*Yes, we sometimes give ratings
to days or weeks. It all harks back to our beginnings.
The views expressed in this weblog are those of the individual author alone and do not in any way reflect the views of any organisation or any other contributors.
Alright. Fingers on buzzers. Last front-bench politician to convert to Catholicism?
Ann Widdecombe, correct, who changed denomination from the Church of England following the decision to ordain female priests. Good old forward-thinking Widders.
Interestingly, if you answered Alan Clark I'd have marked you wrong on two counts. For one, I'm not sure I'd call him a front-bench politician, since he never held high office. And two, his widow denies the reports that he converted to Catholicism shortly before his death. So it's Widdecombe or bust. Or Widdecombe's bust. I'll allow you a quiet shudder there.
So who else, then, has done a Reverse Henry? Thrown away the faith into which they were born in order that they might join the Alma Mater of Christianity - perhaps while serving as a peace envoy in a hotbed of religious zeal?
Looking down the list I find Buffalo Bill and Eric Gill to be a happy rhyming couplet of Catholic conversion. Bill, whose achievements primarily involved bison; and Gill, who not only sculpted Prospero and Ariel for the BBC, but invented its current font of choice - Gill Sans. Both found sanctuary in the Pope's bosom (not Widdecombe's). Gill converted early on in life, and we shan't mention the child abuse in any detail as it's an open goal as far as this conversation is concerned. Bill took the oath on his deathbed. They all count.
Bob Hope makes the list, having lived like Blair with a family composed in its entirety of Catholics, and John Wayne's last act was to follow suit for the same reason. The Jewish Siegfried Sassoon bit the bullet during his life as well, as did Evelyn Waugh (in 1930). And the man who once upon a time occupied my first room at university, JRR Tolkien, moved with his mother from Baptism to Catholicism at the age of eight. (It's not name-dropping if the name in question had been dead for more than 30 years when the incident to which you refer took place.)
But perhaps the finest name of them all on the list is that of Delia Smith. Yes, your favourite gastronomic goddess is a culinary Catholic. She was baptised into the Church of England but became a Catholic at the age of 22, writing the book "A Journey Into God" in the process - rather God than me.
Inspect the list for yourself on Wikipedia here. I have double checked all the entrants above but be careful with some of the others, it being Wikipedia and all that.
It's alright, everyone. We play the South Africans at cricket in July 2008 and we'll beat them then. Mark Thursday the 10th of July, 11am, in your diaries now - the first test begins at Lord's.
There are moments in life - a fair few, actually - when I'm proud to work where I do. This is one of them:
The BBC's online services will be made available free of charge at thousands of wi-fi hotspots around the UK. The corporation has agreed a deal with wi-fi firm The Cloud, which operates 7,500 hotspots around the country.
The news website, programme sites and downloads of TV shows via the iPlayer can be accessed freely.
Any wi-fi enabled device will be able to surf the BBC's website in one of The Cloud's hotspots without paying a log-in or subscription fee. Users wanting to download a BBC programme - or stream a video - will have to use a laptop initially.
But the BBC said the ambition was to let users download programmes over wi-fi on to portable devices, such as the Sony PSP and Nokia 95.
I mean, it's not simply that this is remarkably useful, in the sense that you can now go into a coffee shop and watch your favourite BBC TV series at your leisure, for free, on demand, in high quality. Or surf the many and varied BBC websites (yes, even catch up on what's been happening in Berkshire - you could listen to ice hockey highlights!).
It's more, for me, the fact that this is ridiculously clever brand positioning.
We are faced with a big dilemma in that younger, internet-savvy people (a bit like, well, me, really) are not always drawn to BBC content. They spend their time on Youtube and Facebook, not necessarily because those websites do anything better than we do it - we offer different services - but because they don't perceive the BBC to be offering anything of interest to them.
But stick them in a wi-fi hot spot and give them two choices - pay up for the web, or enjoy the BBC for free - and I reckon they'll be downloading Eastenders before you can say "boom, boom, boom boom boom boom-boom-boom".
Not that enticing 16-24 year olds back to the BBC (were they ever there?) is going to be as simple as luring them into a hot spot then acting as an alternative to highway robbery. Yes, getting the BBC for free in thousands of places up and down the country is great. But that means nothing without upping our game in terms of the stuff we're putting out for people to use.
The most excellent Drop Click rugby game is a perfect example of what we need to do more often. It's a quiz based on the Rugby World Cup, but by answering questions you progress in the World Cup, eventually winning the final (hopefully!) and posting a high score. It's very clever and looks immense. When I first saw it, I thought it was an independent production, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover it had the BBC name attached.
Now fans going to Paris can play Drop Click on their phones before the final - and cheekily, BBC Sport have got a new link on their rugby pages, advertising mobile coverage:
If only I worked there, eh, in that pit of cunning ideas. Well, steel yourselves, because here's an announcement: I now do. I'm pleased to say I've been offered an attachment at BBC Sport Interactive until the end of March, working for bbc.co.uk/sport.
The aim of the game is mainly to develop and write for the BBC's Beijing 2008 Olympics website, which obviously will form a large part of the BBC Sport website next year. I can't go into any detail but I've seen initial designs for this and they look stunning. The task in hand for me is to make those already excellent designs redundant by coming up with stuff so unbelievably good, it needs incorporating into them.
Watch this space. Well don't watch this space, watch bbc.co.uk/sport, the new home of yours truly at the Beeb. I've not started quite yet - you'll know when I do, because I'll be purring with enthusiasm after my first day in the Sport Interactive newsroom at Television Centre - and I'll be back at BBC Berkshire at the end of it, but in the mean time there is going to be a lot of fun, and hard work, to be had. And you can enjoy it all for free, in a coffee shop near you.
So it's goodbye Ming, despite one of the more impressive lists of Facebook friends you'll see. The problem, one suspects, is that Ming's friend list was also the list of the only UK ciizens who'd vote for him.
From the BBC News website:
Sir Menzies Campbell has resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, "with immediate effect".
Senior Lib Dems Vincent Cable and Simon Hughes made the announcement, saying the party owed Sir Menzies "a huge debt of gratitude".
Speculation has been growing about the Lib Dem leadership, particularly since Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided not to call an early general election - and indicated he may not do so until 2009 at the earliest.
It's a little difficult to stomach the notion that Gordon Brown's election-that-never-was has brought about Ming's downfall.
After all, if you're a Liberal Democrat (and at least one Dayorama author is), then you'd be a fool to have installed Ming in the first place if the premise was Gordon Brown taking the nation to the polls as soon as he assumed power.
Nobody expected Brown to call an election when he took over, and the media fervour of the last few weeks has only been because wildly excited political journalists thought 2009 had come early. All the political hacks I've seen have looked decidedly downbeat since Gordo chickened out.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that equally disappointed Lib Dems, staring terrible opinion polls and a two-year wait in the face, saw breaking an antique Ming as an excuse for the cheap thrill of a leadership contest.
Not that anyone outside the party can name any other Liberal Democrats to take over, with a few exceptions. We know Vince Cable because he just told us Ming had resigned and he's the acting leader; we know Lembit Opik because he's bonking a Cheeky Girl; and we know Charles Kennedy because he used to be leader.
It's not a world class squad, is it? If the Lib Dems were in the Rugby World Cup, they'd have been Georgia. And just as there are only eight rugby pitches in the entire former Soviet state (fact), so there are few visible opportunities for the Lib Dems to develop.
Credit, though, where credit is due. A search to see which of Ming's Facebook friends has recently updated their profile reveals some staunch loyalty among the faithful:
Oh, and speaking of the faithful, let's see if Ming and I have any mutual friends...
Well done Rachel - but shame on you, Amy Jones. Bet you're Charles Kennedy's friend...
Now I have every sympathy with Sprogget's owners - nobody wants to lose their dog in any circumstances - but one has to ask a few questions about this.
Did it not strike anybody that a deaf and blind dog, on a hillside above an abandoned colliery, was an accident waiting to happen?
I'll grant you that even a deaf and blind dog can probably enjoy a good walk with bracing breeze and plenty to smell, but you'd think a lead would be a very wise investment given the inability to call the dog back or wave at it, even without a gaping hole opening up in the hillside!
Sprogget's owner, New Zealander David Sandford, who moved to the area in April, said he believed the hole on the hillside had opened up after recent rain.
Initially he had feared Sprogget might not have survived the first night.
He said: "This is the biggest event of his life so far so I just hope he comes out of it."
Of course one also has to ask: how unlucky can one dog be? Not only has Sprogget lost his sight and hearing, he's somehow had the misfortune to wander into an open hole above an abandoned mine. That's just not fair.
Good luck Sprogget. I'm off to check the sculpture trail for fissures. I don't want to be the one responsible when Toby embarks on Journey to the Centre of the Earth to retrieve his tennis ball...
You might be aware - and I suspect more Americans are aware than Brits - that ice hockey's NHL is coming to London this weekend.
Two games between the LA Kings and Anaheim Mighty Ducks will take place at the O2 Arena, giving British hockey fans (and Europeans prepared to fork out for flights) a taste of the best ice hockey league in the world.
The LA Times has written a very nice report looking at British ice hockey fans - you can read it here. I've excerpted my favourite bits below:
"Some British mysteries just bamboozle the brain, from Stonehenge to Jack the Ripper to the chronic popularity of "Big Brother" to just who on David Beckham's green earth bought enough hockey tickets that London would sell out two NHL games in a hasty fortnight.
"Start by combing the green hills of England, Scotland, Ireland. Tucked in there amid the outnumbered rugby fans and the outnumbered cricket fans and the legions upon legions of keen-eyed soccer fans who can spot an opponent's handball infraction from a buzzard's distance, somewhere in there, yes, some people do report their own hockey fandom.
"They follow unembellished clubs such as the Coventry Blaze, the Basingstoke Bison and the Sheffield Steelers in the Elite Ice Hockey League, which Roberts rates on a level with the United States' East Coast Hockey League. They decry soccer's hegemony without risking deportation.
"They read newspapers with frustration. Epitomizing their place in the margins, they might read a hockey score in the newspapers knowing full well the game went to overtime, but the newspaper will note only, say, "Coventry 3, Cardiff 2," because there's just not room to note the overtime what with all the soccer coverage.
"They often know their athletes personally. If they're out shopping in Basingstoke, say, and they see a member of the Bison, they'll just have a chat.
"Trickles of Kings and Ducks fans have come to London in recent days and have marched through the O2 arena, which houses so many good, varied restaurants that you could live in it full-time without risking malnutrition -- a sports-arena rarity.
"Some inveterate Kings fans such as David and Linda Baltazar of Downey, who rapidly signed on last spring after the announcement of the game, on Friday witnessed the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and filed into the O2 for a party Friday night -- all part of a whirlwind, five-day London trip. The Baltazars also reported that the Kings tour group they joined on the club website had fallen victim to some savage infiltration from Ducks fans.
"Tickets, by the way, are being sold on the open market for $800, according to some news reports."
The Special One has walked out on Chelsea and Spurs fans are already lining the gates of White Hart Lane in the forlorn hope that the board will throw half a billion quid at Jose to replace Martin Jol.
Nobody really knows what happened that's caused Mourinho to up sticks at quite such a surprising moment, but the consensus seems to be that he and his Russian chairman had a bit of a barney and this is the end result.
On the BBC's 606 message board, contributor Eduardo_rules came up with this - probably entirely accurate - rendition of those final moments:
Roman: Jose, we're not happy about the start to the season. And we want to play better football. Jose: Let me run the team and do it my way. I have won two Premiership titles, a Carling Cup and an FA Cup, not to mention the UEFA and European Cups with Porto. Roman: No, we want it done differently. Jose: Okay. Maybe I'll just leave then. Roman: Maybe you should. Jose: Maybe I will then. Roman: Fine. Jose: Okay I'm leaving. Someone get my dog for me 'cos I'm off. Roman: You go then. Jose: Right I'm off, last chance, 'cos I'm really going. Roman: Bye then. Jose: Bye.
(Jose leaves)
Roman: B*$%*^$! What are we gonna do now? (Much swearing in Russian) Avram, do you have any ideas?
... but they've given a mile. Yes, that's the news today - the EU have got bored of trying to persuade Brits to change from imperial to metric, that they've finally given up. Fabulous. I may be of the metric generation, but tell me to bake a cake with 1/2lb of flour and 4oz of sugar and I'll know what you're talking about. Give it to me in grams and I'd actually have to think about it.
I'm also amused by this article. Now, there's a debate on BBC Oxford about whether the view of Didcot Power Station is one of the worst edifices in the country. Rubbish, I actually think it's pretty beautiful. Well, in the way only a power station can be beautiful. The view from the M40, looking over the Oxfordshire plain wouldn't be the same without Didcot (you know, the bit where the sheep stand on the edge of the cliff and end up with one leg longer than the other...). Anyway, apparently Didcot is one of the healthiest places to live, by life expectancy. It seems living next to a power station isn't such a bad thing. Now, that's good to hear since I was brought up in the shadow of Didcot.
I'm enjoying HK so far. All well and good. More on that over the weekend... (i.e. when I actually do more than walk from my apartment to the Office!). I do have the most fabulous view from the 43rd floor overlooking HK harbour though!
Nobody denies that it's horrible when little children go missing, and it's impossible to imagine how it actually feels were it, God forbid, to happen to your children.
But there is a line between sober reporting of this kind of tragic development, and sensationalising something to the point where the actual human loss seems to be somehow devalued and overlooked.
This screenshot of the Daily Express website, on the page where you can view its last seven front covers, is a case in point:
In case you can't tell, the front page has the word "Madeleine" splashed across in big letters on each of the seven days. (On two of them the word "Diana" has also made it.) The same photo of Madeleine is on six of the seven front pages.
This was drawn to my attention while reading the BBC Editors' Blog earlier on. In it, the BBC's head of TV news - Peter Horrocks - had the following to say:
"The situation that many facts are not reliably established has not stopped many of our press and broadcast colleagues from treating rumour as being newsworthy.
For instance, ITN led last week on a claim that a child like Madeleine had been sighted in Belgium. ITN headlined this with a lurid photo-fit of a suspect abductor with the words "Does this man have Madeleine McCann?"
The BBC gave little prominence to the possible Belgian sighting, on the basis that there have been many previous false sightings."
Well ITN are so unhappy about this accusation that ITV News editor-in-chief, David Mannion, has written back using the comments:
"I feel I must correct the impression made by Peter Horrocks concerning the reporting of the story by ITV News.
[Peter] singles out ITV News for leading on the potential sighting of Madeleine with a man at a café in Belgium to which the BBC gave little prominence on the grounds that there had been many other sightings.
May I point out that, like the BBC, ITV News has given little or no prominence to the countless sightings which appeared to have no basis in fact. The Belgium sighting, however, was different. The person who believed she saw Madeleine was a highly credible witness, a professional woman who worked with children and often worked with the police. We sought and achieved an interview with the woman in order that we might establish for ourselves, her credentials and to question her about what she saw. The police in Belgium confirmed that they regarded the matter worthy of detailed follow up investigation. In my book this was a story and your article, Peter, amounts to little more than an excuse for missing it."
Well, no, that's not a story. One hates to parrot the party line but, no matter how reliable the witness, there was absolutely no hard evidence (indeed now that the evidence has arrived, it strongly suggests the sighting was in error). If the same "highly credible witness" had said she'd seen a UFO, and had seemed pretty convincing when interviewed by ITV, I still doubt they'd have run the story unless they had bloody good visual evidence for the existence of such a thing.
The coverage of a young girl's disappearance shouldn't be about "missing stories". There are two stories: one, the girl is missing, and two, the girl has been found. While things remain in a state of flux it is absolutely pointless reporting on glimpsed sightings unless there is demonstrable, hard evidence to lay before the public. As for seven days of Express front pages, the continual use of Diana as a marketing device is sickening enough, without this.
If you were reading yesterday, I promised you a multimedia special including the solution to the tantalising question: where have I lost my BBC pass?
The answer is just to the right of the Citroen:
Yep, I tossed my BBC pass to one side on the grid at Silverstone as I prepared to film this piece to camera. It was clicking against my jeans and I didn't want the unnecessary noise. As I threw it down onto the grass verge, I made a mental note: "Don't forget to pick that up."
I forgot to pick it up and, having done the filming during a short break without any cars on the circuit (bar the Citroen), only remembered once Porsches and Ferraris had resumed thundering round the track at hundreds of miles an hour.
So, lying as it does on a stretch of grassy verge almost inaccessible to man, my BBC pass has probably found a new permanent home just next to the fifth grid position. Look out for it at next year's Grand Prix.
Yesterday's filming at Silverstone was a marvellous, jaw-dropping experience. We'd gone along to report on a young man from Maidenhead who, aged 15, has a bright future in motorsport. He'll most probably go on to become a touring car ace, but you never know - he might just be the next Lewis Hamilton yet.
The filming was a treat in itself. We shot interviews in the Silverstone pit lane, then I perched in the back of a Renault Espace, filming our kid in his souped-up Citroen Saxo as we did a slow-motion lap of the Grand Prix circuit.
Ever since I put this date in my diary, I've had a dream of recording a piece to camera with cars buzzing past my ears while walking gingerly down the grid to the start line. I was amazed to discover we could make this a reality - and, having jumped a fence, enlisted the Saxo to roar past me as I bellowed an impromptu script to the camera. The image above is taken from the middle of this. It's one of the most exciting things I've ever done.
That said, it has competition for that honour from the laps of Silverstone I spent as a passenger. Some of the cars idling in the pit lane were literally worth millions of pounds, and we were offered a seat in one of only two Ferrari F50 GTs in the world. The father of our racing starlet was kind enough to offer us a lap alongside the young maestro, first in the Citroen, then - unbelievably - in a Porsche 911.
I could feel my guts scream with anticipation as we roared out of the pit lane, slamming round the corners, thundering over the rumble strips, and lurching from side to side as the tyres fought to grip the legendary tarmac.
To think I used to try to nip over the grassy bit of the chicane on Formula One computer games. In real life it turns out it's bad enough being on the tarmac, without going cross-country. Then I looked across at the driver. Here I was, in a Porsche 911, being hurled around a world famous motorsports venue... by a 15-year-old.
And he's a much better driver than me, I can tell you. No wonder he's already top of his junior championship with a deal to drive at senior level next year. I've added him to my collection of future sporting legends - I now have interview footage of a potential British number one tennis star and, who knows, maybe the next Lewis Hamilton. Va va voom.
PS As regards this being a "multimedia special", the caveat is: only if you're on Facebook. I only had time to upload the final video piece there earlier on. Think of it as an incredibly small incentive for you fuddy-duddies out there to sign up. By which I mean all our parents.
Words military spokespeople never thought they'd say:
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area."
That's as may be, but try telling that to the Iraqi locals around Basra, where the British military are of course based. They have a different story to tell. Mike Drummond, editor of US paper The Charlotte Observer on attachment in Iraq, explains more:
White “hog badgers” [are] attacking people in Basra. Badgers, of all things. And white ones, no less.
The story comes gratis from the Al-Mashriq newspaper, one of the many dailies our staff reviews at morning meetings. The article even used some jpeg images culled from the Internet. One of the images, I’m fairly certain, isn’t even of a badger. I’m also fairly certain badgers don’t live in Iraq.
Supposedly, the creatures have something to do with a British military plot, Al-Mashriq said, citing scared locals.
Later, [Mike's associate] Hussein and I have a chat [and] the subject, naturally, turns to badgers in Basra.
Hussein talked with one of his friends there. Didn’t know anything about badgers, white ones or otherwise. But he did hear about the young man who was bitten by a dog. Later, the young man flew into a mad rage and, before dying, bit his father. The older man is now in the hospital. You know, that sounds like rabies to me.
So now authorities in Basra have declared a sort of jihad on feral dogs in the city. Given how itchy the trigger fingers are in this country, you don’t want to be a dog, or anything on four legs, wandering the streets of Basra. Those badgers better lay low.
Bless Madonna, trying to get into the spirit of things as she closes the Live Earth event at Wembley.
What to say, when you're the last act on stage and everyone else has already harped on endlessly about the environment? What to say, when Terence Stamp has just come on stage and sucked any momentum out of the entire day with a dry, monotone speech delivered like a lecture to the Wembley WI?
Here's Madge's suggestion:
'"If you want to save the planet, let me see you jumping up and down!"
What's that going to achieve? Are we going to collectively jog the planet slightly off course, widen the orbit a fraction, and cool the face of the globe just enough to get by for another few hundred years? I mean, it's a plan, but even 80,000 people being ordered to "Jump, Motherfuckers!" by a 48-year-old mother of two-and-a-bit is unlikely to work. Al, we need a Plan B.
We ought to have known, really. If there is anything early Saturday evening television has taught us, it's that whenever something is amiss in major British cities, it's got something to do with a Time Lord.
The following copy has just arrived down the wires from Cardiff:
Two controlled explosions will be carried out in Cardiff this afternoon, as part of a BBC production, believed to be Doctor Who or Torchwood.
The explosions - large enough to damage a number of windows at the film site - will take place at 1200 and 1400.
South Wales Police say they understand that, with the heightened security measures currently in place across the country, this may cause some concern to members of the public in the vicinity who are unaware of these events.
High visibility uniformed Police Officers are on duty in the City Centre to provide the necessary public reassurance.
Quite what South Wales Police think those officers will achieve, God only knows. Have they not seen the show? You need a police box!
It would have been difficult to miss the widespread coverage of the symbolic hand-over of power between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown this week, but that I did. Not through ignorance, you understand, but sheer business. I was at a job interview (which you'll hear about as and when things progress, over the next 9-12 months), then travelling with my mother, and generally being constructive.
I did discover, therefore, that if you are a busy, hard-working member of society, you don't realy notice which personalities occupy the seats of power so long as you have food on your plate, a roof over your head, and the trains run on time (mine didn't). After all, Tim Henman is still out of Wimbledon, England are still rubbish at cricket, and it's still raining. Plus ça change, Gordon, plus ça change.
Nevertheless, it has been pointed out that six of the new Cabinet (Ed and David Miliband, Ed Balls, Ruth Kelly, Jacqui Smith and James Purnell) read PPE at Oxford. Those of us in the Dayorama Village - it's like the Westminster Village, but better - stifled a giggle at that because I read PPE at Oxford. I expect my job offer got lost in the post...
Much like my father's, really. The few hardy souls who've read my Dayorama biography - yes we have those: click here - will have read Ollie's rather cryptic message about there being a Lord in the family. It is true; my father is a working peer, though he prefers to be known as 'a Peer of the Realm.' His take on the new PM is this:
"I have not yet received a job offer from Gordon. Maybe he has lost my number.
Different PM: still ignored.
love,
Sulking Dad"
That's no longer a question. Today Tony Blair ploughed through his final Prime Minister's Questions, and in a few short moments he'll pop his feet up, settle back, relax, and look forward to a peaceful non-confrontational retirement... as a Mid-East envoy.
In the mean time he did still have that half-hour minefield to negotiate. We know the drill by now. First, the condolences to the members of the armed forces killed this week. Then the announcement of Prime Ministerial engagements. Except this week: "I will have no such further meetings later today, or any other day." Much laughter in the Commons.
Everyone seems to be wearing their front bench finery, particularly the likes of Ruth Kelly, who's dolled herself right up for this one. Gordon continues to look deeply bored by the whole process: he gives off an aura which suggests, in present mood, his answer to most PMQs would be, "Whatever".
And perhaps that attitude's rubbing off. To a Lib Dem question about the relationship between Church and State - "given his successor's reported views" - Blair's simple response: "I think I'm really not bothered about that one."
You know what, today does mark a paradigm shift on the front benches. For the first time in a long time, the Conservatives will have the better hair. Maggie's hair went a bit wild, John Major's retreated to a polar opposite, and several Tory leaders since have been entirely bereft - all the while, Tony's kept a refined mop, but one which suggests a hint of daring on occasion, even as it's greyed with age.
Gordon, by contrast, not only has boring hair, but hair that's already showing a considerable grey twinge. If he sticks around as long as Blair, it'll all be an arctic white by 2017.
