This is what the folks at Wikipedia would call a "stub" posting, as I haven't had time to wrap any suitable words around the podcast in question.

Basically, this is a continuation of last week's tatty gay disco, but with a faster BPM rating. It's also, um, a little more specialist than last week's gentle warm-up. The weekend starts here! Woo!

Something occurred to me earlier today.

A lot of my favourite weblogs are what you might call "personality based", ie. where the unique, distinct personality of the blogger is clearly discernible in the writing style.

When reading these blogs, I will often imagine that they are being read out loud by their author. Consequently, a little "performance" voice will switch itself on in my head, as I start to dramatise the reading to myself: accents, cadences, pauses, the lot. (It must be the repressed thesp in me.) This phenomenon is particularly evident when I have either never met the blogger in question, or else have no tangible memory of their speaking voice.

Right now, I'm particularly proud of my Guyana-Gyal: a blog which absolutely reads to me as if it were the script for a series of filmed monologues.

Does anyone else ever do this? Have you ever done this while reading this site? And if so, then did my podcasts make any difference to your interpretation? (I ask this because my Naked Blog voice has shifted somewhat, after hearing Peter recite some of his posts.)

Alcuin and Flutterby
Is a weblog containing,
Amongst other things
Of lesser interest
To an atheist,
Traditional Norfolk koans.

There is, in fact,
So far as I can tell,
No such tradition.

But maybe now
There is.

(via)

---

I would love to tell you which celebrity K is talking to right now, even as I type - but the information is, as they say, "embargoed". All I can safely say is this: she has been on the front cover of Heat, Hello and OK, and her level of celebrity was sufficient to send K into a MAJOR Outfit Tizz yesterday evening.

(It took a good hour, several jackets, most of his smart trousers, and his entire shoe collection - but the Paul Smith suit we eventually selected combined vet-friendly brown corduroy with a sharp, celebrity-compatible cut. I could charge for this sort of work, you know.)

The trouble is: I hate having to keep secrets. One of life's blabbermouths, that's me. Mainly because I can never quite see the point of secrets, even when the need for them is screamingly obvious to anyone else with half a brain. There's just something about the whole concept of secrecy which bothers me; a hangover from the whole "coming out" process, no doubt. For once you've broken free from a secret as major as your sexual orientation, it is tempting to view all "lesser" secrets as not worth keeping. It's a strange kind of naïve adolescent idealism, which I've never fully grown out of.

I am also burdened with a more childlike desire: to be The One Who Breaks The Big Story. There is something delicious and irresistable about watching people react to a juicy piece of news which I HAVE TOLD THEM; it makes me feel all Important and Special, rather like that awful gossipy elephant in Dumbo. Combine these two factors, stir in my abilities as a Good Listener (providing you've got some good dirt to dish, that is) - and you're left with a dangerously unmanageable personality trait, which has got me into some awful trouble over the years.

Perhaps I should have gone into journalism years ago.

---

STOP PRESS: The embargo has been LIFTED!

Tell you what: let's play Name That Celebrity Twenty Questions in the comments box. One question per person please, and your question should be phrased so as to expect either a "Yes" or a "No" answer.

Readers of the Brighton Argus - and I'm sure there are many - will be able to discover the answer for themselves in Friday's edition.

Off you go!

Note 1: As this celebrity is not widely known outside the UK, overseas readers will be operating with a fairly massive handicap.

Note 2: Alan, Dymbel, Mish and JP are forbidden from participating. Well, breaking the embargo to carefully selected confidantes is no crime, is it? Quod erat demonstrandum, I guess.

Following a mention from Gordon, and after a certain amount of wrestling with half-understood scraps of CSS, I have just succeeded in generating an automatic calendar of forthcoming events on my sidebar. (Scroll down to the "we're seeing..." section.)

The whole thing is powered by Upcoming.org, which lets you manage your events (both public and private) online. Registering for the service was quick and easy (and free), and although the interface could be a little more intuitive in places, I found it fairly straightforward to add my events.

