As Mickey Mouse’s animated doggy friend, he entertained generations of children. But in a scandalous move, Disney have now demoted him from being a classically planet-sized celebrity – with his own shows and lines of clothing – to a minor dwarf, taking Snow White’s total to eight.

It’s pure speculation, but this could have something to do with the circulating rumours that he and Mickey have never buried the hatchet since the 1930s incident dramatised in ‘Chain Gang’ where Pluto chased Mickey, when the latter escaped from prison. He then became Minnie’s pet, before becoming Mickey’s own pet some years later.

Pluto has also had short spells in the care of Donald Duck, but it would appear that even this friend refused to take him back on this occasion, leaving him to become one of the dwarves in the care of Snow White. The reason for rejection by his closest friends is clouded in mystery, but could be due to repeated sexual indiscretion, drug addiction, or alcoholism: Rumours of all three have been circulating in media circles for decades, largely thanks to his surprising and unexpected absence from Mickey’s Christmas Carol in 1983.

Due to a difficult childhood, Pluto has been mute throughout his adult life, unlike his fair-weather friend Goofy. It’s thought that this latest rejection won’t help heal the psychological scars left from his early years.

Pluto’s son, Pluto Junior, and brother, KB, are not thought to be joining the ranks of the dwarves at the present time.

Oh, and there’s something about a planet not being a planet in the news, too. Don’t know what all that’s about.

It’s the story we never hear in the media. 75% of 18-year-olds have just failed to get three passes (grade E or above) at A-Level. Popular opinion, mainly thanks to the media, has it (in a survery I can’t find again to link to) that over 80% of 18-year-olds reach this standard. Bollocks. The vast, vast majority of the young people in our country don’t even attempt A-Levels, let alone pass them.

Let’s talk, me and you, about one of the most respected, classical subjects at A-Level: History. Of the 375,000 18-year-olds in the country, the top 13% sat an A-Level in the subject. Frankly, these days, that’s an acheivement. Schools no longer enter people they don’t think will do well, because it damages their league table results and ultimately affects funding, which is why 87% of the population don’t get to take it. So it is fair to say that the 13% of youngsters sitting the History A-Level are the top historians of their age in the land. Well done.

10.9% of the 18-year-olds in this country passed that A-Level. We’ve weeded out 89.1% of the population – hundreds of thousands of people – without even looking at grades. But if we choose to look at that top ‘A’ grade, we find that just 2% of the population managed to achieve it. 98% didn’t.

In chemistry, only 9% of the population passed, with under 2% acheiving the top grade. For maths, the top 13% were entered, and the top 3% got A’s. And for the much lamented media studies, 7% were entered and just 1.5% got A’s.

People say that A-Levels are easy, worthless, and don’t discriminate anymore. Yet the vast majority don’t pass them, and our example shows that very few reach the top grades. How much more discriminating would you like them to be?

Ahh, Dixons. That famed electrical store which, three months ago, stopped existing as an actual entity, and turned entirely virtual with a woman poking at non-existing buttons on a non-existing screen and asking a non-existent customer “When do you want it? … That’s not a problem” (at least according to the ads). This was, of course, as parent company Currys ate up the Dixons brand and spat it out.

Dixons. What a marvellous shop it is. And ethically aware, too. It does lots of recycling – not least of press releases.

You may have seen in today’s newspapers and news programmes that Dixons is to stop selling analogue radios, them being so old-hat. This news has had a mixed reaction on the web: Some are cynical, some think it’s a step towards the future, some a sign of the times. But it’s undeniably getting wide coverage. It must be nice for an electrical chain to get so much free advertising of it’s modernity, but I can’t be the only one for whom this story rouses a profound sense of deja vu.

It smells remarkably like a reheated story from last year, when Dixons decided to stop selling 35mm cameras, them being so old-fashioned and uncool. That, again, was seen as a big sea-change in consumer electronics, and generated much free advertising for the chain. But again, there was something not quite fresh about the story.

That might be because the year before, Dixons decided to stop selling video recorders, them being so old-school and obsolete. This generated much free advertising for the chain, and every talking-head worth their appearance-fee told us that this marked a huge shift the consumer electricals market. But some complained that this story might not have been quite as modern as they’d hoped.

Crazy suggestion, but that might just be due to the fact that a whole four months before, Dixons had decided to take a stand and stop selling Manhunt, a computer game which the parents of a murdered schoolboy blamed for his death. “Ooh, look at our corporate responsibility for the modern age” cooed Dixons, to the sound of many press photographs outside their stores. Rumours that they later regretted this when stocks of the game completely sold out in the rest of the country due to massively increased demand thanks to the oxygen of publicity the case provided remain unconfirmed.

By now it must be struggling to think of things to stop selling. It apparently has personal CD players and “boom boxes” on its “endangered list”, but if it’s going to continue at this rate, there’ll be no non-existent buttons left for the virtual Dixons woman to poke at.

