Elif Batuman

I review Elif Batuman's fantastically entertaining book The Possessed here. If you're in the Book Club you can win a copy. I've exchanged a few emails with Elif (she's lovely and very, very smart) after getting her address from the inestimable Dave Lull, a fan of hers.

Via Elif I got in touch with her UK publicist, Henry Jeffreys, another lovely person whom I met in London last week at the inaugural Dabbler booze-up summit. Henry is now The Dabbler's wine correspondent, and Granta will be supplying monthly books for the club.

Thus the interconnections of the web and indeed, life. If you want to meet interesting people who might well change your life, you could do a lot worse than join the League of Dabblers.

Blogmanship - the word spreads

It's very gratifying to see some budding blogmen taking enthusiastically to Noseybonk's recommended ploys. See these highly amusing comment threads at Metafilter and Reddit.

The fifth and final extract, including Hostmanship and Blogwomanship, was on Friday's Dabbler. Plenty more unserialised material in the book proper.

Buy it today you tightfisted swines! If you really do hate eBooks, you can always follow Recusant's excellent eLuddite example: buy the PDF for a mere £2, print it, staple it together to form a sort of pamphlet and read it on the Tube (or bus or train etc).

Blogmanship 4 - Advanced techniques...

...including Moral Indignationship, Above-the-fray play and Wriggling Out of Arguments you have Clearly Lost, in today's Blogmanship extract on The Dabbler.

Blogmanship part 2: The Blogman's Toolbox

In today's extract from Blogmanship, Or How to Win Arguments on the Internet Without Really Knowing What You Are Talking About, Noseybonk examines the blogman's basic tools, including Logicplay and aggressive bookrecommending.

Buy it now!

Blogmanship - buy it now!

All this week The Dabbler is serialising Noseybonk's hilarious and essential new handbook Blogmanship – Or, How To Win Arguments On The Internet Without Really Knowing What You Are Talking About.

Part 1 is here.

You can buy the complete eBook for just £2 as a PDF direct from The Dabbler, or as an eBook from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com for £2.81 (or $3.99).

Enjoy!

Germania

Also at the Big D, I contribute to the Dabbler Book Club's review of Germania by Simon Winder.

Germania is a book that pulls off the remarkable trick of being simultaneously very entertaining and very boring. Weird.

The Book Club is doing a novel next, and we've also got publishers queuing up to give away freebies, prize draws etc, so make sure you join today - it's free.

Weekendus Mirabilis

Lots of things to be patriotically proud about this weekend. Our gutter press is not one of them but Kate is – a sensible pretty English upper middle-class girl who, having been going out with a Prince for a decade, bravely enters her gilded, paparazzi-patrolled prison with eyes open.

So, a cynicism-defyingly joyful Royal Wedding, Manchester United lose and they kill Osama bin Laden; yes, I’d call that a pretty good weekend.

But it’s back to work now, a mega-Tuesday, the hangovers have accumulated and, to put the tin lid on it, it’s my birthday.

Cheer yourself up over at The Dabbler with my selection of four songs that will make you LOL.

Royal Wedding on The Dabbler

Today Jonathon Green kicks off The Dabbler's Big Royal Wedding Jamboree with an eye-watering dictionary of nuptial slang...

Frank Key, Susan Muncey, Worm and Mahlerman will also be contributing special Wills'n'Kate related posts over the weekend...

Rampant commercialism

O, Think of England, if I have been neglecting you it is only because I have been devoting my time to furious capitalist activities over at the Dabbler, all alcohol-based, including signing a spectacularly lucrative deal with Glengoyne whisky - see Ian Buxton's review here.

You should all also enter the Bath Ales competition pronto. You'll thank me for this one day.

Meanwhile, me old mucker Craig has a brilliant post today about researching his book on the KKK.

Glencairn whisky glass - an object of desire

Over at the dabbler I interview Andy Davidson and write about the extremely desirable Glencairn whisky glass.

We're getting some lovely Dabbler-branded editions, and you'll be able to get your hands on one later....

Harry Beck

Over at the Dabbler I write about Harry Beck, designer of the Tube map.

I love the Tube map, it's one of the best things about London. I have a print of Simon Patterson's Beck-inspired artwork The Great Bear at home. It's a nice piece, but I think now I'd prefer to just have the real map on my wall.