And as we look across to the other side of the House, we find David Cameron's hair has miraculously Blairified itself! It seems to have perked up a bit from out of nowhere, as though it were arching a bushy eyebrow, and it's developed that upstanding greyish tweak without joining Brown in the box marked 'grey' entirely. Cameron is clearly the heir to Blair hair and this can only bode well for his election chances.
In the mean time PMQs continues, although it's like leaving a family gathering where you know the various strands of the family don't particularly like each other, but feel the need to be courteous. Messrs Cameron and Campbell pay their respects, Blair pays them back, and all the while everyone disassociates themselves from the other's politics.
There's that awkward tension in the air as these various family members share a cool, distant pat on the back resembling a hug. You stand by the door waiting to leap into the car and drive off, but someone else keeps insisting on paying a phenomenally insincere compliment.
Ian Paisley has the honour of the penultimate question. "I fully understand he was downcast, disappointed, angry and that perhaps he even lost his temper. But I want to say that he treated me with the greatest of courtesy. I disagreed with him on many things but we faced them, and I'm glad today that I can stand here and say to the Prime Minister: the people of Northern Ireland felt the same way as he felt, but we have made progress.
"Not as great a progress as I would like to see, but they are dedicated. The Unionist people I speak for are dedicated to see what has been started, concluded, so that every man and woman in Ulster will have the same rights, liberties and opportunities. I hope he'll look back and be able to say it was well worthwhile."
And if you're friends with Ian Paisley, you know it's time to leave.
Tony Blair's final words: "That is that. The end." Applause. Ovation from both sides. And with that the Prime Minister, doing well to hold back tears, shakes the hand of the Speaker of the House and departs.
Stuart Pearce has been sacked as Manchester City manager. Sighs of relief all round.
BBC journalist Chris Bevan, himself a City fan, has written an excellent article on Pearce's sacking here:
As a Blue I can speak from first-hand experience about how painful it has been to watch City this season.
Defensively we have been sound but there has been no creativity in our midfield and zero cutting edge up front. I am used to being frustrated watching City but it has rarely been as bad as this.
Even when we did score goals and win games it was through a war of attrition and that seems to be the only way Pearce knows.
Apparently Gerard Houllier, ex-Liverpool, is interested, and it can't escape notice that Paul Jewell has resigned as Wigan manager today. I'm not sure either of them inspire me but I'll lay off the speculation. Bevan wants Derby's Billy Davies in, which is the equivalent of Everton appointing David Moyes a while back, and that's done them no harm.
I remember meeting Stuart Pearce 18 months ago, when he was fairly new to the job - you can read about it on Dayorama here, and listen to my full interview with him.
Back then the atmosphere at the club was very positive. Pearce was still being hailed as the club's saviour after a brilliant run once Keegan had gone, and on a bitterly cold morning at the club's Carrington training complex, he was all fun and games.
I had gone to interview him for my broadcasting postgrad and had sat nervously at the back of the entire press conference, not saying a word. Once that had finished, Pearce stood up and - in front of the assembled journalists - pointed his finger at me.
"Oi!" He said. "You! I hear you've got some questions for me."
What do you say when Stuart Pearce says that to you? I can't even remember what I said but it wasn't very impressive. We went off to a tiny media booth at the back of the room and Pearce rested himself up against a table. There was a cream handbag next to it. I saw my chance to level the score.
"Is that yours?" I asked.
What was I doing? I'd just implied to the man dubbed Psycho, face to face, that he carried a handbag.
"Nope. Mine's the black one," replied Pearce.
In the ensuing eight minute interview he was nothing but honest, thoughtful, and frankly interesting. So many football manager will spout on til kingdom come without really saying much, but even when Pearce didn't say something, it meant something.
I remember asking him how he felt about missing out on a World Cup medal as a player. He'd been honoured by the Queen - would he swap that for England honours?
Pearce replies: "I don't know," with incredibly thoughtful intonation, and then he thanks the Queen. There's just enough pause in his reply for it to be clear that even Stuart doesn't completely know the answer.
Perhaps what sticks out now, in retrospect, is the way Pearce talks about football management. Back when the interview happened there was absolutely no danger of him losing his job, so he was looking at things from a very healthy point of view. But even then he knew it was never likely to last:
"Football management's very tough, no matter whether results are going well or not so well. You have to have a long-term goal and also win your short-term battles.
"I'll never enjoy management as much as I enjoy playing. I miss the camaraderie between the team - management gives you a second place to that but make no mistake, when your team win and you've put your little bit in... you can never be one of those players again."
It can be difficult for broadcasters to fill Bank Holiday schedules.
Many local radio stations, for example, will air a totally different line-up of presenters on Bank Holidays - not necessarily lesser lights, but regular presenters filling different slots according to need, since others are off.
TV is trickier, especially for smaller niche stations. And as BBC Parliament's editor Peter Knowles explains, his channel is "the narrowest of niche channels"...
"You’d have to travel down the channel listings as far as Discovery Ironing +1 before you’d find something more niche. What it says in the lid is very much what is inside: Parliament.
"So, over a bank holiday weekend where the weather was less than inspiring, the channel made use of some surprising resources."
"From the archive, ten years on from New Labour coming to power, BBC Parliament showed in entirety the election night broadcast and this ran all day across the rainy bank holiday Monday.
"We’ve been told that many participants in the 1997 election stayed glued to their sets, throughout the day. (Next stop in our tour of the election archive:1987, which is showing 5 October)."
And by now you'll have guessed which sad idiot watched almost the entire 14-hour repeat of the 1997 election. I couldn't help it. I was only channel-surfing and there, suddenly, was Dimbleby, about to cross to Enfield Southgate where he was told Michael Portillo could lose his seat.
The moments passed in blurs: Tony Blair speaks to his constituents at Sedgefield, William Hague goes on air refusing to speculate on who might be next Tory leader, Portillo's seat goes, other leading Conservative figures drop like flies around the country, Taunton goes Lib Dem (I remember that!), John Major leaves Downing Street, Tony Blair arrives, all with the man Dimbleby somehow keeping his eyelids prised apart throughout.
A few people have left comments on Peter Knowles' little article thanking him for the repeat, since they were too young to fully understand it when it happened first time around.
I know exactly how they feel - so was I, and this was a brilliant second chance to relive a defining political moment (there's not been an election like it) from a time when I would only have been 12. I can remember, at school the following day, OJ and I adopting staunch pro-Conservative stances and generally acting upset, simply because I don't think either of us had been introduced to the concept of not being Conservative. (OJ still hasn't, whereas I've adopted the position of being nothing in particular and a dead, non-voting loss to society.)
It must be said that the 1997 broadcast was a high water mark for the use of graphics. They look good even by today's standards. Peter Snow's swing-o-meter has never since reached the highs it did on that night, thanks mainly to the gainful employment most Labour candidates were able to offer it. I think this was the last election to have just enough graphics capability to look good, without over-egging the pudding a bit.
I'm now counting down the days til the 1987 election's repeated - one I definitely don't remember. But then I can barely remember what happened in 2005 now. It's a good job the local elections were last week, otherwise I'd have turned up shocked to discover it was Labour taking a hammering, having just seen John Major fighting back the tears as he left Downing Street for the cricket.
Come on, Gordon. Get into power and call a general election. We need another exciting one, I can't wait til October.
I know we've got readers in Kent and our Chief Kent Correspondent, Amy, might even be there as I write. There've been "earth tremors" there, as the BBC and Sky have taken to calling them, thus giving the much underused word "tremor" a fresh breath of life.
We don't as yet know what precisely has happened - some are saying there's been an explosion, some are saying it was just an earthquake, measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale.
What we do have in all situations like these are eyewitness reports from people in the region. People like Paul, quoted by BBC News Online. The following emphasis is mine:
Paul Smye-Rumsby, who lives in Dover, said: "It was about 08.15 when suddenly the bed shook violently.
"I thought my wife had got cramp or something but then I saw the curtains were moving and the whole house was shaking. It lasted about 1.5 seconds.
Today's not been great for English cricket. As I write the South Africans are nine runs off a victory with approximately 31 overs to spare, which suggests an England defeat is becoming likely, and that'll be the end of their World Cup.
Performances on the pitch (there goes another four, five needed) have been pretty useless, but performances by England cricketers off the pitch haven't been top notch either.
Stand up Michael Atherton, former England opening batsman now plying his trade as a commentator for Sky Sports. A couple of overs ago one of the South African batsmen had a great big mow at the English bowling (who wouldn't?), edged it, and wicketkeeper Paul Nixon caught it. We'll pick up Atherton's commentary here:
"And that's out! No, wait, it's a no ball, but neither Paul Nixon nor Graeme Smith have realised!
"Had Nixon realised, he might have had a shy at the stumps!"
Pause.
"Er, not that that would have mattered at all."
Having just completed my umpiring course, I'm well placed to tell you why Athers is making a fool of himself. It was a no ball, which means the batsman obviously can't be caught, but he can still be run out. Alas, not by the wicketkeeper he can't, if nobody else on the fielding side has touched it. If that did happen it'd be a stumping, and you cannot be stumped off a no ball.
So, as Athers belatedly realised, Nixon lobbing the ball at the stumps would have achieved nothing. If you've captained England in a record 54 test matches and you're still not 100 per cent on what can or can't happen from a no ball, when will you be?
And there are the winning runs from Graeme Smith, the hapless Saj Mahmood watching his delivery disappear back behind him to the boundary. Thank you and goodnight.
Who says we only ever hear bad news from Iraq? Quoting BBC News Online:
A Royal Military Police Major from West Sussex is spearheading a scheme to teach cricket to children in Iraq.
Andrew Banks, of Midhurst, is helping to bring the game to Basra Province to build bridges with local communities. Major Banks, of 110 Provost Company, said it had stopped some children from throwing stones at soldiers.
He said: "Something that runs through the sport is fair play. It would be very nice if the concepts of right and wrong were extended beyond the sports field.
"Maybe we have started something in Iraq. At least the children and their teachers were enthusiastic. But I don't think the Australians need to worry yet," he added.
It occurred to me that maybe, once the 2007 Cricket World Cup is done, the tournament could move to Iraq and Iran for the 2011 tournament.
But alas, it seems the hosting of the 2011 World Cup has already been decided: it'll be shared between India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
So how about 2015? Nope: that'll be Australia and New Zealand. Okay then, 2019? No again: the tournament's back in England for that year.
Astonishingly, the ICC has everything sewn up until we reach 2023, by which time Iraq probably won't have had time to qualify for the World Cup, let alone host it. Bangladesh first appeared in competitive action in 1979 and reached the World Cup for the first time in 1999, which means we need at least 20 years, so it's all about 2027... if the ICC haven't already booked that one up, too.
By the way, we are now officially only the third article on the internet to mention the 2027 Cricket World Cup. In twenty years' time I'll look back on this as a proud moment. Coverage starts here and it's my sworn ambition to write for Dayorama at the 2027 World Cup Final. (I'll be 42. I'm going to go and cry now.)
One of the great joys of having every Wednesday off is the ability to watch Prime Minister's Questions, live and in full. You can't beat that half an hour for 'Punch and Judy politics', which is of course a far more enjoyable breed of politics than any other on offer. Unless you're a Liberal Democrat, in which case PMQs is no fun at all and you've already discovered many other enjoyable perks of politics, most of them illegal in many countries.
This week David Cameron took another opportunity to lob grenades at Gordon Brown before the good Chancellor gets his chance to fight back once Blair's gone. Cameron employed the ingenious measure of asking members of the Cabinet to vote on their future under Gordon - have a listen:
This from the man who would have 'Punch and Judy' banished. I hope he regrets that statement. The very last thing you want to do to Prime Minister's Questions is get rid of the comedy and high farce element, to be replaced by more inane wittering from pet Labour MPs, asking if the Prime Minister will congratulate himself for the success of a flower arranging demonstration in their Grimethorpe West constituency.
By the way, I managed to get my first ever shots onto regional telly on Monday night. South Today aired the story of Reading Rockets' triumph in the basketball at the weekend, using some of the footage I shot for the web special (which you can find here).
Apparently I, in my inexperience, cocked up some button or other while sending the footage down the line from Caversham to Southampton, which made some shots look a little the worse for wear on screen, but we live and learn (in my defence there was nobody around to help so it's a miracle it got there in the first place). I should have some speedway stuff to send them next week so we'll try to get it completely right next time!
Tesco is launching itself as "Fresh & Easy" in the USA with a series of stores set to open in the midwest and west coast, starting with Phoenix, Arizona.
Here's how Tim Mason, of Tesco USA, sold the idea to the British press:
"The Fresh & Easy Neighbourhood Market format is designed to draw customers back to their local neighbourhoods by offering high quality, fresh and nutritious food at affordable prices.
"Our company has enjoyed strong success in countries throughout Europe and Asia, and we are excited to bring that success to America."
And here's how he sold it to the Arizona Republic newspaper:
"It is not a funny specialty store that sells imported things that a few Brits have a hankering for. It is very deliberately designed to meet the needs of the 21st-century American consumer."
Funny how the mildly denigrating latter comment didn't make it over this side of the pond. Still, at least there's no danger of Tesco destroying the smaller town centre shops in Arizona. If they ever even existed they've long since been killed off by the indigenous grocery behemoths, let alone the plucky outsiders.
The Sun has pulled off a blinder in acquiring the video footage of a friendly fire incident which killed a British soldier.
You can watch the full fifteen-minute video here. I just have done and, if you've ever played any Flight Simulator games, it's a bizarre, harrowing experience to see and hear what it's like behind the controls of a real fighter jet when something's just gone horribly, horribly wrong. Even listening to the audio alone is extremely powerful.
Fortunately, none of the 400 passengers or further evacuees from Didcot Parkway station seems to have been hurt, but it could be leaving First Great Western with some long-term damage. If postings on a number of railway forums are to be believed, this is the third such fire involving one of First's newly re-engined High Speed Trains. And, let's be honest, the enthusiasts are usually right.
If there's one thing First Great Western is right about, it's the long-term merits of refurbishing its 30-year old HST fleet over buying new; they're much preferred by passengers on the grounds of speed, number of seats, ride-quality and comfort, to the point where FGW plans not to renew the lease on some of its newer trains when HST refurbishment is complete. But with quite such dramatic teething troubles (for teething troubles they are, I'm certain), it's a wonder the country's media aren't licking around First's headquarters with all the ferocity of Saturday's flames.
I hope they get this sorted before something terrible happens. Quite aside from the potential dangers of trains bursting into flames unannounced, it would be tragic to see the excellent reputation of the HST besmirched by an ignorant media, hungry for an easy scapegoat. The age of the train would dominate the headlines, and First would be slaughtered for their use of 'museum pieces' or the like, where actually they deserve praise. The danger lies not with the HST because it's old, but with a modification that presumably needs a little more thought.
It could happen to any train...
... but as Ollie and his online journalist friends know, seldom you can find a photo, eh Ollie?...
You have to feel sorry for the 160,000 turkeys on a farm at Holton, in Suffolk, now facing the chop after three thousand of their colleagues succumbed to the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
They probably got away with Christmas on the grounds that Farepak collapsed - thousands upon thousands of Christmas hampers went unpacked, so our feathered friends were given a stay of execution.
Only, sadly, for Christmas to catch up with them a month and a bit later. Whoever sneezed first in that barn last night must have experienced an all-too-fleeting moment of the deepest unpopularity before they expired.
There's some horrific pictures on the BBC News website, showing turkeys apparently being emptied from a truck into a container as the authorities try to contain the outbreak.
Meanwhile here in Berkshire all thoughts turn to how we're going to cover this story.
Last year we put a piece of broadcasting kit in a farmhouse in West Berkshire - if bird flu appeared in the area, it meant we could get a local farmer on air in good sound quality almost immediately.
Two months ago we sent an engineer out to bring all that kit back, since it was felt we needed it elsewhere. Do we rush it back in place in the expectation that H5N1 will wend its way across the south? Will our roving reporter be stood in the middle of nearest turkey farm come Monday morning? There's about three people in this newsroom all weekend, so resources aren't exactly overflowing, but if I were you I'd put money on the sound of gobbling on your radio this coming week.
You have to pity the few remnants of the Barmy Army still to be found sat in various Aussie cricketing stadia, watching 2005's heroes cementing their position as 2007's laughing stock.
Not only have they had to contend with a run of performances not seen since George Bingham first suggested to the other 600 members of his light brigade that there was nothing for it but a good old-fashioned charge.
Nope - now our beleaguered England fans Down Under can't even get pissed and fart around like morons, thus losing their one great love aside from cricket: the Aussie authorities have banned the Mexican wave!
Now to you or I, that sounds like an unbelievably killjoy attitude from a nation just about to finish wiping the floor with some of the most spineless cricketers produced since the short-lived Grass Snake XI.
But apparently the Aussie version of the Mexican wave isn't just a statement of utter tedium brought on by the sporting "event" in question - it's an excuse to lob your food at the nearest small child, says Australian columnist Malcolm Conn:
Anyone who wants to complain about the banning of the Mexican wave by cricket authorities should turn their anger towards their fellow spectators.
Sections of the outer at some one-day international matches are yobbo-infested cesspools of drunkenness, foul language and sprayed beer.
During my time as a father of young children who loved cricket, I was reluctant to take them into the outer at the Melbourne Cricket Ground during a one-day match. It could be unpleasant, unsavoury and dangerous.
Being showered with beer, food, rubbish and, in some cases, urine from yobbos relieving themselves in their empty beer cups, takes all the fun out of a Mexican wave.
You can see why, in that light, the Mexican wave is slightly less appealing. But over on the other side of the fence - well away from cans of urine - Sydney Morning Herald columnist Philip Derriman says the tide should turn in favour of the wave:
Recently, the SCG [a cricket ground] did something else which has proved more successful than all the other measures combined: it restricted everyone outside the members' area to light beer. Not a huge change, you might think, replacing beer that's around 5 per cent alcohol with beer close to 3 per cent. But the effect has been profound.
Since the change was introduced in all public areas at the SCG last summer, unruly behaviour has all but disappeared.
In fact, there wasn't a single arrest during the recent Test, or during last week's one-dayer against England. No spectator did anything bad enough to warrant it. All of which confirms what everyone has known, that alcohol is the root cause of crowd problems.
In light of this, the SCG should now consider relaxing the ban on the popular Mexican wave. Cricket Australia, not the SCG, ordered the ban, apparently because drunks were using the Mexican wave leap as an opportunity to shower people around them with chips and beer.
Now that the beer is light, the wave ought to be trouble-free.
The solution, surely, is to adopt the straps used by Nintendo Wii controllers? Despite early technical problems they've done a fine job of keeping every gamer's Wii under control:
Strap one of those puppies on and you can leap up as many times as you like, but the beer - or any other contents - stay about your person. I thank you.
I'm going to give you something of a world exclusive here.
A couple of hours ago a lady rang the newsroom at the radio station. When I answered she said she'd given us a call because she "just wanted to moan".
This is usually the cue for ten or fifteen minutes of thinly veiled abuse from a member of the public dissatisfied with the work we're doing in some shape or form. But it turned out that the lady didn't want to moan about us - she wanted to moan about her electricity company.
Now you'll remember we had some mightily blustery times on Thursday, as a rather large storm passed over Berkshire and the other Home Counties. Well after the worst had passed, this lady discovered a live electricity cable dangling over her driveway, just underneath head height. It had been brought down in the storm and while all the other houses in her street still had power, she didn't - except for the death-trap swinging to and fro near the front door.
Naturally she rang the electricity company to report this as quite an urgent matter, and she says they agreed. They'd send someone over, and in the mean time she and her family were to remain indoors and on no account venture out near the cable.
That's all well and good, but it took the electricity company over a day - in fact, nearly two - to turn up! The lady was busy telling me the story on the phone when she broke off to answer the door, and in the background I could hear a gentleman explaining he had come from the electricity company about the cable (clearly he'd made it past said cable to the door - it would be unfortunate to electrocute the electrician).
So this poor lady has been trapped in her home for a couple of days, afraid to leave for fear of sending however many thousand volts down her spine. Somehow she seemed quite chirpy about the whole thing, whereas I'm sure I'd be on the point of murder if I had things to do and couldn't get past my door unless I diced with death.
What would have happened had one member of the family fallen victim to the cable? What if a neighbour happened by and failed to notice it? What if the postman suddenly found his round curtailed when leaning back up from their letter box? Who would be responsible for the horrific accidents that could have taken place? The owner of the property or the electricity company charged (sorry) with maintaining the cable? I'm hoping we get her on our breakfast programme on Monday, it should be really interesting.
The storms have apparently also taken their toll on Basingstoke Town FC. Some of the exterior walls at the club's ground have been blown over - and the club are getting one of their fans to fix it! According to their manager, who spoke to me earlier, a supporter named Cliff is a dab hand at this sort of thing.
It reminds me of Slough Town's Darron Wilkinson, who's just taken over as Slough manager having previously been a player. In 2004, when they played Walsall in the FA Cup, the FA said Slough's ground needed segregation for home and away fans putting in. It just so happened Darron was a scaffolder, so he ended up installing the extra facilities, then playing on the pitch!
For starters, 2007 is an International Polar Year - only the third ever, after years in 1882 and 1932. It means groups from various countries will club together to pool their resources in order to further our understanding of the poles.
And speaking of Poles, the first day of 2007 sees Bulgaria and Romania join the European Union, while Kofi Annan will finally step down as UN Secretary-General, to be replaced by South Korean Ban Ki-moon.
At the end of January, Microsoft will release their new operating system - Windows Vista - for public consumption.
On 11 March the US and Canada switch to Daylight Savings Time, two weeks ahead of the UK, in a change to the previous dates. Meanwhile, on the same day, the World Cup of cricket begins in the West Indies (anyone got a ticket?). Two weeks and a day later, the long overdue smoking ban comes into force in England.
22 April heralds the first round of the 2007 French presidential election . I'm supporting Ségolène Royal, because I like her name. As with the US election, there was very little science involved in my deliberations. The second round takes place on 6 May.
The Eurovision Song Contest takes place in Helsinki on 12 May, after Finnish band Lordi won in style last year. Expect the Icelandic vote to be somewhat distracted - they've got a general election on the same day.
6 June marks the start of another G8 summit, this time in Germany. Will Tony Blair be there? And three weeks later it's the start of the Manchester International Festival - coincidentally, just two days before a calendar blue moon (a second full moon in a calendar month). Maybe it's Manchester City's year...
The first day of July brings us the concert for Diana, which will take place at Wembley Arena, and six days later London is again the centre of attention as the starting point, somewhat illogically, for the Tour de France.
Finally, in September we can look forward to the World Cup of rugby, with matches mostly in France but also occasionally in Wales and Scotland.
Now, the bookies have long since cottoned on to our predilection for a prediction, and at 6/4, Girls Aloud splitting up is a hot favourite for the year ahead - but the Spice Girls could reform, at 12/1.
Prince William to become engaged to Kate Middleton is at 2/1, far more likely than the 10/1 shot that is Osama Bin Laden being captured - itself a dead cert compared to the UK winning Eurovision, at 20/1.
But some people are banking on an altogether less likely proposition: the Second Coming.
I hope it doesn't happen too soon, I need a few more years of life.
Yes, on 26 October.
No, but it would be nice. What a surprise for Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has an interesting little section entitled 2007 in fiction.
Finally, one blogger predicts MySpace will become "uncool" in 2007 (it has to happen at some point), to be replaced by fellow social networking site Orkut. So - anyone got an Orkut invite going spare?
Happy New Year all - 2006 Dayorama not-a-zeitgeist-honestly to follow...
One wonders, now that the 37-year-old arrested in connection with the Suffolk murders has been released (albeit on police bail), whether the decisions of various media outlets - the BBC and the Mirror included - to publish interviews with him was overly wise.
I couldn't believe it when I first heard the interview being broadcast. All the legal training I've been given would point to this being at best a bit reckless and, at worst, likely to cause serious prejudice to any possible trial. But nobody at the BBC is going to have aired it without the legal team going through every second of it first. As a legal example it goes to show the changing, shades-of-grey nature of broadcast law, rather than suggesting anything's gone horribly wrong.
Yet I'm still surprised it ended up on air. The gentleman concerned apparently had the word of the BBC that it would be used for background purposes and would not be aired. Just because the man ends up being arrested, it doesn't immediately invalidate any responsibility to keep promises made to him. It's a major journalistic scoop to have that interview, but it's a little morally vacant to go back on your word in the process.
