Today's best news story. What the hell? Have I fallen asleep and missed April?

Sophie Ellis Bexter has been found head-butted to death in an apartment of a French footballer.

Police say it was Murder On Zidane's Floor.

How ace is this? It's Elvis baby, Elvis! Well, sort of.

I always feel slightly left out of those utterly insane conversations where people I start channelling The King through their cereal boxes. Honey Nut Cheerios are fairly crap at picking up that sort of telepathic activity. I fully reckon that Lucky Charms would do the trick, except England seems to have quietly banned them, probably because all those delicious Charms contained enough E numbers to turn your average school into an army of screaming hoojimongers. I relish the memories. Relish them.

I got so bored of having a blog where nothing worked that I have ixnayed it altogether. From now on the only fluffy kittens on this bastard will be the ones posted from stuff on my cat! Oh yez!

OIR has finally succumbed to the blog phenomenon and you can read her here. I say read because unlike me, OIR actually writes great long diatribes about Things, whereas I tend to have a diatribe maybe once every two months and the rest of the time get distracted by links. That's the thing though, isn't it? If you spend your whole day writing, you don't tend to write for relaxation. Maybe I would if I were a poet like Barney, or reet musical like the Autistic Muso, but I'm not so there we go. I wrote and recorded some fairly terrible blues which these guys are apparently turning into an electro track, and more importantly I made a pom pom when on holiday. So I don't give a shit.

This weekend I'm spending my time interviewing people I really like. Interviewing is possibly my favourite music thing to do ever (except, errr, listening to it) and I'm VERY excited. And Paolo Nutini, who I can't get excited about at all, despite the Blonde Drama Queen's best efforts. Maybe he'll be lovely. Anyway.

So, tomorrow I will mostly be plugged into the computer, listening to a boatload of tunes and grinning like a lunatic about the fact I get to meet talented people who I admire and respect. Three days of gin will surely follow.

I would quite like some now in fact. But that would be wrong. Happy Birthday Mother Brown.

This "Italy training camp" vid on You Tube can most likely be applied to Portugal as well. Shocking ;)

Someone must help this poor man crush his Peugeot 307. Inspired by The Simpsons (as all good things are, natch) he's got so fed up with the company refusing to sort out his rapidly decaying car that he's raising money to get it squashed. And raise money for charity, he's not a complete arse.

"Why?
Because this particular car is the worst Peugeot 307 ever built, and Peugeot UK has been completely uninterested in fixing my problems or trying to resolve the situation despite the assistance of WhatCar? magazine who featured this car in March 2004.

I was fed up of being told that it was only my car that had experienced problems when a quick scout around the net proved that lots of owners were having the same problems.

The final straw came this week after the exhaust dropped off after just 26k miles. According to Peugeot this is normal and they won't discuss it any further."

26k. That's a bit shit even for Peugeot.

MISSOURI: A federal judge has just stopped all human executions after findnig out that the doctor in charge of mixing up the lethal injections was dyslexic.

"The court is gravely concerned that a physician who is solely responsible for correctly mixing the drugs ... has a condition which causes him confusion with regard to numbers," the judge writes.

He also doubled the level of one drug which the doctor had been mixing. The deal is that first you get an anaesthetic, then you get one which paralyses you, then potassium chloride, which stops your heart and is fucking painful if you haven't been knocked out. Guess which one the doctor had been dishing out at half-strength levels?

I've lived in London for nearly a year now and while my housemates are busy falling over Pete Doherty in Soho, the only famous person I've spotted was Rob Brydon. There's no excuse for this as I work a mere stumble from Soho, Noho and the other ho's so randomly littered around Berwick Street.

This might well be due to the fact that when I walk along I either stare at my feet in case I fall over the pavement, or so straight ahead that I can't see anything that isn't in my direct eyeline. But today! Today I walked past human hair-stack Russell Brand while I was going into Soho House. Admittedly he was standing still and about two inches from the front door - still, I've finally got a good spot.

