Last month, I said a number of things… not least, that there wasn’t going to be a This Blogging Month post this month. Well, there is. I also announced some changes to site navigation which, to cut a long story short, have now been reversed, due to user comments. No more ‘Older’ and ‘Later’ posts links!

In terms of hits, they’re up slightly on last month, which comes as something of a surprise, given that I’ve not written that much – I’d really expected the hits to drop off, but clearly they haven’t. I now stand at just over 135,000 hits this month, and I also passed the million mark this month for hits since the site’s launch. Amazon revenues just about covered costs this month.

Towards the end of August, the site had a fairly big design tweak, with titles now in the current curvy-style things and basically all round reduction of the dotted lines that were beginning to take over the site. I’ve also slimmed the site to a standard width, with the aim of improving design and accessibility, and having the helpful side-effect of reducing line-length to the standard 9-10 words for maximum readability. And you thought this was just thrown together… Printing still works properly, and the print template has stayed the same. The website now looks a tad better in Firefox, thanks to some tidying of the CSS. As always, I’m open to suggestions on the site’s design, so feel free to contribute to the discussion. I ‘ve also made the upgrade from WordPress 1.5.1.3 to 1.5.2, which was made infinitely easier thanks to Swing as You are Dreaming‘s change log.

I think that’s about it for this month’s update – so a bit shorter than usual. Hopefully I’ll start to post a bit more regularly again now, as I’m back at uni with full internet access. Bet you can’t wait.

A week ago, Johnathon Freeland wrote an excellent piece for The Grauny, comparing decision making in the TV drama 24 with the post-London-bombing decision making taken by the Government. He essentially concludes that, with respect to terror legislation,

Almost all of the Blair proposals are… superficially appealing, but on closer inspection either flawed or unnecessary.

It’s well worth reading, and I would’ve blogged it last week had I been near a Pea-Sea, but I was not. But it’s still relevant, very well-written, and makes its arguments in a very convincing way.

It strikes me as odd that the lists published by France and Belgium should be mutually exclusive. One would think that they would use similar criteria to decide whether or not an airline was safe, and thus if it’s safe enough to fly over Belgium, then why not over France? And vice-versa? Surely one would expect at least some overlap?

The Observer has a fascinating report this morning that The Vatican has drawn up an instruction banning gay men from becoming priests, but not due to some worry over the morality of homosexuality, rather because…

the presence of homosexuals in seminaries is ‘unfair’ to both gay and heterosexual priests by subjecting the former to temptation

It’s certainly an interesting angle to take, and not entirely the one I personally would expect from the Vatican, who I would expect to ultra-Conservatively condemn homosexuality as a whole. It smacks of a church with an attendance crisis, which can’t afford to alienate anyone, trying to couch their moral objections in flawed logical arguments to make them more palatable to objectors.

But, from a purely practical standpoint, how on earth do they plan to screen for homosexuals before admitting people to seminaries? After all, if they can’t even manage to screen for paedophiles with any level of success, one really wouldn’t think they have much of a hope screening for gay men. Plus, as the Observer article points out…

Studies show that a significant proportion of men who enter seminaries to train for the priesthood are gay. Any move signalling that homosexuals will not be allowed to join the seminaries, even one couched in the arcane language of the Vatican, could reduce the number of recruits to the priesthood.

It will certainly be fascinating to see where this one goes, and whether it does get published or just quietly forgotten about; I would personally be surprised to see this published any time soon, especially by this Pope.

Nick Witchell’s got himself in the news again today (the last time was back in March), for a pretty hilarious argument he had during a rehearsal for a radio news two-way. Unfortunately for him, the mp3 of the incident has found it’s way into the metaphorical hands of the Grauniad, and then onto their website… and from there, onto this website:

In all honesty, though, I tend to sympathise with Mr Witchell in this case – the questions the presenter was rehearsing were generally pointless, as indeed was the whole two-way. And it probably eventually went better for having had the argument. Granted, it would probably have gone on even better if the presenter or the production crew actually had any idea about the story that was being reported, but perhaps that’s too much to ask nowadays.

But however much I think Nicolas was in the right, this will undoubtedly form another chink in his far from flawless armour – and his position is already looking increasingly dodgy, as the Beeb and others oust informed, connected, and mature correspondents in favour of inexperienced attractive young ‘faces’.

