Click the auto-update button for the latest posts and email Paul.Doyle@Guardian.co.uk with your witticisms. And for all the latest scores in the Europa League click here5:55pm: "As i pondered the worst possible replacement for Rafa," begins Connor Hurley. "Paul Ince ambled into the studio ..."5:52pm: TV has cut to commercial. The first one is for a car, which reminds of a question that I would like an answer to. Why do they say the price of the the car in digits rather than a complete number, ie. ONE FIVE NINE NINE NINE rather than fifteen thousand nine hundred and ninety nine pounds? Is it because they're paying for the ad by-the-second and it's quicker that way? Or is it because they think the first way makes it sound cheaper?5:50pm: Rafa has just been interviewed on TV and disclosed...

Benji Lanyado's Twitter-led trip in search of the soul of Leeds took him from baroque music in a Grade II-listed building to a punk gig in an old working men's club - via the oldest pub in the city, naturallyThis TwiTrip had a tough act to follow. The finale of my last Twitter-fuelled adventure - to Blackpool - involved a transvestite cabaret act. Hopefully, Leeds was up to the challenge.As with all of our previous adventures, nothing was planned. I was to turn up at Leeds station, sling questions into the Twittersphere, and wait for tips to be fired at my profile. Then I would do exactly as I was told. You can see how it played out here ... and below you'll find what the good people of Twitter helped me find.The Twitter tipsIt has become TwiTrip tradition to precede the day's events with...

Tim Moss runs adventure website The Next Challenge. His next challenge is running the length of every London Underground line. He told me why he was doing it:"Bored of repeats on TV and leftovers at Christmas, I decided I needed a new challenge to keep me sane as I entered 2010. And what could be more sane than running the route of the London Underground train lines?Not convinced? Well then, here are some other reasons that I've decided to run around London's transport network...1. To explore London – The Tube's a fantastic method of transport but by travelling underground you miss out on all of the wonderful places that the tunnels connect. Running overland combines a great bit of exercise with the opportunity to explore some new areas and build new memories for the familiar ones.2....

Choice is a wonderful thing. The Fujifilm FinePix F80EXR even lets you choose what you want your camera's sensor to be doing as you snap...

Douglas Rogers is a Zimbabwe-born author and journalist based in Brooklyn. His memoir The Last Resort, about his parents' outrageous struggle to hold on to their game farm and backpacker lodge in Zimbabwe, is published by Short Books in the UK this March. The New York Times wrote of it: 'This vibrant, tragic and surprisingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life - for blacks and whites - under Mugabe's dictatorship.' Here Douglas discusses Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Douglas Rogers on As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee I read Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie in high school in Zimbabwe in the 1980s, but perhaps because I'd never been to England, much less rural Gloucestershire, the book never made much impression on me. So I wasn't...

Stoke City entertain Arsenal this afternoon looking to continue their proud FA Cup record of never having won a tie against the visitors. Rarely will they have been presented with a better opportunity. It is safe to say that this will not be the strongest Arsenal line-up that they could face. It does not mean that those playing will be any less determined, just not the first choice that Arsene would have played were it a Premier League match. The side though will be more akin to that which took the field at Upton Park than an outright Carling Cup side. Injuries have ravaged the Arsenal squad throughout the season and players need rest with the upcoming run of Premier League fixtures. Abou Diaby is definitely absent, quite possibly from Villa Park as well. Wenger has said he will miss that...

This has everything to do with the profession and yet nothing at all. Bear with me here. Regular readers will know that Hugh MacLeod, aka Gapingvoid is one of my online heroes. Earlier this month he and I were talking and he was bemoaning the way the blog media worked has become ‘too big’ and ‘too anonymous.’ He wanted to change the way he does things. Today, I received (along with 60,000+ other subscribers) an email letter telling me that he’s no long putting his cartoons out on Gapingvoid. At least he’s not putting them there first. He says: Blogging changed my life. It also allowed me to share my work with people who understood and valued it. For the longest time, I felt as if gapingvoid was almost a “club” of like-minded, passionate,...

