Offmessage

Thanks to things for providing a link to the actual picture… Nothing that you haven’t seen at Bush or Chimp a million times before….

I’m not usually one to continue our nations stereotypes, but if this game is an example of what German kids grown up on it would go a long way to explaining the differences between our industrial reputations.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that the Labour Goverment is the best Government we could have at the moment (despite my personal Liberal - and liberal - leanings and despite my opposition to the war in Iraq and many other policies). But oh my God have I hated David Blunkett ever since he got that job. He has proposed, supported and pushed through some of the most vile and illiberal legislation I can remember, things that even the Tories at their worst would not have dared even to suggest, let alone put in a Queen’s Speech. To see him brought down by his own stupidity in what should have been his finest hour is to me truly enjoyable - schadenfreude at it’s finest.

And if it turns out that on top of everything else Charles Clarke hasn’t the stomach for ID cards my year will be complete.

Edit: Apparently he has - ah well, it was to be expected.

Home test matches will no longer be available on terresterial TV. This sucks. Not only was Channel 4’s coverage considerably better than Sky’s, but this is the national team - surely we should be able to see our national sportsmen without excessively expensive subscription TV? Already we can’t see England play Rugby Union without it. Wasn’t there an uproar about England football matches? Can’t the same happen for other sports?

Oh Apple, oh U2. What have you done?

Hmmm… Thanks to Adrian for pointing me in the direction of Privacy International’s analysis of the current state of play with ID cards (PDF). Well worth a quick scan. Nice to see that they will require 50 pieces of information about us stored on the card, including our drivers licence number and passport number as well as a whole host of other things.

Grrrr. See the link to Stand on the left? Click it.

It would appear that mushroom sellers are free to continue their trade for a little longer (despite the recent rather doubtful U-Turn by the Home Office)… A test case held at Gloucester Crown Court has thrown out the case for the prosecution on the grounds that the law is ambiguous and unenforcable. Which was obvious, but rather nice.

Monkey portrait closes art show…

I link to this article in the Guardian because it does exactly what it should do. Half of it I’m so glad to hear someone else say (like Bob Marley, Jim Morrison and The Beatles) and the other half really winds me up (how can you say that about The Stone Roses, Beefheart and Neil Young?). Marvellous. Stir up a little controversy at your Christmas party…

On a related note - The 10 most accurately rated bands in history. Number 1: Van Halen:

This band should have been the biggest arena act of the early 1980s, and they were. They had the greatest guitar player of the 1980s, and everyone (except possibly Yngwie Malmsteen) seems to agree. They switched singers and became semi-crappy, and nobody aggressively disputes that fact. They also recorded the most average song in rock history: �And the Cradle Will Rock.� What this means is that any song better than �And the Cradle Will Rock� is good, and any song worse than �And the Cradle Will Rock� is bad. If we were to rank every rock song (in sequential order) from best to worst, �And the Cradle Will Rock� would be right in the fucking middle. And that’s exactly what I want.

Company doing badly? Desperate for positive (or should that be any?) PR? Why not do like Sainsbury’s and get your press department on to something like this cutesy little number?

Sales of tea towels are booming as parents use them as headdresses for their children in primary school Nativity plays, Sainsbury’s supermarket said Monday.
So great is the demand — known in the trade as the Bethlehem Boost — that Sainsbury’s has ordered extra supplies.