The last case I cited is, admittedly, a little different, but it’s hard to deny that Dixons have put out almost exactly the same story for three years running now, simply replacing one piece of technology for another. And yet it still generates acres of media coverage and free advertising. This either means that newspapers don’t realise what Dixons are up to, or simply don’t care about serving three-year-old reheated reports to their readers – after all, it fills another page in the lazy summer months.

Perhaps it’s irony – after all, this latest story is published right alongside the twenty-four-year-old reheated trash about A-Level results, for which the quote in this post (still on my wall) is probably still the best response published in a national newspaper. To anyone getting results today: I hope they’re what you wanted; if not then it might seem tough today, but you have your whole life ahead of you and you can still go on to do many wonderful things. A-Levels are no pre-requisite for greatness.

As has been widely reported, NASA have lost the original tapes of the first steps of man on the moon.  Oops.  I’ve lost one or two things before, but I’ve never really managed to lose one of the sole records of a defining moment in human history.  So I feel I’ve done quite well over the last twenty-one years, and it makes me feel better about the occasional bit of kit I might have lost at school.

Luckily, copies of the footage still exists.  The stuff that was shown on TV is clearly still around, but that’s grainy.  NASA, who were technologically advanced enough to send man to the moon, were not technologically advanced enough to work out how to directly broadcast their lunar footage on TV, and so had to show the footage on a TV monitor, which was then filmed by a TV camera, leaving the image somewhat grainy.  And, so it would appear, no-one’s bothered working on a solution to the problem over the last 37 years, so we’ve still not seen the original footage.  And now they’ve gone and lost it.  Probably taped over it with the Dick Van Dyke show, or something.

Now, wonderfully, internet conspiracy theorists are claiming with all the conviction they can muster that this doubtlessly proves that the moon landings were faked.  Of course it does.  The loss of a tape in an archive of tens of thousands clearly outweighs the evidence of the (albeit grainy) film footage, photographs, and samples of the moon that the astronauts brought back.

Anyway, in my experience, if they stop looking for them they’ll turn up.  And then they can make a fortune by airing the ‘lost footage of the moon landings’ in some TV special. 

In fact, you know where they probably are?  Right alongside Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and 150 Home Office PCs.  Wherever they might be.

It can’t have escaped your attention that, yesterday, John Reid seemed to be doing the job of the Prime Minister. In Tony’s absence, Dr Reid took his position chairing COBRA. Whilst the good people of the USA were addressed by their President, our glorious leader was tanning himself on holiday, so we were addressed by Dr Reid. In fact, Mr Prescott didn’t really do any of the duties of the Prime Minister in his absence – so why his title is Deputy Prime Minister, and quite what his day-to-day job is supposed to be, I’m not sure.

Guido appears to have discovered that the reason Mr Prescott wasn’t available to lead the country through a national crisis is that he was responding to an article called ‘Prescott really is in the hotseat’ from Wednesday’s Daily Express. Fantastic leadership.

In other news, would it be cynical to suggest that the airlines would quite like the cabin baggage restrictions to continue? Suddenly, they’ve got a whole new revenue stream, as they can realistically offer novels and newspapers at highly inflated prices, reasoning that people will buy them on board if not allowed to take them on board. Furthermore, the advertising rates in their in-flight magazines can shoot up, because they suddenly have a captive audience that largely ignored their offerings forty-eight hours ago. And without big, bulky bags, boarding becomes much quicker, and hence turn-around shorter. In the longer-term, the overhead lockers could be done away with, saving a huge amount of weight, and cutting fuel prices too. This could be highly, highly profitable for airlines… even if it does scupper Ryanair’s latest plan to offer mobile phone calls on-board. I imagine the newly-created market would be more profitable than that one anyway.

As I write this morning, news is just reaching sjhoward.co.uk towers of a foiled terror plot to blow up planes in mid-flight. In response to this, hand baggage has been banned on aircraft departing from the UK – all that is now allowed is a clear plastic bag containing travel documents. And medications. And glasses. But that’s it. Except for baby food. Oh, and wallets. But not much, really, no. Forgot to mention keys – they’re still allowed. Oh, and ‘small personal items’. Which I guess doesn’t include small personal explosives. And everybody’s being hand searched, and the clear plastic bags are being X-rayed for reasons that aren’t clear to me. US flights are having two searches, just to make sure, and you’re not allowed to take liquids on board. Except the baby milk, but you have to taste that to proove it’s safe. Books and newspapers are too dangerous to take on board, because you could give someone a pretty nasty paper cut. It’s beyond parody.

Really, this is quite a wonderful idea. Everybody is carrying an identical clear plastic bag containing identical passports and tickets. How long before everybody ends up with somebody else’s passport and tickets? That’ll complicate things a bit.

