Just overheard in the Pret a Manger on Haymarket:

- Why are there so many chicken sandwiches?
- Because a lot of sandwiches come from New York
- So?
- And there's a lot of Jews in New York
- Yeah?
- And they can't eat pig

Simple, when you know how.

If Prince Charles employs 26 butlers at a total cost of £2.5m (averagely/approximately £96k each), then I'm in the wrong job.

Just talking to a friend, I said that last night at a party, I'd bumped into an old friend who's a quant. (I now know this because I've been doing all that capital markets research) What's a quant? He asked. A quantitative analyst in an investment bank. Oh, he says, not a Mary Quant?

Whole new investment bank rhyming slang, we're developing here. "You got a Mary?"

IDB is a TLA meaning he works for his Dad.

Barschak: I've finally seen the footage, and he's wearing a tallis. This is not good for the Jews.

Oh, and apparently his Dad's a survivor, which means this whole thang might be down to Second Generation issues. Excuses, excuses. When he's not being a nutter, he's IDB.

Well, here's a thing. The natural inner-journo checked out where comedy nutter Barschak lived, on Monday. He was listed on the electoral roll (192.com), as sharing a flat with his sister in deepest Kilburn. His parents were listed, unsurprisingly, as sharing a house with each other, in Kilburn. I won't exacerbate their doubtless privacy-free status by publishing it here, as it'll end up on the front page of google, and that's just not nice. But today, Aaron's gone from 192.com; like never existed. Amazing what a deal from the Daily Star or whatever can do. Customer service only works at speed if you've got a couple of zeros on the end of your name/paycheck.

Anyway, what this is really about is that I just got back from a friend's party (M, 21 again), where N was talking about Monday's piece in the Times. Scroll down to the last paragraph:

Jill Ducasse, one of Mr Barschak’s neighbours in Golders Green, North London, said: “A couple of days ago, he was outside wearing an orange boiler suit. He said that he was doing a terrorist character from Camp X-Ray.”

Now when I first read this, I was convinced that "Golders Green, North London" was Times-esque for Jewish. But a bit of judicious 192ing, turns up that Jill Ducasse lives in an extremely noisy street backing onto the Hendon Way/A41, overlooking Clitterhouse Playing Fields (a name, I've always felt, that was some kind of town-planning joke visited on us for generations). So it could be that he rents out his place in NW6, and rents in NW11.

Be very afraid. Of something.

And his Dad called himself, in the Evening Standard, "a small scale property developer" or some such. Why say you're small? Cos you're big, that's way. Conversly, why overstate the size of your investment? Because it's miniscule. You get the picture.

I have too much to do. NY thing. CRM thing. A new thing. Another potential new thing, where they want a third meeting with me for no good reason. Writing. Life.

Turns out Aaron Barschak's dad is a macher at the Canfield Gardens shteibl. See.

Sympathy - required. Looks like it's gonna take six weeks for my ankle to get back to normal, and a bad sprain is apparently as bad/worse than a fracture.

Here's an (updated) list of things I can't do with my (not very long) nail extensions:
take my earrings out
put my contact lenses in
scratch, properly
pick up small items
get a credit card out of my wallet
type, accurately

Boy, do women suffer. This is crazy.

Aaron Barschak - the comedy terrorist. I mean, p-u-leeze. He had a strategic plan to show up the security breaches at the palace. More like, he had a strategic plan to get his name all over the papers.

My Jewdar's working overtime, though. Biblical first name. East european second name. Big beard. Lives in Northwest London. Parents aren't very happy with him (great piece in the Standard interviewing his folks, but can never find their stuff online.) We know the score. Unzerer.

Can't get a Glastonbury ticket? My local is Gladstonbury - this Sunday in Dollis Hill.

NHS Customer Service Prize
No, really. My friend B very kindly took me to the Royal Free, Sunday night, to get my ankle checked out, and the whole thing (triage, x-ray, nurse-practitioner, strapping up) took fifty five minutes. Some say, I was lucky (and I did do waiting-time arbitrage before we left, phoning round three hospitals to see the deal, but they all say it's heaving because they don't want malingerers). And it's not broken, it's just a bad sprain, so you can all rest easy now.

I've noticed a curious phenomenon. As you know, I'm no 2 in that well-thumbed google search, "Nails Inc Bishopsgate" (watch me reach that number one spot, baby). Recently, I've had quite a few hits manicure-searching from City law firms (I can sometimes tell from the IP address). Here's what I think happens: a secretary on her lunch break thinks, "maybe I'll go and get my acrylics done? I've seen a place around the corner. Now, what's it called?"

