Well, I know what I'm having for xmas dinner this year.

* The North Korean leader inherited his father's fear of flying. Kim Jong-il preferred to travel by train and took his luxury carriages all the way to Moscow in 2001, when he reportedly had roast donkey and fresh lobsters flown to him every day.

Palin shits

I really should get one, but the problem is that it's not terribly like. I would have to explain who it is as well as what it is, which would cruel the joke, such as it was.

Step by Step

I mean, if someone wrote to you to say "the status of the phone-hacking case is as bad as we feared" wouldn't you conclude too that it was just spam and hit delete?

I can remember once confronting - at Lincoln, this was - someone who'd dropped a note in my pigeonhole complaining that they hadn't been consulted on something.
"You should have come to the meeting that was about exactly this," I said.
"Nobody told me," she said.
"We sent out notices," I said.
"I didn't get one," she said.
"I shoved it under your door," I said.
"I've only got your word for that," she said.
"You wrote your note to me on the back of it," I said.

It's not often you get a score like that. But Murdoch is getting there.

I rather wish we would spy on America, mind

Martin Perez, in the New Republic:

There is at least one more obsession of the Israeli right (and of the religious right, as well) which rankles me. It is the case of Jonathan Pollard which has reverberations in the United States. Before spying for Israel, Pollard committed espionage for Australia and Pakistan and had some obscure tie to the People’s Republic of China. For all of this he received remuneration.

Quick wikicheck:

During the course of the Pollard trial, Australian authorities reported the disclosure of classified American documents by Pollard to one of their own agents, a Royal Australian Navy officer who had been engaged in a personnel-exchange liaison program between the U.S. and Australian Navies.[26] The Australian officer, alarmed by Pollard's repeated disclosure of NOFORN data to him, reported the indiscretions to his chain of command which in turn recalled him from his position in the U.S., fearing that the disclosures might be part of a "CIA ruse."[26] Confronted with this accusation after entering his plea, Pollard only admitted to passing a single classified document to the Australian; later, he changed his story, and claimed that his superiors ordered him to share information with the Australians.

That is, he didn't spy for Australia, and he certainly wasn't paid to spy for Australia, and Perez is wildly wrong (a sentence that should be left in type to save time).

Certainly

From the High court last month

Mr. Justice Heydon

According to Griffith CJ, "The law is always certain, although no one may know what it is."

It came up in the course of a high court decision saying that the common law rule that wives cannot be compelled to give evidence against their husbands -

"the law will not suffer a wife to be a witness for or against her husband, to preserve the peace of families"

that I had always thought was settled law (and can remember providing the bulk of the plot in several Agatha Christies) had in fact never existed at all, being traced back to a few lines in the judgement in R v The Inhabitants of All Saints, Worcester, a somewhat ambiguous decision concerning which parish was responsible for particular poor law recipients in 1817 that involved, along the way, finding out whether the man Alice was living with was a bigamist (because if so the parish could tell Alice to go off and batten on another parish) and whether they could go ask Alice.

Which does, I have to say, mean that the drive for gay marriage has lost most of its point.