Right here. Happy New Year as well, I suppose.

Normal service will be resumed at some point, including another bloody meme being put to the sword. The lurgie given to me for Christmas by my parents has mutated into a delightful ear infection that has left me temporarily stone deaf in one ear. Apart from the screaming tinnitus which is making me want to kill somebody, obviously.

I’ve got a shiny new iPod on the way from Amazon and only one ear with which to listen to it. And I haven’t had a drink for a week. Something has got to give and soon.

In my absence, I’ll leave you with John Prescott being interviewed on Radio 4 this morning (RealPlayer required). Anybody who’s read more than one post round here will probably know that appeals to my patriotism and sense of national pride are likely to fall on, currently, one deaf and one scornful ear.

That said, if you can listen to that interview without burning with shame at the thought that this man is currently running the country, you’re a more charitable person than me. One can only presume that the Chuckle Brothers were busy.

Later.

Update: Mark Steel says it all for me.

To Donald and his partner Lucia, a baby girl, born yesterday at 12.46pm weighing in at three kilogrammes. Mother and baby both doing well.

If anybody is at a loose end tonight and would like to see me make a complete arse of myself, then they should tune in to 18 Doughty Street at 9pm.

Apparently you can text and IM questions into the show so if anybody could send in a few easy ones to get me out of trouble, I’d be eternally grateful.

…being fitted for an orange jumpsuit have been greatly exaggerated. After a slight server hiccup, I’m back.

While I’m here, I might as well alert you to the current rash of blog roundups requiring attention. Tim Worstall’s Britblog Roundup #91 and Mr E’s Swearblogger Roundup #6 are now available for your viewing pleasure. Also out is James Higham’s Blogfocus offering a perusal of the graphic images bloggers use.

Chicken Yoghurt now has an Advanced Search feature thanks to the rather spiffing Contutto Advanced Search plugin.

The vanilla WordPress (the publishing system that powers this blog) search facility is, frankly, bobbins and needed beefing up. Hopefully it should be easier to find things now, should you want to steal passages for your GCSE coursework or whatever.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

A question for anybody who knows anything about hosting websites.

So far this month, according to CPanel, Chicken Yoghurt has used 4334.84 MB of bandwidth. However, the AWstats trafic stats says I’ve used a total of 3.28 GB - 2.01 in traffic viewed and 1.27 in traffic not viewed (search engines spidering the site and the like).

So why the discrepancy between the 4334.84 MB and the 3.28 GB (3355 MB)? There’s been no significant FTP or email activity to explain a stray thousand meg of bandwidth. Any ideas? Would polling of the site’s RSS feeds by the likes of Bloglines use that much?

Ta in advance to anyone with any help.

No Friday Thing piece this week. Work pressures coupled with a sense of humour failure served to torpedo my muse. (See also lack of action round here of late.) All back to normal soon, hopefully.

Anyway, despite my absence (or maybe because of it), this week’s The Friday Thing is a right royal rocker. Get over there, get signed up and have a look. It’s completely free and completely ace.

It seems quite a few people (including someone from within the Ministry of Defence, according to the visitor stats) are looking for dirt on erstwhile Hove MP and defence minister, Ivor Caplin.

If you’ve arrived at this blog via Google in search of Caplin’s skeletons (at least the ones you’re looking for), I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment.

Sorry.

I am alive and playing catch up. I’ve crawled to the keyboard if only to escape the hellish whirligig that is British daytime television: a sickening calliope designed by Hieronymus Bosch. It invades even my fitful dreams as I grip the sweat-drenched sheets.

24 hour news is so repetitive and endlessly recycled that I’d awake thinking I’d been asleep for only seconds to find I’d dozed for an hour. I’m definitely getting old as music television is less like entertainment to me now than what I imagine those disorientation techniques they use to train the SAS to be. Is it mandatory that every Euroclub anthem video feature uncountable women all with their sweaty arses hanging out? Must every R’n'B number feature “J-Lo”, “LL Cool J”, Mariah Carey or some unholy combination of the three? There’s a song on continuous rotation on one of the channels called “I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair)” which is a cultural and historical (not to mention musical) car-crash of such proportions that it needs to be reviewed not with harsh words but with anti-tank weapons.

