Well, kind of. I get a mention in an article about local bloggers. It's somewhat critical - the newspaper's Lib Dem slant is well known - and rather inaccurate in places, but I suppose all publicity is good publicity at the end of the day.

BLOGGING BUG BITES THE CITY POLITICIANS

Watch out there's a blogger about. Once upon a time, the nearest local politicians ever got to your home would be on the doorstep at election time. A firm handshake, a spot of baby-kissing and a pledge to sort out that nearby pothole and they'd be on their way to the next potential voter.

Now, thanks to the wonders of this multi-media age, they can enter your living room via the Internet and endlessly pontificate about themselves. Online political blogging has already made national stars out of the likes of Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. Their mildly subversive blogs have attracted cult followings and prompted the national parties to follow suit, from David Cameron's own WebCameron to Labour's scarily-titled Labourvision channel on YouTube. So I suppose an avalanche of local political blogs was always going to be inevitable. More surprising is the apparent lead taken by the Conservatives in pouring out their personal views online.

Yes, where are all the "local" Liberal Democrats' blogs? Besides, I don't consider my blog to be a "local" blog, since it very rarely strays into local issues (it only has lately because of this running for council malarky).

Take Tory city councillor Andrew Percy, who calls himself Andy on his own blogtastic blog.

Which was, incidently, down to me not him since I designed his blog. As that's the name he goes by, it seemed the obvious choice!

This week he posted his own YouTube video, showing our hero breathlessly recounting an exciting day spent canvassing in Rawcliffe.

Filmed on the fly by Andrew Allison, incidently. Not in any way planned, in case anybody was wondering.

Most of the time, "Andy" uses his blog to talk up his chances of winning the Brigg and Goole seat at the next General Election while largely ignoring his own city council patch in Bricknell ward.

That's laughable if you know "Andy" and saw the hours he puts in locally!

However, last month he also informed readers: "I have returned from a week skiing in France with only the odd graze and small bruise."

Slow news day is it, chaps?

Slightly more entertaining are the blogs of Martine Martin and Andrew Ellison, two self-styled footsoldiers in David Cameron's True Blue Army.

Only slightly?!! And I rather hope there's no such thing as a True Blue Army - that sounds utterly attrocious. Also, Andrew Allison, not Ellison... I would have thought that would be picked up on, since his blog is thus entitled.

Both are standing as Conservative candidates in Hull, but seem to blog more about their exploits helping the Conservative campaign in the East Riding.

That would be because our blogs a) predate standing in the area, and b) have nothing to do with standing in the area, other than in passing. They're national/international commentary blogs first and foremost.

Martine also offers her views on life as a humanist while Andrew's also posting YouTube videos of himself. Both have recently announced plans to cut down their blogs until after election because they're simply too busy knocking on peoples' doors which almost defeats the object of blogging in the first place.

How so? We blog because we're aligned to a party. We help out local conservatives delivering leaflets and door knocking because we're aligned to a party. During times of a local election, the latter rather outweighs the former. You see where I'm going with this.

The same goes for Labour city councillor Gary Wareing who has been blogging for the last few months in the build-up to his re-election campaign in Drypool. So the daddy of local political blogs remains What The Hull, an anonymously-penned view of the city council that is usually spot on with the latest gossip. If there are any more out there, I'd love to hear about them.

Councillor Gary Wareing's blog is rather good, it must be said. I particularly like his post about the Hull Lib Dems being investigated for fraud (someone sent me a link to that a while back). He does have his finger on the pulse with regards to local issues.

There are other Hull-based blogs in my sidebar, should the author of that piece wish to pay another visit and look a little closer.

* The "Dull Daily Mail" image was borrowed from here.

It has been days since I last updated this blog, for the simple reason that I've been rushed off my feet with various local election campaigning. Add to that all of the essays and presentations due in soon and the reason for the blogging vacuum becomes clear why, unfortunately.

However, to be honest, I think I'll be doing far more good delivering leaflets, canvassing and proactively helping my party to seize some seats in the Local Elections, than I would by tinkering with my blog - as much fun as that is!

And so with a heavy heart, I believe the best thing to do would be to suspend this blog until May 3rd (sans special occasion). I will get itchy fingers, it's true, but hopefully I'll return renewed, refreshed and buzzing with election success stories.

My party needs me! Farewell!

I won't be dwelling too much on my local campaign for council election in Hull on this blog (for those wishing to follow that, I have a dedicated Facebook group). But the problems that are really coming to my attention in the area over the course of this campaign are, unfortunately, common to most areas across the country.

Of course the biggest problem is crime - isn't it always nowadays? In the Newland Ward area, students are easy prey. In fact, several of my friends have either been mugged, had their home robbed or been hassled in the streets. Local residents are also bearing the brunt of this crime spree. The lack of a visible police presence is a running joke, I'm discovering - although that might be due to the street lighting, which is so poor in the side streets you might as well walk through holding up a neon "mug me!" sign.

