Child obesity 'a form of neglect'

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Vatican urges end to Amnesty aid

I'd feel bad taking money from the crazy cultists anyway.

The cardinal suggested that Amnesty had come under pressure from the pro-abortion lobby and that this had clouded their judgment. (from video report commentary) Let's all bask in that poisonous hypocrisy awhile.

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In pictures: Wildlife survives in southern Sudan

*sings "A lion and a leopard come to this open place" in Zulu*

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The bizarre and selective Puritanism of the US is as old as the nation.

Bizarre and selective, absolutely. We all think this.

(But I'm not too sympathetic to the woman who was put in jail for breaking the law. Campaign for a law change or prison reform, absolutely, but if you do something wrong and get caught, quit bitchin'.)

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A flood-isolated Australian town was in danger of running out of beer this week until emergency volunteers came to their rescue.

Ah, Oz. <3

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A little grave robbing...

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...and a kid who hitched a ride in the wrong coffin.

Quite weird, but I'm absolutely sure the dead woman and child don't mind, and while the parents didn't know they didn't mind either. Comes down to a case of simple fraud. They paid for a service they didn't receive.

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Birds try to discourage more people entering early graves.

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Junk DNA isn't junk!

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Corallium corals to be protected from becoming hideous necklaces

(Appeal in progress on behalf of non-tacky jewellery, likely to be turned down, because there's never an excuse for pink.)

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Awesome. The landscape needs more water wheels, I say.

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Campaigners trawl Tube for papers

Yes! The stacks of free newspapers annoy me so much! Nobody much even puts them in the recycling bins near my work station. They just dump 'em in a normal bin or leave them on the Metrolink seat. There are even people employed to hand out free evening papers on my way home, and that irritates me intensely.

We do not need newspapers. We have radio. We have internet. We have telly, though BBC breakfast 'news' these days is a national joke (or ought to be). We do not need this daily waste of paper. It's absolutely appalling.

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Wafflecopter.

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Yay Ash! (Especially them. Half the tracks on the album of theirs I've got are rubbish anyway.)

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Bad pun alert! "Scot of the Arctic". That's like something Juris would come out with. Mwaha.

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When Augustus John sat for Vicari in the 1960s, he insisted he was drawn not painted and I can see why. That one's a brilliant sketch, but the paintings are ugly.

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Kettle? This is Pot, you black bastard.

(not-very-nice racial language used purely in spirit of satire)

Spin-savvy politicians (and other celebrities) have a twisted, diseased symbiosis with the press. They're both feeding off each other, except that the tabloids have the option to turn on their mutual parasite (in fact this is guaranteed to happen, after a predictable trimeframe).

I'd like to see standards of quality, not content, imposed on the press. But not by this authoritarian government. The proles seem to want to read this trash about boring Paris Hilton's boring prison sentence or which boring person boring Alan Sugar wants as his boring apprentice, and with this generation it's because they've been brought up on it, so it's a nastily tangled problem.

(Do these 'apprenticeships' only last a year, incidentally, so they can sell a further series of the programme? I thought, traditionally, apprenticeships were much longer. They're for mastering your craft, after all. Clearly I am laughably out of date with today's edumacational system and entertainment media.)

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Getting the most from open source

Good that they've finally heard of OpenOffice (which is a pretty good program, though it suffers from a few annoying characteristics inherited from MS Office!), but they could have come up with some more interesting further recommendations than Firefox-Thunderbird.

How about Pidgin (tafka Gaim), the open-source multi-network messaging client? Or PDFCreator, which lets you create PDFs from any program that can print? And those are just some of the ones that this XP-using non-Slashdot-reading aspie's heard of.

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US town set to ban saggy trousers

I still think public ridicule trumps legislation as an approach, you reactionary political loon. Having said that, I recently happened to be walking behind an isolated case of some youngster with des waistband approaching des knees. It was hilarious. De had to pull them up in the end.