What's all the fuss about the new facebook? It's much neater and tidier, and has the LibDemBlogs feature that you see every update by people you want to - no more missing stuff - and you can mute someone if they are livetweeting something and forgot to turn off the facebook feed!

The highlights box is really nice too, and I like the photos link.

What's not to like?

The Petition to Make Bendy Buses Make Accordion Noises as They Go Around Corners: A pressure group to increase the enjoyment of public transport.

... And disabled my feed of theyorkshergob. And the reaction of the twitterati to this injustice?

Some spammers do post less than you...

Which I suppose is true. And here I am, posting again, just to prove them right.

Hey ho.

Poll #1275640 Question Time
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

Is there any point in watching Question Time if one can't blog it because one's blog feed is disabled?

ETA: OK, OK, am going to watch QT. But I'm taking the gin with me.

So, plans for the beer festival at work are pretty much finalised, and it's for the weekend of Hallowe'en. YAY! This means dressing up and lots of beer with silly names and... Hangonaminute... There's something already happening that weekend, isn't there...?

Oh yes, Lib Dem Yorkshire regional conference. So, yeah. Will be working on the date of regional conference. Which is probably for the best because I'm not sure £54 (just over my weekly food budget for all five of us) is tremendously good value for a buffet lunch for two and a chat anyway... Apologies, therefore, to burkesworks, Ros and Mark, and Millennium and his daddies, all of whom we had told we would be there. Mat may well decide to go anyway, if someone can persuade him that £27 for one day really IS good value, but there is no way I can get time off during beer festival.

Still, Hallowe'en beer festival! YAY!

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Speaking of the barmaidness, eruvadhril posted this as a response to my open letter:
I LOLed.

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It is a little talked-about thing of blog etiquette, but having a huge header does tend to really annoy people. So much so that I am a style=mine nazi on LJ, and I feed EVERYTHING to LJ so I don't have to look at other people's layouts. This also conveniently gets me around the insane preference that most people seem to have for insanely bright/pale backgrounds (white is worst) that hurt my poor sensitive goth eyes. So, yeah, I joined the League of Curmudgeonly Whiners Who Hate Large Headers. I'll extend the same offer as the erstwhile starter of that group, too: if you have a large header and want it resizing, I'll do it.

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Via chickenyoghurt comes the news that Amnesty International have set up a neat petition against 42 days that will email each MP with the signers from that MP's constituency. Go, sign, and send your MP the message that 42 days isn't a questioning period, it's a disappearance.

As Peter Black and ihavecake report, the LHC has had to be stopped for repair. This means we have to fret needlessly about other ways the world might end - alien invasion, Yellowstone Park, or asteroid strike are my favourites, but why not check out Exit Mundi for more things to make you paranoid.

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While we're in a 'pologetic mode: sorry Mitch. I am bad fangirl. I was too distracted by shiny shiny politics geekery and forgot about your diet (and, indeed, my own). I shall go and buy tickets for your tour in pennance. Although the three dates that are in travelling distance for me will all necessitate time off work... [/whinge whinge moan moan]

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Via Forceful and Moderate: McSweeney's Hamlet in Facebook news feed form:

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

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Speaking of Facebook, am still enjoying Language: English (pirate), which is selectable by all from the settin's menu. F'r'instance, an item on my newsfeed this morning:

Nick Clegg, Mark Valladares n' Richard Dominic Flowers be spied in a gallery o' paintin's.
by the brigand Helen Duffett
Amidst the Seas of: Bournemouth

It's amazing how such a small thing can cheer one up, me hearties.

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Stephen Glenn has a very amusing top ten of tips for Millibland if he wants to be more like Hesletine.

Are YOU a Lib Dem? Are you of the female persuasion? Then go and fill out your bloody Who's Who thing. I've done it, it's not hard. Come on, chop chop. Jo gives you all the instructions you could possibly need here. Go on, get to it.

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This is basically a video of how to do an awesome Penn Jilette impression:



Such a shame that it's the evil greenhouse gas of doom :(

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Don't forget to join Bloggers for Fluffy Justice if you're on FaceAche O:-)

Facebooking again: you know that Blog Networks thing? Lots of you were kind enough to log in and tell it I write this, so now it believes me. I'd like to return the favour, but it's a bugger to find who has the app installed and if they've claimed their blog etc. - a fact I discovered when trying to submit amused cynicism, only to be told it already exists. If you have the app installed, can you have a look at my list of blogs-I-read, and if you're not on there leave a comment with a link to your blog page and I'll add/vote for you? I've added a couple of my favourites that seemed to be unaccountably missing from the list, but I am too lazy to do them ALL...

