ITV4 Darts: Paul Nicholson beat Mervyn King 13-11 in the final last evening. It had been close with Taylor Beating Phil Jenkins 8-7 when both players were down to the deciding double. Much the same happened with the Taylor Nicholson match, with Nicholson winning 8-7.
Phil Taylor has enjoyed a magnificent career and achieved more accolades than any other sports person. But it was becoming somewhat boring when he won anything and everything. I bet the bookies are rubbing their hands today.
Congratulations to 'Bad Boy' Paul 'the acid' Nicholson, I always liked his image even though the crowd tended to take it too seriously. It had to come, new and younger players are hungrier for the glory, and the out-shots Nicholson was shooting were magnificent.

Mervyn King's 'walk-on' theme is Motorhead's 'King Of Kings' which was originally a Triple-H walk-on theme, but it suits the darts world just as well.

There are 6 Summer Festival dates noted on www.imotorhead.com - more to follow.

The Head Cat: are going into the studios today to record their second album. Motorhead are also due to begin recording, or at least rehearsing for theirs about now, too. A busy time for Lemmy.

My shot at getting my latest fiction, When The Clouds Have Passed, published; ground to a halt when it was returned yesterday. The publisher asked for manuscripts on their website, but the returning letter said 'we don't take unsolicited manuscripts, we usually commission stories.' If the website agreed it could have saved time and postage.

The 'Eartha Kitts' Were No Fun: Several wards were closed recently at Poole Hospital with a D & V bug but whether Mrs. B brought it home? It wasn't pleasant by any stretch, but then they're not supposed to be, are they.
It seems to be trendy today in trying to apportion blame for bugs and colds and suchlike, and whilst I am not scrupulously clean, (is anyone 100%?), the petrol pump is my worst enemy. Whilst they provide plastic gloves they're a pig to get out of the thing they're housed in, and worse to try and get on. So the paper towel is a favourite in avoiding all sorts of dreaded lurgi whilst filling the petrol tank.
Door handles are also a known favourite for germ carrying, but how else can we get in or out of wherever? A lot of bugs are airborne, too, and whatever we do during a lifetime we're bound to pick up a few along the way. If we didn't, we wouldn't be human; and I'm just grateful; if indeed there is anything to be grateful about, that I only suffered the D but not the V.

Jack The Rat - The Sloop, Poole: A friend and local MHB, Tony Fox, rang a couple of weeks ago. He told me a mutual friend had got a new band together and they were playing The Sloop pub opposite the town's Municipal Buildings.
Tony and I had been on the agency circuit and met at a local electronics factory. Same thing with Ryan, but we were working nights in a different electronics factory. With another young chap named Shawn, Ryan started a band named Diablos. It got Shawn out of this self-harming thing he was into, so rock 'n' roll saved another day.
Diablos played a few gigs and we went to see them a couple of times at The Central at Ashley Cross in Parkstone. In my alcoholic days, I famously bought 6 shots of SoCo costing £12 there after a panic attack frightened me into thinking I wouldn't be the usual 'me' tomorrow if I didn't. They were a great band and leaned more towards hard-core punk, and Ryan wrote lyrics and sung.
Then I heard he emigrated to Australia.
And then I heard due to the recession Australia were throwing all the migrants who had gone over in the last 2 years back.
Perhaps he was one of them?
But somewhere along the line he formed Jack Rat.
So I drove to The Sloop, I hadn't set foot in the place since 1969, and inbetween times it had been called The Conjuror's Half-Crown and then reverted back to The Sloop - Poole and its nautical connections, perhaps? But back in '69 we could get burger and chips there for the same price as the college served it. The drawback was we also had a beer and had a job staying awake during the PM lectures.
The band had set up a very basic drum kit and small amps on the stage. No sign of Ryan. It wasn't that crowded and the bar people were serving. A crowd of 7 or 8 young lads bundled noisily inside and the bar people almost rushed to serve them. So I stood at the bar with my money in my hand. And I stood at the bar with my money in my hand. And I stood at the...
...and then I thought f*** this and drove home.
Maybe I'll catch Ryan and Jack The Rat somewhere else.

Stieg Larsson's: Millenium Trilogy has now been completely read and digested. How to end such an amazing piece of fiction would have been difficult but essential; but Stieg was obviously happy with it and it seems to be the right one. Apparently he gave the publisher a 4th manuscript and synopsis for another 6 books. Presumably we will get the 4th at some point, but it won't be another The Girl Who tale or the trilogy would have been a quartet. Such a tragedy he did not live to write the others.

