I seem to be turning down far more broadcast work than I’m doing at the moment. I was supposed to be doing an hour on Talksport this lunchtime, talking about online shopping – advice, safe places to do it, and so on.

It’s such a tired subject I’m quite glad I turned them down in the end, but wasn’t around to see who they’d managed to get, as the real reason I’d said no was that I was heading around to see Mark and Ja with strawberries and chocolate, ready for pancakes.

This year’s pancake day seems to have gone on for a week and a bit.

Fortunately – knowing us all far to well – Mark had covered the kitchen carpet in an old duvet cover. Just as well, as Mark P ended up flipping one straight out of the pan and onto the floor.

The next one looked like scrambled egg.

Between us we managed to come up with some good ones, though (and a few that didn’t stick to the pan) and then settled down to watch last night’s Eurovision qualifying round. I actually saw it last night, not realising we’d be watching it again, although hadn’t seen the outcome. They were all miserable efforts, but at least the least bad one won through in the end.

I don’t think it’ll be another nul points year for the UK, but I can’t see us doing much.

Got gabbing to Alison about Poland, remembering just before I left that she’d been there a few years ago. Seems it’s not the place to be going for more than a few days, but then if I do it by train it makes Warsaw an eminently sensible turn-around point with a two night stop-over.

Just need to decide on the stopping places in each direction if I go for it in the end.

Ho hum.

The Voice of America is America’s version of the BBC World Service, but while the World Service manages to produce very balanced output, which is as likely to criticise the UK and its government as it is to promote it, every time I have listened to VOA it has presented a very one-sided pro-US stance. I guess that is to be expected, considering its name.

This week, it has posted a story on its site about the latest US government report on Human Rights, and saw no hypocricy in the following statement:

The State Department’s latest report on human rights says rights abuses worsened dramatically in communist-run Cuba last year. (Source: VOA News)

Naturally, the full report doesn’t even talk about the US itself, but then perhaps that, too, should not have been surprising.

Meanwhile,

Pentagon officials have confirmed that Guantanamo (Cuba) detainees may still be kept in detention, even if they are found not guilty by a military tribunal… A lawyer appointed by the US military to represent one of the first detainees at Guantanamo Bay to be charged has also voiced his concern… “This is unlike any system we have seen since at least World War II – except perhaps similar military commissions in other countries that we frequently criticise as fundamentally unfair,” he said. (Source: BBC News)

Well, I had planned on going out to take pictures this morning. Spring seems to have arrived overnight (or perhaps I’d just not noticed it creeping up on us) and the whole town seems to be full of white blossom and yellow flowers that will no doubt be murdered by the next batch of snow.

Walking to the station on Wednesday morning, the sky was a brilliant, vibrant blue, the grass an almost unnaturally intense green and the white blossom a stark contrast to it all. This morning, though, when I have time to go out and be creative, the clouds have come over and everything is dark and grey, which probably means I’ll settle down with the iBook again and try to make some more progress on the book.

I could do with a day away from the keyboard really, though. For one thing it means I’ll drink less coffee (although saying that the kettle is boiling as I type), and for another I should probably give my fingers a few days rest. Spent the whole of yesterday in the lab typing up reviews or meeting with suppliers, and the rest of the week, barring Thursday night, working late.

Still, the late nights should hopefully subside a little in the next few weeks, as the magazine redesign – which none of us could talk about until now – is complete. We sent off the final sections to be printed on Tuesday, and the first issues arrived in the office yesterday morning. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround.

Everyone has worked very hard on it – especially the art team, who have done even longer hours than me some nights, and on one occasion worked non-stop from 10 one morning until 5 the next evening without going to bed. It’s paid off, though. The result is a cleaner, fresher, more colourful and less cluttered set of pages, with plenty of space for flexibility, which retains the magazine’s design strengths.

It should be with subscribers by Monday or Tuesday, I guess, and out in the shops by the end of next week, at which point the emails should start to roll in.

Is the BBC laughing at Vodafone’s misfortune?

And what do you click here? Click ‘yes’ and you’re stupid. Click ‘no’… and you’re stupid.

Yesterday was a long one. I arrived home (from the office, not a party) at quarter to one this morning, and immediately slipped into a hot bath with a mug of redbush tea.

Of course, that’s a stupid time to think of having a bath, but it was oh so relaxing, helped by the fact that the only thing on the talky stations worth listening to was the shipping forecast on Radio 4. Strangely therapeutic at that time in the morning.

After that a long and exceptionally comfortable sleep.

I’d told the others who’d been stuck there with me not to come in this morning, so in the end we all turned up at about the same time – lunchtime – to find the left over pancakes from last night sitting where we’d left them. They weren’t particularly good. Quite obviously the whole of Fitzrovia seemed to have sold out of the things, it being pancake night, and all I had been able to find – after bumping into Three Counties Neil in Sainsbury’s and then Tesco – was strawberry filled crepes that tasted like warm, damp Cornetto cones.

It was not an experience to repeat.

The US has announced it is about to try the first two prisoners from Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held for the last couple of years.

‘The Pentagon announcement insists both men will be presumed innocent of any charges until proven guilty at a military commission,’ reports the BBC.

Does that mean that it was assumed they were innocent all the time they were held in the camp? If so, why were they there? If not, that must mean the US has just decided they are innocent.

In which case, why are they being tried?

