Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

I'm not about to do this and obviously don't tell anyone, but a recent foray to the nearest Fopp outpost in this hinterland led to the discovery of a cheap copy of a Will Young's Keep On album. Somehow I managed to find myself buying it, weirdly enough without having to bury it amid copies of Rambo or Rocky or some such pointless violence in an effort to negate it (hmm, what is butch and dull? And doesn't allow any option for watching it for the bodies? And isn't laughably macho?), which is usually rendered pointless by the tendency of shop assistants to flirt over the till regardless of purchases. It's odd; he has a face like a smug Cosmo (or is it Dibbs?), a voice part lisping duck (think a well-phelgmed oboe in Peter and the Woof) and musically he didn't even have the grace not to do well as the merchandising for some manufactured pop advertising programme (did he win? Who knows? Cares?). And yet that was a while ago, and he is just a person, albeit one whose maternal grandfather was the Cheshire Cat. Given the same university, same grade (how do I know that?) thing there must be something mundane about him; he might even verge on human. Disliking someone or something because of how they used to be perceived probably isn't a good thing and perhaps isn't entirely fair. And so the music.

Firstly, it works better when heard without a vixen solicitously scatting over the top. Secondly, it's better than you'd think. Yep, there's a feeling of generic pop and an aura of borrowing, giving it the air of a young compost heap, but there's more to it than that. There may be bits that sound like Billy Joel but there are others that sound like the far reaches of Jamiroquai or patches of either Sinatra. It even has something that just made me think of the theme to Pigeon Street (along with a somewhat ill-advised tin whistle, an instrument that I thought had been sunk permanently by Titanic. Cutting the ramble that lead me here, think how much better the cloyingly Fenian* Titanic would have been had the theme tune not be foghorned by Celine Dion but sung by Mrs Doyle: My heart will ga awn, ga awn, ga awn).

* Firefox's spellcheck does not recognise the word, suggesting I replace it with Armenian, Athenian or Slovenian. Is it pure coincidence that people of all those descriptions would probably see themselves as recently oppressed? Whereas I meant it to reflect the unthinkingly Eire-uber-alles attitude which is prevalent among some Americans and thus in some Hollywood films. Sorry, that should have read Irish-Americans, because their family's only been out of the country for 8 generations and being three-eighths-Italian, a quarter-Quebecois and most of the rest not so Irish really isn't important when one thinks about it, and it doesn't matter much that the only cockles and mussels alive alive-o to have featured in their lives so far came from Squibnocket. Yes, that was a rant, and no, I won't tell you who it was about.

Back to the music, it's surprisingly good. Said he typing this and suddenly hearing the lyrics which had passed me by earlier (largely because I assumed they were just words chosen to make the right sounds in the right places). I might to go away and actually listen to the words now. Or, you know, not.

But as I said before, whatever you do, don't tell anyone (WY to QOTSA? Intriguing).

And having scanned a map of the Eastern Seaboard (is that as in sideboard, South Eastern Electricity Board or the height of the hull above water? And why is it only America has seaboards? What's wrong with 'Atlantic coast'?) to find Squibnocket, that allows me to artfully segue to Strange Maps, which is the type of site I'd expect to find on Dan's sidebar, had he still a sidebar, and which is not only extremely diverting if not outright fascinating, but handily sums itself up in the name.

Anyhoo,