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Via Liberty Alone: a very interesting (if provocatively titled) post on why averages do not apply in the specific, and sort of what I was getting at with this post here.

Any of you wondering where today's is will have to wait a bit longer. Sunny has made a lot of alterations to the way the site runs, and one of these is that the Netcast is no longer a post in its own right, but edited into the news post. He has forgotten to give me editor privileges, so I can't do it, and I didn't discover this until I tried.. . I've saved the post as a draft and someone might get to it later, but I wouldn't hold your breath. In my experience neither of the people whom I know have editor privileges are online much, if at all, on a Sunday.

For those who are interested, here's what I would have posted, had I been able:

Peter Black AM reports on Gordon Brown's vandalism. Somebody give that man an ASBO!

Alas, a Blog! discusses the Olympics, and their impact on sexism/racism/ablism etc.

Brad Hicks knows why McCain picked Palin. Best post I have seen on this so far.

Moments of Clarity has a brilliant article about Faith Schools.

The Yorkshire Guidon is amused by Tory embarrassment with being Tory in Leeds.

And finally, Mark Pack has an amusing typo on Lib Dem voice (which the Greens among us might find slightly less amusing than me)

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In other news, lizbee is the overall winner of my blogotheyear awards. I shall make her a special shiny shiny graphic later.

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In other other news, I got a comment from That Tory Blogger on my post about whether I should add him on Facebook. I note that even in a tiny comment on an insignificant blog like mine he can't help but fib to make himself appear more important and popular. I also notice that he doesn't appear to be able to manage an open ID log in. Possibly because he doesn't want comment notifications... Oh well. At least I have afforded some small amusement with my antics, which is of course, the purpose of blogging.

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In other other other news, I have played about with my sidebar a lot this morning. Am now having wibbles about it being too big. Hopefully Ros will get elected as party president SOON and then I can delete that button... ;)

I got a notification this morning. It said "Iain Dale has added you as a friend on Facebook". It seems I cannot escape. I don't read his blog, having looked at it a few times I don't want to read his blog, devoid of substance and full of opinions I despise as it is (and that's without even going into some of the pure poison in the comments threads); and although people keep assuring me he's a lovely bloke in real life, I'm not sure I want to be added to what I am sure he sees as his personal fan club.

The thing is, I don't know if this is just part of my habit of self sabotage. Maybe having That Tory Blogger as a "friend" would be useful in some way. But I know that if I added him, I'd end up reading at least some of his stuff, getting annoyed, getting into wangst and flamewars... I don't want to turn into another Tim Ireland, or even another Sunny (no offence, Sunny mate). And I certainly don't want to contribute to the "Iain Dale is the centre of the blogosphere" trope, when 1, I don't believe that he is and 2, the whole POINT of the blogosphere IMHO is that it's completely decentralised and doesn't have leaders.

(I just got a horrible image in my head of Iain Dale as Granny Weatherwax - the most respected of the leaders they din't have and all that - and yet he's far more of a Mrs Earwig IMHO... My essential Oggishness doesn't react well to Earwigs)

Maybe I am overanalysing. Facebook isn't that important, anyway...

Anyway, my trademark indecisiveness means I am devolving decision-making to you, dear f-list.

Poll #1250633 Iain Dale
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 8

How should I respond to being added on Facebook by That Tory Blogger?

ETA: I've added him on limited profile, and gone back through the import feed of my blog and tagged him in all the entries I can find mentioning him. Most of them are not complimentary.

We shall see if anything comes of that.

Anybody here on Facebook? Do us a favour and add the blog networks app and tell it I write my own damn blog, will you? It's still not believing me because apparently I have to have ten people tell it I write it...

Also, innerbrat (currently second in the bloggotheyear overall winner poll) has written an AWESOME post about Red Riding Hood and rape allegories and related issues which you should all go read.

There is something about two guys in India who doggedly refuse to be ground down by giant multinational corporations that really makes me want to shout YES!!! You see. these two guys like to play Scrabble. And they developed a version of it that people could play on Facebook. And it was good, and millions of people played it. Then the rightsholders for the game got pissy, which is, I guess, understandable. But instead of licensing the already successful game (which would have been the sensible thing to do) they went down the road of lawyers to shut Scrabulous down.