When Ralph Nader declared he was going to run for the American Presidency again last weekend he said it was because he wanted:

to join all Americans who wish to declare their independence from corporate rule and expanding domination (source: VodeNader)

So why is his campaign site so Mac-unfriendly? In Safari it only loads the menu running across the top of the page. In Explorer the whole thing loads, but the whole layout is so out of whack you have to scroll down the page to read any of it.

Are these really the doings of a man who wants to fight ‘expanding domination’?

Of course, his decision to run has not been received with universal delight. His first attempt at the Presidency, in 1996, saw him win just 700,000 votes – less than 1% of the American population. The second attempt, in 2000, was barely any better.

Nearly three million Americans – more than 2% of the vote – backed this anti-establishment consumer champion when he stood as the Green Party candidate in the last presidential election. (Source: BBC News)

That 2%, though, was seen by many as being just enough to keep Al Gore out of office, as many of the people who voted for him could have been expected to have voted Democrat otherwise. As had been reported,

The possibility of Nader allowing a Bush victory in 2004 by drawing votes from the left side of the political spectrum is troubling some Democrats. (Source: CNN)

You can’t fault his motivation, though. ‘After careful thought and my desire to retire our supremely selected president,’ he said on NBC. ‘I’ve decided to run as an independent candidate for president.’ Of course, that could just be posturing if the real reason was actually personal gain.

It can’t be the personal slant that is driving him, though. After the perceived damage he did to the Democratic campaign last time around the consumer rights organisations that he fronts saw donations and support fall off dramatically, and the same could reasonably be expected to happen again this time around.

Howard Dean, who withdrew himself from the race to win the Democratic nomination for this year’s election, sums up what a lot of Democrats must be thinking right about now:

Ralph Nader has made many great contributions to America over 40 years. But if George W. Bush is re-elected, the health, safety, consumer, environmental, and open government provisions Ralph Nader has fought for will be undermined… It will be government by, of, and for, the corporations – exactly what Ralph Nader has struggled against… , a vote for Ralph Nader is, plain and simple, a vote to re-elect George W. Bush. (Source: Howard Dean Weblog)

Rather than simply criticise him, though, perhaps the Democrats ought to look at how they can appeal to those who would otherwise vote for Nader and in effect make his campaign irrelevant. Indeed, Nader hints at this himself:

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Why is the BBC becoming so reactionary at the moment? It’s only a couple of weeks since they rang me up asking for someone to be outraged about the gay Tesco ads on Tottenham Court Road station and they rang off when I said I thought they were perfectly harmless.

Today they pick up on some nothing story about people getting mugged for their iPods and they ask if they can send a whole film crew down to the office to do a piece with me on the news about how dangerous it is to wear an iPod on the street because it makes you a target.

I know it got its fingers burnt after the Hutton Report, but surely it’s not reduced to being a broadcast version of the Daily Mail, is it?

It’s only a couple of days ago that they seemingly devoted half an hour of the Today programme to talking about a new Beach Boys album, although in fairness I was waking up at the time so it was probably closer to five minutes but just feeling a lot longer.

Sadly, it means I’ve found myself watching ITV News these last few nights.

If it goes much further I’ll probably end up switching to Sky.

Well there you go. You turn your back for five minutes, then stand up to close the curtains and the cars are covered in snow.

I can guarantee that getting into work tomorrow morning will not be a pleasant experience.

OK. I think I understand Donnie Darko now. It’s taken three viewings to get it, largely on account of the fact I didn’t notice the last black screen said 2nd October on it. I’d worked out he went back in time, of course, but then didn’t connect that with the last few scenes.

Hmmm…

Anyhow, I feel at least partly gratified that this allowed me to explain it to Mark and Ja when we finished watching it last night, as usually it’s Mark explaining films to the rest of us. Being a decidedly non-private environment I won’t write my theory here for fear of offending eyes that haven’t yet seen it, but I am at least less confused now, and don’t feel the need to what it again for a while, by which point it will be incomprehensible again.

So last night was a good night. The food turned out well, and I had a hard time convincing them I’d made it and cooked it myself rather than slamming in a Sainsbury’s packet job. We spend the rest of the night mooching around in the lounge and largely watching QVC for some incomprehensible reason.

The tasteless jumpers they were selling were available from medium to 2XL size, which perhaps explains a lot about QVC’s demographics. Switching over to the Travel Channel, they were desperately trying to sell holidays by showing film of people line dancing by a swimming pool, which is surely enough to put anyone off.

Somehow we always end up watching crap when they come around. We used to watch hours of distorted singing in the films on Asianet, not understanding a word of us. Then they axed the channel (at least on my package) and so we’re stuck with camp old men selling jewellery until most of the cable stations switch to hardcore porn and encrypt themselves.

Today: a bit of a drifter. Devoted it to doing very little in light of what I expect next week will be like, so spent the afternoon finishing the initial redesign on the homepage. Switched from blue to orange, and built in little buttons in the left-hand margin for changing the font size to glasses-friendly proportions for those who need them.

I’ll see how it holds up before changing the rest of the site to match.

Mum and Andrew around for pancakes this evening – their traditional annual visit. I don’t know when they were last here but it seems everything was new since the last time, so it has to be six months at the very least. Minor cock-up on the mixing front, though, when I made up enough batter to feed the whole of Chelmsford.

As a result: feeling full.