# In response to a survey showing that lots of people would consider becoming vegetarian in the light of the latest food scare (sorry can't find a link), the Today programme had a 'debate' on whether vegetarianism is a good idea or not.

Obviously the people invited are chosen to express polar opposite views and any agreement that arises is by accident rather than design. In this media-savvy age, you'd expect the participants to be aware of this. Anthony Worral-Thomson, pro-meat, certainly was - he was pretty calm and reasonable, gave ground willingly on factory farming, was aware of things like when and where The Vegetarian Society was founded. The pro-vegetarian Chrissie Hynd, who must have done a few interviews in the course of her illustrious career, on the other hand was a shrieking gobshite. She wasn't listening to the questions put to her, butted in, was aggressive, sarcastic, and assumed all vegetarians have the same views as her.

Attitutes to vegetarianism have changed greatly in the last twenty years or so, but it's still common to encounter suspicion and hostility. Ridiculous ranting in public fora does nothing to promote vegetarianism as a sensible thing to do. Quite the contrary, it makes us look like a bunch of emotionally-crippled oh-the-poor-animals tossers.

At first I was pleased that they hadn't got Carla Lane on. She's a pathetic, irrational whiner who's about the worst advertisement for the causes she esposes there could possibly be. Then we got served up another lunatic celebrity instead. Perhaps the script called for a "meat vs. veg celeb debate (must have loony)". [added 28th Mar 2001]
While the editors are under no obligation to get speakers who are "good" adverts for their various viewpoints, it does damage Today's reputation as an informative and authoritative current affairs programme when they do something like this. Surely it couldn't have been too much work to get someone from The Vegetarian Society for instance, rather than "couldn't get Tony Banks MP - who else is on our celebrity veggy list?" [added 2nd Apr 2001]

[Add a comment]

# Saint Francis Life Continuation Sanctuaries - The Saint Francis Story: You no longer have to look forward to heart-rending grief at the death of your pet. Today you can keep some of your pet's cells alive at one of our St. Francis Life Continuation Sanctuaries. If you take this step now, you will have the option in the future to continue your pet's life in a new body.
Start your day with spam.
[Add a comment]

# Current boss Frazer spent the end of last week going through his late uncle's effects. Hadn't spoken to him for years, he'd said before hand, Probably be dead boring.

Frazer's uncle had a big sideboard. And I opened it up and it was full, really stuffed full of cigars and cigarettes. At the back, I saw these packets and I thought 'what the hell are they?' Players Number 6. Packs of 200 still in the box, you know with the cellophane still on them. And I was thinking 'what the hell are these?' On the end of the packets, there was a little paper label stuck on with the date written on it. Nineteen seventy three. Frazer's uncle didn't smoke.

And whisky. Thirty odd bottles of whisky, and they had the bloody date written on them too. Frazer's uncle did not drink.

Do you remember those grey paper bags they used to use at Marks and Spencer? He had a whole suitcase full of ties. And you know the space in the bottom of a wardrobe, you know, between the bottom of the stuff hanging up and the bottom shelf? Three of those, full of Marks and Spencer shirts. Still in the wrapper, in M&S paper bags. It's not known if Frazer's uncle wore a shirt and tie.
[Add a comment]

# In my continuing battle against too many comics, here's partial list of stuff I'm giving away. There are a few little gems in here actually, and the odd thing of interest to the Grant Morrison or Pete Milligan completist.
[Add a comment]

# Every since he could sit up, the Bean has hated lying on his back. That's unfortunate because that's a regular part of the daily grind when you're a baby. Up until now there hasn't been much he could about up from cry and wave his arms around. This week he's been learning to roll over, and today he perfected it. Changing nappies has gone from the work of a few moments to a major battle. He's trying to flip over and crawl away at speed (which is hilarious) while I'm attempting to get any poo of his backside without spreading it anywhere else (which is akin to torture). It's good that he's developing and learning obviously but it's a bugger he hasn't learnt something more useful, like doing the washing up.
[Add a comment]

# Over at LMG, Darren's been having fun digging curious examples of fan fiction, those stories written about characters from films or television shows by people with just a little too much time on their hands. It seems that no character is too obscure to escape having loonies write leaden stories of lumpen prose. A lot of fanfic is, not surprisingly, rather rude (or slash to use the argot). Some shows have an obvious sexual element - Xena for instance, or Kira's antics in DS9. Some programmes leave an indelible mark on the young mind - Louise Jameson skipping around Tom Baker in chamois leather, or Daisy Duke's shorts for instance. You'd expect people to write saucy stories using those characters.

But not Transformers. Surely the eternal battle between good and evil played out across the galaxy by chuffing great robots that turn into cars couldn't inspire even the most off-kilter wordsmith in a below-the-waistline kind of a way?

