The occasional trip into the city centre. Mainly to pick up some prepared meals for when I'm working late over the next month, but also to have a general look round. Took the camera with me, and I've whipped together a photomontage of Birmingham city centre.

The well dressed young man, scanning the faces of everyone on the street, as if one of them will provide the clue he's so desperately seeking.

Spotted in Het Grauniad

In January 1998, the New York Times crossword editor, Will Shortz, allowed a young man to propose to his girlfriend by putting a message into the crossword. Shortz was a little suspicious when Bill Gottlieb called him. "At first," Shortz told me, "I thought I couldn't do this. I couldn't let the Times be used for something so personal. But then I called him up, and he seemed to me to be an earnest and sincere young man, and completely in love with Emily. I agreed."

"So anyway," Gottlieb told me, "Emily's doing the puzzle and I'm reading the rest of the paper and pretending not to know anything, and watching as she becomes suspicious. She fills in her name, and then my name. And then one answer is 'Will you marry me?' and she gets that. And then we had 'Yes' as an answer. And the clue for 'Yes' was 'Hoped for answer to "Will you marry me?" '

"And by then," Gottlieb continued, "she knew something was up, and that's when I asked her, properly, to marry me.

"And I said 'yes'," said Emily.

The icon to your left is called "sick sad world".

In a nationwide Knight-Ridder poll, 50% of respondents say that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers came from Iraq. Only 17% say none came from Iraq. No government or major newspaper has ever suggested that even one of the 9/11 hijackers came from Iraq. Additionally, nearly 1 in 4 respondents thinks the Bush administration has publicly released evidence tying Iraq to the planning and funding of the Sept. 11 attacks, and more than 1 in 3 respondents didn't know or refused to answer. No such evidence has been released.

The old dragon who sends her pet husband to keep a place in the checkout line, but he's not unloading anything, but waiting for her to finish shopping and move him on to a less empty register like a pawn in a game of Losing Chess.

Two comments on the above: 1) It was as confusing to me as to you; 2) but it didn't make me angry that other people had been inconvenienced, just incredibly confused. Chalk down as Not Fighting Other People's Battles, which is A Good Thing.

Do you think that Iraqi scientists will be killed if they talk to the UN? asks CNN's Your World Today show. How in sodomy are we meant to know? Fifty Iraqis close to President Sadaam might know, but they're not going to say just yet for good tactical reasons. The UN people might know if they can spirit people away, but they're not going to tell for equally good tactical reasons. For the rest of us, we haven't a frikkin' clue. And that includes the CNN editorial staff, who are just inviting people to add to the weight of speculation, guesswork, and poppycock surrounding the whole issue. US military commander General Guff could not be reached for comment.

White-haired gentleman walking down the hill, pulling his green coat over his diamond-patterned jumper, trying to keep in just a little heat from the chill wind.

Apropos of nothing much, I've never found tea to be deliberately offensive on its own. It can react with other offensive items (glares at British beef, quietly pecking in the corner) but the words of nastiness appear to have been bred out of its vocabulary. And if it ever is insulting, it tends to be because the voice of the tea has been shouted over by something else in the area. It's usually those jam doughnuts that are to blame - they just will not shut up and let the rest of the patisserie speak. Put them with cucumber sandwiches and you're going to be half-deaf for the rest of the day and no mistake about it.

Records that send shivers down my spine...

"Good Vibrations", if only for *that* acapella moment about two-thirds of the way in.

"Hey Jude", for the singalong chorus.

"American Pie", the lyric by which all others are measured.

"Past the Mission", for reasons as yet unexplained.

The Channel 4 Daily theme, light bursting through a window.

And "My Star", because it's my song and no one else's.

Googlebot will not eat my spoilers. Buffy 702 remains firmly cloaked behind a Javascript popup.

Great Political Mistakes on BBC4 is billed as Mrs Margaret Thatcher. However, the show is only 50 minutes long, so we only have time to cover one blunder in any depth. The one blunder is the community charge, and there are interviews with Nobby and Basher - Ingham and Clarke, though not necessarily in that order. A lot of shots of people's feet, walking down the pavement, for no reason at all.

Very impressive Childrens' Television WEAKEST LINK tonight. Anything that can gather Mr Rat, Mr Gopherman, Mr Ball and Mr Mallett in one place has to be on a winner. The quiz is almost secondary.

Driving your car like it's a dodgem and parking in the disabled bay doesn't make one look clever, just foolish.

A throwaway comment on the Simon Mayo show: there are about 2.25 million listeners to the show, and if everyone put £1000 into the pot, the show could buy up a supermarket chain currently on the market. What Mr Confessions appears to forget: been there, done that, called it the Co-Operative. The Co-op consistently undercuts that other store on price, and is slightly higher quality.

Young lady in the dark pink beret, short skirt, tights, boots, and clearly at ease with her sexuality.

