10 minutes in and Burn Up, the BBC's bruited new 'eco-thriller' - even with Ron Cook - isn't a patch on Edge of Darkness, which I watched again last weekend. Edge of Darkness is quite simply the best piece of television drama ever made, with the exception of the impossible to find Australian policier Phoenix.

It must be a bunch of clowns, or the bunch of clowns standing in Glasgow East. The SSP are finished for the forseeable future, Sheridan and the Cliffites can piss off, so in time-honoured entyrist fashion, there is little else to say other than recommend a vote for Labour, for all of the current party's manifest faults.

Not actually - the headline reads Gay bishop Gene Robinson 'must be sacked' to save church from schism . Considering how much there is in the Old and New Testaments about front and back bottoms, compared to accounts of smiting and casting out and so forth, some people seem more than a bit obsessed. Splitters ...

This CNN report, found via SimplyJews, was bad enough. Two drowned Roma girls are left to lie on a beach near Naples, while sunbathers sit around them, apparently quite unconcerned - sunning themselves or eating their lunch. This report is worse:

Witnesses say they lay on the beach for hours - and so did many of the sunbathers who allegedly watched the drowning and, according to some press accounts, did little but stare and carry on with their Saturday afternoon.

Naples is also where thugs firebombed Roma camps last May in one of a series of racist attacks on Roma and other ethnic minorities in Italy - in the same period in Rome, a mob smashed up shops run by Bangladeshi migrants. According to this report, a survey found that 68% of Italians want Gypsies 'expelled' from Italy, whether or not they are Italian citizens. Expel Italy from the EU and demand all EU funds back.

Giant lobster found at sea - unusual, as you'd normally expect to find them out doing a spot of gardening.

Going through some papers today, I discovered a photocopied page with the following quotation from the late Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich about Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich:

He gave me the manuscript of the First 'Cello Concerto on 2 August 1958. On the sixth I played it to him from memory, three times. After the first time he was so excited, and of course we drank a little bit of vodka. The second time I played not so perfect, and afterwards we drank even more vodka. The third time I think I played the Saint-Saëns concerto, but he still accompanied his concerto. We were enormously happy.

Heard pontificating on BBC News 24 this afternoon, a talking head saying that holidays are one of the last things to feel the pinch of the current 'credit crunch', because it's difficult for parents to tell their children that they won't be having a holiday 'abroad' this year. Holidays 'abroad'? My parents have never left New Zealand. Holidays were at a camping ground about an hour and a half's drive away and we didn't think we were doing too badly.

The Fabian Society says people should stop using the word 'chav'. In fact they should stop using it on two counts: it's an unpleasant bastardisation of the Romani/Northern 'charva'; and its southern usage is dripping with class hatred - because it's always fun to laugh at the poor don't you know? Well, apart from the cuddly ones in exotic foreign parts - you can go on nice poverty tourism holidays and watch 'them' in their natural setting, all noble and savage and so, so sad - a cheap holiday in other people's misery ... before their standard of living picks up and 'ruins' it for everyone.

Anthony Foster, whose family was preyed upon and destroyed by clergy is less than impressed with Bishop Anthony Fisher's sensitive comments:

I think most of Australia was enjoying, delighting in the beauty and goodness of these young people ... rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds..

Crankily? Yes, all this unpleasantness should just be locked in cupboard and forgotten.

Death to the Black Hundreds!