When it comes to presenting the news, I’ll take informed presenters like Jon Snow and Jeremy Paxman over autocue reading, lip-gloss wearing, automatons like Natasha Kaplinsky and Kay Burley any day. How can someone who doesn’t even know what’s been going on in the world ever possibly conduct a decent interview about it?

Updated 29th July 2006 to include audio file (replacing dead link)

Good luck to everyone who’s going to pick up their GCSE results today! I really hope you get the grades you wanted – and don’t listen to all the stuff about them getting easier, they say it every year, so don’t let it lessen your sense of achievement. If you haven’t got quite what you wanted, don’t let it worry you too much – I’m sure you’ll find the right way forward for yourself, and be very successful in your own way in the long-run. And for those who did get what they wanted: Congratulations!

Charles Clarke’s new terror plans scare me. Let’s look at just one of the new powers:

Home secretary automatically to consider deporting any foreigner involved in listed extremist bookshops, centres, organisations and websites

The Government wants to have the power to deport any foreigner who it considers ‘extreme’. I can’t begin to beleive that any government would even suggest such measures – how can anyone seriously think that a government has the right to deport those who, essentially, it disagrees with? And, just to clarify, Mr Blair has already made it quite plain that we’re not solely talking about bombers and murderers:

We are dealing not with an isolated criminal act but with an extreme and evil ideology

This government wants to legislate against an ideology, not just the crimes which might stem from that ideology. Not only that, but we’re now allowing our politicians to use judgement laden words like ‘evil’ to describe sets of people – that’s just wrong, and further alienates the sizeable Muslim minority with sympathetic views. In fact, it doesn’t just indirectly alienate them, it actively does it:

Make justifying or glorifying terrorism anywhere an offence

If I sit here and try and understand the rationale behind terrorist attacks, and try to draw conclusions about how it is justified in the minds of the terrorists, I’m breaking the law. We’re being asked to continue an ill-defined ‘war’ against an enemy we’re forbidden to try and understand. Surely that kind of thing shouldn’t happen in a healthy democratic society? And whatever happened to free speech?

I’ve previously said that we’re bordering on the political situaition of Germany circa 1933, and the semantics are getting ever close: Hitler branded large groups of people (most noticeably the leaders of Czechoslovakia) as evil terrorists.

Besides which, in the age of global communication, does it really matter if the people attempting to incite terrorism are in a different country? The suspected nineleven hijackers were allegedly indoctrinated in Afghanistan, and that didn’t seem to harm the scale of their attack.

This is bad, dangerous, and unnecessary legislation which restricts our freedoms – including our freedom of thought – even more than ever before, and should be strongly opposed.

Mo Mowlam, one of the most popular members of New Labour, has died following a long illness due to a brain tumour. The former Northern Ireland Secretary’s biggest political achievement was the overseeing of the negotiations which led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998, but above and beyond that, she will be remembered for being one of the true characters of modern politics, charismatic and controversial in equal measure. She will be fondly remembered by many. There is a full obituary on the BBC site.

Good luck to everyone who’s going to pick up their A-Level and AS-Level results today – I hope you get the grades you wanted, but remember that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. After all, if you’ve tried as hard as you were willing and the results haven’t come out in your favour, then whatever it is you wanted to do probably wasn’t for you anyway, and you just need to rethink your plans. If you have got what you wanted, then well done, and I’m very happy for you!

Now unfortunately, by the time this appears I’m going to be some considerable distance from my ‘pooter (about 1,100 miles by my calculation – yes, again, I’m positively jet-setting this month!), so I’m not going to be able to catch up with everybody 🙁 I will when I get back though… I haven’t forgotten you!

I’ve done The Indy and Channel 4 News, now it’s The Grauny’s Notes and Queries page. In response to the query ‘What is the best ever list of ‘best evers’?”, I wrote:

To find the best ever list of best-evers, we would first need to compile the best ever list of best ever lists of best-evers, or how could we be sure that our list of best-evers was the best ever?

So where to next? The Times? The Telegraph? Who can say? I’ve done the Mail too, but that was before the blog.

Okay, so none of them are really that impressive, but let me have my egotistical moment of glory. There’ll be a new post here at 9am tomorrow, because I’ve already written it and pre-published it. I’m not asking for too much, am I?