It could.

Anyway, Soundwave would never do that with Megatron. He was just waiting for Megatron to really cock it up so he could take over as leader of the Decepticons. You could hear the stifled laugh in his voice whenever he said As you command, Megatron. [Listen]
[Add a comment]

# Tim Burton's World Of Stainboy - macabre vaudeville sketches involving strange characters that we don't know yet in a place eerily reminiscent of Burbank, California
Tim Burton is some kind of god. [Listen]
[Add a comment]

#Good Night, Mir
[Listen]
[Add a comment]

# The [Listen] entries are all prolific's fault. I'd was piddling around last night when I should have been working and ended up here, listening to her recording. It was a slightly spooky experience actually, especially as I tuned out a bit in the middle of the poem and stared out of my skylight at the night sky. (If you read notsosoft, you're probably thinking I've just hit the beans point. I have, but I'm going to plough on regardless.) Recently I've been catching more and more Brummie coming into my voice, and prompted into thinking about the whole recording your voice business plugged in a mic and set to it. At university I did a radio show and could ramble into a microphone to an unknown and unseen audience without any trouble, but not last night. I read a couple of passages from randomly selected books, but that didn't work either. So I finished up recording my own magnificent prose. It seemed like the right thing to do.[Listen]
[Add a comment]

#What have we wrought?
Comics chum Frazer emailed.

GAAAHHH
I don't believe it.
Inspired by you, Pete and various others who have done the "clear out" I set out to do the same today...bugger me if I ain't got too many comics.
Shit. I now realise that I could do with ditching a fair few meself.
Bollocks. So I gratefully yet shamefully step back from yer kind offer [of free comics], as I now have my own unwelcome task of comic-shifting to do.

Like, what can one do with so many West Coast Avengers? It's not like it was any good either....

West Coast Avengers - proof that comics arn't just for kids, if only because kids would read something more interesting. Anyone else have a comics sin they'd like to confess?. [Listen]
[Add a comment]

# Delia Online - Is there too much cooking on television? Because for the most part it's fairly wacky and lively. Is that what people want, cooking with entertainment?
The woman who's done more than anyone to rip the joy out of cooking extends her dead hand into cyberspace. Filled with obviously ghosted prose which is by turns patronising and tedious, product endorsements, over-specifed recipes (like this), Delia's book recommendations ('fiction and non-fiction'), Norwich City FC, and page after page of shameless huckstering this website is a hymn, nay a cathedral, to one woman's grossly over-inflated self-image. [Listen]
[Add a comment]

# As you approach junction 6 of the M40, going north, the motorway is cut right through the middle of a fairly hefty hill. The road sweeps down and to the right through the cutting, so as you zoom along the landscape ahead creeps into view. Finally, for a few seconds as you clear the boundary of the hill you can see for miles all around. As you continue down the slope, your field of vision is cut back down until it's just the road and the traffic again. It's a spectacular little interlude on an otherwise pretty dreary journey. [Listen]
[Add a comment]

# Action Comics Weekly 601-642 are yours if you want. There some good stuff here - Deadman, Secret Six and Blackhawk were all strong stories as was Black Canary. The Superman stuff was okay, Green Lantern varied between fun and boring and the Nightwing stories were complete stinkers. It's an anthology comic, what do you expect.

This is only the beginning.

[Add a comment]

# Ain't arthritis a bugger. Months without anything to speak of, then blammo! Your knee doesn't work and your elbow feels like it's got a nail driven through it.
[Add a comment]

# Cough...splutter...

Just heaved my comics, all 8 tons of them, out the attic where they've been languishing since we moved to Birmingham. They need a bit of love and attention, reboxing, sorting, reading, lots of reading. It's probably about time to do a bit of wheat-from-chaffing too. I'm going to trawl through and give away the ones I don't want, and you, yes you, can have them if you like. I've already found a duplicate copy of Rick Geary's excellent Borden Tragedy, so if you'd like it (for free!) just say so.
[Add a comment]

# As befitting my new socio-economic class, I'm thinking about getting one of these little beauties when we get the kitchen done.
[Add a comment]

# The New Social Classes - For the first time in nearly 90 years, the government has changed the way it classifies people according to occupation.In the seven class system more emphasis has been placed on employment contract than on traditional divides like manual/non manual or skilled/unskilled ... And the results are likely to show that -relatively speaking we are not all middle class now. A third of the people in the top two classes – a third in the bottom two - the rest spread between the remaining four AND those who have "never worked".
It's worse than I feared - I've gone beyond middle class.
More: Check your class.
[Add a comment]

# Waiting for the kettle to boil I wandered through to the sitting room and flicked on the telly to discover Vanessa Feltz in full career rehabilitation mode, doing the This Morning phone-in -

Judy: And our next caller has what maybe a bit of a leading question.
Vanessa (groans audibly): Oh nooo.
Judy (concerned, puts out hand and pats Vanessa's arm reassuringly): No, no, it's alright. Really, it's ok.
[Add a comment]

# Toyah's diary - The book signings have been brilliant! ... a man gave me a flask of sperm and told me he loved me ...
It's not my idea of a good time. Filling a whole flask must have taken ages.
[Add a comment]

# Kendo Nagasaki, UK Wrestler of the Millenium - stands tall as one of the greatest figures ever to grace the wrestling ring, a total original who has entertained and infuriated audiences over five decades
That's as may be, but he scared the living daylights out of me.