Once you've added some events, the "Upcoming Badges" service will generate some code, which can be pasted into your blog template. You can opt for a standard layout (no technical knowledge required), or you can hack the code about to make it blend into your site style.

Update: If you keep scrolling below this new section, you'll find the return of an old friend. (No mouseover text this time, though. Firefox can't cope.)

Those of you with long memories might recall my friend Alan's guest post on this site back in July 2004, in which he shared his amusing experiences at a certain budget hotel on Nottingham's Alfreton Road. With all the thrilling recklessness of the novice, Alan also included a link to the hotel's official website.

Earlier today, the hotel's managers finally discovered the post in question. Let's just say that their reply makes for entertaining reading.

(Alan now blogs - tirelessly and ceaselessly, it has to be said - at Reluctant Nomad. I'm sure he would value your custom.)

Because it has been far too long since I posted one of my meaningless music-geek lists - and in honour of Pitchfork magazine's noble effort, which appeared earlier this week (not at all bad for a bunch of Americans!) - here's a list of my favourite singles from the so-called "New Pop" era, as championed by the likes of Paul Morley in the NME during the early 1980s.

The rules for inclusion are: one track per act, singles only, UK artists only, nothing before Buggles or after Band Aid.What would you have added to the list?

- Did you get your web access back at work today?

- Yes, we did.

- So have you got round to reading the final part of my "wedding" series yet?

- Oh, didn't you see my comment?

- Well, there wasn't one at ten to six...

- Hmm, the screen did go a bit funny after I pressed the Submit button. It must have got lost.

- What did it say?

- I'll type it in again, shall I?

[...]

- OK, it's done. Do you want to swap places?

- Where is it? Oh, you've closed the window. Ah, got it. Yes, haha, very good.

- Thank you.

[...]

- You know, this is a very post-modern way for a couple to discuss these issues. Most people would just have an actual conversation.

- Pfft, who wants to do that?

---

From the Women & Equality Unit of the DTI: Civil Partnership Act 2004 - Frequently Asked Questions.Two witnesses, eh? People are just going to have to form an orderly queue.

Also, I do hope there's going to be none of that "With my body I do thee worship" business. Most unseemly. Especially at our time of life.

Creative writing assignment, satire module #1: How would you word such a document? Let's have some vows that today's modern same-sex couples could really use! Answers in the comments, please.

Full information from the DTI, including a downloadable version of the official Civil Partnership booklet (released today), can be found here.

Update: My colleague JP has just downloaded the booklet, and has printed off two copies: one for him and his intended, and one for me and mine. This is so COSY! All of a sudden, we're turning into those irritating people in the office who keep discussing their wedding plans! (Sorry, S. You KNOW I don't mean you.) Yay for equality! Are you collecting for your bottom drawer?

For paranoid egotists such as myself, who like to keep close tabs on what people have been saying about them, the link:URL feature of Google's new blog search service (still in Beta test) could be the perfect replacement for the increasingly hopeless Technorati. (via)

Looking at the results for this site, it seems to be doing a fairly thorough job, throwing up several results which Technorati had missed. Results are ordered by date; links to specific posts are spotted; and best of all, you can subscribe to a feed, using the links at the bottom of the results page. Fabulous! All change! We love Google!

Update: I've already spotted a couple of restrictions. Firstly, in order to show up in the search results, your blog MUST have a site feed of its own. Since the vast majority of blogs now have this anyway - including all Blogspot and Typepad blogs as a matter of course - this shouldn't be too much of a problem. This also means that, as Google is building its information from feeds alone, blogroll links won't be picked up at all - just links within specific posts. (As someone who checks his referral stats once or twice a day, this doesn't particularly bother me. It's the specific references within posts which are easy to miss.)

