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Jamie got’s a theme tune for his blog. It’s a brilliant idea and so I got myself one as well. Like Jamie’s, it’s in keeping with the blog’s general theme, tone and subject matter…

What would your theme tune be, readers?

All my bags are packed and comment moderation is on. Off on me hols. I’ll leave you with this which I thought was pretty damn cool…

(via Graham Linehan)

Back in a bit.

So, apparently I’ve been doing this cack for five years this week. Go me.

All told, and without going into detail, 2009 was downright crappy for me and mine hence the large quiet periods on the blog. You quickly realise what a shallow and bathetic spectacle British politics is when reality decides to bite you on the bum.

The likes of Nick Robinson might as well be commenting on the goings-on inside the World of Warcraft for all the relevance the cloth-eared gobshite from Brown, Cameron, Clegg and the rest has when you’re up against it. No wonder millions of people don’t vote; if they’re not soldiers dying in vain in the desert, or not kids losing their minds in government detention centres, or not too close to the sharp end, they’re bumping along without politics and politicians. I imagine they’re quite happy. Or at least no more miserable.

So what’s next? Well, an interminable, unedifying and dirty-as-never-before general election campaign stretches out before us like a skidmark on the underpants of a morbidly obese incontinent. And nobody, as far as I can see, is offering to put a wash on. Mind you, the speeches we’ve heard so far have all the rhetorical heft of detergent commercials.

Judging by some of the bloggers the mainstream media have recruited so far to fill its hours of dead air and yards of fish and chip paper on the cheap, the general election is looking like one that will be won less by the Internet and more by the twin howitzers of glad, self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism and spitefully stubborn moral cowardice.

You think people are brassed off with mainstream politics now. What’s it going to be like in five months after all this?

It might be a little quiet around here for the next couple of weeks, unlike the kids who are on holiday and fighting like cat and dog.

Back whenever.

…to The Netherlands for a week. Might pop in from time to time if I get chance but possibly not.

Be good.

Looks like my blog software went berserk overnight and turned off all the commenting. No idea how that happened. Hopefully things are back on now.

The lovely Philip reports that Chicken Yoghurt is crashing his browser. Whenever he goes to the comments, his Mozilla Firefox 1.0.3 (running on Mac OS X 10.2.8) closes unexpectedly.

Anybody else having trouble?

1. Very busy over at Nuclear Reaction. I’ve just written this re-setting out the anti-nuclear stall.

2. Been meaning to blog about Dave Walker and the legal threats against him. While I find the time, Matt Wardman has all you need to know.

3. I owe James Graham a meme.

4. Back soon.

Ever since I read Swag by Elmore Leonard 15 years ago, I’ve always wanted to try the Salty Dog as drunk by Ernest Stickley, Jr. Tonight, I finally got the chance.

Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts.

Blogging may be light for a while before tailing off to non-existent when my liver fails some time in the next fortnight.

It may be a little quiet here for a bit – I’m working on an exciting top secret project which will be revealed shortly…

The next person to make a non-ironic and in-all-seriousness comparison between the Nazis and anybody else in the comments on this blog is banned for all eternity from making any other contribution.

It’s not clever. It’s not satirical. It’s rhetorically empty and it makes you look like a tit. That is all.

Bollocks to the lot of it. If the blogosphere was a pub you’d be looking for another one less stuffed with wankers.

Back in a bit.

So very sorry.

A worried somebody phoned me and ended up calling me a very rude word. Thank you to those lovely, concerned citizens who emailed to make sure I wasn’t being waterboarded. Now, obviously, would be the best time for the authorities to have me disappeared.

I’ve just upgraded the WordPress software that runs the blog to a new version. It generally involves all kinds of sexy options for maintaining the blog – behind the scenes stuff. As such, there shouldn’t be too much to show for it for the reader.

If anybody does notice anything funny going on, would you mind letting me know in comments. Ta.

I’ve installed a Threaded Comments plugin on the blog to give it a go. Basically, it allows commenters to reply to a specific comment. It then groups those comments together meaning you can several conversations running for any individual post. Sounds very nice.

There’s an example of me replying to comments here.

Here we are again, happy as can be. Let’s hope for longer than last time. We never did get to the bottom of just what happened but Chicken Yoghury wasn’t the only blog to fall victim to scumbags – Nosemonkey and The Sharpener being just two others.

Anyway. I’ve taken the opportunity to rebuild the blog from scratch, tidy the place up a bit, add some new features, and bin some old ones. If anybody’s missing anything or has any suggestions, please pipe up and I’ll have a look.

Thanks to WordPress’s import doohicky, I’ve been able to move all the posts from my redoubtable fallback position, Chicken Backup, to this place. Should Chicken Yoghurt go down again, let’s all head on back over to Backup.

I’ve also taken up Twittering again, so my tweets will appear here in a daily digest. If you haven’t tried it, I really recommend giving it a go. You can fire your blog’s RSS feed into it or the one from your moblog or whatever. And writing blog posts – from your mobile phone, Instant Messenger, web browser, third party thingamajig or Twitter itself – in 140 characters or less is a nice little mental exercise with the need for economy and succinctness.

Just need to say that big love has to go to Jo and Ben for helping me out getting this place sorted again. And also to Clive who I owe big time.

Let’s roll.

PS. I’m really, really, really sorry that everybody on the email list got all 100 posts sent again when I imported the Chicken Backup posts to Chicken Yoghurt. The post emailer went a bit doolally. Sorry.

