Hitch has made his way up to Glasgow for the weekend - his first ever visit. And the sun has (surprisingly) come out to make the city all the more shiny and beautiful for him. We will be visiting my favourite places and no doubt some favourite pubs. Hopefully a report on the activities will follow next week ...

On Tuesday night there was a Channel 4 documentary about what has happened to Herr Bobbit since his former wife divested him of, well, his Bobbit. It was the usual semi-exploitative drivel you’d expect such a programme to be, but it did remind me that for a while I thought JWB to be quite the ten-out-of-ten dumb Yankee eye candy.
Indeed, it also reminded me that in the dim and distant days where anything was deemed worth of an item on The Late Show (a topical arts programme I worked on throughout the first half of the 1990s for anyone who doesn’t know) we almost made a piece about Bobbit’s post-chop career as a fledgling porn star and celebrity about town. So serious were we in our ‘research’ that we had an employee then filming in the US sneak us back a copy of John Wayne’s first video, the ‘hilariously’ titled Uncut. Only two things really strike me as memorable about this laughably inept video – firstly, that in his premiere sex scene, when two nurses in the hospital come to his bed to (ad)dress his ‘wound’, JWB has quite a hard time of, well, getting hard. The other is that in the recreation of the crime night that opens the tape, as the actress playing spurned wife Lorena throws the severed member from her car, it lands at the feet of a traffic cop played by (of all people) Lemmy from Motorhead. A genius piece of casting.
Pictures of Bobbit are surprisingly thin on the ground on the internet, which just goes to show yet again how dumb rubber-faced jocks, like fat hairy men, are not a widely appreciated Object Of Lust.

It's a little thing, I know, but I got enormous pleasure from this story in today's MediaGuardian despatch:

Complaints that gay men kissing during family television viewing times was unacceptable have been rejected by the advertising watchdog.
The Advertising Standards Authority made the ruling after 89 viewers complained about a TV advert for Dolce & Gabbana watches.
The ad showed people in cafés and bars each wearing two watches on their wrists, with the final scene featuring two men briefly kissing on the lips after the first gave one of his D&G watches to another after he fixed his car.
The advert was shown during The X Factor on ITV1 on Saturday nights and drew a flood of complaints, with 70 viewers objecting to a kiss between two men being shown when children were likely to be watching.
The ad was also shown during the early evening on other channels including ITV2, UK History, UKTV Documentary and Hallmark.
A further 19 viewers said an advert showing two men kissing was unacceptable at any time. The Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, which clears adverts for broadcast, approved the ad so long as it was not shown around programmes aimed specifically at children.
"The scene was relatively mild and did not justify any further restriction," the BACC said.
The ASA said the scene was "not inappropriate at times of general, family viewing".
"We did not consider that a kiss between two men automatically made an ad unacceptable for broadcast or that the kiss was in itself grounds for imposing a stricter timing restriction."
The watchdog ruled the advert did not breach the codes for offence, scheduling restrictions and treatments unsuitable for children.

Personally, I'm just as offended by the grisly, tawdry 'entertainment' of the X-Factor itself and by the shamelessly naff products that emanate from the studios of Messrs. D & G., fouling our high streets with their ghastly logo-laden designer wear for the challenged of taste.

And besides what a great excuse to publish the above picture.