Blunkett
Oh but wouldn't it be lovely if David Blunkett was brought crashing down by the palaver around his ex-lover's nanny? Sadly, the teflon nature of this vile government will probably extend even to its vilest member, and he'll continue to plague our lives with his nonsensical policies and holier-than-thou attitudes.
Outside (apparently) of the government, does anyone know *anyone* with even the tiniest shred of respect for him? Because I've never met anyone who does.
Sorry All You Gamblers Out There
But after a spate of spam comments lately (more than fifty in the last three days, not counting the ones caught by my filters), I'm now barring any comment which uses the words 'casino' or 'poker'. Words cannot describe how fucked off I am at having to do so.
I use MT-Blacklist to try and avoid these, which does a sterling job of checking those incoming comments, but which is at the end of the day always going to be a step behind human ingenuity in coming up with quirks to banned URLs. Why hence I'm taking a more blanket approach.
I hate the people who perpetrate these things more than I do those who deal in email spam.
Happy Running Dave
Dave is taking part in the Nike London Run 10 kilometre run this evening, so I just wanted to wish him well.
Have fun....
Been A While….
....since I blogged about The West Wing. The reason is that because of the way C4 schedule it I've had to give up on terrestrial broadcast, and it's taken me a while to get through my box set of Season Four.
But I just watched the end of the final episode, 25, and all I can say is "Oh my word". It's a patchy season, and while the best of it is among the very best the series has ever offered, some of the less inpressive episodes really fell incredibly flat. But the closing five or six episodes all work beautifully. Even one as apparently inconsequential as Evidence Of Things Not Seen does the kind of character work that most series never even bother to try.
Now I want to start the whole thing over, and I haven't felt like that since watching the last episode of Buffy.
The Adventures Of Dave and Dan
We picked up some DVDs yesterday, and last night watched Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, which is a follow-up of sorts to Are You Dave Gorman? the Edinburgh show/TV series in which Dave Gorman set out to find a number of people with the same name as him.
Googlewhack is a slightly different proposition, involving him meeting people who run sites that result from Googlewhack Google searches, having them find two more Googlewhacks and then following up to try and meet the owners of the sites, etc etc. His aim was an unbroken chain of ten Googlewhacks.
Somewhere between Are you... and the new show, Gorman has adapted a rather angrier style, with quite a lot of the show crossing over the line between manic and aggressive, but it's still funny, and very cleverly presented - the use of slides to illustrate the points along the way remains from the earlier show.
Concurrently, I'm reading Join Me, Danny Wallace's book about the Join Me campaign he started a few years ago. I remember when everyone was emailing round about what this strange thing could be all about at the time. The point, such that there was one, is that he set out to get 100 people to Join Him. Join him in what? Well, in being joined, basically.
The connection is that Wallace and Gorman used to be flat mates, and Wallace was the person who went on Gorman's original challenge with him.
The two together have put me in an odd frame of mind - I do find myself wanting to be set a challenge of some description, though what it would be I wouldn't like to say.
By The Way
You may have missed that there was another fairly significant vote in the House of Lords this week.
This one in fact: Lords back rights for gay couples.
That's it. Royal assent by the end of the year, then some time next year we can start to share the legal rights and obligations that have been the exclusive domain of straight couples until now.
Which reminds me - did I ask someone to marry me in the last few months?
Part Troll (Don’t Ask Which Part)
David and I went to see Bill Bailey's live show Part Troll tonight - it's bloody hilarious, though I probably won't ever be the full-on Bailey fan that David is. He's got a great line in musical pastiche, taking a song and recreating it in an unlikely style. His Kraftwerk version of the Hokey Cokey was a highlight, as was the genius street rhythm piece inspired by the BBC News theme.
Of course, now I'm prowling round the flat unable to sleep, and that's annoying.
Uncivil
I listened in some fascination to reports on the radio this morning, as I have all week, regarding the Fox Hunting Ban. This morning the focus is on the upcoming legal challenge to the Parliament Act, and also the campaign of 'civil disobedience' which hunt supporters are proposing.
I'll come to the Parliament Act in a minute, but the disobedience is interesting. To start with, there are some people who say they'll just carry on hunting anyway, which is their choice as far as breaking the law is concerned. The law will deal with them in its own way I'm sure, and there will be some suitable outrage in the Telegraph when people are arrested for breaking an unequivocal law.
On the other hand, entirely within the law, people are planning on denying access over their land to (non-government) people who currently need it. People who maintain waterways and railway lines for instance, or the power companies who have pylons sited on private land. One guy interviewed this morning apparently has three electricity pylons on his land that he's going to ask to have moved.
Depending on the actual number of landowners who are planning on undertaking this kind of campaign and how co-ordinated they are, it's possible that they will in fact create a significant amount of disruption. Someone appears to have been thinking this through.
On the subject of the Parliament Act, former Master of the Rolls Lord Donaldson was on Today this morning, and thinks that there's a case to be made for the Act as it stands not being 'legal'. But I have to say that the principle of the elected house being sovereign does somewhat undermine the argument in practice, which is that a Bill should go back and forth to the Lords over three years, rather than two.
(The point is that the original agreement between the Houses back in 1911 was that the Commons can impose a Bill against the wishes of the Lords if it's been presented to the Lords for revision over three sessions. The 1949 version, which the Lords rejected, brought that three down to two.)
Brrrr
Well that was an interesting start to the day - scraping ice off the car at 6.30. When I don't actually have an ice scraper.
I thought all cars came with a fairly basic scraper, but clearly I was wrong. I guess I'd better find one, hadn't I?
Crazy Bonkers
I've had the weirdest bit of smail mail I think I've ever received this week: An invitation to invest in the production of a new film based on Hemingway's Garden of Eden.
Now obviously I'm impresed by their drive, and wish them every success both in finding investors and in the ultimate success of the production, but I'm left a bit thrown by the quality of their marketing data.
What is it about my profile that triggered me as a recipient? Could it be my scads of disposable income? Or my extensive track record in cinema production investment? Maybe I should contact them and find out.