Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

Sometimes being an English NFL fan means late nights. In fact, it pretty much guarantees late nights. Last night, for example, it was about 4.50 am my time when the game finished. It went to overtime, which is exciting, but also makes it even later. But it was a brilliant opener to the season, with some fantastic moments, and on top of that it was fun just staying up with my brother and shooting the breeze whilst watching the game. He’s a Steelers fan, and as such it is my duty to dislike them – it made for an even more entertaining game than normal.

I’m also doing a fantasy football thing this season, with some of my old university friends. Something about that that makes what is already an exciting sport even more enjoyable. I suppose it’s the fact that, even when you’re not supporting a team, you are still supporting your players. You cheer on teams you wouldn’t otherwise have done … you look into matchups and situations that you wouldn’t otherwise have done. And, of course, there is all the friendly banter and trash talking that comes with it, which has already begun in earnest.

I slept in till midday, and my dog was very pleased to see me when I finally did emerge. And I think I will spend today recovering. Now I’m just lounging in front of the television, watching a bit of Neighbours at lunch time. It’s amazing that, no matter how bad things get in that show – and things get very bad indeed, sometimes – there is always this wonderful, upbeat, happy jingle at the end that more often than not serves as a huge contrast to what has just happened in the show.

And now for some lunch…

There is an article here, detailing what is apparently the world’s most expensive hat, and it’s being sold for around £60,000.

If you like that kind of had, it looks rather nice I suppose – but whether it’s £60,000 nice, I don’t know. The hats are not named after the place of origin (it is called the Panama hat), but their point of international sale – although they became fashionable when people picked them up en masse as they sailed along the Panama Canal.

If you’re selling that hat, but even more so if you’re in a position to buy one, I would imagine that you’re probably the sort of person that can wake up one morning, eat your finest breakfast and drink your fresh coffee, before deciding on a whim to invest in Panama real estate, even if you don’t currently live in Panama. It would be an interesting place to go on holiday, at the very least, with your brand new expensive Panama hat.

Certainly you could have a lot of fun, if you were into investments of any kind. If money can’t buy happiness, it can certainly open a lot of doors; and investing, if you invest well, is a door worth having open, I would imagine. You can even continue it as a nice hobby on the side, living in Panama, with things like offshore financial service that a lot of banks are providing now.

Or perhaps you can make do with a cheaper hat, and a cheaper destination for property investment.

As sport seasons go, the NFL season is a short one. 16 games is not very many. So it always seems as though it takes a long time for the next season to roll around. But now, the 09-10 NFL season is here. And there is quite a lot going on in preparation for kickoff night tonight. Well, tonight for me – 1 am, to be precise. Such is the pain of being an overseas follower of American football.

The NFL.com website has all sorts of features up for the start of the action; from players roundtables on various topics, to fantasy football, and who you should be starting in your team. The new Madden game has come out. And even Nike football is getting in on the action, with these entertaining mini-game things on their website.

It’s quite interesting in that it gives you something of a sneak peek into Adrian Peterson, LT, and Calvin Johnson’s pre-game rituals, the types of gloves and shoes they like, and that sort of thing. It’s quite good fun, even if it is aimed at selling you a load of Nike merchandise and products.

Of course, my trusty St. Louis Rams are not looking to be in very good shape – and this after a poor season, too. We’re in something of a “rebuilding” phase … which means it will more than likely be a number of years before we can begin to properly contend for anything again. So I have become something of a player supporter, rather than a team supporter at the moment.

Chris Johnson is one such player; the fastest man in the league, and very exciting to watch. It will be interesting to see if he can rip open defences with as much ease as he did last year, where, as a rookie, he would have been slightly overlooked and underestimated.

Every week, when I turn on the television, there are all sorts of shows that are essentially the same thing. Either someone gets paid to travel around the world, seeing the sights, or someone gets paid to go off and discover new species of animal; sometimes it’s someone getting paid to go away and have a taste of a different culture for a while. One such show was on just now.

Great British Journeys, it was called, and it was all about a man who gets paid to recreate these fantastic trips that have been taken through history, and recorded in aged, peeling books. He walks where these people have walked, long ago, and extracts are read from their books in the background, and at times it was just wonderful.

For example, today, he was rowing down a river so vast and beautiful that it’s a wonder that it’s even somewhere in our grey country. Mist hung in the air, only barely revealing the trees that surrounded both sides of the river, and as the camera panned back I was reminded of the Lord of the Rings. The book that he was recreating was all about finding picturesque places – the author, whose name, rather rubbishly, I can’t remember – had his own definitions of what made buildings beautiful, and we were treated to a number of his original drawings, and how similar they are to the real buildings, lost in the wilderness and touched only by father time.

The show finished, and the voice-over-man said that the next episode would be on later, I thought: thank you. I might just watch it.

I had a brief stint on the Xbox 360 just now, and before I logged off, I was browsing through the marketplace, where I eventually ended up looking at a section I had not checked out before: the indie video marketplace. There’s not much there, but what is is something that has made the last half an hour quite a wonderful half an hour indeed.

