I failed to do any work after getting home last night, because two of my favourite celebrities were on TV. John Peel was on Room 101, and, by the standards of the show, failed miserably, taking most of the items he was trying to have cast into the room home with him. Following more or less straight on from that, Billy Connolly‘s new show, on of his “World Tour” series, this time visiting Ireland, England and Wales.

Peel’s a marvellous chap, combininng a real love of new music with a sort of reassuring steadiness, and a dry sense of the ludicrousness of, well, everything. There’s something immensely comforting about his presence in British media – as longs as he’s around, there’ll be someone with some sense on air…

Connolly, as well as just being screamingly funny, has a similar sort of sense, and a psychogeographer’s instinct, a knack for finding the interesting places, the slices of history and art and touches of the weird that make a place interesting, along with an eye for the things that bind a community together, make a place what it is. Well worth your attention.

Sometime in the next few days, I shall be sending out the info for Thought Bombs. A few people have mailed me on the strength of the name alone, wanting to be involved, which I regard as a good sign. But either way, as of tonight, the back is broken on the required tech-work, so all I’ve got to do is write up the sort of call for contributors that you’d all have to be mad to refuse, and finalise the utterly minimalist design I’ve been working on.

What makes a god different to a hero? (I’m speaking of the type of person you would refer to as “one of my heroes” rather than the sort that you find myths about.) Both of them are unreal things, things that only exist inside our heads. If you ever get to meet your heroes, you discover that they’re normal, flawed people, who certainly can’t live up to the pedestal that one naturally places heroes on. For example: Bill Hicks is one of my heroes. But while I can look to him as someone who spoke the truth as he saw it, and did not compromise, as a genius who was only coming into his own when he died, and as a comedy god, I can do this because I was never confronted with the reality of him during his time as a alcoholic or drug abuser. The man who inspired the myth of Bill Hicks isn’t my hero – rather, it’s the myth figure. (Hicks is on my mind at the moment because I have just finished American Scream)

And it sets me to wondering – is this a better way to treat gods? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if, instead of gods who recieve worship, we all instead had heroes? Something to live up to, rather than obey or give obeisance to?

Or am I simply falling into the terribly easy trap of believing that the world would be a better place if everyone was like me?

My cousin was involved in developing an awful lot of the very clever AI for this game. I’m going to give it at look, when I get a chance. But what boggled me was my discovered that the damn thing has been optioned.

God, but I would commit murder for a cigarette right now. In one week, I will have been quit for a year, and I have no fucking intention of re-starting now. But there’s something in the air tonight. Got home too late to get to the gym with enough time to do anything useful, so I decided to take a walk. I found myself wandering the backstreets of Tooting, Tom Waits “Mule Variations” on the headphones, absolutely dying for a smoke.

And then it started to piss it down, fittingly. So I stamped back home, all wet leather and drowned rat, and am drinking a dose of whiskey in a fruitless attempt to take the edge of this craving.

This has happened quite a bit in the last few weeks. I make jokes about being willing to tear someone’s arm off for a tab, but most of the time, I’m pretty good, to be honest. But just this last fortnight?

I’ve done a pretty good job of re-wiring myself over the last year. I am Healthy, now. But there’s part of me that still smokes, in my head.

Most people seem to have a pretty concrete image of me. There is, apparently just something about me that people can see a base state in. For example: even my friends who say I would look better with short hair, admit (for the most part) that I wouldn’t look like me with short hair. This extends to my personality, as well, where I am, I’m told, either distressingly easy to read, or totally impossible to figure out. There’s just something I project – “an energy about me” as one friend puts it. Everyone does it, I’m sure, but a few people have been commenting on it to me in the last month or two.

But nights like tonight make me wonder if this base me, the one that my friends form a picture of in their heads, smokes.

Because I’m pretty sure the bastard does.

Dammit. So much for getting a load of work done this week. I’m at my parents tomorrow, and I’ve got the 2000AD Birthday Bash on Thursday. Fucksticks. Wtih any luck, I’ll be out of here in half an hour or so, and home by 9:30, so I should be able to get a bit of work done tonight, but it’s still pretty pitiful…

Site Update: Teaser information for the forthcoming SIX STRINGS by myself and Neil Evans now available in the sidebar link, replacing the now-dead Electricana project.

Because I think “what I did at the weekend” posts are pretty fucking dull. But I had an absolutely cracking weekend. So I’m writing about it, as much to justify having done no work at all over the weekend as anything else. Booked in to get a tattoo (from Miles at Into You) in March, then went to see Ocean’s Eleven with Lyssa before having to rush off to Camden to make an eejit of myself on a dancefloor all night. And entirely fabulous Saturday all round.

Sunday was quieter, and started later. Spent the afternoon watching Farscape with Andrew and David (at some point I must get around to writing an essay about that show…) and then we went for Italian and to see Monsters Inc. Might write a couple of short reviews for the films at some point.

But the downside to this is that I absolutely must get a load of work done this week. I’ve got a pitch to finish, and a series to re-plot, as well as a column to write, a code re-write to complete, and I’d like to get some more work done on Thoughtbombs, before I send out my call for contributors.

pantsonhead.com. My co-workers run this site. The gallery is often traumatic. Some of the dowloads are kinda nifty. The reason I’m writing this is that I’ve just been looking at it, and found, at the bottom of the page the following line: “Patience is wasted on the incompetent.”

I laughed.

I use a little CSS on this page – mostly to control the font faces without long tags. But I’ve been reading these CSS tutorials, and I’m seriously considering switching to a CSS based layout system, rather than my current tables based one. At the very least, the site I’m currently developing is almost certain to be CSS-based. Hmmm…