Kendo [e] said There are two "n"s in millennium! [added 16th Apr 2005]

anonymous said This man was simply the best. When I was a nipper he was my hero and still is. I was lucky enough to take my kids to see him in 2001. The man will always be a ledgend. [added 15th Dec 2006]

[Add a comment]

# Ang likens stuffing a new operating system onto your box to getting your haircut. I think it's more like getting a new pair of boots - you don't do it very often and it takes a few days to get used to the change, but you don't go back.

It's been a bit over two years since I had my hair cut short, and it took me months to get over it. Weeks later I was still using far too much shampoo, wasn't used to my hair drying in minutes rather than hours, still pulled a phantom ponytail out when I put my jacket on. Short hair seems to need so much more looking after - it sticks out at funny angles when you get up in the morning, you can't scratch your head in puzzlement without worrying if half of it is now standing up vertically, Stan Laurel-like, on the top of your head, if you go "overdue" getting it cut it becomes all unwieldy and will turn spontaneously untidy in the middle of the day. It's just bother, all the time. Since growing it long again seems more or less out of the question (I'm not sure I could go through that indeterminate not-short-not-properly-long stage again, and I *know* Nat wouldn't), getting it cut off completely is becoming more and more attractive.

[Add a comment]

# Am I ALL YOUR BASE or NOT - Please select a rating to see the next picture.
Quality meme-mangling
More: Shockwave, at The Guardian, at Wired
[Add a comment]

# Live from the Chrystal Software offices high above Slough's Windsor Road, it's the Key West Car Park Cam!
[Add a comment]

# VisorPhone - Just snap it in and start talking.
I don't often suffer from technolust, but I'm going to be barging to the front of the queue for one of these little cuties.
More:Simson Garfinkel reviews the VisorPhone at Salon.com

See? Pale LMG ripoff.
[Add a comment]

# Bush gives more money to Mars exploration. Amazing! George Senior put Dan Quayle in charge of the NASA budget and he thought Mars is essentially in the same orbit... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.
[Add a comment]

# The link I was going to post that prompted the little outburst below is this First star of the Internet retires - The Trojan Coffee Room camera is coming offline. I remember when I first saw it (before anyone called these things memes) - I was amazed. A live picture of a real place live on the web, cobbled together from left over bits of hardware, that served absolutely no useful purpose at all. It opened my eyes, I'll tell you.
[Add a comment]

# Can't decide if I should keep using posting plain old links LinkMachineGo style.

On the one hand it's both lazy and rude to steal someone else's design so blatently. The four part layout - category, link, comment, quote - is, as far as I'm aware, uniquely LMG so me lifting it dilutes that identity. Might even encourage others to do likewise.

On the other I think Darren's got the almost-but-not-quite-annotated link thing down pretty much perfectly, and presents it very well. It's so much more friendly than the bald RobotWisdom list or the Dave Winer style What is this. The reason I want a different format for links is to make them visually distinct from diary entries. Any format of my own I attempt to come up with now is bound to be influenced by what he's done, so isn't it more honest to just to stick up my hand and say I nicked this.

[Add a comment]

#
[Add a comment]

# Labour will turn Britain into a foreign land, says Hague

Good. If Birmingham became a bit more like Dusseldorf, for instance, I wouldn't mind one bit. Dusseldorf has an excellent tram system that reaches throughout the city, while the Metro reaches out in Wolverhampton and, er that's it. German bars stay open until the small hours, unlike the eleven o'clock close down we have here. As there isn't a designated chucking-out time, there are fewer late night disturbances and you can always get a taxi. Dusseldorfers enjoy their food and the city boasts a wider variety of restaurants than Brum, and at reasonable prices too. Bicycle usage is much, much higher.

But that's the flippant response.

I'm opposed to nuclear weapons. I don't believe there are any morally justifiable grounds for stockpiling nuclear weapons. Even leaving that aside, there's no strategic argument for having stocks nuclear weapons, regardless of whether any supposed enemy state holds them or not. They're just plain wrong, and a very expensive wrong at that.

