The Tories are, of course, using the case of Margaret Dixon as something of a stunt. But it is cynical and silly of Labour to say that this is just a stunt: Michael Howard is making a serious point, just from a human interest angle. Mr Blair should address the real problem, not just the way in which Mr Howard presents it. And, just for the record, I thought Mr Blair seemed arrogant and incredibly insincere at PMQs yesterday. Definitely a good week for Mr Howard.

Tony Blair faces the prospect of a celebrity anti-war candidate seeking to unseat him in his constituency stronghold of Sedgfield at the coming general election if a suitably wholesome figure can be found to follow Martin Bell’s 1997 example.

In response to this

Labour dismissed the idea as “a silly stunt”

This is certainly not something I’d say if I were particularly interested in getting people involved in the democratic process. Surely giving the electorate a choice is the whole point of an election, not just a “silly stunt”.

Perhaps this betrays a far more deeply held attitude in the Labour party: This is just a silly stunt in an silly election. They’re so sure that they’re going to win that they don’t really care about the other candidates and what they have to say, they’d rather just overlook the democratic process because they’re sure they will win and just be re-elected. It’s a foregone conclusion for them.

Yet another reason why Labour shouldn’t be elected.

Hospital bosses who found themselves at the centre of a storm today after banning the sale of chocolate and sweets in NHS staff canteens have hit back at their critics.

The chocolate and sweet ban, which applies to three community hospitals and the headquarters of Barnsley primary care trust in South Yorkshire, was introduced as part of a local wider campaign to promote healthy lifestyles, said the PCT’s director of public health, Dr Paul Redgrave.

Well let’s just hope that this doesn’t roll out nationally: Our medical school runs on a constant supply of chocolate and coffee – if the chocolate’s taken away, then things will grind to a halt! I don’t think I’ve sat in a lecture for a long time now when I’ve now been offered a chocolate button or the like. I expect this will only get more prevalent as I move into hospitals, and people really get the munchies.

As this article says, Yahoo search is getting to be very good. I’ve personally been using it more and more of late, as I have the Yahoo Toolbar installed. It’s index is fantastic, and can certainly rival Google: looking at this very site, Google has 89% of it indexed, and Yahoo is very close to that at 86%. The lead between the two is always chopping and changing.

But Yahoo simply isn’t as good as Google yet in terms of the actual searching. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve simply given up on a Yahoo search and reverted to Google, because the results are next to useless. In terms of precision of results MSN is surging ahead – and there’s very little point in having a fantastic index if you don’t have a fantastic search method.

One of the things I’ve come to love about Google (and MSN) is the direct answers feature, where I can type in ‘define x’ and just get a definition. If I try the same query on Yahoo, I don’t even get a link to a dictionary, let alone an acutal definition.

Yahoo is okay for some everyday searches, and it will continue to be a player in the Searching Saga. But the one to watch this year, as I’ve consistently predicted, will be MSN, not least because it has a big advertising campaign underway right now, and once people realise it works, then they will be very likely to move across, particularly as Microsoft will be pushing it from all directions.

I’ve had a breakdown of my exam results today, question-by-question. I was very happy, because there wasn’t a single question I got nothing on, and I got 100% on two questions.

It seems clear that I won’t be the best doctor to ask about Epidermolysis Bullosa (20% – and I don’t even remember ever hearing about it in my life!), Bacterial Pneumonia (30%), Bacterial blood cultures (20%), Tanzanian Blood Smears (10% – but when am I ever going to go to Tanzania anyway?), fertility (25% – but I did get 50% on infertility, and it would seem more likely that that’s what a doctor would deal with), or kidney transplantation (30%).

But I’m practically an expert on Enterococcus Faecalis outbreaks (80%), Medical Histories (100%), Health Diaries (70%), Undertaking the Community Placement (100%), E.coli 0157 infection (70%), Spermatozoa structure and function (70%), and Sensitivity and Specificity of tests (95%).

Everything else was inbetween… Prostate Cancer (60%), Blood Glucose (50%), Complement (40% – which is good, considering I still don’t really know what it is or what it does), Anaemia (50%), Male Pelvic Anatomy (62.5%), Pelvic anatomy (60%), EBM (41.67%), cervical smears (37.5%), Iron deficiency anaemia (30.77%), Pelvic osteology (62.5%), Anatomy Spotter (55%), and Mammography (35%). We don’t get a breakdown of the MCQ, but I got 61.94% overall on it.

Given that the pass mark is about 50%, I think I did very well.