Meg Harper was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She combines writing for children with being a drama practitioner and counsellor. She runs a youth theatre in Banbury and has a busy time creating writing and/or drama workshops for many contexts. Meg is currently nearing the end of a writing residency in Westgate Primary School, Warwick, and will soon publish the book the children have written with her. Her own next book Stop! Thief! comes out in 2010 and she's just back from the British International Schools of Beijing and Guangzhou. She is an occasional blogger for the Scattered Authors' Society's Awfully Big Blog Adventure. In this post, Meg discusses George Eliot's Middlemarch. Meg Harper on Middlemarch by George Eliot When I discovered that Nicolette Jones had already...

Doctor Who - The Angel Teaser Trailer for the 2010 Pilot, voice: Ryan Trallis in Second life . BBC iPlayer (UK only) has Torchwood - Children of Earth: 3. Day Three, the eyes of the world turn to Britain, as the 456 announce, 'We are here'.Dr Who Fan Films has What is the best Fan Film of the Noughties?, voting ends Jan 31st 2010.TARDIS Scanner - Who Tube has...Doctor Who: The End of Time - The Big Questions, Part Two, With David, Russell & JulieDoctor Who: The End of Time - David, Russell & Julie: 'Moments We Loved'Doctor Who David, Russell & Julie Our favourite episodesBBC Doctor Who has Day Thirty!, Happy New Year Cards, we've a choice of three cards that each feature one of that trio, so if you're going to a party and want to dish out a selection of...

EastEnders is viewers' choice on Christmas Day as Coronation Street gives ITV only top 10 placeThe BBC delivered nine of the top 10 shows in the Christmas Day ratings, after a mixed batch of festive fare saw millions fewer tune in to watch festive specials such as Doctor Who, featuring the first half of David Tennant's last outing as the 10th Time Lord, and Strictly Come Dancing.The 10.9 million viewers who watched EastEnders on BBC1 proved to be the largest audience of the day, with a 45.9% viewer share. However, that was significantly less than the 14.3 million who watched the top-rated Wallace & Gromit adventure last year.Doctor Who – featuring a cast including John Simm and Catherine Tate – was the third most popular show, with an audience of 10 million. Again, this was down on...

Furnishing a new home can be quite the adventure, and depending on which point of view you are coming from, it could be either a positive or negative experience. Most ladies would bemoan the fact that their men seem less than interested in how the house is filled up, from its choice of colors to fittings and furniture, while others gush on how their men take the lead in such matters. While we can talk about different styles and methods of getting a house home-ready, there is one essential accessory that you must not miss out on – the humble doormat. The front door of your home is the gateway to the outside world, and every single day there ought to be at least one person going in and out. How else are you going to remove all those dirt trapped under your shoes? The answer lies in...

Guest post! An actual real one written by someone else this time Illustrious and longstanding commenter of this parish, Emrys, noticed I was struggling (or, to put it plainly “not even managing to post at all”) to keep up with my catvent calendar, and emailed offering one of his own cat tales as a catvent day. And I was more than happy to accept it. More than this, it reminded me of a very own post I had written on this here blog, meaning Emrys had actually offered me TWO days of catvent goodness! Hurray! Now, onto Misty and her questionable hunting skills… Billy the Bass-tard (another That Stupid Cat adventure) Recent comments by someone about Misty’s intelligence (and the unlikelihood of there being any) reminded me of the Great Fish Caper story. Her brother,...

TARDIS Scanner - Who Tube has Doctor Who: The End of Time - Bernard Cribbins - Alan Titchmarsh Show (14/12/09)BBC iPlayer (UK only) has...Doctor Who - Series 4:9. Forest of the Dead, as the shadows rise, the Doctor forges an alliance with the mysterious River Song. Doctor Who: Top 5 Christmas Moments, a look back at the best moments from the Doctor's festive adventuresBBC Doctor Who has....Day Fourteen!, A choice of two goodies for you today, or rather one goodie and one baddie..., we're offering two screensavers. The first is packed with images from The End of Time, Part One... green aliens, tense Time Lords, Wilfred Mott and more, but we're also preparing for the return of the Master with a screensaver that celebrates his various guises though the years... from his new look that you'll...