This has also drawn my attention to a deeply weird blog called Your divas info, which seems to be cobbling together genuine "diva" links (my own included), presumably to bury Google-fooling spam links amongst the content. However, I can only find one spam link on the entire site - although one of the posts has already been hit by spam comments. Wheels within wheels. These people move in mysterious ways. (And I'll be removing this paragraph before the end of the week, to avoid pumping up their Googlejuice any further.)

Update: Once again, thanks to Pete Ashton in the comments, for introducing me to the Googlejuice-busting "rel=nofollow". We don't talk tech too often round these parts - but when we do, we like to get things right.

Sorry, were you expecting something in English?

As any seasoned blog-surfer will tell you from bitter experience, it really isn't a great idea to leave comments on other people's sites when you've, um, had a few. This is a lesson which I forget at my peril.

Last Wednesday, Gert of Mad Musings put out a call for questions from her readers. Knowing what a huge opera fan she is, I dived straight into her comments box:Rambling, over-parenthesised (even by my standards), pretentious and needlessly provocative: yup, I was pissed all right. "Access the emotional dimension", indeed. Even Uri Geller would have blushed at that one.

To make matters worse, the previous commenter had already asked the same question, but nicely. But you don't notice these things when the blood has rushed to your head and your fingers are in full, fevered flow. (Use of alliteration, hem hem.)

Posted yesterday, Gert's lengthy reply provides a useful insight into the mystifying world of the Opera Buff, her response to my "ridiculous artificial warbly voices" charge being particularly well made. Then, towards the end of the post, she says the following:On this score at least, I can claim to have made an effort - not once, not twice, but on three wretched, soul-sapping evenings which I'll never get back in this lifetime. Let me take you through them, starting with the most recent.

2002: The Soldier's Tale (Stravinsky), Buxton Opera House.

Older readers will have read about this before. For now, suffice it to say that I was fast asleep for most of the first half, before being sharply reprimanded by the man in front of me for jiggling my right leg up and down all the way through the second half, in an attempt to maintain alertness.

1989: La Traviata (Verdi), Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg.

Displaying all the sophisticated production values of the Harpenden Light Operatic Society's 1978 staging of The Merry Widow (which I have excluded from this list on the grounds of Lightness), this stiff, stilted piece of souped-up Am Dram provided a good clue as to why the Mariinsky Theatre - home of the world-famous Kirov Ballet - has not been equally celebrated for its opera.

Once again, with an all too rare consistency that borders on the admirable, I was fast asleep for most of the first half. There was certainly nothing happening on stage which could possibly have roused me from my slumbers.

Perestroika still being in its infancy, there was no bar on the premises. Instead, the audience amused themselves during the interval by slowly pacing round and round the edges of a sizeable ante-room, in orderly rows of three or four abreast (strictly one direction only, no overtaking), occasionally waving graciously across the room at people they recognised. The whole thing had something of the flavour of a Regency period "promenade" to it, with the crinolines replaced by badly fitting crimplene. Sadly, this proved to be the most stimulating feature of the whole evening.

1981: Tosca (Puccini), some posh theatre in Portsmouth. Or was it Southampton?

The real reason I went to this: it would give me a chance to sit next to the guy I'd sort-of had sex with a couple of months earlier, so that we could play Ooh Is That Your Thigh I'm Rubbing Against Oh Well Never Mind games all the way through the performance.

(He was a shallow, shameless, sexually ambiguous tease who liked the attention but wouldn't commit; I was 19, almost wholly inexperienced in matters of the heart, emotionally over my head, and basically totally f***ing desperate. But we're here to talk about opera. Oh yes we are. No, I think you'll find we are.)

However, not even the ready proximity of the betrousered limbs of my Dearest Him-bo was enough to keep me from slipping into the arms of Morpheus during the first half, such was the unremitting Sheer Bloody Tedium of the spectacle on offer. Call me ADD, but when it comes to dramatic entertaiment, I like it best when things actually, you know, happen. (I have the same problem with Beckett.)

As I say, consistency. Maybe it's Pavlovian.

