Birmingham Post

John Peel may have left us but his spirit lives on at Dandelion Radio. The Peely-devoted web-based radio station has been polling listeners for a festive fifty, the annual poll which the radio One DJ used to run every Christmas and New Year. A bit tardy perhaps, but the results are in and these are their top 50 records. The station is broadcasting them all week...

There's a new album coming soon but for those who can't wait, Kevin Rowland's gone and posted a new track online... Listening to it now and it sounds like it's going to be business as usual when It's OK Joanna comes out. I'd be interested to know what the rest of you think....

In six weeks' time, Birmingham will welcome back a sport that hasn't been seen in the second city for over 20 years.
A former colleague of mine on the Post sports desk used to decry it as 'motorised lawnmower racing'; it is the kind of thing Sky Sports uses to fill the schedules during the three weeks of summer when it can't wildly overhype football or rugby union.
Its' national media profile is lower than ice hockey or basketball, yet you could argue (and, yes, I'm about to) that it's grassroots sport at its' finest.

Well done to Birmingham's Robot, the city's lo-fi mechanoids of melodic prog pop (their words, not mine). They've only gone and landed the honour of providing the theme music for BBC2's new primetime gardening show, Grow Your Own Veg!

When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision to try to avoid the mainstream. The last thing you need is yet another smart-arsed sofa expert offering their views on why Aston Villa aren't world-beaters yet, or why England can't put 50 points past Italy at rugby, or what went wrong (then right) for England's cricketers Down Under.
But blogs, so the Trinity Mirror guide to best blogging practice tells me, should engage the reader....and I can think of nothing more likely to engage the reader this week than David Sullivan's remarkable observations on Birmingham City supporters.

Howdy. Sorry I ain't been in touch recently, folks, but it's been as mad as free tasting day at the hooch distillery here at Birmingham City Council's communications directorate.
This month didn't get off to a good start for yours truly, head of strategy, personal adviser and best buddie to Mayor Mike Whitby.
Mayor Mike says he doesn't know who he'd most like to line up against a wall and shoot. Faceless "booryaucrats" at somehwere called the Audit Commission, or smart-arsed journalists on The Birmingham Post, which is a paper he never reads.

Knockout tournaments - what's the point?
Both rugby union and football seem to be falling over themselves to rubbish the cup competition.
The reputation of the latter stages of the FA Cup is falling ever further in the minds of those big clubs forced to take part (Manchester United 3rd XI v Reading reserves as primetime viewing, anyone?), while the Football League Cup has long since ceased to be anything other than a cheap way into an equally devalued UEFA Cup.

The killer stat of my sporting weeK? 10,000 hours. No, that's not the time since Tamworth FC or Worcester Warriors won a match. It's not even the time Jonny Wilkinson has spent in the treatment room over the last four years.
Ten thousand hours, spread over ten years, is by common consent, the amount of time needed to be devoted to training in order to reach Olympic Games medal-winning standard.
That's 2.73 hours per day, every day of the week for ten years.

if this is a taster for the album, i can't wait....

here's a thing i just snarfed from youtube... rather dodgy footage taken at moseley folk festival last summer.

Howdy. Now, keep this under your hat. It's gotta be treated on a need-to-know basis, as my new best buddy James North would say. I've just returned from two super-secret missions in my role as head of strategy in the communications directorate at Birmingham City Council.
First off, I had to go on the orders of council leader, Mayor Mike Whitby, to some place called Manchester where I had to "dig some dirt". It seems that this Manchester is getting too big for its boots and needs to be taken down a peg or two. Yihaa to that!
Anyways, when I got there I discovered that Manchester's train station is so under-used that they don't even have to close the gates to passengers in the rush hour. And, you ain't going to believe this, but it's all on street level.