Count Arthur Strong

You can watch that as many times as you like. It's like a symphony, is that.

Tuesday

Picture by Craig

This is the baboon's bonbons

Oh well, if it helps distract them from plotting a high school massacre then I suppose it's alright. (Steve)

Announcement: Willesden 2010 shortlist

The shortlisted stories for the Willesden short story competition 2010, adjudicated by Richard Peabody, are:

Busy. Come. Wait. - Tom Vowler
Emily Strabnow's Freckles - Willie Davis
Falling - Henrietta Rose-Innes
In the Land of Flies - Julia Goubert
Letters - Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Love and Longing in the Marvellous City - Jonathan Attrill
Monkey Hat - Kevin Spaide
Precious - Carys Davies
The Architects - Wena Poon
Veronika and Roger-Roger - Toby Litt

Also highly commended:

Hope Street - Paul McGuire
Learning Stick - Jarred McGinnis
Pearl - Peggy Riley
Shutters - Jo Cannon

All will be included in the forthcoming anthology "New Short Stories 4". There will now be a very long wait till the results event when we'll be revealing which story takes the prize mug. The date could be as far ahead as end of March I'm hearing*, which I know is a long drag but at least spring may have arrived by then. Meanwhile here's to the short story. Cheers!

* New Short Stories 4 launch and results announcement: Saturday 10 April, The Charles Dickens Museum. Invitation only.

Update 10/4/2010: Results announced

Conclave cloisterered, smoke anticipated

The special chimney has been fixed to the roof of Herald House and the cardinals are voting. White smoke will indicate making tea. Black smoke will indicate making toast. We will not announce the winners till the results event, but we will announce the shortlist before then. At all events not long till the shortlist but not short till the long event. We never make things simple here in Willesden, the new Byzantium.

Ossian

Monday

Eclectic electric

What's on David Bowie's iPod? Music Culture The Observer "The pop master gives us an exclusive peek to mark the release tomorrow of A Reality Tour, the live double album of his acclaimed 2003-4 world tour"

You can play David Bowie's current favourite iPod tracks courtesy of Spotify, which has his playlist here: http://bit.ly/6oTqwp. A long way from sheet music?

Library car park

Virtual Tour of Willesden Sports Centre

360 degree virtual tour

Check our marvellous competition standard swimming pool and facilities. It's nice having this at the end of the street. You can nearly see Herald House on the 360 degree view. Also houses the Willesden Museum of Comedy known as "the gym". (Ed.)

Shortlisting progress

Just popped in to let you have a quick update. I'm hoping to send the final list to the judge by the end of this month (January 2010). Finding some great stories - thanks everyone.

Best wishes & donate to the Haiti earthquake appeal! (a) Disasters Emergency Committee. (b) Save The Children.

Ossian

DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal

DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal

The light switch

Night clocks on -
And maybe next door hears it too.
That is the end of my day.
And, hardly thinking,
The other one might say,
There, he's gone.

--
Stephen Moran

Snow branches today

Plan for a cartoon #N: The Great Clunking Fist

In the background a boxing poster announces:

Gordon "Rocky" Brown
-v-
David "No-Creed" Cameron

In the foreground, Gordon "Rocky" Brown, face a gory mess, jaw broken, is in the arc of a death-dealing haymaker up to the smirking, unseeing face of dancing "Apollo No-Creed" Cameron, with Round 15 on the signboard and 30 seconds on the clock.

Zoz

Robin

Robin
Originally uploaded by Willesden Herald

The creepiness of David Cameron

BBC iPlayer - Prime Minister's Questions: 06/01/2010: "Live coverage of questions in the House of Commons to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Broadcast on:BBC Parliament, 12:00pm Wednesday 6th January 2010 Duration: 30 minutes Available until: 12:29pm Wednesday 13th January 2010"

The creepiness of David Cameron. He actually makes my skin crawl with his egregiously personal and unprofessional comments and demeanour.

