Judging by some of the earliest comments I received, a fair number of you were taken in, if only temporarily, by yesterday's seasonally appropriate drollery. I'd apologise, but K and I are still pissing ourselves laughing about it (it was a joint conspiracy, conceived over supper on Friday night).

The clues were there all along, though. "Ria Poloff", a woman about whom Google knows nothing, is an anagram of... well, I don't propose to insult your intelligence (MWA HA HA!) by spelling it out. And check out the final sentence of the post: "If I merely sound foolish, then please don't hesitate to let me know."

Mind you, that last one did rather rebound on me.What, like I'm NOT FUNNY OR SOMETHING? You wanna STEP OUTSIDE AND SAY THAT?

Ahem. Well, anyway. As you will have spotted, I didn't exactly go to great lengths to Femme Up my little recitation. This is mainly because, when I experimented with a full-on falsetto treatment, the results were so painfully jarring that it just wouldn't have been fair to inflict them upon you for the full four and a half minutes. So I went for a sort of Home Counties Lesbian In Sensible Shoes approach instead, concentrating mainly on eradicating all traces of Northern from my speaking voice. (K thought I sounded like the transsexual travel writer Jan Morris. I can live with that.)

Having said that, the recording did bear some of the hallmarks of a Rush Job; indeed, I ended up using the first full take. This was because I was using the only room in the cottage with a) a decent acoustic and b) an absence of those f**king de-humidifiers (or Dementors as I now call them, as they SUCK THE JOY out of everything around them). This meant banishing K to the upstairs bedroom for the duration, as I am a complete Prima Donna who Cannot Possibly Be Expected To Rehearse In Front Of An Audience. However, as I am also a Prima Donna With A Guilty Conscience About Banishing My Lover To A Cold And Lonely Place, I ended up spending less time on the recording than perhaps I should have done.

(Also, those "Hungarian" comedy accents were sheer bloody murder on the throat. How I suffer for your entertainment.)

My thanks to those of you who played along, and especially to Lionel for coming up with Ria Pollof's reply.

Extra special thanks to Abby "One Track" Lee, for agreeing to let me desecrate her oeuvre in the first place, and for being such a jolly good sport about it all.

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However. All of this knockabout japery has given me another Medium Sized Idea. (OK, it gave Lucy a Medium Sized Idea, which converted to a Medium Sized Suggestion, for which I now propose to take all the credit.) Why don't we do a Shaggy Blog Podcast?

So. If you're a) featured in The Book and b) are tolerably OK at Reading Things Out Loud, then please e-mail me with a digitised reading of your contribution, and I'll stitch together a podcasty thing.

Yes. That could be a nice little Easter Project for us all. Well, it beats drawing faces on boiled eggs...

Labels: comicrelief

And is this the beginning of the beginning for decent sound quality on paid-for MP3s?

In both cases, and despite significant reservations regarding using this as an excuse to bump up the purchase price, I hope that the answer is Yes.

But for now, as always, I'll be sticking to CDs for the music I care about, as opposed to the music about which I might display a fleeting curiosity.

Labels: linkage, popmusic

Here at Troubled Diva, we only Do Adverts if they're a) for friends and b) for worthy causes. This is one such rare occasion.

My good friend Sasha is embarking on a humanitarian aid mission to Moldova in May, and she needs to raise £5500 before she leaves. With over £2500 already raised in donations, she has decided to generate additional funds by arranging a one-off Sunday lunchtime screening of Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

As the film isn't currently on general release, this might be an ideal time to catch it, and to sprinkle a little bit of philanthropic love-dust along the way.

The screening takes place at the Tricycle Cinema in Kilburn, London, at 12:30pm on Sunday April 29th. Tickets cost £12.50 (including nibbles), and can be booked by calling 020 7328 1000.

Full information can be found at www.sashinka.com/tricycle.

I'm fully aware that, y'know, linking to things is, like, soooo 2002. (Weblogs that link to things? Whoever heard of such an idea?) But nevertheless, it would be very cool (retro-cool, even) if you could spread the word.

Here, have an image for your sidebar.



Here, have some HTML code to go with that.

<p><a href="http://sashinka.com/tricycle/"><img src="http://www.sashinka.com/tricycle/inctruth29thbox.jpg" width="250" border="0"></a>

Image too big for your sidebar? If so, then take that width="250" down a few sizes.

Thank you. We now return you to your regular scheduled programming.

Labels: charity, community, films, linkage

Messages texted to Twitter between 1900 and 2120 last night:

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Back in nottingham for tonight's sugababes show.

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Walking past beverley knight's performance in the new market square. Damn, that girl can sing...

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My plus one appears to be a no show. His loss!

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Having a moment of existential alienation in the half empty cheap seats. How dare they? Sharpening my blackest pencil. Also, cold.

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Have just discovered that there's another support act to endure after this one. Kill. Me. Now. I could still be in derbyshire, dammit...

