I’ve just made a tiny change to the mobile service: To get the link to the sjhoward.co.uk mobile edition send to your phone, you should now text ‘simon mobile’ to 60300, rather than ‘sjh’. Everything else remains exactly the same. This is just to make the service appear more consistent, since to send messages to the site you should continue to text ‘simon’ plus your message to 60300 – and it has the beneficial side effect of being much easier to type with predictive text. Full details of the mobile service are here.

As you’ll no doubt have seen some time ago, the BBC has now apologised over its report that the Queen walked out of a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz, a story I also reported here. The footage the BBC played to journalists spliced together footage of her objecting to removing her crown with footage of her walking in to the portrait sitting, as you can see in this clip:

It seems extraordinary that the news on BBC One can report something as fact based on some badly edited footage of a BBC One programme. I know the BBC’s verging on Brobdingnagian these days, but when a world renowned news team can’t check out a story based on a programme for the same organisation, I think we’re in trouble. Whatever happened to ‘One BBC’?

Earlier this year, when asked to remove her crown, the Queen walked out on Annie Leibovitz. Fantastically, the moment was caught by a documentary crew, and will be shown on BBC One this autumn. And, judging by the still above, she does a pretty good icy stare before marching out.

I think showing this footage is a master stroke. The nation’s fondness for the Queen comes from her human quality, and the fact that we’ll get to see the ‘real’ Queen – warts, angry tantrums, and all – can only play in her favour.

But one thought lingers… RDF, the documentary makers who’ve caught this seemingly incredible footage, are also the team behind Wife Swap. I wonder if the Windsors and the Al-Fayeds have a matching opening in their schedules any time soon?

Obviously, I haven’t read Mr Campbell’s book yet, but I fear that his introduction tells me everything I need to know:

What I hope this book does is help to paint a rounded picture of a man of enormous drive and vision, who was determined to use his time in power to make a difference and brought about a lot of change for the better.

If that’s the rounded version, I’d hate to see the sycophantic version.

I’ve just published Teenage Heroes; Teenage Villains over on Gazette Communities. It’s a post with a local focus, but wider resonance, and it’s all-new.

Instant Opinion, the book collecting together some of the best political posts from this site, is now available in all good bookshops around the world.

Here in the UK, the book is now available from online shops including Tesco (who currently have a 5% discount, the biggest of the major retailers), Blackwells, Amazon, and sjhoward.co.uk/shop. In addition, one Amazon Marketplace seller has it for the bargain price of just £6.08.

Further afield, it is available direct from the publisher and on local versions of Amazon sites, as well as other online bookshops.

For more information about the book, as well as a free preview of it’s contents and how to buy the exclusive ebook version, click here.

Copies are also available through local bricks-and-mortar bookshops, throughout the UK and around the world.

It’s an old’un, but a good’un…

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My book, Instant Opinion, is now available from a number of bookshops, including the ever-reliable WHSmith and the Foyles group of sites. WHSmith is actually selling it cheaper than I am able, and that’s with free delivery to your local store and seven very exciting Clubcard points.

In a moment of wonderful irony, it isn’t yet available through sjhoward.co.uk/shop; it is, however, available through the links on this page in both printed and (exclusive) ebook formats. I’ll let you know when it becomes even more widely available.

Edge has released a list of the Top 100 computer games of all time.

I’ve only ever played four of them. I haven’t ever heard of most of them: What the hell is “Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”? Who or what are “Ico”, “Okami”, “Shenmue” and “Ikaruga”? Is there really a game called “Geometry Wars”? No, I don’t really want to know.

Give me a quiz game or a business sim over this lot any day.

Is this proof that I’m not a computer geek and all the monitor nerds will shun me forever? Or the exact opposite?