Apparantly, the Director of award-winning film “The English Patient“, Anthony Minghella CBE, has died.

A sad moment indeed. Thoughts and prayers are with family and friends.

Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954 and was working on “The Ninth Life of Louis Drax” recently, rumoured to be his directoral follow-up to Breaking and Entering.

Minghella was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 2001 New Year’s Honours list and was lauded as early as 1984 when the London Theatre Critics awarded him the Most Promising Playwright of the Year.

1.  Super sensitive grey hair dye. 

Am I the only one to notice that 18 Doughty Street has totally disappeared? Iain Dale told us it was going to get bigger and better. They even had a wordy statement on the website before it too went bye-bye.

Where did it go? I was trying to find a show from last year that talked about Recess Monkey posting prematurely on the death of Margaret Thatcher, which later turned out to be a trick played on the editor of the left-wing blog.

How can a TV station just disappear like that?

Let’s do a WHOIS lookup to find out eh?
http://whois.domaintools.com/18doughtystreet.com

Turns out the domain is registered to a one Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov Plc, who also owns 171 other domains. The other names associated with the account were Darren Hudson and Mike Rouse. The latter is the Technical Contact. We have emailed him for an explanation.

UPDATE…

Mike Rouse has responded quickly. Our email conversation is printed here:

I aksed…

Dear Mike,

I notice that 18 Doughty Street is no longer up and running. As the Technical Contact for the domain can you explain why?

Yours,

Percy

He said…

Dear Percy,

Thanks for your email. I am no longer associated with or contracted by Doughty Media Limited and as such no longer provide any services to the company or have access to any of its facilities.

It is the responsibility of Doughty Media Limited to keep its WHOIS records up-to-date and they should have replaced my details with their new technical contact by now as my contract was discontinued in December of last year. I do not have access to the domain to be able to remove my details.

Can I suggest you drop the company a line on 020 7405 1818 if you have any further queries?

Yours,

Mike Rouse

I then asked if it was OK to publish his answer here, to which he said…

Percy,

If you could just point out that I am no longer associated with the project and to contact 020 7405 1818 with any queries I would be grateful.

Incidentally, you might be able to find what you were looking for at http://18doughtystreet.blip.tv/

Yours,

Mike Rouse

Consider it done.

Has anyone been watching Crufts?  Now I’m not usually a dog type person but I tuned in last night for the toy breeds out of pure boredom.  I enjoyed seeing the Chihuahua and the King Charles Spaniel and then the Pug, but then this thing came prancing out…

What the hell is that?  And why would anyone want to breed more of them?!?!  It look like. E.T after a visit to the hair salon.  Now I know I’ve just said I’m not a dog person so granted I don’t really have the qualifications to say whether or not that thing classifies as a dog, but I’m pretty sure somewhere in the rule book, there is something about not being able to enter overgrown hairy rats in to Crufts.  Seriously.  That’s not even a dog.  Not only does it look like it’s been smacked in the face with a frying pan but it looks like a giant version of one of those puffy things I powder my face with.  If that’s what qualifies as a dog these days, I might just enter myself in to Crufts next year under the “it’s a dog, honest” category.   Just you try and stop me.  Coo coo woof!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7269743.stm

Hope the foreign press are pleased with themselves for leaking this story.  Prince Harry is out there doing a job no different to any of the other brave men who have gone out there to fight for this country.  Only he’s not just any old person – he’s third in line to the throne meaning that if his identity was to be made known, he would become a bit of a trophy target; bringing increased danger not only to himself but those around him at the time.  By keeping his deployment secret, obviously they were trying to prevent that.  But now that it’s made national news, why don’t they just shove a ruddy great big neon flashing sign on top of his head which reads “Dear Taliban.  Here he is; Prince Harry.  Come get him.”

If you were flying out of Heathrow Airport today you could be forgiven for losing your temper at the sight of Greenpeace protesters climbing on the top of a Boeing 777 to unfold a banner in protest against the 3rd runway expansion. Personally, I would have just treated them as a terror threat and shot them on the spot.

However, they’ve already saved me the job by shooting themselves in the foot with today’s protest.

1. Most ordinary folk will see the action as militant, inappropriate, and unnessesary. It is something more inkeeping with the now defunkt Fathers for Justice. Why is it defunkt? Because the founder said the protests had gone too far and the organisation too extreme. Sounds familiar. Most folk will now see Greenpeace as an extremist element and shut their ears to their protest against the 3rd runway rather than be inspired by it. Of course, a few nutters and hippies will love the action and want to join in, thus sending the organisation further away from peaceful protest.
2. The protest was hardly green. With police vehicles, media vans, and planes having to circle the airport or the ensuing delay to the carefully managed flight control system the carbon footprint as a direct result of the action was probably quite large.

I hope they feel better that their action has caused more damage to the Earth and undermined their arguments. Hardly green or peaceful.

Was Donal Blaney attacked by Alexander Deane in a contribution to CentreRight.com? We’ll never know if there’s been a scrap because the editor, one Timothy Montgomerie, has intervened and removed the post because it linked to an “inaccurate” list published by Donal Blaney that showed how many posts each ‘contributor’ has made. Turns out that when somebody posts to the site it doesn’t always show their name or become attributed to them. On that basis, the list has been deemed inaccurate and no links to it will be tolerated:

Timothy comments on Donal’s blog: “Your original post contained some errors. It suggested, for example, that David Willetts, Liam Fox, Nile Gardiner and Matt Sinclair hadn’t posted at all and they had. After Alex Deane had linked to your post I requested that we take his link down as I didn’t want to be linking to an inaccurate list.” 

We wonder if that means the editorial policy of CentreRight is to never link to anything that could be deemed to be inaccruate. What about the latest post by the editor almighty himself? What if the number-crunching alluded to in the post is later found to be inaccurate to any extent? Will the post then be removed?

Semantics aside. What we really want to know is if there was an attack by Alexander Deane on Donal Blaney in the post and it’s now being covered up. Oh we do love a good old right-wing conspiracy. Give the people what they want - let Deane and Blaney battle it out. We’ve had our eye on Blaney for a while and know he’s a heavyweight at debate as shown during the now mysteriously vanished 18 Doughty Street project, but as for Alexander… Well, Alexander who?

Sky News have brought us scenes of chirpy Lib Dem MP Lynne FEATHERStone talking about German nudists. Thanks to the Sky.com/News programme at 7:30pm old Percy got to see those lovely lips talk dirty. Percy likes a bit of Lynne in the mornings, and the evenings, and any other time Lynne likes

She’s also been getting her lucious teeth stuck into the whole Derek Conway debacle, saying:

“Day in day out I question how taxpayers money is spent by the government therefore it is perfectly reasonable that the taxpayer should be able to question how I spend their money.

If we want voters to believe that we are honourable members, we simply cannot be afraid to open ourselves to real independent scrutiny.”

The full thing can be seen on the Sky.com/News blog.

My mate Roger saw the spirit of Jeremy Beadle pass him by in Hackney on the way to the pearly gates. He was mumbling something about being cheated, so Roger asks him what he’s on about. Apparantly, Beadle was playing a game of poker and it turns out he had been dealt a dodgy hand.

Us pigeons will miss Beadle what with all the crumbs that fell out of his beard and the mess he made trying to eat a sandwich with one good hand. Tragic stuff, but at least he brought us laughter and entertainment. Let’s give him a big hand.

Seriously though, what a fucking legend he was.