What you call 'love' was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.

That line was when I knew Mad Men had got me. Until then, its vision of the ad men of sixties Madison Avenue had all been very nicely done and well-acted and period authentic and ultimately, so what? I've got Ashes to Ashes, I don't need Life on Mars without the time travel. I need more than period recreation, and in that line I knew I could get it here. And to then follow it up with something even better, with "You're born alone and you die alone, this world just drops a lot of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts"...I am, appropriately, sold.

Went to Kilburn last night for The Low Edges' last hurrah. Another name to be added to the rollcall of my own hypothetical version of 'Sweeping the Nation', another great band who never quite made it to fame and fortune, or even the level of momentum which sustains a band in their absence. They will not be missed by enough of us, but they will be missed; all the more so for having lighting which suited them so well last night, and for ending the end with their finest song, 'Carfax'.

I was never much of a Dungeons & Dragons fan myself - like many another originator of a genre, it was a flawed and clunky beast soon overtaken by the others which sprung up in its wake - but Gary Gygax's death still hit me in the much the same way I imagine Stan Lee's will; a chancer, and a glory hound, and in many ways not that much cop, but without what he enabled the world would be an even worse place. Which reminds me, there are plenty of entertaining obituaries of the flamboyant publisher Anthony Blond online, but oddly (given how thorough they normally are about putting everything online), the Guardian's isn't among them. This annoys me, because while it isn't as good as the Telegraph's it ended with a variant of one of my favourite phrases - "he added greatly to the gaiety of nations". Which set me wondering, aside from a very few genuine heroes of history, can any of us hope for a better epitaph?