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.

I’ve already written something for Blog Action Day over at my FCO blog. But I feel should give it a go here too.

I hadn’t given much thought to what I was going to write. In fact, I’ve just written and deleted a thoroughly depressing draft looking at progress - or not - at feeding the world in the very nearly 24 years since Band Aid first asked us to do exactly that.

I found myself sitting on my comfy sofa in my warm flat, with my laptop that costs more than however-many-percent of the world make in a year, asking myself what the point of Blog Action Day really was. Am I really going to tell my kids in years to come (or tomorrow) that yes, Daddy helped end poverty and injustice - by blogging about it?

Then I decided to check out some of the other posts, from 11,509 sites and counting, who’ve contributed.

If you read one of them, please check out this from David Griner.

David has created a team at Kiva called ‘Social Media for Change’. Kiva, if you haven’t heard of it (I had, vaguely, but never done anything about it), lets you lend - interest free - to entrepreneurs in the developing world.

I like the idea - if you’re becoming disillusioned with top-down development, give bottom-up microfinance a go.

I especially like the mission statement David has written for the Lending Team:

We are bloggers, Twitterers, lifestreamers, networkers, podcasters and more. Some of us do it for money, others for fun. What connects us is our interest in being connected — and maybe helping change the world for the better in the process.

I’m in. And I will badger relentlessly my social media friends to come on board too. Maybe Blog Action Day can change something after all.

Here’s the link.

Here it is again, in case you missed it.

It’s here, people.

PS it’s Global Handwashing Day, too.

… if you live on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Bering Strait, anyway.

Found this on FP Passport: a webcam on the (US) island of Little Diomede, which points at the (Russian) island of Big Diomede, or Ratmanov Island.

On a clear day the view’s rather good, too.

Slate helpfully points out that, thanks to the International Date Line, this webcam really does show you the future. Cool.

Off to France for a week - light blogging ahead.

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?

Thanks to Joey Jones at Sky, and Sam Coates at the Times, for drawing our attention to this ‘mischievous diagram’. No, I’m not reproducing it here.

Tim Ireland is clearly enjoying himself with the fallout (in between taking pot-shots at Paul Staines, who’s had a fair amount to say on the subject), and there’s a little mini-spat in Tom Watson’s comments section too.

Alas all the mischief-making doesn’t exactly make my job easier - it’s not as if there isn’t enough going on already …

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.