I have long been telling everyone who will listen that Eugene is not what he seems. The speech impediment, the beautifully timed non-anecdotes, the nerdy ability to converse fluently in Morse, his MI5 style shooting one tin can after another in his practicing for the Rodeo Task, are all, in my mind, glaring pointers to him acting a very good character in order to win the show. I do want him to win whether or not he is in character – having just seen him cry over the dilemna of whether to shorten Makosi’s kidnapping torture, I have decided he is either an incredibly talented actor, or a man of such feeling that he must win.

Will the nation please get over their misapprehension that Anthony is good looking – he looks like a character out of Pokemon.

And, in other Big Brother news, once more tonight’s show has confirmed to me that Craig is a malicious, sanctimonious parasite who is not fit to lick the blood off Pete Doherty’s needles.

Forgive me for once more admitting to a preoccupation with my web stats. I was showing Drunk how I can tell what country, referrers urls, etc., my readers come from. I was delighted to see that some of my readers come from the other Recidivist , whose site I have recently discovered, and who writes interesting and trenchant commentary on social and political issues.

Web statistics are a strange thing. I am not sure how good any one else’s analysis is, but mine does not appear very sophisticated – of just over 10,000 visits logged, for instance, it can only analyse the Top Level Domain of 1569. But as I was showing Drunk how I could see what internet providers people who read my site use, I was somewhat surprised to see that out of these, 1 of them came from “.gov” – or, to give it it’s full title, the United States federal government agencies.

I was wondering how this US government employee found my site. I tend to Google first if you type in “recidivist”. But type in, say, “Beck”, or “Zimbabwe AND Jan Raath AND Angus Shaw”, and I am not sure that I even feature, even though I have written entries on these subjects, because, to be frank, when I Googled these search terms to check, I couldn’t be bothered to keep looking after the twentieth page of links to other sites. And, apart from the fact that this makes me wonder if I have got the hang of this whole blogging malarkey, it also means that you are not likely to just stumble across my blog if you haven’t followed a link from somewhere.

So I am left posing the question: “Was it a random Friday afternoon, when someone linked to my site from xfm.co.uk, where I posted something on their message boards about Beck, with a link to my entry on the gig I saw in June? Or did someone google “recidivist” when they read the word in a piece of legislation they were reading about the penal system?” Obviously even in the US government, people spend time messing around online, and it would be interesting to know what sites are visited from their domain.

I, of course, prefer the melodramatic and sinister possibility that the US likes to monitor web opinion, and came across my blog because they were looking for references to Menezes, or Wolfowitz, or George Galloway online. I know it’s entirely unlikely, but I enjoy the thought that I am being monitored! I have determined to write much more stuff about shopping, and food I have cooked, and music. Just to keep my imaginary online spy busy… And I will definitely not mention the time I was arrested in Paris for helping to try and bring down a foreign despot who was visiting France at the time.

Oops.

Drunk and I are sitting here listening to music, downloading things on Limewire. I had my little brother round for dinner, with his new girlfriend. And Drunk stayed out of the way, for the sake of propriety, watching ‘The History of British Jazz’. As the dinner guests have departed, and Drunk felt safe getting to the fridge for some wine, and as I have finally wired up my phenomenal speakers in this house, we started an impromptu drinking and listening to music session.

I decided to educate Drunk in African Jazz, seeing as he was already well on the way to appreciating English Jazz. Imagine my dismay on typing in ‘Dollar Brand, The Wedding’ to Limewire, and seeing the following. Drunk couldn’t see what I was complaining about, but really!

Back in March I had fallen back into some bad habits (well they don’t call me Recidivist for nothing) and was fraternising with Drunk again. And in a somewhat worse-for-wear state, I blogged a ‘Notes and Queries’ entry. Drunk was trying to remember a really good question he wanted to pose to the well-loved column in The Guardian. Unfortunately, as we were both obeying the fate that our names force upon us, we were too scrambled for him to remember the question or for me to do anything beyond the entry that I did then…

I have trodden the well worn path that a habitual re-offernder must, and find myself once more in Drunk’s company. And he has miraculously remembered the question, even though his status is similar, or even worse. We submitted it yesterday. We’re crossing our fingers that it gets published. Look out for it in the pages of Wednesday’s papers…

‘When do you become too old to be too young to die?’ Drunk (31).

I am very excited that today, at around 3pm, I got my 10,000th visitor to my site. Ok, it ain’t going to give google or the beeb anything to worry about in terms of competition, but I have to admit to a little frisson of delight at that news.