DK, earlier today, lambasting Suicidal Jones:

So - with all due respect, i.e. none - ...

You can probably guess what kind of Diabolical verbiage follows.

DK was a fellow performer at that Oxford thing, see below, and while there I asked him if he would consider doing a recorded interview, along the lines of the ones I did recently with Bishop Hill (but I trust without the clicks) and Toby Baxendale.  He replied in most positive, even flattering terms, without once using any bad words.

The other speaker was Tony Brown (of this fame), whom I know from many an evening at the Tim Evans Parents household, listening to second-Friday-of-the-month talks.  I sometimes find Tony’s conversational manner at bit exhausting, because he uses the old wait-for-it wait-for-it method of talking, with lots of pauses and circumlocutions and unjustifiably heavy emphases, while I stand there fuming and waiting for him to get to his point.  He addresses, me, in short, as if I were a public meeting.  On Friday night, he was addressing a public meeting, yet for some reason - although maybe I was imagining this - he actually talked more quickly than usual.  Odd.

It’s the result of the recent, somewhat twinned ideas (a) that people ought not to drink and drive, and (b) that pregnant women ought not to drink.  As in drink alcohol of course.  Which means that when he and she go out to dinner, she, because she won’t be drinking much alcohol anyway, gets to do the driving home.  At least that way, one of them gets to get pissed.

Well I don’t know that that’s very widespread, but recently I dined with a group of friends among whom were a married couple.  She was pregnant.  That was that deal they had, and that was why.  My guess is that they are not the only ones who do this.

I haven’t watched it yet, but here is what I was doing last night.

Following my earlier mention of cats in Alicante, absence of, Michael J has been sending photos of foreign cats.

This particular snap was taken in Hanoi.  Like MJ says, that cat must be a bit unhappy.  But it doesn’t seem so.

MJ is now - see first comment on posting immediately below - in Malaya, which I mention at the end.  So maybe more cat photos from him next Friday.

Today I am in Oxford, addressing the libertarians there, briefly, along with a clutch of other libbos.  What will I say to them?  Maybe tomorrow evening I’ll write about it.

From English Russia:

One would think, how sweet of them, people of Saint-Petersburg fixed up several monuments commemorating their favorite pet… but it turned out to be that the cats themselves deserved that.

September 8, 1941, the city was besieged and the blockade lasted for 900 days. Soon enough there was no food in the city at all and the inhabitants began dying of hunger. During the terrible 1941-1942’s winter dwellers of the city ate everything they could and even pets were eaten (and that saved many peoples’ lives.) But if people are dying – rats begin to proliferate.

A few months later there were literally tens of thousands or even more rats prowling about the city and terrifying all the citizens. No weapon could do any harm to these monsters whether it was bombing or fire. The beasts ate even the smallest bits of food, all the provision remnants that were left in the city at the time. Moreover, because of rats the city was under the threat of epidemic diseases. And then the government put a fabulous idea through, they decided to gather cats all over Russia and send them to the city where they were right in place.

Altogether, during the blockade period more than 5000 cats from Omsk, Tyumen, Irkutsk and some other cities were sent to Leningrad and completed they job well – the city was cleared off.

Somewhat Russian English but a great story.

It reminds me of another concerning how they parachuted cats into ... Malaya, was it?  Also to deal with rats?  During the emergency?  Link, anyone?

What have I started?  In the comments on this, four Yorkshiremen are taking it in turns to reminisce about how they were beaten to death every night by their 1 megabyte hard disks which cost ten thousand pounds, and considered themselves lucky.

Heh.

Strata SE1 is apparently the name of the new three eyed tower at the Elephant and Castle, now nearing completion.  I spied it down a street on my way to London Bridge Station to see the Shard, on Saturday.  That’s a shot I will surely try to shoot again, better.

The thing I like about photo-ing architecture is that it changes, so is worth photo-ing, but from one day to the next it stays - approximately speaking - put.  You can do a photo, then think about it, and come back a week later and do it again,

Although, you can only do this if you yourself are not on the move too much.  If you are gadding madly around the world, you only get one chance.

This is one of those postings where I have to try it out to see if the photo fits.  Before this paragraph, it didn’t.  Will this be enough?

No.  But this does it.

As of yesterday, it remains true that the Shard is definitely being built:

Some recent Guardian Shard blogging here.  He likes it too.  Perhaps because it will contain so many Guardian-readers, what with about half of it going to be full of London’s local government.

But, just like me, this blogger and amateur photographer has a problem photo-ing the Shard just now.  This is because it is getting big, but is not yet big enough to be visible from a distance, as it starts seriously to tower over surrounding London lumpage.  So, you still have to get close up to it, which means you need the kind of wide angle lens that we Billion Monkeys do not possess.

But, trust me.  They are building this.

That’s a picture of me taking a picture of a picture (with a shiny black background) of the Shard, as it will be.

Here:

Germany’s gay foreign minister was in China with his partner, but did anyone notice?

Well I did, and enough to type that all out by hand, what with headings like this one being uncopiable, and therefore inevitably unpastable, by me anyway.

Yes, incoming from Tony, with whom I stayed last week in Alicante:

I saw TWO cats today!

Maybe the truth is I only saw close-up the centres of a couple of towns.  Had I meandered about in suburbs, maybe cats would have been a common sight.

Tony, whereabouts were these cats?

If not the decade:

The internet is having an effect.

Indeed.

Wait two months for a Brian Micklethwait Dot Com recorded conversation, and then two come along on the same day, although actually these two were recorded over a month apart.

This one with Antoine, recorded on Tuesday of this week, describes the electoral earthquake that was the victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in the “special election” they had there, and how the Republicans have now caught up with the Democrats when it comes to applying blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc., to the winning of such elections.

How does this affect US politics in the months and years to come?  And what can we in Britain, in particular we libertarians, learn from all this?

We managed to keep it down to below half an hour this time.  Enjoy.

More from Antoine on this election here, and generally here.

Plus more recorded talk on related topics from Antoine to these guys.  Click on this for the talk itself.  More thoughts from Antoine just before he gave that talk here.

Early last month (on Dec 8), I had a chat down the phone with Bishop Hill, aka Andrew Montford, about his new and now available-to-buy book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, and related topics.  Listening to this conversation is a seriously insufficient substitute for reading the book itself.  But as a way of learning what sort of a guy Andrew Montford is and what sort of mind he has, what got him thinking the way he does and blogging the way he does, it’s a good and useful listen, or so I hope.

It would have been an even better listen had it not been disfigured, right at the beginning, by mysterious clicking noises, caused by I don’t know what.  Luckily, after about a minute and a half, this ceases.  I have decided, rightly or wrongly, to just ask my listeners to hear past this annoyance.  The rest of the conversation, which lasts just under 35 minutes, is okay.

So, with deep apologies for that early glitch, enjoy.

I will of course be writing more about the book itself, here and there.  During the above conversation, pessimism about the book’s prospects was expressed, what with how long it was taking to emerge.  “Missing the boat”, etc.  But as of now, all the signs and early reactions I have encountered look good, and it is going to sell very well.

Question.  Is this sexy?

I think: yes.  Provided the legs are nice, which these ones are.  Even if green.

Photoed by me in Lower Marsh, London, Jan 15.