The pilot episode of James O’Malley’s new podcast, to which I have contributed, is now available at poddelusion.co.uk, and also on twitter @poddelusion.

Go now! It’s fun!

As seen in my local Tesco Metro yesterday.

If you’re missing the fact that I haven’t written anything of note on the blog so far this year – and why wouldn’t you be? – you’ll be delighted to hear that UK retailer Play.com has my book, Instant Opinion, for the bargain price of just £6.99 – postage included.

Go on, you know you want to…

Happy New Year to all! I wish you all the very best for 2009 and  beyond.

Valley News's front-page oopsie.

It seems that the New Hampshire-based Valley News managed to misspell its own title on its own masthead on Monday by appending a superfluous ‘s’. Quite impressive stuff and, rather extraordinarily, not spotted by anybody involved in the production process.

No doubt if I owned a newspaper, stuff like that woud be happening all the time. But perhaps that’s not surprising given that I come from the home of the Southport Visiter, consistently misspelled for 164 years, and read theguardian – a paper not best known for its spellchecker, and whose spaceless nonsense masthead has fascinated me since its introduction.

On a more serious note, with editors everywhere laying off subeditors, claiming that they are no longer relevant or necessary in the multimedia newsroom, could there be a more prominent, clear demonstration that the role is still vital?

Without subs, accuracy suffers, whether it be grammatical or factual. And in the ever-more competitive world, where the internet means that CP Scott’s maxim that “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” has never been more true, what do newspapers have on their side, if not accuracy?

There’s a pub in central Newcastle which has posters outside perpetually advertising appearances by the drag act Ophelia Balls. Thanks to my sweet innocence, it took me to walk past the pub many tens of times before – earlier this week – the terrible pun in the act’s name finally registered.

Having barely recovered from the shock, imagine my surprise at finding this new product on a visit to Ikea this weekend:

Apparently, it’s part of the bigger Ofelia Collection. Surely they must have noticed…

If you remember this site six years ago, in the days before the blog when Tilly O’Shea, The Corporation, and TOSSers reigned supreme, then this may be as much as blast from the past for you as it is for me.

Browsing the site’s external archives recently, I’ve unearthed a veritable mine of stuff that I haven’t seen in years – and frankly thought was lost forever. In fact, it came from the old simonhoward.co.uk, in the days before sjhoward.co.uk ever existed…

Perhaps the most startling find is this complete mock red-top newspaper report, which formed part of my A-Level English work, but also formed the centrepiece of a whole website about Tilly O’Shea and The Corporation – some of which still survives via the Wayback Machine. It’s amazing to look back at crap I wrote so long ago – and endlessly fascinating. Though probably primarily for me, I’d guess.

There are a couple of other things I’ve rescued from digital oblivion, primarily for the sake of nostalgia – a small collection of downloadable pub quizzes and lyrics to a few Lazlo Bane songs have both found a new home in the ‘Freebies’ section. And I guess no sjhoward.co.uk nostalgia-fest would be complete without links to the latest So It Goes column by Jason Love, and The View from Here column by Shelley Strauss Rollison, both of which were at one time popularly syndicated by this very site.

If that’s quite enough parochial navel-gazing for you, then you’ll be utterly dispirited to learn that this very blog’s fifth birthday is just a little over two-weeks away, and there’s bound to be more self-congratulatory whooping then. I can’t wait!

This decision over one’s own body is for the conscience – the conscience of individual citizens in this country. It is not for this Parliament, by free vote or other vote, to impose upon them a requisition of their bodies after death for the state.

So said John Reid, a little over three years ago. It would appear that Gordon Brown now disagrees. And, for once, I agree with Reid.

I have no moral, religious, or ideological issues with organ donation, and have been a registered organ donor for several years. I do, however, have a strong objection to the proposed suspension of the idea of informed consent – a guiding principle of modern medical practice.

There are so many deep practical problems with the idea of presumed ‘consent’ – not least of all that presumed consent in such a context is realistically no consent at all, and that once a mistake has been made, it cannot be undone.

But, most of all, we’re skipping steps. We’re going from a situation of maintaining a relatively little-known and little-promoted organ donor register to presumed consent, without trying anything in between.

For appropriate candidates, it should be made a legal requirement that relatives are asked about organ donation as part of the death certification. This would immediately increase the number of donations, as doctors are poor at asking such questions for fear of embarrassment, insensitivity, and upset. As a standard legal question it would be unavoidable.

This would be a simple, non-controversial measure that could be put in place very quickly and would increase the number of viable organs available for transplant.

Why don’t we give it a go?

The Guardian reveals today that, over the last seven years, the Government has spent £2bn on computer systems which have then been abandoned as they were not fit for purpose. Just to put that into context, it’s enough to have employed almost 20,000 nurses over for the same period of time.

This Government’s record on IT projects is abominable. From the CSA computer upgrade that didn’t work to the £12bn NHS computer system which is being rewritten as it was ‘not fit for purpose’, and from the loss of half the country’s personal data to the national police website which never worked, it seems that this Government is simply incompetent when it comes to the management of IT projects.

Even after condemning the MTAS computer system as useless and rapidly running away from it, this Government felt it would be a good idea to rehire the company which designed it for another NHS IT project.

Is there anything IT-related that this Government can get right? And in an ever-more technological society, can we trust this lot to represent the best interests of the citizens of the United Kingdom?