Proper blogging will resume in a couple of days, but for now here’s some links.
Firstly, I got an email through from lulu today saying that if you buy my latest book from their site before 15th August, they’ll give you 15% off if you use the code MYBOOK305 at the checkout.
In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series.
A new Cindy And Biscuit story is being serialised at Mindless Ones. Part one part two.
Rais Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face by a racist gunman as a response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, is fighting to stop the state of Texas executing his attacker.
Stewart Lee on Michael McIntyre
Matt Seneca on Geoff Johns
The British Psychological Society report Understanding Bipolar Disorder is free to download until the twelfth of August. Also Cambridge University Press is offering free access to all articles published in its journals in 2009 and 2010 until the end of August.
The Muppets’ Strange Life After Death
And physicists have designed a time cloak
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
That time cloak only works for something like 10 nanoseconds though. I’d say they have some more work to do on it, before we start seeing the benefits in our lives. :)
Do your British politicians get called on by God to run for office? Michele Bachmann says she was called on by God to run for President, and now Rick Perry (the Texas governor) is saying that God is calling on him to run, too. It’s so confusing. I suspect at least one of them is fibbing. Does stuff like this fly in the UK?
Absolutely not. If anything, anyone suspected of being overly religious is at an *enormous* disadvantage. We have a couple of Bachmann types (the Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries, for example) but they never get even a sniff of real power. Britain’s such a secular culture, in fact, that even though Tony Blair’s a very, very religious man (albeit one who appears not to have read the bits about not killing and not bearing false witness and most of the rest of the Bible come to that). that when interviewers brought the subject up his press advisor would step in and say “we don’t do God.”
Be thankful that British politicians don’t have to cowtow to the religious right. It’s not healthy, and it skews the public discourse into potentially dangerous directions, in my opinion. When you have people in high office basing their opposition to global warming (for example) on obscure passages in the Bible, it’s downright bizarre. Frankly, you could use passages in the Bible to justify almost any high crime and misdemeanor.
Tony Blair is actually better-suited to being a politician in the US. He’s always been very popular here.