I mean, I’ve heard of Gonzo journalism, where it’s written as a first-person narrative, and where events may be instigated by the journalist themselves, but this is surely taking it too far… Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on…Macedonian police began to suspect him [...]

I’m running out of things to talk about. Any ideas? I’m planning a football season preview, but I’ll leave that until the week before the season starts (that one specially for ‘Peter Sunderland’ who visits from time to time to argue with me about Roy Keane and Sunderland’s chances), but other than that I’m a [...]

Now there are two options here*: either the people labelling the shutter simply mis-spelled the word ‘shutter’ either accidentally or because they didn’t have enough Us for the label, or someone thought it would be funny to make a swear word on the sign. My theory is on option 2. And I also believe that [...]

Is it fair to call a four-year old a sci-fi geek? Well, I was a dinosaur geek when I was a kid, able to tell you the difference between your Allosaurs, Tyrannosaurs and so on and could even tell you the periods the respective dinosaurs lived in, even if I now can’t tell my Cretaceous [...]

There are some little tells you are probably aware of that let you just know whether or not someone is a geek. The person who looks at a train departure board showing an error message probably isn’t. The person who sees the error message, gets his camera out and waits five minutes for the error [...]

Thanks to both Emma and Jeremy for this: there’s not much I can add to what they’ve already said, but I’ll tell it in my own words… Basically, what has happened is that the Civil Service have published a code for online participation for civil servants. These are: Be credible — Be accurate, fair, thorough [...]

I’m encouraged to see that the BBC are continuing their policy of looking at the important points in the news and not getting involved in a dumbing-down process. Oh, wait a minute, what am I saying? We want to see your pictures of lumpy and misshapen fruit and veg. So if you found a straight [...]

I’ve been a blogger since 21st November 2005, which means I’ve been blogging for just over 2 and a half years. In that time I’ve seen various blogs come and go: some are no longer updated any more, some are updated sporadically, and some continue to be updated regularly. I’m also constantly surprised by the [...]

‘Twas father’s day at the weekend. This meant that instead of the normal procedure of being woken up early by two bouncing children, I was instead woken up early by two bouncing children with a card. And indeed a present. Fortunately however not the ‘My Angel’ pants available from Gateshead Council in a strictly limited [...]

I’m reading a book called Quirkology by Professor Richard Wiseman. He looks at a lot of studies of quirky little things: how good people are at assessing whether or not someone is lying, how easy it is to suggest memories of events that never happened and so on. Oh, and that I was born in [...]