(Also. Clarrie's "Oh Eddiiiiie" has now replaced Ruth's "Aw naaaaaw" as the most annoying catchphrase in The Archers. I'll rip her fictional tongue out of her head if that sodding son of hers doesn't turn up soon.)

Someone at ESPN clearly did not pay attention when they were teaching them how to write headlines. A-hahahahahahaha! And again, ha.

Random Birth Twin would like it to be known that he took this screengrab. Duly noted, well done you.

Two lovely Grauniads in Private Eye this week:

"For forty years the satirical magazine Private Eye has held it's regular lunches in a dinghy upstairs room of the Coach and Horses pub in Greek Street Soho." - The Anglo-Celt (they need to duff up their sub).

"And when all that walking has tired you out, jump aboard one of Strasbourg's sleek and futuristic tramps to sweep you onto your next stop." - Donnie Evening Post

The Donnie lass and I never travelled any other way when we lived there. Especially if the tramps were us.

Snigger. How unfortunate if it actually succeeds.

Tabby cats are totally awesome. Especially this one, who cornered a black bear up a tree. Twice.

My mate Laura is currently doing Important Things in Ghana. She sends updates about what she's up to which are generally awesome. Her last update included a list of the 10 best store names she's seen so far: STORE names mind you. The equivalent of Curries. These are:

10. Gift of God Beauty Salon
9. God is King Radiator Services
8. Jesus’s Victory School (imagine competing with them!)
7. Jesus is Alive Supermarket
6. The King Maker (with no explanation over what that store actually is)
5. The Success Spot (ditto)
4. My God is Able Phone Cards
3. Showers of Blessing Fashion Shop
2. The Lord’s Restaurant: continental, Ghanian, and Chinese cuisine

And finally, giving a whole new meaning to “Let there be light”:

1. God’s First Electrical Store

Good grief, it's barely an hour past breakfast and already there's a quote of the day:

"Joy Division are the poster boys for robot-dancing art house pretender boys thinking that their middle class roots have left them sterile and defenceless."
- Monkey Wrench, Empire forums.

If there is only one non-essential procrastination that you do today, make it listening to last week's Mitch Benn episode which I am about to listen to for the third time, zoning out during the non-humourous bits. The Franz Ferdinand piece 8 minutes in is genius, and someone finally lets Robin Ince do his Morrissey impression on the radio. Marvellous.

Is this the Greatest Picture Ever? We're thinking yes.

I have a serious workload. The only way around a serious workload is to ignore it completely, which is why I nipped out for drinks instead of going home and crying myself into an early grave.

Last night the Random Birth Twin and I went and had cocktails and oxygen at, er, Oxygen. It turns out that oxygen is a bit like laughing gas only without the stomach cramps caused by excess hysteria, though I somewhat spoiled its healing powers by smoking before and afterwards.

We then decided that as RBT had never done karaoke before to go and find some. The only place that could/would take us was Lucky Voice's six person booth where we proceeded to spend an hour belting out Nina Simone, Spencer Davis Group and The Offspring (me), obscure 80s bands and The Smiths (RBT) amongst various screeching levels of The Cure, Alison Moyet and Suede. They had Suede! Marvellous!

We also did the world's GREATEST duet of Gangsta's Paradise. Nothing like watching two middle-class white indie kids doing complicated hand signals while screaming out passages from the Bible.

While looking through a list of top festival moments EVAH, Mick Jagger reading rubbish poetry came up, and then an argument over his frock and its levels of awfulness. There's this:




...which doesn't look so bad. More of a kaftan in fact. No! God, no. Black and white photography, as we all know, covers many many sins. See here:



And yes, exactly the sort of thing I used to be forced into aged 5. I have no sympathy for a man who shops at Laura Ashley. Even one who wrote Wild Horses.

