Two nil-nil draws in a row? Away? Granted, we’ve managed to score absolutely no goals in the process ourselves (partly because Michael Owen’s “international pedigree” doesn’t score goals by itself and he just isn’t good enough to cut it anymore) but it has been a long time since I remember Newcastle having two clean sheets [...]

The Scottish accent has come top in a poll of the most reassuring voices to hear in an emergency.BBC News: Scottish accent ‘most reassuring’ …still, I think if it’s just that he wanted to appear reassuring, something less than a complete meltdown of the global financial systems would have done…

The new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, received a somewhat mixed response. Hardly anyone went as far as to say “don’t go and see it”, but a number of reviewers expressed concern that it wasn’t as good as it could — or should — have been. As you may expect, there were a goodly [...]

A man has been jailed for breaching the peace by singing Spiderpig from The Simpsons Movie at police officers. David Mullen was sentenced to three months for the incident and calling an officer “ginger” in a police van. BBC News Now, while I can understand that the man was in a police van because he’d [...]

On the BBC News Home page, there is a section which shows the most popular stories now — the most read, the most emailed and so on. The emailed list is as follows: Bad bosses may damage your heart Compulsive gamers ‘not addicts’ Beach-sex couple to be deported New laws against forced marriages Mauritania’s ‘wife-fattening’ [...]

Well, Newcastle do it again. Just when you think that they are nailed on certainties to achieve expected thing A, they go out and do something completely different. Our last eight trips to Stamford Bridge to play Chelsea have resulted in defeat, going back to a time when Chelsea were not as strong as they [...]

I’ve just noticed a new feature on my blog, the Akismet spam stats. From looking at the Akismet blog, I’ve realised that it’s been on there for about a month before I got round to noticing it, but it has pretty graphs on it. It shows a breakdown of your comments by spam (unwanted comments); [...]

We’ve had a trip to the opticians. As far as the family goes, we’re fairly crap, eyesight-wise. My wife wears glasses or contacts. My wife’s parents wear glasses. My parents wear glasses or contacts. I was prescribed glasses at around 14, but never wear them because I am only short-sighted (admittedly very short sighted) in [...]

So, we’ve heard all about the fun I had getting to and from Lancaster; the jolly old time I had wandering around taking photos of various pubs, and indeed the tale of the calamity which befell Interstellar Master Traders. Now it’s time to talk about the people. Someone expressed the thought that they were a [...]

Not that long ago, we were in London. On the way back from London, we stopped at a service station to get some lunch. I took the kids to the toilet. When we returned, my wife asked me if I wanted the good news or the bad news first. Fine, I thought, I’ll have the [...]