British Board of Film Censors has...DOCTOR WHO - THE END OF TIME - PART ONE [Additional material, Audio commentary] passed PGSERIES 4 SPECIALS - DELETED SCENES [Additional material, DOCTOR WHO] passed PGTARDIS Scanner - Who Tube has... BBC One Christmas Ident 2009 Professor What 13 - Part 3.BBC iPlayer (UK only) has... Doctor Who - Series 4:3. Planet of the Ood, the Doctor takes Donna to her first alien world. The Sarah Jane Adventures - Series 1 - Eye of the Gorgon - Part 1, Sarah Jane and team encounter the Gorgon, a terrible creature that turns victims to stone. Dreamwatch has Phil Ford: “I wanted it to be drive-in Doctor Who…”, the writer on new animated Who adventure, Dreamland.A big thank you to Time Out Magazine and Eva Maria who has mailed me the following..."We thought...

(ht2 Earwicga & Feministing) Amnesty International Stop Violence Against Women Many of the same points are reiterated in the Guardian article by Stewart (see below) but the video is worth it for the humanity it communicates. The video is also interesting in what it reveals of class and the military, also the term ‘weekend alcoholic’ rang some bells with regard to people I have known. And also although at first he refers to ‘losing control’ he later makes clear that violence is a choice and in his story shows how that choice was condoned by much of the community and the police, I would also make the wider connection that it was sanctioned through the war and military culture. So (although we had to defend against the Nazis) after conflict we should acknowledge...

Isn’t it just! I have now been at the market for 15 weeks. 15 WEEKS!  That’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? It’s time for an update. Life has been rather busy, I don’t exaggerate. Nor do I seek sympathy as it was good busy. Isn’t it good to be busy? However, the downside of this busy-ness is that normal service of recipes and randomness on this blog wasn’t possible. Mainly because I didn’t have much time to cook, and if I did, I didn’t have time to write about it. Then there was the sad day that my lovely DSLR camera was appropriated by someone else. I do have a tiny point and shoot but it just doesn’t cut the mustard for me and sadly, nay stupidly, it wasn’t insured, and I am not yet in a position to replace it. I miss the...

New Zealand was your favourite long-haul country in the our 2009 Travel Awards. We focus on Napier, flattened by an earthquake but rebuilt in glorious 1930s style'Grandad was on the loo when the earthquake struck," says Gill, a chirpy New Zealander who grew up in Napier. In 1931 this genteel port on Hawke's Bay, on the east coast of North Island, was struck by a tremor measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale. It flattened the city just as its children were starting the first day of a new school year. A total of 256 people lost their lives in what remains the country's worst natural disaster – although there were some lucky escapes."Our family had an outside toilet back then," Gill recalls, "and Grandad fell into the cess pit, where he was eventually rescued some hours later. The soft...

To err is the characteristic of humans; to do nothing else, that of politicians.       Alexander Pope, from his Essay on Criticism, section relating to Prospective PMs?   The Prime Minister is to send more troops to Afghanistan.  He has no choice.  If he were to recognise the futility of military operations there, he’d have to admit he’d been in error in supporting the adventure for the previous seven years.  Impossible!   He’s a man whose self-esteem is built on the perceived correctness of earlier decisions.  He has to have been right in the past—even if that means continuing to be wrong in the future. The leader of the Opposition, on the other hand, is psychologically unconstrained.  He’s not seeking to justify mistakes made in years gone by.  He’s content to...

