Hello.

If you take a careful look at this week’s Weekly Hat, you may note it is a shade shorter than usual. Although, to be fair, it’s still around 1,500 words, which is a few. But yes, after finding that producing this and Behatted is sucking every drop of free time I have, I’ve decided forcing myself to cover three news stories a week was a bit much. I have novel manuscripts to edit that I’ve been ignoring for too long. However, I do enjoy doing this, and it shall carry on. Just not at quite as much length.

(Not to mention, the news at the moment isn’t all that inspiring. When looking for topics, I have the choice of… swine flu? Or Michael Jackson? Or MP expenses? Or how about some swine flu or Michael Jackson?)

So, what’s in the new, improved, slightly shorter Weekly Hat?

• Politics, as usual: The Norwich by-election may be the most exciting thing ever to happen. (Not really.)
• They keep killing: Some other news stories, covered in short shortness, as most of them have been done before.
• Media and stuff: Moon? Season Of Secrets? Horehound? Posthumous advertising by Bob Monkhouse?
• Behatted Photo Of The Week: The ‘Next week’ section may have gone, but this bit is forever.

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A slightly late Hat this week. I’d love to say it’s because I’ve been out experiencing something to write about, but… no, I’ve just been busy with tedious old real life. Sorry.

Oh, in case anyone’s interested, I’ve recently started doing some articles on random topics for Suite101. Check it out. My profile is here (and also now linked from the sidebar of this site), and anything I do should be linked there. I warn you, some topics may be re-used between here and there, but they force me to be slightly less anecdotal, flippant and offensive.

Now, this week’s material…

• Here is the news (now pay up): The evil Murdoch empire wants us to pay to read the work of professional writers. How crazy is that?!
• And now sports: We’re really not doing well at cricket this week.
• Media and stuff: Taking The Flak! Dexter! Weird Al!
• Behatted Photo Of The Week: Mr Yankovic, come on down!

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Good morning, all. It’s 8:43AM on Sunday, and I have a few hours to publish The Weekly Hat before I return to Billericay, Essex for a short while, mostly to watch DVDs and have a beer. I mention this only because Billericay was in Gavin & Stacey, and it’s important to cling on to these small claims to fame.

I am rather more indifferent to announce that I will not be covering the whole “Americans say mean things about the NHS” story, simply because I’ve read enough about it lately and have nothing in particular to add. Yes, it’s clearly an attempt by the American right to stop voters there from noticing that we’ve had “socialised medicine” for years, but still manage to have decent middle class western lives. Bastards. Oh, I do allude to it at one stage though, not particularly subtly.

An admin notice, for regular readers: I am attending Richard Branson’s corporate V festival extravaganza next weekend. Because of this, it’s unlikely I’ll manage Weekly Hat publication on Sunday. It’ll probably be some time the following day, in order to incorporate a write-up of the V experience. This could mean that posts in RSS readers will no longer be in a nice, even order of three comics/one Weekly Hat/three comics/one Weekly Hat etc, and I can only apologise.

But for now, this week’s hillarity is as follows…

• The unspoken amazement: A jewellery shop robbery in London this week has been widely reported, but not correctly.
• It only burns when I P: An article about the reveal of Baby P’s killers in the media. I apologise in advance.
• Media and stuff: Dollhouse, the new Brendan Benson album and an excellent new comic called Chew come under the stuff-roscope
• Behatted Photo Of The Week: Um. Yeah. There’s a photo here, but. Y’know.

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Good morning.

Back to the regular time slot this week after being pre-empted by the V festival last week. Unfortunately, we have a string of weekends coming up where I’m moving house, going on holiday and doing other busying things, so more jiggering about with the Weekly Hat schedule might follow. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, due to the worrying lack of genuine news I could find to write about, the sports section has been promoted to first place (freaky, I know), and everything else relegated to bullet points. We’re also covering the problems of Oasis, in a nice continuance from last week’s episode when I was denied the chance to see them at V. Sound exciting? Well, that’s because it is.

Precise table of contents follows…

• And now first, sports: Well, kinda sports-related. Cheating, hooliganism and other things that give sport a bad name. Yes, that’s what it takes to get the sport moved upfront.
• Look what happened!: The rest of this week’s news, in bullet points. Tabloid headlines! BBC abused by evil empire! GCSE results! Kidnap!
• Media and stuff: I wrote a perfectly good media section about light television programmes, and then Oasis imploded. Typical.
• Behatted Photo Of The Week: Oasis homage photo thing!

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