Chicken Yoghurt is three years old today. Special love to everybody who’s linked, commented and supported over the last year.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to say a big ‘fuck you very much’ to all those who’ve made blogging such an unpleasant experience of late. The twats masquerading as wits, the illiterate posing as the lettered, the idiotic dressed as the intellectual, the liars wearing honesty’s coat – you’ve all helped to make British blogging the stinking, ill-regarded craphouse it is today. Very well done.

Here’s to the next three years!

…so I’ve laid in a crate of import-strength lager and my shortest temper, as is traditional at this time of year. I’ve been out and done the obligatory ’spend money you haven’t got on stuff people don’t need’ so I’ve discharged my responsibility to the economy. Gordon Brown shouldn’t refer to us as voters or tax payers. No, we should be his army of little economic Atlases. All wearing Santa hats if that makes you feel any better.

Anyway, I’m off now to bitch incessantly about how the telly is shit again this year. Happy whatever to you and yours. Back in a bit.

Here’s your pressie:

(Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)

Hopefully all the wrinkles have been ironed out.

While the blog’s been down I’ve been entertaining myself with idle revenge fantasies against the horrible little spunker who orchestrated the Denial of Service attack in the first place.

Some of the details of the attack are quite interesting. The blog wasn’t just hammered from one source but several. The IP addresses of those sources were very intriguing.

Two IP addresses were of note. One was sourced back to the offices of one of the UK’s larger gas and electricity suppliers. God knows what jobs its online abuse team do but chasing online abuse doesn’t seem to be one of them.

The other IP address was sourced back to a department within the American government. I did toy with idea of sending my server logs showing the attack to the FBI’s Cyber Investigations department. What larks that could be.

Don’t get me wrong, whoever did this shows some small spark of sapience. Spoofing IP addresses must take some rudimentary skill. I’m not suggesting real intelligence, more a driving instinct like the one that makes a dung beetle push shit around for a living. Yes, that kind of thing.

Hello. Well, it looks like I picked the wrong month for my blog to be on the receiving end of a Denial of Service attack, doesn’t it? For a minute there I was worried the government might fall before I was able give vent to my self-importance once again.

I suppose I should be pleased and flattered that some lonely little sociopath was offended enough to deem me worthy of their time, attention and effort. Generating thousands upon thousands of ‘404 page not found‘ errors on Chicken Yoghurt, exceeding the bandwidth quota and thus taking down the site clearly demanded a very special brand of dysfunctional personality.

But then I think, no. Isn’t it just another example of the societal and cultural zeitgeist that has always been and will always be with us? Namely, the knuckle-dragging tendency that – rather than attempt an arrangement of reasonably carefully chosen words – reaches for a blunt instrument. It’s the instinctive reaction when words fail a certain kind of person, I suppose.

Anyway, I’m back. Kudos and undying gratitude must go to the very excellent Mr Clive Summerfield who has taken me under his technological wing.

Special love must also go to Chicken Yoghurt’s number one fan who made the return possible. They know who they are. As do the people who emailed to ask if everything was ok.

Many thanks must also go, however, to the ‘maverick’ with the ‘elite’ ‘hacker’ ’skills’ who no doubt rubbed himself with self-appreciation when Chicken Yoghurt went down the other week. You see, while the blog was down, I wrote this piece about the Labour Party donor scandal for The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, just to keep my hand in. It was meant as a puckish, throwaway, Brooker-esque romp; a self-satisfied poke at all involved.

So, imagine my gleeful surprise when the piece was later selected as an ‘editor’s pick’. This means in a week or two, I’ll be receiving a small cheque by way of recognition. As coincidence would have it, this sum is a little over my webhosting fees for the next year. If it wasn’t for our bell-end of a hacker chum, I’d have had to find that money myself. Instead, the Guardian will foot the bill. Ah, the silver lining.

I must, however, also send a message of sympathy and pity to our king dong of a hacker chum. Why sympathy and pity, you ask? Well, I once felt as he does: my ‘enthusiasm’ for computers defined who I was, my resentful inarticulacy made me want to lash out and my only comfort was incessant masturbation.

I was thirteen. I do hope, for his sake, that our pendulous ballsack of a hacker chum has a similar excuse, the inadequate little quim. Time for them to spend less time at their keyboard, perhaps? They could pay someone to have sex with them, maybe?

As I say, I’m back. We have much to discuss…

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and divorced the bowel-achingly tedious Facebook. I’ve ‘deactivated’ my relationship with her. I got sick to the gills with her constant banging on. ‘Justin, come and look at this’, she kept saying. ‘Justin, come and do this’, she kept suggesting. Join that, poke this, invite the other. Nag, nag, bloody nag.

It makes me laugh that there are thousands of people out there who are screaming at the tops of their lungs that they’d rather go to bed with John Prescott than submit their details to an ID card database, but there they are cheerfully fessing up to their political affiliations, educational histories, reading and viewing habits, what they’re doing at the weekend and all the rest on a ’social network’ which is, get this, AN ENORMOUS BLOODY DATABASE.

I was one of them. Not any more. So there.

Back after the blip of the last couple of days. I exceeded my bandwidth, not as any measure of popularity – my visitor statistics wouldn’t massage a gnat’s ego let alone one that needs constant buffing like mine – but because the site’s being bombarded by search engine crawlers again. Just had to wait for November 1 to tick over when my monthly bandwidth limit was reset.

So anyway, yes. Back.