I “have the courage to ignore populism.”

You “look over your shoulder at the [American] public .”

He’s a dictator.

Pujols?  Who?

Boston’s pitchers and Renteria saved me.

The All*Star Game Ballot is now open on mlb.com. I’ve listed my quick picks below (trying not to be too biased towards Boston nor my fantasy team; meaning I’ve got far too many Yankees for my liking).

Everyone can vote up to 25 times.

p.s. Just realised I’ve left out Pujols: Given his poor showing for my team so far, it bloody serves him right.

  Despite an awful week from Pujols, the Yankees’ OF pairing of Damon and Matsui letting me down with poor showings and injuries, and the Red Sox’s wayward pitching, I won my first game and top my league’s Central division.  This was largely thanks to a storming week from Lo Duca at catcher, which I thought would be my weakest position.

Now I’m merely plagued by fears of doom having followed my head after rafting Pujols rather than my heart and getting Big Pappy.

This week:  OUT Matsui (injury), Dye (hello?); IN Granderson (can he continue?); Swisher (despite saying on Five’s baseball show that he wouldn’t draft himself).

Sadly one of my favourite series of beer commercials in recent times has been dropped. Miller Lite have apparently axed the campaignbefore Sunday’s Super Bowl in the face of declining sales.

Obviously there was an unwritten man law: don’t drink horrid expensive tasteless beer.

So the Government has decreed that the TV Licencing fee shall decrease in real-terms over the next seven years.  A move that was declared to be in line with a “tough spending round” for HMG departments, n.b. these are not ‘Tory cuts’.

Fine, I say.

Yes, it was silly for the BBC to agree to a new charter, and all the requirements that entails, before it had secured funding.  But a large chunk of money has been put aside within the BBC budget for additional projects relating to the transformation to digital TV and the analogue switch-off.

Extra-ordinary costs! you doubtless say.  How can the Licence fee payers be expected to pay for the jump across to digital?

Well, they might not have to.  The analogue switch-off will free up lots of prime real-estate in the UHF spectrum.  This time around the telcos aren’t going to get their fingers burned again after the 3G fiasco, but the auction of the spare frequencies should still raise a pretty penny.  Brown wasn’t planning on keeping all that money to himself, was he?

Let the Beeb / Channel 4 / ITV / 5 keep the dosh raised from the analogue auction and make them plough it into assisting folks with digiboxes and new digital programming.

Just so long as it’s not more Robin Hood.

Wet Feet offer an excellent careers guide for graduates and young professionals. It is fairly US-centric but it’s general advice cannot be far off the mark for the UK. Advice ranges from 6 Steps to a Job Search Action Plan to a odd discussion of Dating on the Job [?].

Wet Feet appear to sell this customised advice to various universities, inc. Oxford. From the sloppy URL encoding, it seems there are 157 sub-sites thus far [dpip<=159].

Some poetry by Jim Key from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe:

I went out with a model,
But I found her dull,
And also she was one of those fatty models;
So not much to look at.

___

Baby faced assassin.
Assassin shot baby.

The guys behind the entertaining May Day Bingo Ball announced today The Fresh Ball 2006, which is an ‘unofficial freshers ball for everyone‘.

The May Day Ball was certainly good fun and the old bingo hall on Magdalen/Cowley Road proved to be an unusual location with lots of original charm that was well-suited to a ball focused on a small number of acts.

Hopefully they will learn from experience and rethink the entertainment slightly: no matter how good/cheap acts are, if they are to engage the 99% of attendees that are in the main hall, then they need to encompass broader tastes. The fact that The Brothers’ 80s electro funk/rock act that night and OU’s salsa team were usurped by the Brookes DJ playing the Baywatch theme should indicate things going slightly awry.

David Potter in this month’s Physics World offers hope for us physicists [19 (8) p42] :

Back in the 19th century, studying classics was seen as good preparation for positions of leadership, but in the modern world I think physics is a wonderful training of the mind. It teaches you to apply rigour to modelling simple, even banal, problems like how an apple falls. That approach is extremely useful in business — in analysing and understanding how markets behave. Business gurus and consultants talk the fashion of the moment, which is often claptrap, so applying greater vigour is valuable. Theoretical physicists known well that out of every 10 ideas they have, nine are nonsense, even if they seem beautiful.

I hope to collect some more titbits like that over the next few weeks.