Meanwhile, in Romania

…this sort of thing is going on (5 minutes):



Hat tip: Wagner's Saxophone

Cometh the hour, cometh the Cruddas

Independent and Guardian introduce Labour's man to watch.

At risk

A slideshow of threatened Victorian and Edwardian buildings.

(Here's one we've already lost: Rockville, a wonderfully mad Edinburgh house knocked down in 1966.)

Private agony

Dad's Army's Arnold Ridley never recovered from World War One.

Mixed metaphor of the month

President Asif Ali Zardari declares:

Democracy in Pakistan has finally been restored but it is still a tender sapling which needs nurturing before it becomes a great, sheltering tree.

There are still elements who want to derail it yet once again.

Remember the old slogan, "British Rail - it's quicker by sapling"?

Weasel Stomping Day

Not always amused by "Weird Al" Yankovic, but he hits the spot with this anthem to a little-known public holiday (90 seconds):

Click to see video

Congress must act to save stupid people

ScrappleFace's take on the economic meltdown.

Eighty today

Eric Lubbock won the famous 1962 Orpington by-election, and, as Lord Avebury, he's still on the Lib Dem front bench. (Is he the oldest front-bencher there is?)

My Language Fails

Loved for his verse for children, Hilaire Belloc is forgotten as a Catholic controversialist, historian, essayist, novelist and serious poet, writes A N Wilson.

Not drunk enough

Catherine Tate is abjectly sorry but… (3 minutes):

MODERATOR!!!

The various folk who cause hassle on an online forum are pithily summed up and deftly caricatured at Flame Warriors.

"Risible little wonker"

Rod Liddle slaughters David Miliband and asks where all the Big Beasts have gone.

Nature's gentleman

Norrie Woodhall (102) remembers Thomas Hardy.

Town ain't big enough

Publicity and clips from history's only all-midget Western, The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), blend well with The Dead Kennedys' cover of "Rawhide" (4 minutes):

City of ickle dirks

Will Self lopes through Edinburgh, coining phrases as he goes.

Lloyds is pants

But they don't like you to say so.

Gone with the wind

Hazel Warp, dead at 93, was Vivien Leigh's stunt double.

Scourge of Scum

Jon Culshaw does Jeremy Kyle (2 minutes):

Knifed

Britain's biggest exam board censors Carol Ann Duffy.

Who's the greatest Leither?

There are so many candidates.

They demolished this

New York's original Pennsylvania Station was pulled down in 1964.

"Cash-in-buttocks man in M25 ban"

Best headline ever.

Better than cakes and ale

Neil Jenman shows us his unrivalled hoard of Somerset Maugham books and memorabilia (6½ minutes):

If it's not one thing it's another

Michael Fabricant MP is
forced to eat coffee whitener
at gunpoint.

Women are escape goats

…and other student howlers.

Insomniac masterpiece

Charles Dickens prowls the London streets by night:

The creature was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, and it had a loose bundle of rags on, which it held together with one of its hands. It shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and as it stared at me--persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever it thought me--it made with its whining mouth as if it were snapping at me, like a worried dog.

Part of the fabric

Sorry to hear that Raymond Walters, for many years the self-effacing, endlessly patient Librarian-in-charge of the Oxford Union, has died aged 88.

Hymn for narcissists

The Ode to Joy is all me, me, me (2 minutes):



(based on Peter Mandelson's victory speech at the 2001 general election)

Frontline Granton

A shopkeeper speaks (5 minutes).