BBC iPlayer (UK only) has Doctor Who: The Runaway Bride, Christmas special. The Doctor finds a new companion and uncovers an ancient alien plan.Doctor Who Toys has Forthcoming Forbidden Planet/Underground Toys exclusive release Third Doctor with Maggots.BurnGormanOnline.com has A Special Auction for The Teenage Cancer Trust, Burn Gorman Online and Burn Gorman have teamed up to raise money for his charity of choice, The Teenage Cancer Trust. Mr. Gorman feels very strongly about this charity and has asked us to help out in raising money for them.Unreality SF reviews Doctor Who: The Prisoner of Peladon, The Bride of Peladon, and Torchwood: Lost Souls, Asylum.Gallifreyan Embassy has Doctor Who: Podshock - 163, News, Planet of the Spiders Review, Whooverville 2009 Report (ed: added to the...

Do we need a certain familiarity in recipes involving unusual meats, or is the like of buffalo and ale pie just not adventurous enough?Jeanette Edgar and Rachel Godwin's Exotic Meat Cookbook promises much. As proprietors of Alternative Meats, an apparently thriving business specialising in choice cuts from the kind of beasts more usually found roaming the African plains than cluttering up the shelves at Morrisons, you suspect they'd be perfect figureheads for any campaign for more adventurous eating.I can picture them at the head of an eager army of feverishly loyal, meat-munching followers, days on the battlefield followed by long campfire nights feasting on guinea pig and gnu. And while the cookbook is full of quite delicious treats - the simple allspice and lemon camel recipe I tried...

Gavin Henson, the Ospreys enigma, would be much better off playing his club rugby elsewhereWhen the Ospreys' squad for the Heineken Cup was announced late on Friday afternoon it caused barely a ripple even though the region's most celebrated player, Gavin Henson, was not among the 38 listed.At 27, Henson should be in his prime. Instead, he is on a leave of absence, disillusioned, it is said, by a succession of injuries that have made his appearances on the field sporadic since Wales won the 2005 grand slam.It seems more an excuse than an explanation. Henson's misfortune is little compared to that suffered by Jonny Wilkinson since England won the 2003 World Cup, But whereas Wilkinson was born to be a professional sportsman, devoting most of his waking hours to rugby, Henson is a freer...

Guilty Pleasures: Part Deux. This time it's serious! It’s always fun to be a little naughty, let the hair down, do something different. It doesn’t come much better that indulging in your guilty pleasures. Things you know you shouldn’t have, because they’re not good for you, they’re horribly processed or they’re frowned upon (although that doesn’t bother me, frankly). So, following on from our first Guilty Pleasures Dinner Party, I hosted Part Deux last night. The premise is that all attendess bring a guilty pleasure, some food and others wine/beer. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, what I was most guilty of was being under prepared. I have a stupidly long to do list of things that need to be achieved by the end of this week, and I only started...

Lest we forget, it's also Inner Child reading this weekend and the arrival of Roland Chambers's biography of Arthur Ransome seemed like the clearest sign possible that I should perhaps finally be remedying a childhood omission. I have never read Swallows and Amazons.I suspect I was far too wrapped up in wanting to get a tuck box and be away to Malory Towers to play lacrosse, or be off on a Malcolm Saville Lone Pine adventure to be worrying about getting wet and tramping about in the Lake District.Now I'm overcoming heaven knows what after all your dire appraisals to even open it, but I've paid for it...Bookhound read and loved Swallows and Amazons through a bout of chickenpox, so his library copy probably had to be fumigated, but he recalls total immersion in Arthur Ransome's world...

The miraculous tale of two working dogs from Nymboida in Australia reads like a Disney movie. It's a story of injury, starvation and mateship between a nine-year-old dog named Buddy and a chocolate kelpie pup called Micky. The adventure started on Tuesday of last week when the dogs were out on the farm with their owner Ken Tucker, who was fixing fences. “All of a sudden I looked up and they weren't there,” Ken said. “I could hear them barking in the distance so I dare say there was a wild dog fairly close by.”All Ken usually has to do is whistle and the dogs are back within minutes, but this time they did not return. For the next five days Ken trudged along the frosty fence lines of his property with his third dog, Jive, scouting for the lost dogs. By Saturday, after no sign of...

