I'm sure by now you all know Bristol City are top again, but many of you will be unsure what that actually means. Inter alia, it means these things.

The division we're top of is the Championship. Each team in the Championship plays 46 games. You can see from the table that we've got 5 games left. There's three points for a win and one for a draw, we've got 70 points now, so our maximum total is 85.

Apart from West Brom, no other side has a higher maximum than us. The top two teams are automatically promoted to the Premiership, the Major League of English soccer for my American readers (welcome back Major League, by the way), so if we win all our remaining games no-one can stop us. This situation is always described by players and managers in interviews with the following sentence. It's in our own hands. It's kind of the law that they have to say that. Especially managers, who have to toe the rhetorical line in case they lose the dressing room.

At the end of the season, the clubs placed third to sixth play off in their own little miniature tournament, and the winner gets promoted with the top two. The three bottom teams in the Premiership replace them in the Championship. The word for this is relegation, which originally meant being exiled from Rome to somewhere a bit more basic in the provinces, as happened to Ovid. This captures the sense of the event very nicely.

Of course, smartarse commentators predict exactly this for City next season, should they be so impertinent as to actually get promoted. In fact, they regard this as so likely it's considered hardly worth our playing the actual games. They forget one thing though.

They forget that it actually doesn't matter so much that we're highly likely to get dismembered by Man Utd and Arsenal, because Man Utd and Arsenal dismember everybody. They're the giant hornets of football, cutting all the lesser teams apart with mechanical efficiency.

So as Dave pointed out earlier in the month, survival isn't about those games. It's about doing well against Middlesbrough, or Birmingham City. It's also about beating the teams that come up with us.

For let us be frank, the Championship hasn't produced any world beaters this season. To see this, compare our division with League 1 and League 2. The top teams in those divisions have 82 and 85 points, as compared with our 70. No-one in the Championship has dominated. As a result it's still very exciting, but it's made some people think the promoted teams will go straight back down again. This ignores the poor quality of football being played at the lower end of the Premiership, where the number of points needed to avoid relegation this season may well be the lowest number ever.

It's a sign of the narrow range of teams in our division that we're top, despite having a goal difference of only +2. We've scored 49 goals, but we've let in 47. The bottom team, Colchester, has actually scored more goals than us, 55. It's just that they've let in 76.

Some ignoramuses have tried to argue that this shows we've been lucky. How shallow they are. In fact, it just shows the brilliant success of the City gameplan, as orchestrated by our managing wunderkind, Gary Johnson (I love him).

For the typical City game goes like this. Lots of effort and attacking play in the first half an hour, a goal up, but hanging on until half time as the midfield run out of puff. The half-time tea and cocaine make for a zestful resumption, but then they come down, and it's all hands to the hatches until the final whistle. In the rare event that we're not winning, a big rush in the last five minutes to grap a last ditch winner.

Not that I'm recommending cocaine for sporting endeavour, you understand, and this is one reason why. Thanks to Glenn for the link.

The point though is that somehow, week after week, we scrape out of games with a narrow victory. Unfortunately, we've lost a few away games by three, four or even five goals, and that's what's done for our goal difference. What might at first glance appear to be a sign of vulnerability, when understood more deeply can be seen as a testimony to Johnson's almost magical ability (don't start - I said almost) to extract the best from his squad.

So who's going up? Well, the team with the easiest run in is Watford, but they've been in terrible form recently. Wolves are down in sixth, and play four of their last five games against teams in the top half of the table, so can probably be discounted. That leaves three from four. My guess is West Brom, Hull and us, with Stoke missing out, but then again I've got a terrible record in these matters. Last World Cup I predicted a final between Brazil and Argentina, only to see both eliminated in the next round, and wrote off losing finalists France early on.

Incidentally, inter alia just means among other things. It's a literal translation which adds nothing to the phrase at all, and I could just as easily have said it in English.

Which is a statement of intent. I've decided it's time to relax my eternal vigilance against the least hint of bombast, and start to indulge myself a little. I'm sure there are times when you weary of my constant obsession with plain English as much as I do. From now on I'm going to cut my prose loose from its quotidian moorings.

Why just say things are turning red, when you could have them rubesce? It isn't even a word, but rubescent is, and I know I can trust you to work it out. In fact, I may just skip the Renaissance middle men altogether, and start posting entirely in Latin. It's not like I've got a dressing room to lose. Just my lovely readers, and you're not going anywhere, are you?

