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This is only spookly because just yesterday I was drafting a post suggesting that Google might do exactly that. It was all part of a post about the recently leaked screenshots of the Google Calendar application, and I was going to hypothesise that Google might buy a service like Writely (with Writely specifically identified) and develop it into a full-blown online Office-style application suite, as part of the push to get us all to store more stuff online.

So I very nearly had a scoop. So close, but yet so far. I’m beginning to feel like ITV.

No, I’m not bitter.

Well maybe just a smidge.

The Times’s Ann Treneman has successfully diagnosed the problem with our Health Secretary, Pat “crazy lady” Hewitt:

PATRICIA HEWITT is suffering from a medical condition in which she says the opposite of what is true. Those close to the Health Secretary accept this and have learnt to cope. So when Pat says “the sun is shining” they know that, in fact, it is bucketing down and to take an umbrella.

Yesterday she tackled Sir Nigel Crisp’s abrupt departure from the NHS by heaping praise on him. Hearing this, we all assumed he had been pushed.

She spoke of him in the kind of hushed tones that many people would reserve for an extraordinary pet: a parakeet that could knit jumpers, for instance, or dog that could speak Japanese. “Under his leadership,” she said, her voice lapping upon us like the gentlest of waves, “we have seen extraordinary improvements — record improvements — in the performance of the NHS.”

This made us realise things were worse than we had thought. MPs exchanged looks of incredulity. The Tories were rustling like rats in a pantry. “Retired! Retired!” they muttered, eyes wide with wonder. Ms Hewitt pretended this wasn’t happening.

She has now perfected the art of acting like all three wise monkeys at once: she sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil. If she isn’t careful, she might get a reputation for being vacuous.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, was spluttering. Mr Lansley looks a bit like the mild-mannered Barney Rubble from The Flintstones. Yesterday, though, he managed something approaching anger as he tried to extract the truth out of Ms Hewitt about the ever rising NHS yearly deficit.

This proved as difficult as getting a tooth taken out by an NHS dentist. Ms Hewitt was wearing a giant fake flower on her lapel. All new Labour women have these (I assume a mail-order catalogue is involved) and the Health Secretary owns several. Yesterday she had on a pink peony that was as large as a bread plate. As she came under attack from all sides of the House about the deficits, the peony began to tremble with outrage.
We knew the finances were out of control because she kept insisting she was getting a grip on them. Mr Lansley charted the deficit in remorseless detail. First she said it would be £200 million.

But, after six months, she admitted it was closer to £620 million. So what was the real figure? Was it not now approaching £800 million?

She sat, lips pursed, peony poised for battle. Mr Rubble wasn’t letting her off the hook. Was she going to take responsibility for this? Or, he asked slyly, did Sir Nigel have to take the blame? “Perhaps he doesn’t yet appreciate to what extent he is going to pay a last service to the National Health Service, or at least to the Secretary of State, in acting as fall guy for the lack of financial control in the NHS.”

Her voice was deadly calm now. She praised Sir Nigel for being “outstanding”. (It sounds so damning when she says it.) Then, in what doctors are now saying is as close to a miracle cure as has been seen for her condition, Ms Hewitt admitted things were not utterly fantastic. The House erupted in hoots of laughter. Things are, obviously, very serious indeed.

I’ve always known there was something wrong…

Just when you thought the Daily Mail had hit rock bottom, they’re now insisting on referring persistently to  the parliamentary commissioner for standards as “the Commons sleaze watchdog”.  One really has to feel sorry for Sir Philip Mawer.

Steve Robinson has become the first person to podcast from space (via). He did it from the Space Shuttle Discovery, whilst floating above Indonesia. Seemingly, the main thing this proves is that news travels remarkably slowly round the blogosphere – the story first appeared on the NASA site nearly eight months ago, and yet blogs that I read are only just starting to pick up on it. Especially with such a watched mission, one would have expected something like this to have spread round the web rather more quickly, but hey-ho, I guess that’s just not the way it happened this time.

In addition to listening to the podcast above, you can download it from NASA here, or read the transcript here. Perhaps the more amusing observation is that NASA’s podcast from somewhere off the planet sounds a damn sight better and more human than the podcast of this site, generated just across the pond in New Hampshire, USA.

In other podcasting news, the Pope’s got an iPod to help him keep up-to-date with the Vatican Radio podcast. It’s somewhat unclear which other podcasts he’ll be listening to, but then it’s also somewhat unclear what music he’ll be listening to. From the Newsblog:

The pontiff responded to receiving the gift by saying: “Computer technology is the future … I can’t wait to check out the Arctic Monkeys.”

OK, I confess: I made the last part of that quotation up. But the music player definitely brings the head of the Catholic Church closer to being “down with the kids”.

And so we’ve found it. Podcasting is the single point where religion and science meet back on the other side. The internet really does bring people together 😉

I don’t normally post things like this, but really, this is almost too good to be true!

I’m relatively fanatical about 24, and currently greatly enjoying series 5. Today, whilst surfing, I found that Amazon are offering each of the first five series’ box sets for £16.97. That’s an incredible price – less than £1 per hour of entertainment, and far below half price – and some series even have third-party sellers letting them go for even less! The very latest up-to-date prices are shown below.

So whether you’re a long-term 24 fan, or simply a fan-to-be (and almost everyone’s one or the other), get your orders in quick. Preferably via these links, which help support the site:

I’ve just received this email. Normally, when people forward me these ridiculous virus warnings, I bounce them right back with a link to a page like that one. But how anybody with a grain of sense can really have fallen for this

It is a virus that opens an Olympic Torch which burns the whole hard disc C of your computer.

is beyond me. It’s people like this who make me want to reach for the ‘Ban this person from the internet’ button which no-one’s yet managed to create. I already have enough stupid email to deal with without having well-meaning, slightly-slower individuals clogging it up. Example:

Approximately 90% of all disease and discomfort is related to an unclean colon.

Best get the scrubbing brush out, then!  The problem isn’t a blocked colon, it’s a blocked inbox!
Gmail is pretty good a spam-killing, but the problem now is, how do I filter out friends’ and colleagues’ well-meaning but annoying messages from ones I actually care about?