At a national level, crime is on the up. You'd have to be insane to say otherwise. But there are so many small things that could be done to help in local communities. Decent street lighting is a big one. More recruitment drives and support for PCSOs is another. Something as simple as free rape alarms would be extremely helpful. My point is, the ability to be visible is so important.

It doesn't matter if the police are brilliant, as our local policemen and women certainly are, if people don't see them out and about, they won't feel at all protected or confident in them. At the same time, criminals feel much happier for their appearing to be absent. CCTV is good for coordination, but pretty ineffective without troops on the ground as it were. Likewise, the public need to feel visible enough to be helped were they to feel in danger, and street lighting and personal alarms can do so much in that regard.

So really I think that visibility, as obvious as it sounds, should be a common theme in all areas across the country to help combat crime at a local level. We need to see policemen and women on the beat more than ever and we need to be able to see our surroundings well enough to feel safe.

Picture: Grafton Street, Hull. One of many side streets in the Newland Ward with inadequate street lighting.

It's ever such enormous good luck that Jesus happened to die on a pagan festival day - just as he was apparently born on one! What are the chances of that, eh?!

Anyway, I'd like to wish everyone a (slightly late) Happy Eostre - so named after the pagan goddess of fertility and the moon, for whom eggs were painted at this time of the year by the Anglo-Saxons. For a culture supposedly founded on Christian values, we have a surprising number of Pagan hangups.

Either way, I hope everybody has had a lovely weekend, filled with treats and good old fashioned family moments.

A final watch for this Easter period. There's been a surprising lack of religiousness today actually. Only Channel 4 have picked up the slack (not counting Songs of Praise on BBC1). Not even many articles. Oh well!

The Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter Sermon
Humans are bad. Very bad. Very very bad, m'kay.
Logic: 1/5
Twaddle: 4/5

The New York Times on Pope Benedict's Speech
Europe is doomed unless it listens to the Catholic Church again.
Logic: 2/5
Twaddle: 5/5

President George W. Bush Prays for Peace
With no trace of irony whatsoever, apparently.
Logic: 0/5
Twaddle: 3/5

The Passion of the Christ - Channel 4, 10pm
Wow this movie is slow. And gory. I wish he would just yell "They'll never take our freedom!" and be done with it.
Logic: 0/5
Twaddle: 4/5

On any given day, one isn't likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He's a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug -- not to put too fine a point on it.

But he was dead-on when he wondered why a once-great power such as Britain sends mothers of toddlers to fight its battles.

Excuse me, come again? Now, I don't particularly think of myself as a feminist, but this sort of talk is enough to turn me into one. The gist is, the West is every bit the terrible place Ahmedinijad says it is for "allowing" women to work on the front line, or in the armed services at all.

Women may be able to push buttons as well as men can, but the door-to-door combat in Fallujah proved the irrelevance of that argument. Meanwhile, no one can look at photos of the 15 British marines and sailors and argue convincingly that the British navy is stronger for the presence of Acting Leading Seaman Faye Turney -- no matter how lovely and brave she may be.

How patronising. How ridiculous. The author does not know the person in question, nor does she know her duties on the ship or how well she performs them. Yes, she is a mother. I'm sure many of the young men captured were fathers. Every single one of them chose their career path and were serving their nation. That the Iranians have different values towards women than us should certainly not provoke any kind of soul searching, for some pretty obvious reasons.

No, Ahmedinijad was not speaking some sort of uncomfortable truth. He was speaking his opinion through the narrow goggles imposed by a misogynistic society. The moment the West goes down that route we have lost a lot more than we could ever gain.

Women have a right to serve our nation every bit as much as men do. We have no need to be shielded from the realities of combat. Indeed, we are not less expendable than male soldiers either. If someone takes a job, they should be prepared to do the job. End of the story. We can't have equality and special treatment - it doesn't work both ways.

And yes, Faye Turney is a mother. But it is her business whether she chooses to remain at home to care for her child or whether she choses to go on active service - a concept that would have been completely lost on Ahmedinijad. She made the decision to go. I'm sure she wasn't expecting to be captured, but then neither were the men. The point is, every single one of them had families and loved ones at home, and singling her out was an act of the Iranians, not us. The taunt that the West do not treat their women right comes from the President of a society which still stones women to death for adultery, or for being raped.

We, the West, must not forget what we are fighting for.

Not as much twaddle today as I was expecting. I suppose it's all being saved up for tomorrow. Here are a few items of interest;

The Archbishop of York on the BBC Website
Lack of faith is the reason for all our society's ills and the church is failing its people by infighting.
Logic: 2/5
Twaddle: 4/5

The Bishop of Durham on Comment is Free
Easter is a simple message of surprise hope, yet nobody seems to get it.
Logic: 3/5
Twaddle: 4/5

Charles Moore in the Telegraph
Atheists are just as fanatical as religious people and Dawkins bears a resemblence to Ahmedinijad
Logic: 2/5
Twaddle: 5/5

Here's another interesting graphic, this one courtesy of Auntie Beeb. It's official, folks, the UK is apparently "overwhelmingly secular". Well I never!

