Thank you!

Bloggers publish book for Comic Relief.

100 bloggers have published a book to raise funds of the BBC’s Comic Relief appeal on Friday 16th March.

‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ features hilarious contributions from Richard Herring of ‘Fist of Fun’ fame, BBC 6Music presenter Andrew Collins, comedian Emma Kennedy, and James Henry, scriptwriter from Channel Four’s ‘The Green Wing’.

Authors Abby Lee, David Belbin, Catherine Sanderson and The Guardian’s Anna Pickard have also contributed pieces to the book.

The vast majority of contributions, however, are the work of many of the lesser known and unfamiliar heroes of British blogging; going under pen names such as Diamond Geezer, Scaryduck, Pandemian and Unreliable Witness.

Also contributing to ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’, and hoping to raise funds for the Comic Relief Appeal is local writer INSERT YOUR NAME, LOCALITY AND BLOG DETAILS HERE.

The book is the idea of blogger Mike Atkinson who writes the ‘Troubled Diva’ weblog. ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’ features comic writing from not only the cream of British blogging, but also the best up-and-coming and undiscovered writers publishing their work on their own websites.

Giving himself a “ridiculously short” seven days from idea to finished product, Atkinson admitted that he was overwhelmed with the response, which gleaned over 300 submissions for publication.

With a pool of talented writers, and the latest publishing-on-demand technology, Shaggy Blog Stories bypasses the usual snail-paced publishing industry, and offers a mail order service to customers who will receive their finished copy within days of placing their order, and only a couple of weeks after the original idea.

“Blogging creates complex, worldwide networks of friendship and contacts on the internet”, says journalist Alistair Coleman, one of Shaggy Blog Stories’ contributors. “By creating a buzz about this book, we can reach out to hundreds, thousands of readers who’d be willing to part with a few quid for this very good cause. Mike’s got some excellent writers on board here whose work deserves a wider audience. Everybody wins.”

For details of how to order the book, visit http://www.shaggyblogstories.co.uk.

For the background story on the creation of Shaggy Blog Stories, take a look at http://www.troubled-diva.com.

The moment of glory for Maidstone’s finest, although they did have a few hits of diminishing size (I wouldn’t have called “What’s Your Name” un-PC, Jeff, more a straightforward tale of boy-fancies-girl, boy-finds-girl-fancies-him-back, happy ending). The indecipherable singer might not be the most successful P. Hewson in pop history but gt to Number 1 sixteen years before the other one.

But apart from the Moog, which everyone is justly celebrating, there’s another major contribution we can thank the Tip for. A couple of weeks after “Son Of My Father” was deposed from Number 1, Manchester City signed Rodney Marsh from Queen’s Park Rangers thinking he’d be the last piece in the jigsaw that would enable them to clinch the league title (he wasn’t , and they didn’t – but to be fair it was one of the tightest finishes ever). But it was City fans, IIRC, who were the first to adopt the recent chart-topper, turning it into “Ohhhhh Rodney Rodney, Rodney Rodney Rodney Rodney Rodney Marsh” – the template for any number of songs about three- or five-syllable footballers since. Maybe the City supporters’ talent for purloining previous hits rubbed off on a four-year-old Blue growing up in Burnage at the time.

JACK KIRBY INVENTOR OF TECHNO!

“What’s Your Name” is nice too, but the use of the synth there is much closer to, I dunno, Switched-On Bach. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t feel half as fresh and four-tracky as this…

I looked it up because I thought I didn’t know this song. Of course I know this song! What a brilliant moog solo.

Let’s see, what am I doing at this time? Mock A-levels are over. I’m busy with rehearsals for the school play, The Crucible, which was great fun - it was said of the cast that they didn’t have to act, they were like that anyway. Afterwards we, or at least the oddball faction to which I belonged, would often go to the bar of the Barn Theatre to chill out and set the world to rights and flirt outrageously. I, who had been so quiet and mousy up to this point in my life, began to become outrageous.

I didn’t care much for this, though, despite its positive associations. I’ve never been wild about electronics, I’m afraid.

(in fact what WAS the first sleeve to feature eg a ROBOT? tell me it wasn’t queen)

(of course there are some hyper-modernist CLASSICAL sleeves in the 60s, tho they tend to be expressionist-futurist rather than cubist or pop-cubist)