If it were me, I'd have kept the interview back and only used it at the end of any future trial. That five or ten minutes would have made an immensely powerful backbone for a retrospective documentary had the gentleman been convicted. As it is, expending such emotionally charged ammunition at a legally risky moment, before the subject has been charged with any crime, feels to me like jumping the gun.
I've read Adrian Van-Klaveren's justification and can see what he's getting at (he's one of the people in charge of these big decisions - not a job I currently envy), but keeping the interview back until it could have been used in the cold light of day wouldn't have diminished the journalistic skill involved in getting it. More to the point, if the gentleman turns out to be entirely innocent, BBC News could have talked to him about using parts of it - or quietly shelved it as the background information it originally was.
It's been a good weekend for former members of the London College of Communication's broadcast journalism postgrad.
On Friday night we had a rather large London Irish story break - exclusive to us, thanks to the hard work of our reporter Graham, who knows the club inside out. They were extremely angry about what they allege to be the racist abuse of one of their players by someone playing for their opponents, Ulster. After the match, the club told Graham they were going to file a formal complaint about it.
Nobody else picked up on this story, so we had an exclusive. When I rang BBC Sport Interactive at 10:30pm I was told their rugby union desk had all gone home (!), but that didn't stop us having the story on BBC Sport's homepage by 11pm - with quotes attributed to our station. Here's the BBC sport version.
It's always a nice touch when your station name stays attached to a story (all too rare), and it's been brilliant to see us getting credit for it in the many news outlets which have since repeated it. And it's all down to Graham, who spends enough time and effort following the club that he deserves the occasional exclusive - this one, he handled superbly.
My friend and former LCC colleague Andy's also been doing well. He bounded onto our internal version of MSN Messenger this afternoon like an eager puppy, having broken this story:
Some of the most exotic species at the National Sea Life Centre in Birmingham could die if electricity is not restored after a black out.
The power cut has left temperatures in the tanks at the centre at critical levels, said manager Ian Crabbe. Supplies were cut to 8,500 businesses and homes in the city centre at 0330 GMT due to a fire in a sub station.
Only eight properties - including the Sea Life Centre - were still not reconnected by Saturday evening. "There is a grave risk of animals dying," said Mr Crabbe.
I'm not sure how Andy got this story (whether the centre rang the BBC or he went, ahem, 'fishing' for it) but it's a very good angle on an otherwise mundane power cut. Earlier it had seemed like the fish would be fine but, reading that latest version, all is clearly not well. I'll confess to actually being rather worried! It's really sad to think of those animals dying simply because they're in one of just eight properties left without power.
Finally I had a lovely time at Slough's junior athletics club earlier today. They've just been named Junior Athletics Club of the Year by UK Athletics - that means they're the best in the whole of Great Britain, and it also means a cheque for £3,000. I went down to cover their afternoon of competitions and awards in celebration of their newfound status as the UK's premier junior club, and the atmosphere was understandably buoyant. There was so much cheering going on that my microphone could barely cope with the noise level.
When the ceremonial bit of the afternoon started, I spent a fair bit of time stood alongside the gentleman who runs the club as he made various announcements. He then, unexpectedly, decided to introduce me to the hundreds of children and parents watching. They'd clearly been in the mood for cheering all afternoon, so even I was treated to a really loud cheer. I don't think I've ever been quite so speechless before - for some reason I was dead embarrassed! Very kind of them though and I had great fun (plus I got to use the "Chariots of Fire" music in the package I've edited together about it, which is never a bad thing).
By the way, if you always watch the Olympics in awe of our top athletes as I do, don't be fooled - they're mere mortals. Nicola Sanders, Great Britain hurdler, came to the Slough event too - and then spent half an hour searching frantically for her car keys at the end. They eventually turned up in a toilet (or in the toilet building, at least), but I'm told she has a reputation for losing the simplest of things. Looking at the cricket, she must be an English athlete.
We should probably lay our t-shirt design to rest - it looks like the Hamster is now well and truly back:
My thanks to Amy J (who else?) for pointing out this article, which announces Richard Hammond's return to action.
Richard Hammond celebrated his first day of filming for the new series of Top Gear by attending the TG Cars of the Year Awards last Thursday.
On his first night out since his jet car accident in September, Richard was accompanied by co-presenters James May and Jeremy Clarkson, who confirmed that the first episode of the new series is due to air on January 28 at 8pm on BBC2.
Lego's Andy Woodman presented Richard with a scale model of the infamous Vampire jet car and a Lego version of the Top Gear studio set, complete with presenters and, of course, a tiny Stig. This followed Richard's recent announcement that playing with Lego blocks had aided his swift recovery.
Not sure they've done as well as they could with the chair and sofa in the background, but it'll do.
In other news we'll pop back to the maths story briefly for some stats. Today I discovered that, in its first full day online, the article's two videos were viewed approximately 51,000 times. To give you some idea of scale, the third-placed piece of audio or video in our list - behind the two maths videos - was accessed 31 times. Our servers shifted over 100 gigabytes of maths video to the world that day.
I'm also pleased to see that the comments to my follow-up, while still largely disagreeing with Dr Anderson, have been of an altogether far higher class of literacy and numeracy. Clearly the folk with enough interest in the issue to come back for the follow-up are the ones with something to contribute - and if that contribution is to disagree strongly then that's fine by me (I'm conscious of the opinion, in certain places, that we've somehow already made our minds up that Dr Anderson is 100 per cent correct). Given our local university's refusal to put anybody up to challenge Dr Anderson, it's vital that people have written in.
It's disappointing how hypocritical some people can be when taking time out of their busy schedules to criticise others. I came across the blog of a Guardian science writer (Ben Goldacre) earlier in the week, a man who took it upon himself to write the following:
What is odd is a reporter, editor, producer, newsroom, team, cameraman, soundman, TV channel, web editor, web copy writer, and so on, all thinking it’s a good idea to cover a brilliant new scientific breakthrough whilst clearly knowing nothing about the context. Maths isn’t that hard, you could even make a call to a mathematician about it.
Now if you're going to accuse somebody of being inaccurate and knowing nothing about a subject, it helps to get any references to that person or organisation right. Of our Guardian science writer's list of people who could have stopped this apparently heinous crime against science (for which read: local "and finally" story) being published, very few actually exist:
There was no cameraman or soundman - our reporter is a video journalist, he does all of that himself.
I wrote the copy for the web but there was no "web editor" involved (how many people does he think work for us? I'm running the site entirely on my own this week!)
Of the list of editor, producer, newsroom, team and TV channel, I can grant that an editor and producer are involved in getting the report onto TV (but importantly, not involved in getting it onto the web). But what's this "newsroom" and "team"? How is a "team" different from a "newsroom"? What is the TV channel supposed to do about it? The TV channel is the end product - it's a thing, not a person! BBC1 can't just stop transmitting if it realises it's broadcasting a maths report it doesn't fully agree with, it's a bloody television set!
The point here is that it's all well and good picking us up for not knowing our mathematics inside out - but, if you're a science writer writing about journalists getting things wrong (in your view), you can't get lots of things about the journalism in question wrong. It devalues your entire argument. You could even make a call to a journalist about it.
What you're looking at is proof, according to one Reading scientist, that you can divide by zero. Or at least, you can sort of divide by zero. If Dr James Anderson has his way, instead of your calculator giving you an error message should you try it, you would get a brand new number: nullity.
I've written his proof on the back of an envelope for added authenticity - nullity is the funny zero-with-an-I-in-it seen in the top left hand corner. You can watch Dr Anderson explain it all himself in an article here.
One of my colleagues went out and filmed him, a piece BBC News 24 and South Today used this evening. Up til 10:30pm tonight we'd had over fifty comments on the web feature, an amazing level of interest in what is, essentially, maths. It's heartening that people who like maths come out of the woodwork given the temptation!
The only problem is, a lot of them think Dr Anderson has got it horribly wrong. Here's a small selection of comments:
"In the derivation when the expression 1/0 x 0/1 is written isn't the 1/0 undefined and the solution unattainable?"
"I fail to see how this idea could withstand basic algebra."
"This is absurd, you can't just take two unknown quantities and set them to your own made up definition."
Some of the comments slip into fairly detailed mathematical language - which creates the fun spectacle of people trying to write "nought over one to the power of minus one" using a plain text box. But the message is clear: Dr Anderson has by no means convinced everyone, and it's looking like he may have struggled to convince anyone.
The next step will be for me to take all these concerns to Dr Anderson and see if we can get a response or a clarification. It seems odd to me that his theory would get as far as television if it's so easily blown out of the water by visitors to our site, so there must be something more to it.
But I'm not going to go before I've armed myself with a little more knowledge. I've harnessed the rusting remnants of my A level maths to reply to one lady who wrote in about 'nullity', since I reckoned I could spot a hole in her logic, but I'm struggling to keep up with the main thrust of the debate. There's only one person to turn to: my old maths teacher, Mr Cutts.
I've fired off an email - if anyone is able to tell me, in simple terms, whether Dr Anderson is onto something or not, it will be him. Whatever the outcome, I think it's brilliant that one of our most successful articles in ages has been all about maths. Perhaps we shouldn't despair for civilization just yet.
Sometimes I look around at the BBC and wonder where all the creativity has gone. But far more often I'm left stunned by the sort of stuff being produced, stuff that makes me realise I've got a long, long way to go.
The series of short animations produced by the Newsround team, to illustrate child poverty in a way that kids will understand - and bother to watch - is a perfect case in point.
Late last week Tim Levell, the Newsround editor, wrote about them on the BBC's Editors' Blog:
One of the aims of CBBC is to make television that's engaging for seven to 11-year-olds, and all our recent research shows that bleakness is a turn-off, both visually and emotionally. Children respond best to strong visuals as well as some practical and positive outcomes.
So when CBBC's creative head Anne Gilchrist suggested the idea of using cartoons to tell the children's stories, everyone at Newsround instinctively knew that this could be a very exciting and powerful idea. As far as we know, no one has ever attempted to tell current affairs using animation.
Children we've shown it to have really liked the different animation styles, including photo-montage, comic strip and cardboard cutouts. They weren't really expecting a "documentary", but to our relief they've kept watching, and some have even had tears in their eyes by the end.
Tim's post about the background to the animations is good, but the comments people have left on it are better. A lady named Di wrote:
I saw the programme on the TV tonight and thought what a strange way to portray the stories - I felt it was a little demeaning. then I noticed my two children, especailly my son who is normally turned off by anything like this. The programme had their full attention throughout and they wanted to engage further after the programme finished too. I've changed my mind completely about the presentation style.
But a gentleman named Donal questioned the raison d'etre behind the animations:
Why is important for children to be aware of all the wrongs in the world so early? Can we not just let children be children, they will spend many years of their lives being aware of "the worlds problems" with out it being drilled into their heads so early.So children recognise other peoples misfortunes? What would you like them to do about it? Feel guilty? Childhood seems to becoming ever shorter.
I've watched every single one on the Newsround website and so should you, they're outstanding and deserving of an award. Not only is the animation absolutely first class - five different techniques for five different stories - but the actual content really is worthwhile and well presented.
Each story is voiced by the child it involves, and we're given the merest glimpse of the actual child at some point in the animation, to remind us that this is the story of a very real person.
Di, in her comment, has it right I'm sure when she says her children were gripped. I'd go further than she does - I didn't find the cartoons demeaning at all, and they kept me much more involved in the story than if this had been a dry Newsnight or BBC News 24 report into child poverty. No reporters, no talking heads, no statistics, just real kids telling their stories with something interesting to watch. No wonder Newsround's target audience responded well to it.
As for Donal's fears about the dwindling innocence of childhood, I don't agree that children should be kept away from the bad things in life, just as I don't think children should be intentionally exposed to them either. It's not like Newsround wants every child to live in poverty, it's just trying to broaden the horizons a bit for children who don't, or let children who do know they're not alone - and that they've got a voice. Kids are exposed to enough truly horrible news - wars, murders, etc - on the 'adult' news, that the least their very own version can do is try to explain some of the bad stuff in the most accessible way possible.
It really would be demeaning if Newsround spent every bulletin pretending the world is a faultless arena of joy to an audience containing, in many cases, kids who know damned well it isn't.
Great news for Graeme Murty - he's BBC South's Sports Personality of the Year.
Great news for us too, because it means the weeks we've spent hectoring Reading fans to pick up the phone and vote have paid off.
The people counting the votes (it was a phone vote between Graeme, yachtswoman Dee Caffari and mountaineer Rhys Jones) kept telling us the vote was extremely close, and at one point announced to us that Graeme was in second place.
So we've spent almost every news and sport bulletin not-so-subtly reminding people which number they need to call in order to vote for Graeme, and tonight he picked up the award.
But no matter how big a personality Graeme Murty is, he's not big enough for Alan Ball to be able to say his name properly.
Watching the live webcast of the event on the net (it wasn't on TV so that was a bit of a triumph for the BBC's web services, even if the connection was sometimes dodgy), Ball opened the envelope and announced "Graeme Murphy" as the winner.
Let's hope Graeme can see the funny side, especially given the inevitable stick he'll get for that in training. But then he's a very funny man when he comes in to do an hour's radio on our breakfast show most Mondays. I'll be making sure I'm up bright and early to listen out for him tomorrow!
Good luck to David, by the way, who will be spending this week frantically working away at books full of bus terminology in preparation for his exam on Friday. And when he's not doing that, he'll be providing us with a pictorial tale involving OJ, a telephone and a boar's head. It's worth the wait.
If you've been on a bus or train, especially in London, you'll have had an experience where some eejit's playing their music through the speaker on their mobile phone, just because they can.
Clearly Ken Livingstone knows the God-that's-annoying-but-they-might-kill-me sensation all too well. Earlier this week he declared that people playing their music to all and sundry on London's buses could be stripped of their travel passes and thrown off the bus in question.
What he didn't say was by whom:
Speaking before the London Assembly last week, Mr Livingstone said ... Transport for London (TfL) was adapting an upcoming campaign "to incorporate the playing of music on buses".
The campaign by TfL is designed to reduce anti-social behaviour and crime and improve "passenger perception of safety on the bus network".
Calling for an "absolute prohibition on playing music from a mobile system" Mr Livingstone said "people will be asked to leave the bus and in the case of a child with free travel concession they would forfeit it".
Ken, that's great. I hate loud music on buses too. But you're not going to catch me confronting anyone about it, and according to to Jim Buckley of the T&G workers' union, you're not going to catch many bus drivers at it either:
"It would mean the driver having to get out of his cab, thereby putting himself in a situation of potential assault," he told the BBC News website. On that basis, we don't want anything to do with it."
Can you blame them? Only this morning came another story of violence on public transport in London: a 12-year-old girl 'brutally' attacked. In that report, the driver gets rapped for not doing more:
[The girl's mother] criticised the bus driver for failing to do more to help her daughter. She claimed the bus driver did not intervene, call for medical assistance or even stop the bus ... An Arriva London spokesman said: "It would be totally unacceptable for a bus driver to behave in the manner described. We expect drivers to make the safety of customers a priority and summon the emergency services via the bus radio if requested."
Granted, you'd want your bus driver to get the emergency services in an incident like that. But get out of the cab and confront the perpetrator, whether it's a knife-wielding maniac or a bloke playing Girls Aloud at 120 decibels? I think any bus driver doing that has a death wish.
The solution for Northern trains has been to employ a private firm on their services:
Private security guards are to ride trains in the north of England to crack down on the abuse of rail staff.
The action follows more than 300 incidents of abuse and assault on Northern Rail staff so far this year.
Rail union RMT said some of its members have been kicked in the head, punched in the face and so badly assaulted that they have taken weeks off work.
Some rail staff have suffered verbal abuse, threats of violence and have been spat at by passengers.
If you're facing statistics like that as a bus or train driver, you're hardly going to go looking for trouble by staring down boisterous youths with mobile phones at full blast. Clearly the trouble is perfectly adept at finding you without you finding it.
I'm no David Sheppard in the Mastermind category of 'bus nostalgia', but I can't help feeling conductors on buses stopped this from even being an issue. Take away the authority figure and it's no wonder mindless hooligans can do what they like on our public transport networks. Even your chavviest teenager can work out that bus drivers need to drive the bus, and won't bother risking anything by coming back there and trying to deal with that loud music. If you get on your bus and you're welcomed by a conductor with nothing better to do than watch you like a hawk, you might share your Jay-Z collection a little less casually.
Having said all this, I'll be delighted to stand in David's bus playing music when he eventually learns to drive it. I'll set my drum kit up in it...
Just a quick one to say what brilliant pictures from Stormont this afternoon, where convicted loyalist killer Michael Stone attempted to break into proceedings armed with a gun, a knife, and very possibly a bomb.
Conveniently it was a pretty big Stormont meeting, which means all the major photo agencies were there. There can't be many occasions where what could have been a grisly attack was captured in finest detail by professional photographers.
All credit to BBC News Online for putting the pictures to full use - there's one expandable image and a gallery of a further five in their article, here.
My main problem with the usual abuse the BBC is given is that some people act like every BBC employee is working on the Middle East desk at News 24 or News Online. If you remove from the equation people with a vested political or personal interest in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the number of people lobbing verbal molotovs into BBC inboxes declines a fair whack.
From my point of view it's sad, and unfair, that people prepared to tear apart the BBC's coverage of the Gaza strip don't recognise that people like me spend our whole working week right in the middle of our communities, trying to do good things - even in our very small way - that people will enjoy.
And when I say communities, there will be people expecting that to bear out a supposed attitude some dub 'hug-a-Muslim'. It doesn't.
I have spent my entire afternoon processing match reports from junior football games around the county - taking reports from parents and coaches, sub-editing them, formattng them and adding them to the web. It might well not be a service you'd ever hope to use in your life, but every match report is 20-plus kids with their names, or at least their team name, in lights on our website. The feedback we get from parents is great: their children love finding the reports online and it feels like a real public service when I'm doing it.
I have absolutely no idea, nor do I care, what creed or colour the kids playing football are. From their names I can gather that some are of Asian origin, some are of European origin, many more are of British origin, but it's the very last thing on my mind.
I've covered a few junior football matches first-hand in the past couple of months, giving up a Sunday on top of my working week to go down to a game, take photos, and interview the young players as though it were a miniature Match Of The Day. I do it because it's great fun and, for the 100 or so players and parents there, it's an extremely visible sign that the BBC is trying to do something good for them.
If junior football isn't your bag I can guarantee the BBC has someone, somewhere, doing exactly the same thing for your pastime of choice - be it music, cars, gardening, wheelchair basketball or computers. It's a shame, for me, that cynics glued to the Middle East news items don't notice it if it isn't political. We just seem to get referred to as "you BBC", as though many thousands of individual employees, each often working in entirely non-political fields, all made Barbara Plett cry when Yasser Arafat died. We didn't.
On a related note, some journalists go beyond the call of duty in ways I could never dare (sacrificing Sundays is not something for which I'm about to demand a medal - I only use that to make the point that it's not something I do because I'm forced).
Dilawar Khan Wazir is a BBC Urdu reporter based in an area of northern Pakistan running along the Afghan border. He's gone missing, months after his young brother was killed and his family attacked by militants in the area. It's likely he's either kidnapped or dead.
I find it highly unlikely Dilawar Khan Wazir is "you BBC", watching militants attack and kill family members while he reports on an area where Osama bin Laden was once thought to be hiding - an area charged with political tension. We're all individuals and some take immense risks to try to find out what's really happening. And no matter what some people may say, that's the driving force behind the vast, vast majority of reporters you will ever meet, BBC or no BBC.
I'm proud to work for the same organisation as Dilawar Khan Wazir, and I hope he returns safe and well.
I'll be missing the live television extravaganza that is Children In Need tonight. From your point of view that's probably a good thing or else I might have ended up live-blogging it, which would only compound your misery if you're no fan of such things.
It feels like a decade since I actually last watched the main Children In Need event, and not even Terry Wogan's bubbling pecs will tempt me back into the house tonight, but good luck to all - I'll still be making a donation.
Of course, for some people Children In Need has already taken up hours of their time. On that note congratulations to Dayorama's very own Mr Sheppard, who formed one half of a team broadcasting right the way through last night to raise money. I assume he made it to the end! I certainly didn't and I imagine he's still sleeping it off, so we'll have to wait for him to tell the full story.
Last year Children In Need raised in excess of £33,000,000, which is a fantastic amount. If this year's total is similar, it stands to be beaten four times over by this week's EuroMillions jackpot, running at £120,000,000 according to all their advertising.
I can tell you right now that if I win that, I'll donate half of it to Children In Need immediately. That's how confident I am that I won't, although I've lobbed a never-to-be-seen-again £6 at four EuroMillions attempts. So, what could I do with £120m?
Renew Dayorama for the next two million years
Pay for a third of the BBC's relocation to Manchester
Purchase roughly half the Chelsea squad
Buy an Airbus A380 superjumbo
Buy a fleet of three hundred Pagani Zondas, and maybe give Amy J the use of one
In these environmentally friendly times, replace the Pagani Zondas with a fleet of six hundred bendy buses, or, alternatively, fund the operation of 60 London bus routes for a year
Or how about the grand combo: renew Dayorama for the next 50 years (£3,000), waive my BBC salary for the rest of my lifetime (let's say £1m), buy Shaun Wright-Phillips back for Man City off Chelsea (£24m), buy a Learjet (£5m), three Pagani Zondas (Amy J will crash two of them, £1.1m), subsidise one London bus route with ten bendy buses I procure (£4m), and throw in a country house with 100 acres, football pitch and swimming pool (£3m).
All that and I've only spent a third of the prize money. Sod it, Pudsey can have the rest.
Having attended a (very useful) training day run by one of BBC News Online's sub-editors yesterday, here's an error I imagine he'll be wanting to correct.
This man could turn one of my dreams into reality.
Here's what I wrote back in late April 2004:
I have been doing some thinking. And I have concluded that the world's ills will be solved by a single invention:
The ability to beam power.
What this means (well, it should be fairly self-explanatory, but Amy reads this so it needs expanding upon) is that just as we beam radio signals, visual signals, light signals etc, so we should eventually work out how to transmit power without the use of wires.
Click the link above and you'll find I proceeded to go a bit mad with this idea and envisage a future where we all kill each other.
But the concept of being able to somehow wirelessly transmit power is extremely exciting, even if I'm hardly the first person to have thought of it - some bloke called Tesla got there before me. It's strange that, for a technology that would transform our lives, wireless power has barely been mentioned... until now.
US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players wirelessly.
The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.
It's Prof Marin Soljacic, whose portrait sits at the top of this article, leading these advances in wireless power. The big plan he and his team of researchers have is to use resonance - the concept whereby something vibrates at a certain frequency. Apparently if you try this with electromagnetic waves, you get wireless power.
At least that's the theory (and I imagine the theory is a little more complex than that, but that's the basic premise). The team have only tested this in computer-based simulations, but according to the article these models 'suggest it will work'.
FirstGroup, the bus company, have set up a new driver recruitment centre - in Poland.
To help new Polish drivers learn the way the British talk, the company then show new recuits examples of British television:
A FirstGroup spokesman said new Polish staff were shown different TV programmes depending upon where they were going to be posted in the UK.
For example, a new recruit going to Glasgow may be shown a DVD of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly.
While someone heading to the English capital might be shown an episode of much-loved sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which is set in the London borough of Peckham.
All those worrying about the influx of immigrants from eastern Europe being too much for our country to cope - you can breathe easy.
Imagine you're a Polish bus driver, sitting down in your Polish recruitment centre for your introduction to the part of Britain in which you will be working.
Onto your screen walks this man:
Half an hour later you are definitely, 100 per cent not leaving Poland just to have to deal with something like that wanting to get on a bus. Potential overcrowding problem solved!
As the well-known video above proves, cats and cars rarely mix. Once I placed a 'fake' cat - a model of a sleeping cat curled into a ball, made with very life-like fur - into the back of my car. No sooner had I done so than my dad, on the verge of breaking into the car, rang me to ask if I knew how the 'cat' had managed to get in. Even non-cat cats are a bad idea around cars.
But we can't just take that for granted, we need somebody to go out and crunch the figures on crunched kittens. So I give you the very latest research, conducted over the last two years and wittily entitled Meowch!.
