North of Milton Keynes

From The Economist (January 5th 2008): “North of 52 degrees latitude (roughly, beyond Milton Keynes), the winter sun is too weak for vitamin D to be produced.”

Dr Gordon’s prescription

Reports this evening that the Government’s latest initiative (health screening) had not been discussed with doctors’ leaders before it was unveiled. Just as worrying was Gordon Brown’s remark that “many of the [200,000 deaths a year from heart disease and strokes], indeed probably most of them, [are] avoidable if we did the right things.” I feel the clunking fist of Nanny.

Looks tell all

Look at the picture of Hillary Clinton on the front page of today’s Daily Telegraph. The caption reads ‘Barack Obama glances at Hillary Clinton after she lost her temper during the Democratic debate in Manchester at the weekend’. But it is not how Obama looks; instead it’s Hillary: she is smirking. Whatever else she is doing, she is playing a calculated game. All the reports today are running Obama’s way but for a contrarian view, read “Why Neither Obama or Clinton will win’, David Herman’s post in First Drafts, the Prospect magazine blog. If either do, Herman thinks this “would be the greatest shock in US politics since the war.”

Dietary requirements

Tim Rice confides in his Diary in this week’s Spectator that whenever he gets a form asking for his dietary requirements, he always put “large helpings”, which request, he says, is unfortunately (but quite correctly) rarely acted upon. I usually put “Summer Pudding”, with much the same result.

Bhutto: a (yet) more detached view

In John McNaughten’s blog, Memex 1.1 http://memex.naughtons.org/, an interesting excerpt from a piece by David Warren on Canada.com about Benazir Bhutto.

My abiding memory of Benazir (I too was an exact contemporary at Oxford) was our first meeting: she was wearing pink hotpants and stretched out on the floor of a close friend of mine, eating Turkish Delight. McNaughten’s summary, “attractive, rich and petulant” is accurate to a point; Benazir was also great fun. It was that girl I remembered when I heard the news of her death, not what she became.