John Konichiwa, may his name forever live in infamy, has tagged me with another damned meme: to list eight random facts about myself. Or should that be ‘facts’? You decide. One of the following is not true. But which one?

1. I once kissed popular British comedian Frank Skinner.
2. Thanks to the incompetent dentistry I was subjected to as a child, I have only 26 teeth.
3. I used to quite like fishing. Until I actually caught a fish.
4. I want this played at my funeral. My Viking funeral.
5. The actor Michael Jayston once came up to me in a restaurant and praised me for getting my two year-old daughter to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.
6. In the past, in order to impress girls, I have tried both vegetarianism and Leonard Cohen. I took to neither. (Vegetarianism and Leonard Cohen, that is, the girls were very nice. Well, one was.)
7. A few years ago, while going ‘commando’, I opened the door to a man in a wheelchair. My flies were inadvertently undone and we saw eye to eye.
8. This is my fourth regeneration.

Spreading the misery, then:

1. Tim Ireland.
2. PDF.
3. Jim Bliss.
4. Clive Nosemonkey.
5. Eugenides.
6. Robert Sharp.
7. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
8. Pond.

Mr E has the merchandise.

Rachel’s terrible saga reaches its conclusion. Let there be no sequel.

Felicity Lowde, who has been harassing me for over a year, and harassing other people for years, was sentenced yesterday, to 6 months in jail, which is the maximum sentence for harassment (section 2).

So, no winners. No satisfaction, only relief. The only good to come out of it was superhuman energy and strength shown by Rachel and the solidarity shown to her by bloggers across the board. See, we can do it when we want to.

I concur with Mr Kenny.

Britblog Roundup #119 and James Higham’s Blogfocus.

It’s Fistful of Euros Satin Pajama awards time again and its heartening to see loads of my favourite guys* getting nominated. Rachel, Unity, Chris, Jamie, Steven, Saussure, Hutton and Daniel.

Get over there and vote.

* And me.

Peeking out from behind his lawyer (and his dad - ask me or Sunny Hundal over a pint some time), Britain’s most fearless blogger gives his views (via email) on the Mail on Sunday’s attempt to ruin Owen Barder:

I would have done him over harder.

He is paid from the public purse and is a public servant. If he wants to express political opinions he should change his career.

Didn’t he also get caught posting a sycophantic “Miliband is Brilliant”* comment on the Miliblog. I rest my case.

Simon Walters is right.

Very classy, as ever. Money, while buying any number of fancy lawyers, still doesn’t buy you taste, courage or a moral compass, it seems.

* For the record, Owen didn’t post ‘Miliband is Brilliant’ on the ‘Miliblog’. He posted that he thought the site was value for money. Not something I’d say out loud, but not regarded yet - except by tax-dodgers with shady pasts - as a sacking offence.

Over at Clairwil’s.

That the Daily and Sunday Mail, the vomitus of British culture, destroy lives in the name of circulation and profit is a constant of our universe. It goes without saying that, in what they produce, these newspapers are analogous in the body politic as the anus is to the body human.

I have friends who’ve worked for these papers in the past but I rather think they likened the liaison to that with a Victorian three penny whore - cheap, functional and over as quickly as possible. In other words, an ugly lesson in life never to be repeated.

Anyway, enough of the metaphor stew. Even if you don’t care about partisan hackery being used to destroy an undeserving man’s career, Simon Walters’ pointless, vindictive, adolescently prurient and unlettered attack on Owen Barder today should outrage all those with a hankering for the issues of decency and freedom of speech. It’s not the first time words have failed Walters either, if stories are to be believed. A physical as well as a rhetorical thug.

Tim Worstall has the details and a worthy rebuttal to the latest foetid depredations of a newspaper not worthy of the name. I won’t duplicate the saga here - go and read it.

Tim rightly identifies this as an issue of freedom of speech. It will be interesting to see if other right-wing bloggers do the same or drop their libertarian credentials to make a partisan point. I wonder if they’ll be screaming as loud as they did over Inigo Wilson. Some of us will be watching.

I’ll just add a personal note. I first came across Owen a little while ago when I wrote a piece about the Department for International Development and its spending on consultants. In response, Owen handed me my arse, in the nicest and most courteous fashion.

The other Sharpener writers and I invited Owen to write for the blog on the strength of his excellent writing on his own blog (now, hopefully not for too long, gone). He accepted, expressing how flattered he was that he had been asked. It was only later, when we read Owen’s massively impressive CV that we realised it was us that should have been flattered.

One more thing. When I was collating The Blog Digest last year, I asked Owen if I could include two of his posts in the book. He politely refused. I was disappointed but he explained that he was returning from his sabbatical to rejoin the civil service. This is not someone unaware or unmindful of his responsibilities as a civil servant.

Unity (twice), Jim and Alex have more.

Update: Tim and Chris:

I’m sorry to see that the Cutty Sark is on fire, and even sorrier to see that the Mail on Sunday’s offices are not.

Update updated: Oh dear. It looks like the Mail, brave souls that they are have taken the comment facility away from their tawdry dreck. How very proper.

Update updated updated: Comments are now back but none of those posted by bloggers have appeared.

Britblog Roundup #117 and James Higham’s Blogfocus.

At Redemption Blues.

It’s irony on a base level, but I like it.

Thinking of linking to posts by Britain’s ‘leading’ bloggers?

Make sure it’s a nice link. They might get a bit upset otherwise.

