Blogwatch

New additions to the SWSL blogroll: A Girl With A Dot Com and, at long last, Richard Herring's blog. Welcome.

Slagging off Z-list slebs - we all do it, we all love it. But they can bite back, as Kenny's found out. Last October he had a few harsh words for Pop Idol reject Kirsty Crawford, including the declaration that he'd be "closely following her career all the way back to the Milton Keynes branch of Pizza Hut". And now she's responded in a bid to set a few things straight. The lesson being: be careful what you write - they might just be watching you...

Mike's recovered sufficiently from his Peruvian exertions to calculate the Cliche Usage Quotient of Troubled Diva, using a list of book review cliches from the Torygraph. Just don't expect me to follow suit and work out the CUQ for SWSL (cheers!) because (a) I haven't got the patience to trawl through the search results and (b) I'm afraid I'll end up with a figure far in excess of 50% and you, my already meagre readership will desert me for pastures new and less hackneyed.

Meanwhile: fellow Newcastle fan Jonathan of Crinklybee has been soaking up some "real football" at Edgley Park, and speculating about his affable local sandwich shop proprietor's talent for renaming his customers; on Dispatches From Deepest Norfolk aka I Don't Believe It, Jonny's aghast at the refurbishment of the village pub - "It is exceedingly posh now. You can tell it’s posh because food is served on a bed of other food, and there isn’t a machine in the gents selling rubber johnnies"; and Nick dissects a load of tracks from his iPod - "'Toxic' is some kind of lesson in weird cybernetic airbrush sexpop, and Britney’s almost complete removal from the actual song (and video, considering the digital effects and image manipulation), the culmination of several years of weird sonic extrapolation on behalf of her varied producers makes it all the more compelling. She’s now not even an image and a voice. She’s a pixel".

...And finally: welcome back to Blighty, Pete!