Here's my analysis of the findings:
Researchers: "A cat is run over on our roads every two and a half minutes. Drivers hit 630 cats every day." Me: Does narrowly missing a cat, stopping, getting out and giving it a good slap count as "hitting" the cat?
Researchers: "Bristol is pinpointed as the UK's cat accident black spot." Me: Now why should that be? Are the people of Bristol less vigilant while driving or do they just have a particular dislike for cats? Or maybe it's cats from Bristol which are peculiarly dense, of course...
Researchers: "Three out of four drivers confessed to having no idea what to do if they were to hit a cat." Me: Pull over, wait for the cat to pull over, get out, inspect the damage - all the while not admitting fault, nor apologising to the cat - then exchange details, take statements from witnesses, and notify insurance company.
Researchers: "Grimsby and Dundee are cat heaven, having the lowest number of reported incidents in the last year.
" Me: Grimsby and Dundee are such grim places that any cat burdened with the misfortune of living there spends its days curled up on the couch watching Eastenders, possessing no desire to test the cat flap. Grimsby cats, having followed the scent of fish, are far more likely to be hit by incoming trawlers.
Reading places sixth in the cat calamity league table, behind the likes of Nottingham and Swindon (bound to be trouble with that magic roundabout). Here's the full top ten, er, rundown:
1. Bristol
2. London
3. Swindon
4. Leeds
5. Nottingham
6. Reading
7. Jersey
8. Manchester
9. Cheltenham
10. Glasgow
By the way, if you're absolutely appalled having viewed the video at the top of this article, you might be interested in an Observer article written about it a couple of years ago. Traditionally when these online-only adverts surface it's assumed they are amusing spoofs mocked up by individuals. In this case, it seems the car company portrayed may have been behind it all along.
My apologies for neglecting you a little over the past week. The great God Wogan often jokes that the British public thinks there's only one man on the radio, and this week in Berkshire, they could be forgiven. By the time I've finished anchoring Sunday's coverage of London Irish versus Toulouse, I'll have spent 29 hours on-air in just eight days - which is roughly the same amount of time I've spent in bed during that period.
While all this has been going on, Britain's railway network has unceremoniously bid farewell to the final vestiges of one of its greatest ever branding initiatives - indeed, to my knowledge, the last trace of the nationalised British Rail era.
Granted, Network SouthEast - the 1980s brainchild of BR executive Chris Green (these days, Chief Exec. of Virgin Trains, Ollie...) - has now been defunct for the best part of thirteen years. But, tenacious to the last, its face has lived on through station furniture, faded signage and even, until recently, through liveried rolling stock.
The coming of NSE certainly brought about some much needed excitement on the railways. I vividly remember being bundled into a car with the greatest of haste to go and see "a surprise". It turned out to be a thirty-year old Diesel Multiple Unit, newly outshopped in NSE livery, which had finally brought the brand to our local station. At the time, it was the most radical change I'd witnessed on the railways in my area. With its toothpaste stripes and garish colours, it all seemed so modern.
In essence, it was an ailing railway dressed in new clothing. It had some real benefits for the passenger, but the priority was in regaining the trust and respect of rail commuters whose faith in the railways had died with any prestige of the British Rail brand, by now a universal punchline. Brilliantly, an army of painters was dispatched to paint red every one of the thousands of lamp-posts on the network, a cheap and simple measure with real visual impact. Things looked fresher, brighter, and the effect was good.
Ironically, red turned out to be a mistake. Just as it symbolised the rise of Network SouthEast, it was a colour that faded all too quickly, and ended up looking as shabby as what had been before. Only within a few years of rail privatisation and the disbanding of Network SouthEast, could most customers (as the private sector would have them) claim to be seeing any real improvement in the quality of their journeys - a genuine depth of colour in the railways which came through much needed investment in the things that actually matter.
But not everywhere. In some parts, investment has remained minimal, which is why thirteen years on, commuters between London Victoria, Crystal Palace and Croydon are still enduring daily sights like this:
Or, at least, were.
To its credit, Southern (itself a brand reborn from the ashes of the old pre-1960s company which served its territory) has at long last commissioned the refurbishment of the Class 456, the final Network SouthEast liveried trains, the first of which reappeared this week.
A miraculous transformation, which for the South East, completes the coming of the latest new age of the train. When my friend Matthew sent me the photograph this week, I was struck by how modern the trains look. It was 1986 all over again, though this time against a very different railway backdrop, where new rolling stock far outnumbers the old, and much of what 1986 set out to achieve has now been done.
So it's a tribute to the initiative of 1986 that, although the 456s had become less than proud ambassadors of a bygone age, I'm also slightly saddened that never again shall we see the colour of Network SouthEast on our metals. Far away on the Island of Soda, the Fat Controller once rewarded the good behaviour of his engines with a nice new coat of paint. Let's hope he paints one grey, red and blue, for all the little boys like me.
In and out as I am, I have little to report, other than - having read Ollie's post below - to point people to this article in Slate where the author tries to determine whether Rush Limbaugh is dumb, or just playing...
In the above US political campaign advertisement, actor and Parkinson's disease sufferer Michael J. Fox is seen struggling with his affliction while delivering a message in support of the Democrats' pro-stem cell research stance.
Famously controversial US broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, on seeing that video, had this to contribute on air:
"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He's moving all around and shaking, and it's purely an act. This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox."
I wonder what would happen to his RAJARs if he'd said that over here. Radio stations have been in the news a lot today, certainly from the perspective of someone who works at one, for this very reason. Today's the day our RAJAR figures - the audience measurement statistics all British radio stations use - were released for the last three months.
Our radio station has suffered a little in some areas and gained a little in others, so overall I think it's fair to say there's no crisis but no champagne either
The way RAJAR works is people are selected at random across the country and given little booklets to fill out, detailing all the radio they listen to, all the time. Then they return these and, from that sample, RAJAR decides how many people are listening to your radio station, when they're doing it, and for how long.
It is fair to say an element of doubt exists among the radio community over the accuracy of this system. In general, about 1 in 10 people actively listen to BBC local radio. We reckon there are about 400 RAJAR diaries being distributed in our county. That means the listening figures on which our shows rise and fall could well rest on the whim of the 40 or so people who both have a RAJAR diary and listen to us. It has been speculated that one diary-owning family going on holiday for two weeks could, in the figures, be responsible for the apparent loss of many hundreds of listeners!
What I really want to know is, have you ever seen one of these diaries? I've yet to meet anybody who has been issued with one, or knows someone else who has. Goodness knows how RAJAR select their guinea pigs. If you've been a RAJAR listener then let me know! What was it like? Did you get bored to death filling out the book? Did you even bother with it all the time? If they gave me one I'd probably leave it lying around somewhere and then have to make it all up at the last minute.
More to the point, how would you feel if the system were changed so that your radio had a little implant which told RAJAR what you listened to? Big Brother, or relatively sensible and unintrusive? After all, websites can tell exactly how many hits their live streaming of radio gets, and where they came from. Why not the same with listeners?
Families and tourists in a London park were left shocked when a pelican picked up and swallowed a pigeon.
The unusual wildlife spectacle in St James's Park was caught on camera by photographer Cathal McNaughton.
Mr McNaughton, from the Press Association, said: "There was a bit of a struggle for about 20 minutes, with all these people watching. The pelican only opened its mouth a couple of times.
"Then it managed to get the pigeon to go head first down its throat. It was kicking and flapping the whole way down."
About a month ago, Manchester City fans hung their heads collectively in shame. That's something Manchester City fans are used to doing, and they've been doing plenty of it recently, not least having lost 4-0 away at Wigan last weekend. But when lowly Chesterfield knocked City out of the Carling Cup, it was quite a pathetic display.
Tonight, then, is a happy occasion for City fans, who are no longer the only ones. Earlier this evening fellow Premiership also-rans West Ham United suffered the same fate, going down 2-1 to the Spireites (so called for the town's wonky spire, above) in the same competition. Chesterfield are now through to the 4th round of the Cup with two Premiership scalps to their name.
This is always the great story for the football media - the little side who come good in the Cup. It happens every season, and this time it is the turn of Chesterfield to taste the limelight when the 4th round draw is made (a draw in which they could face the likes of Arsenal, Chelsea or Manchester United).
But that's the Carling Cup, or the League Cup as it used to be known. It's always been the lesser of our two domestic Cup competitions, where Premiership teams often field weakened sides (neither City nor West Ham did, they're both just crap).
The FA Cup, with all its tradition, is where it really matters. It is from that competition that we get the time-honoured expression, "the magic of the Cup", whenever FA Cup 3rd round day comes to pass. That's when all the Premiership clubs go in to face the smaller sides who've battled through previous rounds for the privilege.
Two of those smaller sides are Maidenhead United and Merthyr Tydfil, who meet in the FA Cup at Maidenhead on Saturday. It's the 4th qualifying round - after this you go into the 1st round proper, so whoever wins this weekend's game will be two matches away from that magical 3rd round moment.
It promises to be a great game and I'm going to be there covering it for local radio. Both teams are in the Southern Premier Division, the seventh rung of English league football, one below the Nationwide Conference South (which is in turn two rungs below the main Football League), so you have to be quite a hardcore football fan to turn up to all Maidenhead United's matches. But some people indeed do, and I'll be meeting fans for a preview piece before the game on Friday.
Some of those fans have followed Maidenhead for so long that they remember the last time Maidenhead and Merthyr met in the FA Cup 4th qualifying round (this being football, there is always a precedent, always a staggering slice of history to accompany any game). That was 27 years ago, back in 1979, when the game was held at Merthyr. Maidenhead lost 2-1 and their fans vividly recall a less than pleasant welcome from their Welsh counterparts, who, it is alleged, bricked the away supporters' coach as it tried to leave the ground!
I'm hoping the atmosphere on Saturday will be a little more pleasant, but the stakes really are high. Win this, and you're in with the chance of facing a league club. Win the next game and you're a step away from Premiership opposition and a television special. To a club like Maidenhead the financial implications are as tantalising as the prestige associated with Cup success. 90 minutes of football will decide if they can make that happen. It's a beautiful game.
It's the done thing for many movies to paint a bleak future for humanity. After all, you only have to look at the news on any given day to realise it's not difficult to envisage things going horribly wrong.
Minority Report, which I watched for the second time on BBC3 a couple of nights ago, portrays a society so rigidly defined by identity that more problems are caused than solved. Every eye is scanned in every location - there is nowhere to hide. When you're innocent, that's a very bad thing.
Children Of Men, the film of the PD James novel, depicts a world where everyone is infertile, the last generation of humanity is dying, and Great Britain is the only nation still in existence - governed as a police state with democracy in tatters. The message: we're just one event short of eternal global catastrophe.
I've been thinking about this, and it is apparent to me that all this freedom of choice we now have could well be our undoing. Take television as the prime example: with a Sky+ box you can already record any programme you like, then watch it back at your leisure. Gone - or at least, going - are the days of appointment-to-view TV, when you can now make your appointment the moment you feel like it. The BBC's currently testing its iPlayer service, which will let you download hours and hours of TV to your computer in high definition, should you please. Already, the Beeb's 'Listen Again' service is operating almost at capacity, such is its popularity. You call the shots in the world of broadcasting.
Now apply this to the concept of 'Top 100' shows, with a liberal sprinkling of Minority Report theory. There are far too many Top 100 shows on TV but we tolerate them because they're always controversial in their own little way, and we like to enjoy watching them in order to catch snippets of our favourite shows. Above all we like to be reassured that other people like the same stuff we do. If Tom & Jerry isn't in the nation's 'Top 100 Cartoons', we want to know why. It's a nostalgic device, a safety blanket and a conversation topic - that's why these shows continue to endure.
What if a box on the top of your TV - the same box which lets you play a 'Top 100' at any time of your choosing - scanned your retina before the show began? What if it used your ID to call up a record of your most-viewed television since your birth and, from that, determined your 'Top 100 Cartoons'? When you sat down you'd be presented with your very own customised programme showcasing the 100 cartoons you've most enjoyed watching throughout your lifetime to date. That, in the eyes (literally in this example) of many broadcasting executives, must exist as some kind of holy grail. You cannot get more personal than that, and today the demand is always for the tailor-made viewing experience.
But how much fun would that really be? Imagine tuning in to be presented with your top 100 shows. There would be no surprises! No room for argument, because how can you argue with yourself? No anxious wait for the number one show because you know damn well your favourite cartoon is The Simpsons! Slowly but surely your idyllic world of on-demand, personalised television becomes a hell-hole where you're encased in your own bubble, away from anyone else's experiences. That's what we're doing - extending the user-generated environment to the point where there's no other input - and that's not just dangerous, it's boring.
The scary thing is just how close all this is. Watch Doctor Who when you like, follow it with Torchwood, download a customised news bulletin with the stories you choose from specialist criteria. How are you ever going to be exposed to anything you didn't know about, or didn't think you'd care to know about? I worry that technology isn't broadening our horizons any more - it's starting to close them. As Children Of Men we may not yet be infertile, but the fertile mind is very much an endangered species.
I'm delighted to find wireless internet has made its way onto GNER's trains, but why does it have to cost so much? Granted, it's a convenient service, but you have to pay £10 for a three hour journey. Given the tickets just to get on the train are pushing three figures for a return to Newcastle, an extra £20 to use the net in either direction seems steep to say the least.
The US parent of British rail firm GNER has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US. Bermuda-based passenger and freight transport firm Sea Containers made the move on Monday, after deciding it could not repay its $630m (£339m) debts.
With this kind of rhetorical question, the Mayor of London has persuaded us that the majority of Londoners are in favour of his forthcoming Low Emission Zone; and to be fair, the majority probably are. Why should anybody object to any scheme which, on the face of it, promises to improve their quality of life, with very little personal cost?
This is surely why the scheme has received comparatively little attention from the media, in spite of the massive implications it will have for the commercial vehicle operators who serve our Capital. The delivery lorries and vans which stock our shops and restaurants; the buses and coaches which ferry the tourists and Londoners who, through choice or financial necessity, have opted to leave their cars outside the congestion charging zone; for these, big change is gonna come.
Agreed, any attempt to improve the City's environmental credentials is effort well invested, and if this turns out to be a genuine stab at standing up for the environment then I'll put a well deserved sock in my particulate trap. But there's something about the implementation of this that appeals to the cynic in me.
Of course, Joe Public has become an expert cynic when it comes to the likes of speed cameras and congestion charging zones, both of which he's been quick to brand as thinly veiled revenue generators (by the way, no fine has been forthcoming for me as yet, so we'll assume I was innocent after all). I'd be quick to do the same in this case, and say who cares if commercial operators are being coerced into coughing up money that will ultimately be ploughed back into our City. A double triumph for Londoners it would be. But this seems a little more complicated than that.
The Mayor's plans will ultimately see a near prohibitive charge for any commercial vehicles inside the M25 which "fail to meet a minimum pollution standard". In that vein, he'll extend camera detection equipment (funded by the Londoners whose support we have already established) outside of Central London, where it's already busily snapping transgressors of the congestion charging scheme.
All well and good, you might think, if it's (a) going to deter smoky vehicles from entering London, and (b) going to catch a substantial number of vehicles which aren't listed as compliant on grounds of age or specification. But thinking about it, will it really do either?
My father, who admittedly runs one of the country's greenest fleets of trucks and vans (both in colour and environmental terms), is totally confident that his fleet will be 100% LEZ compliant by the time the scheme is introduced, just as a matter of course. The natural pattern of vehicle replacement will ensure that for them, as for most others, there are never any legitimate LEZ fines arriving at truck and bus HQ.
So a few years down the line, the Mayor will be left with a network of detection cameras outside Central London which are doing very little to earn their keep. What should he do with them?
Time for another question...
Fancy paying a Congestion Charge as soon as you leave the M25?
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, two London women come close to a shocking death - in a jacuzzi.
Leona Brandon, 48, was left unconscious in the whirlpool at the Esporta Health and Fitness Club in Worple Road, Wimbledon, on Sunday afternoon, when a light fitting fell from the ceiling and sent an electrical current through the water.
Her friend Mary Holland, 50, was rooted to the spot by electric shocks as she grabbed the metal steps and tried in vain to scramble out.
Miss Holland, of Leopold Road, said: "There was a big bashing noise as something fell into the water. Then other bits started falling down and I thought we'd better get out.
"I tried to pull myself up the steps, and suddenly an enormous surge of power went through me. It went on and on for what felt like minutes. I couldn't move, it was like being in concrete. We were both screaming, but Leona suddenly went silent and I thought, 'She's dead and I'm next'."
The pair were eventually pulled to safety and both have recovered. I should also point out that the health and fitness club aren't necessarily to blame - they reckon flooding in the flats above caused a loose tile, which sent the light fitting tumbling.
Mrs Brandon said: "I chose to belong to Esporta because it was a swish place, it looked very well fitted and had a nice blue pool. But it nearly killed me."
Slowly but surely, the nation learns its lesson. The gym will kill you. Don't do it.
Just as David Cameron's trying to rebrand the Conservative Party, local Tory councillor David Clutterbuck turns up on BBC News 24 to defend this email:
FW: Noah and the ark
Anne, I imagine now it would be illegal to only have animals of the opposite sex! Regards, David.
Cllr Clutterbuck was suggesting, light-heartedly, that in this day and age Noah would come under criticism for allowing only heterosexual couples onto the ark.
And if we're honest, he's probably right. More to the point, this is a nothing story - old Tory councillor sends throwaway email to colleague, pokes fun at the occasionally misguided nature of 21st-century inclusivity, gets hauled in front of the nation to account for his sins. Had I been news editor at News 24 this lunchtime, I wouldn't have chosen to mention it.
But I wasn't news editor, and there was Cllr Clutterbuck in all his stubborn glory in the BBC's Southampton studio. Would he be apologising, asked the BBC - no, he wouldn't, was the abrupt answer.
At this point Tory PR officers across the country would be hoping against hope that the councillor might say no, he wasn't apologising, but nor did he want to offend anybody, and this is what he meant by the email, etc etc. A clarification rather than a withdrawal.
What they got was Cllr Clutterbuck digging a suitably deep hole for himself on live television.
He complained that the flag had not been raised for the Queen's birthday, but the rainbow flag had been raised for a gay pride parade two weeks later, for example. That's a valid complaint! If you can do one, you should do the other - if the gay pride flag hadn't been raised, they'd have had cause to ask why not.
But Cllr Clutterbuck decided now was the time to refer to gay pride in Bournemouth as a "nonsense parade" attended by "only a couple of hundred people". Small though those numbers might be (and two hundred people are by no means insubstantial), dismissing the parade in those terms is asking for trouble.
What's really asking for trouble is going on to suggest that the gay population of Bournemouth are rather more promiscuous than their heterosexual equivalent. I think Cllr Clutterbuck used the word "flighty" among other, worse, comments - he certainly wasn't complimentary - and by that stage his remarks were beginning to feel rather unnecessary.
The best way of dealing with a nothing accusation, which has become a nothing story, is to play it down - not come out guns blazing over a one-line email about gay animals, especially in the same week as a party conference extolling the virtues of newly inclusive Conservatives.
Instead tomorrow's newspapers might see the attraction of running headlines like:
Today, two things have disappeared abruptly from places they were supposed to be.
The first is WOMAD. In an announcement at 4pm this afternoon the organisers declared WOMAD would no longer be held on the Reading site it has occupied since 1990, and will now take place elsewhere. You can read a full report here.
Obviously that's a disappointment - it's hardly likely to stay in Berkshire so that's the last I'll be seeing of it for a while - but on a personal note it's nice to think I reported on the very last WOMAD at Reading's Rivermead site. It was great fun and is already up there with my more treasured memories.
WOMAD Photos "I saw plenty of great bands without ever seeing an evening act..."
Back To WOMAD "What a bloomin' great day that was..."
The second thing to disappear abruptly is a large amount of money from my mother's bank account. She's been the victim of debit card fraud.
I got a semi-frantic phone call earlier this evening from her (and who can blame her? I'd have returned the favour and been a sight more than semi-frantic in the circumstances). She's unwittingly paid for about eight different flights on Asian carrier Tiger Airways.
Given Tiger Airways don't actually fly to Europe, let alone the UK, it's difficult to see what use my mum could make of these tickets, so it's fairly safe to say she didn't actually buy them. The bank have stopped the card and say they'll investigate tomorrow.
It does strike me as odd, though, how little information and help there is online about this. You'd expect plenty on the Lloyds TSB website about what to do in the event of card-not-present fraud, but I couldn't find a specific mention of your rights, responsibilities etc anywhere (you might be able to do better than me, of course).
There's a lesson there: always trust a BBC website to have something worthwhile. So on that note, a link for you. A couple of days ago I mentioned my afternoon at a junior football match, and now you can listen to the audio feature, read the report, and take a look at photos from the game, by clicking here.
Or, if you're being lazy, you can cut straight to the audio by clicking here (it'll load in Realplayer).
Well, it's not as if the Evening Standard would print it, but ensconced in my cheap hotel a good 25 minutes walk from the convention, and indeed civilization, it's time to share a few thoughts.
On queues
After my train to Bournemouth was slightly delayed, I finally arrived at around half eleven, along with (it would seem) half of the other delegates. This led to a half hour queue for a taxi, since Bournemouth station is the other side of the town to anywhere useful. And it was raining hard. Still, as I remarked to the taxi driver, it must be pretty good business. Many of you will have seen the reports of chaos at the late accreditation office for those of us who weren't sent their passes in time. It was Monday afternoon before I got there - so the event is almost half over - but by any count, the place was busy. First we were shifted into a large theatre, and we had to queue to get our name ticked off the list. There, the man who did the ticking would either say that your pass was ready, and you had to collect it, or you would just have to wait while the police finished their checks. It was when I was queuing here that I met people who had been waiting two days, and still couldn't get into the secure area. Not surprisingly, there were a fair few roving cameras and journalists looking for the frustrated activist. There were many to be found, but I was not one, for fortunately my pass was ready, and the whole process took me about 25 minutes to get one. Clearly, this is not an apogee of good planning, and while there was water and chocolate available for free, there was little sign of a contingency plan. And yet, as I've mentioned to a few people - if ever you were to get a bunch of people who were happy to queue in a nice orderly fashion, and suffer in silence, it would be at a Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth.
On freebies
Having made it into the secure zone, I then promptly went round the exhibition hall. Lots of free goodies to pick up, it reminded me rather of careers fairs in days past. I was particularly impressed with the Telegraph and House Magazine, who provide nice shiny bags. Sky, the BBC, and other media organisations had some cool stands. I'm not quite sure what exactly some of the local authorities were doing there - Tameside Council, anyone? - and it was good to see the pro-fur and pro-hunting lobbies there in force. Really no place for liberals here. Tomorrow, I'm going back to pick up more free papers, and also to the £6.99 silk tie stand, which looked good value.
On debates
At this point, in the BIC but not in the main hall itself, I was a little lost. I'd clearly missed the chance to get into the main hall, so I settled for a coffee and comfy seat watching it all in HD on the big screen provided by the BBC. Since it was near the end of the day, all I really saw was a meet the candidates session, and the Dragons' Den policy competition, which while just about bearable to watch, was nonetheless often at the edge of excruciating. Tomorrow I'm going to try and hit the main hall for most of the day, as soon as I finish my mammoth trek back to the BIC.
On the fringe
Now for many, the fringe is where the real action happens. Already we've had George Osborne's autism jibe at Gordon Brown (spun way beyond what it was, but frankly not a wise remark to begin with) at one meeting. I got to two interesting meetings. The first was on New Media, and featured Iain Dale and Ann Widecombe on the use of blogs and the internet in politics. Some sound stuff was said - in a couple of weeks, look forward to Widecombe's take on YouTube, the WideoVideo - although they never really got round to discussing how blogs tend to favour those in opposition, since scandal seems to be driving the big two (Guido and Iain Dale) more than serious contributions to policy. There's probably a way to harnass the internet positively in policy creation and government dialogue, but as Miliband's blog shows, it just hasn't been found. I fear for the good quality Tory blogs when we're in power, although by then blogs might just be obsolete.