This would have been OK, if slightly uncool, if they'd developed an official version that was any good. Unfortunately, they haven't. They've developed a slow, clunky, nasty official version, which doesn't have nearly the playability of Scrabulous, doesn't use the proper dictionaries, and is available in some countries but not others due to rights issues - compare this with the peace-and-free-love-for-all offered by Scrabulous, and you can see why people are upset at the Evil Multinationals.

The developers of Scrabulous are not to be outdone, though. This morning I found out about a new Facebook Word Game called Wordscraper. In it, you construct your OWN game board - so you can have a traditional scrabble board if you like (and save that board for later use), or you can build a board entirely of triple word score circles (for they ARE circles, and not squares) if you like. It's like Scrabble for the digital age - better, more interactive, more customisable. IN YOUR FACE, Hasbro and Mattel!

Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, I salute you!

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Ever fancied having George Orwell on your f-list/blogroll? Now you can! The Orwell Diaries are on wordpress, or syndicated to LJ at orwelldiaries

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We're All Doomed! And it's all America's Fault! news story of the day.

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Mildly Amusing Spoof Rejection Letters are mildly amusing.

I have had three random adders on Facebook this week. Nothing seems to connect them, and they are all refusing to answer "Why have you added me?" messages.

Why would you DO that? I don't get it. If you tell me WHY you added me, I might well add you back. If you don't tell me why you added me, if you refuse to interact, what's the point in me adding you back?

Anyhoo, I have been reading a New-to-Me blog this morning, found via scouring Lib Dem Blogs for material for the netcast when lcreadinglist didn't yield enough stuff I wanted to link to, and it is stephashley_fd. It's very good, and she writes with wit and elan about Lib Demmery and blogging, and she has great taste in films and music, and she hates Hazel Blears! It's almost like she's a prettier, more eloquent, more Welsh version of me!

Inevitably, matgb fancies her...

Anybody have any reccs for blogs of pretty long-haired lib dem boys I can be reading to even things up a bit? Or, actually, given the sparseness of postage for me to link to today, any reccs for blogs of interesting things I might want to link to at LC?

Brian Paddick's election diary has been edited and published by the Hate on Sunday. Typically for the Hate there are a couple of errors - the most important one being all over his Facebook profile:

Yesterday
Brian was campaigning in Crewe on Saturday - never give up, never surrender! (11:51am)
May 11
Brian was campaigning in Crewe on Saturday - who said I was giving up politics?! (5:21pm)

However, it has prompted an interesting thread on LDV. Some Lib Dems are offended by the fact that Brian hasn't exactly heaped praise on the party (he's given ammunition to the Evil Dale, you see - and no, I'm not linking to that tosser). I found the article quite endearing. Brian shows himself to have a sense of humour, and also shows up many of the flaws in how the party does things. Hopefully we can learn from them.

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My lovely fiancé has an update on the Johnny Vegas situation. Whether or not he wins this libel action, the main result of this will be that everybody will get to hear about his horrid, unfunny, sexist "performance", and unless (perhaps even if) the girl comes out in unmitigated support of him, it will be a disaster for his career. I really think he's shot himself in the foot here, especially given that the Grauniad's lawyers are no stranger to the odd libel case.

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Speaking of my lovely fiancé: I showed him this link, and he picked lots and lots of holes in it. I'd quite like him to do it publicly, though.

See this? This is a gauntlet. See me throw it down... ;)

So, I was playing Scrabulous while I still can, and this advert came up in the sidebar. I can't decide if it's the coolest thing ever or the saddest thing ever; help me decide, oh all-knowing f-list!

Poll #1125139 Scrabble Holidays
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

A scrabble holiday would be:

The fact that you even clicked the link shows that you are...

I keep getting time outs when I try to comment the last couple of days. This are meaning I are not as interactive as usual, for which I apologise. To add to my intarwebby woes, Hasbro and Mattel are ganging up on me to take away my main reason for Facebooking. Bastards. I shall be joining the Save Scrabulous group forthwith.

I should be commenting on the US Primaries a lot more than I am, I suppose. After all, everyone else seems endlessly fascinated. The thing is, although I am concerned as to what the eventual result of the election will be, because it will have a huge effect on things here in the People's Republic of Yorksher UK, I can't actually summon up much energy to be enthusiastic about the race. It's a general principle of mine not to worry about things you can do nothing about¹, and there is knack all I can do about the US elections.

