The next Post Of The Week will be announced on Sunday evening! Prepare yourself by viewing this fine field of contenders.

Place your bets and save your links for next week (after Sunday evening, of course). I’ve got money on one nominated by Mike or Kate!

1. Jerry Chicken: It’s His Birthday Today
[nominated by kate]
In his later years after he had retired to live in Benidorm I used to get feedback from my auntie, his sister, to whom he would go to for his sunday dinners when he was back in the UK for a few months every summer, she’d ring me and tell me that he’d mentioned again how proud he was of what I was doing with his old business, and then the next day he’d come down to the office and spend an hour criticising everything we’d done and telling me how we’d be going bust if I didn’t pull my socks up - eventually he was nearly right.

2. Armchair News: Neon Lights are Bright on Broadway
[nominated by Mike]
So I went to see Duran Duran play on Broadway on Friday night, having done a nice little article on the shows (they’re doing ten of them to promote their new album, “Red Carpet Massacre”) for work, a version of which will appear in Billboard later this week. That is the sort of sentence which, when I was 15, I’d have literally wet myself to imagine I’d be saying some 27 years later. If I could have imagined 27 years later. And there still is a 15 year old in the upper left side of my brain going “holy shit! holy fucking shit!”

3. Love in the Time of Chlamydia: This Blog is Ruining My Life
[nominated by Mike]
My life started unravelling last Friday night when, after a gruelling week of mincing around the office designing pretty things I decided to reward myself by watching the DVD box-set of Queer As Folk. I’d been meaning to do this for a while, as being a gay man who has not seen Queer As Folk is a bit like being the only member of the 12 disciples still sporting a foreskin.

4. Our Kids: My Extreme Makeover by Heather Covington
[nominated by Mike this week, after the spam catcher ate Misssy M’s nom last week]
For me, before and after means something different entirely. When I see my son’s before picture, the before applies more to me. When I look at his smile and remember that day, I know it was taken back in that time when I didn’t know. When I thought I had a typical child.

5. Sarsparilla: Clean
[nominated by Mike]
We popped in to visit our own portly, twinkly eyed shaman, Orlando, earlier; lounging in a dusk hammock, between two dusty trees in the shambolic unfinished building site that any very old peruvian house resembles. He told us to come back at midnight, when the ceremony could start, but mototaxi transport (one motorbike, four people squashed into an exhilaratingly unstable rickshaw contraption behind) is less than safe after 9:30pm, so we’re sitting on a wooden bench in a moonlit yard, waiting for the witching hour, so we can pay for our own witches to do their stuff.

6. Diamond Geezer: St. Pancras day 1
[nominated by Mike]
St Pancras is reopened. A train to Paris and a train to Brussels departed just after eleven o’clock yesterday morning, and the first arrival (from Brussels) drew in a few minutes later. Nothing ran late, which was just as well given the quantity of the world’s media scrutinising proceedings. By evening there were passengers milling around the ticket barriers and fumbling for passports as if the station had always been open. Normality beds down fast.