I left the New Media event early to trek to another hotel (having gone to two similarly named ones already) to attend a meeting held by the Conservative Rural Action Group (CRAG). There were four very interesting speakers, including Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (the Black Farmer - alas, I didn't have time to discuss his foodstuffs with him in person), who is now the PPC for Chippenham, and also a lady from IPPR North, whose name I have forgotten, but bravely spoke to a hostile crowd about her research into the drain of the youth from rural to urban centres. She's sending me a copy of the reports, and it'll probably be worth a post in the future, but for now, she did remarkably well considering she started off with "I'm a feminist and a socialist" to a room that was, on average, at least 50 years old. Nonetheless, there were many interesting takes on whether the rural vote matters or not, and proof that not all the young have given up on the countryside. Expect to hear more from CRAG in the future - they've just relaunched, and have an impressive new drive. Couldn't sneak one of their t-shirts though.
On Bournemouth
Well, erm. Yes. It's Bournemouth, and I spent this evening back at the hotel trying to get some food while watching old people dance to an old guy rocking an old guitar. Labour stole a trick by going to Manchester, I think, and I shouldn't imagine that we'll be back in Bournemouth anytime soon. Or, if we are, I'm going to book my place much earlier, so I don't have to see any man in velour singing along to Buddy Holly.
On tomorrow
Tomorrow I'll hopefully be in the main hall for some of the big beasts - Hague etc. - on international terrorism. Then in the evening I'll be at the NFU fringe meeting which will be very interesting indeed I suspect. And then I have to catch the train back to London, and if I'm not on the 10.15, then I'm homeless for the night. Not good.
Mr Ross is on fine form this evening with his Friday night show. As I write he's about to serve up a fish stew he has cooked with the help of Jamie Oliver, in between a conversation about what happens to food that gets sent back at restaurants.
Ross: "Back goes the steak, it goes up there, in there, in the sock, round a few times, in the toilet, flush, flush, in the microwave, ping, on the plate, back out, 'I think sir will find the steak is better done'."
Don't ask where there is. Suffice to say it was a visual gag at that stage. I visually gagged.
Meanwhile, remind me to develop some sense of road navigation by 2011.
At the moment I rely heavily on my little satellite navigation widget to get me places I've never been before - even, sometimes when feeling lazy, to places I should really know well enough to find of my own accord.
In 2011 I'll be stuffed with an attitude like that. New Scientist reports as follows:
Navigation, power and communications systems that rely on GPS satellite navigation will be disrupted by violent solar activity in 2011, research shows.
A study reveals Global Positioning System receivers to be unexpectedly vulnerable to bursts of radio noise produced by solar flares, created by explosions in the Sun's atmosphere.
When solar activity peaks in 2011 and 2012, it could cause widespread disruption to aircraft navigation and emergency location systems that rely heavily on satellite navigation data.
For nearly two years I've been following the saga of Manchester City FC's quest to power their stadium with a wind turbine.
In November 2004, on the short-lived Floating Dog, I wrote:
The club has been in discussions with the local council and energy companies over proposals to place a series of wind turbines a stone's throw from the ground, so that the stadium would become the first of its kind in the country, indeed the globe, to be powered entirely by a renewable resource.
City already have an answer to anyone thinking of complaining. The club are expected to offer any excess power generated by the turbines to local homes at a discount.
Then, in August 2005 here on Dayorama, I noted that the scheme had reached the stage of an application for planning permission.
Today that planning permission has been granted! City will become the very first football club in the world to power its stadium with its own wind turbine and, as predicted, local residents will benefit from any excess energy generated.
This from the BBC News Online report:
The structure, designed by Sir Norman Foster, will be one of the UK's largest land-based turbines and should dwarf the nearby B Of The Bang sculpture.
Manchester City Council said it would be operational in 2007.
Planning spokesman Neil Swannick described the development as "an iconic statement of Manchester's commitment to renewable energy".
In all of this, there's one person for whom this must be incredibly bad news - Thomas Heatherwick. His studio designed 'B of the Bang', a splendid sculpture standing at one end of the City of Manchester Stadium. Its 59-metre high frame will now stand in the shadow of the 120-metre high wind turbine. Bang goes its 15 minutes of fame...
You know, I admire Tony Blair. I'm by no means a politician in the making, by no means a political correspondent in the making - but I know what I like, and this man, I like.
Forget the policies, the decisions over war in Iraq. You have to understand that in a modern political environment it's less the decisions that matter, more the personality - the personability - of the people making them.
Gordon Brown made his keynote conference speech yesterday and you might as well, I suspect, have watched paint dry. Nick Robinson had five minutes on the speech in the Six O'Clock News and that was less than riveting - the whole speech can hardly have been better.
Tony Blair is currently on the stand and he's holding his audience - here in the office, there at the conference, probably across the country - rapt. He can talk to people. "How," my dad asks - and bear in mind, here, that my parents met at a meeting of the Young Conservatives - "How," he asks, "can people elect that man when he took us to war on a lie?"
But this is a man whose words could weasel him out of any situation. Gordon Brown's words couldn't weasel him out of a brown paper bag, let alone a Brown crisis. He shall forever remain weaselly. He looked weaselly yesterday, he's sat there looking weaselly now, he'll look weaselly on tomorrow's front pages.
A case in point. Just a few sentences into his speech today, Tony Blair delivered this line:
"At least I know Cherie won't run off with the bloke next door."
Try and envisage Gordon Brown delivering that line. No, I can't either.
Can you envisage David Cameron delivering that line?
Do you care much about the Guinness Book of Records? Did you even think it still existed? Somehow it seems a bit passe (I'd put an accent on that but I'm pushed for time and don't know the keyboard shortcut).
The Doctor Who website team think otherwise. I quote from a news item on the site yesterday:
When the 2007 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records landed on the Doctor Who website team's desk, we were eager to see if Doctor Who gets another mention in the new volume.
It does, but not quite in the way were expecting.
Baffled by its claims, we asked Tom Spilsbury, the statistically-minded assistant editor of Doctor Who Magazine, to do the maths for us:
"I was pleased to see that Doctor Who is mentioned on page 178, as 'the longest-running science-fiction TV series'," says Tom, "although there have been 723 episodes now, not just 709, tsk!
"But I was left rather baffled by the entry on page 180, which lists the record for 'Longest running sci-fi TV show (consecutive)'.
"The book has awarded this particular record to the US series Stargate SG-1, which started in July 1997 and had notched up 203 episodes, beating the previous record of 202, allegedly held by The X Files. (There's even a picture of the SG-1 cast with their certificate!)
"Why isn't Doctor Who given this record, when the programme had a new series of episodes every year without fail between 1963 and 1989, racking up 695 episodes in the process? Why doesn't this count as a much longer 'consecutive' run? Surely 695 consecutive episodes beats 203, doesn't it? Doesn't it?"
The team put out an appeal for contact details pertaining to the Guinness Book of Records (they couldn't find any), received a fantastic response, and now promise 'an exciting development' soon...
It's looking like we can write Sergio Garcia off as Europe look to hold their lead in the Ryder Cup in Ireland.
The Europeans have won every single session so far to give themselves a 10-6 advantage over the USA (where you get 1 point for winning against your competitor(s) over 18 holes, and half a point for a draw).
But with 12 matches on the last day you've got a potential 12-point shift to worry about, so a 4 point lead can be reduced to nothing very quickly. With Garcia four holes down on American Stewart Cink after just six holes, and putting his second shot into the water at the next hole, it's starting to look like that's at least one point surrendered.
Tiger Woods is also leading - having had a terrible weekend thus far - but the Europeans hold narrow leads in three other match-ups, not least Colin Montgomerie, who was first out on the course today.
It falls to Irishman Padraig Harrington, in about half an hour's time, to be the last European out on course against Scott Verplank. It could fall to Paddy to hole the putt to win - or lose - the Ryder Cup. Lucky boy.
Everyone here in the newsroom is upset - we all love Richard Hammond. He's by far the wittiest presenter on the show and plays his role perfectly. Just a shame he has to go crashing jet-powered cars. I wonder if it hit a caravan...
Note, by the way, that should Richard Hammond take a turn for the worse, his fate will immediately be compared to that of Steve Irwin - both sustained their injuries doing the job they loved. Is it worth it? I asked that question here.
What's the story in the morning glory that is today's Times? (London Times, not Hindu.) Well, Noel Gallagher may be a Manchester City fan, but he's an unlikely transfer market shakermaker for the blues. So it's surprising to discover he's been trying to bring Alessandro Del Piero on down to the City of Manchester Stadium.
Sounds odd, but the Times' Rick Broadbent decided to roll with it:
"I’ve been here [at Juventus] 14 years and have a strong bond," he said. “I owed it to the Agnellis [the owners]. I couldn’t leave the Old Lady like this.
"Noel Gallagher did ask me to go to Manchester because we’re friends through music. I dee-jay and we have the same record label. He gave me my gold disc and came to the World Cup semi-final. He’s my lucky mascot."
Some might say it was always unlikely Del Piero would slide away from Juve for the likes of City, even following the champagne supernova that was their championship win followed by enforced relegation. And he'll cast no shadow on the City pitch any time soon.
Still, it's nice to see Noel doing his bit for the cause - I can remember him and his executive box up in the sky at one end of the old Maine Road ground, back when I were but a wee nipper as the club plummeted into the depths of the football league.
And what's this about Del Piero having a record label? Well, I've done a bit of research into this, and he does indeed have a CD out entitled 'The Best Of Alessandro Del Piero'.
However, looking at the track listing, it seems the boy doesn't actually sing or play any instruments himself - sadly it's just a compilation of other people's songs beginning, surprise surprise, with 'Lyla' by Oasis.
Well done to you if you spotted all eleven Oasis song titles I've worked into this post, by the way.
I'm delighted to see the BBC News website doing blogging properly in its coverage of Labour MP Tom Watson's resignation - by accepting the existence of the politician's blog as the norm and giving it no accompanying fanfare.
In the article 'Blair's 48 bloody hours', an analysis piece by Nick Assinder, the link 'Tom Watson's blog' appears neatly under the small column for related internet links. That's where it should be. Finally we're getting past the stage of rubbing our eyes in disbelief when we see a blog written by someone who might have something interesting to say!
As a related aside: I'm in Southampton, where I spent the morning in a meeting about audience research regarding the BBC's Where I Live websites. BBC Manchester's blogging initiative was mentioned. Apparently one visitor to the site had written quite cynically of it on their own weblog. In the words of one BBC employee this morning who shall remain nameless, "Robin [our blog expert] went onto their blog and responded to their argument, because he can do that kind of thing".
What, leave comments on weblogs? Rocket science it is not - if my dad can do it, and he's done so on here enough times, then it really doesn't need a blogging expert!
Back to Tom Watson's blog. I had a look at his homepage and it's got his letter of resignation, coupled with Tony Blair's response, as the latest post, which makes sense. At the time of writing there've been 37 comments so I clicked to open the comments window.
As soon as the window opened, my PC flashed this warning at me:
SUSPICIOUS WEBSITE
This might be a phishing website.
Phishing websites impersonate trustworthy websites for the purpose of obtaining your personal or financial information.
Microsoft recommends that you do not give any of your information to such websites.
Goodness me! A politician, try to impersonate something trustworthy while thrusting a mischievous paw at your finances? Whatever next?
(Not, of course, to suggest any such thing is occurring here. I somehow suspect Microsoft's phishing filter is being a little hypersensitive. Although strangely this marks the very first time it's found a problem in over a year of using this laptop daily!)
I'm stunned. If you don't know who Steve Irwin is you've been missing a lot of television, because the man was larger than life whenever he was on screen - usually doting over the prowess of his young daughter Bindi, be it at croc-taming or TV presenting. To think I thought him pompous for it at the time, and now his little girl doesn't have a dad.
But then that's the risk you take if you're going to make a career out of doing something inherently dangerous. A stingray barb to the chest can't have been the way Steve most likely envisaged going, but an untimely accident involving wildlife was always on the cards by the very nature of his shows.
Similarly I'm currently reading the autobiography of BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, who was shot and left for dead by terrorists in Saudi Arabia two years ago. His entire life since his late teens has been spent in or around the Middle East, often in the company of the most amazing people in the unlikeliest of places, as I am finding out while reading the book. It's fascinating and makes me truly envious of the life he has led, but ultimately that element of risk very nearly cost him his life and left him paralysed.
Is it worth it?
Ultimately it's hard to see why careers like those are worthwhile when you consider two little kids have lost their dad Steve and two more little kids nearly lost their dad Frank - both to incidents which could have been, to a degree, predicted given their livelihoods.
But then if everyone in this life chose to sit at home and stay on the safe, narrow, well-trodden path society lays out for us, it would be a boring world indeed.
I know my little sisters watch Steve Irwin's shows goggle-eyed at his antics. He performed a damn good public service in explaining with extreme precision and maximum entertainment just what it was to go out chasing wild, and potentially dangerous, animals. He had a career to be proud of and a young family being raised in the same vein.
Do you take risks some people would find hard to justify in order to fulfil what you think is your goal in life? Especially when you have young kids? Or do you play it safe to keep yourself alive as long as you can? My God, what a question.
My thoughts are with his family. Little Bindi, now Steve's legacy rather than sidekick to a proud dad. It's a really sad day.
No. I'm sorry, but no. I've had my human rights infringed earlier this week and now you're trying to take what little bloody astronomical knowledge I have away from me!
I spend the best years of my life being told there are this many planets, and here they all are in a nice and wholly unrealistic line on a poster, and this one at the end is tiny and called Pluto, and suddenly BANG! It's gone!
Well not literally - what a story that would be - but it might as well blow up because clearly it means nothing to astronomers of the twenty-first century.
You can't just unwrite seventy-odd years of history like that. Alright fine, technically it's small enough that other non-planets are bigger, but being a planet is as much a spiritual thing as a physical one. It's a planet because, way back when, someone bloody well said so. That's why it's a planet, not because it meets the height restriction or any of that pap. It has that planetary je ne sais quoi.
The only small crumb of consolation I can find in today's decision is that Pluto will henceforth be referred to as a 'dwarf planet'.
This conjures up the most fantastic image of dwarven aliens - each replete with axe, westcountry accent and fiery temper - one day landing on Earth and enslaving the entire population. "Refer to our planet with politically incorrect terminology, will ye!", they will snarl, as they drink their outlandish alien cider and whistle "Hi Ho" through their grey, lipless mouth sockets.
Moving on: it's Reading Festival tomorrow til Sunday, and I've had my impossibly-tight wristband snapped around my defenceless right wrist. Come Saturday night it will probably be a toss-up between the continued existence of my hand and my ability to enter the festival, such will be the lack of circulation.
We drove down to the festival site to pick up the passes and the place was absolutely heaving. The Reading Evening Post's six foot cuddly lion (why?) was taking the brunt of the onslaught, faced as he was by jubilant hippies queueing to embrace his costume.
I also noticed that, in the comedy t-shirt stakes, I'll be playing with the big boys at this festival. Happilly we had a new batch arrive this week so I've got fresh, unspent ammunition to unleash on them all.
I'll be at the festival from very early until remarkably late each day so expect things from me on Dayorama to go a little quiet. Then I'm in Canada so my absence may continue! We shall see.
Every now and again I see a story on BBC News Online that I just wish I'd had the chance to write:
Filipino 'dwarf' judge loses case
A Philippines judge who said he consulted imaginary mystic dwarves has failed to convince the Supreme Court to allow him to keep his job.
Florentino Floro was appealing against a three-year inquiry which led to his removal due to incompetence and bias.
He told investigators three mystic dwarves - Armand, Luis and Angel - had helped him to carry out healing sessions during breaks in his chambers.
The court said psychic phenomena had no place in the judiciary.
The bench backed a medical finding that the judge was suffering from psychosis.
In other news, Chris Tarrant has just called the studio demanding to know if we were talking about Reading's first Premiership campaign, starting tomorrow (of course we were). Chris then asked if he could come on air and talk about it, which he duly did. He's gone for a 3-0 Reading win. All that generosity on WWTBAM has turned him overly optimistic, I fear.
There seem to be some people arriving at Dayorama on a quest to find out why Big Brother's Sezer is not one of the former housemates available to be nominated for re-entry into the house next week.
As stated on Channel 4, Sezer cannot take part for legal reasons.
More specifically it's because he was arrested in July following "an alleged incident of rape", to quote a City of London police spokesman. He was subsequently bailed but has to answer bail on 17 August.
As far as I am aware that is one day before the current Big Brother series will end. Clearly, were Sezer to be admitted back into the Big Brother house, this would cause the show immense legal and logistical complications, so it's safer simply to remove him from proceedings.
It should be noted that Sezer denies the rape allegation. You can read more here.
So it must be good. But bless the Daily Mail, it seems completely and utterly in two minds. Here's an excerpt from its online report about Time Trumpet, the new comedy series launching tonight on the BBC:
The BBC has been urged to pull a 'sick' new comedy show which features spoof news reports of Tony Blair being assassinated and a 9/11-style video of terrorists crashing an airliner into the Houses of Parliament.
The clips for an Oscar-style 'Terrorism Awards' ceremony that forms one of the sketches in the new BBC2 series, Time Trumpet.
To add authenticity to the clips - which appeared on the internet yesterday in what appeared to be a cynical attempt to drum up publicity - 'The Terrorism Awards' are hosted by BBC election veteran Peter Snow and Tomorrow's World presenter Philippa Forrester.
Two points. One is that the second paragraph doesn't make sense, but we'll gloss over that.
The second is that despite the Mail reporting the show's "cynical attempt to drum up publicity" by putting clips online, it goes and BLOODY LINKS TO THOSE CLIPS at the top of the article! With the phrase "Watch a sneak peak of the Terrorism Awards here"!
Now either you truly believe putting the clips online is cold and cynical, and the show is sick, in which case you do not link to said clips (since that clearly furthers the show's objectives and you're seen to play into the whole marketing campaign), OR you don't believe a word of what you just wrote so you offer everyone a 'sneak peak' anyway. Ridiculous.
What hope have we for keeping our future generations safe if the bloody dolphins can't do it?
From BBC News Online:
Thousands of passengers have had travel plans disrupted after a ferry struck a whale just off Holyhead in north Wales.
[Irish Ferries'] Declan Mescall said: "We're not too sure exactly what happened.
"We certainly hit a submerged object this afternoon, about half an hour out from Holyhead port. The Jonathan Swift hit something big and soft and the suggestion is that it's some kind of sea mammal."
He added it was not unusual for dolphins to play alongside the firm's larger car ferries as they made the crossing.
Just you wait until the authorities get their hands on the parents involved here. Someone - and I'm looking at you, dolphins - has let their young dolphin offspring lark about right next to a bleedin' great car ferry!
Can you even begin to imagine what would happen had they been human? They'd have been ASBOed for a start, the parents would have become pariahs then gone on Trisha to explain themselves ("My dolphin offspring play with shipping"), and a campaign would have been launched for a skate park to stop the dolphins having to play with ferries "because they've nothing else to do".
Of course this is neglecting the real issue: the harsh words undoubtedly being exchanged in the whale household this evening. Imagine your other half coming home not only with a bump the size of Jersey on their head, but also having endangered the lives of hundreds of people and caused disruption to thousands more! You can cut the atmosphere in that living room with a knife.
Can you envisage any circumstances, in our lifetimes, in which the terror threat will drop to 'low'? Or even for that matter 'moderate'?
To me the politics of this planet will have to change beyond my comprehension for terrorism on British soil to become 'unlikely' as per the definition of the lowest threat level.
Do the 'low' and 'moderate' levels mean anything? Or are they there as nominal tiers because to start the scale with 'substantial' would be admitting the inevitable and indefinite nature of the threat?
Here's an excerpt from a BBC News Online report about the "red mercury" trial involving Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World's infamous "fake sheikh" investigative journalist. These paragraphs deal with a story the NOTW printed last year:
In November 2005, a 27-year-old man was jailed for four months after he admitted selling a fake story to Mr Mahmood and the News of the World about being lined up to be "the fifth bomber" on 7 July.
On 23 October, they printed a story headlined "We expose Brit extremist linked to evil 7/7 monsters".
The article began: "This is the British-born Muslim terrorist who was lined up to be the fifth 7/7 bomber."
It went on to say: "He says he is friendly with another young Muslim who is close to launching a terrorist atrocity here."
[The man who faked the story] was paid £200 for an interview and was promised £5,000 for his story by the News of the World.
I'll declare an interest, I'm no fan of Mazher Mahmood's antics. I don't believe it is responsible journalism, and this is why.
The above excerpt claims the News of the World printed a story about a man they suspected to be the "fifth bomber" on 7 July 2005, having interviewed that man. The man had initially approached them with his story. He said he knew another man ready to commit a terrorist act on British soil.
The excerpt then says the newspaper paid this man £200 and promised to pay £5,000.
Is it our understanding, therefore, that a British newspaper promised to pay a man they thought was a terrorist £5,000?
Does anybody else have a problem with newspapers paying terrorists for their stories?
Yes, the man was later exposed as a fake. But the paper printed his story which strongly suggests that at the time they believed him sufficiently to commit his tale to print. To my mind, journalists paying supposed terrorists in return for splashed front page news stories is horrific.
I don't usually get involved in these things since I'm not good at criticism. Be it a movie, album or piece of art, I'm fairly likely to find something to like about it and settle for that.
But I have to say that if we end up with that thing on the streets of London, I will be absolutely delighted.
If art galleries can't be a bit exotic, then which buildings can be? For pity's sake let's not have another boring brick, cement, stone or other-bland-substance square building. This, after all, is the twenty-first century. Anyone who's played the original Sim City will know that by now all buildings are supposed to be so funky you can barely look at them for the futuristic chill they send down your spine.
That Tate extension will be the very embodiment of our century's architecture embracing its destiny. To infinity and beyond, where our buildings look bloody awesome. If the Jetsons wouldn't be seen dead in it, I don't want to know.
For some reason, whenever I agree with something, or find something I want, I've taken to saying "I'll have that." I can't work out where I've picked it up from. It doesn't beat my friend Becky, however, who earlier said the prices at Madame Tussaud's "felt like rape". Lovely.
Image nicked from Londonist in return for bigging up their usual excellent coverage of these things.
You may or may not know that tiny devices exist which will 'broadcast' the output of your mp3 player to any FM radio of your choice.
They only have a range of a few metres, the idea being that you can listen to your mp3 player in the car without having to complete any expensive alterations to your existing car radio. They're really popular in the US and in Europe.
And of course they're not doing badly in the UK either - but the catch is, they're illegal here. For now at least.
According to reports today, Ofcom - the body which regulates anything broadcast-related, including every British radio station - has put plans in motion to legalise these little gadgets.
The initial concern on Ofcom's behalf had been that despite their size, the very nature of these things might mean they interfered with the signals of recognised professional radio stations. However they're seeing sense in acknowledging that with a broadcasting range of a few metres, you would be unlucky to find your radio listening interrupted for more than a split second by someone using this device.
A problem might conceivably surface if a healthy percentage of the British car-driving population adopt gadgets like the iTrip. If every other car you pass on the road is listening to their iPod using a frequency normally reserved for BBC Radio 2 (perfectly possible), the Wogan-time you set aside each morning will rapidly become impossible to endure. However I somehow find this an unlikely proposition.
Radio stations could feel threatened by this development, but equally I don't think they're any more endangered by this than they were by mp3 players in general. True, car radios are currently doing well in the fight against the mp3, given the techicalities involved in listening to an iPod in a car without using earphones and thereby becoming a hazard to yourself and others. But even these gadgets can't actually replicate proper radio, which after all is the reason a lot of people tune in. Sure, some people go for commercial stations where the emphasis is squarely on music, but people listening to Radio 4, Five Live or BBC local radio are usually doijng so because they like the chat, the news and - for some, most important - the travel. No iPod will tell you if junction 11 of the M4 is blocked.
Ooh, hang on though. Imagine when that does happen, as it surely will. The day will dawn when TomTom Traffic, provided by the satellite navigation company, or any other similar service merges with the likes of iPod and iTrip. Imagine having a hand-held device which gives you sat nav directions, your favourite music and your favourite podcasts, plus thirty-second traffic reports - automatically compiled to relate to your current position on the road and inserted every half hour or so in the gaps between your music.