With just two knives for cutting and a baby pig for company, Xavier Rosset sat solo on an uninhabited Pacific island for 300 lonely days. But unlike Robinson Crusoe, the young Swiss adventurer made a choice to isolate himself totally, surviving on food and shelter got by his own hand to challenge the modern way of life."It was hard, yes, very hard," Mr Rosset said, freshly arrived back in Europe after ending his 10-month stint in Tonga. His island of choice was Tofua, a 64-square-kilometre volcanic isle home to nothing except "some pigs, lots of coconuts, a lake and tropical forest". His luggage consisted of just a Swiss army knife, machete and a video camera to record his adventure for a documentary to be aired later this year.The mission was to try to relearn the natural survival skills...

Sophie McKenzie was born in London, where she still lives, and worked as a journalist and editor before concentrating full time on writing. She is the award-winning author of the thrillers Girl, Missing and Blood Ties, which won the Red House Children's Book Award in 2009. Her new thriller, The Set-Up, is the first in The Medusa Project series about a group of teens with psychic powers. Here Sophie writes about Robert Westall's The Kingdom by the Sea. Sophie McKenzie on The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall Since I started writing fiction seriously – about five and a half years ago – something terrible has happened. I've stopped enjoying books as much and as often as I used to. I rarely find that I'm totally caught up in a story any more, completely invested in the characters and...

Whilst National Express frantically try to renegotiate their franchise for the East Coast Main Line, and CEO Richard Bowker resigns to take a plum job overseas - can you abandon a sinking train? - I am reminded that introducing the private sector to public services is not the universal panacea that some of my colleagues suggest it to be. Yes, that means you, Tristan, and you, Liberal Vision. Oh yes, and you, Cllr Papworth...The Train Operating Companies signed up in a bidding contest to run train services for a fixed term - all entirely fair so far. Their business model made a series of assumptions, and they were promised fare increases linked to inflation. So far, so good. In the early years, when times were good, they made decent profits which, for the most part, were doled out to...

Jason Santa Maria, AKA Stan, is the man. Here’s here at An Event Apart in Boston to talk about Thinking Small. He’s my warm-up man. He begin in the 1980s; Christmas day in the Santa Maria household—Jason gets Castle Greyskull. One Christmas, his parents played a cruel joke on him. Instead of getting him toys, they got him books. But these books were better than regular books. They were choose-your-own-adventure books; classics like You Are A Shark and War With the Evil Power Master. The best part is that they are interactive. Of course you cheat. You go back and see what would have happened if you had made a different decision. Let’s look at the decisions we make when we are building website. Jason will show us seven small decisions that change the outcome of a...

Jason Santa Maria, AKA Stan, is the man. Here’s here at An Event Apart in Boston to talk about Thinking Small. He’s my warm-up man. He begin in the 1980s; Christmas day in the Santa Maria household—Jason gets Castle Greyskull. One Christmas, his parents played a cruel joke on him. Instead of getting him toys, they got him books. But these books were better than regular books. They were choose-your-own-adventure books; classics like You Are A Shark and War With the Evil Power Master. The best part is that they are interactive. Of course you cheat. You go back and see what would have happened if you had made a different decision. Let’s look at the decisions we make when we are building website. Jason will show us seven small decisions that change the outcome of a...

We recently brought you news of a new and revitalised Monkey Island Special Edition game, but now we have even more news to bubble your bootlegger blood. Telltale Games have teamed up with Lucas Arts to bring you a brand new swashbuckling adventure called Tales of Monkey Island, available in five episodes available to download each month – the first of which shall be released on July 5th for PC and Nintendo WiiWare! The good news is that we’ll all be getting more Guybrush than we can handle this summer – I know I’ve never shied away from making him shiver my timber at my own beck and call. The bad news is that if you finish your latest installment within a week, ye’ll be three sheets to the wind fer three whole weeks befor ye can grab some more of that ol’ booty! Okay, I’ll...