In the mid 1980s, the anti-nuclear movement was very strong and you might have expected the moral and strategic arguments for and against to have been rehearsed in the national media. The Thatcher government, however, refused to engage in that argument. They sidestepped the whole thing, coming up with a series of ridiculous allegations - that CND was funded by "Soviet Gold", that anti-nuclear protesters wanted leave the country "exposed", that we were all "dupes of the communists". The implication was pretty clear - if you disagreed with the government's defense policy, then you were a traitor. It actually went further than that. Thatcher rarely referred to the Labour Party directly, preferring instead to talk about "the socialists". She also worked pretty hard to link socialism with communism as practised in Eastern Europe, China and Cuba. She painted the world in a highly polarized fashion, where the only possible choice if you weren't with her was collective farms, five year plans, big beards and labour camps

Why go to such extremes? After all, suggesting that dissent equates to treachery is the stuff of those communist regimes that Thatcher professed to hate so much. I believe it the only stance a political party can take when they know that their policies don't stand up to scrutiny. Knowing that arguing nuclear weapons were needed to prevent the USSR from trying to invade Britain lacked any kind of merit, but wishing to remain "strong" (the Thatcher government was all about strength after all) the only path was to diminish the dissenters and suggest there motives where dishonourable. That's politics unfortunately.

So here we are, in what we're told is the run up to a general election, and the best William Hague can come up with is voting Labour will make Britain "a foreign land" - that voting against the Conservatives is voting against Britain. The Guardian recently asked why the government was so dull. When the leader of opposition has so little faith in his own policies, does the government really need to be exciting?

Of course, Dusseldorf doesn't have it all over Birmingham . It isn't a very multicultural place and is quite conservative in many respects. While Germany has an image as quite an environmentally aware society, you still get a lot of quizzically raised eyebrows if you say you're a vegetarian for instance. There also seem to be more large cars on the road that in Britain.

[Add a comment]

# Even though I suspected he was a bit young, I took the Bean down to the Sea Life Centre on Saturday. Located in the heart of Birmingham's swanky Brindleyplace, it is apparently Britain's first inland sea life centre and boasts over 50 aquaria.

We didn't get off to a very promising start, as the Bean fell asleep in the sling as we walked across the city centre and wouldn't be roused. Little sod. Brindleyplace is packed full of bars and what-not, so I slung him round on my back, parked myself in a coffee bar and read the papers for an hour. He still hadn't woken up, but I decided to go in anyway.

The building doesn't look very big on the outside, but turns out to be deceptively spacious. Business seemed brisk and there were lots of kids there, but it wasn't crowded. It's laid out on several floors, and you're guiding along from display to display. The various tanks simulate different marine and river environments, and range in size from the large to the enormous. The fish are pretty beefy and weren't bothered by half a dozen toddlers shoving there faces up against the glass, so there's no I'm sure there's an animal in here but I just can't spot it problem. All the displays are at the right kind of height for kids to see into, so if you're a grown-up with a dodgy back you might not enjoy it so much.

I'm not quite sure what Daniel made of it. He woke up a few minutes after I'd gone in, so was a bit dopey to begin with. It was also quite noisy, what with running water and lots of other kids belting around. Still, he looked at a lot of different things and began to point and chat once he'd woken up a bit. The highlight of the trip is the cheesily named Titanic Experience, where you walk through the middle of an aquarium in a transparent tube. The fish - sharks, rays and what-have-you - are swimming all around you. It is a bit strange to begin with, but really rather wonderful. He enjoyed that I think, even if he was bit alarmed when a manta ray swam over the top of us and seemed to blot out the light.

The Sea Life Centre pitches itself into the fun and educational slot, but I felt information was a little thin on the ground. Some sections were good - especially the seahorses, which had information about different species, conservation efforts and so on. On the minus side, several tanks seemed not have information about all the fish in them. The open sea display had a shoal of mackeral, some pretty wild looking lobsters and a couple of mystery fat fish. Everybody saw them, but there was nothing there to tell them what they were or why they were fat. Perhaps there was more information in the programme.

We spent just less than an hour going round, but if he was older and walking we'd have been in there longer. It cost me £8 and Daniel got in free (I'm not sure how old children have to be before they have to pay too). Whether this is good value or not is entirely dependent on how keen you and your kids are on fish.

We got the bus back, which he enjoyed enormously, had a spot of lunch. After that I watched the rugby while Daniel went to sleep for nearly three hours, which is pretty much unheard of especially after a snooze in the morning. He must have been paying attention after all. Top man.
[Add a comment]

# Ooops. Just left Nat standing outside the front door in the snow for fifteen minutes after she'd come back from her run, because I was working in my programmer's garret and didn't hear her knocking.
[Add a comment]

# Down in snowy Slough. According to the safety notices, if there's a fire we have to assemble in the graveyard.
[Add a comment]