How tempting would you find that? Is most live radio so good that you wouldn't trade it for a morning commute of tracks hand-chosen by you, traffic reports tailored to you and, say, Channel 4's morning news podcast? All that's missing there is the interactive element - texting or phoning a show, being fed "social ammunition" by presenters, etc - but how much do you value that? No wonder broadcasters are so keen on that side of their remit right now, it could be their last line of defence against your ability to broadcast your own 'dream radio station' to yourself.
Gosh! What a day of sport. For a family who are thoroughly unenthusiastic about watching sport in general, today we have excelled ourselves. It all began about 1pm when a close friend from school arrived. Our plan was to go out, have a walk somewhere and a spot of lunch. But it was hot, both of us are too poor to have cars with air con, and the draw of Aggasi meant that my lounge and some strawberries were where it was at. A wonderful gossip with some good solid tennis. Then it was the turn of the football. I think Ollie was right... everyone had that faint hope, a real hope... but somehow you just knew that we weren't going to get through the penalty shoot-out. Amazingly though my Father, who until about 4.30pm didn't know who England were playing, became enthusiastic. Towards the beginning of extra time we began eating our dinner outside, but turned the TV on very loud so we could hear the commentary/cheers to find out what was going on. Then we all sat around cheering on when the penalties commenced. What's so amazing about that, I hear you cry? Well, perhaps nothing. But in general we are a thoroughly apathetic family, and suddenly the World Cup spirit had captivated us. If that emotional roller coaster wasn't enough, my Mother and I settled down to watch Murray beat Roddick. Roddick is a great player, but for nineteen Murray exuded such supreme confidence and spirit, as well as providing us with some highly entertaining tennis. Towards the end my Mother and I had moved off the sofa, onto the floor in front of the TV, just to make sure we didn't watch anything - and when my Father entered the room, he was quickly told to "sssshh". We were cheering and gasping with the rest of them. It just goes to show that sport is incredibly captivating, and addictive (as well as being tiring to watch). Despite our enthusiasm today though, I fear it may be short-lived. There'll be no red and white flags on our car for a while!
I think we've had enough of this football. What about tennis? I must admit, I've never before been able to get enthused about tennis until the second week of Wimbledon. That's when I usually select who I'd like to win (Henman and Murray aside, obviously). However, perhaps this year will be different: today's tennis will be worth watching. Henman v Federer. Also, Venus Williams is playing, as is Sharapova, Hewitt (quite cute on a good day) and Roddick. Anyway, back to Henman. I'd like to have the confidence to say "Henman will win". But, um, I'm not sure I can. Having said that, Federer has won pretty much everything of late and is said to be suffering from "fatigue", so is this an opening for Henman? Henman also seemed pretty fired up in a BBC interview and confident that he had a chance. Surely if Henman gets over this clash, he'd be on a roll for greater success? Anyway, we may as well support him with full-force today, as we may never get another chance this tournament!
All this flying the St George flag around at the moment... forget football... the below story is just another reason why we should be proud (in a slightly odd way) to be British...
(lifted from the Telegraph online... because they have a nasty habit of denying access to articles after about 7 days and then all of our links fail and we look sillier than normal...)
"For 30 years villagers had wanted a road sign to direct lorry drivers to a nearby bacon factory. It belatedly went up this week. But there was no rejoicing among the residents of Elmswell, Suffolk.
The factory is closing down tomorrow.
"We've had years of putting up with lorry drivers coming through the village and asking where the factory is," said Andy Taylor, 41, who has lived in Elmswell all his life. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw someone finally putting up a sign." The sign, pointing the way to Grampian County Pork, where 380 people are losing their jobs, was one of 16 put up around Elmswell by Suffolk county council this week as part of a new one-way route for lorries."
Fame for my left hand - holding a penkife sent by a company to a school in Berkshire, offering children cheap knives. The company has since apologised, the full story is here.
I've got a great, flawless theory... (context: revising for my exams - corporate finance is clearly getting to me...)
Students are under performing apparently, right? People spend too much over Christmas? People are getting skin cancer from too much exposure to the sun (this is my flaw...)? People are getting fatter as a rule?
So, you move all exams to December. This way no one wants to go out in the cold and wet. Thus, they are forced to stay inside in the warm, eating mince pies, and working. Therefore they perform better in exams. Since they have to work, they are also less tempted to go Christmas shopping and therefore they spend less money and don't end up in such high levels of debt. They may end up slightly fatter from being sedentary and eating mince pies (but surely this energy is burnt off revising?)
If you have exams in June/July, no one wants to work inside - therefore they study less. They also eat too many ice-creams (compensation for exams) and end up with over exposure in the sunshine anyway - you see they go outside to work and forget to put suncream on. They spend more at Christmas because they aren't distracted by exams and probably still eat mince pies anyway (double the eating on mince pies and ice cream)
Therefore, having exams in December would mean that the country is wealthier, more intelligent (if not slightly fatter from mince pies) and whilst they will have exposure to the sun in summer, they may remember to put sun cream on. Having exams in summer means that no body works, therefore the country is thicker. They eat too many ice-creams, spend more money at Christmas and still get sun burnt anyway.
I say we move exams to December. Sod's law this should be the last of my summers which are obliterated by exams. The other 70+ will just be obliterated by working. When you're on the 23rd floor in a tower in Canary Wharf with a/c, I don't suppose it matters what the weather is like.
I'm not bitter, honest I'm not. So, how do I apply for listing on the stock exchange, what requirements must my prospectus fulfill and what disclosure obligations must I comply with...
----
And in the space of our comments, here is one oposing view (I don't have permission from the author, but I'm sure they won't mind...)
It seems to me a question of whether you can enforce productivity. To turn this on its head, you could say that it's easy to work in winter, so that's taken care of - the question is how to prevent students wasting time in their summers, when the lure of Grove Quad is strongest? The answer being, you give them exams. You say people don't work, but that's not really accurate, is it? Now people might work 20% less hard across the summer because of the distraction of the sunshine, but it's better to have that amortised by consistent work across the winter plus that Great Summer Cram. The alternative is that students do absolutely no work across the summer, because there is no incentive, and then have to work across the winter.
100% being maximum effort,
Summer Winter
Current: 80% (Damoclean fear) 70% (won't go out anyway, "cold and wet".)
Your Way: 20% (no fear, & strawberries) 100% (all pressures combined)
It would also mean starting the academic year in January, in order to finish in December,
which means the summer break's halfway through the course, and your big welcome/fresher's photo is held in the January downpour. Nor, most importantly of all, will the novices be trained up in time for Eights.
So there we are. Now, a few readers should be able to work out who wrote that. Hint: another bored trainee lawyer currently sitting exams...!
If you were an MP, would you use all the influence you could muster to try to land yourself some World Cup tickets? Of course you would. Since twenty-three-and-a-half hours in each MP's day are spent being publicly ridiculed in some form or other, some nice seats in Frankfurt for England's opening game - courtesy of McDonald's - would provide welcome relief. Let the eleven plonkers on the pitch suffer the humiliation for 90 minutes, then back to the daily grind.
Of course, not everyone sees it that way. 23 MPs have snaffled tickets off the burger chain, worth £70 each but going for four figures on the black market. Cue Kevin Miles from the Football Supporters' Federation:
"They've got the tickets because they're MPs, but the biggest crime is that McDonald's is in the position to give them out. They're doing it to buy themselves influence, let's make no mistake about it."
Only one of the group has spoken out to defend the ticket snaffle, and that's John Leech. You know, the John Leech. No, of course you don't, because there's six-hundred-odd MPs and John Leech is one of the many who quietly get on with being MPs without playing at being a kitten on television.
If McDonald's have given him a ticket thinking it'll safeguard their right to render us all hideously obese, I strongly suspect they've got a surprise coming. I imagine John and his friends, having landed the tickets, will now go and enjoy the World Cup. The moment it's over I am sure they will not give a monkey's about McDonald's. You wait til John ends up at Membury services and discovers they've only got a Burger King. See how long the Big Mac influence lasts then.
Maybe, just maybe, I'm defending John and his pals because of his eloquent defence as follows:
"I've been a season ticket holder at Manchester City for 22 years. I can safely say I'm a proper football fan. The tickets that have been provided for us would have been given out by McDonald's to somebody else, and I'm sure there's plenty of fans that would like to see the game as I would. I fully understand people's frustration, but it's not up to us who gets the tickets."
Which, roughly translated, means: I've suffered enough, you'd have done the same, and all we did was ask nicely. Having had to watch City for far fewer than 22 years, I think World Cup tickets are the least the man deserves.
Filed immediately in the "genuinely hilarious" category is this email exchange. Step up Erica Davies, fashion editor at The Sun, emailing her brother Gareth about his antics in the bathroom among other things. Except she's actually emailing an entirely different Gareth Davies by mistake...
From: Davies, Erica
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:15
To: Davies, Gareth
Subject: 2 things
1: can you PLEASE stop drowing the bathroom with water and wee every morning???
Everyday I wipe up the puddle of wee around the toilet and have to stop myself slipping cos you haven't used the bathmat. Last night's puddle of wee actually indicated that you hadn't managed to get ANYTHING in the toilet...YUK
2: Can I send you your dry cleaning as I haven't got a car and am going out tonight so don't REALLY wanna take your suit to the pub...
Anyway hi xx
Erica Davies
Fashion Editor
The Sun
1 Virginia Street
London E98 1SN
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Gareth
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:19
To: Davies, Erica
Subject: RE: 2 things
Eh? Do I know you?
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Erica
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:30
To: Davies, Gareth
Subject: RE: 2 things
Ok sod you then, won't bother sorting out YOUR dry cleaning
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Gareth
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:37
To: Davies, Erica
Subject: RE: 2 things
Don't get me wrong - it's very kind of you to sort out my dry cleaning - but I don't think we've ever met.
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Erica
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:39
To: Davies, Gareth
Subject: RE: 2 things
That's it then
I get home late from a very LONG day in Paris
I have to cope with a puddle of wee on the floor
before I can even go to the toilet
I sort out your dry cleaning
I then worry about how to get it to you
And you're being silly???
Forget it
You can wear your sodding jeans
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Gareth
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:45
To: Davies, Erica
Subject: RE: 2 things
Listen... some poor fella is getting into awful trouble here.
But something tells me you've got the wrong man, even though I DO have a pair of trousers at the dry cleaners. Check the e-mail address!!
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Erica
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:48
To: Davies, Gareth
Subject: RE: 2 things
Oh My God!!!! how embarrassing, so sorry!!
But yes, he IS in serious trouble!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SORRY!!
Ps always remember not to wee round the toilet!!
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Gareth
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:52
To: Davies, Erica
Subject: RE: 2 things
What?? I'm afraid to go to the loo ever again after this!!
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Erica
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:53
To: Davies, Gareth
Subject: RE: 2 things
Ha ha!
I am bright red and mortified with embarrassment! So sorry for bothering you with this!
His address usually comes up straight away hence my confusion - REALLY sorry Gareth
-----Original Message-----
From: Davies, Gareth
Sent: 02 June 2006 10:58
To: Davies, Erica
Subject: RE: 2 things
No worries. And here's to a nice, clean bathroom tomorrow morning.
Can you believe that it is June? So cold, wet and windy. But at least Lance Armstrong has been aquitted of any drugs misuse in the 1999 Tour de France. Perhaps now people will universally admit that he really is a thoroughly amazing athlete and person in his own right. We can only hope.
Last week I noticed some of our visitors were wondering if David Miliband was vegetarian, and promised to find out.
He's not. And I quote:
"I am sorry to disappoint ... but I do eat meat (and fish - though my fish and chip shop of choice in South Shields, Colman's, assures customers that all their fish is caught in a sustainable fashion)."
Meanwhile, it has not escaped my attention that the Prime Minister now appears set on nuclear power - with a question mark over whether he was determined to pursue that option from the start.
A month or so ago, well before the PM had made any such intention clear, my driving instructor told me several of his clients were Americans working at Somerset's Hinkley Point nuclear power station. They had been hired ostensibly to assist with the decommissioning of the plant, but he swore blind they were really here to oversee the expansion of the site. (A new generation of nuclear plants will mostly, if not all, be built on existing sites to allow the speedy acquisition of planning permission and to lessen the likelihood of local residents complaining.)
Now, my instructor has a thing against civil servants in general and also against Tony Blair, so I'm always careful to err on the side of caution when listening to him where these matters are concerned. But it's looking like he might just have been right. The bad news for Somerset and the rest of Britain is that one of these individuals, charged with pioneering the development of more nuclear power in the UK, could not tell left from right during his driving test. I'd start digging your bunker now...
That's a sight no Arsenal fan will want to see ever again - Norwegian referee Terje Hauge with a red card in his hand.
The consensus emerging from tonight's Champions League Final between Arsenal and Barcelona is that this was a game, in the words of Sky's Andy Gray, "too big" for Hauge to correctly officiate. And we've just heard Thierry Henry launch an unprecedented attack on the referee, and on Barcelona, moments after the final whistle on live television. This is from memory, but he said words to the effect of:
- the referee may have been wearing a Barcelona shirt;
- he, Henry, had been kicked off the park in the first half and no one had noticed;
- maybe Henry would have to learn to dive to get his attention.
That's the sort of post-match interview that, as a journalist, you dream of. It's all too rare in the stage-managed, overly cautious world of football to catch a top professional footballer letting their guard down completely and saying precisely what they think - all too often they're far more concerned with the potential for an FA disciplinary hearing or such like.
But you can entirely understand what drove Henry to say what he did, when he did. There were some decisions made by Mr Hauge which were questionable at the very least - from the decision to send Jens Lehmann off rather than award Barcelona a goal, a decision to the benefit of neither side at the time, to his apparent reluctance to book Barcelona players for any one of a series of quite dangerous challenges. Henry will have felt well within his rights to tell the world precisely what he thought had happened on the pitch. And now the fallout begins.
Yes that's a clever title, not a spelling mistake. Ever since Spurs collectively turned the same shade as the pitch they were playing on and handed fourth place to Arsenal on a (salmonella-ridden) plate, there's been debate over the whole debacle.
Should the game be played again? Should it heck. Can Spurs sue the Premier League? Can they sue the hotel where they all got food poisonin? Can the whole thing be traced back to Arsenal spies breaking into the kitchens in the dead of night?
And how about, were the Spurs players actually suffering from food poisoning at all? For all the fuss they've kicked up, the tests performed on food samples from the hotel seem to show there was nothing wrong at all. Instead, to quote the BBC report:
Tests on food and players have been carried out by the Health Protection Agency and environmental health staff.
But they suggest one person had a form of gastroenteritis which may have spread to the other players.
Dr Alex Mellanby, Consultant in Communicable Disease Control at the Health Protection Agency, said norovirus, a form of viral gastroenteritis, was found in a sample from one of those affected.
He said the person affected by viral gastroenteritis appeared to have been exposed to it before the stay at the Marriott Hotel in Canary Wharf, east London.
So it's highly unlikely Spurs will be suing anyone if it turns out none of them had food poisoning at all. But can someone sue Spurs? If I were in charge of the Marriott hotel they'd stayed at, I might be so inclined. That hotel's name has been dragged through the mud in the past week. Careful analysis of the written reports I can find shows Spurs officials to have been quite cautious about this, tiptoeing around pointing the finger of blame at the hotel. Not so the reports themselves though, which seem to clearly implicate the hotel, even if they do stop short of proclaiming judgement:
"Until we get the results, we don't know whether it was the food or a virus," said a Spurs spokesperson. "We should get the results in 48 hours."
The players had dined at a London Marriott hotel.
If the hotel is found guilty of serving unfit food, the punishment - under the Food Safety Act of 1990 - could range from a fine to the threat of six months in prison.
The investigations at the hotel are the responsibility of a joint team involving the Health Protection Agency and the Environmental inspectors at Tower Hamlets council.
That's as close to the bone as anything gets online, but I heard radio stations broadcasting the hotel's involvement with near certainty. Now it looks like the hotel had not a single thing to do with it. Whose fault is it that the hotel's reputation spent most of last week in tatters? Spurs, for publicising the reason for their lacklustre performance? Various news outlets for rushing to make five out of two and two?
Spurs chairman Daniel Levy referred to "highly suspect circumstances" surrounding the illness and the hotel just two days ago - now that suspicion's resting on a virus already present when the team turned up. In the litigious society we inhabit there's more than enough possibly for heads, and not just stomachs, to roll.
I haven't been one to comment on the Iraq war. I have my own opinions on the matter, but I'd rather not get caught up in a pro/anti-war protest and create a large fuss on this site. However, isn't it about time we pulled our troops out of Iraq? I was thinking this as I read the Metro this morning. On one page, there was a report that the government have won an appeal against a rule allowing the chap who has been protesting against the war outside parliament since 2001 to continue to do so. On the other were the sad details that out of the five British military personnel killed in Iraq over the weekend one was the first British servicewoman to die in action in Iraq and another was the most senior officer yet to be killed in Iraq. And then there were another three men with equally grieving families and loved ones. I'd like to know what our mandate for staying in Iraq is. What are we achieving? I'm not saying I disagree with why we are there... I just don't know why we are, and I doubt I'm alone. I think we have a right to know what we are doing and the timescale for us staying there is. Otherwise, how do we know whether these innocent people have died in vain or not?
There are times when it feels good not to be centre stage in the build-up to the England World Cup campaign.
William Hill are offering odds on whether Theo Walcott - the 17 year old called up to the England team by Sven yesterday - will pass his driving test or not.
From the William Hill press release:
Theo Walcott is more likely to pass his driving test first time out than he is to play any part in Arsenal's Champions League Final against Barcelona, start in England's opening World Cup game against Paraguay, or score at any time during the World Cup finals.
Bookmakers William Hill are quoting him at 11/10 to pass the driving test (4/6 to fail), but 7/4 to be involved on the pitch in the Barcelona showdown and 2/5 not to.
The Sun have revealed Theo was in the middle of his theory test when Sven picked him for the squad.
Apparently his driving test was booked for June, but obviously the boy's off to Germany now so it'll be July at the earliest. This means I've got at least one go, probably two, to pass it first. I am quoting me at 1/2 to pass my test before Theo, and 5/1 not to.
He's been robbed of a BAFTA for 'Deal Or No Deal' by Jonathan Ross and, while I bear no animosity toward Ross, I can't help but feel it's a gross injustice.
I'm not afraid to admit to loving 'Deal Or No Deal'. Not in a must-see kind of way - no TV qualifies as must-see for me, not even the likes of 'Green Wing' or 'Lost' - but in as much as whenever I happen across an episode of 'Deal Or No Deal', I've got to watch it til the end.
Only a few days ago I watched a young man prancing round the studio in a maelstrom of agony and delight when he narrowed his chances down to two boxes: one contained £20,000, the other £250,000. He was offered the chance to swap boxes. He declined. Then his box turned out to have 'only' twenty grand in it. He was devastated, Noel was devastated, the studio audience were devastated. The man had won a year's salary and he was on the point of tears. Noel assured us we'd all be back to watch the next episode, and if only we didn't all have lives, we would.
It's brilliant television, a stupidly simple concept that generates painful decisions, moments of stupendous, irrational genius, and more highs and lows than a day in the life of Pete Doherty. There's even camaraderie between the occupants of each 'wing' of prospective contestants, who each open boxes for the lucky individual in centre stage until one day it's their turn. In the episode I most recently watched, the young man insisted on joining his 'wing' for the last time as the stakes rose and the pressure mounted.
Even Ross admits he'd have liked Noel to win. What were the judging panel thinking? (Who decides these things? Tell me this wasn't an audience vote.) Maybe I'm just biased because Noel once landed at the front of my school in a helicopter, but this is no deal for Noel and 'No Deal'.
What a baptism of fire for Des Browne, newly promoted to the Defence post in Tony Blair's earthquake-stricken Cabinet, replacing John Reid, who replaces Charles Clarke, who's been sacked, unlike John Prescott, whose responsibilities have gone to Ruth Kelly, who's replaced in Education by Alan Johnson, who's replaced in Trade & Industry by Alistair Darling, whose eyebrows will be sorely missed at Transport, now occupied by Douglas Alexander. Margaret Beckett has somehow ended up as Britain's first female foreign secretary, kicking Jack Straw into the lowly post of Leader of the Commons, and David Miliband has wisely evacuated Local Government for the Environment - reassuring isn't it, especially when Climate Change minister Elliot Morley appears to have had his job wiped out with no replacement.
None of the above can have had such a depressing start as Des Browne. His first task under the Defence brief was to tell us all that a helicopter carrying British soldiers had crashed in Basra, accompanied by depressing pictures of scores of local people hurling everything from rocks to petrol bombs at the wreckage and other British reinforcements. Nice to know you're welcome, isn't it.
My friend Sue's Iranian - she was in Manchester yesterday and we spent about five hours in a coffee shop, which I swear is some kind of record for me (given I don't even bloody drink coffee). For me it was previously very easy to fall in with the received wisdom that Iranian society is essentially dangerous and backward. It's dominated by religion to an extent we can't even begin to understand in the West, it's hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, it supports the idea of terrorist acts to get the Israelis out of the Middle East, and the concept of democracy in Iran is, to say the least, fledgling. At one point Sue casually described the limits on opposition parties "coming out with their crap", which struck me as something of an off-hand dismissal of the principle of free speech.
But parts of her argument were pretty compelling. It's relatively easy to forget Iran had a revolution only a quarter of a century or so ago, and revolutions aren't easy concepts for us to understand either. The US had one a good couple of centuries ago, and even that's recent compared with the last time the British popped their tea and biscuits down for a minute to patiently endure a revolt. We don't do that sort of thing any more, we just engage in elections full of hanging chads and rigged postal votes, with a dodgy system of representation and a culture of spin. And we settle for that, and tell ourselves it's a nigh on perfect system of democratic government.
I tend to agree. It's probably as good as we're going to get. But there are more than enough flaws in it for countries like Iran to wonder why, precisely, we think replacing a fledgling Islamic, Iranian government with a "Christian democratic" one would be such a grand idea. Twenty five years after the British had what passed for a revolution, we as a nation were not a pillar of democracy. Rotten boroughs spring to mind for a start. Countries which for centuries after their revolution allowed seven pigs, a horse, three dogs, two cats and a pigeon to elect a Member of Parliament should not rush to judge any foreign modus operandi so soon after such upheaval.
The big problem is it's only now that governments fresh out of a revolution have nuclear weapons on the brain. Not that the theory hasn't been practiced before. The Russians had a good crack at world domination after their revolution; it was accepted for new Viking overlords to pop invasion high up the list of priorities. Revolutions tend to breed people in power who suddenly acquire the liking for power and an urge to keep hold of that power. Then they go a bit mad on the idea and we need another revolution. All we get in Britain is a cabinet reshuffle if we're lucky, but some people might argue bloody revolution achieves the aims of a lot more people a lot more efficiently than telling John Prescott he's not allowed near any communities any more. In the grand scheme of things one can hardly blame the Iranians for wanting the same kit the Americans have got, given the apparent predilection of the US government for a fight.
Iran presents a danger to the West, but all that's happening is a relatively new government finding its feet and trying to copy much of what we've done over here. I'm not saying that's all okay and we'll learn to live together, but I can see why Iranians object to opinions of Iran as an irrational aggressor. If you're Iranian, you just happen to live in a society that does things a bit differently, and not necessarily for the worse. This will be no comfort when Iran has blown up London and the UK has blown up Tehran, of course. Who would be Des Browne? Still, at least he's not one of those having to take responsibility on the front line today.
Well you wouldn't. Amir Khan, silver medallist at the 2004 Olympics, is already something of a boxing legend in his home town of Bolton, if not Britain as a whole.
So you can understand why Network Rail chose him to front their new campaign against kids playing on railway lines - No Messin'.
With the Atomic Kitten scheduled to be interviewed today crying off sick, off I went to Bolton station instead, for a press call where Amir would set out the campaign and speak about his own experiences.
Paul MacDonald was the real star of today's press call. Paul lost his arm when he was 12 after being hit by a train.
He's lucky to even be alive but when you've seen him detach his fake arm, it brings home the reality of what happens to kids who think they're invincible until it's ten seconds too late.
He wanted to take his shirt off and detach his arm for the various TV cameras who turned up, but they declined on the grounds it'd be too shocking for early evening television. I think that's a real shame - the true, graphic nature of what happened to Paul is a far more powerful message to kids than anything Amir Khan can say, genuine and forceful though he was in his delivery.
