I spent the final three days of last week in a grant-writing binge: tapping at my keyboards in the early hours, making phone calls to Brighton, wading through artspeak, eating dodgy fast-food. Over the weekend I had a chance to perambulate properly in cyberspace.

By following the ‘Blog aggregator of a friend I found an interesting live journal. I won’t name the intermediate friend because his is a just-for-mates ‘Blog. The interesting live journal, however, seems to be a public thing. It belongs to Shreena who is doing a PhD on Augustine who is a man worth a thesis. One of the longest friendships of my life started with me talking crap about Augustine over dinner at Green College and being corrected by someone who actually had a clue. Shreena includes herself in the loose bracket of “Indian”; like me, she passes the Cricket Test, but with flying colours. Also, like me, she doesn’t believe that racism is confined to whites. Here she is writing about British “ghettos”.

Chase Me Ladies was funny last week, live-‘Blogging a crash landing. It also vied with Shooting Parrots for the last ‘Blogging word on those shocking revelations about what Kate Moss puts up her nose. Harry at CML goes with “Colombian Death Squads Dump Kate Moss“; Shooting Parrots offers this majestic piece of word play. (As you would expect, Laban Tall is taking a harder line.) This is good too.

As if to atone for previous crimes, Spirit of 76 gave Freud a deserved seeing-to at Drink-Soaked Trots For War. The crushing of the old fraud makes a satisfying squishy sound, especially when followed by the crunchy-grindy noise of his spectacles and pipe being pulverised.

Meanwhile, at Blognor Regis (whose Mark Holland I must thank for the Shooting Parrots link), those of you craving the kind of comedy denied you by my decision not to finish this post can enjoy his replay of that classic of British cinema Confessions of a Driving Instructor. I have no doubt that Holland’s commentary is funnier than the original script.

Now, a request to ‘Bloggers everywhere: could you please, please (especially you, Worstall) put your fancy tracking/counting/ego-boosting widgets on the RIGHT HAND SIDE of your content. That way when the rest of us come to visit your homepage we don’t have to wait for the Technorati/TLB/SiteMeter servers to decide whether or not they’re working before your actual posts start to appear in our Web browser window. It’s maddening.