I’m watching BBC2’s “The Big Read”. Two foul travesties have occured. Firstly, Jilly Cooper won the “Author’s Weakest Link”. That was bad enough. But she won about seven and a half thousand pounds for charity. And what’s she doing with it? She’s donating it to a society that wants to put up a statue in London, as a memoiral to all the animals that have been killed in wars. That’s just fucking sickening.
Point 1: I’m a damn sight more concerned about all the fucking people that have died in wars than their bastard cats.
Point 2: It’s not fucking helping anyone. Charityable donations should be making life better for people with a pulse. If you can’t manage the people part then fuck, I’ll settle anything with a pulse. A statue to dead things, and worse, dead fucking pets is not a charitable act, it’s a memorial. Gah!

And the second travesty? It turns out that I have to dump Fin, because Martine McCutcheon’s favourite book is Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and there’s no way I can date someone who shares their favourite book with Tiffany out of Eastenders. Sorry.

Idea shamelessly thieved from Marysia, I present the meaning of my name:

Alasdair: Scottish form of Alexander, meaning “defender of men”.
Nicholas: From the Greek “Nikolaos”, meaning “victory of the people”.
Watson: Son of Wat. Wat is a medieval contraction of Walter, meaning “ruler of the army”, so “Son of the ruler of the Army”.

So, broadly, my name means that we’d all be better off if the rest of you just did what I said.

So, I’m feeling like shit, my brain’s a weird syncopation around the real world, and I spent half my day drifiting in and out of a strange psycho-political landscape, fever dreaming in time to the third season of The West Wing. I’m trying to put together questions for an interview with Grant Morrison about the relationship between comics and magic, and actually, all I seem to do is jot down my notes, theories and ideas about the link between us an our fictions. I’m re-reading a piece I wrote a couple of years back for a fringe-culture magazine that I don’t think ever saw the light of day, and allowing for the fact that the pop culture references date it slightly (less that I’d thought they would – the Beckhams are a little less current now, but that’s it) it’s still passable. There are a few nice phrases in there, but it’s knocking on 2000 words, so there ought to be a few occaisions where I hit my stride.

The piece was an attempt to understand magic as a tool for identity manipulation. What Robert Anton Wilson calls “meta-programming”. Last year, for Ninth Art’s 24 hour comic event, I wrote a story that was a tool to teach me more about the Kabbalisitic Tree Of Life, but I think in the end, it had more to tell me about fiction and reality than about the Kabbalah. I think perhaps that’s what I need to do here. A twenty minute speech on fiction as magic. See what I come out of it with, and then see if that’s a start point for an interview.

It’s that, or I get stinking drunk, and write down whatever old shite comes into my head. That’s worked OK in the past.

This is how I know I must be unwell. I feel like I’ve got a cold, but with even more exhaustion. So, I’m dropping back inot my usual pattern when unwell. Drink loads of tea (something I almost never drink, outside of when I’m unwell) and remain in bed, is some kind of weird half-state between awake and asleep. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Yeah, it’s an appalling and predicatble pun, given that an issue of the comic was littered with subliminal messages. Well, less messages, but the word “sex” has been slotted into the art quite a lot. There are protestations of innocence from the artist, and claims that there was nothing in the script about it. Me, I’m not convinced, but it’s funny…

Blackmask.com. Loads and loads of books in the public domain, available free, in loads of different formats, including some palm-friendly ones.

Etymonline.com. And on-line etymological dictionary. Not as sophisticed as I might like, but I’ve been after an decent etymology resource for a while now.

Have just discovered allconsuming.net. Give me a couple of hours, and there’ll be interesting new bits on my website.

They keep mounting up – here’s an article on American War Crimes, just in case there’s anyone out there that thinks that US has any kind of claim to a moral high ground, in well, any situation whatsoever.

I’d just like to note here that I’m not doing this for the sake of “America bashing”. It doesn’t make me feel good. I have many lovely friends who are American. I’m doing this because we’re at war and I feel that in war, one of the best things a pacifist can do is report on the atrocities his own side is commiting. I’d be linking to stories about the British Government doing this sort of thing, if I could find them. As it is, America is nominally on “my side” at the moment…

Just shut up and read this, OK?

I’m a nightmare to buy presents for. If it’s in the “affordable present” price range, and something I’m likely to want, then there’s a pretty good chance that I’ve bought it for myself already. I’m not good at waiting. My mother has been giving me grief about this for years – on the few occaisions when she can both get enough of a handle on my tastes to buy me something I’d like and actually find somewhere she can buy the thing, I’ve almost invariably already got it.

So, today’s my birthday (and many thanks for all the birthday wishes). Naturally, I’ve just bought myself the new West Wing boxed set that’s due out in a couple of weeks. On the one hand, it’s not acutally out yet, so no-one can have got it for me as a present, but it’s kind of symptomatic, you know?