As already mentioned, the ban on smoking in public places comes into force on Sunday (which also happens to be my birthday, so I’ll probably be having a fairly wet ‘n’ windy time outside a pub somewhere…)*

What’s the general opinion? Sanctimonious?** Sympathetic? Unwilling to divest yourselves of a toss? Time for a new poll. Long live fags, as the Eton prefect said to Elton John!

* - apart from being the dawn of my 35th year on this planet, Sunday is, more importantly, Canada Day. See, Kyklops, I remebered! God keep your land glorious and free! (of baby seals…)

** on the subject of sanctimony - and I’ve probably mentioned this before - one of the things I hate MOST IN THE WORLD is when someone at Wimbledon takes a photo and forgets about his / her automatic flash. Whereupon the umpire makes an announcement along the lines of “please do not use flash photography” and the rest of the spectators applaud, as if to say “Yeah. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner. Bad man, with your flash photography. I’d NEVER do that.” Self-righteous arseholes.

The pub smoking ban approaches rapidly, and finally, after months of sanctimonious “you smoke, I choke” types wagging their fingers and saying “aahh, you won’t be able to do it for long” - to which smokers generally reply “actually, I think that an indoor ban is a very good idea” - FINALLY someone is launching some kind of protest. And it is… Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses (!?)

Mr Slash is currently being investigated for smoking on stage during a gig in Wales. “I heard about it (the investigation) though the newspaper and s*it like that. And I was like ‘Well f*ck I didn’t know it was banned!’”, quipped the chubby-cheeked poodle-haired rocker, before insisting that he would continue to smoke on stage even if that meant the prospect of a £50 fine every time he played.

Your humble editor is a reasonably regular smoker (especially when out on the lash), but I will no doubt fall meekly into line like everyone else come July 1st. So I’m quite “down with” Slash’s rebellious stance on this one - but it’s a sad state of affairs when the land of The Who, The Clash and Cliff Richard have to rely on ageing Yanks for any modicum of whisky-guzzlin’ lawbreakin’ rawk ‘n’ roll livin’. And sh*t like that.

Stop press - apparently Slash is being signed up as the figurehead for a campaign against urinating in public (guffaw…)

A couple of lookey-likeys for your delectabilitation:

Long-chinned Canadian faux-Brit Greg Rusedski:

… and his smiley younger brother, long-chinned pop-votey bummer Will Young:

And, while we’re at it, WAG-bothering over-rated footie lump Peter Crouch…

… and special needs anime icon Timmy off of South Park -

TIMMAAAAAYYY!

No, it’s Hen-man. The world’s lamest superhero is once again Britain’s top hope at Wimbledon, thanks to the late withdrawal of Andy Murray. But predictably, as Henman has aged and his powers have waned, genuine hope has turned to typically British mocking cynicism; Henman is now largely a figure of fun. OK, his cause isn’t helped by the fact that he STILL looks like a 9-year-old swot, or by the fact that the name “Tim” is the polar opposite of “Clint” in the macho stakes. But let’s get his career into context - he has been plying his trade at the same time as Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, arguably the two best grass-court players (arguably the two best players FULL STOP) - of all time. A Wimbledon win would have been astonishing. He has, despite the complete lack of a tennis infrastructure in the UK when he was starting out, enjoyed a remarkably successful career, rising to 4th in the world at one point. His career earnings top £8 million.

These facts (especially the latter) are probably adequate compensation for the disappointment of never getting past the Wimbledon semis - and I daresay had he NOT had to deal with the pressure from Wimbledon’s annual tennis-fan-for-a-fortnight public made up of ignorant corporate rah Pimms-quoffing twats and even more ignorant tabloid feeding-frenzy commoners, he might even have won it.

So the Spice Girls are to reform… obviously inevitable, following Take That’s recent lucrative album and tour - even a tubby, be-suited reincarnation of their baby-oil-drenched boy-band excesses of the ’90s was enough to send fans wild.

Apparently, the Spazz reunion had been proposed by desperate record company bosses for at least 3 years, and the reason that the Girls held out so long is that both Mel B AND Mel C absolutely LOATHE Geri Halliwell. £10 million each was evidently enough for them to bury (or at least temporarily secrete) that particular hatchet. So, as a result, Crappy-Solo-Career Spice, Last-Album-Didn’t-Do-Much Spice, Attempted-to-go-Hip-Hop-But-That-Didn’t-Work-Either Spice, Pulped-Autobiography Spice and Stick-Thin With-Bizarre-Gravity-Defying-Breasts-But-Fortuitously-Married-to-David-Beckham Spice
will wow the world once more…

Ahh, facial hair - loyal, but oft-spurned, companion to the sartorially correct male. Every man should experiment with facial hair at some point in his life - my father always had some kind of moustache or beard going on. But we live in an emasculated age of backs, sacks and cracks and chest waxing (for the love of Christ!) - so what’s a chap to do?

