Poor Monkey We were happily playing Monkey-fetch when his neck ripped a little. I was then forgotten about and number one priority became to remove as much stuffing as possible. I’m sure she’ll be ever so useful when I try to clear it up, too

Lexus sent a brochure to Mr and Mrs A West. There are so many things wrong there I don’t know where to start. And yes, I’m going for the record of most wasted space in a single photo
My shiny new 7610 arrived yesterday, and this is taken with the built-in one megapixel camera. It’s probably not the ideal subject to judge quality from, though.

The Office Weblog pointed me towards t-shirthumor.com, and I just laughed out loud at a few of the designs. I like these particularly:

and, of course:

Genius I’ve gotta get myself some of those.

From BBC News:

The force is strong among a group of West Yorkshire parishioners who held a special service on Sunday to celebrate the release of Star Wars Episode III.

…

“We wanted a special service to bring these themes together and celebrate the victory of good over evil,” said the Reverend Paul Walker.

As long as they watched the film
Also:

The service also included a hymn sung to the John Williams Star Wars theme.

Apparently it went:

dum DUM dum de de DUM DUM dum de de DUM DUM ooh god is great

Although I can’t seem to get the image of a cloned-stormtrooper mass choir out of my head. Can’t think why…

There are extreme sports, then there’s just being stupid! Click that link to go right to the video (which I’d recommend, as you won’t know what’s coming up), or here for a description.

While we’re talking films, Star Wars: Revelations is a rather stunning fan film. $20k worth, in fact. It’s a whopping 45mins (and 250mb download), but once you’ve seen it you may wonder where the other $120m goes for the cinema releases.

I don’t like banks very much. I’m not a “I’m going to keep all my money under the mattress” loony, but I agree with the Radio 2 financial adviser who said that banks are the enemy and should be treated as such. Aside from the whole you-clearly-don’t-have-as-much-money-as-you-thought-you-did-so-we’re-going-to-charge-you businesswank, it’s the completely archaic systems of money transfer that gets me the most. Four days to clear a cheque? Four days? How stupid do you think I am? You put the two account numbers, both of which can be read automatically, into the computer, which then checks to see whether funds are available. If they are, money is transferred. If not, it isn’t. Exactly which part of this takes four days? Physically moving the cheque to the correct bank, I suppose. Because that’s necessary, I’m sure. Similarly money transfers via the internet. They can’t even use the paper-confuses-us excuse there, since it’s all electronic anyway. And don’t pretend the computers can’t take it, because if I use my debit card the money’s gone instantly. So there.

Who got me started? Who did it? Bad person! Ah yes, I remember now. It was this article, which says that the Office of Fair Trading has told banks to speed up money transfers to within one day. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA. Sorry. Actually, I’m not. And the following is delightful news, too:

Later this year the OFT will investigate the amount of time it takes banks to clear cheques.

Consumer groups are hoping that the OFT will decide that the three to five days it takes to clear a cheque is too long.

“Cheques must not become the Cinderella of the bank payments system,” Ed Mayo, National Consumer Council chief executive said.

“A donkey could deliver cheques faster than banks can put money into customers’ accounts.”

It’s not often I agree with consumer groups, but HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. If I could cackle, I would.

It’s entertaining to see Terry Wogan getting praised at Slashdot, of all places. I’m not so sure about the article being linked to, however…Surely a report on Eurovision and its associated voting tactics would be compiled by sociologists or psychologists rather than physicists?

The US has a daily…

In the US there’s a show…

“The Daily Show” is a programme from the US that’s…

AAAAGHHH.

The US television channels display, on a regular 24 hour basis, a televisual pixel-blitz known as “The Daily Show”. I didn’t actually see it while I was over there, but I’ve seen a fair few clips from it on the Dem Bloggers and UnitedLeft websites (run by the same people). It makes me laugh *all the time*, and I thought you might like to see their take on the British elections. If you haven’t seen the show you may not know the attitude, so I should point out that the whole thing is taking the mickey out of the reporting methods of the major news channels, with a fair bit of commentary. So nobody complain about americans insulting the brits, ok?

“I don’t understand their system at all”
Update: If you enjoyed that, you may also like this (fairly long) segment on blogging. The news story at the beginning genuinely is true, by the way.

You owe it to yourself to listen to this. It’s all taken from genuine speeches, according to boingboing. I’m in awe of these kind of remixes.

Also somewhat Yoda-like. Utter genius. Link via Ben Hammersley.

Had an interesting political discussion earlier. It’s fascinating to see the varied opinions even within a small group of friends. I’m surprised we didn’t get all out war when somebody made the innocuous comment: “I’m guessing everybody here would vote Labour?” I’m going to
I put some new ebay items up earlier today. Hopefully I’ll have a little more luck than last time. I’ve added gallery images and set a lower starting price. The gallery images cost an extra 15p, but I’ll stretch to that.

Anybody see CSI: Miami yesterday? The final advert break contained a preview of the following programme, which was footage of a penis-extension operation. They showed a full-on clip of the procedure. I don’t object or anything, but that’s a fairly brave thing to do in a preview. I guess that anybody watching CSI: Miami will be used to graphic scenes, but there’ll undoubtedly be complaints.

Things I’d like to talk about but haven’t gotten around to:

• The BBC today launched their Creative Archive license, which is quite stunningly cool. I’m not really sure where the world’s heading at the moment, what with copyright laws becoming tighter and tighter while information is becoming increasingly free.
• I was very entertained by this MP (oop, can’t say that any more - how about ‘wanabee MP’) who criticised new speed cameras on the M4. Long-time readers will know that I buck the general opinion of these devices, and it was great to see him get totally smacked down by logic.
• You can create your own Conservative Party poster here, with your chosen phrase in handwritten letters over the ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ tagline. I just left it blank. There are some not very polite real-life poster alterations here.
• This site attempts to end ‘Beg the Question’ abuse. Good luck with that.
• This is supposed to be the world’s ugliest car. I think it’s cool. I want one. Ben disagrees.
• And finally, the random computer science research paper generator just has to be seen to be believed. Its mimicry is really quite scary. The creators have managed to get a paper accepted at a conference, and fully intend “to go there and give a completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face.” Brilliant.

About half of those links came directly from Boing Boing, btw. Ho hum. Getting tired now. Had something of a restless night yesterday so I’d best be off. Night!

I rang Dorridge surgery for an appointment at 11:00 this morning (I’m pregnant), then promply saw the doctor and was all done by 12:00! Very impressive. The Government implemented a new system last year in which you can only make appointments within the next two days, and I admit I was a little skeptical. However I haven’t had a problem making an appointment since, which is very cool
After that I nipped over the road to the bank. I had a dollar cheque to pay in and it ended up costing

There was an interesting incident at badminton this evening. Having lost a game for the first time in many, many weeks, Simon packed up his things and stormed out of the room. We all looked at each other, somewhat shocked. We felt bad. Had our glee been too extreme? Had we taunted excessively? Thirty seconds later, he jumped through the doors and leapt into our midst. We were well and truly fooled. Nicely done

Why Megan failed the Andrex puppy auditions

While things have changed, this morning news was apparently fairly light. Hence the 10 o’clock news on radio 2 contained the following item:

A bird-loving couple in [somewhere] are raising money for the RSPB by auctioning their number plate. Keen bird-watchers, they’re putting the rare ‘BIRD1′ number plate onto eBay. They hope to raise