I've saved the most damning episode to last.

With the lead soprano indisposed due to illness, one of the great doyennes of the Welsh Opera had graciously offered to stand in at the eleventh hour. For the clued-up buffs in the audience, it must have been a great treat to witness her reprising one of her greatest roles, after all those years.

After all those many, many years.

Years in which - how can I put this delicately? - her physical charms had shifted from "sylph-like" to "ample".

Now, there was one fact, and one fact only, which I knew in advance about Puccini's Tosca: that, at the end of the final act, the heartbroken heroine would commit suicide by flinging herself off a high parapet.

As the Great Doyenne launched herself off the specially constructed tower and sailed towards the stage, her skirts billowing about her, I suddenly remembered the apocryphal tale, as told to me by my old German master, of The Tosca Who Bounced.

At which point, I got the giggles. Big time.

To the extent that people as far as two rows in front of me turned round and glared at the spotty youth who had single-handedly wrecked the tragic denouement of the entire evening.

I didn't even get a snog out of him on the way home.

---

A few weeks ago, I struck a deal with an acquaintance of mine in Nottingham, who is passionate about the medium. He'll take me to the opera, and I'll approach it with an open mind - so long as he commits to seeing a live band with me at The Rescue Rooms, under the same conditions. There's no hurry; he would prefer to wait until something really good comes to town.

He's thinking that maybe something by Benjamin Britten might crack me open. As I once sang the lead soprano role in a Britten children's opera and enjoyed it immensely (The Golden Vanity, prep school gym, 1974, didn't see that one coming right?), he might be on the right track.

I'll let you know in due course. Who knows, it might even be the start of a wonderful new chapter in my cultural life.

Then again, it might pay to sprinkle a precautionary gram of whizz into my Red Bull beforehand. Better safe than sorry, and all that. After all, I'd hate to be an embarrassment.

Plus points:

• Unlike the Times and the Independent (both tabloids), there are still plenty of stories on the front page. Although these are mostly just short summaries, they are also complete within themselves, i.e. you don't have to turn to an inside page mid-sentence. Each summary also points to a full article on an inside page, in a visually clear, easy to follow manner.
• Not only is there colour on each page, but the colour reproduction quality is immeasurably improved. No more smudgy Steve Bells!
• The new "Egyptian" font is attractive and easy to read.
• The "Media" pull-out section looks much better in its new, larger size.
• The TV listings have been expanded to give equal weight to BBC3 and BBC4.
• The full colour centre-spread photograph has a real impact.
• The smaller page size promotes marital harmony. On those rare occasions where our carefully constructed morning routines fall apart - meaning that, horror of horrors, we are forced to have breakfast together - we can now read the separate sections in comfort, without fighting for table space.

Minus points:

• With more pages to flick through, browsing inevitably takes longer. As I don't allow myself much time at the breakfast table, this raises Time Management issues. (In later life, it might also raise RSI issues. Hypochondriac, moi?)
• The headlines look more like large size text than proper headlines; there's a lack of immediate impact.
• Now that the old "G2" tabloid has been shrunk to a "half-Berliner" size, it looks awfully diddy and inconsequential.
• The TV picks of the day have been dropped, along with full listings for the Sky movie channels. At the same time, the programme descriptions in the main listings have been shrunk to almost nothing.
• Almost every article now finishes with a URL for the relevant section of Guardian Unlimited. However, as those of us whose URLs have appeared in print can testify, almost nobody will ever bother to type them into a browser. So it's a bit of a waste of space.
• Those irritatingly ego-gratifying little photos of all the columnists, which all newspapers insist on having these days: they've been re-shot in colour, but I don't think they've been shrunk to fit the new page size. This makes them even more intrusive than before. (Also, there is at least one previously fanciable columnist who doesn't look half as good in his new photo. This disappoints me. No, I'm not saying who.)
• Where's Doonesbury?
  Update: It's returning, by public demand. (via Pete in the comments)