A married man was having an affair with his secretary. One day, their passions overcame them and they took off for her house, where they made passionate love all afternoon. Exhausted from the wild sex, they fell asleep, awakening around 8:00 pm. As the man threw on his clothes, he told the woman to take his shoes outside and rub them through the grass and dirt. Mystified, she nonetheless complied. He slipped into his shoes and drove home.

“Where have you been?” demanded his wife when he entered the house.

“Darling, I can’t lie to you. I’ve been having an affair with my secretary and we’ve been having sex all afternoon. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until eight o’clock.”
(more…)

Picture from Radio Times.com

Channel 4 in the UK are showing a season of programmes on the use of torture this week. Starting tonight with Is Torture a Good Idea? and Torture: The Guantánamo Guidebook. The latter programme is (unfairly?) being referred to in some quarters as a “reality tv” show. From the Guardian tv listing:

…a re-creation of conditions in Guantánamo Bay, as seven volunteers are submitted to the interrogation techniques commonly practised at the camp — all endorsed by the US government* — to determine whether these treatments constitute a denial of human rights. The subjects, some of whom began as a supporter of the process, are put through painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, religious and sexual humiliation, enforced nudity, extremes of temperature and “non-injurious physical contact”, with disturbing results.

* And by the British government.

(more…)

and I should have stopped when I was tired but there you go. So here’s what I need to fix pronto:

1. < li > in the sidebar
2. Posts aren’t displaying any dates. Goodness knows what I did there.
   - Thanks Jann.
3. The text “Posted by Daisy at 10:52 PM in” is still a funny grey
   - thanks Em.
4. There’s a purple-ish border showing around the banner in IE6.

Anything else broken?

In the meantime, a quick link: She blocked me by Bob Ricci.

[via Emrys]

I’ve had forebodings about the Wales v France game today and seeing the shoulders of the French team as they came on the pitch only deepened those fears. Five minutes in and we’re 7 12 down.

And I’ve run out of tea.

Let’s find some distraction - how about Jo? She’ looking for some menu ideas.

Or Andre? 8 cigarette free days and he’s perfecting the art of the hate list.

And lovely Billy has some fantastic news.

I’m not number one on Yahoo for this?

the style sheet that is. Why, what did you think I meant? I can see what’s wrong with the paragraph tags in Explorer but am puzzling over the placement of the banner graphic in Firefox. Plans are to finish early today in order to shout at websites rather than clients. But the thought of running the dogs in the snow is very appealing so maybe I’ll hold fire until the weekend.

I’m taking all of your help on board (thank you!) and I’m beginning to see that pixeldiva’s advice to put as much presentational content in the style sheet as possible will mean really changing the TypePad template. Gulp. For example, the banner information is all in the main index page but I’m guessing that I should move that to the stylesheet.

One thing I can’t work out how to do (and I think this is a question specifically for TypePad users rather than MT users) is how to add some text to the comment box - just a line saying something like “Basic html tags can be used: < b >, < i >“. Does anyone know how to do that? Done! You need to add the code to the Individual Archives rather than the main index archive. Duh.

. . .

In other news: I’m still shuddering at this “interesting” kitchen product via Adrian but chuffed to bits with ExplorerXP, a tabbed file browser [via Gordon and Hanni]. The only thing I’d like to add is the ability to view thumbnails but I guess we’ve got other tools for that. Basically it’s what Windows Explorer should be but never will be. Oh and it’s free. Wheee! Also just bookmarked PIE’s Common Coding Problems with HTML and CSS

And how many hours is it now to the start of the Wales v France game? :-0)

In case you haven’t yet seen the excellent spoof Mastercard advert, here it is [via Toni].

And isn’t it time for a Kozo moment? It’s always time for a Kozo moment!

Here’s the smaller frame but better quality version and here’s the larger frame but grainier quality version.

As we hit for a cold snap here in the UK, thanks to non blogging Jane for sending some pictures predicting the sort of weather we’re going to get…

Update: Hang on, this is getting serious:

Flights to Paris ahead of the weekend’s rugby are leaving Cardiff after being cancelled on Wednesday due to snow.

Remember that link to the quilt makers of Gee Bend, Alabama? Well there’s a programme on Radio 4 all about the quiltmakers in about 45 minutes from now [11:30 GMT, 24 February 2005]:

Some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced come from a tiny African-American community in a bend of Alabama River. Stephen Evans meets the women of the Gee’s Bend Quilting Bee, whose humble handiwork born out of slavery now graces some of the most prestigious galleries in America - and fetches high art prices.

It will be repeated next Monday at 12.15am, but if you can’t wait until then, it’s on the Listen Again page.