Just some quotes

John's blog has been a little quiet this week due to unforeseens, but here are some political quotes to bring you joy.

John Prescott was interviewed by Andrew Marr on Sunday, looking back on his years as DPM. Here he is, referring to a story in the papers that, using a blueprint prepared by John Birt, Tony Blair was preparing to sack Gordon Brown after the 2005 election:

"Lord Birt wasn't a paid advisor, and I think he was worth every penny of it."

Winston Churchill, quoted by Michael Cockerell in the documentary How To Be An Ex-Prime Minister, once said:

"History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself".

Tony Blair's last PMQs is available from Hansard in full - here is the final section, scroll up for more. His last words:

"That is it. The end."

And finally back to Prescott who finished his Andrew Marr interview rather differently.

"Hope the grammar was OK."

Flingo

It's a cross between "tennis and French cricket".

Glug

Here's another website for wine... Please welcome, wine answers.

Plastic bagged

Waitrose start selling milk in plastic bags.

Chocaholics

Chocolate fountains. Here. Oh yes.

Masked

Celebrate Wimbledon with a tennis mask.

Longpen

Author Dean Koontz doesn't like flying, so he's done a book signing in Piccadilly from the comfort of his California home, using one of these.

Watch

Only a tiny picture of this funky watch from Nike, but there's a better one here.

Park

Driving into London and need to know where to find a meter? http://www.park-up.com/.

Now you can get them legally

Quaglino's is selling off it's Conran-designed ashtrays as the smoking ban comes into place. £15 to you. That's one, over there, showing how it can usefully double as a salt-and-pepper thingo. This is the same restaurant which had to have an amnesty for the return of its ashtrays in 2003 after 28,000 of them were pinched.

Photoblog

Gentle Sea

Pricey

London's the second-most expensive place to live in the world, says a new report, up from fifth last year. The most expensive? Here. The cheapest (of 143)? Here.

Flowery

Roses, by post from John Lewis.

Flick and switch

Coming soon from Philips, a universal remote which will also control your iPod via the docking station included.

Walk

The Walking Britain website.

Cycle

The Cyclists' Touring Club says four million of us are using our cars to drive less than three miles to work - a distance we could cover by bike in less than 20 minutes. Doing that for a year would save a couple in CO2 emissions the weight of a small car.

Promoting the benefits of cycling in combatting climate change, the government has funded a 60-second film, Cycle Hero, showing in cinemas from the end of the month.

Dell 2 Dell

New laptops from Dell and other news in this cute and apparently legitimate blog entry.

Convert

File conversion from Zamzar. If you've been sent a file in a format your software won't read, Zamzar lets you upload it, and then receive it by email, translated.

Can't live without it

Half of 25 to 34-year-olds say they couldn't exist without email. (What, they'd just shrivel up and pass away? I love my email but that's a bit extreme.)



E-mail's most popular in the South East, and considered least essential in Wales and the South West.



The research is from ICM.

No static at all

The now-legal gadgets which transmit from your iPod to your car radio are all very well, but finding a good frequency can be fiddly. The Quickseek from Kensington claims to offer the answer - it will scan the dial to find the best frequency, and save you the trouble.

Google with a difference

New ideas from Google, including results shown on a timeline, and on a map.

Chattanooga Turtle

That's a four-eyed turtle. Why does it appear here? To mark the highly rare birth of one such at the Tennessee Aquarium.

A long list of books

The Independent's "50 Best Holiday Reads":

Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Lionel Shriver - Double Fault
Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Rory Stewart - Occupational Hazards
Donna Tartt - The Secret History
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Elwood Reid - DB
Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
Adam LeBor - City of Oranges
Ngaio Marsh - Artists in Crime
Will Self - The Book of Dave
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Nancy Mitford - The Pursuit of Love
Bill Bryson - The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid
John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps
Jackie Kay - Wish I Was Here
Rick Moody - The Diviners
EM Forster - Howards End
DH Lawrence - DH Lawrence and Italy
Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley
John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones
Maggie O'Farrell - The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
George Eliot - Middlemarch
John Burnside - A Lie About My Father
William Boyd - Restless
Clare Allan - Poppy Shakespeare
Jonathan Lethem - You Don't Love Me Yet
James Hogg - The Private Memoirs
Kate Williams - England's Mistress
PD James - The Lighthouse
Iain Hollingshead - Twenty-Something
Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence
Tim Flannery - The Eternal Frontier
Lee Child - The Hard Way
Mark Haddon - A Spot of Bother
Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca
Elizabeth Speller - The Sunlight on the Garden
Chimanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of Yellow Sun
Jeb Rubenfeld - The Interpretation of Murder
David Pace - The Damned Utd
Philip Roth - Everyman
LP Hartley - The Go-Between
Carmen Callil - Bad Faith
Stef Penney - The Tenderness of Wolves
Michael Collins - The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton
Carl Hiassen - Nature Girl
Anthony Hope - The Prisoner of Zenda
William Dalrymple - The Last Mughal

It's a kind of magic

They float, and they change colour. Solar lights. You know you want one.

