The rain finally clears long enough to attack the trees and garden, which is good news. If it stays mostly dry tomorrow, the grass will get a chop. Cutting the trees is a much-of-the-day job.

Thence to Treasure Hunt doing some of the more obvious tourist attractions around Tucson. No time to take a trip up Mt Lemmon, sadly, coz the pie up at Summerhaven is out of this world. I would recommend this place to anyone, though not during the summer when 110F is too hot for everyone. Even though it's a dry heat...

All railway stations accept cash, cheque, travel warrants, credit and debit cards. A growing number of stations also take Solo, Electron, and JCB. So, if you want to travel by train and can leave a large yellow digger in payment, you're away. Though you might prefer to keep the digger, and plough your way up the line. It'll be quicker.

A well-reasoned set of articles in Het Graun today. One argues that to cut crime, one can legalise drugs. Another roundly pooh-poohs the "national entitlement" card proposed by the increasingly fascist David Blunkett, who a recent survey should have voted as The Most Dangerous Man In Britain. And another reminds us that "meat" is regularly bulked up with crap. Literally. And Der Spiegel reports that Mr Blix reckons there never were any CBNs in Iraq. Welcome to Sick Sad World.

It's Friday, it's five. It's, er, Davina's pay packet per second.

1. What brand of toothpaste do you use?
Whatever's on sale when I finish the previous tube.

2. What brand of toilet paper do you prefer?
Whatever's on sale when I finish the previous pack. Am I being a little too dull here? Pardon me for being economical.

3. What brand(s) of shoes do you wear?
I can either buy cheap pairs that wear out after 100 miles (perhaps three months) or buy quality pairs that will last ten times that distance for just four times the outlay. Marks and Sparks own brand all the way.

4. What brand of soda do you drink?
When I want soda, I'll ask for "cola" and let them brand it.

5. What brand of gum do you chew?
That I don't do, it makes me worry that my fillings will fall out. And I think it sounds disgusting anyway.

Because we like Mr Jiggery Pokery here, we'll join in with his mrstrellis experiment. "Picking someone neutral completely at mrstrellis random, let's see if Google's PageRank doomrstrellishicky can get someone - perhaps mrstrellis - into the top forty. If some of the other well-placed folks mrstrellis could gratuitously mention mrstrellis a bit for no good reason then it would be interesting to see if anything happens." Will it, mrstrellis? Stick a few references to mrstrellis and see what happens. Give it a month or two to percolate through the indices.

No previews for Eurovision - it's Buffy popup night, and that's not going to be beaten in the 8p slot.

No B on BBC2, instead, Phil Collins performs one of his 1989 singles. In silence. That'll be revenge, then.

The UN votes to lift sanctions against Iraq. On the same day, it emerges that even the UK government believes its actions in Iraq are unlawful. Lord Goldsmith, the government-appointed yesman who was the only person in the world to believe the March action was legal, says that the occupying army business is unlawful. Well spotted, sir.

And the CIA is holding an enquiry, suspecting that its assessments of Iraqi weapons of mass hallucination were incorrect. Well spotted, gentlemen.

Think of what it means to die for a friend. It is deliberate and painful; there is no ecstasy. For friends, dying is hard and bitter. The dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps never be recreated. Friends do not, the way comrades do, love death and sacrifice. To friends, the prospect of death is frightening. And this is why friendship or, let me say love, is the most potent enemy of war.

Chris Hedges, Rockford college graduation ceremony, May 21

Five more for Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest:

• Spain: Not entirely without hope, just probably hopeless.
• Israel: Boppy and vacuuous. The commercial break follows.
• Netherlands: Rush back for one of the best instant tracks so far.
• UK: Could just do the trick, but will probably fall flat on its face.
• Ukraine: It's good, but it's not Latvia or Poland.

More previews for Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest:

• Bosnia-Herzegovina: Zzzzz.
• Portugal: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I can see people getting *very* drunk during this stretch.
• Croatia: Better than any of the past half dozen songs, though doesn't seem to be up to the country's high standard
• Cyprus: Quick trip back to the bar. The next bit should be good.
• Germany: There are very good reasons why "Alles Wird Gut" didn't win, and anyone for Berlin 2004?
• Russia: The stage performance is going to make or break the song. On record, it's crap. But what's with the 30 second gap in the vocals part way through?

Some thoughts on why drinking to excess is socially acceptable, but playing computer games isn't.

