Daniel Radcliffe naked: the un-PhotoShopped version

OK, here's the actuality. Daniel Radcliffe in Equus. Click once to, er, enlarge.

Videojug blogging results: Madame Arcati muses on the stats

The Videojug blogging survey results are out - here's a sample of stats with my comments in italics:

Top Five Reasons For Starting A Blog:
Most people start their blog to either showcase their talent, to educate and help others, as a hobby, for corporate reasons, or purely for the monetary benefit. Madame Arcati was conceived in Barcelona, one of the world wombs of creativity, when its creator sought a new identity for the salvation of sanity. The notion of writing in drag appealed, and the prospect of limited liberation excited. A chicken stuck in a journalistic battery suddenly felt free range.

Bloggers Don’t Enjoy Press Releases:
Recommendations and press releases only consist of 3% of content that bloggers choose to feature. The majority (65.4%) still blog about their personal choice. Madame Arcati deletes most press releases on sight, unread. Spam and other fraud attempts are showcased on my delightful satellite blog, Spam2Arcati.
 
Sponsored Blog Posts Are Hugely Popular:
The majority (56.5%) stated they would accept payment for a blog entry with the minimum payment ranging from $2 to $1000 per post. Madame Arcati is appalled by this whorish tendency and deplores the use of the US dollar currency.

Bloggers Love Leisure, Food & Drink and Education:
Leisure and Hobbies (29.2%), Food and Drink (17.8%) and Education 17.9%) are the most common blog category subjects. Personally I love breathing, excreting and getting up in the morning. Eating, fucking and listening are also popular with me as are getting dressed and looking for melanoma spots. Oh and I adore the MJ History remix.

Blogs: No Cost, No Profit:
70% of bloggers spend less than $50 running their blog, however a massive 55% don’t have any advertising on their blog. My running costs are zero if I factor out indirect spends such as on my email sub, electricity and my rate-per-hour as a writer whore. The best thing about a blog is beating a team of salaried cunties on a newspaper or magazine - I can't think of one publication that has yet developed a readable blog. This is primarily because a salaried hack confuses blogging with cutting and pasting compromised and self-edited pieces from another medium: free expression is stifled, a pose of writing down detectable. Most journalists are half-educated propagandists who can only assume positions created in thought-moulds by an editor or a proprietor. Even a hypnotist would have their work cut out trying to discover what a hack really thinks about anything.

Stephen Gately: The Sun, Andy Coulson and... blackmail?

The Sun reminds readers today that Stephen Gately of Boyzone - who has died suddenly at 33 in Majorca -  "was the first boyband star to bravely come out as gay" in 1999. "He took the decision to 'out' himself in the Sun in June of that year." Oh, really.

The reality of course is much more interesting than that. I must have imagined that his mother Margaret had a different view of the matter at the time. "Stephen has been bullied into doing this," she told the Mirror. "The Sun has destroyed so many lives. There was Lenny Henry and there was Sophie Rhys-Jones. Now it's my son - and us. All of us are involved in this. I have to go out and do my day's work with the whole place looking at me."

An ex-Boyzone roadie had slithered to the Sun with his gay Gately tale. Having promised to give up its habit of homophobia earlier in '99, the paper couldn't just splash with its exclusive (with its unreconstructed "gay shame" implications). It had promised: "From now on the Sun will not reveal the sexuality of gays - men or women - unless we believe it can be defended on the grounds of overwhelming public interest. If gays choose to come out, we will report it if we feel it is newsworthy or relevant. Otherwise, we will not invade the privacy of gay people."

So the paper, anxious not to lose anything to mere integrity, contacted Boyzone's PR agency and made it plain the story would come out sooner or later, so why not let the Sun handle it responsibly. Or as Boyzone manager Louis Walsh said at the time after a phone interview with the Guardian's Roy Greenslade: "Greenslade said to me that didn't Andy Coulson (of the Sun) ring me and say: `There's two ways of doing the Gately story - the right way and the wrong way?' Was that not blackmail? I said it wasn't blackmail..."

Ah, Louis, ever the pro. As he has said, "We work the tabloids. We need them. They need us." And our old friend Andy Coulson! Now the Conservative Party's media boss.

John Lennon and the Moon: Piss in our time

Irksome Yoko Ono tweets excitedly that something called The International Lunar Geographic Society (formerly the Lunar Republic Society) has renamed a crater on the Moon in honour of John Lennon on the 69th anniversary of his birth. The John Lennon Peace Crater measures approximately six kilometers in diameter, with a depth of about 990 meters. Get your cunting bunting out.