Over the weekend, three friends posed six month challenges. Chris, I accept your challenge, and a short story will be winging its way to you by July. Laura, I accept a variation of your challenge; make it six Martian months, or just under one of your earth years. And Reverend, I accept your challenge to write one sentence about someone I meet each day, and will be filling it right here.

The rules I'll be following are decently simple. No one I know. No one I meet through work, though people who use the conference facilities on the same campus as work are fair game. And I won't deliberately write about the same person more than once.

Young man, standing outside the barbers', applying cologne to his newly naked neck, as if it would lure an unsuspecting female to him like a vampire to its prey.

Curious thing spotted at work: a tomato on the wall just behind the kitchen. Still firm, still plump, slightly black on one edge, but left on the wall. Another tomato was on the grass some few yards up the hill. Had they made a desparate bid for freedom, thinking that Tomato Paradise was at the top of the hill, if only they could reach it? Was the one on the wall watching the one on the bank in some strange mating ritual? Indeed, was the one on the bank planning to go into the bank? Was it going to rob the bank? Should I have called Vegetable Crimestoppers and asked PC Pod to put in an ap-pea-rance, see if he could divine what these fruit bean up to, and perhaps cucumber them with an asparagus and chain? Who knows.

Four part series on The Gulf War on UKHI yesterday. It was a 1996 BBC production, and really hasn't aged well. Gawds, they used Voiceoverman rather than Ms Subtitles. Over on C4, Bremner, Bird and Fortune returned to kick exposed butt.

Two observations on popular music.

1) Sanctuary Records, the largest independent label in Britain, announces profits up 25%, and sales up by almost as much. The indie thumbs its noses at the Big Five, saying that reports of the death of good music are greatly overblown.

2) Robert Williams, a highly-paid Big Five singer, with a contract worth a reported £80m, said when he had been to see all the major labels and asked what they were going to do about music piracy, "I heard a lot of hot air. The heads of the record labels don't know what to do about it." Williams went on to praise copying of disks, saying "it's great." Williams' most recent release is in a format that claims to be copy-proof, does not meet the Red Book standards, and in spite of selling more 5" silver disks than any other title last year, hence failed to become the Biggest Selling CD of 2002 for the fairly simple reason that it's not a CD.

In what must surely be a display of trolling, a government minster said that music piracy supported international vice gangs, drug runners and prostitutes. The minister also claimed that music piracy amounted to going into a record store and shoplifting the material on sale, that Gareth Gates could easily make it on his own, and that there was nothing unusual about the lime green pigs flying past his window. Amazingly, the minister said all this gobshite with a straight face, so either he's going for the Tony Blair Bonty Liar prize, or he actually believes this load of twaddle. You deride.

1. Window shades or blinds?
Curtains all the way here. With an added blind in my bedroom to stop the sun from getting in through the window, and to keep the cold out.

2. Wall or desk calendar?
Wall calendar: goddesses this year, Buffy last. Spotting a connection...

3. Paint or wallpaper?
Paint. Any twit [waves] can put up paint. Wallpapering takes some skill, and if you get the wrong wallpaper it can be a lifelong burden.

4. Electric or gas stove?
Gas hob, electric oven. The best of both worlds.

5. Carpeting or bare floors?
Carpets at the mo, though parquet floors are appealing.

6. One TV, or more than one?
Two right now - a big one downstairs, a little one upstairs.

7. Leather or fabric sofa?
Fabric.

8. Eat meals in kitchen or dining room?
In the living room - kitchen is about big enough to cook, living room is big enough for a small orgy.

9. Fabric or vinyl shower curtain?
Vinyl was the one I inherited.

10. Your kitchen: well-equipped or bare bones?
Enough for me to do what I need to do.

Over on digitalspy (no link, forum pages move with the wind speed) they wonder about one's Default Channel. The channel you're most likely to be watching at any given time.

For my money, weekends head towards Challenge ?, the original game show channel. The good (Desert Forges), the indifferent (Ice Warriors), the ridiculous (Knockout) and the sublime (Adventure Game, Knightmare) makes for hours of entertaining viewing.

Weekdays are a little more sedate, evenings tend to gravitate around whatever channel has that night's Must See TV or radio (Mon: BBC2; Tue RAD1; Wed RAD4; Thu SKY1/ E4 ; Fri (when I'm in) C4 / E4 .) But it's more a case of find the faves in the listings and work from there. Rest of the time, and when I'm not working, it's CNN, Eurosport, News 24, VH1 Classic, Q - in roughly that order.

Never one to be left out of a good thing going round, here's my desktop at the moment. Icons going down the left side: phoplay, emacs, sequoia view, net uno, snood, mozilla, pegasus mail, dial-up, birthdays. Second column: double killer, anagrammer. Centre: BBLS & meself. Right: text doc, lynx, jpeg cleaner, random quotes. Far right: text doc, psion, two text docs, hard disk, second dialler, /dev/null. Along bottom: directory window, moz, html editor; winamp, moz, two wavefinder apps, swift download; volume, proximotron, display, anti-virus, clock, digiguide.