Over at poons’ place.

Double bubble over at Mr E’s drum.

It’s Hutton’s Chase Me’s birthday:

Been doing this nonsense for three years now, and where’s it got me? Nowhere. It has simply widened the circle of people who think I’m a dick. That’s all it has achieved.

And isn’t that, in a final analysis, what it’s all about? Nobody called me a ‘cretin’ or ‘filth’ or ‘you cunt’ before I was a blogger.

Yay, blogging!

I bought a straw cowboy hat on Brighton beach today. It’s made me inordinately happier than five years - on and off - of blogging ever did.

This week courtesy of Philobiblon.

There’ll be a lot less blogging about blogging here from now on. I’ll be doing it here instead.

A bit of thinking out loud, this one.

I don’t think Warren Ellis‘ BAD SIGNAL email list is archived anywhere on the interwebs so I reproduce this recent email with apologies:

Here’s an idea I float out there every couple of years:

Years back, I stole a term from Bruce Sterling, “ideological freeware” — this predated Creative Commons — and applied it to the notion of web distribution of printed matter. We were talking in terms of the dearth of good writing about comics. Simply put, one could create a small magazine about comics and format it for cheap copying in black and white, and free it so anyone could print off copies. And then put it in comics stores. Viral distribution from pixel to print. SAVANT was the one that took up the entire idea, and the first twenty or so numbers of that were fireworks.

I’m talking specifically about web-to-print here, rather than the mags where the PDF was the end result, not the intermediate form.

What occurred to me after that, that I don’t think anyone picked up, was the broadside format. The single sheet. The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas.

I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting.

In web terms, the costs are tiny — host the image on a free hosting site if you’re worried about the bandwidth hit. Use Livejournal or Blogger for the whole thing.

Hell, I might even do it myself one of these days…

The Guardian’s printable G24 is a very nice thing but a one-sheet for the bus, bog or bed would be even better.

It’s an appealing idea and I’m pretty sure it’s one that hasn’t caught on in blogging (at least, if it has, it hasn’t caught on in a widespread way that I’ve heard of). A facility that aggregated a favourite blog’s last five posts (say) into an attractive, printable one-sheet would be rather haveable, I think.

Read it and then leave it on the bus or park bench for someone else. Fold it into a paper aeroplane and send it to a colleague across the office. Virtual virus to a paper-based one. Hmmmm.

I see Oliver Kamm is once again defecating on the medium through which he made his modest reputation as a writer.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

The ‘Oliver Kamm is the author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy. His blog is at…’ sign-off was my favourite bit. Blogging is bobbins, please look at my blog.

Ah, I remember Oliver when he merely used to get stroppy about the difference between a ‘faction’ and a ‘fraction’ (as in the ‘Red Army…’). ‘The stupidest blogger alive,’ was how he described Ryan of Beatnik Salad over the affair, not poisoning the debate at all. Happy days.

I met Kamm once. It was at the lunch where the bloggers who were christened ‘the new commentariat‘ by the Guardian were summoned. (I was invited, inexplicably, all other bloggers in the country seemingly too busy being civil to each other and engaging in intelligent debate). Oliver turned up late and immediately launched into another tedious and protracted diatribe against Noam Chomsky. The starters were therefore cold so Tim Ireland and I finished all the wine between us. True story.

I believe Oliver lives near me although I’ve never bumped into him. Since that day I’ve kept an eye out for him so I can mess up his hair, push him into a patch of nettles or roll him in dog muck in the park.

The travelling roundup reaches Liberal England.

More’s the pity.

Unity over at Ministry of Truth has uploaded Guido Fawkes’ Newsnight film to YouTube.

He makes some good points and asks worthy questions. It’s just a shame it was Guido asking them. It’s like Prince Harry lecturing someone about their drinking.

Here, making my YouTube debut, is the studio debate afterwards.

Share and enjoy.

It seems Michael White hurt Guido’s feelings somewhat and Britain’s most fearless blogger hit back this morning. Funny, he said Michael was ‘fantastic’ last night.

One can only imagine what Guido’s new visitors will make of his shiny, revamped website. He should have used the money he saved by not suing Tim Ireland, Sunny Hundal and me to pay for a website designer. It looks like he had a teenage nephew do it and makes Guido look like a bedroom fantasist.

What will sophisticated Newsnight viewers make of the commenters on his blog going by the handles of ‘homosexualist bummer‘ and ‘little black sambo‘? Or Guido’s biggest scoop this week: Gordon Brown picks his nose.

Paul Staines is 40.

Once again, blogging takes a shot in the arse. Why are self-appointed exemplars in any field invariably its worst exponents?

Update: Manic has a transcript of Guido’s pasting with a revelation of another example of Britain’s top blogger being ‘cavalier’ with the facts.

Guido Fawkes was on Newsnight last night. Hung, drawn and quartered is how I think you could describe it. His might have opted for a ‘disguise’ but it wasn’t enough to hide his signature white quiff. Grecian 2000 might be in order if he wishes to stay ‘undercover’.

Does anybody know how to take streaming media and get it on to YouTube? I’d like cherish it and cherish it again.

Watch it here (fast forward to about 33:30) and see Guido rat out BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson as one of his sources. Stay right to the end for Paxman’s closing punchline. Guido is now furiously deleting adverse comments about his appearance from his blog.

It seems even the best of us have a spin cycle.

Ha.