Then there’s the adverts. I realise that sofa-bound Britain needs cheap finance fast but is the market really that big to sustain so many cheap finance companies? Would you be tempted to take a loan from a company whose ad campaigns are fronted by an ex-cricketer with an opening gambit of “I know nothing about loans”? And I’m completely fascinated by the advert for athlete’s foot treatment, Lamisil Once. If this once-only, fire-and-forget footrot torpedo is so spectacularly effective as the ad claims, then why are Boots selling it in a buy-three-for-the-price-of-two deal, as my partner reports?

And that’s just the daytime shift. Did anybody see Deadringers last night? Bloody hell. My daughter’s Year One class can write a better scripts and do better impressions. An “Ooh, Betty. The cat’s done a whoopsie…” Frank Spencer impression slotted in there would have actually improved the show. I’m going to start two lists, one of reasons why the television licence fee is theft and one listing why it isn’t. I expect the first to be John Holmes to the second’s John Prescott.

Anyway, what did I miss?

Update: For some reason the links aren’t showing properly at the bottom of this post in IE6 (the browser’s fault? WordPress? The Earth’s magnetic pull? Who knows). If you want to read the comments for this post, click the “permalink” link.

The doctor says I have tonsilitis. Roaring tonsilitis, mind you. It’s a double bummer seeing as how I had my tonsils removed almost twenty years ago. I mean, what was the point? Doesn’t stop you getting tonsilitis apparently, in fact it can be (and in this case, is) worse in the event. Ulcers. In my throat.

My eyes water every time I swallow. Phagophobia has taken a merciless hold of me: the anticipation of swallowing is almost worse than the act itself.

I’m off back to the couch where a blanket, all three Lord of The Rings extended cuts, a big glass of iced water and fitful dozing await me. I owe a bajillion people emails which I’ll get around to when the antibiotics kick in.

Pass the wire brush and Dettol.

Sunny and warm weather is forecast in Brighton this weekend. I’m off to Blackpool where it is not. Cheers.

Back Monday.

Here we are.

The look of the new place is pretty much the same as the old place. But the WordPress blogging system here has a lot more bells and whistles so you might notice a few additions around the place that weren’t present on the old site - most notably a search engine and an archive by category.

It’s pretty much all here. I managed to transfer all the posts from the old place after much wailing and gnashing of teeth but I’m leaving the old site in place so permalinks will still work.ÂÂ

Anybody who receives posts by email won’t have to do anything. If you use a RSS thingy to read the site, there are now three feeds (the links are in the sidebar) - a WordPress feed for the posts, a WordPress feed for the comments and the old Feedburner feed. Those subscribing to the Feedburner feed shouldn’t have to do anything - I’ve switched things over so posts from this site now go to that feed. If anybody has any problems please let me know.

There are still one or two formatting problems in the archives which I’ll be sorting out over the next few days. If anybody notices any other problems or has any suggestions for the place I’d be very happy to hear from them - drop me a line or leave a comment.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by while I was building the place to offer thoughts and suggestions.

Andiamo!

Update: I’ve installed the Spam Karma plugin to trap comment spam. However, it’s about as tolerant as Charles Clarke at a church meeting and may savage perfectly reasonable comments. If anybody has any problems, please give me a shout.

After much screaming, weeping and a use of profanity that would make Dennis Hopper whistle with envy, the new WordPress version of Chicken Yoghurt is approaching completion.

Apart from a doohicky that will send posts to subscribers by email (can anyone suggest a good one for WordPress?) the place is just about there. I’m aiming to make the move on April 1 - it seemed apposite.

If anybody has a spare five minutes and would like to have a look at the new place (looks-wise it’s same as the old place), make suggestions, post some test comments and generally try and break it, please drop me a line.

Some regular vistors will have noticed that a troll has taken up residence in the comments here this week. If he’d been witty or gained responses from other commenters I would have been prepared to let it go. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring the funny in any sense, has been studiously ignored by the rest, and seems determined to derail any debate or conversation.

I’ve been deleting his comments but can’t police the place 24/7. So, very reluctantly, I’ve turned on the blog’s comment moderation facility. Nobody’s comment will appear until it has been approved by me.