I'd be impressed except I notice that among the other "select few luminaries" honoured by the Society with a lunar crater handle is Julius Caesar who, if I recall from my readings of Plutarch, murdered one million people and enslaved another one million in his Gallic Wars, in the furtherance of his notice-me political career. Plainly a commitment to peace will not in itself earn you nominal possesssion of a bit of a dead rock in space. Iconic celebrity might.

However, the Society did help to remove a crater designation to accused Nazi war criminal, Dr Hans Eppinger, Jr: whether this cunt killed more people than Caesar I couldn't say, but two millennia separates them. Nothing like a bit of historical distance to launder a name.

So who or what is this International Lunar Geographic Society, that is as celebrity obsessed as OK! magazine? Well, just read part of its Proclamation: "The people of the Lunar Republic do hereby mandate that all beings throughout the Universe do recognize, respect and uphold our sovereign right to self-determination and self-governance as a free and autonomous citizenry."

For $16 you can become "a citizen-partner with the Lunar Republic Society, joining in the groundbreaking international effort to bring about private ownership of property on the Moon, as part of a ten-year, three phase $3.8-billion program to return humans — including professional astronauts, engineers, scientists, and civilians — to Luna....We are on a fast track to return to the Moon by the year 2015." In other words, the Society admits it owns nothing on the Moon to sell. However, for as little as $34.25 per acre, you, too, can "buy" a tract of lunar land near Crater M Jackson.

Just like Yoko's Imagine Peace Tower on Videy Islandm near Reykjavik in Iceland, the International Lunar Geographic Society is another organisation for the nattering-on about fantasy projects. The John Lennon Peace Crater is in good company. It was born on the same day NASA bombed the Moon.

Nesta Wyn Ellis: From John Major to the Paris Métro

Nesta and the then Prime Minister John Major

Transformations always fascinate me. Back in 1991 author Nesta Wyn Ellis bestrode the world of British biography with her life story of the then prime minister John Major. The two had clicked when she interviewed him for the now defunct glossy Woman's Journal. So she was his natural Boswell when he most improbably made it into Number 10: her book was the first to suggest that the Major marriage was no tropical fishtank, among other things. The book made her famous. She appeared on the primetime chatshow Wogan and made the Sun and Sunday Times front pages - it was rumoured that Norma (Mrs M) was most upset by the bio. Hurtle into the Noughties and Nesta has left behind the world of British politics with which she was so intimate and pursued her dream to be a free spirited chanteuse. In this rare footage, she busks in the Métro de Paris. She has also appeared in numerous city clubs there and made a movie. I am bedazzled.

Piers Morgan: Is Simon Cowell planning to sideline him?

On my recent tour of London goss salons one rumour pops up repeatedly - that Simon Cowell plans to sideline Piers Morgan fom his TV formats. And why? Because Morgan is just too good and more popular than the dark lord himself.

Really? I express doubts to my sources: Morgan has certainly enjoyed a good summer what with his Katie Price audience, his benign duel with Sir Cliff, his toyboy status in the SuBo universe: only today there's news of Cilla breaking down on one of his TV shows, not about bloody Bobby again one hopes. All very impressive. But Cowell has now attained a Gatsby-like status, confirmed by his £1m 50th birthday party the other day, with his co-ownership of ITV a credible reported aim. I conclude this rumour is just horrible mischief.

Then quite by chance I happen on PR-meister Mark Borkowski's stimulating and always insightful blog where he posits his theory about Morgan and Cowell. Have a read - scroll down to the Morgan pic on the posting. Borkowski is uniquely a philosopher-PR with I suspect a mystical side. Certainly he's shrewd. But don't tell him. Such praise might go to his head.

Mark McGowan smothers himself in peanut butter for dying kids

Stunt artist Mark McGowan will mark World Food Day this month by riding around London for 24 hours on a tiny child's tricycle covered in peanut butter. His efforts, in support of Action Against Hunger, aim to raise awareness of a new life-saving peanut-based treatment for 19 million children dying of hunger. He starts his journey at 10am on October 15th 2009 at Downing Street and will circumnavigate London, ending in Greenwich on World Food Day - October 16th 2009.

Roger Lewis: Why he sucked his trousers up his arse

Has the Daily Mail run the extract from the funniest book of the year yet - Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as It Is Lived by Roger Lewis? I can't be bothered to look, and I'm awfully busy, so please be a duck and check it out. Last I heard, the paper bought the serial rights then got the wally-wobbles. Editor Paul Dacre was horrified by the book's venomous refrains (foreign to him as we know), spiked it, and ran something toothless by Janet Street-Porter. Very foolish. (Yes! The Mail has run the extract, a commenter claims. Now I can't be bothered to rewrite this par. Mr Dacre has proven to be more pliant than legend allows. He also has good taste in property. Longer[er] may he reign!)

