Beckham, Baby and Blair

I've added to the www.biogs.com site a piece about the two recent bits of news on the Beckham front - one that Victoria is expecting their third child, the second that Cherie Blair asked Greg Dyke to arrange for her to buy her son a Manchester United No. 7 shirt. If interested you can click on the headline above to get to it..
I also added a page about Euripides and one about Frank Zappa - both important cultural figures in their own way!
TTFN

Tony Blair up and running

Blair's popularity may be down but my microsite all about him is up. Take a look at http://blair.biogs.com

I'm off for some zzzzzzzzzzzz

Kelly Holmes from home

Well done Kelly Holmes. Brilliant. Although I wouldn't go as far as Steve Cram commentating on the BBC and start calling you Queen Kelly. For what it's worth, my Kelly Holmes page is up on the site now - although I shall need to add more detail.
I do find the BBC commentators extraordinary - they rabitted on for half an hour yesterday about Paula Radcliffe. If it was radio (rather than TV) you wouldn't have realised that there were any other runners in the race.
Today for biogs.com saw mainly development behind the scenes. It's a long haul!

Jung, free and single

Well, I've put an entry up for Jung and noticed in time that I kept spelling Carl with a K - I have a worse spelling problem, though: A lot of the pages are based on a template where I have made a spelling mistake that is now reproduced throughout the website. I know it's only one letter but it irritates me! (in fact, it's so annoying that I can't even get myself to specify it here). Anyway, there are probably plenty of other literals knocking about the site and after a few seconds of deep breaths I've decided to adopt a laid-back approach.
I'm learning as I go with this website and have now decided to set up some portals on a few personalities - more work (aaaaagh)

Mick Jagger and Bobby Fischer: Oh what pain!

I used to think I was efficient, but it's amazing how much time I've just wasted in constructing my Mick Jagger page. It's a tiny page with not that much info - to be honest; but I spent ages scouring sources for something more to say ... and not a jot of any note. Then finally I came across an interesting article on the web - so I added a link to that.
In some ways I think the site will be useful in saving visitors time by selecting quality links - so they don't have to wade through the dross.
I had a worse problem with Bobby Fischer - I'm a chess fan and I wanted to write a really good biog of Fischer and I got so bogged down that I haven't produced anything yet! The clock's ticking, I mustn't let my flag fall!

Back to the future

Have just enjoyed an excellent, relaxing few days hols in Ballylickey, Ireland and came back fully refreshed, raring to go, and then of course ... problems; problems with the computer, problems with the server and sure enough the holiday seems weeks ago now. Still, I have hastily added Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher and Mark Thatcher to the site. So it's back to the future ...

The perils of Beatrice Dalle

I can't beleeeeve it! As Victor Meldrew would say. I was looking for a good external link for my biography of Beatrice Dalle and thought I'd stumbled on a top-notch site and so I had, but ... the flipping pop-ups drove me mad. I have a pop-up blocker but sometimes I switch it off if I need access to certain pop-up pages. So I decided not to put the link to the page on my site. I haven't yet written my biog of Jennifer Aniston - I started to research her on the net and about the fifth page that google came up with brought up pages of such nauseating garbage that I stopped in my tracks and focussed on Tony Blair instead! I won't be able to blog for a few days so I thought I'd get this off my chest now.

Out with the old, in with the new

I am restructuring the biogs.com site and have decided to get rid of the articles page but I wanted to keep the info - so, my solution is to dump some of it here...

The Harvill Press edition of Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees features an excellent 'afterword' by the author's daughter, Aline Giono - which the webmaster proposes to discuss at a later date. We would be grateful if anybody can provide any helpful background on the genesis of The Man Who Planted Trees

On 13th August, 2002 The Independent published an obituary of Michael De-la-Noy. The most interesting thing about it was that the man wrote it himself! It was the first time they had published an 'auto-obituary'. Does anybody know of any other instances where this has happened? Please let us know.