Vale, amice. Plus pila quam primum.

Now before I start, I need to make alternative arrangements for some of you, who may just be a little bored by the subject of football.

So here's a link to a page that's all about camera lenses. It discusses every camera lens in the fucking world in the most exhaustive detail possible, so there's absolutely no danger of anyone being bored in any way.

Still here? Then you must surely care that Bristol City are top again, after a dramatic winner against Norwich in injury time. Good old Stevie Brooker headed his first goal for City in a while.

For he's had a difficult time over the last year. After a short prison sentence following a fracas in a nightclub (it isn't just Premiership players that do moronic things), he had a nasty injury, and recently he's been on loan to Cheltenham, which is surely enough karmic retribution for anyone. He's been banging them in there, and Gary Johnson's brought him back for the promotion push in the last few games.

You can see the table here. Or, for those who are only able to engage in anything if it's first passed through the medium of a photographic website, here it is on Flickr.

Best viewed large. I think I might submit it to DMU.

In other football news, players and managers have been struggling to express themselves through the medium of words. Russell Brand in the Guardian, watching Fabio Capello being interviewed after the France game, noticed that he was clearly understanding questions in English because he started to answer before the interpreter translated, but still chose to give his answer in Italian. Ray Wilkins on Sky was on hand to explain. "With foreign", he said, "you can understand it but you can't speak it". In my experience of foreign it's the other way round if anything. I can rattle off a form of foreign known as French at ten to the dozen, but I still need French speakers to go slow and e-nun-ci-ate.

Rio Ferdinand, meanwhile, has the much rarer skill of taking English and making it sound like foreign, explaining in a recent interview that after Gary Neville's injuries stopped him being captain, "Giggsy's come in and taken up the mantelpiece". Barney Ronay picked up on this, and goes on to speculate about the directions the football DIY metaphor might go in. Worth a read.

This is the bit where I tidy up loose ends. In the process, I'm going to have to talk about photography, which is a bit of a challenge for someone who's never owned a 'proper' camera. I have to though, because I'm responding to this.

... photography is about time and place and moment and occurrence and coincidence, and revealing banality, and so on, in a way that previous mediums (such as painting) aren't. If we use or consume photography simply as (for example) painting (as the photo-secessionists did), we are missing the point of its uniqueness.

I'm really not seeing why painting can't be just as much about all of those things. Or sculpture or verse, for that matter. Striqun says photographs capture, better than most media, moments in historical time. I don't see why it captures them better. Of course it captures them more realistically, and of course that realism has its virtues and its possibilities, but I don't see why a photograph of a Parisian couple kissing in the street in Paris is a better capturing of a moment than Bernini's Apollo and Daphne.

There is one supreme virtue that photography has, which is its democratisation of the image. He refers to this when he talks about having a personal record of ageing, and I take his point to be that everyone can have a liftime of photographs of themselves, whereas only Popes and Chancellors get to have a lifetime of painted portraits.

He mentioned the photo I have on my living room wall as a perfect example of what photography can do. There's a tale that goes with that picture. My friend Gary went travelling round Cuba, Guatemala and Belize, and he took his digital camera with him. He also took one of those miniature hand-held printers that do you a photograph in a couple of minutes. He took loads of pictures of people, and everyone he photographed got a copy. Lots of his subjects had never had a picture of themselves before. Now that's how to democratise the image. His online gallery is here at gallery 2C, by the way.

So Striqun's right about that. And it makes absolutely no sense to limit photography to the painterly style. Yet apart from the early photo-seccessionists, I'm not sure who does. Certainly not photographic artists.

And anyway, what people do on Flickr, that's not photography. It uses cameras, but it's not photography as Striqun means it. Except for the ones that run their own little Flickr-secessionist movement, futilely protesting against the intrusion of Photoshop into their homages to Cartier-Bresson.

For what's happening on Flickr, and in other places, is new. Back in the Eighties many of us got quite excited about the graphic novel. Some of you probably still are, and I wouldn't disrespect the form. That thing where people take pictures, put them on their computer, muck about with them loads, a bit or not at all and then hang them out in cyberspace for the world to comment, that's the graphic novel of our age. I just tried to type that's a new art form, but it came out as that's a new fart form, and I thought maybe my fingers were trying to tell me something. You know what I mean though.

