The Current Outlook

I’ve visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

For reference, that’s:

England

Cheshire

Cornwall

Cumbria

Dorset

Isle of Wight

Lancashire

Greater London

Greater Manchester

Liverpool and Merseyside

Nottinghamshire

West Midlands

Worcestershire

Yorkshire

Wales

Denbighshire

Flintshire

Pembrokeshire

Scotland

Ayrshire

Dumfries and Galloway

I haven’t been to the Isle of Man yet but plan to visit later on in the year. I haven’t been to any of the counties in Northern Ireland yet either.

Sweary Scottish libertarian blogger Devil’s Kitchen drops the foul language for a change and produces two wonderfully rousing and amusing posts on how he would make Britain Great once more. Highly recommended.

An interesting meme comes via Will Howells’ blog.

You need to go to Wikipedia. Type in your birth date (but not the year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post the results on your blog.

So here’s my effort:

Birthdate: June 2.

Events:

1953 - Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, the first to be televised.

1979 - Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country.

1997 - Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Births:

1740 - Marquis de Sade, French author (d. 1814)

1857 - Edward Elgar, English composer (d. 1934)

Death:

1990 - Rex Harrison, English actor (b. 1908)

The red star on the north-west of the map. Politically, I’m generally libertarian, believing that taxes and state subsidies should be lowered (but not in all cases) and I’m strongly in favour of individual freedom.

Click here to have a go at the test yourself.

The new British non-aligned civil liberties website Liberty Central (set up by Unity of Talk Politics) has just been set up and running this Monday morning. Go, have a look, register, bookmark/remember, whatever.

Tim Worstall has the 54th Britblog Roundup up on his website. Go and have a read.

Just checking in to send you all a quick message. My computer is down at the moment and I have absolutely no idea when I can reasonably expect it to be up and running again. I’ll be offline for tonight at the very least and probably won’t have Internet access back for a good few days, depending if I can get someone to fix it.

On the plus side, it does mean that I can start on the ten or so books I got for Christmas as well as another five I bought myself.

Sorry for all the inconvenience. Normal service will should might resume shortly.

AOL has announced that it will start charging to send emails in an attempt to cut down on spam.

This is a completely ridiculous idea from AOL. Most people I know who have any real knowledge of computers wouldn’t touch AOL with a bargepole anyway. In fact, you’d have to be some sort of idiot to use them (or their e-mail service) these days when there’s so much other choice with broaband and all kinds of different ways to send e-mail now.

Right-wing Scottish blogger Martin Kelly has sent an open letter to Conservative MP John Bercow to debate with him at a time and place of Bercow’s choosing on the economic benefits (or otherwise) of mass immigration.

What could be better on a Sunday afternoon than sitting down at the computer and leafing through Tim Worstall’s BritBlog Roundup, a compliation of the best blog posts of the week, of which this edition is the 50th. There’s a very interesting post on ID/NIR and RFID in there too.