Olympic Mascots Wenlock Policeman Figurine: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games:

Technical Details

• Hello, I'm Wenlock! Don't I look smart in my police officer's uniform?
• I have the important job of protecting you on your journey to the London 2012 Games.
• Take this figurine on a journey to the London 2012 Olympic Games – we can have lots of fun together! [...]

The customer reviews are all you'd expect and more…

[Via Charlie Stross, commenting at Making Light]

Ed Miliband sends in the Army.

In the wake of what's turned out to be an … interesting … week for the UK banking industry, a reminder from Yes, Prime Minister¹ that this is by no means a 21st century phenomenon:

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
They've broken the rules.

SIR HUMPHREY
What, you mean the insider trading regulations?

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
No.

SIR HUMPHREY
Oh. Well, that's one relief.

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
I mean of course they've broken those, but they've broken the basic, the basic rule of the City.

SIR HUMPHREY
I didn't know there were any.

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
Just the one. If you're incompetent you have to be honest, and if you're crooked you have to be clever. See, if you're honest, then when you make a pig's breakfast of things the chaps rally round and help you out.

SIR HUMPHREY
If you're crooked?

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
Well, if you're making good profits for them, chaps don't start asking questions; they're not stupid. Well, not that stupid.

SIR HUMPHREY
So the ideal is a firm which is honest and clever.

SIR DESMOND GLAZEBROOK
Yes. Let me know if you ever come across one, won't you.

[Via Flip Chart Fairy Tales]

1. Broadcast barely a year after the deregulation of the UK financial services industry that was known at the time as "the Big Bang." ↩

Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock (BBC 2010):

Summary:
Every age gets the Holmes it deserves.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

The Yorkshire Ranter has plotted a map showing which local council areas authorised the most Jubilee street parties per head of population.

It turns out my home borough of North Tyneside is a little island of monarchism. Who knew?

[Via Blood & Treasure]

Towards the end of a posting at the Wellcome Library weblog commemorating the 80th anniversary of the mass trespass that led, in time, to the creation of Britain's first National Parks and the establishment of the Right to Roam, the subject turns to libraries:

One of the inspirational presentations [at a symposium in London last year] came from information professionals in the Swedish city of Gävle, describing an initiative that promoted the city's libraries, archives and museums together under the slogan "Kulturell Allemansrät" – the cultural right to roam. A library gives its users the same freedom that the Manchester Rambler needed: access to the whole world of knowledge, without restrictions (except for a few on behaviour that harms other people's rights: [...]), without the concept of trespassing. The world of knowledge is laid out: and readers have the right to roam.

Damn straight.¹

1. Reading that passage, I couldn't help but think that a recording of Jerusalem should have been playing in the background. Well, either that or the Manic Street Preachers' A Design for Life. ↩

Ferdinandea will rise:

In the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Sicily, an island comes and goes. Called, alternately and among other names, depending on whose territorial interests are at stake, Graham Bank, Île Julia, the island of Ferdinandea, or, more extravagantly, a complex known as the Campi Flegrei del Mar di Sicilia (the Phlegraean Fields of the Sicily Sea), this geographic phenomenon is fueled by a range of submerged volcanoes. One peak, in particular, has been known to break the waves, forming a small, ephemeral island off the coast of Italy.

And, when it does, several nation-states are quick to claim it, including, in 1831, when the island appeared above water, "the navies of France, Britain, Spain, and Italy." Unfortunately for them, it eroded away and disappeared beneath the waves in 1832. [...]

This Past Imperfect post about Closing the Pigeon Gap is a fascinating look at how 19th century continental powers made use of networks of carrier pigeons in wartime, and how the British responded to the perceived threat of a Pigeon Gap developing. All good stuff.

And then there's this one passage that reads like a scene from a discarded Blackadder Goes Forth script, recounting a description by Lieutenant Alan Goring of a sticky moment during the Passchendaele offensive of 1917:

[...] I was left with just a handful of men, all that was left out of those three platoons…. We had two pigeons in a basket, but the trouble was that the wretched birds had got soaked when the platoon floundered into the flooded ground. We tried to dry one of them off as best we could, and I wrote a message, attached it to its leg, and sent it off.

To our absolute horror, the bird was so wet that it just flapped into the air and then came straight down again, and started actually walking towards the German line. Well, if that message had got into the Germans' hands, they would have known that we were on our own and we'd have been in real trouble. So we had to try to shoot the pigeon before he got there. A revolver was no good. We had to use rifles, and there we were, all of us, rifles trained over the edge of this muddy breastwork trying to shoot this bird scrambling about in the mud. It hardly presented a target at all.

Welcome to Shit London:

These are photographs of the unintentional human comedy that surround us in the city. It's the flotsam and jetsam of city life, the overlooked minutiae, the tragic, the grotesque and the basest of base. It's the adapted posters, the dirty joke on the back of a van, the mispelt (sic?) signs, the glory hole in the public loo, that weird shop down the end of your road and the knob graffiti strategically placed for maximum effect.

Grab your camera. Notice your city and laugh at it.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Fact of the day:

The gold medals that will be awarded in London this year will be the biggest and heaviest handed out at any summer Olympics. At 400 grams (14 ounces), the equivalent of having a large tin of baked beans hanging round your neck, they will be more than twice as heavy as the average of the previous five games, and almost 17 times heavier than at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

[Via The Morning News]

Another old time UK Blog bites the dust. It's undoubtedly best to recognise when the blogging urge has gone, but it's still a shame. Thanks for sharing, Jon.

