I'm with Chicky Yog on this: how hard is it to wash your damn hands? I mean, clearly, lots of the people on buses have touched stuff that other passengers have touched, so it's conceivable that they have other people's shit on their hands, rather than their own, but seriously? More than 50% of men in some cities have SHIT ON THEIR HANDS? I am so glad I hadn't eaten my breakfast when I read that. I now have the urge to wear gloves EVERYWHERE.

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anisiriusmagus and other Cushites might want to check out today's edition of dw_daily. I do like the variety that lizbee is bringing to that comm.

ETA: also, today's XKCD is awesome. again.

OK, first up was Lib Demmery. It was a meeting at which Stuff was Decided and Tasks were Allocated and it was amusing (Nick's legendary Jaffa Cake Moment which I suspect you had to be there for) and useful and actually productive. I am still slightly shell-shocked. A productive meeting! Who knew they were even possible?

Anyhoo, I somehow appear to have volunteered to do lots of stuff, including knocking up a press release within 48 hours (no pressure THERE!) which you will all no doubt be relieved to hear, as it means I might be quiet for a couple of days.

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Via innerbrat, a Public Service Announcement! If your daughter gets raped, it's her fault, and also your fault, but definitely not the rapist's! This vid actually made me feel physically sick, and it might be triggery for others too. Proceed with caution.

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If that didn't make you lose your lunch/dinner, this certainly will. It's a news story about a guy who runs a kebab shop making kebabs with a human corpse and a dead rat in the same room. With pictures (of the rat)!

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When you see this, quote from Blackadder in your journal!

First, I'm going to have a little drinkie. Then... I'm going to execute the whole bally lot of you! - Queenie

In the light of John Major's comments re: the 42 days issue, I'd like to remind everyone of one thing.

The debate before the house is not referring to the total period a person can be kept inside before they have to be released. This is, in fact, about whether or not we should have 42 days of imprisonment for people before they are even told what they are supposed to have done wrong. Once you have been charged, once the rozzers have deigned to tell you what they think you've done, you can still be kept locked up for an almost indefinite period, up to and including your trial, given the consent of the judiciary.

The sole reason that this measure has been introduced is that when the police bring charged suspects before the courts, a lot of the time the courts say this man is clearly innocent, let him go, and the government wants to stop innocent people being released because they think it makes them look soft. Does anyone have any doubt at all that the three (yes, THREE, such a huge proportion of our 60,000,000+ population!) people who have so far been kept to 28 days under the current legislation before being charged would have been allowed to be detained post-charge by a court? FFS... What sort of country are we living in when someone can be locked up for any significant length of time without even being told what they are suspected of doing? How the hell have we come to having our government piss wantonly and indiscriminately all over habeas corpus without a peep from most of us about it? I'm sorry, I'm becoming incoherent. This just makes me SO ANGRY.

Given that you can be detained almost indefinitely post-charge, do we really need to have a limit of more than a week? Or even a couple of days? America manages with a two day limit...

Good news: GRATS GEORGE!!! Nobody deserves a beautiful wedding more than you, mate.

Bad News: OFFS you have GOT to be JOKING?! Have they learnt nothing whatsoever from all the recent data fiascos? Clearly not. Then again, maybe it's a late April Fool... Or maybe they announced this today in the hopes that it would be burying in all the noise about abortion...

Could be either: Moffat is taking over from Rusty on Who. On the one hand, Moffat has written all of the best episodes of new Who, so even if he takes the show in a bad direction, at least it will be a better-written bad direction... But on the other hand, we don't know what that direction will be. Still, at least we can comfort ourselves with the hope that it's unlikely to involve bloody Billie Piper. We can has TEAM Tardis, and not just DUO Tardis, Oh Grand Moff? Pretty please with a cherry on top?

I wasn't at this gig. I've never seen Johnny Vegas perform live. I hope that the girl involved in this was a plant, or was otherwise briefed prior to the event

I’m slightly concerned about misrepresenting what happened if you didn’t see it with your own eyes. I can’t give you the complete context without recounting the whole set, and that would take forever and I’d probably get it wrong anyway. With that in mind, I’ll try to explain what happened, but please take what I say with a pinch of salt and bear in mind that it’s my intepretation.

Anyway, fairly early on in his set, he stated that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid; it came across as quite possibly the truth spoken in jest. He started chatting up girls in the front row in an exaggerated, slightly cartoonish way, and quickly focused on a girl who was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by it. To cut a long story short, he fairly insistently press-ganged her into getting carried onto stage by six members of the audience, while pretending to be dead. The premise was that they would then lay her down on the stage and he would bring her back to life with a kiss, and he warned her that there probably would be tongues. Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London - she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.

Once she was on the stage with the 6 ‘bearers’ lined up at the back, he told her to lie very still and he turned back to the audience for a bit. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling, so he told her to shut up and look more dead or he’d kick her in the ribs. There was a menacing tone to his whole set, so I have to admit it didn’t come across to me entirely as a joke. There wasn’t anything funny about it anyway, unless you find that funny in itself.

Eventually he got down next to her and started stroking her breasts. That hadn’t been mentioned before, and in the light of of the repeated refrain of “don’t fucking move” it seemed like an abuse of power. She could have got up and walked away, but it would have taken a lot of courage to do that in front of a large room full of people, against the explicit orders of the famous guy with the microphone. Then he started running his hand up her leg and pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she’d reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up and ended up fingering her through her clothes for a second or two. Then he straddled her, completely pinning her to the floor, and kissed her quite full-on for quite a while. Then he asked if they could bring the curtain down, which they couldn’t, so there was an awkward minute until Simon Munnery came out and brought down an improvised curtain consisting of his coat.

It was pretty hard to know what to make of the whole thing. I came away with the distinct impression that she was given very little chance to say no, if at all. The six ‘bearers’ made it even more grim, as it seemed their sole purpose was to make it look more acceptable - more endorsed, if you will. If it had just been him and her on the stage, I think it would have been rather harder for the half of the room who laughed through it to do so.

I say half, as my impression at the time was that people were going along with it and broadly enjoying the set, but on leaving, I heard nothing but “that was disgusting”, “that was practically assault”, and so on. My girlfriend was quite upset that she’d sat through it and not done anything, but I’m not sure what she could have done - walk out, I suppose. I was just fucking confused by trying to find a way in which it was acceptable. I don’t like to think that any area is out-of-bounds for comedy, even if the comedy is lazy nonsense (which on this occasion, I think it mostly was) - but that really only applies when you’re talking about words and ideas. Once you’ve got someone pinned down on the stage, it becomes a rather different matter.

(link)

If she wasn't briefed beforehand, or a plant, I hope she goes to the police. Sexual assault is not funny. Assuming she wasn't a plant, this comment from the Guardian review pretty much encapsulates my views:

To those apologists for Vegas who believe he was breaking boundaries or parodying his own wretchedness: what actually happened was that he abused his power to sexually molest a woman on stage in the name of 'entertainment.'

Why would this be legal on a stage when it is not legal in the streets, or in an office? Defending it on the grounds of context is dubious in the extreme.

Between this and waking up in a country that's suddenly turned blue this morning, I'm feeling pretty angry. Just so you all know.

Austrian man keeps daughter locked in cellar for 24 years, fathers seven children by her, and his wife didn't know what was going on.

Like bagfish says, When I hear things like this, I sometimes wonder whether humanity would actually be better wiped from the face of the earth, we have such a capacity for evil and wrongdoing.

I feel sick now.