It’s exactly this kind of action that makes me doubt anti-hunt campaigners’ motives. Surely a group that are truly concerned about the welfare of foxes would be celebrating the fact that they’ve had success in banning the 6% of fox-killing undertaken by fox hunters, and should be gearing up to tackle the remaining 94%, not continuing to run around chasing after the 6%.

It makes me think that they have something against Hunters (which most anti-hunting campaigners vehemntly deny), not support for the foxes. By all means try and support the ban, but don’t encourage all your activists to spend their time doing this if you’ve still got 94% of a problem to tackle. Unless, of course, trapping foxes with wire and allowing them to starve to death, or alternatively sit for hours or days in total fear before blowing it’s brains out with a shotgun is less cruel than letting them be killed quickly by their natural predators.

I don’t agree with most things on the Backing Blair website, but this made me smile.

For balance’s sake, this didn’t:

Why don’t you f*ck off and apologise for Iraq you tw*t?

Well, maybe just a little.

Why is it that mud thrown at Labour rarely sticks (at least according to the polls), whereas the distinctly lower-quality mud thrown at the Conservatives seems to have super-glue-like properties?

If someone said that the Conservatives wanted to raise countil tax by 4.4%, their poll ratings would drop in an instant. Even more than they already have. But the government have been raising Council Tax for years, it’s clear it’ll happen again, and yet their ratings are on the up-and-up. The Lib Dems want to change the system altogether, and yet nobody seems to hear their shouts.

Well this is a pretty big oopsie. But at least it’ll give the tabloids something to get their knickers in a twist about tomorrow. They’ve always liked cancer stories: I guess it was always the big unknown fear, before the hype about terrorism kicked off. Why are more people scared of terrorism now, with so little of it happening here, than they were when the IRA were blowing things up left, right, and centre? I don’t know.

At the moment, this seems like a reasonably good idea, as it will encourage Royal Mail to become more efficient and an all-round better service. The real test, though, will be whether we still think it was a good idea five years hence, which will largely depend on whether Royal Mail has performed, or ended up increasing prices, removing rural services, or just giving up completely.

Not the best publicity for Microsoft, but at least they’re doing something to tackle the problem. But then, I suppose it’s all coming a bit late if you’re one of the 53 people who have been injured or got a burned carpet.

A burglar is today behind bars after picking the wrong house to burgle. His crime was caught in full by a webcam, which the hapless thief stole along with the computer, but not before it had sent pictures of him to a website.

So says silicon.com. And, as you’d expect, they’ve got the photos to prove it:

Still, at least he doesn’t look really gormless…oh, hang on. You’ll note as an observance of tradition he has opted for the time-honoured burglar uniform of a striped jersey and swag bag – just to make it really obvious what he’s up to.

“What’s that… it looks like a camera. I don’t understand. My brain hurts so much I have to take my hat off…”

I’m sure Umbro are delighted with the chavtastic publicity.

Although I’m sure the anti-Microsoft camp will try, I can’t see that this is anything but good news… and something Microsoft should have planned to do all along. It was always foolish to say they were only going to release new versions of IE with new versions of Windows, because that simply could not sustain their position in the browser market.

My media sources tell me that an Independent/NOP poll published tomorrow will show the Conservatives slipping to down to just 30% – and Labour up to 42%. Which is, frankly, scary. Even the Lib Dems are down three points on this one.

The only questionably good news is that only 55% said they were certain to vote, and a low turnout would almost certainly be bad for Labour. But, frankly, when they’re twelve points ahead it’s not likely to make anywhere near enough of a difference. It could make some impact though, particularly if all the other polling data is correct in saying that the Conservatives are ten points ahead of Labour in turnout – that’s a long way in front.

I just can’t see what the Labour party have done to court voters even further since the last poll I looked at. But they must have done something, and it’s looking increasingly certain that Labour are going to win the General Election by a fair margin. So please try to stop them.

Movies. In ASCII art. That’s quite impressive – though you might not be able to ‘see’ it unless you’re familiar with the films in question. Thanks to BackBytes for the link.