Have you seen Stewart Lee's article on Chortle? It's really very good indeed.

There is very little point in trying to reason with The Daily Mail, and attempting to do appears to have driven Robin Ince mad. But once they have written a load of shit about you, it buzzes away in annoyance ruining your day, and you have to purge it somehow, and so ( Read more... )

Made myself give time to reading George Monbiot's article for The Guardian on new tax laws.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% ( Read more... )

Reading Levitt & Dubner’s Superfreakonomics. Interesting, as the first book, with regards economics research results can be looked at sideways. When they muse on people and incentivised behaviour it might be about prostitution price-per-trick comparisons, or the correlation between names and nefarious activities. But still coming across a little ( Read more... )

Remembered how much I am enraged by ANYTHING that is not a medical aid for poisoning being described as an “antidote”.

Yoghurt can be described as an antidote to thrush. It is not an antidote to chocolate pudding.Shortly afterwards, I realised I was grumbling at fictitious as yet unmade adverts for Muller Pots. And distracted self with a lovely ( Read more... )

Watching old Have I Got News For You, from November. They’ve just shown a clip of a man who got stuck trying to sneak into a tiny Portuguese supermarket window: his trousers fell down, in the struggle, and he was left there for 11 hours, just a pair of boxers and waggling legs in the street. “To make matters worse,” fnar-fnared the host Mr Smith ( Read more... )

"The great thing about it is when you start seeing it in places like China and Afghanistan. It's democracy. We've kinda given democracy back to the world."

That's Simon Cowell there. Talking about the rise of the TV talent show, while suggesting he had briefly hidden democracry from China and Afghanistan under his bed, and is now handing it back, ( Read more... )

Have been to three of London's museums this weekend, and in every one a security guard had me open my bag and perfunctorily shine a torch into it, before allowing me on my way. At the Natural History, I was asked if I had anything sharp; with a denial there's no further questions. No metal detector, no X-ray scanners, just men in blazers peering at ( Read more... )