Tidbits

'Perf4ming his greatest hits 4 the last time' - or so the hype says. "You can't handle me," Prince reportedly told thousands of his fans in London's O2 Arena (formerly the ill-fated Millennium Dome) last week. It was the start of the musician's 21 day residency at the venue, and there's been nothing but blanket praise for His Purpleness in the papers. London's never seen anything like it. Prince played from 8.30pm till 3am, and he's charging only £31.21p for tickets - 31.21 is the title of his new album, which he's giving away free with newspapers. And this blogger can only watch in awe via the news reports. A historical Pop Culture event, and I've got no ticket!
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And here's something that might interest the poet Esiaba Irobi, whose recently published collection of poetry is titled, Why I Don't Like Philip Larkin. In today's Observer, a little snippet about just how much thought Larkin gave to his image. Published photos had to 'air-brush' him to achieve these desired results: "I am not bald, I have only one chin, my waist is concave." He who was all of the above!

In the wake of 2 great directors of European cinema - Ingmar Bergman & Michelangelo Antonioni - dying on the same day(!) - a gently amusing little piece in Jasper Gerard's column about when the famous die all at once. CS Lewis and another famous fella were short-changed in death and didn't get the kind of obituaries they deserved in the immediate aftermath because they had the misfortune of dying on the same day as JFK. And very appropriate for funnymen, due hilarity about Frankie Howerd (of the Carry On movies) and Benny Hill dying at once. There is still confusion about which of the two actually died first. Enough about death...

This blog doesn't care much for Britney Spears, Robbie Williams or Courtney Love (Love says her mouth is 'wonky' but what did she expect, with all that needless surgery? Don't famous people get embarrassed? Some of them only vaguely resemble the people they were when they first started out) - but I have more time for Alec Baldwin right now perhaps than his ex-wife Kim Basinger does. Still, since this is a blog, I didn't miss this piece (left) about how 'the other half blogs'.