This was the first draft of my Guardian column this week, before I found out that Charles had already written a piece about the Arrington/LeMeur spat. Shame to waste it...
* * * 
In April 1971, martial law was declared in Saigon.
The city had fallen to the North Vietnamese and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had announced [...]

Yes! It’s that time again. Time again for me to share a Brilliant Idea that I can do nothing with. Time, in other words, for another fun-packed installment of Brilliant Ideas For Other People.
This time: The Long Fail.
You might remember a couple of weeks back that I bought up the domain name ‘TheLongFail.com‘ on the [...]

Since I’ve been gone you’ve been lost without a trace /You dream at night you can only see my face /You look around but it’s me you can’t replace...
This was actually an idea that we - myself, Robert, Scott, Michelle, Alex and some others - came up with in San Francisco, but which stalled when [...]

Tonight is my last night in London before I leave for the mountains of Spain and six weeks of work, rest, work, play and work.
But before I go, and as I sit in this ridiculously huge three-room upgrade suite in Bloomsbury (£70 a night, for cash and winning charm), digesting the last of my Deliverance [...]

Hot on the heels of last week’s B.I.F.O.P., the first part of a new feature I’m calling ‘Paul Can’t Be Arsed To Post Anything Today So Does A Stupid Card Trick Instead, Tuesday’. The rules are simple...

More next time!
(Update: As requested by Emma - version two, in a format that can be frame-by-framed. Pft.)

After posting the first installment of Brilliant Ideas For Other People this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that there might be some cynics out there who would doubt me.
Cynics who would think that I wasn’t giving away these brilliant ideas through generosity or because I couldn’t be bothered to do anything with them, but [...]

Like most brilliant people, I often come up with brilliant ideas for businesses that I know I’ll never bother to do anything with.
And then, inevitably, a few months later, some other clown has the exact same idea and gets all the credit. And rightly so, I suppose. It was kind of inevitable that someone else [...]

A few days ago, Techcrunch broke the news that Hasbro - the makers of Scrabble - are suing the makers of the Scrabulous Facebook app for breach of copyright.
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I’m a huge fan of Scrabulous. In fact, I probably lose more hours to that than I do to hangovers. [...]

As anyone who knows me will testify, there are many - many - occasions on which I should have been arrested. Occasions on which my being bundled into the back of a Black Maria would be entirely justifiable, if not on grounds of public safety, certainly those of my own.
The recent occasion, for example, when [...]

‘Ladies and Gentleman, the pilot has switched on the seatbelt indicator. Please return to your seat and ensure your seatbelt is securely fastened. And for those of you interested in the Super Bowl, the Steelers are currently leading 7-3.’
Another late night bing, this time seven miles up, somewhere over the Atlantic.
I’m writing this from seat [...]