Although it still does all the stuff he said. It's still a democratising medium. That's why so much of it is rubbish. It's also a record of people's lives, and so on. I use it in class, actually. Say I've got some Somali students in the group, I might get them to search Flickr for pictures of Hargeisa or Mogadishu. They see places they know, and click on the link to see who took the picture. It's usually somebody else from the Somali diaspora, in Belgium or Canada or somewhere, and I explain how to get in touch with them.

This conversation arose when we were talking about zombizi's exhibition. He does all those other things too. When he does ophelia, it's a moment in time, and a snapshot of a human life. It's just got other stuff going on as well.

But the art is the thing with him, and he's actually very good at it. I'm seeing through a glass darkly with his work most of the time, but I can see there's stuff there, even if I'm not always quite sure what it is. I'd find it easier if it had more Romans in it. I think he deliberately avoids the whole subject of ancient Rome just to annoy me.

While you, striqun, you do this. Why isn't this art?

That'll do on this, now. I'm getting bored with it, and rumblings of discontent in my audience have reached me. Yes you, on Smeaton Road, I'm talking about you. I see and hear all you know. Yea, ye shall know the fear of me, and thou shall not come out of the fire, that ye shall taste of my vengeance.

I'm sorry, that's the Qur'an coming back. I keep pushing it down, but it keeps popping out again. Tomorrow, football.

So, the Metamorphoses. By Ovid.

There are fifteen books in the book (don't start), and the theme can be summarised as moments in classical mythology when a being changes into something else. A book is about 800 lines, so the whole thing is about 12,000, which in terms of readability is a lot less than it sounds, and well within your scope.

The most famous metamorphosis in the book is probably the story of Apollo and Daphne. Apollo is struck by one of Cupid's arrows, and Daphne has the very bad luck to be passing at the time. The river god Peneus saves her from his unwanted attentions by changing her into a laurel tree, this change being the metamorphosis in the title. The myth is famous because of the Apollo and Daphne statue by Giovanni Bernini.

There's lots of this kind of thing, by which I mean people metamorphosising. Animal, vegetable, mineral, they'll change into anything at the drop of a hat. Things must have been more fluid in the olden days. Ovid moves from the creation myth, through Hercules, Theseus and so on, and on to the Iliad and the Odyssey. After that the action moves to Italy, through Aeneas, the mythical survivor of the fall of Troy and ancestor of the Romans.

In the final book, we meet Pythagoras. He makes an eloquent plea for vegetarianism, which striqun would like, before going on to talk about the inevitability of change. Seasons turn, rivers flow (famously, you never step twice on the same piece of water), people age, and so on. And yet within change there is continuity. People die, but the people persist. Summer fades, but always returns. The water in a river Meanders down to the sea, but the river itself is always there.

At this point you realise that the whole book, with its constant repetition of metamorphoses, has been building up to this. People change into laurel trees, dragon's teeth become warriors, the gods capriciously take against you, then (sometimes) relent. But hubris always leads to disaster, love always leads - well, to disaster, apparently, and the gods, representing the implacable forces which govern human lives, go on for ever. A book which appeared to be nothing more than a collection of charming vignettes turns out to have philosophical depth.

But the scheme of it's a bit cock-eyed. It's Pythagoras talking, but the idea is from Heraclitus. And the timeline is askew. Worse, this should have been the climax. Instead, the action moves on into Ovid's own time, and ends up with a calculated grovelling to Augustus.

For Ovid wasn't popular with Augustus, who thought his poetry was too licentious, and lacked patriotism. For us these are the best things about it, but in the political climate of the time Ovid felt it necessary to use the ending to the Metamorphoses to help him get away with the rest of it, and had to accept the artistic damage this did to his verse.

It didn't work. A few years later, he was exiled from his beloved Rome to a remote settlement at Tomi (modern day Constanta, on the Romanian coast), for the rest of his life. Two thousand years before Mick Jagger, Ovid was the original butterfly, broken on the wheel.

So how is all this connected with the argument? Fairly loosely, frankly. I just wanted to write about it. But inasmuch as I have a point beyond just saying Ovid! Go and read some Ovid!, it's in response to striqun's comments on art. For me, it is a cultural category, dominated by class issues, knowledge-as-power, and straightforward careerism and commodification (in its actual practice, and even more so in its critique and collection). From that point of view, I have a personal dislike of art.