And all they get is my tale of lost nail tips, allegedly damaged nail beds (all extensions require the nail technician to file down your nail bed a little, and some have to be filed off, too. Mine took six months to go back to the mediocre state they were in before I got so vain) and disappointing service. Such is life.

So I'm on the phone to a client around 8.25 this morning, and when I hang up, there's voicemail from my Dad to tell me there's a piece on blogging on the Radio 4 Today programme.

It was essentially a two minute debate between Cory Doctorow (pronounced, strangely, doc-TOUR-owe, whereas I would probably say DOC-t'-roe, but either way, he's cool and a fab writer, and I just found out has been staying with my friend Yoz and is speaking at the Work Foundation in about an hour, bugger) and Debbie Georgovitch, editor of handbag.com, which is not a weblog, but hey.

Cory defines a blog as somewhere between a commonplace book and a public diary (though I prefer his "outboard brain" thing), but Debbie says "you have to be carefuly what you're reading, because it's not professionally edited, not self-policing". Cory says "it's liberating as a writer to be able to write the thing that interests you for public consumption... and making it easy to link replies". Once he got into pings and trackbacks, they all went "scared of the science!" which was a shame.

What there was little time to say, was that clearly an editor-style person is worried that her job will go out of fashion if too many people write editor-free. And we didn't really get into what I think is the more interesting conversation: the iterative, conversational nature of blogging, and the democratisation of content.

And one more thing in the "what's a weblog?" debate. Sometimes, old-media book-oriented people (and I'm just as much one of those as the next person) say to me, "I haven't read all your blog, yet." I'm at pains to say you don't have to: it's like a box of After Eights - it's nice to have a couple, but if you eat the whole box, you'll be sick."

Yeah, I was on the radio Friday: not quite as exciting a debate as I'd have hoped, but fun to see the inside of a radio station (again - I used to do voicevers for a friend on local radio). The feature leaving as we bloggers arrived was a group talking about working from home, and Mel someone was among them. Can't always tell the difference between Mel from Mel & Kim, one of the Mels from the Spice Girls, and Mel from Big Brother. Think this was the Big Brother variety: apparently she's training to be a barrister, now. Yeah, and I'm Maggie Thatcher.

So, met Jamesand Barney. James and I were kinda on the same blogger-wavelength, but Barney was a bit more diarist-journaller, though he had a fabulous manicure and tights. Man after my own heart. Barney says a lot about what I'd like to say in the ancient weblog v journal debate, so go read him.

The worse thing about being self-employed is that I have a projec to finish this week on NY time that does require me in Central London, a new project just starting that I can do from home, but is with a bloke from Boston. And two projects to negotiate that are suppsoed to start pretty soon. None of these people probably care if I have a sprained/broken ankle.

Not in a good way - sprained my ankle yesterday, coming out of the gym (ironic, I know). Serious pain, in all senses of the word. So much for living in zone two - no-one would help me. There I was on doubled over in agony on Crickewood Lane, when a woman with a kid in a pushchair went past: "nothing broken?" she asked, without even waiting for my reply.

Eventually, I got a lift home from some kindness-of-strangers woman, and called NHS direct who tried to persuade me I had no feeling in my foot, and that there was something wrong with my nerves. Then they said I should go and sit in casualty. I took some paracetamol, and did cold compresses, and was just generally in a very bad mood. Today, it's more swollen and hurts even more, and a friend who's a doctor took a look at it, and said I should get it x-rayed.

Waiting time at the Royal Free is hours - when I was knocked down a couple of years ago and hit my head pretty hard, I spent about seven hours in casualty there, until my headache got so bad from the MTV and saturday-night-party feeling that I went home, threw up, went to sleep and went to see my GP in the morning. Lived to tell the tale, though.

So I found out that waiting time at Finchley Memorial is only a couple of hours, weekdays only, so I'm going to go there Tuesday morning. Have a big meeting tomorrow about a possible column in a real newspaper that even a third world war wouldn't keep me from.

Was just in a conference call with a Boston client - so international, daaahling, I know - a technology supplier, who wants to make sure their messaging is reaching clients for Q4, and we were talking about business, and what levels of sales they have. "They're not buying strategic implementations so much, as buying part of the vision". Last night, at dinner at Maroush with S - a management consultant - she actually said she was helping someone transform their organisation, and she didn't say it ironically. Last weekend, M, a consultant at the same firm, implied that their information services department (formerly known as the Library), didn't have appropriate project milestones to meet their objectives.

Whither old-fashioned jargon-free language.