Oh well, I have some parcels to post later, and then hopefully I will be putting up a public BPAL swaps post. This will be the perfect opportunity for those of you who have not yet seen the light to see what all the fuss is about (this means you, people I am tagging on Facebook :P). For those of you who are completely unenlightened... I gave up smoking about 18 months ago. Yeah, I know, I still have the odd lapse, but mostly I haven't been a regular smoker for a while. When I was smoking I never bothered with perfume, because (lets face it) when you smoke, all you smell of is fags, no matter what you squirt on. When I started getting my sense of smell back, somebody² mentioned BPAL and roughly outlined the ethos³, and I was intrigued enough to buy a few imps (samples). The very first one I tried⁴ hooked me, and remains a big favourite to this day. Thus, giving up smoking hasn't actually saved me much money...

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¹ Worrying about something you can do nothing about is a completely pointless waste of time and energy, and I am very lazy and thus have little time and energy to go around. I have therefore tried quite hard to train myself not to do waste time thinking about things which I can't possibly affect. Sadly this means that, as in the case of the US elections, there are some things which one would expect me to be quite enthusiastic about, where I just can't summon up much interest at all.

²I think it was strangefrontier, but it may have been puddingcat

³ Hand-blended, natural perfumes, made from essential oils (and not diluted with alcohol etc. like the big name ones are); esoteric and interesting names; continual production of new and limited edition smells; happy and vibrant community of consumers who swap and sell each other unwanted stuff so there's no waste...

⁴ Monster Bait: Underbed. Yes, trust me to fall in love with a Limited Edition for my first ever BPAL...

Meme from irreperable:


Free-IQTest.net - Accurate IQ Test

This is a lovely example of an information-harvesting meme. It makes it appear that you have to fill in your name and address and phone number to get your results, but you don't, just your email address. Still, if one has an IQ of 154 then it's easy to realise this ;)

More seriously, it's also proof of the truism that the more IQ tests one does, the better one gets at IQ tests. When I did the facebook one a couple of months ago, I hadn't done one in ten years. It pegged me at 140. Now I do this one, having done one a couple of months ago, and I come out at 154...

Still, it thinks I am in the top 1% of the population for IQ, so I'm not going to complain too hard ;)

It's rather disturbing when one's theoretically heterosexual fiancé gets invited to a Facebook Group called "Nick Clegg is More of a Hottie Than David Cameron Any Day" by another theoretically heterosexual male. I know that Lib Dems are enamoured of using FaceBook as a campaign tool, but really, even if you're taking the mickey (as that group clearly is), some things are not going to make you look good. And do you guys really think that yet another comparison of your glorious leader to Cameron is a good plan? If everyone thinks they're the same person then that weakens you catastrophically, surely?

Still, at least Facebook have listened to my earlier whinge and changed "fan of" to "supporter of" for politicians. Which means I'm getting loads of invites to become a supporter of X person... I'm with Mat on this one; if you're a Lib Dem and you value localism, you want your supporters to be local. This means that I still won't be becoming a supporter of any Lib Dem councillors in, for example, Ealing. Even if they buy me a really good birthday present ;)

Devil's Kitchen has whined about MPs pay. He kind of has some good points (I think MPs should spend less time legislating too, although not so they can spend time in other jobs, but so that they can spend more time doing constituency work and becoming more accessible to the electorate). But the assertion that we end up with the dross and the crap who can't actually make £60,000 plus £136,000 expenses in their normal professions if that is what we pay MPs is extremely offensive. Firstly, the assertion that everyone who earns less than £200k is dross and crap is something that makes me want to punch the right wing twat on his pompous nose. Secondly, as I said in the comment to Aaron Heath's entry, I get uncomfortable when people complain that other people are not worth the money they are paid and that their jobs are easy when they haven't actually walked a mile in their shoes, possibly because I have been on the receiving end of such accusations myself more often than I would like. I also think that the suggestion that MPs only do 160 days work a year is not only inaccurate, but dangerous. MPs might only sit in parliament for 160 days, but that doesn't mean they don't have surgeries, local campaigns, etc, to do in their constituencies. Asserting that this is not the case simply furthers the endemic disillusionment with politics which has been stalking abroad in this country for ages. I, personally, think that MPs should be paid more. That way we'd get people attracted to the job who have some measure of intelligence and talent, and less people like Hazel frigging Blears.