It's nothing new to say I hate people eating on the tube. The chap next to me on the tube this afternoon was eating a tuna baguette. I love tuna, but not on the tube. And then, to add insult to injury, he applied cold sore cream to his mouth. Yuck. It was enough to entice me back to my 20p (what a bargain) Evening Standard. My environmental side has finally got to me. It isn't Cameron's cycling to work... with his papers being driven behind him that convinced me... no, it was the fact that Ken Livingston doesn't always flush his toilet at home if it is only "yellow". I'm guessing that means urine since it would be pretty odd to have yellow turds. Unless you were a seagull perhaps. Anyway. It's a good point though, 1/3 of our water is wasted through flushing the toilet. Surely with the worst drought in years looming, we really should be watching our water carefully. I was driving in Kent the other weekend and saw a man washing his wall. Not a special wall, just any old wall. I nearly got out of the car and read him the riot act. Why was he washing a wall with a bucket and sponge when there is a hose-pipe ban in the area? I'm also going to get some new bins for my flat so that I can separate cans and glass - I drink so much coke (and wine) that I really should recycle more than I do (just newspapers at the moment). What else? A friend bought me a pineapple and some lychee juice yesterday. Lychee juice is actually very pleasant and would probably be lovely with some vodka. I'm sure I was going to say something mildly important. Oh yes, the local elections. I'm really annoyed. I've voted Labour in my local election (postal vote - which, miraculously, didn't get stolen in the post). Why? Because I don't want the Respect party, or the BNP to stand a chance in the Local Elections. But, this means I have to endorse Tony Blair. I've always been of the opinion that local elections are more about the local councillors themselves, rather than the politics behind them. But even so I have to vote Labour, when all I want to do is tell Blair to stick it where the sun doesn't shine. Then again, the sun hasn't really shone on him at all this week has it? Oh and I passed another couple of exams on the LPC.
Just pop "art definition" or something into google and you get a few dictionary definitions for the word/concept "art". I suppose that the acts displayed here are just acceptable. I don't really understand why you want to have a giant hug-athon though. And for 15mins? Blimey, I like hugs but I wouldn't hug anyone for that long. I'd suffocate. And why Nottingham? I'm not sure I'd like to hug half the people in that City - they do have guns in their pockets, rather than just being pleased to see you.
Hold the front page - I've just come up with a decent vox. What do the people of Manchester think about the news that Brazilian manager Phil Scolari's been offered the England job? The first person I approached outside couldn't speak English very well, he told me. I asked him where he was from.
"Brazil."
Thank you God for that minor miracle. He had just enough English to explain how Scolari's a great manager and he'd do a good job for England.
Personally I had a bit of a problem with the idea of Scolari as boss til I met another bloke about ten minutes later, a young guy bouncing down the street listening to his mp3 player. He knew everything about Phil Scolari and reeled off a list as long as your arm of the awards and trophies the man's won. Once he was done talking, I could find no reason why England shouldn't have Scolari managing them.
He certainly put up a better argument than another lady, who insisted she'd prefer an English manager. Why? "Well, English football team... English coach!" I asked why not Scolari since he'd taken Brazil to World Cup glory. "Um... very true. Very true."
Out on the streets of Manchester this morning canvassing for reaction to John Prescott's minor indiscretion. The copy of The Mirror I had with me included some gratuitously horrifying photos of his mistress unbuttoning his shirt. Surprisingly public opinion seemed to hold that Prescott could have done better, not vice versa.
The Government are trying to clamp down on ticket touts with a new code of conduct for ticket agencies. Tessa Jowell's asked them to be careful how many tickets they sell to one person, stop selling 'futures' - tickets which don't yet exist for evens far in the future - and blacklist known touts. The problem is the code's voluntary, and a spokesman for the box office at the MEN Arena told me some legislation might have been better.
And there are new crime figures out for Greater Manchester tomorrow. They're embargoed til midnight (because why let us tell you now, at a reasonable hour, when midnight makes so much more sense) so if you're that keen to find out what they are, this is neither the time nor the place. I spoke to a local community group ahead of tomorrow's morning bulletins though, finding out if their impressions of crime in Manchester are the same as the police force's. Without giving too much away, it seems like there's a genuine success story going on.
Tomorrow morning brings a Harlem Globetrotter to the studio, and it falls to me to stand on a chair and interview all 6' 5" of Globetrotter 'Goodwill Ambassador' Michael Wilson. Hopefully he'll bring a basketball with him and everyone can have fun watching him beat me all ends up. I enjoyed playing basketball at school once or twice but somehow, with a microphone in one hand as well, I don't think I'll be much of a match.
Meanwhile my friend Gabi (or Gab, or Gabby, or maybe even Gabz or Gabie, I never know which way to spell it - to think I deride people for getting 'Ollie' wrong) is off to interview David Cameron on the Metrolink in Bury. When I put it that way it suddenly sounds less glamorous. I'm reliably informed one of my other coursemates met him last week (and the Queen, for good measure). OJ's also brushed past him in a corridor, as I recall. That man gets everywhere! One wonders what colour the chameleon needs to turn in Bury to be sure of success...
Another hectic day - some more great stories though. (For the next few weeks this may become what-happened-in-Manchester-todayorama...)
- Altrincham FC are going to be relegated from the Football Conference after being docked eighteen points for fielding an ineligible player. But local MP Graham Brady's come storming to their rescue - he's written a formal letter of complaint to the FA. I spoke to him about the injustice to Altrincham and whether he thinks his campaign will have any effect. I pondered what Altrincham's future would be if his letter failed, and he just laughed a rather grim laugh. There's optimism.
- After the bomb blasts in Dahab yesterday, we've been keen to speak to any local people who happened to be over there at the time. Countless phone calls to tour operators and local scuba clubs (it's the thing to do in Dahab) later, it slowly and happily emerged no Mancunians had been near the line of fire. I did, however, speak to Dahab scuba instructor Ed Poore (British, not Mancunian - close enough), who'd been very close to the explosion. He insisted Dahab was no less safe than anywhere else in the current world climate, though he stressed good scuba training helped maintain an element of calm in the immediate aftermath!
- The Home Office have had a pretty rubbishy day following the admission that over a thousand foreign nationals held in UK prisons simply wandered off after their release, rather than facing the usual deportation checks. I spoke to Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, who of course considered it 'disappointing' but noted the prison service was stretched to its absolute limit. Stockport MP Andrew Stunell, a Lib Dem, agreed with that point but couldn't find room to forgive Home Secretary Charles Clarke for insisting he wouldn't resign. He told me the government had known about this back in October and were "hoping it could be swept under the carpet". If you do look under that carpet you'll probably find a few foreign nationals evading deportation...
Do excuse the dodgy quality of the image above - it's composed of screengrabs from an online version of Labour's party political broadcast, to be shown tonight.
Admitting during the broadcast that the David Cameron campaign (yes, come on, that's him up there being shown as a chameleon) has so far "worked a treat", Labour have decided to break out Dave's much-feared "Punch and Judy politics". The video's no more than a character assassination, with not one mention of any Labour personality, policy or priority. The philosophy is not reasons to vote Labour; it's a reason not to vote Conservative.
The Guardian's news blog has some thoughts on it, along with a few interesting comments attached.
You can watch the movie here, at the snappily entitled davethechameleon.com. We are promised more next week. I personally found the video quite amusing, if not politically persuasive - but then I don't find anyone politically persuasive, unless Tamsin Greig intends becoming a candidate any time soon.
The salaries of top BBC Radio 2 stars have been leaked to The Mirror, a week after the salaries of their Radio 1 colleagues appeared in The Sun.
You might expect the BBC to keep very quiet about this; you might expect the corporation to fight back and argue the stars are worth the money. Instead BBC News Interactive have taken the following stance: "well look what doctors get paid!"
You have £250,000 going spare. Your options are:
a) one doctor
b) Jo Whiley
Decide. (I actually think it's a tricky one. Technically Jo provides a service to far more people than a single doctor can...)
The BBC are reporting that digging has begun to unearth a suspected pyramid in the Bosnian countryside. (I love it when the BBC suspect things. Last week they reported a ferry colliding with a "suspected whale", giving me visions of the poor thing up before the beak charged with Being A Whale under the 1984 Oceangoing Mammal Offences Act.)
This is a story that's been around for a while (here in October last year, and here in January this year), as I'm sure the pyramid has too. And here is the dodgy-looking hill in question:
Apparently the pyramid theory's been engrained in local legend for many years. In the words of Semir Osmanagic, who's spent fifteen years looking at South American pyramids before noticing this oddity, "you don't have to be an expert to realise what this is". And he's right - it's a hill. But he's also right in that it's looking pretty shifty, isn't it? It couldn't look more like a concealed pyramid if it tried. There's more evidence, too:
Initial excavations have revealed a narrow entrance to what could be an underground network of tunnels. On Friday, a team of rescue workers from a local coal mine, followed by archaeologists and geologists examined the tunnel, thought to be 2.4 miles (3.8km) long.
The team found two intersections with other tunnels leading off to the left and right. Their conclusion was that it had to be man-made. "This is definitely not a natural formation," said geologist Nadja Nukic.
Satellite photographs and thermal imaging revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley, which archaeologists believe the tunnels could lead to.
Of course, the question now arises: what is a (suspected) pyramid doing there? Which lost civilization - extremely bloody lost, in fact, considering where all the other pyramids are - came up with it? What was the point? And why underneath a hill? What's the bleedin' point of a pyramid if you hide the sod with sod? The Egyptians at least had the right idea with the whole prominent-display, get-the-tourists-in-after-millennia-have-passed routine. The Bosnians, alas, have failed miserably on that score. Whoever came up with this one was a complete hillock.
I watched about fifteen minutes of today's 6.30 ITN bulletin, for the first time in some years. I've always been a BBC or Channel 4 man, but I had remembered ITN as being a solid alternative. Today corrected that assumption. In the course of fifteen minutes, we had a story about the airing of cockpit tapes of Flight 93, an investigation into renewable energy homes, using a video diary from the children of a handpicked family, a report on Harry's passing out parade, and a report on the Herceptin ruling. Only the last was treated with any real degree of appropriate seriousness. The Flight 93 report was an excuse for dramatic re-interpretive visual effects of what happened inside the plane, while the Sandhurst story was a typical royal correspondent's piece. (To be fair, I'm usually unimpressed when the Nicholas Witchell pops up on the screen as well, so it's not just ITN.) But the eco-home investigation just smacked of an overly thought through "inventive" piece. I can imagine them in the editorial room. "How can we make people more interested in the news?" "Make it like Big Brother!" "Excellent, excellent." It lacked a clear argument, had too many fancy visual tricks to try and make the story more interactive/relevant, and was, quite frankly, amateur. I particularly disliked the link that followed the story, which reminded us that ITN was holding a competition, which we could enter online, to win a hybrid eco car. (Cue picture of a Honda Insight, with "Hybrid" on its number plate.)
Since when did news broadcasts turn into Family Fortunes? My word, the BBC is far from perfect and riddled with its own problems, but I cannot believe that what should be a serious bulletin has been effectively turned into tabloid news. Now, I believe, and circulation proves, that there is clearly a place for tabloid journalism, and I am a regular reader of the Sun and the News of the World. Both satisfy my low expectations. But did I miss the memo sent out by ITN that promised news in the style of The X Factor?
O tempora!... O Williams? (I only hope you raise the bar!)
Clever stuff from the BBC regarding 'citizen journalism' today. There's been a scaffolding collapse in Milton Keynes, and the Beeb have a related photo gallery displayed on the news front page, showing various images of the collapse and its aftermath. It seems they've all been taken by 'citizen journalists', i.e. Joe Publics with phone cameras and the like. The BBC have taken the decision to bung all these photos in one gallery to show different views of the incident from people on the scene, and it works really well.
To my mind that treatment definitely complements the accompanying full, professionally-produced report, rather than threatening it. The report pulls together a video clip of a police statement, full details of the incident, a map, eyewitness statements, and quotes from the ambulance service. I don't think any 'citizen journalists' have the resources at their disposal to get that report online that quickly, let alone the authority the BBC name brings to it.
I've got to write an essay on how the internet's affecting broadcasting for my course, so you might hear more about this in the near future. It's interesting stuff but I don't think broadcasters are anything like as threatened as some people might have you believe.
UPDATE: I hadn't noticed this before I wrote the above yesterday, but the scaffold collapse story and its related 'citizen journalism' were mentioned on the BBC NewsWatch site that afternoon, in very similar terms.
Matthew Eltringham, Assistant Editor, Interactivity, had the following to say:
The value of user generated content as a source of amazing news material was underlined on Tuesday, when scaffolding on a building in Milton Keynes collapsed.
Within minutes a trickle then a flood of pictures of the incident came into our inbox. While others were left with maps of the area, News 24 were able to show scores of images of the wreckage.
So the initial small team of three producers that had been looking after user generated content since June, last week expanded to six. And they're now open for business longer too, from 0700 to 2300, seven days a week.
The bigger team means we can provide more opportunities for citizen journalists to send their material to the BBC - and get more of it on air and on the website. We can publish more pictures and run more personal accounts.
Yes, it's done by Banksy, he of the assorted artistic graffiti around London. And yes, the moment Westminster Council noticed it they had it towed away. But at least one group of people were impressed - British Telecom:
This is a stunning visual comment on BT's transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider.
Give the press officer a medal for that one. Of course, if all of us now go out to hack up telephone boxes with red paint and assorted forms of weaponry, it will be interesting to see if BT hold their line (arf arf) on this one and compliment us on our artwork. There's no reason why Banksy should be singled out for special treatment. Get out there and start vandalising, for the sake of BT's transformation into a modern communications services provider!
Photo and indeed story stolen from Londonist, who in turn stole the photo off Banksy's website. Sharing is good.
Twenty-five years on, life is imitating the art of one of our finest political satires.
Read this extract from the plot synopsis of a 1981 episode of Yes, Minister, entitled 'The Compassionate Society':
[The minister, Jim Hacker] learns from his chauffeur that there is a new St. Edward's hospital in Northern London that is staffed with 500 administrators and ancillary workers, but has no doctors, nurses or patients. Jim Hacker is aghast and decides to ask Bernard to look into this ... Bernard reports to the Minister that there are indeed no patients in St. Edward's hospital.
A Somerset hospital trust is so short of cash it may never be able to pay the staff needed to open one of its new multi-million pound wards.
Weston General Hospital's £6m, two ward mental health unit, built under a Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was due to open to patients in June. But finance chiefs admit they failed to budget for the £560,000-a-year cost of staffing one of the wards.
The 10-bed section looks set to remain closed indefinitely.
George Galloway's been served with an injunction banning him from posting photographs to the internet revealing the identity of investigative journalist and 'fake sheikh' Mazher Mahmood.
Can't believe I missed George himself talking about his efforts to uncover Mahmood, at length, on The Guardian's Comment Is Free multiple-author weblog. Click here to read it - it's long but worth your time if you're interested.
Rupert Murdoch’s News International tonight obtained a 24-hour injunction against George Galloway MP, Ron McKay and those acting on their behalf against the publication of photographs of News of the World employee Mazher Mahmood, the “fake sheikh”.
The picture had already been circulated to Members of Parliament and the House of Lords, to the Queen’s private secretary and to others in public life who may be in targeted by Mahmood’s unscrupulous, agent provocateur methods. Ironically, the solicitors acting for News International, Farrer & Co, also act for the Queen.
The restraining order expires at 4pm tomorrow and George Galloway plans vigorously to contest the ban. “This is exactly what we expected. And now we see just how hypocritical and slight News International’s professed commitment to press freedom is,” said George Galloway.
I can't help but feel any injunction is pointless by now. My understanding is George got the photos on there earlier today, in which case even if they've been taken down now, they'll have long since appeared all over the internet thanks to blogs like this one, news sites, gossip forums, etc. News International are already fighting a losing battle. And after all, Mr Galloway has as much right to investigate Mr Mahmood as Mr Mahmood does to investigate Mr Galloway...
Indeed as I finish this post, I've found the photos are still online at georgegalloway.com, injunction or no injunction. Right click, 'Save As'. Like about ten million other people. Murdoch and co might as well call it a day for the sheikh's anonymity, I'm afraid.
SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, has been set up with a view to becoming "Britain's FBI". In the words of Tony Blair:
"There is absolutely nothing, in my view, that should come before the basic liberties of people in this country to be freed from the tyranny of [serious] organised crime. [It's time to] stop trying to fight 21st Century crime by early 20th Century methods."
Nope, instead we'll fight them using Third Earth methods - that being the planet the ThunderCats came from. Take a look at the two logos above. On the left we have the well-known ThunderCats emblem; on the right, the new SOCA logo. Guardian Unlimited's News blog brought this to our attention and even asked a few questions to give the new SOCA press officers a workout:
[They] confirmed to us that the animal is a panther - in heraldry terms, a leopard argent, salient and reguardant - and they did admit that we "wouldn't be the first" to note the resemblance to the Eye of Thundera. We leave it to the reader to decide whether this is a coded admission that the ThunderCats symbolism has been secretly approved by the highest levels of government.
The Lord of the Thundercats was of course Lion-O. The man ultimately at the head of SOCA and the rest of the country is Tony Blair. Presenting the face of British crimefighting, Lion-O Blair: he projects a red beam of light across the sky to summon an organised crime team, then demands the mafia give us a clue.
Princes Charles, William and Harry are all going in front of television royalty Ant and Dec as part of celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the Prince's Trust.
This is apparently their first joint television interview and is among a number of events to be screened by ITV for the anniversary during a three-hour special. I hope the other events are in keeping with the channel's choice of interviewer:
Ant: Welcome back to "You're a crusty old waxwork, get me out of here"! It's now early afternoon out here in, uh, Middlesex, which means it's early afternoon where you are. Dec: Before the break we saw Charlie and Harry with their hands in unicorn poo, squishing and squelching around for more of those precious stars! Ant: Now Charlie, you only managed to get two stars. What went wrong out there? HRH Prince Charles: Hahaha yes, well, one isn't used to getting one's hands quite so dirty in quite such a fashion. Plus one's son seemed surprisingly inexperienced at being up to his neck in shit considering the tabloid reports. Dec: Okay, but that leaves you with just two meals. Who's going to miss out? HRH Prince Charles: Well I think both Harry and I have to take responsibility for that, but bless Wills, he never makes a fuss about anything, so we'll keep the meals and he can make do. He's got a girlfriend to look good for, after all. Ant: But you're in love with someone too, aren't you Charlie? HRH Prince Charles: Haha, erm, yes... whatever that may mean. You know I still haven't found that out, I must look it up. Dec: Moving on, Harry, you've got to be looking forward to the next challenge - an AS level art exam... Prince Harry: Oh definitely. I've not really got any experience of doing one, but I've been shown how it's done and there's a few recordings somewhere I can use to mug up on it. Ant: And before we go, if we cut back to the scene back at camp, there's Will and it looks like he and that Kate girl are getting pretty intimate. Proud dad, Charlie? HRH Prince Charles: It's a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved son.
It's the boat race today, and you wouldn't know it from the BBC Sport pages, which give the event all of one tiny link in the bottom right hand corner of their sports index with around two hours until it starts.
This is of course fine by me. As far as I'm concerned rowing is one of the most tedious sports going, made all the more distasteful by the calibre of some of the individuals involved with it. It tends to breed Ellen MacArthur Syndrome - electing to do something that involves irregular hours and hard work, then using this as a badge of honour and superiority over mere mortals, as though it's some heroic task foisted on our protagonist by divine intervention.
On the contrary, getting up early and doing lots of exercise in the name of propelling a boat a few hundred yards down a river as fast as you can is not the summit of humanity. Get on with it quietly and let us know how you get on at the end. It is not licence to get unbelievably drunk once or twice each year in your individual Oxbridge colleges, then puke everywhere and wake us mere mortals up.
But I imagine the BBC might do themselves a slight disservice by pretending the thing doesn't really exist (ITV, who now have the rights, have of course got it emblazoned as the main story on the itv.com front page). I might not give a monkeys who wins, but I've had at least five people invite me down to the riverside for the afternoon to watch it with them, and I'm known for not liking rowing much.
There is a guaranteed audience out there for this (far more a BBC audience than an ITV one, I would've thought - I can't help but feel ITV only want this as a symbolic victory over the BBC and not as a genuine ratings-grabber). So it seems ill-becoming of the BBC to ignore it in its entirety. Yes, the BBC has a remit to provide an alternative to the services offered by commercial broadcasters, but that doesn't mean completely ignore a sport those commercial broadcasters have nicked off the Beeb. Not everyone will defect to ITV if the BBC just happens to mention there's a boat race on.
Meanwhile I'll be listening to Man City v Middlesbrough instead, which I seriously reckon more people in this country care about than pay any attention to the boat race. There's probably more people already in the City of Manchester Stadium than exist at either of the two universities competing...
The BBC are carrying an article on a new traffic centre that would have been dull as dishwater, but for this quote from traffic camera controller Matt Kirby*:
"We had an odd one the other day," he says, "200 starlings fell out of the sky, dead, onto the M65. We thought it was bird flu but they'd just flown too near a power line or something. Luckily the delays weren't that bad."
I've searched and searched, but I can't find the section of the Highway Code relevant to dealing with mass starling suicide. Slow down and prepare to stop? Or sound the horn and accelerate quickly through what the BBC delicately termed "feathery carnage"? Good job they didn't ask me that one in the exam... (Obviously, the answer to a theory question is never, ever, accelerate quickly. Despite its inclusion as an option one hundred per cent of the time.)
It's a deserted LCC newsroom this lunchtime (I'm in here trying, and failing, to fix some online audio links - all the audio's disappeared off the system, which is always a blow), so I've put Radio 2 on. First thing I heard? Fenella Fudge reading the news, which was very pleasant since she came to give us LCC folk voice coaching last term, and was very good at it too.
And on the news she read, mention of the Electoral Commission wanting one-to-one meetings with the treasurers of both the Labour and Conservative parties over these allegations that they've both been taking dodgy loans in return for favours. What's the point of a meeting with the Labour treasurer?! He's already bloody admitted he didn't have a clue!
"Hello Mr Dromey, glad you could make it. Have a seat."
"Thanks."
"So, what can you tell me about your party's operations with regard to these loans."
"Nothing."
"Can you give us any information on this?"
"Not a bean."
"Thank you very much for coming Mr Dromey, I'll show you out."
A big part of the media law exams I sat last week had to with reporting restrictions - what we can and can't say when filing court reports in a variety of situations. For example any alleged victim of a sexual offence, from the moment they claim to have been a victim of a sexual offence, cannot be named by the media for the rest of their lifetime (with the notable exception that they can if they're later found guilty of something like wasting police time over it).
Youth Courts are another one. These exist to try people under the age of 18, and under the terms of the Children and Young Person's Act 1933 we can't name any child or young person who pops up in one of these, no matter if they're the victim, the accused, a witness, whatever.
But - we can if these restrictions are lifted, as they occasionally are by either victims seeking to clear their name, or the courts in seeking a fair, unprejudiced trial (e.g. appealing for more witnesses to come forward), or in the public interest. And it's on the grounds of the latter that The Times' Steve Bird has been able to name names in this fantastic report of yesterday's events at Newbury Youth Court:
Britain's youngest drink-driver attacked a lawyer and threw a jug of water at magistrates yesterday as she was sentenced for her second offence of driving while drunk.
Leanne Black, 14, screamed obscenities and kicked over a chair before lunging at the prosecutor and punching her in the back. As the three magistrates who had sentenced her to four months in a young offender institution tried to flee, the teenager picked up a two-litre jug of water and hurled it at them.
Black, wearing a shiny white tracksuit and fake gold jewellery, was eventually grabbed by security guards and bundled out of Newbury Youth Court, in Berkshire ... Mrs Bates [chair of the magistrates' bench] took the unusual step of allowing the child to be named moments before the violent scenes. She ruled that the public interest in the case outweighed the court’s duty to protect a young person.
...
The disturbance in Newbury was not limited to the court. As Black arrived she had hurled eggs at photographers as her mother stuck out her buttocks at them. As the family left, there were further scuffles.
