I don't know if Amazon will publish it, so…

One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, by Melissa P.

Not hot enough for one-handed reading, not intelligent enough to need a brain

"A girl who loves herself doesn't let her body be violated by any man whatsoever without a specific reason and without any pleasure."

Quite: casual sex can be delightful, but if it contains no delights for you, don't do it! This is the big difference between this and, say, Catherine M's memoir that others have compared it to.

The problem is that it takes about two years into the diary for the protagonist to write that. Unfortunately, by that point I'd lost any interest in the characters. She's looking for love via casual sex, they're inevitably looking for a compliant set of holes.

Eventually someone decides they love her, but – even in such a short book – I had to skim backwards to work out which one it was, and didn't care enough to bother.

Cut tagged, so you still have time to guess

This picture:

What do you think the BBC News title is for it this morning?

This won't mean anything to people under, oooh, their early thirties, but Valerie Singleton shagged Peter Purves!

I never did believe the 'Val's a lesbian' stories, but I knew someone who swore that Peter brought his boyfriends into the pub they worked at…

The power went off just after nine this morning. A big plume of smoke could be seen towards Crystal Palace and we had a call from someone coming over that the trains weren't going along one of the two lines near us.

A call from someone closer revealed that it was an electricity sub-station going bang, and could he come over to do some washing because it looked like taking four or five hours before the fire was extinguished and – apparently – might be days before power would be restored.

Gosh that was frightening… Never mind having to do all clothes and dish washing by hand, with cold water (gas heating/hot water, but electric pumps), never mind quite probably no school for JA next week, never mind losing a recently refilled freezer's worth of food… no internet!

Fortunately, it came back a few minutes ago, so the power cut was about three hours long.

How long is civilization meant to be away from breaking down? As someone who grew up quite happily with power cuts in the early 70s (miners strikes leading to coal shortages at power stations) it feels like it got shorter.

January: PC Pro talks about Microsoft being the 'partner' digitising the entire 19th Century stock of the British Library – "Microsoft and Google have both been digitising books from US libraries and adding them to their rival online services for some time, and the British Library opted to partner with the former. Choosing Microsoft as a partner for any archiving project brings not only a wealth of experience and financial clout, but also a degree of controversy…"

May: Microsoft abandons the entire 'Live Search Books' project (and 'Live Search Academic'). But hey, they will start to "offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers", i.e. split ad revenue. If you're in the US.

Found during a search for something else…

"We do hate to rain on a high-profile corporate love-fest, but we have to point out that in addition to the much trumpeted $100 million Billg has donated to India's fight against HIV, he's funding the Microsoft jihad against Linux to the far more impressive tune of $421 million. That means that Linux is more than four times worse than AIDS to Billg…"

More here.

I don't think I've spotted this on the UK bits of my friends list: the producers of Expelled, the bilge of a film about how 'intelligent design' is being cruelly treated by people with a brain, paid someone to do a video, Beware the Believers, dissing Richard Dawkins.

It looks like they went to the wrong person. The video is here, and so much of it is funny because it's true.

I mentioned the long-standing dispute between the UK tax authorities and a retailer of teacakes back in 2005. At that point, it had been going on for over a decade and was heading off to the European Court of Justice.

They've just sided with M&S. Mind you, they've passed the final decision back to the UK courts.

All this is over about £100,000 from memory. Lawyers fees will be in the millions.