Rugby tomorrow. If I remember rightly, I persuaded every last one of you to get into it.

But this blog isn’t about about how amazing we are; that topic must wait until we’re given an Osbornes-style reality docu series. Today I’m asking – not for the first time – for help.

I shall say straight out that it’s unlikely many of the regular readers of this blog (students, public servants, and other members of the dispossessed) will be able to get involved in this – although one is already, to my enormous gratitude. But I’ll be tweeting links to this page and generally using it as something to refer back to, so forgive me if this appears irrelevant to you.

My sisters are running a trip to Moldova in August. They need people to go with them and help with a range of unglamorous but massively worthwhile tasks. These include painting and rebuilding schools/houses/orphanages, playing with kids who haven’t got anyone else to play with, planting vegetables – that sort of thing. It is a ten-day trip and the accommodation and stuff is all sorted out. It would be a fairly amazing thing to do. (I’d jump at the chance to do it myself, but since I’m destined to be in Edinburgh, I’m forced to continue taking part in my traditional manner by writing cheques.)

The drawback is that you have to pay to do this trip. The charity doesn’t have spare money for overheads; what it raises goes directly to the communities it supports. This is the reason it works so well – it minimises the admin expenditure which people (rightly or wrongly) associate with big charities – but it does mean things are always tight.

So this immediately rules out a lot of you, but if I found even one person as a result of doing this blog, I’d be delighted. Perhaps you are considering a summer holiday, but feel you’d like to do something a bit different and adventurous and involving-orphanages. Maybe you happen to be reading this thinking ‘I am just waiting for the internet to inspire me into a new direction’. Perhaps you can’t countenance a trip of this kind, but this blog has made you remember that you were thinking about sponsoring a kid at some point, and now you’ll go back and do it. Anyway, you can see my motivation for this rather worthy-sounding entry.

Their website, http://www.themoldovaproject.com , fills in a lot more details. Twitter, @themoldovaproject. Facebook. Actual life. And so on.

I’m biased, but this is an immensely worthwhile thing to get involved in, and also a non-mainstream one: a way of doing something valuable that’s not something you would otherwise have known about.

Thanks for reading this. Just by loading the page you’ve donated £2000 to Moldova. Not really. Nice thought, though.

Then there was a row because Uni Lad’s apology was a bit half-hearted and some not-very-bright people tried to defend it, claiming that ‘a joke’s a joke’ and ‘hey we can all see rape is bad, this is comedy, let’s chill out’ and other such defences which show a very limited understanding of the issue at hand. A large majority of people – including quite a few comedians – pointed out that this is wrong. A joke’s NOT always just a joke, it’s not just unfunny but potentially harmful to make light of problems which cause enormous misery; and just by calling something ‘comedy’, or issuing the caveat that your opinion is ‘meant to be light-hearted’, you don’t necessarily buy yourself out of a debate over whether it’s acceptable to be complicit in hammering home dangerous misconceptions or stereotypes.

Good good.

It’s interesting though, because I seem to remember saying these exact same things about a year ago in a different context, and getting a fair old bit of hate mail. Funny old world!

Maybe I’m just not noticing the fuckwitted backlash in favour of Uni Lad/misogyny/cruelty in comedy this time, because this time it’s not me on the receiving end of it. Or just maybe, the public’s relationship to the idea of ‘comedy’ as a universal get-out-of-jail card is starting to change a little bit. It’ll be interesting to see.

http://www.youredoingitright.com/

…and very simply, it exists to give a small nod of acknowledgement to people who are doing their jobs well, doing something good, just basically making a respectable go of the nearly impossible task of being a viable human which confronts us all.

This is very much in the spirit of the blog. I encourage you to read this and get in touch with the curator with your own suggestions of people who have ‘done it right’.

If I were a bit older, I’d make a remark about all we ever hear on the TV is bad news, and it’s nice to finally have the other side of the story, and I don’t know why they always have to concentrate on all these massacres in Syria and aren’t newsreaders young these days and how come they all seem to have regional accents now? I’m not going to, but some of the sentiments are there.

Those of you with a Twitter habit can also follow the person manning this quiet outpouring of gratitude. I think it’s @ydir. Anyway, you’ll find it.

Well done to this blogger and anyone who upholds the basic but neglected principle of recognising people for their efforts.