That's not art though. That's the bullshit that surrounds art. Art is when you've read fourteen and a bit books of poetry, and suddenly a passage in the fifteenth book rocks you back in your chair as it turns the others upside down. Art is when a sculptor shows the violence in a myth by carving a hand grasping a thigh so firmly you can see the force that's being used in the way it presses down the flesh. Imagine having that kind of skill with solid rock, or for that matter with fluid words.

We all should bow the knee, and I do mean all of us.

Striqun: If we accepted your definition of art, my feeling those things would become an act of cultural imperialism. For you, there seems to be no actual art in art at all.

Art has to share the world, and to that extent it's always compromised. Ovid's art was compromised by political power. Like Shostakovich with Stalin, he had to edit his work to please a cultureless thug with no idea what he was really doing. He might as well have called the book A Roman artist responds to justified criticism.

As well as threats, art is also vulnerable to blandishments. Creative decisions are inevitably influenced by the marketplace, and artists who are willing to trim their sails with the prevailing wind will have longer careers than artists who aren't.

But that isn't a definition of art, any more than Roman Abramovich is the definition of football. It's just the cess you have to wade through to find the pearls.

I haven't addressed your whole argument yet, I know. Next time, I'll talk about photography, which is a subject I know virtually nothing about. Should be fun.

Right, let's get to the meat of the argument.

Striqun says this. But what I find important is that talking and thinking about 'artistic' photography distracts us from the far more interesting, innovative, and culture shattering stuff that is photography; something that has only existed for barely more than 150 years and has a profound, and truly revolutionary effect on us.

He talks about the Photo-Secession movement, and says they started off disguising the photographic nature of their photographs in various ways in order to protect their status as art, but then came to realise the power of photography in itself.

I wasn't familiar with their work, so I've just looked them up on Wikpedia, and it must be said that the authors of the articles on Photo-Secession and Alfred Stieglitz don't see the dichotomy between art and photography that he describes. Instead, they say the movement helped to raise standards and awareness of art photography, and Stieglitz was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture.

And I'm not really seeing the rebellion against art in striqun's description, either. It sounds to me like an artistic movement which changed direction, rather than a movement which renounced art. Certainly, Stieglitz took hundreds of pictures of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, which are considered quite artistic enough to earn him a V&A exhibition. A photographer, publisher, writer and gallery owner, he played a key role in the promotion and exploration of photography as an art form, they gush on their website. He also helped introduce modern art to an American audience.

I do think you're right that photography freed art from its responsibility as the best form of realistic depiction available, and enabled it to move into new territory, but I don't think there's a huge gulf between the two genres.

Neither do I agree that Photography as art is backward looking. In particular, and this is the trigger for our whole debate, I don't think that the new art form of digital images on the Internet is backward looking, but I'll say more about that in another post.

Your second email is very good on the virtues of photography, but again I'm not seeing why any of that stands in conflict, or even contrast, with art.

In your third email, everything becomes instantly clear with your personal definition of art. For me, it is a cultural category, dominated by class issues, knowledge-as-power, and straightforward careerism and commodification (in its actual practice, and even more so in its critique and collection). From that point of view, I have a personal dislike of art.

I think you are missing the point about art. To explain, I'm going to talk about Metamorphoses, a book of poems by the Roman poet Ovid. I'm using this as an example because it isn't painting or photography, and stands far enough from modern debates to offer some perspective on them.

That's a total lie, actually. I'm using the Metamorphoses because I've just re-read them, for reasons too tedious to recount, and I'm just dying to go on about them at length.

Tomorrow, though. Gird your loins.

I said I'd reply to striqun's argument. It's been a rather drunken Bank Holiday weekend, but now I'm ready.

First off, can I just say what a nice change it makes to have a civilised debate? Normally I'm arguing with godbotherers, warmongers or homeopaths. How very convivial to be able to assume a certain amount on the part of the other participants. It comes as a particular relief after several weeks spent knee deep in the Qur'an. I feel almost - cleansed.

Cleansed, and baffled. For suddenly I find myself constructing an argument without needing to insult anyone, and I'm really not quite sure how to proceed. Typically my opponents come strutting up with their inerrant texts and their only too errant capitalisation, there's a brief flurry of adverbs and spite and they withdraw to pull my barbs out of their bleeding haunches and look them up in the dictionary. It's nice to swap my halberd for an armchair and a glass of something soothing, but it does leave me in need of a way to break the rhetorical ice.

