Hooray! My esteemed colleague, Ray Ison, has started a Blog which gives him a soap-box on which to rant about the idiocies of the governmental and corporate world.

Lovely post on Thomas the Tank Engine Blog. It’s headed “John Naughton Certified as Braindead; Few are Surprised” and goes on:

In my first ever attention grabbing, go out on a limb, blog post, I decided to comment on John Naughton including Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends (1984-1991) among his worst 50 TV shows of all time (discussed here).

The inevitable conclusion of his including Thomas and Friends on such a list is that he’s lost his mind. I suppose there might be other conclusions… feel free to post below should you think of any but my list is as follows:

John Naughton is so stupid that he sits on the TV and watches the couch

John Naughton recently sat on an airplane in close proximity to a loud-mouthed Thomas loving 2 year old

John Naughton thought no one would pay any attention to him unless he said something so stupid that it was news worthy (I have no doubt that this is true… whether he realizes it I have no idea)…

Good stuff, eh? It goes on a bit in the same vein.

Sadly, it’s nothing to do with me. There’s another guy with the same name who writes about film and TV for low-rent magazines (and, I think, the Sunday Times). I still get sarcastic flak from my academic colleagues over a review he wrote, many years ago, of a compilation of stag night videos!

Just for the record, I loved Thomas the Tank Engine and often had learned (and interminable) conversations with my kids about Annie and Clarabelle (who — I need hardly remind you — are Thomas’s carriages).

Later… It’s interesting to see what bloggers pick up. When I looked on Google Blog Search, I found that the two things that had been most widely linked to were my piece about ‘websites that changed the world’, and my doppleganger’s Radio Times piece about the worst TV programmes ever. Clearly there is something about lists that piques people’s interest.

The interesting thing about the ‘websites’ piece was that I didn’t choose the sites — that was done by other Observer writers. I was merely asked to write the introduction to the list. But that hasn’t saved me. On Friday I was having lunch in Cambridge University’s West site (where the Computer Lab and the Microsoft Lab are located) when a prominent computer scientist walked in, spotted me, and said severely “I have a bone to pick with you, John Naughton”. She then sat down and berated my for the list which — she opined — was far too oriented towards what she dismissively referred to as “leisure sites”.

I read the Financial Times every Saturday, mainly because its magazine still contains some of the best book reviews. One of its more quirky features is “Lunch with the FT”, in which a journalist takes some grandee out to lunch at the paper’s expense and, under cover of that, conducts a half-baked interview. This week, the guest was Professor Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian. The lunch was in Wilton’s, a ludicrously expensive restaurant just off Jermyn Street in London. What interested me about the piece was not so much the content (which was pretty banal) as the bill:

1 x crab and avocado salad
1 x asparagus with Bernaise sauce
2 x poached halibut
2 x summer pudding
1 x expresso
1 x bottle of mineral water
1 x half bottle of Pouilly Fume

Total: £169.88

James Cridland’s in Berlin and has seen the future.

The television has DS:F on it, which until recently has been showing a motor-sport type show, and is now showing what QuizCall would look like if it was also a porn channel. A leggy blonde in yellow hotpants is asking questions to a caller – they could win 200 euros – and has just peeled off her top to display a fearsome set of headlights. She’s now stroking her hotpants suggestively. This is the German equivalent of ITV1, at 10.50pm, folks. This is what might happen at home. Please write to the Daily Mail now…

Well, well. After all that guff about how muslims are more loyal to their religion than to their country, how about this from the Pew Research Center…

Among non-Muslim nations, the United States is the outlier in terms of religious self-identification. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes poll finds American adults are closely split between those who see themselves as Christians first (42%) and those who see themselves as Americans first (48%); an additional 7% say they see themselves as both equally. By contrast, only a third of German Christians (33%), and fewer than a quarter of British, French and Spanish Christians self-identify primarily with their religion. In this regard, the views of Americans closely parallel those of French Muslims, 46% of whom think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality…