As someone who has had American Airline's "security" personnel ask for a) proof of employment [and how do you prove that in an airport transit lounge?] and b) proof of funds to cover what they plainly thought was an excessively long summer holiday, I sympathise completely.

It is strange that over the last decade or so the only two people I can remember ever having really lost my rag with [i.e. they reduced me to a state of incoherent rage] were both employees of American Airlines.

Now some people seem to think that this will end the scourge of comment spam, where people [or, more to the point, machines...] post 'comments' in weblogs that are nothing more than link-filled ads aimed at manipulating Google's page-rank algorithm by artificially increasing the number of links to the spammer's web-pages.

Problem is, not only will many not install the software necessary to allow these new controls to work [it ads a rel="nofollow" attribute to anchor tags...] but it still won't stop spammers posting crap to people's blogs. MT-blacklist is as essential as ever...

Er, that'd be me, in a nutshell...!

The Guardian has an interesting section on ethnicity in London, including maps of the distribution of ethnic and religious groups.

Before you get too astonished by the patterns on the maps, you should look very closely at the legends and how the wards [?] have been grouped.

Which is in and of itself sufficient reason to hold referendums[ae??] - local authorities in the UK have a rather bizarre yet utterly complacent belief in their divine right to rule.

After all, we do need to be developing the new generation of David Blunketts, don't we??

What complete and utter rubbish - since when have 18 year olds been mature enough [both socially and politically...] for this to have the slightest relevance to them?

And sayeth the remarkably sensible Liberal Democrats:

Carson to join Liverpool

A department store with its own holding cell???

The image links from here:

SkyscraperCity Forums - Glasgow Latest

Well, have turned off the TypeKey requirement, so anyone who wants to can post... the net result of which is, of course, a huge flood of comment spam. So we have taken the odd step to moderate this... [pardon the pun] so first time posters will be auto-moderated.

Lots of things are just being flat-out rejected, so if you want to say anything about viagra, ciallis, poker etc. you're probably out of luck. :-)

Er, is anybody actually watching this?

History's other great relief effort

Apparently Herbert Hoover wasn't quite the useless muppet that we've all been brought up to believe.

Or so sayeth the modern Shakespeare, Stuart Hall.

Harry urged to say sorry publicly

More like Harry urged to grow the f*ck up methinks...

Real agree Morientes fee

Chance & Circumstance - Peter Malick Group feat Nora Jones etc.

It's crap.
Buy New York City instead, which has all the Nora Jones songs on it and which is half the price.

just busy coughing.

You can now access the sultan ahmet camii [aka blue mosque] gallery.

When you've fixed the contact page nice people are able to tell you that things are broken, which is v. much appreciated :-)

The contact page now works again, possibly for the first time in months. My apologies for being a muppet and not noticing.