I’ll continue – over the next few days/weeks/even years – to post a few blogs appealing for information, or asking people to do odd things on their phones, and other stuff which won’t make all that much sense or seem relevant or worthy of your time. I can only say that once you have seen the show, you’ll see why. I’m quite keen that the show builds an online ‘community’ of people who’ve seen it/are going to see it, and so extends beyond the natural boundaries of a stand-up show until something more long-lasting. That’s already happened with this blog and hey, look at us now. Which reminds me, if you’ve not signed up for the first Annual Watsonian Trip To Ibiza, the deadline is looming.

(Clearly, I’m joking about the trip to Ibiza.)

In the coming week – another charity appeal, the return of the Very Late Review, and some other nonsense.

Edinburgh shows will be announced, incidentally, soon. As well as a normal show I’m doing one of my Crazy Stunts. If I were you I would plan to be there around August 13-20.

It seems I’m very confident tonight about what I would do, in your position. Anyone want me to take over their life?

If I were you, also, I’d check out a comedian called Eric Lampaert. He’s supporting me in these Norwich gigs and he is the closest comedian to being me all over again. But more muscular. And different jokes. If you like me you’d like him.

That’s all my advice to you for now.

Just in case anyone else doesn’t know, here’s an example of a QR (or quick response) code:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Wikipedia_mobile_en.svg

If you’ve got a fancy smartphone, you can download an app (like QR Reader for your iPhone, or QR Droid for those of us with Androids), take a photo of the QR code and it’ll take you to a web page, or something of that ilk. For example, if you were to take a photo of the above one using an aforementioned app, it’d take you to the front page of Wikipedia. They’re really very clever.

….very clever indeed. I’ve become increasingly interested in these barcodes which seem to be on every piece of promotional material, in the windows of half the buildings you walk past, and by now – for all I know – tattooed across people’s eyelids so you can find out their hobbies while they’re asleep. It’s fascinating that we now have shortcuts to information so efficient that we don’t even need to write out web addresses and type them into a computer. We can literally walk around zapping little squares of code with our phones, and receive vast amounts of knowledge, all in the space of a few seconds. There’s no doubt this is the sort of thing we were meant to be able to do in The Future. It suggests that perhaps we’re not so far from being able to hover, or set up cities on the Moon, after all.

So I’ve started to use this astounding, yet already commonplace, idea in my shows. As you walk in, you can scan a barcode (like the one above) from the screen. It takes you to a webpage from which you can vote on walk-in music, what colour T-shirt I’ll wear in the show, and so on. More importantly it supplies a phone number which you can use to divulge certain information about anyone you’re at the show with. This information is then, if possible, worked into the show. It’s audience interaction for the new decade. I realise the decade’s well underway now. But it takes me a while to have ideas.

You can get a QR reader, to join in with this malarkey, on most types of iPhone and BlackBerry and so forth. But actually, you don’t even need one to do some of the joining-in-with-the-show high jinks: you can just text from any phone whatsoever. It’s just that if you have the barcode reader, there’s quite a large range of extra stuff that you can do. But probably the most important bit is the leaking-information-about-other-people-in-the-audience. So if you’re coming to an imminent show, get in touch on Twitter, or via this email address: markwatsonspreview2012@gmail.com – and tell me stuff.

The purposes of all these shenanigans are
1. To mirror the show’s theme of how easily information is created/traded/changed in today’s world, and what it means for us;
2. To create a form of ‘audience interaction’ which doesn’t put anyone on the spot, but still produces bantering opportunities;
3. To mimic the general obsession of the world with gimmicks, distractions, technological jiggery-pokery;
and
4. Larks.

PS As for bringing strange food and drink to the show, I don’t really know quite why I’m asking for that. But the first time it was really funny and, well, this is just about still a comedy show.

I still mostly do jokes, by the way.

You might know, if you’ve seen me over the past few months, that I’ve making t shirts with a specific slogan on. I won’t mention it here as it’s slightly compromising, legally, but you know the one.

I’m wondering if anyone has- or can take- a photo of themselves wearing one of these shirts. Ideally out and about in public, but really anywhere. I have a couple of great ones already and I’m looking to build a collection.

Do pass this on to anyone who’s in possession of a t shirt. If you’ve yet to procure one but reckon you could wear one in an
amusing place, also let me know.

You can tweet pictures, or post links here, or transmit pics directly into my cerebral cortex.

Thank you