A quick question on all this piracy that’s been in the news (and everywhere else) lately.

Did the frequency of such attacks suddenly spike? Or have they been doing it for ages and the world’s media have only just noticed? And if the latter, where/when was the tipping point?

Yes, it’s that election today. I’ll be off to the Election Night Party at the US Embassy in just under 24 hours.

In the meantime, some links to amuse and / or take your mind off the waiting.

Solve the Italian Job cliffhanger once and for all - RSC puts up a prize for the best entry. C’mon, we know they got away with it.

What’s wrong with Neil’s new MacBook?

Cool, we made Sky’s caption competition. You’d all have got better photos if you’d backed off like I asked …

See Obama, Hook Up! h/t Wonkette. Really?

Large Hadron Colliderscope - h/t Theo

President Medvedev and I share the same taste in hardware - according to TUAW

… and finally, some Plinkety Palin (and McCain), via Tim Ireland. Brilliant.

PS not entirely sure what happened to the ‘Scouting for Girls’ post - it was there, and then it wasn’t, and now it’s back again. Odd.

… or ‘Scouting for Audiences’

Thanks to a pair of HomePlugs, an AppleTV and a bargain Samsung LCD that no-one wanted because it’s last year’s model (and it’s white), we can now enjoy all manner of digital media in the bedroom. Including - and arguably the main reason for this technological extravagance - what I shall nostalgically refer to as Virgin Radio.

[They’re ‘Absolute Radio‘ these days, apparently, which has already upset the vodka people. I assume whatever’s behind this change in nomenclature is related to the appearance of those gaudily flourescent ‘Zavvi‘ places where the good old Virgin Megastore used to be. Progress, I guess.]

But I digress. The other morning on Absolute Virgin Radio I was delighted to learn that Scouting for Girls will be releasing ‘I Wish I Was James Bond‘ as a single on November 3rd. Excellent timing - and deliberate, no doubt, coincident as it is with the UK release of Quantum of Solace on 31 October.

Fair play, chaps. I hope it sells you some records. And if you need a venue for the single’s launch party, give me a yell.

Gives me an excuse to play you the song again, too, complete with new video …

Hello Mr Bond, I’ve been expecting you.
Martini in your hand, and that eyebrow that you move.

Scouting For Girls - I Wish I Was James bond

We’ve just finished watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It’s typical Sorkin. West Wing-style plots, half the West Wing cast even. Not to mention the dozens of West Wing references thrown into the script. Except it’s not set in the White House, it’s set around an SNL-style sketch show in LA.

I loved it. But apparently the audiences didn’t. Or rather, not enough of them did. The Observer claims that some of them hailed Studio 60 as an ‘instant classic’, although apart from one review on IMDB I can’t find the reference.

Regardless, Studio 60 was cancelled after one series, and I’m sad.

Enter Richard Millington.

Over at his ‘FeverBee’ blog, Richard instructs us in some detail on ‘How to save a TV show‘, by mobilising online communities and generating not just necessarily just interest and pressure, but cash.

There’s 2,000-odd fans on Facebook already. I’m sure they’d all chip in a few quid. So how about it, Aaron? I’ll raise the money, you make the show? You know you want to.

Yesterday saw the first post on my ‘official’ FCO blog. Those of you who follow .gov.uk will know that the FCO has been slowly expanding its online presence, including encouraging more of us to blog on the fco.gov.uk platform. So, after much agonising, I’ve decided to give it a go.

Why agonising? @simond summed it up well in a tweet yesterday evening:

@jamesbarbour One blog not enough for you? :) Intrigued to see if/how you can manage them, especially when one is explicitly gov.uk

I’m not entirely sure myself, Simon, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been following the emerging debate on civil servants blogging for some time, contributing on occasion. But there’s still a fairly hefty unresolved grey area surrounding those of us who blog in a ‘private capacity’. So, as I’ve said a couple of times, I don’t talk about work on this blog. I talk about comms, tech, politics (carefully) on occasion - whatever floats my boat outside of the office, but I steer clear of goings-on at the Embassy.

Thing is, though, I want to blog about work. I have a great job which raises all sorts of issues I’d love to share. And blogs.fco.gov.uk is the logical place to share them.

Second thing is, I’m genuinely excited by the FCO’s moves to engage online. First steps, yes, but all the more important for that. And I want to be part of it.

That’s two pretty good reasons, I think. And, provided I can find the time, I hope there’s still room for jamesbarbour.org - I don’t want to clutter the FCO blog with random thoughts unconnected to my work. I reckon I can still be a civil service blogger and a civil servant who blogs.