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They've locked the outside smoking area, and aren't allowing pass outs. Bastards! Bang goes my one chance of fleeting pleasure...

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Existential alienation swiftly converting to a generalised misanthropic loathing. I had more fun running for the train at derby station.

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Anyway, where are the gays? I see no gays. They're probably half a mile away, down the front, in the good seats.

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I have seen a gay! He is wearing a sparkly silver cowboy hat and is waving glow sticks. I feel a warm surge of kinship.

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Oh. The "gay" is actually a glow stick seller, working the pre teen market. I feel a cold twist of betrayal.

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Woo! It's sugababes time at long bloody last! I shall shut up now. Thank you for "being there" for me during this time of trial.

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...and here's my decidedly sour review, which originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post.

The Sugababes – Nottingham Arena, Sunday April 1.

With sixteen Top 20 hits under their belts over the past seven years, including five Number Ones, The Sugababes can lay claim to being Britain’s most successful girl group since the Spice Girls. To mark this, their first arena tour has been billed as a Greatest Hits show, and thus a celebration of their achievements to date.

After a long wait, and just as the audience’s patience was wearing thin, the girls finally took to the stage at 9.20, and proceeded to rattle off nineteen numbers in just over an hour and twenty minutes – a bare minimum of performance time for a show of this scale. Backed by a simple four piece band, and surrounded by a barrage of wonderfully stylish computer-generated light patterns, they quickly proved themselves as confident, powerful live singers.

That said, there was little of interest in the vocal arrangements, which stuck fairly rigidly to the melodies, leaving little scope for creative flair. Although the three voices meshed together well, the three personalities behind the voices seemed oddly detached throughout. For a girl group to succeed on stage, there needs to be some sense of a team spirit – that this is a gang of best friends, who stick together and support each other. Bananarama and The Spice Girls had it; Girls Aloud have it in spades; but The Sugababes seemed all but strangers to each other, occupying their own separate spaces, and barely acknowledging each others’ presence.

As the sole remaining original member, Keisha seemed very much the leader of the group, with the strongest vocal presence. Balancing her aloof attitude, Heidi was all smiles throughout, while “new girl” Amelle stayed mostly in the background, never stealing the limelight, knowing her place.

Only during a stripped-down Ugly did anything resembling true passion bubble to the surface. The rest was competent, professional, but disappointingly sterile.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, journal, popmusic

A few minutes ago, my esteemed colleague JP made the 451st purchase of Shaggy Blog Stories, thus nudging the total money raised over the £2000 mark. Considering that the book has only been on sale for 17 days, and considering that it has received only minimal publicity in broadcast and print media, this is a remarkable achievement.

A brief moment of self-congratulation may now be countenanced.

(Incidentally, I hope you're all still keeping an eye on that eye-popping Flickr pool. Cleavage! Nudity! Prosthetics! Banjoes!)

Labels: comicrelief

After five and a half happy years of stats-watching, I have just ditched SiteMeter from this site.

The reason? The SiteMeter Javascript has started serving calls to specificclick.net, which attempts to place site-tracking cookies (a.k.a. spyware) on your machine. Not only is this Bad and Wrong - it's also Dead Slow and A Bit Crap Really. Especially if you're still using Internet Explorer, which has been noticeably slow in loading this site for quite a while now.

(As always, Firefox users would appear to be safe from such threats, with no noticeable degradation in response times. Look, I'm just saying...)

I'm going to see how I get along with Google Analytics instead. In the meantime, if you have SiteMeter installed: my strong advice is to ditch it, now.

Thanks to pete.nu for the heads-up, which confirmed my growing suspicions. Oh, and if you want more proof... here it is, and here again.

(In the interests of balance, here's SiteMeter's "privacy statement".)

Update (1): Suburban Hen has more juicy insider gossip on this, although she has enough tact not to mention the culprit by name. Looks like StatCounter is another viable alternative, then...

Update (2): Eric Odom: Did Sitemeter sell out to Spyware?

Update (3): StatCounter Says NO! This is what we call "Maximising a Competitive Advantage".

Labels: meta

Update: The following story is 100% untrue. Were YOU April Fooled? Oh, I do hope so...

Well, this is all very exciting. On Friday afternoon, I received the following e-mail from the BBC:As I say, all very exciting - but perhaps you might have spotted a slight flaw in Ria's proposal.

She thinks I'm a woman.

Deal breaker? Originally, I thought so. Now, I'm not so sure. After all, this would indeed be "great publicity for the book". All I have to do is convince Ria and her team that I Am A Lady.

This is where you come in. Seeing as it's a Sunday, and that no-one from "Woman's Hour" will be at work today, we've got just enough time to run a little experiment. As I'll almost certainly be removing this post before Monday morning, you'd better be quick.

Take a listen to this reading from The Book, which I recorded in the cottage yesterday afternoon. Does it sound sufficiently female? Could I "pass"? Please let me know in the comments. And if I merely sound foolish, then please don't hesitate to let me know.

Labels: comicrelief, mediawhoredom