Person of the Year

According to Time Magazine, I am Person of they Year. And so are you.

Instead of awarding it to an actual person this year, Time has decided that, given the rise of user-generated content in 2006, we are all Person of the Year - us bloggers, YouTubers and Wikipedians. Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry on 'Person of the Year' was briefly vandalised thusly:

In 2006 Time's Person of the Year featur jumped the shark as once again they refused to name a real person and instead went with a cutesy-poo concept. In doing so, they have rendered that feature uninteresting, unimportant, and unencyclopedic, so the rest of this article has been deleted.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_the_Year"

Vandalism aside, the rise of U-gen is quite remarkable, not because of the sheer volume of it (I wonder is the internet's word-count greater than that or published literature yet?) but because its authors have couragously ignored the fact that everything has been said before and that there are only five plots and seven characters in the world, and have relentlessly got on with the business of being derivative and clichéd. It's becoming a cliché to say that sometimes clichés are true is a clichés: pop has well and truely eaten itself, so to speak.

So, the latest sporadic update, by way of clichés:

• The English eccentric: A nut who looked like Doney Gandalf sat next to me on the bus today. He had a long, ragged grey beard. His brown overcoat smelled like it had been deep-fried in chip grease and left under my brother's bed for a month during his teenage years. The rims of his spectacles were so thick they could have featured in a performance by Stomp. He wore a Greek tragedian mask on the top of his head. He told me he was going down to Speakers' Corner to tell the world he did not recognise the authority of the British government, its councils and boroughs. The only authority he recognised, he said, was that of the Kingdom of Wessex, or "at a pinch, and mean a real pinch, the barbarians of Mercia".
• Dirty women: The Special One's friend Omega has left the funeral business, and so the flat that went with it, so she's staying with us. It's the first time in 10 years I've lived with more women than men, and let me tell you, when they get together, they are filthy. Shower: a pink razor, eight - repeat, eight - bottles of shampoo, various hairbands and a chocolate bar wrapper. Coffee table: several empty fag boxes, overflowing ashtrays, painkillers, pins, reel of velvet, crisp packets, chocolate wrappers, a treasure-trove of nail polish, mascara and various other powders, paints and other tricks of the trade. There's about 12 pairs of shoes littered around the sitting room. Neither of them has washed up in two weeks. Forget all this nonsense about women being cleaner than men. Slatterns, the lot of them.
• Me: I spent this afternoon drinking strong coffee, listening to jazz, doing a chess problem and watching my cigarette smoke swirl in the single shaft of winter light that came in through a gap in the curtains.
• Things you only see hungover: Last Thursday was the office Christmas party, in Café de Paris, which is normally frequented by Chelsea footballers and where a single serving of Black Bush costs £9. So Friday was a bit shaky. Coming back from lunch, a colleague and I saw a squirrel standing on the road in what can only be described as 'attack postition'. A crow landed nearby and the squirrel charged it. It flew into a tree; squirrel barrelled up the tree and chased it from branch to branch. This went on for a good five minutes, with the crow leaving the tree and returning. We think he was teasing the squirrel.