Ordinarily I'd start by defining terms, but that would leave me defining art, a notoriously futile activity. As Louis Armstrong said about jazz, if you gotta ask you ain't never gonna know.

But perhaps I should bite the bullet, brave the inevitable brickbats and pick out some of the features of art which are relevant to this debate. I must emphasise though that these are neither necessary nor sufficient. In other words, you could perfectly easily have art which doesn't meet any of these conditions, and you could have artefacts which meet all of them but still aren't art.

Firstly, art is an intention rather than a thing. It's art because whoever made it says it's art. By this definition, coral reefs, though beautiful, are not art, but if I made a coral reef identical to the real thing and said it was art, it would be.

Secondly, art has stuff going on under the surface. It refers to things, including itself. Dali's droopy clocks aren't just droopy clocks, they symbolise Einsteinian time. Or something. Ovid's Metamorphoses include explicit and implicit homages to the Iliad.

Thirdly, art shows, rather than tells. Picasso's Guernica is political, but it's political art, because it isn't just an explanation of why bombing is bad. zombizi's pictures are about stuff like mortality, or human relationships in the age of the Internet, but they don't explicitly say so. He's probably a bit ticked off that I've said so, so I won't go on.

Fourthly, art has structure. Symphonies come in movements. Novels have chapters, paintings have frames. And digital images have pixels. For all the images we see on the Internet are written in 256-256-256 time. Or something similar. You get the idea.

Your homework for tonight is to think of exceptions to these rules, and add them in the comments. Tomorrow, the main argument.

Just a quick one. There's a film out in America called Expelled!, which is made by the big and scary creationist movement over there. The film apparently claims that evolution is a plot concocted by Big Science, and that academics who tell the truth about it are persecuted for their beliefs. It's not the first Christian lie about persecution, incidentally - in the time of the Roman Empire, the death toll from persecution of Christians went up after the Empire became officially Christian itself, because many of the sects of the time were now defined as heretics.

But in the minds of the film's backers, they're making a brave stand for free speech. So it's perhaps a little odd that they've got security guards on the venues where it's being shown, whose job is to keep out anyone from the opposing camp. PZ Myers, author of the Pharyngula blog, was expelled from the movie theatre himself yesterday.

They didn't notice his guest though, who got to see the flim in its entirety, and join in the debate afterwards. Honestly, you'd think they'd have recognised Richard Dawkins.

But we don't want to descend to triumphalist catcalling and juvenile stereotyping. So repeat after me. Only some religious people are stupid. Only some religious people are stupid. Only some ...

My good friend striqun has emailed me with a debate. This happens to me a lot. I'm already debating the Qur'an with the Guardian, the improvability or otherwise of humankind with the magnificently named pippy longstocking (no website, so no URL) and that's before I've even started on the usual everyday badinage. Yes, my last girlfriend did leave me. How did you know?

So you all have to help. Not with my last girlfriend, that's all done and dusted. With this.

Here's what he's written. It's about the relationship between photography and art, and follows on from the great zombizi exhibition. Please bear in mind that I haven't edited it, except for a little minor tidying for posting, so don't expect it to be structured like an essay.

Email 1:
Photography isn't art any more than writing is. Writing can be everything from a shopping list to an epic poem. And whilst some people might want to get into that murky realm of defining some writing (and seriously, only a very tiny fraction of it) as art, to talk about writing and art together generally is nonsense. It's a special case, if at all.

Email 2:
... so pursuing the idea that photography is a special medium in a class of its own, we need to remind ourselves of its unique ability to freeze a moment in time. Whilst photography can be used for still life (and very beautifully too), it's at its best when it's presenting you with a privileged view into an otherwise unrecognisable 500th of a second: unstaged smiles, unfolding tragedies, strange or banal coincidences, beginnings ends and in betweens. Life, death - our mortality - is acted in time, not static.

Email 3:
Pondering all this further, I've decided it may be more helpful to separate out my arguments. The whole argument about art is a very difficult one, because it depends so much on what you define art as. For me, it is a cultural category, dominated by class issues, knowledge-as-power, and straightforward careerism and commodification (in its actual practice, and even more so in its critique and collection). From that point of view, I have a personal dislike of art.

