YouView could entice a large cache of older viewers too technologically timid to hook their set up to a games console to view the world of TV a little differently.

So said The Guardian this morning. It seems that, for YouView to be successful, Lord Sugar is relying on customers who are all of the following:

1. Too tech timid to hook up a games console, but tech confident enough to hook up a YouView box using an almost identical method.
2. Too money-conscious to spend cash on a Sky, Virgin, or BT Vision subscription (all of which offer – or will soon offer – most of the new features), but happy to spend £200 on a box whose additional online functionality is broadly comparable to that of a £49 Roku box.
3. Have a broadband connection (or are willing to pay for one), despite tech timidity and money-consciousness.

That doesn’t strike me as a huge market… but perhaps I’m underestimating the power of its big-name backers!

If people could actually see inside my brain, all the things I was thinking, it really would be a very bad day.

So said Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, in an interview with Amber Elliott for Total Politics published today. This may be a slightly ill-advised soundbite given that there’s a perception that he’s duping the public with his plans for the NHS.

As it turns out, he’s having a pretty bad day anyway, as doctors have voted to take industrial action over pensions.

He tries to convince us that ‘we’re all in this together’, and doesn’t realise how disingenuous it makes him sound.

It’s not original to say that Cameron’s the heir to Blair, but it was a little arresting to find this sentence in a post I wrote almost seven years ago about Tony Blair – certainly not the Prime Minister most associated with that particular phrase these days.

Recently, the polyphonic ringtone acquired a competitor: A compressed snippet of actual recorded song emanates from the cell-phone handset as if from a tiny radio.

It’s easy to forget how quickly technology progresses. It seems remarkable that this New Yorker article from 2005 already seems so quaintly dated – and yet it was published just two years before the first iPhone launched.

I just would have liked to have seen Bartlet say ‘goddammit’ from time to time, which you can’t do. You’ll be able to say ‘motherfucker’ on network television before you’ll be able to take God’s name in vain.

Aaron Sorkin in this Kaplan and Leibovitz Vanity Fair piece about him, his methods, and his move to HBO. It’s a really good read.

I feel compelled to write to you about an architectural disaster that has been inflicted on the people of Southport. This building is totally out of place and reminiscent of drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

Janet Berg wrote this complaint to the Southport Visiter. It might seem a fair complaint: archiectural disputes are loved by local papers. But I noted with amusement that the urgent compulsion to complain to the local paper about this building has occurred a full 40 years after it’s construction. Though, in fairness, it is fairly ugly.

One of the cabin crew panicked upon landing. She was screaming like a banshee – ‘Get off, get off’ – she was pushing people down the chute.

Tom Alrigde, complaining in a BBC News article about a member of cabin crew trying to evacuate a plane suspected of being on fire as quickly as possible. Yes, really.

I own a house in North Kensington and my house in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have. Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.

David Cameron, talking to Ginny Dougary for The Times, in 2009. I missed this first time round, but have just found it via David Eaton in the New Statesman.

Everyone else pitched baby carrots as an antidote to junk food. Where Crispin came out was almost the exact opposite. We want to be junk food.

This article from Fast Company describes a fascinating and (at least initially) successful approach to marketing carrots. I think it provides some interesting food for thought for public health people, like me.

Somewhere at the top of the Hundred Acre Wood a little boy and his bear play. On closer examination, we find a forest where neurodevelopment and psychosocial problems go unrecognised and untreated.

Over the weekend, somebody (I forget who) posted this paper, which gives a neurodevelopment perspective on Winnie-the-Pooh, on Twitter. Wendy and I both really enjoyed reading it – it’s a brilliant piece of medical whimsy.