There's something a little galling in reading, on the same day I only sit my driving theory test, that a 14 year old is being banned for the second time! I know I'll hardly be the first person to raise this issue, but what purpose does a ban serve on an individual already banned by virtue of their age?
Also in today's Times there's a great advert that I'm going to have to scan when I get home for Dayorama purposes - stay tuned.
A title that makes me sound like I'm pouring coffee. But I'm ashamed at The Week, or more specifically its editor Caroline Law.
This is the weekly magazine which rounds up the news and comment from newspapers both home and abroad. It's immensely useful, highly readable and a fine product all round. My dad got me into it and I've had a subscription for quite a while now, plus I've seen a steady rise in the number of people reading it on things like buses and trains around London. It's a magazine that is going places, providing a digest of all the best articles in one convenient location.
So it's saddening when the editor writes something quite as alarmingly craven and ignorant as she has this week. This is the text of The Week's brief editorial column, in full:
"What are you looking at?" It's a question every city dweller dreads: you've run into a yob, grandstanding on the street, looking for trouble. What are your options? Face down the aggressor, and risk violence? Or avert your eyes, and skuttle meekly away, your day ruined, your spirit crushed, so that he can swagger on, king of the hill? Francis Gilbert, author of a new book, Yob Nation, calls this kind of territorial behaviour "parading", and it seems it's not confined to thugs. We're all at it now, bristling with knee-jerk indignation, primed to take offence.
Dismayed by the incompetents competing for his patronage on The Apprentice last week, Sir Alan Sugar warned them that his company, Amstrad, was a real business - not a further education college where "dummkopfs come to learn where to make mistakes". To must of us, it was a throwaway remark on an entertaining TV show; to Dr John Brennan, cheif executive of the Association of Colleges, it was a grave slight on him, his colleges, and hardworking students up and down the land. Seizing the opportunity to assert himself over a well-known pugilist, Dr Brennan wrote Sir Alan an outraged letter, requesting an apology. And perhaps he'll get one, since Amstrad - as Dr Brennan surely knows - does a lot of business with FE colleges. But let's hope not. Because if we kowtow to the unarmed grandstanders, the passive aggressors in their comfortable offices, what chance have we got against the yobs on the street?
My blood boils just rewriting that for this weblog. What absolute self-defeating, hypocritical nonsense (and she over-uses commas as well, if I'm allowed a cheap crack). The thrust of her piece is that Dr John Brennan is "grandstanding" by making his complaint, and should not be allowed to defeat a "well-known pugilist" like Sir Alan Sugar. I hardly know where to begin. Let's take this point by point:
"Sir Alan Sugar, a well-known pugilist" - and not a "grandstander" himself at all, of course. Using your ability to make "throwaway" remarks to millions of people in order to generalise horrendously about an entire industry isn't grandstanding in the slightest, then, is it? It was a grave slight! Had I been in Dr Brennan's position I'd have felt perfectly entitled to an outraged letter demanding an apology. Sir Alan had every right to say that about FE colleges, and Dr Brennan had every right to demand an apology. This is not some absurd yob-related concept of grandstanding or "bristling with knee-jerk indignation", this is free speech. Had Dr Brennan shot, stabbed or otherwise physically attacked Sir Alan, I may have understood the analogy and the theory behind the editorial. He didn't, and I don't. Differences of opinion do not "passive aggressors" and "unarmed grandstanders" make.
"Unarmed grandstanders" - yes, speaking of that, what bollocks is that supposed to be? Sir Alan Sugar, broadcasting to the nation on prime-time television during a series with a cult following (substitute one of the Ls in this sentence for an N depending on your point of view), is vety much an armed grandstander! Is that in any way better than an unarmed one? Is it perfectly acceptable to make derogatory generalisations without reproach on national television? By all means allow him to say it, but he has no immunity from further education professionals and students feeling quite rightly hard done by. This is a basic concept of our society, not some new fad that's cottoned on, otherwise letters page would never have existed in national newspapers.
"We're all at it now, bristling with knee-jerk indignation" - quite right, Caroline. You're at it yourself, writing an editorial bristling with knee-jerk indignation at Dr Brennan's knee-jerk indignation. I'm at it writing a weblog post bristling with knee-jerk indignation at your knee-jerk indignation at Dr Brennan's knee-jerk indignation. And yet somehow it almost feels like we're just expressing opinions rather than bristling with anything untoward. No one has died, to quote a certain Radio 1 Newsbeat editor I met a few weeks ago. The earth has not stopped moving. These are not the actions of yobs threatening people on the street, this is reasoned debate between a man who thinks FE colleges are useless and a man who doesn't.
"The passive aggressors in their comfortable offices" - one wonders how spartan your office is, Caroline. Would that I had the ability to make a "throwaway remark" or two on national TV. Who knows, maybe at some point in the future I will? And if I do, I'll make sure I take the time to remark that Caroline Law and her team at The Week are a bunch of worthless, untalented hacks with nothing more to contribute to human existence than collecting proper journalism from other journalists and publishing it for their own gain. And naturally I expect you to take that lying down, Caroline. None of that grandstanding now...
We wouldn't be a very good Guardian-shortlisted Best British Weblog (alright, alright, it was in 2002 but even so) if we didn't at least briefly mention today's budget.
The problem for most news outlets is of course that it's the most boring budget in a long time, and budgets are traditionally boring. Gordon Brown said so little worth reporting that Jon Snow's opening comment on Channel 4 News referred to the recycled paper used to produce each edition of the budget. In his 'Snowmail' email update an hour before the programme, he'd said it wasn't recycled. At 7pm, he said it was 50% recycled. That discrepancy, dear user - a mistake on the behalf Mr Snow, most probably - is almost the most exciting budget related news to report.
But not quite. Ahead of it is Five Live's revelation regarding the cars which qualify for 0% vehicle excise duty, as announced by Mr Brown today. There are two types of car which qualify for this rebate. One is a Honda, the other a diesel Smart car. The car must be new to qualify for the rebate. Neither car, Five Live discovered, is now available for purchase in the UK. The 0% vehicle excise duty concession is therefore available to nobody.
Now that is certainly something, but my interest is piqued instead by a phrase used all day long to describe this budget. "The devil is in the detail," they all say. at least three different people on Five Live, Channel 4, and various websites have used this phrase to suggest Gordon has been less than up front about certain items on the UK's financial agenda.
Typically, it is the legal profession leading the way in the use of meaningless jargon. "But as one lawyer commented, 'the devil is in the detail'," reports TheLawyer.com.
Only Nick Robinson avoids using the term (or at least I've checked twice and can't find it, and my suspicions remain). Instead he pointed out one fine example of the machinations to which the term alludes:
Study the Treasury's Red Book - the bible of hard facts that shed harsh light on political rhetoric - and you discover that the "long term ambition" to match what private schools spend in state schools comes with no figures attached, no target date and no explanation of how it will be paid for. Provided the government doesn't cut school spending it will inevitably reach what's spent now in cash terms in private schools.
Staff at the Independent and Independent on Sunday have rejected an improved pay offer from management and are pressing ahead with plans to strike on Wednesday.
If staff at the Independent on Sunday strike on Wednesday, is that the journalistic equivalent of a tree falling down in the woods with no one around to hear it?
Minor technical hitch from the BBC's One O'Clock News. Darren Jordon's reading the headlines, during which we cut between a series of three-second long clips used to illustrate each story. So for example, the first story is the men seriously ill after a drug test went wrong, so we see a three-second clip of the 'Welcome' sign for the hospital where they're being treated.
And now the problems start. Story two is 'Tony Blair vows to shake up the honours system after loans scandal', for which the three-second clip is some men working on railway tracks.
Eh? Railway tracks? What's that got to do with Blair or the loans system?
But we move on anyway, and Darren Jordon begins story three: 'Guilty of manslaughter-' but wait! There's Tony! Appearing, smiling, on screen at the exact moment 'guilty of manslaughter' is broadcast. It turns out the story's about a man gulity of manslaughter over the deaths of four rail workers. Ah ha. Oops.
I know a few people who read Dayorama are, or have been, treasurers of some form or another. Can they perhaps explain to me how the Labour party treasurer, Jack Dromey, 'did not know' the party had secretly borrowed millions of pounds?
[Mr Dromey] complained that neither he nor Labour's elected chairman knew about the loans from businessmen, despite being regularly consulted about bank loans.
He only found out when details of the money emerged in the newspapers and wants to find out who obtained them for the Labour Party. "It cannot be right that the elected officers were kept in the dark," he told BBC News.
So hang on. This man, as treasurer, is presumably in overall charge of the party's accounts, or at the very least has unfettered access to them. And as he was going about his treasurer's business, someone else in the party - or perhaps connected with it, or working at Downing St - snuck millions of pounds past him? How on earth can you be 'kept in the dark' about something like that? Will it not be stark bleedin' obvious, especially if, as he says, 'the loans will show up in Labour's accounts'. If they'll show up in the accounts then they must have been entered into the accounts, and surely that means Mr Dromey noticed them?
Put another way, imagine you're opening your bank statement. Essentially you're your own treasurer, having as you do access to your account and responsibility for the sound fiscal maintenance of that account. On scanning your bank statement, you happen to notice a seven-figure sum - or allowing for scale, say maybe a four-figure sum - inexplicably lying there. This is a four-figure sum of credit, so obviously you're not exactly horrified by this, but it still warrants some sort of mental flag, some token attempt at an explanation, doesn't it? And under what circumstances would you not notice it was there?
I'm sure there's a very good explanation for why treasurers can overlook such massive figures even if, as Mr Dromey says, those figures will appear in the accounts for which the treasurer is responsible.
In other news, I'm horrified by the fate of those poor human guinea pigs languishing in a life-threatening condition in hospital after being given an experimental drug. The Evening Standard's coverage of this story, with its 'elephant man' headline and graphic description of the damage to vital organs, was enough to put anyone off their dinner and certainly put you off volunteering yourself for simillar tests in future. I'd imagine the industry will now find it extremely tough to find human beings willing to risk a repeat performance in the interests of science. £2,000? Chickenfeed if you're going to end up with a head three times its normal size for half a year...
Goals from Georgios Samaras and Darius Vassell gave my beloved Manchester City a 2-1 victory over Aston Villa on Tuesday night - City are now in the Quarter-Finals of the FA Cup for the first time in thirteen years.
I'm told by my dad that I was there when we last made it to this stage of the Cup, back in 1993. We played Spurs at home apparently (I can't remember any of it, I'd have been eight) and the score reached 5-2 to the London club before a number of City fans decided to invade the pitch in an attempt to get the match stopped. Some of our fans are a bit daft like that. In any case their attempt was painfully unsuccessful, resulting only in the introduction of police horses onto the pitch in place of the donkeys in sky blue. The result stood, and my mum - who'd also gone to the game - was duly appalled.
I can only hope things change for the better when we meet either Bolton or West Ham this coming Monday night in the Quarter-Final clash. I won't be there, disappointingly, so if there is a pitch invasion you can rule me out as the culprit. But I'd like to think we won't lose 5-2.
Stuart Pearce has also bowed to pressure tonight and signed a two year rolling contract with Manchester City after much umming and aahing, mostly over his insistence that he didn't care about bits of paper and didn't want any compensation if he and the club parted company anyway. With the contract signed, Pearce is now a dead cert to take the England job.
Or at least you never know if you live around Bath. The Bath Building Society is encouraging students to become landlords under a new scheme which works as follows:
1. Student takes out 100% mortgage on property up to the value of £250,000;
2. Student rents out spare rooms in property;
3. Rent covers mortgage repayments.
Sounds great in principle, but Bath University's student union president Tamara Johnson makes a valid point:
"With more and more students facing debt and with top-up fees being introduced in the autumn, we have concerns about the increased financial burden that a student could experience. It could distract students from their studies as they potentially pick up legal responsibilities as a landlord."
It's true that I have enough problems as a tenant, let alone a landlord, at the same time as being a student. Merton Council are still chasing me for a four-figure sum of council tax, half a year after their initial request was met by the relevant documentation to prove my student status and claim exemption accordingly.
Now they're demanding to see proof of student status for all other occupants of the house (something they must have had already, the other two have been living in Merton for much longer than me) and they've followed that with another reminder to pay around £1,500 in arrears.
I'm starting to suspect I'll have left Merton entirely by the time this is sorted. More information on the student mortgage story here.
Surprising revelation of the week (and we're all of thirteen minutes into it): the man who produced my band's demo CD plays guitar on a psychedelic rock single named 'Cow' for which Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow provides vocals.
Feel free to re-read that once or twice. Then carry on reading this excerpt from The Guardian's article on it:
There can't be many similarities between Jimmy Evil and Pete Bastard on the one hand and Jon Snow on the other. The first two are the guitarist and bass player, respectively, in a psychedelic avant-metal band called Suitable Case For Treatment. The latter is a Channel 4 newsreader whose known dealings with psychedelia have never gone much further than some self-consciously exuberant ties.
"I'd written this song," vocalist Liam Ings-Reeves explains, "and I just thought that Jon Snow's voice would work really well. He's got this austere but welcoming tone. I went to get his autobiography signed at the Hay-on-Wye festival and I just said: 'I'm in a band and I've got a monologue I'd really like you to read' and he said, 'All right!'"
"It wasn't difficult to persuade me," Jon says. "I thought it was a great wheeze! It was a bit of a breakout from Bach and the Beatles."
And the producer on my band's CD? Jimmy Evil. Also ran the mixing desk when we played a gig at The Cellar in Oxford last year. Top man, and I'm sure Jon Snow thinks so too.
Another year, another Crufts, and this time an Australian Shepherd has won it. (Ah, but what was the dog, I hear you cry. You and your whimsy. I dunno.)
But seriously, Australian Shepherd? What happened to German Shepherds? Can anyone be a Shepherd these days with a bit of effort and a classy nationality? I guess it's certainly possible to have an Afghan Shepherd if you give the right two breeds a little coaxing, or possibly a Danish Shepherd, Irish Shepherd, West Highland Shepherd and even Pekingese Shepherd.
Really this was just an excuse to use the above photo, found on Flickr. There were surprisingly few Crufts photos on there, especially from this year (the photo shows last year's event on TV, disappointingly). I don't think Flickr is all it's cracked up to be yet, certainly not from the point of view of current affairs photos. If 'citizen journalism' really is coming to the fore, we should be seeing a torrent of topical snaps appearing on there each day, covering everything from Crufts to North Korea.
I made a brilliant discovery today. Something I've been trying to get hold of, on and off, for ages now. The mid-90s BBC News theme tunes.
I'll admit up front that I probably enjoy news jingles more than any ordinary person should, but I like the whole idea of a piece of music designed entirely to make you think 'NEWS!'. Not only that, but 'NEWS!' followed by 'I should really watch this'. That can't be easy, and I imagine if I sat down to create my own news theme tune, it would end up making most people think 'DYING COW! Better not go anywhere near the telly while that dying cow's making that dying noise'.
So why the mid-90s BBC News, and not the current BBC News?
The current BBC News just doesn't quite sit with me. All that 'DOOM-doom'... for a start, how depressing to have a jingle that announces the news with a sound like 'doom', however appropriate. And that's really all there is to the current BBC News music: that double drum beat, some beeping, and one chord change. Seriously, count the chords you can hear in it, I swear there's two notes played and that's your lot. It doesn't seem very imaginative or inspiring somehow. Get hold of the full minute-long BBC News 24 'we've got nothing better to do for the next minute til the headlines' jingle instead, which has about six different notes in it instead (how lavish of them).
The whole point, for me, of the news jingle is to make the hair on your neck stand up by the time it finishes, so you really, really want to know what news there is that needs such important music. By the time you get to the final five seconds of that BBC News 24 minute, that's happened. Never happens with the quick BBC News version.
Nope, it's the mid-90s for me. Same short amount of time, but all the power and gravitas you could ask for. It's like having Michael Buerk sat in front of you saying 'we will fight them on the beaches to bring you The News'. Full orchestra, strings, kettle drums, sexy blue 'virtual studio', the works.
I've also got an attachment to the mid-90s jingles because they were around when I'd just reached the age where the news made some kind of sense. I can remember a newsflash about the Gulf War in 1991, that's the first proper bit of news I know I saw and vaguely understood. But by around 1995 or 1996, I'd be sat in front of the telly at six o'clock waiting for that orchestra to swing into action and scream 'NEWS!' at me.
So it's great to have found them again. It's less about being a radio geek and wanting to find any old jingle, and more about this being the sound of the BBC when I was growing up. Although what I didn't realise was that there were three quite different versions of the news theme - one for 1pm, one for 6pm and one for 9pm:
- The one o'clock version's very pacey, skipping and frolicking along in a 'NEWS! But this is only the news so far, there's still loads left to happen today' sort of way.
- The six o'clock has a massively pensive opening, like the opening drumroll of a West End musical, warning you there's an epic half hour on the way.
- And the nine o'clock has soaring strings breaking into a full fanfare to close the day - listen to this one if you want proper doom-doom drum noises in a news theme, none of your bland twenty-first century crap.
Right then, so that's your little news theme briefing. Now go here and check them all out.
I might also add I never knew most of the blue news studio was computer-generated, including the glass insignia/globe at the front. I'm not sure if I feel amazed or betrayed. I always wanted to see that studio for real when I was younger! Now I'm faced with the sudden realisation that it never properly existed. Those bastards!
If you live in or around London you may well have seen an advert like this. They form the Disability Rights Commission's new advertising campaign and they're all over the underground for starters. Personally I take a little umbrage at them, since they seem to imply that every able-bodied individual is somehow at fault for discrimination against those with disabilities, a patent manipulation of the truth. But today I found out more about an issue affecting everyone and especially those with mobility problems.
This morning saw London's lamentable lavatories lambasted in a report by the London Assembly, wittily entitled 'An Urgent Need'. Despite the report's moniker it's a serious issue - London's lost 40% of its public loos since the year 2000, the total figure now standing at 419, or just one public toilet for every 18,000 residents, and that's not even counting the 28,000,000 tourists arriving in the capital each year. Imagine the stink, actual and political, when Olympic year rolls round.
In essence, the London Assembly want the government to force local authorities to give us more loos by law. But it's not that simple. Technically the authorities are already bound by the Disability Discrimination Act to make sure the loos they provide are readily accessible for disabled people, which you'd think would mean nice, clean, well-attended toilet facilities for all as a by-product. Alas, no. What that legislation failed to do was close a minor loophole whereby the authorities can just close down offending toilets instead and get away with it at no cost. If you're a local authority faced with either shelling out thousands to renovate an 'illegal' loo, or close the thing down for nothing and save on maintenance costs, what would you do? Precisely. So all London's loos are disappearing under a tide of bureaucratic indifference.
The reason I know so much about this is I was covering it as a story all day. It took me ages to get someone from a disability organisation to talk to me about it, not through any great reluctance but more because they all knew I was, fundamentally, broadcasting to nobody and therefore unimportant. Eventually the very kind Alison Rose of the Disability Rights Commission had a chat to me, and she said it was 'inexcusable' for local authorities to hide behind the legislation as a reason for closing loos altogether. Moreover, she made the very good point that the population as a whole - London and the rest of the UK - is getting older. That means many more older and disabled people needing to use public toilets which just aren't there at the moment. With the Olympics six years away and new disability discrimination legislation due at the end of this year, it seems like now is the time to loosen up on our elusive loos.
And in case you think this is all bollocks and you've never needed a public loo in the last X many years, just sit back and have a think. If you're getting on a bit, soon your bladder's probably not going to be what it was and you'll have to make more stops than you ever previously thought necessary, so shopping might just become a nightmare. If you're young, soon you might have kids, so think about where you'll take them if they really need the loo (and they will, you mark my word) in the middle of town on a Saturday. Are you going to have to rely on the one crappy - quite literally - toilet in a local supermarket? Let's not forget a poor eleven year old girl was raped in one, a story all over the news today. Clean, safe, plentiful public toilets are a hallmark of a civilized nation, and the onus is on our local authorities to stop putting budget sheets before toilet seats.
With Oscar fever reaching its climax - come on, look interested, they've put a lot of effort into hoovering that red carpet - the Razzies had their fifteen minutes of 'and finally' fame at Hollywood's Ivar Theatre last night.
For those who've successfully avoided the annual spectacle of reporters finding comedy angles on the Oscars, the Razzies are the awards for worst performances as opposed to best. You can read the full BBC report on them here, but for now all I want to mention is Hayden Christensen's Worst Supporting Actor award for his role as Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.
Entirely undeserved! I thought he did a decent job actually. Or did I? Maybe it was Palpatine I liked. It all blurs into one. Happily though this weblog also serves as an aide-memoire and on searching it I've discovered I actually wrote a review of the film in May last year. And yes, I thought the boy Christensen did alright:
The relationship around which the film's entire plot revolves simply isn't conceivable. Anakin, as whom Hayden Christensen puts in what I thought was quite a good performance, looks convincing as he is torn between the devious Palpatine and the love of his life. But how can he be in love with that? The quivering, whimpering morass of puppy eyes and panic that is Padme would never attract someone of Anakin's stature and deep, fermenting emotional turmoil. She's so utterly spineless and transparent that I've seen oily puddles with more layers.
The rest of the review is here. Poor Hayden. Deserve his Razzie he did not.
No wonder we all like Daz Sampson, victor at this evening's Eurovision UK Qualifying on BBC1 (see previous post). He's one half of Uniting Nations, the act that gave us dancefloor/radio hit Out Of Touch last year. A man of so many talents! Douze points!
I knew this time would come. Maybe it's come before now and I haven't noticed, but this time there's no escaping it: someone younger than me has cracked a debut test century for England. Alastair Cook (b. 25/12/1984) has reached 104 not out opening England's second innings in India.
This puts my 54 for Taunton School 2nd XI against Queen's College 2nd XI in June 2002 into some perspective - that being my first half century for the school in my last ever game for it, having plugged away as an opening batsman for quite a long time. To say I had a reputation for slow scoring is like saying Pete Doherty sometimes has trouble resisting illegal substances; I can vividly remember one opposition fielder forcefully reminding me that it 'wasn't a test match' after I'd crept my way to 9 not out in the 20th over of a 35 over match.
In fact I can remember most of my own team, including the member of school staff umpiring, reminding me of the same thing during the same game (and others). The fifty was of course the pinnacle of my school career, but prior to that I was most proud of carrying the bat through another full 35-over innings for 28 not out. We won the game by one wicket. I pointed to this as proof that my slow scoring was sometimes necessary when everyone else got themselves out cheaply; the rest of the team argued they'd been reduced to kamikaze batting to get the score anywhere near the total required with me at the other end of the crease.
When I got to university, my place at the top of the batting order was sacrificed and I found myself sneaking in lower down the order. This was quite a welcome move because it meant I could scrabble around for a few runs here and there on the understanding I was a bowler or wicket-keeper and in no way responsible for the number of runs on the board. With this in mind I duly recorded a stunning nought not out over forty-five minutes on a churned-up, almost muddy Exeter College wicket in 2004.
Of course if my batting didn't deliver many knock-out blows, at least my wicket-keeping delivered one. In June 2004 I misread an over-pitched delivery that soared over the stumps, thudded into a divot in front of me and slammed into my left eye socket. I couldn't see properly for nearly a month afterwards (it's mentioned in passing by Amy here, I presumably couldn't see to write about it!).
All of which goes to prove that Alastair Cook is probably better at cricket than me. This brings to an end quite a long period of my life where I refused to believe anyone my age was technically better at the game, just they were more experienced, luckier, stronger, quicker, more agile, and generally given the gift of physical prowess that I couldn't quite match. Technically, I could wipe the floor with the lot of them. I must now admit that this is more than likely not the case. Still, with the injury crisis England are having, at least if called into the test side I could probably hold an end up...
Conversion Tables
Not Only Have They Given An Inch
Keeping It In The Family
Not The Age Of The Train
Dilawar Khan Wazir is a BBC Urdu reporter based in an area of northern Pakistan running along the Afghan border. 
Reading places sixth in the cat calamity league table, behind the likes of Nottingham and Swindon (bound to be trouble with 
All That He Seems?
It's the done thing for many movies to paint a bleak future for humanity. After all, you only have to look at the news on any given day to realise it's not difficult to envisage things going horribly wrong. 