If anyone has anything to say, perhaps you might like to add it in the comments box. I shall post some remarks of my own over the next day or so.

I'm looking at the Championship League Table. It's beautifully balanced in its composition, teams artfully arranged in order of excellence. If I sent it off to the Royal Academy they'd hang it in their summer exhibition without a second thought.

It's yesterday's table. I was looking at it a mere 23 hours ago, before the game. With a sigh, I hit Refresh.

What a monstrosity. Honestly, you couldn't get a Turner Prize for it. It's particularly ugly just at the top, precisely where it was latterly so elegantly formed. Stoke, it says, baldly and artlessly.

Well I've been to Stoke, and it isn't even a proper place. It's just a bunch of smaller places which, having bumped into each other, needed some kind of collective noun. The nerve of it.

So let's reconsider. Bristol City are second in the Championship, and the only team above them are from a place which isn't even a proper place. Therefore, Bristol have the highest Championship team of any place.

So after you correct for erroneous data, City are still top. I thank you.

And apart from our actual game, it wasn't a bad weekend. Stoke and Watford, our two nearest rivals, drew, while West Brom lost a supposedly easy game against Leicester.

And Rovers lost as well. To Cheltenham, and a goal scored by Steve Brooker. A striker on loan to Cheltenham from - yes, you've guessed it, Bristol City.

But I can't even celebrate that. Because of this. Twats.

Regular readers will already be aware that there are two football teams in Bristol, and that one is massively better than the other.

No this isn't an outrageously unscientific claim, because in football, as opposed for instance to painting or cookery, success can be measured by a precise yardstick. To be a good football team, you have to score many goals compared to the number you concede, win matches, and progress to as high a level as possible.

Because City are top (I said We! Are! Top-of-the-league! etc etc) of the Championship, the second best division, and Rovers are 17th in League One, the third best division (I said They! Are! Seventeenth-in-a-shit-league!), therefore my statement is simply true, in a way that similar statements about Tracy Emin v Damien Hurst or chicken vindaloo v pasta carbonara are not true. People who dispute this clear statement of fact are thus comparable to people who maintain that life was created in 4004 BC in their sheer bovine, obstinate wrongness.

And now we know why. Scientists at Plymouth and Durhan Universities have analysed team results, and have concluded that teams in red do better than teams in blue. The precise causal relationship is unclear. In other words, they don't know whether playing in red helps you to win in itself, or whether the redness attracts more fans, which means more money, which means the club can afford better players, staff and facilities.

I have a third hypothesis, which is that teams do better in red because on some visceral level they feel they're connected to Bristol City. Teams in blue, on the other hand, feel unnerved at the possibility that other people might confuse them with Rovers. I can certainly imagine feeling both those things, and by the standards of the religious that makes it definitely true. So now you know.

And the semifinals are:

Those of you who haven't been paying attention may suspect a typo, but stet, or sic, or something, for that is in fact the correct fixture list. This is a statistically significant year in the history of the tournament, and this is why.

Contrary to popular myth, in the last thirty years the FA Cup has actually been dominated by five teams, Arsenal, Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool and Spurs. The last time there was a final without any of these teams was 1984 (Everton 2 Watford 0), and the last time before that was 1975 (West Ham 2 Fulham 0). Between them the Big Five have won 24 out of the last 30, and established a relationship with the tournament analogous to the US relationship with Britain, including all the compulsory buttsex.

But not this year. Tiring of being relentlessly sodomised by bigger boys, with their bigger boys, this year the second tier of English football have got on top themselves for a change. This year there will be at least one team from the Championship in the final, and if West Brom beat Portsmouth there will be two. I don't know about the dim and distant history of the game, and frankly I can't be bothered to find out, but for post-war English football that would be unprecedented.

Three cheers to Barnsley, who put Liverpool out last time and this time comprehensively outplayed the mighty Chelsea. In fact all the quarter finals went the way of the underdog. Oh yes, except for poor old Bristol Rovers, beaten 5-1 by West Brom in front of a sellout crowd and the assembled millions on their sofas. And people say it's a waste of time watching football on the telly. Best two hours of my life. Now they can get back to the serious business of gazing wistfully south of the river, wondering how it would feel to be successful.