"We consider ourselves to be the protagonists of our lives, the directors of a story that no one could live for us. However, we cannot avoid shivering (from rage, from enthusiasm or from a burst of energy) when we hear words that we might have used ourselves in the first person come out of the mouths of others.

"At times they are phrases that describe us, that unveil parts of ourselves that we believed were ours alone. This makes us feel somewhat exposed, as if others were listening to our voices instead of the voices of those singing the songs. Other times songs describe what we would like to be, which deep down inside inspires us to be what we are or to try to be what we would like to be.

"On these occasions, we feel less alone: there is someone somewhere who thinks like I do and wants to do what I want to do, and they have put it in words. These are the songs that become more than just background music while we are dancing or getting ready in the morning: these songs become our hymns."

- Silvià Terron.

Mr HM-PJ: "I have attached the best thing I have done today so everyone can see how much of that very expensive journalism diploma I am actually using…" Bloody awesome, and rather more than me, illegible shorthand aside. Although I once came close to using Quark, but managed to escape before it bit me in the arse.

That's the trouble with not leaving the house in 36 hours: you miss out on all manner of exciting news, such as the fact that they've discovered a whole new sort of shark in the US.

That's obviously only exciting to me then.

It's not quite on Megalodon levels of thrill as this one's basically a slightly swankier version of a scalloped hammerhead. Mind, those are pretty cool - hammerheads have evolved the hell out of the other 434 species. The reason why they've got those insanely shaped heads is so that they have a wider field of vision and so their ampullae of Lorenzini (basically electric fish detectors) are more spread out. Awesome.

Masterchefs Of The Universe says:
Am going to die alone eaten by alsatians

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
oh no you won't

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
certainly not alsatians at any rate. perhaps wilderbeast for I hope you will be writing your famous book in some exotic land

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
alsatians are too british

Masterchefs Of The Universe says:
The ultimate indignity would be to be consumed by small yappy rubbish dogs.

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
oh no....a chiwawah

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
[sic]

Masterchefs Of The Universe says:
Pomeranian!

Masterchefs Of The Universe says:
Oh the horror...

Anna - in that world I shall abide forever says:
a squirrel would also be quite shameful

Masterchefs Of The Universe says:
Jesus. Can you imagine? Their beady little eyes staring glassily at you while they gnaw their way through your right thigh.

Nobody should get up on Sunday morning - end of. More to the point, nobody should actually choose to get out of bed after an evening of trains, cocktails and screaming drunks, and then go traipsing across London to go running.

Which is naturally why OIR and I did so for the Race For Life. I don't get guilt very often, but I did when I saw it being advertised in the Metro a couple of months ago and signed up for it. OIR gets very excited in the tube on the way over and suggests that we sign up to do the half marathon. I break it to her that 13 miles is considerably heftier than 3.


Highly-tuned athletes. Honest.


Who I ran for. My grandma had cancer when I was small and the wonderous folk at Bart's sorted it out. My cousin is doing the chemo for breast cancer at the moment.


Where there is cancer to be researched, you will find morons with cameras.

I haven't been surrounded by so many women since I went to my single-sex primary school. It's slightly unnerving until we all have to take part in the world record attempt for biggest simultaneous stretch. Kat Brown, BA Hons (Dunelm), World Record Holder For Stretching - beats the crap out of my ungainly attempts at learning how to do handstands yesterday.

Gloria Hunniford gets wheeled out to beam benificence on the crowd. Barking mad aerobics instructors warm us up with routines so frantic it would take industrial quantities of Ritalin to bring it down to something folk can actually deal with.

Helen, quite sensibly, abandons all pretence of paying attention to the barking mad aerobics instructors. Then we all start to run like there are wolves after us: slow, fairly stupid wolves. People line the route and cheer which is quite nice, and makes up for the fact I really, really dislike running. Note for the future, all-female running races attract a surprisingly attractive male fanbase.