Firstly, full beards are out; they make you look old and / or like a history teacher. Likewise conventional moustaches, at least until we reclaim them from stereotyped homosexuals, Dutch plumbers and Arab dictators. To my chagrin, it has become apparent to me that I’ll never be hairy enough to grow a “walrus” moustache (as made famous by cricketer Merv Hughes), or even a horseshoe moustache (as recently worn to spectacular effect by James Nesbitt in “Murphy’s Law”) -

Seriously, that one display of facial hair was enough to make me forgive Nesbitt for a lifetime of abysmal crap like “Cold Feet”.

Anyway, gents, back to the point - I desire to proclaim my manhood through the medium of facial hair, but I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to do it. As a holding strategy, I’ve started growing a big ol’ pair of rockabilly sideburns, but I want something a bit more impressive. Any ideas?

Like an over-incubated egg which has begun to exude a faint whiff of mould, I’ve been sitting on a draft of this post for way too long. But in the absence of anything else particularly interesting to write about, I’ve got little choice but to let it fledge. My problem with the idea is that several million bloggers have already had it, making me about as original as a man who invents a hard toffee-flavoured sweet and calls it “Weathers”.

I’m after the worst band names EVER - as far as I can ascertain, bad band names fall into three categories -

1) Appalling puns: The Beatles (obviously), Gnarls Barkley (for anyone who doesn’t know, there was an all-time great basketball player called Charles Barkley), Razorlight (rays o’ light - GAAAAH!)

2) Dumb mis-spellings: Def Leppard, Limp Bizkit, INXS. Led Zeppelin are of course exempt.

3) - and these are invariably the worst - names which were supposed to sound jaunty and cool at the time, but have ended up being about as “shtreet” as a pair of snow-washed combat trousers worn with white socks and sandals. eg Fun Boy Three and (incontrovertibly the worst band name ever) Kajagoogoo.

What say you, consumers of the fecal six-inch-sub?

“Larger-than-life” comedian Bernard Manning died today, aged 76; many accused him of being a racist, and certainly from the ’80s onwards he was deliberately marginalised by the mainstream media, despite being obviously talented. On the other hand, as this BBC tribute site shows, a great many people thought he was misunderstood.

Coincidentally, on the same day a big hullabaloo is being made by various Islamic states about the decision to give Salman Rushdie a knighthood. The obvious question is this - if Rushdie offends Muslims so much, doesn’t that make HIM a racist? Or is it OK for him to offend people because he went to Cambridge, writes impenetrable novels and talks posh?

As for my thoughts on Bernard Manning - to be honest, as a vegetarian, I was always more worried about the turkeys…

I think it was Swiss dog-breeding philosopher George St Bernard Shaw who said “Hell is full of musical amateurs”. Well, I’m not really sure what he’s on about, but I’d like to share with you my personal private musical hell - maybe you can pay me back in kind by voting in the new (or should that be “nu”) poll, or even by making your own suggestions for inclusion.

Here they are - music’s darkest hours (in reverse order)

4 - early 1980s electro. A seething horde of sexually-confused apprentice electricians from Essex fail to complete their City and Guilds and instead take to the stage, writing earnest but barely-scanning lyrics about God, Love and Margaret Thatcher. They then proceeded to sing them, usually flat, whilst playing the same note repeatedly on a Casio VL Tone. We bought the records. What WERE we thinking of…

3 - The late 1980s in general. The final embers of punk and new wave had LONG fizzled out, and we’d fallen out of love with new romanticism; The Jam had become the Style Council and Spandau Ballet were pretending to be the Krays in EastEnders (or something). Into the vacuum leapt the blandest acts ever: Wet Wet Wet, Level 42, the frighteningly bad T’Pau, and (brace yourselves) Stock Aitken and Waterman, who discovered the handy trick of being able to sell us the exact same record (performed by different artist) again and again. And again. Serial offender Rick Astley is still wanted in several Scandinavian countries for crimes against humanity.

2 - Nu-Grunge / Alt-metal. Frankly, I’m at a loss to describe quite how dull supposedly gritty, shouty American rock bands like Creed, Staind and Nickelback are. At least we Brits have never really succumbed to this shite.

1 - Acid House / Hardcore Rave. Calling themselves something like “DJ Wicked” and shouting “techno techno techno” over an old disco record which they’d speeded up from 33 to 45, talentless lower-middle-class drug-taking oiks stole the youth of a generation in the early 1990s. Want evidence of the fallout? Check out current Big Brother contestant Tracey.

Hit me, Sandwichians… you always give good poll…

I’m sure the BBC thinks it’s doing something admirable by recycling corpulent former funnymen (and women) who have long-since lost any mojo which they might (or might not) once have possessed, but do we REALLY need to see Lenny Henry travelling around Britain in a quest to find out what makes us laugh (the Beeb having established that it’s evidently not him…)? Or Victoria Wood pretending to be a school cleaning lady or something? Or Billy Connolly driving around Ireland on a stupid 3-wheeled motorbike spouting earnest Caledonian platitudes about the country’s tragic history through a purple fucking beard?

Stateside readers - do you have to put up with this kind of crap?