And stet and sic are both Latin, for let it stand and thus respectively. Did you really think I didn't know? Oh ye of little faith. In me, in whom you should surely be most trusting.

Incidentally, there are some anniversaries today. It's Lithuanian Independence Day, marking eighteen years since the Russians pulled out, so a big cheery hello to them. It's also ninety years to the day since the British Army captured Baghdad from the Turks. The military campaign was straightforward enough, but the aftermath was a nightmare, and there was a bit of a fuss because it turned out they'd been beating civilians to death behind closed doors. I'm saying nothing.

As if to mark the apotheosis of all things blasphemous, it's the great zombizi exhibition!!! Rollup, rollup, that's what he's stood outside smoking.

Actually, from now on I shall refer to him as The Great Zombizi, firstly because he's genuinely quite good, and secondly because it makes him sound like a freak show under a canvas awning, which rather suits him.

Oh yes, details. He'd like it if I remembered the details.

It's at the Here Gallery, 108 Stokes Croft, Bristol, from Saturday March 8 to Saturday March 29. I'm going to the opening preview tomorrow, which if you ask me is proof positive of how very important I am.

But it's not about me, apparently, it's about zombizi and his really very good art. Yes photos are proper art. zombizi's are, anyway. Not that it will say they're proper art at the exhibition. That's because they're proper art. Show don't tell, you see. It's a bit late for me though, I've got far too much telling under my belt to go changing now. So listen to me, and go and look at him.

To get your juices going, here's a quote from an admirer. “Zombizi's photos are unsettling - but in a good way - like once when I had a dream about Jeanette Krankie and Maggie Thatcher 'doing it' in Razzle...”

And if that doesn't make you want to go, then I've terribly misjudged my audience.

The House of Lords has passed an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. For reasons I don't fully understand, this piece of legislation covers the blasphemy laws, which are now to be repealed. Richard Dawkins was apparently used on both sides of the debate. One Lord quoted from the God Delusion, and then asked what the point of a blasphemy law was if that kind of thing could get past it.

After centuries of tyranny from our Abrahamic warlord masters, little by little their pudgy little fingers are being pried loose of the reins of power. Now we can be as rude as they can be.

But what's this? In our moment of triumph, the atheist community lets me down. Your search - "Jesus on the lavatory" - did not match any documents. Come on people, you're just not trying.

I haven't written up an experiment since O-Level Physics. As I recall, the correct layout goes something like this.

Hypothesis: That, since all cleaning products are essentially identical, being designed to interact with cack and water so as to form a rinsable slick or sludge, it should be possible to replace expensive types of cleaning products with cheaper ones.

Prediction: When washed in alternative cleaning products, hair will become clean.

Equipment: One shower, some dirty hair, some washing up liquid, clothes detergent and kitchen cleaner, no shampoo.

Method: Whilst showering, I washed my hair in the above products.

Results: The results were unsatisfactory from a personal grooming point of view.

Conclusion: All cleaning products are not in fact essentially identical.

So now you know. It's not the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, but in some small way I've been there for you.

I think this one comes under the heading of broad satire.

It claims to be by Adam Buxton off the telly, and judging by the voice I think it actually is.

It's called A New Pope. The cinematically literate among you will notice the pun in the name.

Thanks to Pharyngula for the link, and well done to the Irish Atheists for getting to the domain name http://www.catholic.ie/ first.

Incidentally, we're top of the league you know. I can't remember if I mentioned it before.

It's quite satisfying.

I really don't know why I should be expected to do this now. I'm so drunk, so very drunk. Never has one blogger hit the Backspace key so many times in a single sentence.

But you must know. Some of you live in Indiana or somewhere, and your local media are sadly ignorant of these matters.

So, it falls to me to command you to click here. Now. Not after 3:15 UK time tomorrow (today), but now.

Because we (Bristol City FC) are top of the league.

I know. I've been struggling to cope with the enormity of it myself. And yet it is true.

Not  you will burn in hell true. Not we are the best people to run your government for you true. Actually true, in the actual world.

Oh ineffable joy. Joy beyond all merely quotidian joys.

So all repeat after me. No matter where you are.

We (half a breath) are (half a breath) top-of-the-league (last four words quite rapidly) I said we are top of the league (all spaced quite naturally really).

Repeat to fade. Not that fading is on our agenda.

I thank you. Goodnight.

Hooray, and the like.