABOO
Same. Old. Shit.

VINCE
Cool!

Noel/Vince fiddles with his hair. Girls go bananas.

HOWARD
We’re floundering. What was funny with the idiots last series?

NOEL/VINCE
The cockney guy with the Polo eye.

HOWARD
Let’s put him in again.

NOEL/VINCE
What a wacky universe we have created. Have you read NME this week?

HOWARD
No. I mean yes. Donkey wasp!

NOEL/VINCE
Have you seen my hair? My naïve fashion sense is going to get us in trouble and you’re going to have to bail us out because, well, you’re older and less likely to get split ends.

HOWARD
I miss ‘The Hen and Chickens’ and my wife.

NOEL/VINCE/SAME OLD VOICE
Let’s do a song.

HOWARD/VINCE/NABOO/A MONKEY/ANNOYING AMERICAN M.F
Cheese pie/ cheese pie/ some kind of soup/ a nice soup/ a funny soup/ soup/ and biscuits!

VINCE/NOEL/WHO GIVES NINE SHITS
The banal tossers at the students union will love this! They’ll lap it up like dogs that couldn’t write this shit themselves but, in reality, a three-year old child could. They’ll remark how ironic it is and buy our t-shirts. Let’s go on a convoluted adventure that plays on our overly worn character traits.

HOWARD
Let’s not.

VINCE/NME
The Horrors!

HOWARD
We’re switched on because we know bands of the moment.

VINCE/VINCE/NOEL
Quiet! I’m wanking over my own shadow.

HOWARD
Brilliant.

Tomorrow: Normal service is resumed when Dan looks at the last week of Daily Express covers and feels a bit Groundhog Day-ish. Again. Then he resists the urge to do the crap joke where he repeats what he has just typed as it is about as funny as a scat jazz virus.

Another long day so I have no brain left. I started work very early for making of display tables and windows. Bonus fun points for the bag of ‘foreign tat’ (their words not mine) that I got given from our resident ‘great Escapes’ person who had just returned from Australia. And Japan! Bloody hell! Then I went to Fancy London for a works drink thing, which was nice. We started off in a quiet untrendy old fashioned pub in Soho (just off Shaftesbury Avenue, before the prostitutes bit) which was a refreshing change, and then on to a trendy multi-storey bar near The Trocadero that had very expensive drinks and people to help you wash your hands in the toilet. Now call me old-fashioned but I do not wish to tip somebody for holding the handwash and squirting it onto my hands when I could easily have odne that myself thank you very much. I felt sorry for Toilet Man and his female equivalent in the ladies’ toilet, as they seemed a bit unnecessary and full of politeness that probably concealed loathing for the general public. Not that I would blame them off course. The leaving do drinks were nice (Kopparberg pear cider, mmmm), the leaving person was nice and got a nice present. We were all old and tired from running our bookshops and not being of the age that wants to be out in The West End on a Friday night. So I came home and had a cuddle and a cupp of tea. Fun? Yes, for me, definitely.

Here’s a free mp3 of White Diamond by a certain Aussie lady. It’s now a ballad, which is nice, and happens to link nicely to a certain thing on Channel 4 on Sunday evening.

No exciting stuff as I am rather tired so here are some handily ‘one I prepared earlier’ things. More rubbish Christmas present ideas:

It’s only a Battlestar Galactic Number Six bust! Of course! Why not?

The Very Best of The Friday Night Project? Huh? What? Why? How? No. Just no.

That boy/man who played the goth on Coronation Street has gone done a CD. Say no more.

My shitty transport rage at taking 2 hours and 5 minutes from door to door to get to work today (which is a non-peak time car journey of 15-20 minutes) was almost soothed by a leak of the new Goldfrapp album, Seventh Tree on my iPod.

It’s not out until February 2008, how annoying that it’s appeared online already. As somebody who has listened to it and pre-ordered the CD can I just say how marvellously stunning it is, with them re-inventing their sound once again. It’s still Goldfrapp but it’s not quite like any of their other albums, as usual. Quite chilled (a little bit folky, a little bit Zero7-y) but with no whistling this time but the occasional disco strings. Can I go so far as to say ‘the first essential musical purchase of 2008′? I can? Well I just did.

While tweaking new and interesting tables of big expensive books today I spotted an uncanny lookielikey…

The Daily Express, every day.

The Wildflife Photographer Of The Year book.

Spooky!

This is what I have been working on: Christmas has arrived in the bookshop!

This is the newly reopened and ‘different’ place where I used to work before it got taken over by The Other Bookshop chain:

This is my Christmas window:

This is their Christmas window:

I think theirs is rather cluttered to be honest, but they have very nice bows. I am biased of course.

Going to the old shop for the first time since it got sold and renovated was extremely weird. We met up in what used to be my office and is now the travel section, and freaked out their staff by wandering around dazed by the newness, brightness and cleanliness of it all. It even smelt different and only the window frames and doors gave it away as our old place. It’s like visiting your childhood home after someone has stripped out all the wallpaper, replaced the doors and made the ‘tired’ kitchen all chrome and marble. That was weird enough but when we went to the old pub and found it closed for renovations I started thinking about some kind of conspiracy.

We went to the goth pub instead. They were playing We Close Our Eyes by Go West. Which was different.

These people work in publishing and bookshops. Beware!

Lots of newly-dyed hair impressed us all.

Then I went home very slowly due to tube delays. Some things never change.