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.

DML via Theo

I’ve been very remiss in sharing links lately. With apologies, here’s a few highlights:

EFI-x – run OS X on any old PC. Hardware issues here we come – but if it works on a tiny Vaio I’ll be tempted

Why “Old Etonian Simon Mann” is a twit – Gill Hornby in the Telegraph. Brilliantly insightful.

Charles Crawford on public sector and public service mawkishness. Priorities indeed.

Happy Birthday iPhone. Still loving mine, despite the awful camera. Interesting predictions here from The Reg.

Two great posts from Lords of the Blog. Compulsory voting – with (and only with) a box for ‘declared abstention’ – has been a hobby-horse of mine for some time. Not just for our (elected) representatives, but for all of us. Reading these convinces me even more. But would the electorate wear it?

Intel says ‘no’ to Vista. Me too.

Does anyone ever use ‘sharing buttons?’ asks Simon. I suspect he’s right. In fact I’d go a little further – do the majority of web users actually use the likes of Digg on a regular basis? Or is it just for small groups of like-minded geeks?

Stairway to Brand Heaven (or Hell) from David Armano, via Steve Clayton. A picture telling a thousand words – again.

… and finally, a little Aussie humour from Theo.

More later, perhaps.

Interesting missive received through my ‘contact’ page the other day:

Dear James,

I understand from one of your posts that “Thanks to Google Reader, I have all of Civil Serf’s posts from some point in December onward”

I found myself in the same position as Civil Serf and was hoping that you know exactly what happened to her. Was she disciplined? What was the outcome? Has any light been shed on the whole civil servant blogging issue?

Would also be grateful if you could provide me with some of her posts to use as examples in my case.

Kind regards,

There was a name at the bottom, but I’ve edited it out for obvious reasons. Let’s call him / her (for it was an ambiguous name) Bob.

I sent what I thought was quite a helpful (if a little sceptical) reply to ‘Bob’:

Bob,

Sorry to hear of your troubles.

At this stage, and please forgive me for being blunt, I have a suspicion you might be a journalist on a fishing expedition – there’s been a lot of interest in the Civil Serf story. But, assuming you’re not, I’d be interested to hear some more background, although I’m not sure I can be of any real assistance.

Best

James

Haven’t heard back from him / her.

So was I too suspicious?

BBC NEWS | Edinburgh buskers ‘to pipe down’: “Bagpipers on Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile have been told they will be arrested if they continue to play.”

Whatever next?

(thanks to Dave Henniker for the image)

Sorry, Sky, but this is sloppy.

Thousands Spent on iPods for Civil Servants

screams the tabloidesque link. Shock, horror! Those fat-cat civil servants getting yet another perk, eh? Bring on the revolutionaries.

Now hold on just a wee minute here.

Civil Servants Listen While They Learn

is the real story. The Home Office has bought a bunch of iPods for employees to watch training videos on – sensible and cost-effective, methinks. Not such an eyecatching headline, though, is it?

Received an interesting Facebook event notification this morning, inviting me to vote for Rod in this year’s PA News awards. He’s up for ‘Public Affairs Personality of the Year’.

The profiles of the three shortlisted candidates make interesting reading. Rod’s, to my mind, doesn’t do him justice. I don’t know ‘Anne Longfield OBE‘, but despite an interesting enough write-up there’s no photo. This makes me nervous. Lionel Zetter’s entry, though, is well worth a read, if only because he comes up with a true Rod-ism if ever I saw one:

of course there is good lobbying and bad lobbying, just like there is good sex and bad sex – but let’s face, it most of us would rather have bad sex than no sex at all!

I voted for Rod, of course. And you should too. Maybe if he wins we can persuade him to start blogging.