How to make the perfect mix tape. Though it seems to have more about compilation CDs than tapes, the general principles apply. [Via me3dia]

School sports day has had a modicum of press interest lately, after one school decided not to have a competitive sports day. No, actually, what happened was that many schools decided not to have a competitive sports day, one of them told parents not to bother coming, one of the parents sold their story to a trashy tabloid for almost 94 cents, and the rest is media hype.

According to the received wisdom, everyone who doesn't do well at school sports days have emotional scars for the rest of their lives. This is, of course, complete hogwash. At primary school, everyone competed in one event, a 100m dash. Clearly, this choice advantages those who are good at sprinting, and disadvantages those who would prefer longer distance events. My stamina doesn't kick in until something like the 5,000m, and we never ran more than 1500m at school.

So no, I wasn't "scarred" by this choice of sport (singular.) Indeed, until this media flap, I hadn't thought about it in years. By secondary school, only the "best" would compete across a full track and field programme, and by no stretch of the imagination would that include me.

How much do we dislike thunder cells? Let us count the ways. One this evening made it impossible to get a stable telephone connection - the line kept dropping thanks to crackles on the circuit. This is no fun at all.

Also in the "Boo, Hiss" category, news that Digiguide has pulled out of the US market. It's a crying shame, but after six months selling subscriptions for the US service, they'd made less than 1500 sales, a third of the break-even figure. I'm sure that the company will return when the time (and marketing plan) is right.

UK lottery operator The Lottery Corp unveils various new games and competitions. Full coverage at The UK Lottery Pages, but here's the skinny:

• Olympic Change: a 6-from-?? game, tickets cost 1p (0.014 ECU), daily prizes £25,000 (ECU 35,000)
• Olympic Mega Draw: a biannual game, costing £5 (ECU 7) per play, prizes up to £5m.
• Gold, Silver, Bronze: a weekly draw, guaranteeing 30,000 prizes. Sounds like they're selling a fixed number of tickets, possibly in a mechanic similar to El Gordo.
• Draws in the main 6/49 game six days per week, similar to US state lotteries. Possibly (hopefully) linked to a relaxation in the rollover rules, and cutting down the advertorials to a brief insert at the 8pm junction.
• A European game, also played in France and Spain, with a potential jackpot of ECU 50 million. This could well be the start of the Single European Lottery, where a 1 ECU ticket could win a continent full of money. For small values of "continent."

Staying on the music theme, first batch of previews for Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest:

• Iceland: Strong, zippy, a fine each way bet.
• Austria: Mad. Wogan will have a fit.
• Ireland: Sorry, mate, this is a watered-down "Fly On The Wings Of Love."
• Turkey: The first chance to refill your glasses.
• Malta: For the first time in six years, there's no chance they'll get my vote. On the completely specious basis that all the winners this century have been from the countries I voted for exactly two years previously, this will win.

And an album review: Hall & Oates' newie, Do It For Love.

The good burghers of Portland, Oregon (yes, such people do exist) were going to spend next weekend opening up a time capsule from 1903, commemorating the visit of President Theodore Roosevelt. The only trouble with this plan: they can't find the bloody thing. They've looked everywhere, but short of demolishing the entire monument, they haven't been able to find it. Any doctor who might have visited it and made a time-travelling capsule should call the Portland Council no later than last Thursday.

The NFT report into this case contains the following choice quote:

[Investigators] considered ground penetration radar technology. On Thursday, an expert in that field, Stephanie A Bates, owner of Concrete Inspection Services of Sandy, paid a visit.

"The situation, quite honestly - this is not a feasible option," Ms. Bates said, giving technical reasons involving thickness, antennas and 1,500 megahertz that neither Mrs. Paulus nor anyone else listening appeared to understand fully.

In other news, the US Democratic party is finally (finally!) calling the junta's inability to deliver on its campaign promises. Battling terrorism? Mr bin Laden is discussing his crushes with a website editor eight thousand miles away. Protecting the US? Allowing the worst crime against humanity on the American continent in decades, and weakening Al-Qaeda so badly that it couldn't even dream of co-ordinating attacks in Arabia and Morocco.

Joss Wheedon, also in the NFT, on Buffy.

The only thing that we’ve ever actually been stopped or asked to stop doing was the fast food run. When Buffy worked at the fast food joint it made the advertisers very twitchy. So apparently the most controversial thing we ever had on Buffy was a hamburger and chicken sandwich.

I think the mistakes I’ve made in my own life have plagued me, but they’re pretty boring mistakes: I committed a series of grisly murders in the eighties and I think I once owned a Wilson-Phillips Album.