For those of you who have been refreshing your RSS feeds in a panic, wondering why no Thing has been posted yet, I am still alive. I’ve been following the original Thing-A-Weeker Jonathan Coulton around England for most of the week, with very rare internet access and only a borrowed adaptor to plug my Mac into power (which I have returned to its owner, so I only have about two hours of battery life remaining.) It’s been great fun, I’ve been travelling with several other Jonathan Coulton fans I knew from the internet. Apart from being fun people to hang out with, who have great taste in music, they and my Thing A Week deadline have done a good job of convincing me that I should get an iPhone.

As planned, I got Jonathan Coulton and his opening band Paul and Storm to pick fives of clubs, and promised them to their faces that I would write something about their chosen cards by Sunday midnight. I think perhaps it’s bad luck to do such a thing. I thought I’d have some time on Sunday to write something, but we got waylaid (at Cadbury World) on the way back to London, and I ended up not even being anywhere with internet until 1a.m, and not having time to write anything either. I do have an idea of what I will write, but I’m going to have to do it next week. I suppose I could write something tomorrow on the train, and then write something else next week, but that would only result in two low-quality hurried Things. I think that considering who picked the cards, I really should write something that’s actually good, even if only by my standards.

Jonathan Coulton missed a few weeks of his Thing A Week, so I feel I’m allowed. Though admittedly, he took a week off after the smash hit Code Monkey, whereas I took a week off after a collection of random snippets held together with gluons. But as Jonathan said: I’ll refund a dollar to all you paying subscribers [as Tom Lehrer said: of which I have none]. The rest of you will just get nothing for nothing, which seems fair.