"Most buses carried no passengers at all until the invention of the bus-stop in 1972, by Mrs. Gladys Henderson, the famous explorer."

"Water is not, as once thought, essential to life. This was merely a clever scare campaign launched by Water Ltd. about 8 years ago."

"Elvis died accidentally while putting into place the final details of his plan to fake his own death."

"Custard is fixotropic, and thus is sensitive to vibrations in the air around it, so shouting at runny custard will make it set."

"The 'millennium bug' is a direct results of the fact that, when the old software was written, 95% of programmers believed that we would be using 'stardates' by the year 2000."

"Friday;
Restate my assumptions.
The writer writes for himself,
Not for you."

Song of the album; Lost Property, a fairly trivial list song ("It's a song about losing stuff.") that manages to be thoroughly beautiful and emotion-provoking, allegories or otherwise. Very much looking forward to hearing the studio version. (Although Sweden on electric guitars was rather marvellous...)

Still, the actual Whitbread award-giving seemed rather less interesting than the preambling discussion, to me - I'll be reading English Passengers because of the things Ian Hislop was saying about it, not because some panel or other voted for it. A sentence from a person whose opinion you respect counts for so much more than a "First Prize" rubber-stamp.

The resignation seems a bit odd, with the whole passport imbroglio only getting as far as Mandelson misremembering a phonecall - although the run-up to an election is a poor time for something like this to be raked up, it seems just as poor timing for a cabinet resignation. Strange that it's not been fought more. Mandelson was being rather shifty on Channel Four news the other night, mind, saying how he wouldn't object to the log of the disputed phonecall being examined, but how such was an outrageous breach of privacy unheard of since whenever, and whatnot, so maybe there was something dodgy going on.

"Nobody makes me laugh like George W. Bush" is a useful mnemonic for remembering the eight steps of making a complete mess of the whole kitchen, not to mention getting everything covered in blood with a sprinkle of Parmesan.

There's also a brief NME article to be read, of producers and money and touring. [via Yao]

• Is the fifty-fifty random, or do they deliberately take away the two most-obviously-wrong answers? Has anyone ever bothered to ask this before taking it?
• How long will it be before someone phones a friend with a ready-and-waiting search engine, for one of the straight-fact answers? Or even a friend with a room-full of people, I suppose.
• When asking the audience; if the contestant is confident that one of the answers is definitely wrong, why don't they ask any audience members who aren't entirely sure of themselves to give that one as their response? Or if the contestant really has no idea, why not ask the audience to use - I don't know - the last digit of their phone number, to determine their response, thus averaging away any ignorance?

Bravo the Lords for giving further research the green light, anyway; this is just as much a temporary stepping-stone to working directly with adult stem cells as it is to full human cloning, and far better kept under scrutiny in the public sector. Annoying that a lot of people are still speaking of cloning as if it's obviously a terrible and evil thing that we should be really careful to avoid, though. I'm reminded of one of my favourite discussion-panel appearances by Richard Dawkins; the man continually pointing out that a clone isn't very different to a twin, to general deafness.

"Another common reason to use all lower-case is because that way you can type faster, meaning there will be the absolute minimum time for you to consider what it is you will be saying."