From a Telegraph report

Tony Blair has come under fire in the Chinese media for charging nearly £200,000 for a single speech – and not a good one at that.

The former prime minister spoke to businessmen and government officials in the industrial city of Dongguan, two hours’ north of Hong Kong, on Tuesday evening.

Local media estimates of his fee ranged from US$330,000 to US$500,000 (£160,000 to £240,000).

Although the real estate firm which hired him for a “VIP banquet” refused to confirm the sum, the local tax office admitted he had paid just under £80,000 in income tax and £6,500 for a three per cent business tax, which would work out to a total fee of about just under £200,000.

What made matters worse for newspaper commentators was that Mr Blair failed to say anything interesting.

One said he had trotted out the same platitudes about the importance of collaboration between government and business, and of the environment, as you would hear from the officials in his audience.

“Frankly, we are very familiar with all this – it’s just like listening to any county or city official’s reports,” Deng Qingbo wrote in the China Youth Daily…

The piece goes on to say that a recent US tour netted £300,000 for the disgraced former PM.

Puzzled about the subprime market crisis? Try this explanation by John Bird and John Fortune.

Excerpt:

Fortune: How does that [the subprime market] work?
John Bird: Well, imagine if you can an unemployed black man sitting on a crumbling porch somewhere in Alabama in a string vest and a chap comes along and says “would you like to buy this house before it falls down? and “why don’t you let me lend you the money?”
JF: And is this chap who says this, is he a banker?
JB: Oh no, no, he’s a mortgage salesman. His income depends entirely on the number of mortgages that he can arrange.
JF: So, his judgement to arrange mortgages is completely objective?
JB: Completely objective, yes.
JF: And what happens next?
JB: Well, this debt, this mortgage, is taken — bought — by a bank and packaged together on Wall Street with a lot of other similar debts…
JF: Without going into much detail about what is actually…
JB: Without going in to any detail. No, it’s far too boring. And so this is put into a package of debt and then it’s moved onto Wall Street and … it’s extraordinary what happens then… somehow this package of dodgy debts stops being a package of dodgy debts and starts being what we call a Structured Investment Vehicle…

Bird and Fortune are comic genuises. No other words for it. I’d missed the South Bank Show on which they appeared, so thanks to Hap for reminding me.

… a Neighbourhood Watch Area AND the18th century. That’s a working gaslight on a suburban Cambridge street.

No, I am not making this up. The Daily Telegraph report begins:

A man has been placed on the sex offenders’ register after being caught trying to have sex with a bicycle…

Fans of Flann O’Brien will not be in the least surprised by this. Bicycles loom large in his novel The Third Policeman, largely because of O’Brien’s curious take on the atomic theory of matter.

The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.

Postmen and policemen were particularly suspect in this regard, on account of the bicycle serving as their main mode of conveyance in those days (the 1930s). One sure way of telling if someone was more than 50% bicycle was to see if they tended to lean against walls and doorposts while stationary. And of course anyone seen sniffing bicycle seats was automatically suspect.

Having said all that, I can’t see why the chap reported in the Torygraph was hauled up before the beak. As one of the paper’s bloggers puts it,

He was in his hostel room at the time, behind locked doors (staff went in when they got no response from him). It was between him and the bicycle.

.

Quite. There’s a guy in Cambridge, by the way, who regularly rides around, stark naked, on his bike. Perhaps he’s a Professor of Divinity? Or of Natural Philosophy? You never can tell with academics.

Fact: I am myself only 4% bicycle.

Update: Several readers have commented on the ambiguity of the headline on this post. Nothing to do with me, guv: I just copied the Telegraph‘s lead!

Hooray! Stephen Fry is going to write a weekly technology column for the Guardian…

What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started …