I haven't been blogging in a bit, folks, because I've been a bit depressed. And I hate to say it, but it's because of our fans. We've been playing some big festivals lately, and lots of folks are coming to see us, which is fine, but they tend to get a bit close to the stage. They crowd around the stage and scream at us, and the young ladies say, "We love you Thom!"

Excuse me, but I don't even know you, certainly not well enough to reciprocate any kind of feeling you have towards me. And unless I'm mistaken, you don't know me, except through the lyrics of my songs, which I daresay you don't understand if you think I would enjoy having a large mass of humanity near me.

The Guardian, following the longstanding magazine tradition of making senseless lists for the sheer joy of making senseless lists, recently released its much-anticipated-by-no-one "Media 100," which ranks influential UK media people. To my surprise, I am ranked number 63 on the list, which apparently means I have to take orders from number 62, Roly Keating, but I can tell Lucian Grainge (number 64), to shine my shoes and he has to do it.

I am now, for lack of a better term, a "major player in the industry," and I can do what I like. I'm going to wear sunglasses all the time now.

And that's not all. Here are other changes I'm going to implement:

The following instruments are banned from popular music: the mandolin, the glockenspiel, the accordian, the harpsicord, the slide whistle, and especially the banjo. If this means The Decemberists will have to disband, that's a risk I'm willing to take.

By now, everyone knows the earth is in trouble, even people who live in caves and the President of the United States. And no matter who you are, the world’s transformation into an unlivable wasteland has to be at the top of your list of problems. For instance, if you’re a football fan, whether or not Liverpool FC signs a decent midfielder is less important than whether Liverpool itself is lying under several feet of water, which would utterly ruin any chance they have at the Premier League title.

The leaders of the most powerful countries in the world just got together in Japan to discuss the environment. You might expect them to spend their days and nights working tirelessly to pass laws restricting gasoline consumption and make immediate, sweeping changes to the way the citizens of the developed world live. What they actually did, after flying in on individual carbon-burning jets, shaking hands with one another several times and visiting the local bondage fetish clubs, was to sign a treaty promising vaguely to cut carbon emissions in half by 2050.

The whole thing sounds like a smoker promising to quit after he finishes the pack. I’d speak out against it, but the treaty’s already been denounced by environmentalists, scientists, NGOs, and the Chinese, and I hate joining crowds.  

History is full of bad ideas: The Pogroms, The New Kids on The Block reunion, my ordering of Hawaiian pizza last night. But the prize for worst idea ever unquestionably goes to the bloke who decided to drill for oil.

In it’s natural state, oil is underground, which seems like a sensible place for a sticky, smelly, combustible, generally ill-disposed substance to stay. Getting it out of the earth is a huge undertaking, and one that involves huge machines tearing up the ground until the surrounding landscape looks like something that you would find on a Radiohead album cover:

I don’t get sentimental very often—unless breaking down and locking myself in a closet out of fear for the future counts as “sentimental”—but nevertheless, I had to brush a few tears from my eyes when the tour dirigible floated into London. The truth is, I miss England. Not in a patriotic way, of course, or in a nostalgic-for-my-youth way (the few memories of my childhood I haven’t blocked out are decidedly unpleasant), but simply because England is the best piece of land on earth, excluding certain remote regions which humans haven’t been able to ruin. It’s certainly the best stop on our tour. Here’s why:

-The weather is divine. After weeks of touring in warm climates where the sun is always shining and the skies are always clear, I feel like hanging myself with an organic hemp rope. Just in time, I arrive back in England, where the Thames is always dirty, it always rained yesterday, and the fog envelops the buildings like a beautiful shroud of depression, like the trench coat I wore in high school.

The Nude Remix competition has been over for about a month now, but I haven’t made a big deal about it. Quite frankly, there are better ways of spending my carbon than giving public recognition to some aspiring DJ living in his mother’s basement. 

But then I saw this video and, for the fourteenth time in my life, something cheered me up.

Well, the tour dirigible is chugging its merry, soy-fueled way across Europe right now. It's good to be out of the US, so I no longer have to worry about catching whatever disease the Americans have that makes them act the way they do.

But not everything is roses and carbon-neutral touring practices here. Today my Egyptian Tai-Chi was interrupted by Ed, who told me that Gene Simmons said our live act was “boring.”

“Gene Simmons?” I said. “You mean, the exercise bloke with the shorts?”

“No, that’s Richard Simmons,” Ed said. “Gene is that guy with the really long tongue and the makeup. He did that song about partying all night or some nonsense.”

“My God, Americans like that sort of thing?” I said. “I’m so glad we’re out of there.”

“I dunno, I liked that reality show he did,” Colin said, walking into the room. “His wife’s quite the looker. By the way, we’re out of donuts.”

“Shut the fuck up Colin,” I said. “You have terrible taste in everything. And I told you, we never had any donuts. Those were just old bagels you put sugar on.”

As you all know, I'm constantly spreading the word about the fact that the world is going to turn into a smoldering cinder unless we reduce our carbon emissions. Sometimes I feel like no one gets the message, like the other day when Ed threw a glass bottle into the garbage and I had to show him "An Inconvenient Truth" another five times. But I am alone no longer: today I turned on the television to discover--excuse the pun--that the Discovery channel launched a TV network devoted to all things Green.

I assume that they've been busy creating their schedule, and that's why they haven't called asking me to do a show. I mean, they gave a show to Tommy Lee and Ludacris, and they probably think the Kyoto Protocol is an act something only certain Japanese hookers can perform. So I figure it won't be too long before the Green Planet calls me. Until then, I'm working on a script for the pilot episode. Here's what I have so far:

We open with a shot of a empty plain. There should be no signs of life, no sound, and this shot should last for at least five minutes. Then we slowly pan to the left until we come to an antique television set, which turns itself on and shows a clip of a man eating porridge. What kind of porridge? We don't know.

We were in our tour dirigible, traveling to yet another godforsaken, car-filled American city, (Minneapolis? Seattle? I don’t even know anymore), and passing the time surfing ARPANET—the name for the Internet before it was cool—when Colin yelled over to me,
“Hey Thom, check this video out. I’ll send you the link.”

“It’s not another one of your fucking Lol Catz montages, is it?”

“No, it’s even better. It’s this guy, ‘The Prince,’ covering Creep at Coachella.”

“‘The Prince?’” I said. I had never heard of the guy, unless he meant Bonnie Prince Billy, who would probably do an awesome version of Creep, by the way.

“Uh, yeah, I think he calls himself ‘The Prince’ or his band is ‘The Princes,’ or something. He’s sort of like a gay version of Lenny Kravitz, as far as I can tell.”

“Good god, that sounds terrible. Definitely send me the link,” I said.

So minutes later I clicked on the video, only to discover that it had been taken down by The Prince, who claimed it was a copyright violation. A copyright violation? Sounds like someone is stuck in 1993.