Wonderful column by Harry Pearson. Sample:

The radio filtered alarming news to my vantage point high above. From what I could make out from an incoherently angry caller to 6-0-6, it seemed that the Manchester United right-back Gary Neville had taunted visiting Liverpool fans at the final whistle by standing in front of them and kissing – and here was the shocking bit – his badger.

That, at least, was what it sounded like. Many would instantly have dismissed the idea as implausible. Those who have been around football as long as I have, however, know better. If we were to eliminate things in football just because they were implausible we’d have to chop out huge chunks of the game’s history – Graham Taylor’s spell as England manager, for example, or Jorge Campos’s shirts, or Rio Ferdinand.

In football you learn to trust Sherlock Holmes’s maxim: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Steve McClaren is favourite to become the next England manager. I rest my case.

Such cruelty! Good Morning, Silicon Valley reports that,

The Aibo lived seven years — or 49 if you count robotic dog years.

On Thursday, Sony pulled the plug on Aibo, its peppy robotic dog with a software-controlled personality and abilities that has entertained thousands of faithful owners. The dogs, which cost upward of $2,000 each, can dance, whimper, guard and play, developing personalities based on interaction with their owners. Sony has sold more than 150,000 Aibos since launching the product in May 1999.

The Tokyo-based consumer electronics giant is restructuring under new Chief Executive Howard Stringer. Sony said Thursday that it plans to focus on three core businesses — electronics, games and entertainment. Its two robotics efforts, the Aibo and the Qrio humanoid robot, got the ax.

And to forestall all those kind readers who will write in to point out the misspelling of “axe”, it’s in the original quotation and follows American usage. As Oscar Wilde observed, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language”.

The news that Steve Jobs is to join the Board of Walt Disney (as a result of selling his company, Pixar, to them) prompted the following exchange on Slashdot:

Does this mean that Mickey Mouse will now only have 1 button?

Yes, but when they release the new Minnie Mouse her button will provide 4-way scrolling action.

Apologies: geeky joke. Explanation: Apple’s fanatical commitment to a one-button mouse was one of the longest-running annoyances in the business and was widely attributed to Steve Jobs’s intransigence. (He has Strong Views on interface matters.) But he must have changed his mind because Apple recently released a fancy multi-function mouse called Mighty Mouse. It’s terrific, IMHO, especially if you suffer from arthritis.

Thanks to Dave Hill for spotting the Slashdot thread.

The great muckraking journalist has died, aged 83. There’s an appreciative Guardian obit which recalls how much Anderson was loathed (and feared) by those in power. FBI chief J Edgar Hoover once described him as “lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures”. Wow! To be so reviled by such a creep as Hoover is praise indeed.

Very good biography of Anderson on Spartacus.schoolnet.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports that actor Brad Pitt’s current inamorato, a lady whose name escapes me, has the Latin inscription Quod me nutrit me destruit tattoed in Gothic type “across her lower stomach”. I’m sure you know that this translates as “What nourishes me, destroys me”. But what I want to know is what the Torygraph is doing inspecting the lower stomach regions of actresses.

This was the scene in Trinity Street, Cambridge, this morning, as the funeral cortege of Philip Grierson made its way slowly to his College, where it was greeted by a silent crowd of mourners. He died on January 15 at the ripe old age of 95 and was the last of a distinctive breed — the bachelor Don, who lived all his adult life in College rooms and devoted most of his energies to teaching, research and scholarship. Philip Grierson was an historian who specialised in numismatics and built up (on a university salary) one of the world’s greatest collections of medieval coins — reportedly valued at between £5 and £10 million. (He donated the collection to the Fitzwilliam Museum.)

In the best tradition of his class, Grierson had memorable eccentricities: he could fly a plane but never learned to drive a car; he once walked from London to Cambridge (a distance of 56 miles) simply because he had missed his train; and he simultaneously held major academic posts at three important institutions — Cambridge, Brussels and Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Collection. He seems to have been a formidable scholar, producing upwards of three hundred academic papers and numerous scholarly tomes.

One thing seems certain: we shall not see his like again — the bean-counting ethos implicit in the Research Assessment Exercise has seen to that. Ambitious Cambridge academics are increasing wary of College life because it threatens to distract them from research and embroil them in pastoral care of the young.

There were some nice obituaries — notably in the Guardian and the London Times. The bulk of the text of the Independent‘s obit has disappeared behind a paywall, alas.

Timely reminder from BBC Online.

The 20th anniversary of the first PC virus falls this month.

It was during the opening weeks of 1986 that the first PC virus, called Brain, was discovered in the wild.

Though it achieved fame because it was the first of its type, the virus was not widespread as it could only travel by hitching a ride on floppy disks swapped between users.

Now 20 years after they first appeared there are more than 150,000 malicious programs in existence.

That’s why my colleagues and I created our online course, Vandalism in Cyberspace: understanding and combatting malicious software.

The Guardian on Saturdays has a nice section (called “Ouch!”) which prints embarrassing misprints and typos. How about this?

The Parochial Church Councils of Risley and Stanton-by-Dale with Dale Abbey have both said that we are Fairtrade Churches. This means we do all in our power to use only fairly traded gods in our churches and activities.

Or this ‘For Sale’ notice?

UNISEX mounting bike universal black & yellow with helmet.