We’ll see how it evolves.

Lloyds is pants - but at least they rescued HBOS.

Man calls 911 over improperly prepared sandwich - Life imitates Python’s ‘good job I didn’t tell him about the dirty knife …’

10 reasons to stop calling yourself a blogger - David Armano talks more sense. Me? I’m not a blogger, I’m a person who happens to blog. I’d add a number 11, though. Mainstream media - and particularly the 24-hour news channels - talk about “bloggers” as if they’re this weird new kind of semi-journalist from Mars. It’s started to irk me.

Lord Norton on the concerning (or not) lack of public interest in our political processes - well it worries me, anyway.

Secret vodka pipeline into Estonia - you couldn’t make this up.

Dad-o-Matic - Dads blogging. Definitely one for my Google reader.

After last week’s Charlie and Lola-esque interview comes this joint “Sarah” / “Hillary” broadcast, from Saturday Night Live:

Say what you like about the US election, it’s anything but boring. And there are countries where you just couldn’t get away with comedy like this.

H/T LA Times, via Redtape

Simon Wakeman has tagged me for the ‘Three Inspirational Communicators’ meme. Which, if nothing else, does at least prove that someone reads this blog. In fact, Simon, wasn’t it you who tagged me for ‘Five Things’ at the end of last year?

I quite like this meme - good call to Andy Wake for starting it. We all draw our influences from somewhere. Our influencers might be people we’ve worked, with, family members, people in the public eye - just about anyone, really. I’ve had a good long think about mine. Remember, these are my three inspirational communicators. I don’t necessarily expect everyone to agree. So, in no particular order, and with a quote from each:

1 - Roald Dahl. Wonderful, compelling stories which so completely involve and envelop you, no matter how old you are. The two autobiographies are even better than the fiction.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

And doesn’t this apply, to some extent, to all of us?

2 - CJ Cregg. There had to be a West Wing character in here somewhere. Jed Bartlett and Matt Santos and Josh Lyman all made the shortlist, but in the end there’s one clear winner: CJ.

Reporter: I think the question was, was he physically and emotionally prepared to make a life and death decision after what he’d just been through?

CJ: : He’d been through a TV interview and a press conference. The President finds you all annoying, but not prohibitively debilitating.

Sometimes, every now and then, my profession delivers up the occasional “West Wing Moment”. And I get to play at being CJ. It rocks.

3 - Bob Geldof. He never actually said “Give us your f*cking money”. But he could have said it, should have said it. What Geldof did achieve, though, was to invent a whole new genre - getting his message across rather forcefully in the process.  95% of the world’s TV sets, if you believe the hype, were tuned to Live Aid. That’s pretty inspirational.

We live in a broken world which has never been healthier, wealthier or bizarrely, free of conflict, but some 500 kilometers south of here they die of want … It’s not only intellectually absurd, but also morally repulsive.

And here are the 10 runners-up, again in no particular order:

Cartwright
Ferrabee
Shapiro
Zimmerman
Jobs
Mandela
Williams
Politkovskaya
Ford
Adama

Now for the fun bit - my turn to tag three more people.  Charles, David, Emma - you’re it.

From Mark Pinsent’s “Another Flamin’ Blog”, Wednesday 3rd September:

Palin into insignificance?

Front page of today’s Metro:

Palin into significance?

Along with many, many others, I thoroughly enjoyed the original Washingtonienne blog. So when a new Washingtonienne came along earlier this year, ostensibly with Jessica’s blessing, I found myself rather looking forward to a new round of adventures on the Hill. Particularly when she signed off her first entry thus:

Well this is plenty for a first post. Much more to come on politics, the media, Washington, guys, dating, and sex to come.

But alas not.

I count fourteen posts, perhaps 80% of which are about boys and why they haven’t called or texted. Precious little on the media, Washington or sex. There’s a faint dash of politics, and one of those awful pictures of a cat that can’t spell. (I kan haz Ur blog?)

And that’s it. The RSS feed’s dried up, and the blog itself is offline. I wonder what happened?

Getting sprung is unlikely - there wasn’t really enough political dirt there to make it worth anyone’s while. The happy-endings part of my brain hopes that a new beau has come along and whisked her off her feet, so much so that blogging is waaaay down the wannabe-Washingtonienne’s personal agenda these days. Or did she just get bored?

Perhaps imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery after all. At least Wonkette preserved the original. And now, according to Gawker, we have an HBO series to look forward to - produced by SJP, no less.