Stephen King's Blaze is reading well, and yes I can see it as a forerunner to The Dark Half as some have emailed to say - Brian Key in Kentucky and Paddy Campbell in Ireland for two of them - thanks.

The manuscript for the story written over Xmas and the New Year is at a publisher being considered.
Finger's crossed.
It's titled When The Clouds Have Passed.

Gary Moore Live In Dublin: Was shown on Sky Arts and was a great gig with Eric Bell, Scott Goreham and Brian 'Robbo' Robertson as guests.

Waking The Dead: has returned and as usual it makes TV worthwhile again. During the commercial break in last evening's showing the Co-Op had an advert for their funerals.
It is the point of any advertising to make the public want what's on offer, or to go to Tesco rather than Asda etc; but funerals? Is the funeral business really that competitive to require advertising on TV? Perhaps we'll have a News headline: HEARSE HOLD UP A hearse was held up in the Blandford Road yesterday by a rival funeral director, and the coffin was transferred from one hearse to the other for onward transportation and interment.
OR
After a road accident in which 6 people died, 4 local funeral director's were queueing up at the scene vying for trade, and a small skirmish broke out when police gave the job to the mortician who arrived 2 minutes later than a rival firm.
I thought I had seen it all.

Dear Diary (Part 3): Missed the first one completely, it was introduced by Richard E Grant; and chuntered on about the second one with Mariella Frostrup last week.
Rory Bremner introduced this third and final 'Dear Diary' and I almost didn't bother for some reason, but pleased I did. Rory covered Samuel Pepys entries about the Great Fire of London, and also focussed on those by politician Edwina Currie and Victoria Wood investigated some diaries from World War II.
But you don't need me to woffle on, if you missed these and are interested, you can find them on BBC iplayer

The Girl That Kicked The Hornet's Nest: Is the 3rd book in Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium Triology' and the only one not in the book charts. Presumably reader's are still on the first two and this will pick up later. It is the most absorbing of the three, I think, and after spending the majority of the weekend reading it I'm torn between wanting to get to the end, but not wanting to because if I do I'll feel somewhat lost. The 3 books have become great friends and it is such a pity Mr. Larsson is not here to enjoy their / his phenomenal success. It is also a pity that his family, whom he apparently saw very little of, are receiving the Royalties instead of his common-law wife. Apparently she is fighting the case through the Swedish Courts. All 3 books are or will be made into films.
Two Stephen King books are on their way from Amazon to take over; 'Blaze' which is King's pre-'Carrie' story which was never published but found as a typed manuscript in his archive at the Bangor, Maine library. SK agreed to its publication, so it'll be worth a read as his first ever effort.
And 'Just After Sunset' is a recent collection of his short stories, and I found them both as hardbacks for 1 penny and 50 pence respectively. Yes, there is postage to add, but...

The Motorizer album: has been voted #5 in Metal Hammer's Top 100 albums of the decade.
You can't say fairer than that.
We knew it anyway, but it's nice to be right, isn't it.

The Illustrated Collector's Guide To Motorhead: is being revised, updated and re-published by Cherry Red Books and will be available on July 19th 2010; the day before the actual 35th Anniversary of Motorhead's very first gig.
Amazon have an entry for it as a pre-order; (payment debited when the book is sent). The finished cover will be different to the Amazon illustration and the page count stated is a rough estimate; the publication date has since been revised to the above.
Mick Stevenson is authoring it this time as he has the main collection source, and it will be just as much the benchmark for Motorheadbangers as the original in 1993.
Pre-order your copy today.

All Pens Blazing (Part 2): The interview for this forthcoming book has been completed and returned to Neil Daniels. It ran to 15 A4 pages so probably the biggest fanzine / fan club interview yet. Neil asked some interesting and unusual questions, which was great. A reminder will be posted here when it is published, probably later in the year.