Profoundly undemocratic; a nonsense; an outrage; a disgrace.

This Times leader clearly has strong opinions on the methods Labour used to force through its anti-terror legislation.

I’ve covered my opinions on the legislation itself, but I’ve yet to register my disgust about the fact that the government have forced through some of the most significant legislation of our time with just six hours of debate. That can’t be a good thing, and certainly can’t be in the best interests of the public.

And this from a man who says he’s not arrogant. To feel that you can force this kind of thing through with such a pathetic debate is arrogant. Mr Blair should learn that he doesn’t always know best, and the best way for him to learn this would be to suffer a battering at the next election.

This bill got through with a Labour majority of just fourteen. This shows why a party having a huge majority is generally bad for the country: A huge proportion of Labour MPs can be against something, as well as both of the main opposition parties, and it can still be passed. If the parties had roughly equal numbers, then the bill would have to be a compromise, healthily debated, and so would simply emerge as a better, crucially safer, bill.

Tony Blair and his government, despite their protestations, are clearly arrogant: If anybody’s “Out of order and control”, it’s them. And I hope that you, the electorate, will send that message to them by voting for someone else.

Andrew Brown has a very acute assessment of science coverage in the Daily Mail:

The Daily Mail subscribes to a radically simplified version of the atomic theory and everyone else tries to follow. According to this theory everything in the world is made from two kinds of basic substance: those that cure cancer, and those that cause it. The job of a scientist is to go through the world classifying everything into one category or the other. Every time something is identified as made of one sort of atom or the other, we have a story, preferably a scandal.

Last week’s scandal was the discovery that some faintly carcinogenic food dye had been used to colour chilli powder, which had gone into Worcester sauce, which goes into everything in Britain. Pages and pages of delicious outrage followed. The most delicious thing about cancer is that it isn’t horribly frightening. I know that sounds brutal, but it’s true. Most people don’t really expect to get cancer; and more people will in fact die of heart disease.

I have no further comment right now on a newspaper whose website’s top story is that Terry Wogan doesn’t like reality TV shows.

The Daily Star’s lead story (as reported in The Wrap) made me smile today:

The Daily Star comes up with the strangest twist to the trial. It claims in an exclusive that the “pop weirdo” plans to call his pet chimp Bubbles as his star defence witness. According to the Star, Jackson plans to “communicate” with the chimp in the same way as one of his fictional heroes, Doctor Dolittle, and has enlisted the services of a gorilla called Koko to help as an interpreter.

Only in the tabloids.

I’ve had this album for a while now, but never quite got round to reviewing it. So now is the time…

It’s an absolute masterpiece of an album, one of the best I’ve ever heard. I’m going to steal from the Amazon reviewer ‘Jules T’, because s/he puts it much better than I could ever hope to:

This is an album to dissolve into, a bit like the best hot bath you’ve ever had. As I have got to know it I have fallen deeply in love with it.

It consists entirely of Armstrong’s hands and a piano, this simplicity only adding to the intimacy conveyed by the mood of the music. It’s deeply emotional, more so than you would expect for a album entirely played on one instrument. And it’s incredibly relaxing and uplifting.

Armstrong plays the piano as no-one before, both in a spiritual and literal sense – he plucks, strums, and digitally messes about, as well as playing straight.

It’s just fantastic, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This was a faintly bizarre book, that wasn’t particularly good, but nor was it particularly bad.

Airframe is advertised as a thriller, but there were only about three short passage that could be classed as even vaguely ‘thrilling’, and they played only the most minor of roles in the plot as a whole. It was really nothing more than a particularly stressful week in the life of a woman who works for an aircraft company, with little bits and bobs about the life of a journalist thrown in here and there.

There really is nothing in particular to recommend about this book, but it’s so bland that there’s nothing particularly in there to criticise either.

Overall, I’d say that this was a relatively enjoyable but ultimately worthless read, which I wouldn’t especially recommend. I wouldn’t say that it was a book to particularly avoid either, though.

Having said all that, if you do decide to buy it, you can get a very competitive price using the link on the right.

This is too good not to share: the latest rumour from Rome is that there are two parties contending over the moribund Pope. The Italians want to let him go gracefully; the Poles want to keep him alive for as long as possible. But the best bit is the proposed compromise: he is to die on Good Friday, thus confirming, at least to Polish eyes, who it is he most resembles. How providential that Easter comes early this year.

Interesting gossip, though somewhat unlikely, I tend to think. Watch, now, as I curl up in embarrassment come 25th March, as the Pope drops dead…