So, the Sorting Hat has put me in Gryffindor. But am I more Harry, Ron or Hermione? Or Percy? Or, god help me, Neville? (Yes, alright, I've finally read the books and I enjoyed them very much and it annoyed me immensely. Bah. Humbug.) §

'All right everyone. Move on now. Nothing to read here. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Move along. Crime scene secured, sir.'

'Good work, lieutenant.'

'The pathologist from the FBI is here, sir.'

'Excellent. Send him through. Agent Strage -- glad you could get here so quickly.'

'Detective Wegg.'

'Call me Bucky.'

'Is this the entry?'

'Yup. Couple of local kids were out in the Weblogs, came across this one and noticed something didn't look right about it. Reported it to us. I called you in. We secured the area, but it hasn't been moved or touched. Take a good look.'

'Hmm. A lot of text here so it can't have been a quick job. This amount of words takes planning. Let's see... No defensive wounds on the blog, so I'd say it knew it's assailant. Time of entry was sometime in the early hours of this morning. It's at least, oh, twelve hours old, but definitely after midnight.'

'How can you tell?'

'You see the grey graphic at the top left?'

'Yeah... sixteen N.O.V.'

'That's a date. N.O.V.: November. 16 November. Although I'm pretty sure this one is a cut and shut -- the day and month from two different graphics clumsily cut together, maybe a last minute thing, like the guy was in a hurry to get it finished then get out of there.'

'Any idea how we might get an ID on the perp?'

'Difficult. Help me turn it over, would you? Thanks. There. Look. Just down the bottom -- d'you see?'

'No... wait, yes. What is that red thing?'

'It's a clue. "Posting rights". Posting rights... posting rights...'

'You think maybe this was a feud? Over these... posting rights?'

'Nah. I don't think so. It's more like a game. This is our invitation to join him.'

'You saying he wants to be found?'

'Maybe. More likely he just wants to see if we'll play.'

'Detective! Detective! We found a witness! Says he can give a description of the possible perp.'

'Good work, lieutenant. What've we got? Tall, thin. Glasses. Suspicious looking. Witness spotted him walking west past the area at about 2:15am. Whaddya think, Strage? Could this be him?'

'Too early to tell. I'll get this entry down to the lab and we'll dust it for tags; see if the HTML has a characteristic signature. Glasses suggests some sort of intelligence, possibly an academic, we could match that up with the style of writing, maybe some unnecessary XML in the text itself, closing tags that don't really need it, that kind of thing. I'll give you a call soon as I find anything.'

'Thanks. Oh, and Agent Strage?'

'Yeah?'

'You think he'll do this again?'

'I can't rule it out.'

'Shit.' §

[CRIME SCENE. DO NOT TOUCH.]

Sorry to leave you all on a cliff-hanger there, loyal readers. Had to pop out the back for a smoke. Where was I?

Ah yes, Gladiatrix. That hilarious, japesome spectacle packed full o' light-hearted laffs; a heaving jokefest, whacked and zaned by the finest practitioners of madcappery; a non-stop whirlwind of... oh God, I really can't be bothered. Look, we found a director, had a rehearsal, performed a couple of shows, and Bob's your uncle. Uncle Bob, patron saint of tidy weblog endings.

Then I decided to farm out One Day Soon to guest columnists. The beginning of the end, really, and yet another sign of the impending Apocalypse, along with all of that urbane-wit-and-mental-fortitude-draining stuff that Benet mentioned. 'Woe to ye, o Earth and Sea, for the Beast shall smite the New City of Yorke, and in far Albion's shores a weblogge shall lie fallow' -- Bobstradamus, 121st quatrain.

But now I'm worried. Not because two bloody great aeroplanes hurtled headlong into two of the mightiest icons of the world. Not because bin Laden may just have the same in mind for my humble flat in Clapham. Not because someone mailed me a 1.5 kilo bag of self-raising flour with a recipe for Anthrax Cake. No, I'm worried because my guest columnists plan has back-fired. You see, that last entry wasn't mine.

I know it looks like it's mine. That easy familiarity with the details of my life; that plug for an interview with my 'self' to lend it a third-party seal of approval; that shameless claim that it will bring 'you, reader, more exciting installments in the tale of James Bachman'. All very convincing -- but it's just not true. Someone seems to have hijacked my blog, possibly through some clever URL-hacking, and has scrawled an entire entry across the perfect unblemished face that was the November 2001 archive of One Day Soon. There I was, planning a silent repeat of September's blank slate: a one-man vigil against senseless chatter; a zen-like, monastic withdrawal from the babble and hubbub of bloggetry; and all of it -- every heavily-sponsored minute of it -- for charity. Yes, you nameless fiend, I was doing it for the children -- for the children! -- and now it's all ruined. And why? Because of your perverse need to gratify a base desire to impersonate me, to steal my glory, to have a little of that Bachman shine illuminate your own pitiful, meaningless existence.

Why, I wouldn't put it past you to come back with some further outrage. No doubt you'll deny vehemently that this post is by the real James, pointing instead to certain people with long-forgotten posting rights to this blog. Or perhaps you won't be vehement about it: perhaps you'll laugh it off with a gentle smile, or indeed a gentle :-), and through such apparent moderation and reasonableness will convince a gullible public that you, the usurper, are the real Bachman, and that I, James Aloysius Wilberforce Bachman the Third, am but a figment of some bored dilettante's imagination?

But it's too late. I can see now that the truth will never out -- that the very idea of 'truth' is undermined in this age of Photoshop and online falsification. The seeds of doubt have been planted, like boxcutters behind a cushion, and it will take a campaign of Enduring One-Day-Soon Freedom to rout you from the Afghani caves in which you hide.

Pants.

[CRIME SCENE. DO NOT TOUCH.] §

Well seeing as Benet seems to have given up sending me any more guest entries, and I now have the evening free because Barunka's cancelled our Gladiatrix re-union dinner with Cal due to work commitments, I really have no excuse for not putting finger to keyboard and bringing you, reader, more exciting installments in the tale of James Bachman.

A month or so ago, Mark and I gave our first ever interview to 'the press' and the fruits of that time spent in the pub over a few drinks and a tape recorder can now be seen on the excellent Comedy Lounge website. Editors Susan and Sharon* have done a pretty good job of deciphering what must have been a good couple of hours of wasted audio tape and turning it into something coherent. They even manage to make us sound quite amusing. Which is nice. [*The very same Sharon Cribbin who gave us such a nice review in the Edinburgh Evening News this August.]

On to Gladiatrix:

Earlier this year Barunka and Lucy embarked on a script for a stage show as a showcase for Lucy as a performer and for their writing and, spurred on by Barunka's obsession with Romans and a recent Channel 4 documentary on female gladiators, came up with Gladiatrix: She-Wolf of the Arena -- a forty minute show about the last moments of a female gladiator marked for death in her next fight. With jokes. Oh and the part of a fat slave man apparently written especially for me. Deciding to take this as a compliment rather than a blunt physical insult, I agreed to do the show which they had booked in for two nights at the Soho Theatre Studio in late October. All they needed now was a director.

This proved difficult. Their two ideal choices were Cal McCrystal, director of such fantastic shows as Peepolykus, The Mighty Boosh and Spymonkey, and Paul King, director of Garth Marenghi, both of whom would be able to direct a good deal of physicality into what was essentially a wordy radio script. Unfortunately Cal was booked in to work on Mel and Sue's upcoming tour and Paul was still working on Garth for their London run as well as some new devised stuff at the BAC, and as we didn't really know anyone else with the same kind of skills it seemed like we were out of luck... §