Final KM. OIR and I nearly cried when we reached 3, mostly because we missed the one that said 2 and thought there was only a street to go and that we were actually rather fast. We weren't.

We get medals. And finish and stuff - they're interviewing the winner when I cross the finish lines ("Raise your hands as you pass!" - no. Not ever.) who'd been training three times a week for the last eight weeks, which was what I meant to do but failed entirely.

Done. And so am I.

Good grief - karma, it seems, actually works.

Having just agreed to write about (and thus watch) Date Movie for work, I was called two minutes later by HSBC saying they'd had my wallet handed in. I lost that wallet the same night I fell asleep on a nightbus and woke up in Crystal bloody Palace, so something pretty damn good had to counteract that one. Happily, the sight of a very tall girl in floods of just-woken-up-and-in-half-asleep-hysterics-tears meant that the psychos left me alone, although that didn't stop me being proposed to on the way home.

Tears are a terribly strange reaction. Why is something that is linked to keeping your eyes clear of rubbish also linked to showing that you're sad, furious or moved? Why don't you, say, get migraines when something horrible happens, or break out in a rash when watching Bambi (a film that, along with The Incredible Journey, is on the Kat dangerlist of films never to be watched, ever). Why tears?

It's at times like this I wish that my brain was geared towards science instead of being wholly obsessed with languages and useless arts subjects.

Having ranted at length about commuting in London earlier this morning elsewhere and suffering the indignity of being patronisde about the offside rule by an Argos assistant while buying my work a Subbuteo kit (I don't give a flying fig for football but I know the cocking offside rule), my brain has now turned to so much mush. It's currently fit for only bad links (hello B3ta, long-lost friend), buying crap off eBay and boggling over this.



Is this the worst tattoo ever? No! That honour goes to the one some bloke's got on his leg with Michael Jackson cradling Macaulay Culkin. Oh the horror.

Kat will go to jail for ... Making an erotic cake for your cousin’s first birthday 'What sexual activity will you go to jail for?' at QuizUniverse.com

Another procrastination from Miss Anna. Natch-tastic.

Best. Tagline. Ever. For Black Sheep, the forthcoming sheep zombie movie (and if that isn't an invitation to the cinema, I don't know what is.)

"There are 4 million sheep in New Zealand - and they're pissed off."

While buckling under the weight of the bonfire of old newspapers this morning, I saw Lordi, puntastic Eurovision winners, on the front page. "Ooh, how nice," I thought. No. It's a picture of someone protesting against animal wrongs in Oxford. Maybe they should take the piss out of themselves every now and then.

I really like puppies. And kittens, horses, guinea pigs, cows, occasional birds and sharks. I don't especially like the idea of my dog having stuff put in her eyes, or being kept in a cage if only because she'd annoy the hell out of everyone around her by shaking until she got her red toy (some people get hooked on crack, she gets hooked on cheap plastic.) However. To all intents and purposes, I was locked in the country for 13 years which rather ingrained me to the fact that things die. While some things, like foxes, make my blood boil - those bastards killed the chickens - I would infinitely rather that every living thing got to lead the best life it possibly could. And that's about as hippie as I get.

While dermatological testing has become the norm for make-up and beauty products - remember when The Body Shop was the only one against animal testing? - until there's a workable solution for testing medicines on animals, that's how it's going to have to be. I realise that if I were ever to visit a testing centre I would have nightmares for weeks, become vegetarian and enter a catatonia of guilt, but I hate cancer, hate the bad AIDs and really, really hate any kind of disease that robs people of their friends and family before their time.

Animals do need us to fight their corner - game reserves and fishing restrictions for example - but that's still no excuse for otherwise sane people to go around emptying graves and terrorising those involved in animal testing if there is really a good reason. And that really makes me feel sick to think about, because I fucking love puppies. Alright?

Welcome to the best production blog ever. It reminds me of a little while ago when a magazine was guest-edited by a famous movie director...