Shamelessly stolen from Stephen Tall as I see Google Analytics has been counting for me, here are the five most popular posts on this blog in 2006. Additional honourable mentions for my anal gig list (an anally-maintained list of musical gigs I’ve been to, let’s be clear), which would have made the top five were it a post, and Will’s kakuro masterclass, a perennial favourite from 2005 which remains the most popular post from the blog.

5. Don’t Get Me Started (September 5th) – popular with people trying to track down online copies of the TV programme in question, this was a brief post in praise of Stewart Lee’s documentary What’s Wrong With Blasphemy?

4. My Resignation Letter (April 27th) – a handy delete-as-applicable guide for shamed and/or incompetent Labour ministers which picked up a lot of hits from Google, presumably from people quitting their jobs who were hunting for a suitable form letter (sorry if, as is most likely, it wasn’t helpful)

3. Mark (January 21st) – from this blog’s busiest ever month, thanks to leadership shenanigans and people trying to find out what it was that Mark Oaten did, this was the obligatory “Oh dear” Oaten post

2. Webcameraon (October 1st) – not exactly an internet phenomenon but as close as this blog is ever likely to come, this was the first of my two YouTube videos spoofing David Cameron’s au naturelle (or au naturale?) home movies

1. Toby Stephens (April 10th) – and while everything else was going on, and probably unnoticed by regular readers, this throwaway post of little consequence has been quietly getting hit after hit. Entirely about the lineage of actor and not very good Bond villain Toby Stephens, it attracted loads of attention via Google after the actor in question appeared as Mr Rochester in the BBC’s Jane Eyre

Helping one of my flatmates to move in yesterday afternoon has left my muscles aching today. It was all the usual stuff: boxes, shelves, lamps, furniture – and a Risograph. This monstrous device was extremely heavy – I’m prepared to believe it literally weighed a ton. It took three of us stopping and starting to get it up four flights of stairs to the second floor and I’m suffering for it today. On the plus side, we now have a Riso in the flat so can print subversive literature like old skool Communist revolutionaries. Or photograph body parts when drunk.

Moving the sofa up the small stairwell was equally entertaining, although fortunately we didn’t quite achieve what would have been an Only Fools and Horses style comedy classic by dropping it over the second floor balcony as we tried to balance it at an angle in order to get it through the not-quite-large-enough front door of the flat. Having succeeded, we celebrated with mulled wine and mince pies, and then a cash machine at London Bridge rather inconvenienced me my gobbling my bank card like a Christmas turkey. They told me 4-5 working days to replace it, so some time in 2007…

Don’t forget that Doctor Who and the Runaway Bride is on tomorrow evening (BBC One at 7pm) and may Santa bring you the capitalist material possessions you so desperately desire 🙂

And incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.

I saw part of an episode of Numb3rs last week. The show is about a mathematician who solves crimes with the FBI, which, believe it or not, doesn’t actually appeal to me. It seems a bit sub-Monk and the 3 in the title is just wrong. Still, it had my favourite line from recent TV, spoken by Peter MacNicol, off of Ally McBeal and the upcoming sixth series of 24, as a geeky academic:

“I know a shortcut through Metallurgy.”

I’ve never been quite sure what metallurgy is, but I know I don’t want to catch it.

TV trivia of the day, which I have just noticed while perusing Gary “Bingo Bob” Cole’s IMDb entry: the last episode of The West Wing in which he appears is Requiem which is also the name of the last episode of American Gothic, in which he played sinister Sheriff Lucas Buck.

Don’t you feel better for knowing that?