No geek
is an island

Chris Lightfoot on the cost of biometrics in passports, exposing yet another false justification for ID cards.

How Zone 1 of the London Underground really looks. (Via, and.)

Following last week’s Observer crossword problem, it was this Saturday’s Guardian that was afflicted.

First I noticed that some of the word lengths in the clues didn’t match the spaces in the grid; then that the grid wasn’t symmetrical; and finally that some clue numbers didn’t appear in the grid at all. The problem: the right-hand column and the bottom row had been omitted from the puzzle.

Fortunately, there is a symmetry in Guardian grids so it was possibly to draw in the missing squares and have a proper go at Araucaria’s puzzle.

I watched the beginning of The Girl in the Cafe on Saturday night but quickly lost interest. Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald may as well have been playing their characters from State of Play, except Paul Abbott’s excellent script had been replaced by Richard Curtis’s lumbering dialogue, neither funny nor dramatic. It became pretty clear how the story would end:

• Civil servant Nighy explains to “normal person” Macdonald how poor poor people in Africa are
• World leaders refuse to suppot heroic Britain’s calls for more money for the poor people in Africa
• Macdonald tells world leaders that as a “normal person” who Nighy met in a cafe, she’d like them to think for once about the poor people in Africa
• They do.

There was no way I was staying around to see if the conclusion turned out as predicted, but fortunately Andrew Anthony from the Observer stuck with it:

Nighy played an adviser to the chancellor who falls awkwardly and chastely in love with a plain-speaking ingenue (Kelly Macdonald) whom he meets in a cafe. After he explains the iniquities of the global economy, she accompanies him to a G8 meeting in Iceland, where she takes the assembled heads of state to task and finally beds a nervous Nighy.

Nicol Stephen yesterday won the election to succeed Jim Wallace as Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. He beat fellow MSP Mike Rumbles by 76.6% to 23.4%.

I was at the press conference where the result was announced by Malcolm Bruce MP and I watched Nicol’s acceptance speech which was as positive as the campaign had been. Nicol is a charismatic new leader (and former MP) who I’m sure will lead the LibDems to a greater presence in the Scottish Parliament in 2007.

“I want us to be seen as pro-education, pro-the economy, pro-business, pro-the environment,” he explained.

“I want our ideas to be radical, responsible and reforming.
[...]
“My strategy is to aim high, my vision is a Liberal Scotland and Scotland’s future is best with the Liberal Democrats.”

Here endeth the PPB.

‘Racist’ remark was sci-fi quote. Of course it was. And I’m a Jedi Knight.