I hope this won’t put off other commenters. Until this week I’ve been flattered and fortunate to have a class of commenter who have been generous with their time and thoughts and made this blog immensely satisfying for me.

I also hope this won’t be a permanent measure. Rest assured it is just to weed out the comments from the one spoiler and I shall not be deleting any other comments.

Apologies to all (-1).

PS. If any other bloggers would like to share tales of similar inadequates and how they dealt with them, I’d be grateful.

Things might be a little slow around here for a few days while one or two things get done. Anybody passing through here last night while the site was unavailable will have got a clue as to what one of those things might be…

The estimable MatGB writes, regarding the Chicken Yoghurt template…

On post pages, the comments and text of entries flows all across the screen, so you can’t read things, and the sidebar takes priority so I can’t even highlight stuff.

He’s using Firefox 1.5.0 on Windows XP. I use the same but everything looks fine to me. Would anybody else seeing anything strange (or not) with the site layout please shout out in the comments. Cheers.

Family, the need to do some proper money-earning work, not to mention a beer festival at my local this weekend, are preventing me from writing anything right now.

Enjoy this brief, merciful respite while you can.

I found this via Warren Ellis. It’ll probably wear thin pretty quickly but it’s of a passing novelty value.

Anybody who doesn’t glaze over after listening to the voice for more than a minute can subscribe to the podcast feed with this link.

…Up North, where beer, house prices and life are all considerably cheaper than down here, for the weekend. To Blackpool, land of my birth to be exact, Europe’s largest Fight Club.

For those who’ve never been, imagine a remake of Escape From New York scripted by an Absinthe-fuelled Michael Barrymore and whose cast members have been forced to eat nothing but cream cakes for six months.

When a man is tired of Blackpool he is tired of pavements slick with vomit. Ah, Blackpool, land of contrasts. Its town centre’s night time denizens comprising exclusively of disconcertingly sexually agressive mental defectives. Its day times filled with the perfumes of overcooked chips and rotting sea breezes.

Back Monday.

Chicken Yoghurt is one year old today. Have some and some. How about a game?

Doesn’t time flies when you’re vainly railing against how crap everything is. Do blogs age in dog years, do you think? That would make my level of political sophistication around seven years old, which sounds about right.

That’s me for a bit. I’m off to contemplate the social pressures that I allowed to force me to spend money I haven’t got on stuff my kids don’t need in order to celebrate a festival I don’t believe in.

I’ll also be pondering why, in this season of goodwill to all, when you go down the shops, people are invariably grasping, ill-bred savages incapable of showing good manners let alone goodwill.

Have a Happy… Thing.

UPDATE: Except to say, was Tony’s visit to Basra to have his picture taken really necessary? We are, after all, living in an age of stupendous special effects. Tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money could have been saved with a little bit of judicious photoshopping. They could have asked Tim Ireland to do it. At least, as a former soldier said on Radio 5 this morning, the squaddies bestowed the honour of meeting Tony will have been issued with clean kit so they look pristine for the photos. I wonder if they were allowed to keep their guns unlike the Iraqi soldiers inspected by Dick Cheney the other day.

And lastly, a fine, flawless diamond amongst the almost unmitigated horseshit that is the output of the BBC these days. Ten solid days of Bach and all to be available for free online. I know almost bugger all about classical music but if nothing else, I recommend trying to find the Six Suites for Solo Cello which are achingly beautiful. The licence fee (just) gets my blessing for another year.

…from the wilderlands with nothing much to say. One or two things may appear later this week including a mathematical formula that encapsulates my attitude towards this bloody time of year.

There is one thing. If the person in Slough who found Chicken Yoghurt today by entering “can i leave a child of 10 at home alone” into Yahoo Search should find their way back here, can I just say: No, you can’t. Please don’t.

Up North, where the beer is best
Up North, where they don’t wear a vest
Up North, where men are men
Up North, ooh, I’ll say it again…

Pre-Xmas duties beckon in the shire of my sires. Back Tuesday.

I’m off Up North, land of my forefathers, for the long weekend and will be out of radio contact for the duration. Just as the election campaign might be warming up as well, Goddammit.

See you Tuesday.