It’s a show about a group of people who are addicted to a massively multiplayer online game, and it’s called The Guild. The game itself is unnamed, but is almost certainly World of Warcraft, or something similar. And the show follows them, their real-world lives, and their online lives. The characters are wonderful, the comedy is spot-on, and I can’t recommend it highly enough – especially since it’s free.

You can watch it on their website, or on You Tube, or on your Xbox, and if you’re in any way into computer games – and even if you’re not – you will probably enjoy watching it.

I think I’ll watch an episode or two more before calling it a night.

I went to London today. One of my friends gave me a lift. But I popped into his house for a cup of tea before we went, and he showed me his new, rather wonderful phone system. I must admit, it was pretty fancy. Quite big – bigger than you would expect from such a modern, technological masterpiece – but yes, pretty fancy indeed.

It could play music, among its many and varied features, and it could also be used using only your voice, with no need to dial at all. It had a bluetooth headset that looked quite impressive in itself. Needless to say, he was quite proud of it; happy to be showing it off.

The city was quite fun; we did the whole tourist thing, we went to a few shops here and there, had a late lunch/early dinner. And it was quite a nice day. When I got back, though, almost automatically I had to fire up the broadband and looked up those fancy phones. Not to buy one myself, not really – more just out of curiosity.

Before long I had started looking into Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, which I tend to do more and more now in the build-up to its release. If you’re into computer games, and in particular first person shooters, this game looks like it’s shaping up to be particularly wonderful.

In a recent blog, I wrote a little bit about selling your house in the recession. And I detailed a couple of ways you could sell it quickly, like with these cash for homes projects that can be quite nice if you are a little short on time, or else just in a hurry. I’ve also seen a piece here, detailing how you can use extra space in your house to earn a bit of money by renting out rooms, and that sort of thing. And all of it, together, sort of got me thinking; thinking of ways I could improve my own home, if I were looking to sell it – for cash, or otherwise – and what I would do to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

To start with, I would definitely need to start with outside; with the garden, and the driveway (which is strewn with all sorts of junk at the moment, whilst we try and find room for it). The garden would need neatening up, for sure. The garage would probably need cleaning. I would probably need to deal with the bathrooms as well, which are pretty shocking at the moment. The taps are the wrong way around in some cases, and hot water comes out of cold taps, and that sort of thing. The shower doesn’t work. I’d probably upgrade to a couple of nice bathroom suites, and do the job properly.

With so much emphasis placed on global warming in the media at the moment, and out ethical footprints, or carbon footprints, or what have you, it couldn’t hurt to add a touch of the ethical home quality to the place … some sort of solar panel to power the electricity in the garage or something. It couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

And once the big things were sorted (and there are a lot of big things, looking back on it), I would probably spruce up the interior a little, as a finishing touch. Get some nice furniture downstairs, and perhaps even some sort of bathroom furniture in the new suites to set it all off nicely.

Of course, all this costs money, too. It’s a painful circle.

There is a battle being fought in the world of books. A battle being fought by Google, in their quest for a vast digitalised book library, and a battle that has, until recently, slipped from my mind. But in that, there is something to be learned: it’s not the end of publishing that some people are making it out to be. Books can now become fully digitalised, and we will be able to read anything from Descartes to Robinson Crusoe on our computers, but physical, proper, hard copy books are still brilliant. People will still go out and buy books, because, quite frankly, there is no comparison: reading something in dead-tree format is far, far more pleasurable than reading something on a computer screen.

In any case, authors have until Friday to opt out of the $125m settlement – it’s not like they will be forced into it. Whilst I’m sure there will be those who don’t take part, I’m also of the opinion that they will miss out on free publicity. I doubt I’m not the only one who, stumbling across a book that looked good, would go out and buy the real thing.

When I think back to my time at university, I can see the appeal of such a project. It won’t be as much about popular fiction as it will be about research books, and classical literature, and books that are on the reading lists at universities. It will make life a lot easier for students (who, presently, have libraries that sometimes only have one or two copies of a book that 25+ people need), and it will make referencing a lot more enjoyable and stress-free.

But it will be pretty awesome from a writerly perspective, as well. Fantastic for information on a wide range of subjects. I’ll keep my eye on this one, I think.

There have been a lot of ups and downs in the NFL recently. The commissioner certainly has a lot to deal with. You might think that managing a multibillion dollar sports empire would make him strict, and in a way, uncaring. But I think that, in deciding to let Michael Vick play in week 3 of the NFL season, though, rather than week 6, he has demonstrated a compassion and sensibility that are good to see in a man with such power.

Precisely because of all this background madness, Goodell has, in the past, vowed to restore order. He hasn’t hesitated to drop down lengthy suspensions, he’s also demonstrated this air of sensibility. And I’m glad he didn’t come down more heavily on him.

We’re dealing with a player who has already spent nearly two years in federal custody. He’s lost the bulk of his money from playing with the Atlanta Falcons, and all of the endorsements and deals that contributed to making him the highest paid player in the league. And on top of that, he’s lost his job as a starting quarterback – for the moment, at least.

I think that anything more would have been slightly on the harsh side of things. I’m all for second chances, and I for one am looking forward to watching him play (in whatever capacity that is).