This is a sad post to write – yesterday we heard the news that Geoffrey Perkins, the incredibly talented BBC comedy supremo, had been killed in a road accident.

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Sorry to be so intensely cynical about this. But I’m afraid I agree with the commenter on this Daily Telegraph story who says it looks every bit as much like a Dementor as the Virgin Mary.

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A previously unacknowledged earthquake threat to New York City has been discovered. But wait, there’s more. And it’s even worse news. The Indian Point nuclear power plant, in upstate New York, is sitting right on top of an earthquake hotspot.

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This was never going to end well, was it? Half-expecting something of Alien Autopsy proportions, I was quite disappointed that it fell apart so soon.

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What I’ve been reading today, courtesy of del.icio.us. View my network here.

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With just 365 (or so) days in any given year, the probability of two similar things happening on the same date is perhaps not so great. But, as this screengrab from the BBC’s On This Day archive feature shows, sometimes a kind of reverse serendipity can be at work, where tragic events from the past are echoed by unfortunate events from the present.

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What I’ve been reading today, courtesy of del.icio.us. View my network here.

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No, not the title of a spam email, but what the words and graphics tool Wordle makes of the categories of this blog.

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Found this today while out geocaching, caught in the hedgerow in a farmer’s field just south of Cottered in Hertfordshire. The balloon (which had been yellow) was in shreds but still attached.

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Puzzle-solving of all kinds is a major leisure activity for the management of this blog. And, having finally cracked a particularly awkward local puzzle cache after several months of trying, it’s time for a new challenge.

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What I’ve been reading today, courtesy of del.icio.us. View my network here.

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Today we are celebrating a momentous date – it’s 08/08/08, an occurrence we could not let pass unremarked. And it has the added advantage of working out whether you’re using the civilised British formula or the utterly counterintuitive American one ;- ))

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Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler is an unlikely source of very silly jokes. However, when his turn to compose the nightly viewers’ taster email comes around (a task not all his fellow presenters can bring themselves to undertake) he includes a quote of the day and a Joke Fit for a 12-year-old.

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What I’ve been reading today, courtesy of del.icio.us. View my network here

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What I’ve been reading today, courtesy of del.icio.us. View my network here.

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Did the adventurer and explorer Steve Fossett fake his own death? This seems like an incredible question to find posed in a national newspaper, even in August. You feel that an editor would want some pretty decent sources before running a story of this sort, that is potentially so upsetting to the deceased’s loved ones. Yet, here is The Independent running just such a story. And it has some pretty good sources.

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Here’s a thing of wonder: the launch of a brand-new A1 Pacific steam locomotive built and paid for by enthusiasts, equipped to run on the mainline tracks, and reported on by The Independent.

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