Clean

Not a beautiful website, but it does promise it'll tell you How To Clean Anything, so we might forgive it.

Working five to nine

The 9-5 is dead. A third of us are now working between 5am and 9am.



The top ten towns for workaholic early hours are: Blackburn (with 43% of its population working at some point between 5am and 9am), Bracknell, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester, Barnsley, Reading and Cambridge. London's only at 23.

New from Sony

The latest Sony Vaio laptops have been unveiled. They may look just like the old ones from the photo, but apparently they're very special.

Pod underground

I can vouch for the fact that this works. Here are the files you need to download, in order to get the London underground map on your iPod. And here's how to sync them.

Brother can't drive

Here's American comedian Eddie Griffin crashing a £760,000 Ferrari whilst filming. Love his explanation.

Hanging

The lightbulb that doesn't need wires.

Wine. Love it.

Here's a really neat wine recommendation site.

Flushed away

From the Independent on Sunday, lost mobile facts:

• 855,000 mobiles a year are flushed down the toilet by accident


• 810,000 are left in the pub


• 116,000 are wrecked in the washing machine


• 100,000 are left in the back of London cabs


• 58,500 are eaten by dogs


• Under 35's are 2.5 times more likely to lose or damage their mobiles than over 55's

Reader

A new e-reader from a company called iRex. The only thing to be regretted about it is that they've called it iLiad. Which is silly.

MSN anywhere

So, you want to use MSN, but you don't want to download the software. Meebo.

The rattle finder

Unidentified noises in the car can be irritating. Natural enough, then, to hire a car mechanic of diminutive size to take a ride in the boot of your car to identify where it's coming from. Unless, of course, someone thinks it's a kidnapping.

Frosty

Looking for glasses with a difference? The Mountain Glass Set from Graham and Green.

Blue Sky Day

Ten days until the longest day... and the National Gallery is running a public art event, asking us to "paint our own inspiration" to celebrate June 21st.

I may not have explained that very well. Here, try this.

No point hanging about

From the New Statesman:

At last year's auction of promises, Canon Adrian Botwright offered to reduce a 60-minute sermon by one minute for each £1 bid, with a lower limit of two minutes. Using a four-line verse format, the rector gave a complete account of the Christian story, from before the Creation to after the End, finishing on the stroke of the 120th second.

Applauded from the pulpit, Canon Botwright said it "took a full four hours to write. The trouble is, now the congregation knows a sermon need only be two minutes."

Tangerine and multi-purpose

Never be stuck without a spoon.

Your London

Store your memories and pictures on an online map of London.

Breaking the ice in New Delhi

In India, they've opened a new radio station for women only. It's called Meow.

Also available in Princess

Just a school bag. But it's got a "villainous pirate" theme. So watch it.

Don't let me forget

Now here's a simple idea from a free website. Set yourself reminders via email with forlater.

Eating and drinking

A huge but fascinating study of what we eat is just out from the Office for National Statistics.



In the section comparing English regional trends, it tells us:

• People in the South West eat the most fruit and veg


• People in the North East eat the least


• People in the North West and Yorkshire spend the most on alcohol


• People in the East spend the least


• Favourite types of takeaway are Indian and Chinese in London, and fish and chips in Yorkshire and the Humber


• Londoners spend the most on eating out. People in the East spend the least. On average across England, a third of all food and drink spending is on eating out.


• Londonders like salt less than the rest of the country.

The full report is here. (3MB file.)

For the planet

For most of us, this is more of a gimmick than a real gadget, but it's a cute idea. The Planet Switch reminds you to help save the world by switching off all non-essential circuits when you leave the house or go to bed.

In its perfect form, all your general lights, and electrical devices on standby, get wired into the same switch, and the eco-friendly housing development in the Cotswolds which is being developed by the same company will build that technology into their house designs from now on.

Retro-fitting would be impossibly expensive. But you could still use the Planet Switch to replace one of your existing light switches, just to remind you.

Daily lessons

What real journalists can learn from The Daily Show.

(Which is here.)

Nessie

William Hill are offering £1million to anyone who can find conclusive proof that the Loch Ness Monster exists, and odds of 250-1 on it happening. The hook is next weekend's Rock Ness music festival.

Twitter

This entry was simply going to say: "See that picture on the left? Bet you can't guess what it does."

Then I spotted the words "BIRD CALL" at the top. Yes, it calls birds, when you wind it up.

Bubbly

Mind-mapping and flowcharts online, without special software, from Bubble.

Hug

From the Independent (with more here):



"Regular cuddles may reduce women's risk of heart disease, and kind, thoughtful words have a similar effect on men."

Looking after your lap

The Belkin CushTop goes on your lap. Your laptop then goes on the CushTop. Following me?

On the go

The online maps from Google (www.local.google.co.uk) are already my favourites... Now they've brought the service to mobile phones, here. I haven't tried it yet, but apparently it's fantastic, although heavy on the data load.

Over ice

Champagne on the rocks is this year's Next Big Thing in trendy drinks.