Mon 2008-09-29 I was just remarking to Zoe that there are no longer any of those television adverts that end: "Your house might be at risk if you fail to keep up repayments".
Sun 2008-09-28 Henry McGee is at Oxenmoot and has obviously been at the mead. Here is part of his take on Lord of the Rings, in the style of Round the Horne:
RAMBLING SID RADAGAST: ‘Ello Me Dearios! It is I, Rambling Sid Radagast, come ’ere after roving the length and breadth of Middle-earth, with naught by the sky as my coverlet, the hedgerow as my bed and a hedgehog for my pillow, with naught for company but this bird called Galadriel wot I found a-moolin’ and a-wogglin’ under a Mallorn Tree in Caras Galadhon.
GRUNTFUTTOCK THE WHITE: Not you again. And how do you propose to release Middle-earth from the tyranny of He Who Must Not Be Named?
RAMBLING SID RADAGAST: I shall sing at them.
KENNETH HUORN: Believe me, it usually clears the place. Those Calcium Ions will be back in their Intracellular Stores before you can say Elen sila lumenn’ omentielvo.
Read the whole thing here. Perhaps I should point out that Henry is a senior editor, biological sciences at Nature magazine, hence the gratuitous references to calcium ions and large hadron colliders.
Sat 2008-09-27 The indefatigable Ben Goldacre:
Fish oil pills are now the biggest selling food supplement product in the UK, with a market size of £110m. Nobody has ever tested them. Most damningly of all, Durham council had the children, and the pills, necessary to perform a decent piece of research. The only thing they were missing was the rigour, and help was offered. The only real question now is this: why has Dave Ford performed a incompetent experiment on thousands of children? And more importantly, why has Durham Council let him?
Read the whole thing here.
Fri 2008-09-26 
Livelygrey is the blog of dutch color expert Igor Asselbergs. It contains lots to interest web designers and other people who use colors in their day-to-day life. This is from his post on Color Contrasts:
Repeat after me: It's not about the colors, it's about how the colors relate to one another. Say it loud. Say it one thousand times. And never forget it.
Don't worry about what I mean by that. Just read this blog. Ultimately, each and every post on this blog is written to support this premise.
Fri 2008-09-26 From an old article by Amy Sutherland in the New York Times:
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.Read the whole thing here.