Kickstarter: Shared Access to David Cameron by RevDanCatt…

Donations are normally made to the Tory Treasurer, unfortunately the current one has just recently left to spend more time with his family. When a new treasurer is found and the dust has settled I will make a donation for the full amount raised (the more we raise over the target the more time we get to spend with the PM) to sit with David Cameron for a full hour to put forward your stories, opinions and lobbying.

[...]

PLEDGE $10 OR MORE

[...]

I know a lot of people have a simple shared phrase they'd like to say to David Cameron. In the very last 10 second slot I will, to the best of my abilities personally issue this phrase to David Cameron's face.

Estimated Delivery: May 2012

[Via iamcal]

The Folding Plug design I posted about in 2009 has finally come to market, having morphed along the way into a USB charger, as The Mu.

My first reaction was that at £25 a time it'll be right at home sharing a bag with the expensive ultralight laptops which inspired the designer to create the original design. On second thoughts, when I contemplate the size of the clunky old¹ mains USB adapter I have stashed in my desk drawer at work in case my iPod Touch needs a mid-day charge, I can clearly see the appeal. £25 is a wee bit pricey, though; at £10 it'd be well worth the money.

I hope they sell them by the thousand, so they can go on to expand the range. I especially want to see the compact 3-way adapter that featured in the original video.

[Via, once again, The Null Device]

1. How old? I think I may have got it with my first iPod, an iPod Colour 60GB model. Mid/late 2005, maybe? ↩

This morning's Devo on 'devo max' for Scotland was by some considerable margin the most surreal item I've heard on the Today programme in quite a while.

I'd dearly love to have been a fly on the wall in the editorial meeting when someone first suggested they ask a member of Devo what they thought of the possibility of adding a third option to the ballot on Scottish independence.

Sometimes I think Marina Hyde is wasted on the Guardian's Lost in Showbiz column. Then she writes a piece like Abu Qatada's weight and the showbizification of terror and I realise she's exactly where she needs to be, doing $DEITY's work:

[The Daily Mail...] is distressed the corporation should regard "extremist" as a value judgment best avoided in news reports, where "radical" would do. But more than that, it seems, they are incensed at the Beeb's guidance on Qatada's present dimensions, despite the fact it was clearly only given to ensure current rather than out-of-date stock pictures are used. "BBC staff have also been advised against using images of the preacher looking fat," the paper shrieks to its readers. "He is apparently now much slimmer than he used to be."

"Apparently"? Now come, come, Daily Mail. This disingenuity does not become you. I put it to you that you knew very well indeed that Qatada had slimmed down – just as you are aware of even minuscule cellular changes in the adipose layers of everyone from Cheryl Cole to third-tier government ministers to babies such as Harper Beckham, who are only one whitewashed inquiry into press standards away from being described as "pouring their curves" into romper-suits and the like.

Harry de Quetteville, Obituaries Editor for the Daily Telegraph, on The Art of the Obituary:

[It is...] rare for us to reflect on funeral arrangements, although there are exceptions. It may be fitting to note that a Spitfire will fly over the church where a Battle of Britain fighter pilot is being buried, or that the proprietor of a famous haunt for sozzled actors has asked for mourners to come to his funeral in costume and make up. Rob Buckman, the doctor who died last October after a career which was devoted to improving the way medics counsel the terminally ill, left instructions for a recording to be played at his own interment. It was to run: "Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don't have to get up in the morning."

Tweet of the week, courtesy of @kjhealy, a.k.a. Kieran Healy:

Alain de Botton plans to build a series of temples for atheists. Apparently he has never heard of Apple Stores. dezeen.com/2012/01/25/ala…

[Via Crooked Timber]

The shortest lighthouse in Britain?

It turns out that former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was laughing all the way to the (run on the) banks:

[Following the release of the minutes of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee's meetings for 2001-2006...]

It makes for quite a fun read if you get past all the boring economic analysis parts. In fact, if the stenographer was accurate, the Committee broke into laughter 45 times in just the January meeting! That's at least 45 jokes (some didn't get laughs – if only we knew the quality of each laughter!). I would have guessed that would be a lot relative to other meetings, right? I mean how funny would it be if the top of the housing market was also when the FOMC was telling the most jokes in their meetings?

Well, being a data nerd with nothing better to do on a Thursday night, I looked into it. To be precise, I went back for just the last six years (2001-06) and searched for how many times the stenographer's notation for laughter appeared in the released transcripts of each FOMC meeting.

Suffice it to say the data is funny…

Sadly, the minutes of meetings of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee are written in a rather dry, formal style, so there doesn't seem to be much scope for a similar analysis of economic policymakers' behaviour over here.

[Via The Morning News]

Joe Moran on a modern version of the dawn chorus:

My favourite character in Craig Taylor's Londoners, his oral history of the capital which I've just finished reading, is Craig Clark, a clerk at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street underground station. There is a lovely opening to this section which illustrates the unconscious synchronisation of millions of urban lives: 'I arrive at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street station when it is loudest, between eight and nine in the morning – when all the lost mobile phones, programmed by absent owners and sealed in their individual brown envelopes, begin to chirp and ring and speak in novelty voices and vibrate and arpeggio on the racks where they are shelved, each with its own designated number. The chorus gets louder every quarter of an hour, until a last burst of sound at nine o'clock, and then most alarms go quiet for the rest of the day.'