Some of the talented B3tan’s responses to the Litvinenko poisoning affair:

Butters (very talented, but somewhat warped)

And Moogy Boobles

For some reason for the last few days, I’ve had a blinking cursor in my Firefox windows, which makes scrolling a pain in the neck and sometimes gets pages stuck.

Apparently this is called caret browsing and can be switched on and off using F7.  It’s there to make selecting text using the keyboard much easier.

Thanks very much for beyond-teck for solving the mystery for me.

The Now Show is back tonight – well, now!  6.30pm on Fridays and 12.30pm on Saturdays.
With any luck, they’ll still be podcasting it too, because in the office, I can get only get Long Wave tonight.

If the Now Show wasn’t enough, ISIHAC is back too, 6.30pm on Mondays and repeated 12noon on Sunday.  If you miss it, you can Listen Again.

But you won’t be able to listen again to Desert Island Discs – for licence reasons, that’s only available at 11.15am on Sunday and 9am next Friday – when Stephen King is on. I hope he has more interesting choices than the guy who was on this morning, who had really boring choices.

On UMRA, we have an acryonym – That Was A Typo But I Like It.

I rather like the Elecrotal Comission.  Almost enough to register the domain.

Happy birthday Rose Wheeler, a new first cousin.

Can’t help notice Paul Keetch, the Lib Dem MP for the city where I went to school, is to retire.

Hem, hem, should I get my candidate approval papers in?

Course not. I’ve worked for MPs and why anyone ever wants to be one is totally beyond me. Yeah, you get the deference, the salary and somewhere to hang your swordlight sabre. But you also get the casework, the responsibility, the travelling, having to front a campaign that costs tens of thousands, having to raise tens of thousands, having to think/say something about every issue.

I can’t even really offer much help to any of my party friends thinking of putting themselves forward for Hereford [1] – although I know the city reasonably well, it wasn’t until I left the county that I started getting into politics, so I don’t really know the local party in Hereford, or any of the councillors.

[1] Specially not you, J, you carpet bagger.

Soliders don’t earn very much.

American satirical cartoons The Simpsons and Family Guy have both recently run episodes about US Army recruitment.

The Simpsons included a reference to recruits’ salaries, so I Googled it.

American soldiers start at $15,282, whilst in the UK, they get £12,128.

Well, it’s more than minimum wage.  In both cases, it seems like your money goes up quite fast with continued service and promotion. But it ain’t much when you consider what we ask them to do.

I’m too fat, too gay and too asthmatic to serve.

I read Dan Savage’s eye-opening sex advice column every week.

He’s now got a podcast.  Do I dare subscribe to that?  The mind boggles as to what it might contain, and iTunes could easily end up playing it by accident in the office…

Here’s a handy list of quality things I read regularly.  I always skip straight to these when my feedreader flags up a new article

• Dan Savage
• Waiterrant
• Magistrate’s Blog
• Liberal England

And here’s a list of the sites I fire up first thing each day over my first pint of black coffee (Sainsbury’s Continental)

• Dilbert – every day for years!
  
• APOD – only since recently, but well worth it
• B3ta – usually just for their best front page images

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it’s been days since my last posting.

So, a quick summary.

Weekend – long drive with a carful of local party activists to Regional Conference in Gainsborough.  A good time seems to be had by all.

Monday, a day in the Council House.  Turn up at 10am for a very bad-tempered meeting.  Check diary and see next meeting is at 2pm.  Not really worth going home and coming back, so I find things to read, and get on with other bits of work.  Then at 1359, someone looks over my shoulder and says “Hang on a minute, that meeting is Thursday.”  Bugger.  I can’t go on Thursday.  The meeting has been moved because of a diary clash for the chair, and I didn’t update my own diary. Then my next meeting is group at 7.30pm.  So I hang around for that too, nattering to colleagues and setting the world to rights.  Finally leave the building twelve hours later when Group finishes, as it always does, with the Council House staff coming around the building to chuck us out so he can go home.

Late at night, discuss recipes with UMRAT friend, who suggests a main course for…

Tuesday, delivery day, and having veggie friends round for tea.  Most of our veggie friends in one go, for convenience.  We had soup, cheese pudding and apple tart, supplemented by extra puds from M&S and rather too much wine.

After the wine, one of our guests made the startling discovery that if you back-comb Fudge’s mane, he looks like Ming the Merciless.