Mad tea orientated goings on in #mobitopia this morning. Shall I be mother?

• Gustaf - On tea
• Libby - kitchensink:howITakeMyTea
• ISO - standards for tea
• Orwell - The perfect cup of tea

Apparently that's official. Stuart reports that Canning Town station was closed this morning because of a "funny smell", if that's valid grounds for closing a tube station the tube would be a far quieter emptier place...

What's going on? I feel like I've misheard or misunderstood most of the news this week, take the following for example:

How did Kiwi Java blogger and Jabber superhero Mark Talios get caught with his pants down in a menage a trois with Sven and an FA secretary? News link.

BugMeNot introduce a registration page.

Matthew is puzzled by the American bloggers' fascination with Run-DNC; a rap group famous only for slaughtering a classic Aerosmith track.

A committee of MPs declare the UK ID card fiasco to be badly thought out. No, never, who'd have thought it?!

Surreal stuff, lets hope next week is saner.

There's a strike on the London Underground today, so the office is half empty as people are working from home or meandering their way in. Fortunately Moof has discovered Social Scrutiny's Tube Strike Emergency Map, which should make the today's journeys more palatable and easier to manage. Good stuff!

Mark took me to the New Delhi when I was downunder a few months back, highly recommended, fine curries and run by friendly amenable folks. It's nice to see they do a taxi service too!

Compare and contrast.

Whoops, I seem to have found a hole in the standard English spelling rule "I before E except after C", not that it really excuses my spellings of recieve receive and acheive achieve...

The rule breaking word is a popular drug extracted from plants grown in Africa and South America, and the correct spelling is caffeine.

I wonder how many of the other spelling rules have holes like this?

Dasani, the joke that came true was recalled last week. We've been calling it Sidcup Spring in the office for weeks in honour of Del Boy, but now given its toxic nature and disastrous PR, can it really continue as a viable product in the UK?

The inimitable Register covers the full story here, personally I wonder if the paramilitary arm of the infamous Sidcup Massive were involved in the attempted poisoning of all these Claire Swire wannabes.

So you can easily beat the latest Pepsi challenge... If you do, make sure you do the right thing and use the Tune Recycler.

"The Weasel Goes Pop"? Ok, bad pun based on an old English nursery rhymme called "Pop Goes The Weasel", now if you'll excuse me I'm off down the City Road, heading for The Eagle.

One of the chaps here is changing job titles, so he's got a few old business cards to spare. Ergo, mad card folding following Ned Batchelder's great instructions.

What we have in these pictures is a simple Menger's Sponge (depth 1), I think the eventual goal is a depth 2 sponge as in this picture. Then again, Gavin is certainly daft enough to attempt the level 3 sponge...

Quick fag packet maths: one cube is 6 cards, level 1 sponge is 20 cubes (120 cards), a level 2 sponge is 20 level 1 sponges (2400 cards), a level 3 sponge is 20 level 2 sponges (48000 cards); I guess we're safe for while, I don't think we've got *that* many cards to spare!

Looks like Matthew has been shagging the au pair and beating the children again.

Then again, I could have mis-understood his post entirely :-)

A real-life FOAF has a need for a cartoonist, if that's you give me a shout with your contact details (email, IM, phone, whatever) and I'll ask him to get in touch with you.

I had an email from Sven van der Hart letting me know that SvenCentral is currently down. His hosting providers are coming out with some lame excuses, but for now you can find some of his splendid Playmobil films here.

I suspect BitTorrent would be a good solution for future distribution of his films.

So, as it appears that Liz got the job under false pretences, what happens next? Let's face it, anyone else with false claims on their CV would be down the JobCentre before you could say UB40.

In days of yore, if you wanted to claim this kingdom was rightfully yours (or not) you'd turn up at Dover with a BFO army and fight for the job. Given that wars these days are now only normally fought by African lunatics or religious despots (that's you George and Tony), I don't think this is really King Mick's style. Also I wonder how much legal control the Queen has over the UK's armed forces these days either. So is this battle one for the courts perhaps? Or maybe a duel or even a game of It's a Knock Out?

Or crashed, or the usual Xmas small print of "batteries not included" wasn't spotted by the ESA chaps at Darmstadt.

Whatever, I've been following the Beagle's progress or otherwise on the Beagle team's Weblog (no feed unforch), and news pages.

However, I'm pleased to see that the Beagle itself is rather smarter than the ESA chaps and not only has managed to avoid the frames and tables tag-soup hell of the official site, but it's also managed to setup it's own blog on BlogSpot. I guess it feels somewhat superior to the ESA folks who've landed it on a hostile planet with such a very limited selection of MP3s, so it's decided to do its own thing communication wise.

A Sven-tastic new film from Sven and his merry bunch of helpers - Santa's New Ride

Yet another cool film to squeeze onto the 3650!

Update 2004-01-13: Sven currently has some hosting problems - details here.

As he said "Well, it's about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize...", what a classic line for an acceptance speech, it certainly makes the usual crap from Hollywood for the Oscars look even more trite than usual. Grayson Perry, you're a star!

Anyway back to the art, Grayson Perry's pottery is exceptional work, classic art from tortured soul. The Chapman brothers' work whilst widely touted seems more like a juvenile lavatory joke in comparison.

More pics of pots on Grayson Perry's website, and more about the Turner Prize from The Tate Britain.

Russ asked: "Show Us Your Tree!"

So here it is, it only came into the house last night, and it's not covered in lights and stuff yet. Vital statistics are 4'9" (1.45m) tall and prickly!

Sure it looks a bit lost in this view, but with the kids and dog running around I really don't need anything else for them to fall over.

Two very cool things with these films, one is that you can now buy them on DVD/CD for playing on your PC and TV, giving Sven and his chums some well deserved funds for their efforts.

The second neat thing is that Nokia's Multimedia Convertor happily converts QuickTime movies into 3GPP format for playing on a mobile phone, so the 3650 is now carrying two great comedy movies!

Update 2004-01-13: Sven currently has some hosting problems - details here.

Gratuitous post for colleagues en vacance. The much pondered shop opposite the office in deepest Bromley has finally de-cloaked and been revealed as a "Shoe Boutique". I suspect this means that German para boots are not in stock.

We're still puzzled as to how to pronounce Chelly Mhoes, the ligature that's been added to the sign to reduce the poor kerning between the "M" and "hoes" probably means that Chelly Em-hose wasn't the correct pronunciation. Also it is still unknown as to whether Chelly Mhoes is a (bad) Spoonerism for Smelly Shoes...