Twitter, to who said the howl of the Democrat

I'm somewhat coincidentally in a Birmingham hotel, a city partly represented by the Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming who today ended the increasingly farcical situation that forbade the media, but pretty much no-one else, from naming Ryan Giggs as a footballer with an injunction covering his alleged extra-marital affair(s).

Hemming's critics, and there were many at tonight's conference dinner who derided him as hungry for publicity, should appreciate that he didn't name Giggs last month, or last week, but has only done it after the weekend's Twitter explosion in response to the footballer's legal team's clumsy and ill-considered attempt to draw attention to alleged online breaches of the injunction, and after Scotland's Sunday Herald had turned the court order into an international joke.

This afternoon's revelation has generated a great deal of interest in the story, but as I understand the situation it's only slightly less ridiculous than it was this morning. Then, I could easily discover the basic facts surrounding the case, but couldn't write about it. Now, I still can't actually name the subject of the injunction as the so-called super injunction prevents it, but I can describe today's parliamentary proceedings and legally blog to the world that an MP today named the footballer Ryan Giggs as the subject of that injunction!

Not even Edward Lear could come up with nonsense to rival this; the lunatics really have taken control of the asylum!

New Bond-Style Super-Villain Reveals Himself!

As someone who uses lots of trains, the news that Dr Sang-Woo Kim of the Sung-Kyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea has discovered a way of charging mobile phones by talking into them strikes me as more of a threat to Western civilisation than anything the late Osama bin Laden could have dreamt up.

At the moment, the technology can convert 100 decibels (about the same level as a busy road) into 50 millivolts of electricity, which isn't enough to charge a phone.

But give it time, and then won’t using public transport be fun? If, like me, you're irritated by sitting near an overly-loud, mind-numbing ‘I’m on a train . . . hello? . . . no, I said I’m on a train . . . ’ conversation, how's travel going to be remotely tolerable when there's a carriage full of half-wits screaming into their Nokias because they forgot to charge them up overnight?

Forget al-Qaeda, the electronics department of Sung-Kyunkwan University needs flattening.
Now!