Lectures can, in short, bring a subject alive and make it more meaningful. Alternatively, they can kill it.

A true, but not altogether encouraging, sentiment in this excellent 2001 paper by Brown and Manogue, sent to me by Newcastle Medical School to help me prepare my first big scary lecture for their students.

Newcastle City Council faces huge funding cuts over the next few years. Nick Forbes, the Council leader, has been talking about this extensively over the past few months. Unfortunately, I think some have lost confidence in his arguments because of his decision to repeatedly push an obviously biased presentation of the statistics.

Hurray, then, for my local MP, Catherine McKinnell, who earlier this week delivered this impassioned speech in the House of Commons. She refused to be drawn into partisan Tory-bashing and mud-slinging. She didn’t suggest that funding cuts were entirely avoidable or unnecessary. Unlike others, she didn’t sink to making dubious accusations about increasing funding in the Tory heartland to win votes.

Instead, Catherine McKinnell gave a factual account of the situation, a passionate description of the effect the funding cuts will have, and set out a reasonable justification for her view that the funding settlement has been unfair. Whether she’s right or wrong, it was a model of brilliant representation of her constituency rather than endless parroting of a standard set of party lines. This week, I’m really proud that she is my MP.

This week’s Pod Delusion is out now! In it, you can hear me wittering on about Captain Scarlet, and lots of really interesting stuff, too: an interview with the wonderful Gia Milinovich, the latest on the bizarre CBeebies Get Well Soon row, a bit of public health discussion of the census by Sean Davidson, and loads more good stuff besides. So why not make listening every week your new year resolution?

Happy new year to everyone reading this!

Yesterday, I finished my year-long photo-a-day project, and promised to come up with something new for 2013.

Several people – Wendy among them – have been strongly encouraging me to continue with photo-a-day, but I feel like I’ve run out of things to feature! So, we’ve come up with a somewhat vain compromise – a photo of me every day!

I don’t know if I’ll manage to keep this one up for the whole year, and I don’t think I’ll be quite as assiduous about making up the numbers if I forget on any given day, but I’ll try my best to do it as often as I can. The first photo will come later today, when I’ve finished designing a new template for the posts… I’m calling it my “scrapbook”!

Ponder the fact that I cannot walk into a pharmacy and purchase six packages of Sudafed, but I can walk into a gun dealership and purchase a .50 caliber rifle of the sort that U.S. snipers use in Afghanistan. In fact, I can buy ten.

Patrick Radden Keefe writing about gun control for The New Yorker.

I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. I constantly try to do what Jesus would do.

So said Nadine Dorries in 2007. Obviously, Jesus has now recommended that Dorries abandons her constituents and takes a month off her regular job (while retaining a full £65,738 salary) to earn about £40,000 appearing on a tacky reality television show. God certainly works in mysterious ways!

She’s an idiot. It was her fuck-up. We say quite politely to passengers like her: “bugger off”!

I’m no fan of Ryanair, but Michael O’Leary’s appalling public response to his airline’s disproportionate and punitive fees for printing a boarding pass at the airport is, at least, appealingly honest.

It fundamentally changes what it means to go on holiday.

It seems it’s a day for hilarious quotes today: following on from this that I spotted a couple of hours ago, this ludicrous bit of hyperbole from Daniel Danker also made me laugh out loud. If, for you, being able to download BBC TV programmes to your iPhone or iPad genuinely changes what it means to go on holiday… well, I doubt we’d get on very well.

For anyone that thought the new Microsoft logo was boring I can’t imagine what this must be like.

This comment in a review of Avis’s re-brand by Armin Vit over at Brand New actually made me laugh out loud.

From tomorrow, I’m starting a new series of posts here on sjhoward.co.uk. I share quite a few news and magazine articles on Twitter and elsewhere; I thought that it would be a reasonable idea to pick one awesome story a week and link to it on here on a Friday, as a recommended read for the weekend.

So I am going to do this each Friday from tomorrow: pick and post a single recommended link for a weekend reading. I hope you think it’s a good idea – I welcome comments as always!