A cautionary tale.

Something worth reading for all you smokers out there.

To your right is a picture of me taken a few years ago when I had orange Gola trainers and a skinny jumper with red stripes down the arms (the collar is in fact quite accurate). Oh, and a massive left hand, which is much better now, thanks for asking.

On a completely unrelated note, enjoy the the most recent extract from Charlie Brooker's Ignopedia.

Continuing our uniquely unreliable interactive knowledge resource

Celebrity

A celebrity is a fellow human being who is better than you because lots of people know who they are. Everyone loves celebrities. Even people who claim to despise celebrities would, if they were honest, prefer to share a drizzly afternoon picnic with Kate Thornton than spend one more second in your revolting non-celebrity company.

If George Clooney called a globally televised press conference, then plucked out two of his eyelashes and announced he would donate them free of charge to the first viewer to turn round and murder their entire family, thousands would perish. Read that again. It is a fact.

Celebrities themselves are rarely evil. Several have talent worth celebrating. Curiously, this is rarely discussed in media coverage, which instead concentrates on how fat their thighs are in order to make regular people, driven to the brink of despair by their adulation of celebrities, feel momentarily better about themselves, and sufficiently robust to stave off suicide long enough to digest further celebrity coverage.

Any member of the public who voluntarily pays to read magazines stuffed with candid photographs of celebrities walking down the street clutching shopping bags is suffering from an acute form of mental illness that hasn't been diagnosed yet, but surely will if there is an atom of hope left in the world, because a civilian flipping through Heat in their lunch break is the human equivalent of a cow being stunned by a captive bolt pistol prior to slaughter - except the cow, at least, dies for a purpose.

More of this here.

What do Beanz Meanz? Another from the Oxford Street store.

This one speaks for itself (apart from to say that it was taken in a shop at the top of Oxford Street that was occupied by some odd and occasionally brilliant satirical art. Is there such a thing? Screwed if I know what to call it but that Banksy chap had something to do with it, you know the fella. I read that there was a message about the disappearing spirit of Christmas in the face of the ever-encroaching commercialisation of absolutely bloody everything, among others. You could also buy lots of stuff so they could hardly claim to be flying in the face of received capitalist imperialist dogma. Having said this, the Modern Toss greetings cards on offer inspired me to make my own from shamelessly downloaded images when I got home. So in essence I was sticking it to the man who's sticking it to the man. Right on.)

A very impressive slide at in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. We rode from the fifth floor. Strange sounds escaped from me without my bidding.

Apparently the fourth floor slide is faster - with a much longer queue - but I went after Mark Kermode (he refused the bump cap offered; mine fell off half way down - I suspect his greasy 'duck's arse' hairstyle lubricated the slide ahead of my turn) and it was a longer ride so I think we made a good choice.

Just doing my bit.

Next, our heroes mug it up for the camera in fine, half-arsed style. It was becoming apparent that we were unlikely that night to stumble upon a photo that shone a light on our inner artists, although to be fair it does say 'nicely toasted' quite eloquently. It'd probably look better cropped. But I digress.

Welcome back. I thought it was about time I got some new photos up here, including some of me and the band. So here we are.

First, we see Damian, Pete and Jeff decorated with icing sugar from some Turkish Delight that was knocking around. The adornment was my idea. I thought it would imbue us with even greater musical powers than usual and create an image worthy of our creative fury. We had swallowed a few drinks by this point (and failed to even so much as look at an instrument) so I think I can be forgiven for such mystical foolishness.