Bellend Sebastian

Did you know West Ham United is an anagram of The New Stadium. Thanks to happy Hammer John Halpin for that one.
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I so want this story to be true but I fear it may be apochyphal.  It's a very funny tale about Sebastian Coe, or Lord Smug of Uphisownarsington as I believe he became under some Tory government.
A few years ago a reporter went to interview him and as he approached Seb, the former runner who was never as well liked as Steve Ovett, put down a copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow and stood up to greet him. The reporter was impressed that here was a sportsman with a bit of culture.
A couple of years later the reporter was having a drink with a colleague who had been to meet Lord Coe that day. 'That Lord Coe' said the colleague, 'you'll never guess what he was reading when I met him.'
You know the rest. Maybe he's just a very slow reader or liked the book so much he read it again and again. (I've read it - it's on the required reading list for every atheist Jewish pseudo-intellectual - and it's not THAT good.)
Anyway, that's all I want to say about this week's decision to award the Olympic Stadium - or the Lord Coe's Ego Memorial Ground - to West Ham. Personally, I think it should have gone to Orient.
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So Mubarak has gone. The first dictator to be toppled by Facebook. Like.
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Is the Daily Star supporting the EDL? It's a valid question after a couple of stories the paper has run recently which, to many, have given the right-wing party some very favourable coverage. This is The Guardian's Roy Greenslade on the issue which explains it well http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/feb/10/dailystar-english-defence-league
Daily Star (and Daily Express) owner Richard Desmond claims he didn't know that the Star were taking this line.
Personally, I think the Star imagined it would pick up circulation by tapping in to the anti-immigration consensus among a lot of potential working class readers and somehow imagine the EDL is not quite the demon of the right that, say, the BNP is. I think they're wrong.
I've always had a good professional relationship with the Star. Starved of resources, their small cabal of staff do a remarkable job most of the time and they are among the most pleasant to deal with from an agency point of view. I suspect the decision to highlight the EDL was taken high up and will, if continued, backfire when advertisers decide they don't want to be associated with it.
And I think Desmond, who is a very active member of the Jewish jetset, will come to realise that supporting an anti-Islam organisation today is not a million miles away from the Daily Mail supporting the blackshirts in the 1930s. At least I hope he will.
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My mate Kevin's funeral today. A good Catholic send-off, they really know how to do it. Church service in St. Albans with some rousing hymns and the most tear-jerking but also uplifting speech from his magnificently stoic widow, then down to the crematorium where he went to the strains of Don't Stop Me Now by Queen and then to the pub for a glorious drink and cigarette fuelled goodbye. I pretty much held it together until I saw his six-year-old son put a flower on his dad's coffin.
It was at the pub that I heard about one of those 'why the hell not' kind of things blokes do. A couple of Kevin's mates have, for the last year, been going to the nearest pub to every underground station in London and having a drink in each.
The results are published on a very entertaining blog in which every drink and every pub is reviewed and is called Tracks Of My Beers which any sub would be proud of.
Always happy to publicise someone else's blog so... http://tracksofmybeers.wordpress.com/
Cheers....Solly