Frogs and Rosbifs

Think of England readers will enjoy today's guest post at The Dabbler - Stephen Clarke on 1000 Years of Annoying the French.

Episodes

Over at The Dabbler I review the first installment of new BBC 2 comedy Episodes.

I had a bit of a sitcom moment myself the other day - could have been straight from an episode of Miranda. Our house is on the market so we're desperately trying to keep things in order, to fool viewers into thinking it's bigger than it is. Anyway, back from work and with 5 minutes to go before the evening's viewers arrived, I was hurrying around making everything ready (hampered the while by Brit Jnr's amiable pesterings) and had got it all pristine and perfect, when I remembered the plug-in fragrancy device in the dining room. So I scampered in, hit the switch and as I did so heard a sickening smash. Down I gazed in horror as a bottle of red wine, which I'd knocked with my big stupid clumsy boot through the back of its rack, emptied itself inexorably over the cream carpet.

I literally gasped in disbelief. That cannot just have happened. And there was the knock on the door. And here was Brit Jnr, gleefully tottering in to see what was the fun. What did I do? I did what anyone would have done in my predicament. I put a child's trampoline over the widening stain and legged it.

A joke about a man with an orange instead of a head

Over at The Dabbler I tell a joke about a man with an orange instead of a head.

It really is as simple as that.

Green's Dictionary of Slang

A bit of a coup for the Dabbler, as we have an exclusive post from Jonathon Green, the English language's leading lexicographer of slang, and author of the astonishing Green's Dictionary of Slang.

When I emailed Jonathon to ask him if he'd like to contribute a post about slang, he said he'd be happy to oblige, but pointed out that his only problem would be choosing, out of 125,000 slang terms, which areas to concentrate on, as the brief seemed rather broad.

'Ah yes', I replied. 'I suppose there are quite a lot of ways you could cut it. How about English slang terms for 'drunk'?'

'Drunk is no problem', he said. 'None at all.'

E'en so here below below

....let steeple bells be swungen etc.

A year is a long time in blogging, and this has very much been a year of two halves on Think of England, halves which we can describe as pre- and post-Dabbler.

Pre-Dabbler, we were swinging along in riproaring fashion. We confronted Tuesday and Mary Beard, sought out the refugees of relative poverty and let loose a blast of the trumpet against the Indecent Left. We examined the Local Character's Zen Bones and the John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood plot thickened.

We learned that the Dungeness Crab is the official state crustacean of Oregon and that every charity shop is obliged by law to stock Wild Swans by Jung Chang. Cupcakes finally jumped the shark and 'jumped the shark' went to Prestatyn. I explained the origins of all sports, discovered a telescope poem, made some films about piglets and had a doss. Obama insulted us, fanatics frightened us.

We had prose poems from a paperblog nutter and Ilfracombe, hungover, and wrote the hit song A Man’s Gotta Do A Dirty Job Sometimes. We correctly identified the fifth and sixth seasons and spotted a Henry Moore potato and some dead animals. Poached eggs! In June I unleashed Chief Trading Post on an unsuspecting world and ludicrously over-analysed my own poem about Boris 'Vuvuzela' Johnson, got tied to the toilet while talking to myself and bought a lobster mug.

And then The Dabbler happened, and poor old Think of England inevitably became a series of pointy signposts to that, interspersed with the odd thing about King Wu of Zhou or Duffy.

Nonetheless, TofE continues, TofE endures. Have a good Christmas, make sure you read the Dabbler's mighty five-post Christmas Compendium, and, as ever, listen to what the Baked Potato say.



See you on the other side.

Bath Ales

Over at The Dabbler I interview the MD of Bath Ales, creators of Gem.

Oh and the other day I posted on Degas, Velazquez and nudes.

Prophecy of a Ten Ton Cheese

Busy, busy...but over at The Dabbler I have posted on James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet.

Messerschmidt

Over at The D I conclude our special Germany day (Wehrmacht Wednesday? - no, best not) with a look at the tolerably horrible Messerchmidt 'Character Heads'.

Gustave Verbeek

Over at The Dabbler I post on the extraordinary upside-down cartoonist Gustave Verbeek.