LibDem Blogs - Archived!

From today's Leicester Mercury:A receptionist confessed to helping move the murdered body of her boss's wife "as a favour", a jury heard.

Gem of a quote from Charlemagne in this week's Economist: "Henry VIII executed his English wives but only divorced his continental ones - so by British standards, he may count as a Europhile."

The Sunday Herald has a striking story: A senior adviser to the Prime Minister told Labour officials at a secret meeting at the Scottish Executive headquarters that building a new nuclear power station at Dounreay would be the ideal way of undermining their Liberal Democrat coalition colleagues. John McTernan – Tony Blair’s director of political operations – suggested the move as part of an orchestrated Labour attack on the LibDems in the run-up to the 2007 Holyrood elections. He said the plan would boost the chances of First Minister Jack McConnell’s party winning Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, the ...

The Apollo Project nominates its top 10 Lib Dem blog postings from September. An excellent idea. I shan't be churlish and complain that they spelt my name wrong.

My webhosts DataFlame are moving my server. This means that DNS setting may end up pointing to old information and possible nothingness. I'm trying to keep any eye on it, and hopefully I'll have no downtime. However it may be possible that LibDemBlogs and my Blog may disappear tonight or tomorrow.

Oh dear.  Been a bit longer than I intended to update this blog.  Lots of evening meetings and under the cosh at work.  That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. On Tuesday 27 September, joined the Ladywell Fields User Group for a crepuscular stroll around the park, seeing what progress had been made, and what problems remained to be resolved.  Sad to see that the newly re-opened cafe had been broken into four times and had been forced to close, at least temporarily.  They even nicked the PG Tips.  Knuckle marks in the dust. A case for the SID ...

Ronnie Barker has died, sadly. A real comedy genius.

Spent a lovely afternoon/evening in Glasgow on Saturday with various fellow Scottish bloggers (yes, I know I’m not Scottish; neither were most of they). Having stopped in at an easyInternertcafé on the way to do a spot of blogging (and to explain the use of word spacing and capitalisation), I arrived at a pub called [...]

I was always a huge fan of Ronnie Barker and would watch anything that he was in. The Two Ronnies on a saturday night were one of the highlights of the week and the reruns that were shown earlier this year were a reminder that they don't make shows like that any more. Barker's mastery of the english language meant that tongue twisting word play was delivered so impeccably it left you breathless. What was less well known was that he wrote much of this material himself, but under assumed names so that his writing would be judged on it's ...

Well, if David Blunkett is not going to Annabel's again then I will have to cancel my plans to take my wife there. Clearly, the place is just not cool anymore!

US Website TPM Cafe reports that some US Neo-Cons have launched a "Committee for A Strong Europe". There's not much hard information on this, all I can find is a French-language website , A L'Heure Americaine which links to its Statement of Intent.: We, Europeans and Americans committed to the defense and promotion of freedom in a dangerous world, have come together to create The Committee for a

by Jabez Clegg James Oates enjoys a beer. Rob looks left, right and left again. Chris Black remembers. Simon Titley on the Bullying-Manner dynasty. John Hemming on the toilet. Jonathan Calder onnot being old Labour. Peter Black on Drugs. Stephen Tall on one more wafer-thin mint. Simon Isledon on Brown going bust. Simon Mollan on ID cards and push polling.

I have to prepare a small email text for publication but calculated in bytes (1024). I know what bytes are but short of actually physically counting every letter and space, can anybody explain how to do it?My email address is under under my photo. I've been a bit lapse in checking the email box attached to this blog but have found some very funny, nice and useful comments. One from Richard which is sincerely appreciated - who wrote: You might want to edit the Blog header, it shows up as  Suz Blog on my browser. You need ...

This is an interesting article referring to the International Energy Agency starting to resile from their prediction of peak oil being about 2030. They are arguing a case that: “It should be noted, too, that there does not tend to be great interest in new types of resources among service and supply-sector players…they need to have ready customers for their new products and cannot easily justify

September's "International Petroleum Monthly" has just been released by the EIA in the USA. (see link). The EIA collate crude oil production figures from a number of sources and then make them available both to the US Government and the rest of the world via the web. They are always working in arrears and often the figures they produce are estimates that are adjusted later. As usual the last

Why do aspirant Tory politicians seem keen to mention they come from single parent families? David Davis is very keen on it. And now the Bow Group's Sam Gymiah uses it as the entree to an article in the Sunday Times plugging his new book about Tory revival. As a young black man from a single-parent household you might imagine I have a lot of reasons to be sceptical of the Conservatives and attracted by new Labour. Given that half of marriages end in divorce and single parent families are increasingly common it seems fairly inevitable that ...

Jackie Ashley (whose occassional op-eds in the Guardian are to become a regular column entitled 'Febrile - why you MUST vote Labour') argues that: PR is not really a principled issue like others; it is about the mechanics of power. Self-interest tends to dominate. Is this a good thing? It is difficult to tell from Jackie's bizarre article which proposes that Labour are to be threatened by the Liberal Democrats and the Tories agreeing not to stand against each at election time. I can't see it happening myself, but perhaps Jackie might well know more. Her source: ...