Call Me Ishmael

Barely three weeks into the New Year, and London is getting decidedly odd very, very quickly.

Celebrity Big Brother is horrific and compelling viewing – I need a shower after watching the damn thing. Pete Burns and his monkey coat, George Galloway and his cat impersonation, Michael Barrymore’s very public meltdown as he descends into a mire of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, slurred speech that would make Ozzy Ozbourne proud, and a growing repertoire of scary facial tics, whilst, unbeknownst to him, there are people waiting outside to serve him with legal papers. When Dennis Rodman is the voice of reason in such a Melting Point of the Strange, you know that the world has tilted somewhat off its axis.

At the other end of the weird scale, there’s the tragic story of the whale trapped in the Thames. What started as a story picked up for its sheer, downright oddness quickly graduated to wonder, awe, and an inspiring rallying of spirit to try and rescue the whale and return it home. I followed the story all day Saturday, and surprised myself with how gutted I was when the whale died. Amazing pictures here and here.

Also, been dabbling with some more webfuckery on this page, trying to collect things in one place. In the left-hand column, you will now find links to my Bloglines blogroll, collecting all the blogs I check on a daily basis. Plus, I’ve set myself up with a del.icio.us page in which to hurl all my accumulated stray urls that I found shoved in old e-mails, scraps of paper, in my browser history and many, many other places. Probably won’t need access to any of those links in a hurry, but it’s nice to find somewhere to keep them all handy if I need to get hold of them. Feel free to have a dig through them. You can always pretend you are shuffling through the teetering mounds of scrap paper on my desk, whilst jabbing a sharp stick at the disparate preoccupations that gnaw away at my psyche.

At some point, I’ll add a Flickr link, once I finally get around to populating my Flickr page with photos. Sucker Punch, embracing Web 2.0 in 2006!