The terror threat level has been raised to ‘Critical’ – the highest possible level. Or at least, it has in some places. The MI5 website says it’s ‘Critical’, but the new exciting important Intelligence.gov.uk reckons it’s only ‘Severe’. Good to see a unified approach. And the police have just been ‘explaining’ the threat level. ‘Critical’ means that an attack is expected imminently. The police say they’ve foiled this plot, aren’t aware of another, but it’s possible. So they’ve raised the level from ‘Severe’, where an attack is ‘Highly likely’, to one where an attack is ‘expected imminently’. Even though threre’s apparently no specific threat. Yup, this is the new intelligence logic.

Why any organised group of terrorists would bother trying to smuggle bombs in hand luggage anyway, I really don’t understand. It’s far too risky. It only takes one of them to be discovered for an organised security response to prevent the others happening. There are many ways of getting explosives on to an aircraft that stand less chance of being discovered, as shown in Whistleblower a couple of years back (and I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting those loopholes have all been closed). Why go with the riskiest option? Organsied terrorists wouldn’t.

Perhaps the new security’s a good thing. I got on a flight last Friday – and off at the other end – without having my ID checked once. My passport never left my pocket from entering the airport to leaving at the other end. There’s a lot of tightening to be done, if you ask me. But then, I flew with an airline that charged extra for hold baggage – they’ll be rubbing their hands with glee today…

Some time ago, Professor Stephen Hawking posted a question on Yahoo Answers asking how the human race could survive the next hundred years. A few days or so later, he (as you might hope for such an intelligent guy) answered his own question with an audio message, which Yahoo have inexplicably combined with a patronising slideshow to create this video:

My first reaction to this news was that, with all that brainpower, you might hope that Prof Hawking would be having happier thoughts. You know, sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, that sort of thing. With a brain the size of his, an awful lot of happiness could fill the space currently occupied, quite clearly, with a whole lot of misery. 😉

Then it occured that the most respected thinkers and philosophers of every society ever (or, at least, quite a few) have predicted the downfall of the human race to be in the near fuure, and it’s not happened yet. What makes the good Prof any different?

Next, it occured to me that it was, perhaps, reassuring that this video was popular enough to make it into the most-watched videos on Yahoo’s site. It shows that people must be interested in the problems which may affect their offspring after their death, that they care for the world in which they live, and actively want to aid the survival of the species.

Then I noticed what was above this video in the chart:

My faith quickly evapourated… but my smile grew.

Live TV… can you think of anything else that can provide this much schadenfreudic entertainment? Watch and enjoy as Windows Vista’s speech recognition is put to the test. And fails, miserably, in front of millions.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/speechrecognition.flv” /]

It’s all a little bit reminiscent of this, which you may remember from eighteen months ago, when Bill Gates himself experienced a Windows failure at the worst of times… But then, doesn’t Windows always fail at the worst of times…?

I’m delighted to see Guardian Unlimited leading the way once again with a brand new feature launched this week: G24. Essentially, this presents a multi-page almost magazine-formatted downloadable PDF digest of the very latest news on the website, so that one can print it off and read the very latest news at one’s leisure.

The G24 (a play on the names of ‘G2’ and ‘G3’ sections of the paper) currently comes in five editions: Top Stories, World, Media, Business, and Sport, each updated every fifteen minutes and containing no more than 10 A4 pages.

The launch is covered in more detail in the Editor’s Week column of today’s Grauniad:

This week Guardian Unlimited launched a new print edition – but unlike any newspaper you’ll have come across before. For a start, its distinguishing features appear to owe more to the world of online news than traditional print. It is updated every few minutes, is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is free, and it can be found around the world.

The big difference is that we’re now asking you to, in essence, supply the printing press.

Is this the future of the newspaper? I don’t know. But it’s definitely a service I’ll be using (indeed, it’s one I’d probably be willing to pay for, as I already do for an ad-free Guardian site), and I will be amazed if this isn’t imitated within weeks by competitors.

I think this is a really good idea.

The Labour government were, just four months ago, caught changing transcripts to say what they wanted them to say, rather than what was actually said. In that last case, Tony Blair’s words magically changed on two occasions: First he unadmitted a mistake, then he suddenly didn’t want to say his MPs supported him, so used some more magical speech Tipp-Ex.

This time, he seems to have passed a bottle of the enchanted correction fluid to his Foreign Secretary. More4 News have discovered that part of a Channel 4 News interview with Margaret Beckett has disappeared from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office transcipt. The offending piece, spoken and yet apparently not heard:

JON SNOW: Foreign Secretary, are you happy to discover that bombs and rockets and missiles are being sent through Prestwick Airport from the United States to Israel?

MARGARET BECKETT: No I’m not happy about it, not least because it appears that insofar as there are procedures for handling that kind of hazardous cargo – irrespective of what they are – it does appear that they were not followed. I’ve already let the United States know that this is an issue that appears to be seriously at fault, that we will be making a formal protest if it appears that that is what has happened. We’re still looking into the facts but I have already notified the United States that we are not happy about it.

Is it now official government policy to delete from the archives anything which, in retrospect, is a bit politcally awkward?