I'm all out of pithy subject lines

Gosh, I'm jiggered.

Two trips to Birmingham on consecutive days, a full to-do list with lots of tricksy problems and ridiculous levels of traffic on the roads (breakdowns, accidents, slow moving wide loads, yadda yadda) have taken it out of me. When I got in on Wednesday night I ended up crawling into bed for an hour before getting up for something to eat whilst watching a docu drama about Hughie Green that was alternately amusing and somewhat disturbing.

Still, Thursday night at the dojo perked me up a bit, even though the grading for level one sword is approaching at a rate of knots. Meep. We've got one more practice session on Saturday morning, but that's just for a bit of tweaking and tightening up of footwork.

What else? At least the time on the road gave me the chance to finish listening to Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare in which I was surprised to discover how little we actually know in terms of facts, rather than speculation and wishful thinking, about the man himself and his times. The most amusing chapter is about the various academic conspiracy theorists supposing that Shakespeare's plays where written by somebody else, based on, er, no evidence whatsoever at all, and include such unfortunately named writers as Messers Looney, Silliman and Battey. I've now started on the first Rebus novel, but apart from name checking some areas of Edinburgh that I know quite well it hasn't really grabbed me and the 'serial killer sending cryptic clues to cynical copper with a troubled past' plot is all a bit contrived and hackneyed.

If you need a reason to get excited about the forthcoming release of Okami for the Wii, go and have a look at okamiart.com and download some excellent wallpapers and concept art. Hmmm, I seem to be turning into a bit of an Otaku about all things Japanese ...

Finally, in case anyone hasn't noticed it and wants to play, we are about to kick another round of Mixclub ...