Speaking of accusations I have been on the receiving end of... Well, it wasn't really an accusation, but a friend of mine mentioned in an f-locked post his moral discomfort with a friend of his having a large age gap relationship (I'm not giving any more detail than that, since the post was locked, and I'll thank readers who are also on this friend's f-list for respecting that confidentiality also). I've been in a large age gap relationship. It didn't work out, but it lasted ten years, produced one child, and ended on friendly terms which remain friendly to this day. I was the initiator of the relationship. In fact, in my late teens, I went through a long phase of going for men in their thirties. Most of them were mildly uncomfortable about my age, because they thought that they would be on the receiving end of precisely the kind of moral discomfort my friend has. It annoyed me then, and it annoys me now. The younger person in a relationship might well be being exploited, but so might the older. My rationale for choosing older men was because they were 1, richer and 2, more grateful. *I* was exploiting *them*. On the other hand, maybe there's a genuine attraction and the relationship will be a happy one. Either way, if all parties are above the age of consent, I firmly believe that not one single person has the right to judge. Nice people don't judge others for having interracial or mixed religion or mixed weight or mixed height or same sex relationships, so why is it still acceptable to judge others for having an age gap larger than we, personally, are comfortable with? I suspect that position will not make me popular, but there it is.

Finally, something that's been bugging the lovely matgb and I, in a low level way, for a while now.



Why is there one corner of the Houses of Parliament which always remains unlit at night? It can't be that the bulb has gone: surely they'd have changed it by now?

ETA: actually, looking at that photo, it's two, isn't it? Weird.

Firstly, for Mister Mat:

There’s an old myth about the nature of human behaviour - the myth of the “rational consumer” - this is a man (and yes it always seems to be a man) who always acts in ways in his own self-interest, driving the “perfect” invisible hand of a market economy.

I'd be interested to hear your take on this article.

pink_weasel continues to be utterly brilliant.

Hearing voices? Ignore those who tell you you're a nutter; it's advertising.

Also, I have been made an officer in the "Get Vince Cable on Strictly" group on FaceBook. This makes me very happy. And distracts me from the very sad news about Pterry and the fact that Uhmericah is daily going further down the road towards theocracy. Waily waily waily we're all DOOMED.

I have noticed in the last couple of weeks that social networking site Facebook is allowing people to sign up as "fans" of celebrities and such. This struck me as rather sad, but not overly worrying... Until the last few days when I noticed several of my friends of the activisty persuasion were signing up to be fans of Brian Paddick. Now, I admire Brian Paddick in a lot of ways (although I don't think he, or anyone else, has a cat in hell's chance of beating Ken), but I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of him, or any current politician.

Chambers defines fan in this context as

fan² noun an enthusiastic supporter or devoted admirer of something, eg a pop group, a football team, a sport, etc. ETYMOLOGY: 17c: from fanatic.

Now, I suppose one can be an enthusiastic supporter of a politician, but that isn't all that the word implies, is it? "Fan", to me at least, implies unquestioning adoration, or at least a willingness to overlook the personality quirks of a celebrity that you find objectionable in the greater cause of fandom. For instance, I count myself as a fan of the broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson. I would, however, be absolutely mortified if anyone took this to mean that I agreed with his publicly stated political stance*. Yet, if we start declaring ourselves to be fans of politicians, this is what we are doing. We are adding an element of political agreement into the terms "fan" that should not, need not, be there.

I detest the current trend to treat politicians as celebrities; I think it does no-one, including the politicians, any favours, and I think it's wholly inappropriate for them to start collecting fanclubs. Politicians have big enough egos as it is and they should be should be questioned and probed and scrutinised and argued with, not worshipped. Conflating celebrity and political activism dumbs down politics in a time when it is already excessively dumbed down. It also pushes the political debate more towards the pointless ad hominem cult of personality, and away from substantive issues. John Prescott lost his job for shagging his secretary. I don't care that he shagged his secretary, and nor should anyone else. I care about how well (or, in Prescott's case, badly) he was doing his job. Yet conflating political prominence with celebrity leads to exactly this kind of thing - what a politician does in his or her private life becomes far more important than their political performance. It has been going on for far too long, and I am not going to encourage it by signing up as a fan of any of the crop of politicians on facebook that have suddenly sprouted fanclubs. Even if one of them is a close personal friend.

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* whether or not the stance he evinces to the public is anything more than persona because it sells is a subject of much passionate debate among his fans ;)