In an article in The Guardian (31 August 2002), JDF Jones poses this question: "What is he[the biographer] to do if he discovers that it [the truth]is anathema to the family that commissioned him?". Jones continues: "Is he to abandon the book - the thoguht occured to me more than once - since he certainly cannot suppress or delete the facts he had unearthed?"

His biography of Laurens van der Post was authorised by the subject's family. Jones says: "... but on publication was described by some as that unusual creature a 'hostile' authorised biography. Some of Laurens's family and friends were understandably distressed ..."

I'd be interested in knowing what others think. But certainly there must be perils involved in an 'authorised' biography. Obviously convenient post-rationalising is not good enough. To justify ones acts by moral codes such as duty to the reader only paper over the real issues. In the end it must come down to openness and the nature of the undertakings made to every party in each specific case.

Can anyone let me know where autobiographies have been written that put their author in a bad light? In the same issue of The Guardian as Jones (see above)talks about the authorised biography, the footballer Roy Keane is reported as saying: 'There's no point in doing the book if I was going to be saying things like 'he's a jolly good fellow' and 'that was just an accident'.I have to be honest. If I'm going to be charged by the FA, I'll deal with that when it comes. I won't lose sleep over it ...Maybe I've been a bit too up front but so what."

Cantona and seagulls

It's a fuuny old world in the content on the biogs.com page for Eric Cantona http://www.biogs.com/famous/cantonaeric.html I mention his famous quote:"When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea", and I just happened to look at the page just now and two of the google ads that derive from the content of the page are about seagull control - you never know I might get lucky and there happen to be a statstically high number of Cantona fans who are troubled by seagulls and I'll get lots of click-throughs - time will tell!

Renaissance

Well I'm slowly converting things to cascading style sheets. The first one I did probably won't mean much to people outside the UK: Mick Quinn. He's at http://www.biogs.com/famous/quinnmick.html
or I hope he is - I typed the URL from memory. I could have written pages more on him, but if I don't discipline myself, I'll never get enough entries up. At the moment the footballers (Quinn is an honourable exception) have a skew to Manchester United - which I should point out for the record in no way reflects who I support. My favourite team now resides in what has this year has become The Championship.

Evolution

Phew! Well there's not that many biogs up yet, but I am gradually, a euphemism for slowly :)sorting some things out behind the scenes. One issue has cropped up: some biogs have my very personal slant on people, and/or feature information not available elsewhere eg Tony Benn; and others eg Muhammad Ali are more in the line of basic factual data and have been included because I believe I need to reach a critical mass of entries for the site to become truly worthwhile. So, in other words, there is no consistency. And then there's the temptation of filling the site up with the very briefest of information - again to build critical mass and attract visitors. this latter thought occurs to me more and more as I realise how time consuming this project is. Still, time will tell ...

Exhausted

It's now 4.12am here in London and I have been beavering away spending hours changing things that I reckon a good programmer could have done in seconds - and what's more I'll probably have to amend the changes anyway. Still - all in a good cause. Meanwhile I have had the television on in the background which has prompted me to note down that I should make entries for Tiger Woods, Patrick Vieira, Michael Owen, Michael Winner, Alice Walker, Emil Zatopek, Sam Allardyce, Michael Howard, William Hague, Jeremy Paxman, Boris Yeltsin. Alexander Solzhenitskyn, Andrei Sakharov, Michhail Gorbachev, Vladmir Volkov, Michael Moore, Bill Gates, Ferdinand Marcos, Carol Vorderman and goodness knows who else ... Will I ever see the outside world or will some unlucky soul stumble upon my weary corpse slumped over the keyboardddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

New improved Biogs.com on the way!

There's a lot going on behind the scenes at biogs.com. I am striving to get the architecture right and improve the look of the pages. And then I'll get the content online! Significant changes will come but they will take some time before they see the light of day. So far I have not publicised this site as I am trying to get it as near to right before I attract visitors, but if there is anybody out there who has stumbled on this site then please do email me at webmaster@biogs.com with thoughts and suggestions. Cheers!