While we await news (no longer), have a slurp of Lewis' glorious book from Christopher Hart's great review in the Sunday Times. Lewis, a journalist and biographer of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, reveals himself to be an authentic, wildly comic, splenetic misanthrope: a hater, among many other things and persons, of Clive James (let's start a club on this fraud), bad manners and Andrew Roberts who has the “grimace of a baboon with diarrhoea trying to hold it in." He's also the first writer to allude to the late film critic Alexander Walker's homosexuality: for some reason it's a complete no-go area in some quarters.

Thanks to Lewis' poor health “I’ve been coughing so much I sucked my trousers up my arse.” And when his father died in 2004 of “cancer of the bumhole… My sole inheritance is to comprise spare bumper packs of Coloplast Direct Wetwipes”. Oh yes, please. Buy now.

Click pic for large version. My thanks to Duncan Fallowell for this photo of the Roger Lewis book launch at Zippo's Circus on Hampstead Heath last week - Roger's son Tristan is a clown and juggler with Zippo's. Duncan Fallowell is in the white trousers and Beryl Bainbridge is offering him money - he can't remember what for. Paul Bailey is in the background (my apologies for trying to kiss you once, Paul ...)

The Duchess of York and how a Laura Van Wormer tale got turned

Being of an essentially humble disposition I am constantly amazed how my little posts on this and that get the media excited. Another example has been drawn to my attention.

Back in February I noted how the trail had gone cold on the co-authored historical novel-in-progress Hartmoor by Fergie, Duchess of York, and the delightfully named US Dallas author Laura Van Wormer. Laura saw my piece and retells on her website how it grew into something bigger. More than coincidentally, the very next day after my story ran, the Telegraph's Mandrake goss column led with: "Sarah, Duchess of York reconsiders plan to publish ’racy’ historical novel." Part of its story read: "Miss Van Wormer admits that even her friends and family are getting impatient about the book’s release which has been delayed indefinitely."

Unfortunately, the Telegraph story prompted friends and relatives of Laura to ask her why she told the paper that they were "impatient" for the book. We must infer that she didn't say this to the paper.

The Bookseller.com site then picked up the Telegraph tale with their take: "Fergie's novel hangs in the balance". So then the Royal Watch section of Monstersandcritics.com reported that Laura had spoken to the Telegraph and wrote ... "Sarah’s literary collaborator, US historian Laura Van Wormer, has admitted she is getting impatient with the delays…" Laura is hardly a historian: a historical fiction writer perhaps ....

Oh dear! Laura writes in one of her journals: "At any rate, just to reiterate, yes, the Duchess of York and I did write a huge historical adventure novel, and yes, it has taken a long time to write, and yes, I should have definitive news for you by this summer." It is now autumn. We are still waiting, Laura.

Do read Laura's fascinating website. Just for the record, I'd noticed that the publication date for Hartmoor varied on trade book sites - a clear sign of a problem. That's what prompted my story. I remain confident Hartmoor will see the light of day. Eventually.

Jonathan King: 'Roman Polanski, vindictive acts and a lack of kindness'

Jonathan King was invited by an Arcatiste to comment on whether Polanski should be returned to the US. Here's his response:

"All I can add, knowing nothing of the case, is the fact that then, as now, a plea of guilty does not mean somebody was guilty. Many mitigating circumstances get washed away as lawyers and police persuade innocent people to admit guilt, chipping away with "you'll be convicted anyway" and other reasons to give up. So I would say - never believe transcripts or pleas or "admission". Likewise, sometimes people did dreadful things having convinced themselves all was fine. Neither extreme is the reality, most times. But what is clear here is that vengeance and vindictive acts seem to have taken over tolerance and kindness in the world. Personally I think we should all be nice to everyone."

Mumbai Calling - 'Grade cancels comedy series'

A darling Arcatiste within the bowels of ITV tells me that the broadcaster has cancelled comedy series Mumbai Calling. This may come as a surprise to the  show's production company Allan McKeown Presents which on its website reports, "Peter Fincham (programming chief at ITV) will decide on a second series by the end of July."

Alas, ITV boss Michael Grade has already axed it, apparently. He'd always hated the series, my mole tells me, and had allowed its debut series to colllect dust on the shelf for two years before reluctantly screening it as a cost saver.

Mumbai Calling sought in vain to raise a giggle from "troublesome turbans and coffee conundrums" at a call centre based in India. It featured accents.

Hilary Gialerakis: Gallery for painter who suffered a large cock

Last year I wrote of the work of the late  and understated modernist painter Hilary Gialerakis and of her peculiar life - among other things, some of her canvases were once bullet-holed by misaimed gun shots at lovers. Then there was her war hero husband's unfeasibly large cock. A website gallery has now been set up - do visit and appreciate.

The Gift