Waiting for the barbarians

Constantine P. Cavafy

The situation is desperate. The city is snowed under. The barbarians are at the gate. All will be laid waste come spring. Send reinforcements.

Boundary changes have trapped our beloved Thurberesque Sarah Teather across the border. Now we're depending on Glenda Jackson but she needn't bother running for re-election. Oh god it will be a massacre. I can't stand Cameron. Help!

Ossian

Now is the winter of our discontent...

Hewitt and Hoon's great gamble | Martin Kettle | guardian.co.uk

"Downing Street took some time to marshal its response to the well-kept secret of the Hoon/Hewitt démarche. By mid-afternoon, however, ministers began to issue statements of devotion to the Great Leader. Before long, the list was an impressive one. Ed Balls's support was to be expected. So, for the most part, were Shaun Woodward's, Alan Johnson's and Alastair Darling's – though the latter was not entirely lavish in his praise of the man who tried to sack him last year."

A real report in a real newspaper. Cherish.

Call for a general boycott

"In a 'difficult' meeting at the Foreign Office, the UK minister Ivan Lewis told the Chinese ambassador Fu Ying that her government had failed in its basic human rights responsibilities by ignoring representations about Shaikh's mental health. 'It's a deeply depressing day for anyone with a modicum of compassion or commitment to justice,' Lewis said." (Guardian)

Where possible let's boycott goods from countries like China and other tyrannical, oppressive and corrupt regimes, including the US, Russia and Israel for their stupid and disastrous foreign policies and penal systems. Maybe if enough people do this the idiots in power might start to get the message. While we can't boycott our own goods, others overseas should do so in order to convey the same message to the UK government. If world trade is shut down, well "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?"

Feargal Mooney

Tokyo Chocolate

Morowa Yejidé - 2010 update: "Tokyo Chocolate", published in the Willesden Herald 2009 short story anthology & 2009 Pushcart Prize Nominee, will also appear in the upcoming print edition of Yomimono, a Japanese literary magazine out of Hiroshima.

This evening

Converging planes

Scenes like this can be seen continuously over King Edward Vii park in Willesden. This is not even a good example, often they seem to converge to the same point, which is puzzling - is it not? Trails can cross but for the leading points of two trails i.e. the planes to cross exactly at the point: this can be seen repeatedly, almost hourly from the park.*

Another thing you can see occasionally from this viewpoint is a plane flying surprisingly low though we're not near the airport. They made a mistake building Heathrow so that planes had to overfly built up London all the time, so let's back Boris Johnson's new estuary airport replacement all the way and close Heathrow. Otherwise it's only a matter of time before a disaster brings out all the hypocrites - if they survive - to wring their hands and puzzle over how it could possibly have happened. Yeah right! Just move the airport - get on with it.

Feargal Mooney

* I know this is probably daft but it makes me wonder if there aren't one or two rogue air traffic controllers practicing for or trying to create a collision - Al Qaeda? Ed.

Hark the old comment restoration completed

All the comments that were originally on the Squawkbox system from 2003 through part of 2004 have been copied and pasted into Blogger comments. The format is not all one could wish for but at least the text is there, preserved in Google's amber for however long that lasts.

Although the counts are wrong, because it will say one comment when there might be five or two when there are about ten etc, the layout is not very different to how it looked on the original Squawkbox system. As some of our technical geegurus have pointed out, a lot of the IP addresses are traceable to the Inbox Café, a local internet caf' that seems to have been piggybacked onto servers forming a technical hub for London and world communications at the time.

Hopefully this will please Mrs and long-suffering Mr Berries, Gladys Abanjo, Dr Gerald Francis, Rainbow Spike, Louisiana Lil, Alura in the Land of Giant Food, the Baroness of Canada and all of our many correspondents from that era. The messages even include one from Lenin - that's how far back they go.

Simon Moribund

Sparrow etc.

Frontenac snow message

To whom it concerns. Something nice to see out your window if you live in Frontenac tower & hopefully had the desired effect (?)