Better To Write Twaddle: than nothing at all. So said Anne Franke or another diaryist quoted roughly as such last evening on a Mariella Frostrup programme, (part 2 next Monday on BBC 4 - I think?), titled 'Dear Diary.' Tracy Beaker and Adrian Mole author's Jacqueline Wilson and Sue Townsend were also featured amongst others.
The quote above, as far as the writer is concerned, is true. Some speak of 'writers' block' but the cure, apparently is 'just keep on writing and it will clear.'
Rather than writers block I think it's more along the lines that any ideas which come to mind seem as if they're crap, so rather than writing crap, writers' just don't write and then say they're 'blocked.'
The effort I have been working on over Xmas and the New Year is now complete, but needs checking through several times before sending out. Everything prior to 2005 of mine was written on a cocktail of lager, SoCo and cigarettes. So I wondered if I would ever be able to write a minimum of 60,000 words sober and smoke-free as I am these days?
Apparently so.
Well, I am pleased with it, anyway, and it turned into something of an Agatha Christie with a cast of thousands, (well, five or six), who could be the serial killer.

What A Joy: Just sitting here looking into the back garden, it's always a delight watching the birds. In summer, the Sparrows have a dust bath in the dust, of course; but now they're doing it in the snow.
Our pond brings in a lot of birds, in the past, unwanted Herons; but today a most welcomed Thrush. There have been stories that our Thrushes had / have almost become extinct due to the heavy use of slug and snail pellets by gardeners; so it was quite a joy to see. And despite it being frozen over, the water is still running and there is a hole in it for the fish to 'breathe,' and also for those birds to drink from the spout.

But we have escaped the snow quite well so far. Yes, it's out there, but only enough for the long winter growth of grass to be seen through it. The biggest problem are the slippery patches, mainly outside shops, whose staff say 'It's nothing to do with us' if you make a comment about it.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: the book I have been chuntering on about, (it's book 1 in what has been sub-titled 'The Millennium Trilogy' by Stieg Larsson), has been made into a film in Sweden.
Getting towards the end of the 2nd book myself, The Girl Who Played With Fire, they are truly superb stories and well worth the commotion that has been generated.
There are also a few clips and trailer's on You Tube, and some footage with the actress who plays Lisbeth Salander, who is quite some heroine.

Cold As A Witch's Tit: The No 1 record will no doubt be 'Baby It's Cold Outside' this week, and even down here in the south where there hasn't been much snow, the temperatures rarely get above freezing.
But our American 'Lemmy the Movie' makers Greg and Wes are, according to some news MHB Arty Golev picked up from the Net, premiering the film at the 2010 South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas in March.

'All Pens Blazing - the Heavy Metal Writers Handbook': is the rather splendid title of a rather splendid book by Neil Daniels, who has interviewed every 'name' UK rock journalist you can think of - Geoff Barton, Steffan Chirazi, Dante Bonutto. Paul Brannigan, Carol Clerk, Malcolm Dome et al. and included them in it. (What a knockout title for a book, eh, why didn't someone think of that before? It's a bit like MHB Howard Roe's band, Knucklehead, who released a CD titled 'Greta's Tits;' it was there but no one thought to use it. Perhaps the secret word today is OBVIOUS.)
There are just under 70 of these 'rock journo's' interviewed in the book detailing their career and how they, by and large, 'just fell into it' and for us rock fans this is interesting stuff and well worth the tenner it costs.
The book is available through Amazon, Search -Neil Daniels - who has also written books on Robert Plant, Judas Priest etc.
Much to my surprise Neil emailed late last year to say that there was a 2nd Volume planned, and asked if I could take part in an interview for it detailing the Motorhead / Motorheadbangers fanzines, fan club, books written etc; and the last few evenings have been busy getting that together. It will be published later in the year and feature another 50 or so fanzine / rock writers; so mention will be given here and a link to buy on the opening website page, no doubt.

Happy New Year: Belated, admittedly, as Mrs. B worked over Xmas and not the New Year we caught up with the family here and there and enjoyed the occasion. So the Motorblog tended to be overlooked, but there has been much writing done, with spells of reading Stieg Larsson's 'The Girl Who Played With Fire,' the second of his Millennium triology, (thanks again, Eddie); and watching the darts. Phil Taylor will probably win again, but Simon Whitlock may just surprise us? He's as painstaking and patient with every dart he throws, just like Taylor, so we shall see. A nice way to spend a relaxing evening when it's cold and bleak outside.

Webmaster Sarmad Sheikh: has made some great new upgrades on the AB website, especially to the fan club heading which opens up into a far more interesting and compact section. There's a new Author Interview and most of the old stuff in the Essays section has been archived. The slideshow needs updating at some point, but hey, enjoy what Sarmad has improved upon in the meantime.