“groovy mother...”

Neals Yard, purveyors of finest homeopathic placebos and quackery, offer to take questions from the Grauniad blog readers. The Bad Science crowd descends, and 24 hours later, no answers are forthcoming.

“I’ve been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.”

Good riddance to President Gore! “Of course, the biggest disappointment was Gore’s failure to handle Hurricane Katrina properly. Not only did the massive evacuation of New Orleans prove a costly and time-consuming overreaction, since the levees - fortified in 2003 - held up fine.”

Some fascinating details on Rupert Murdoch swinging towards supporting Barack Obama. Murdoch has long been my favourite evil media tycoon — I may hate his right-wing propoganda arms, but I admire the smarts with which he’s conducted his businesses.

“The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric “peep” noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.”

Travelogue round Route 128, inspired by Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner”

A Modest Proposal supporting the music industry’s calls for ISPs to block filesharing.

Stephen Fry writes about the HTML5 ogg video debacle — he’s even more geeky that I’d previously imagined. What a hero!

Excellent article on homeopathy by Ben Goldacre — not too ranty in an “all homeopathy is evil” way, rather a “homeopathy should be part of a discussion, if only for the benefits on the placebo effect, but we can’t get the homeopaths to talk”. Hopefully a rational-enough read to convince “believers”.

Stephen Fry reviews the iPhone for The Grauniad. “In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say.”

“When writer Elena Lappin flew to LA, she dreamed of a sunkissed, laid-back city. But that was before airport officials decided to detain her as a threat to security”

Quality grumpiness from Charlie Brooker. “The pop-up a tent was a joy. It comes flat, disc-shaped. You throw it in the air and it unfurls into a canvas shell. Within seconds I was the proud owner of a home fit for a tramp.”

Splendid break-down of the bad science in last Monday’s Panorama “Science says Wi-Fi is dangerous” scarefest.

This weekend, the UK charts will switch to including sales of all digital tracks, not just those marked as “singles”. As a result, album tracks and one-hit wonders are likely to hit the Top 100. Anything that gets The Proclaimers into the charts *has* to be a good thing.

Anatomy of a pump’n’dump scam. Or: Why you’re getting so much more spam this month.

FFS. Detailed explanation of the how’s and why’s of reading/cloning a UK RFID-chipped passport — which don’t even have the tinfoil protective cover that US passports will. “‘This doesn’t matter,’ says a Home Office spokesman.”

The Grauniad’s constantly-updated downloadable PDF, designed to be printed out before you leave the office in the evening to read on the train home. Nice way to attack the evening newspapers’ sales without having to distribute deadtree yourself.

I’ve just changed my voicemail message to say “Send me an email. I rarely check voicemail.”

“Get angry if they don’t believe you. They will eventually. They always do.”

Grauniad to offer easily-print-outable on-demand PDF news digest.