May 23rd - May 29th 2005
Sunday Madrid 1994
Saturday Support
Friday Oui
Thursday Joined up
Wednesday Blackleg
Tuesday Pure poison
Monday Mammary moment
Sunday 29th May 2005
Madrid, Summer 1994
Saturday 28th May 2005
As part of our recent voluntary-redundancy round at work (in which, heh, 17 out of our 19 full-time staff put their hand up), our night-time on-site technical support team has replaced by... someone out there somewhere with a mobile.
Following a little crise around 3am on Friday morning, I had cause to call on them: an unsatisfactory conversation that concluded with my slamming the phone down with the line: "So if anybody asks why the story didn't go in, I tell them you weren't able to find your new password? Good work."
Friday 27th May 2005
Watching the French people decide, en masse, to ignore the stern advice of their frowning patriarchs has been quite fun. But not as much fun as only just resisting the temptation to caption a referendum campaign picture: "French woman with Oui on her forehead".
Thursday 26th May 2005
A footnote to my enquiry to the Environmental Health people in re noise nuisance.
You'll have noticed, and no doubt been gratified by the fact, that Tower Hamlets Council have crawled far enough into this twenty-first century to be able to accept correspondence by email.
What you won't know is that their (fairly prompt) reply consisted of a three-word email ('please see attached') together with, yes, a .doc file.
(Am I the only punter left in the megaverse without any easy means to open a Word file? Somehow I don't think so.)
The attachment, once laboriously decoded and stripped of (utterly redundant) date, contact information and salutation, reads, in full: "An officer from this department will contact you."
As indeed they do, several days later.
With another, wittily ironic, email: "Please find attached a letter concerning your recent email."
I think you can already guess the contents of the attached 'letter' (once stripped of etc etc). "I would appreciate the opportunity of discussing your problem with you and I can be contacted on 020 7XXX XXXX."
Joined up government, they call it: with the head is joined to the tail. Bah.
Wednesday 25th May 2005
What with their ongoing commitment to monitoring left-wing bias in the media, and their sterling dedication to fighting anything designed to ameliorate the plight of the working man, you could count on the Telegraph to find some spiteful angle or other on yesterday's BBC strike.
And, oh boy, they did not disappoint:
Stripped down news bulletins presented by unfamiliar faces might have had viewers switching over in droves but instead, Monday's 10 o'clock news, read by the little-known Stephen Cole, attracted 200,000 more viewers than it had the week before
(Subtext: Go on strike by all means, but don't be surprised if some unknown blackleg wannabe steals your job.)
Tuesday 24th May 2005
I was rather pleased with the model I created to illustrate a review of a history of poisons, but less than pleased with how it looked by the time it had shrunk into the ill-proportioned and meagre space available:
Would you mind terribly if I posted a better version here? I thought not.
(Better than last time, no?)
Monday 23rd May 2005
Every gay man is allowed at least one Kylie moment - and this is mine: I want to talk about Kylie's tits.
Not, I understand, her headline asset, but inarguably noteworthy nonetheless.
I have a sneaky suspicion that he doesn't do nudes these days, but imagine if, just once, Mario Testino had agreed to photograph Kylie naked.
You can imagine the result: all terribly tasteful, Kylie cheerful and unashamed, thoroughly charming with just the faintest whiff of eroticism running underneath.
Not every newspaper or magazine would have bid for them, of course - she is only a pop star, after all. But she would have made a mint.
Now imagine a naked studio session after successful surgery for breast cancer: the tastefully lit Minogue mammaries (almost certainly with little or no visible scarring) proudly bared to prove that women have nothing to fear from early screening.
Is there a newspaper in the world that wouldn't leap at a chance to publish that? Especially when everybody knows that every cent the pictures make is going to support breast cancer charities?
Kylie, your duty is clear: get yer tits out - for the ladies.
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