Dedicated to resurrecting the magazine as a fetish object, giving creative people the room to let their minds go. No ads. No rules.

That’s the mission statement of Dirty Bristow, a new magazine that my friends Danny Smith and Jon Bounds will soon be launching in the general direction of an unsuspecting world near you.

I’ve written an article for the magazine and provided an illustration, too.  The illo – a homage to legendary comics artist Jack “The King” Kirby which accompanies an article by Mark Parfit – is now available as a T-shirt.  It looks something like this:

The T-shirts will help raise funds towards the printing costs of this ambitious, ad-free project.  If you’ve ever felt the urge to help a worthwhile cause by wearing a T-shirt that features something drawn by me (and who amongst you hasn’t?), then you can find out more by going here.

Update: there’s been a change of venue for the Sunday night stand-up comedy show.  I’m just awaiting final confirmation and will update the details ASAP.

I’ve been a bit quiet as of late due to a couple of reasons.  Firstly, I’ve been writing an article for a new magazine that my pals Jon Bounds and Danny Smith will be launching soon.  There’ll be more about that in due course, I imagine.

Secondly, I’ve been attending a weekly stand-up comedy workshop and in a couple of weeks time will be doing my first live gig in front of an audience alongside fellow workshop graduates.  This is a big deal for me, and I’m rather excited and petrified by it all.

Details are as follows:

‘New Faces of Comedy’ event,  Sunday 11th April 2010

The Victoria

48 John Bright Street

Birmingham

B1 1BN

Doors 7pm, Start 7.30pm

Tickets £5

Please pop along if you can.  You’ll either get to see my long-awaited moment of glory or witness me fall on my arse catastrophically.  Not bad for a fiver, then.

I won’t have much time over the next couple of weeks for any fresh bloggage, but what I plan to do is have a trawl through my archives and post up some old articles and stuff that isn’t currently on the Internet.

Normal service will resume as soon as possible.

(Through The Viewfinder photograph of yours truly courtesy of Birmingham Blogfather and TTV virtuoso Mr Pete Ashton).

Courtesy of my good pal Jez, here’s Lord William of Shatner advertising 80′s 8-bit home computer, the VIC-20:

I know that Captain Kirk was promoted to Admiral in the Star Trek movies, but I don’t recall any mention of him being made a Commodore.

Maybe that was TJ Hooker.

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Which reminds me, I’ll once again be sitting in on Danny Smith’s Technical Difficulties show on Rhubarb Radio tomorrow night (7-9pm) in my current capacity as trainee presenter-slash-acolyte.

I was there last week, too, and it was great fun. Last week’s theme was Batman, and the theme for tomorrow night’s show will be Japan. If you feel the compelled to contribute to the show with some thoughtful Japanese-themed input – or even just some personal abuse – then you can email (studio@rhubarbradio.com) or tweet (@techdiff) the studio.

That will be all.

What I did want to do was Find The Story, get about and report on some hidden weirdness, odd sub-culture or unsavoury practice that I could expose. And I found nothing but a bunch of nice people, sorry.

My Rhubarb Radio presenter pal – self-confessed ‘open-minded atheist’ Danny Smith – went to a Christian music festival, suprised himself by having a good time and has crafted a rather excellent, obervation-rich write-up on his experiences.

It’s here.

It’s my birthday today, but instead of letting myself descend into a cesspool of self-pity as I become acutely aware of my mortality and all that, I’ve instead decided to upgrade my mobile to an iPhone. I wouldn’t have done it if Clare hadn’t kept egging me on, but I’m glad she did as it’s rather nice and shiny and I’m currently using it to write this post.

As mid-life crises signifiers go, it could have been a lot worse.

I’ll be helping out with Rhubarb Radio’s Technical Difficulties show this evening.   I’m supposed to say things and stuff.   Feel free to listen.

I’ll try not to make a total arse of myself.

Clare here, I’ve just popped into Tom’s blog to let you know we will be twittering from Latitude this weekend. If you’d like to follow us we are ‘stringerbean’ on there ( the name is a long story involving The Wire and a dream I had one night ).