The poll, conducted last year among people aged 16 and over, suggests that one in four UK adults attends church at least once a year. Tearfund said 53% of people identified themselves as Christian, compared with almost three-quarters who had in the last census in 2001.

But it said that its survey indicated that three million people who had stopped going to church, or who had never been in their lives, would consider attending "given the right invitation".

You've got to admire their optimistic tone!
The full report, should you wish to pour through it, can be found here.

Some pretty worrying stuff really, courtesy of Strange Maps. This map shows how effective the teaching of evolution is in state schools, state by state, in the USA;
I wouldn't have thought that evolution was all that difficult a subject to teach effectively, but apparently, not so.

Today the sailors who were captured by Iran finally had the chance to tell their side of the story. They made it very clear that they were empirically not in Iranian waters, and that the Iranian's had obviously planned out their mission to capture them, arriving armed to the teeth and in great numbers. This confirms my suspicions that the entire thing was a set-up. Not all that surprising really.

Seven of the men appeared for the cameras today, but what about Faye Turney? Obviously, it goes without saying that she will have wanted to see her family as much as possible, but the very fact that she was treated differently by the Iranians means that her side of the story is possibly the most important aspect of it all. Most specifically, the matter of her letters;

We were out in the boats when we were arrested by Iranian forces as we had apparently gone into Iranian waters. I wish we hadn't because then I would be home with you all right now. I'm so sorry we did because I know we wouldn't be here now if we hadn't...

The people are friendly and hospitable, very compassionate and warm. I have written a letter to the Iranian people to apologise for us entering into their waters...

We need to know who exactly coerced her into writing all of that and why they felt it necessary. Was it an attempt to embarrass Blair and Bush specifically? Which faction brought that about? Of all the details of their time in captivity, I would have thought this matter possibly the most important one in need of clearing up.

It was revealed by the men that, during their time in solitary confinement, she was told the others had all gone home for the first four days. That would have been pretty harrowing for anybody. But the letters were written after this period, so that can't have been the reason.

Were they written due to specific threats? What happened? I think we really need to know.

Britian is a multicultural society, as we are told daily. Now, while I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, I do thing there need to be ground rules. The most important thing that must be agreed upon is education.

According to the Civitas blog (a regular haunt of mine);

In a soon-to-be-published report on and entitled ‘Teaching emotive and controversial History 3-19’, commissioned by the Department for Education, the Historical Association found that many schools have quietly dropped teaching about the Crusades and the Holocaust -- despite the latter supposedly being a mandatory part of the National Curriculum -- for fear of offending certain groups of pupils.

This is an enormous travesty if ever there was one. We learn of events as important as the Holocaust in the hope that history will never repeat itself. It doesn't matter if it makes for uncomfortable reading, the next generation must learn it. All of them, regardless of their background.

I feel it's my duty as one of those unpleasant rational people to add my, er, unique pespective on the religious aspects of this weekend. To be clear, I have no particular problem with people celebrating and worshipping as they see fit, I really don't. I just dislike it when logic willfully goes out of the window. As the saying goes, Lord save me from your followers, or at least the ones writing articles.

The Times Leader
If you don't believe in Jesus, you're a communist and life holds no meaning for you.
Logic: 0/5
Twaddle : 5/5

Gerard Baker in the Times
It doesn't work to secularise Easter, with Jesus celebrated as a good man, as divinity is integral to the message.
Logic: 3/5
Twaddle: 3/5

BBC 1 - The Prince of Egypt
Moses kills a man (but doesn't hide the body in sand to try and get away with it like in the bible), goes on the run, finds God in a bush and sings a lot of not-very-memorable tunes.
Logic: 1/5
Twaddle: 4/5

Rachel Zoll in The Christian Post
Nothing wrong with science so long as it doesn't ever point out any flaws in our religion.
Logic: 1/5
Twaddle: 4/5

Alister McGraph in the Telegraph
Atheists are the ones agressively imposing their beliefs on the religious - like in the Soviet Union - and religion is good because it holds up a mirror to humanity's ugly face.
Logic: 1/5
Twaddle: 5/5

Just a quick run down on everything I'm doing at the moment, some of which may be of interest, some of which may not.

My Project on Blogs and Bloggers
Well the deed is more or less done and thank you ever much to everyone who took part. Your input was invaluable. I have finished the project I intend to submit. However I intend to create a slightly different, edited version for those who took part to see the results in PDF format, which I'll get on with during the next few days.

I will contact participants by email with instructions for receiving a copy of the report in due time (once I've doublechecked with my supervisor that it's alright to do that - I have a new so I need to ask again). Then, in May, I'll put a link to a download in my sidebar for future reference.

Sidebar
Speaking of my sidebar, it's a been a while coming and I've finally got round to giving it an update. There are new links and any dead ones have been removed. It seems to be getting quite long now, so at least part of it is now alphabetical. I tend to work on a reciprocal basis so if you're linked to me and I haven't realised, do please let me know.

Standing for Council
It feels odd saying it, but I'm standing for Hull City Council, in the Newland Ward. At least, since I live in the ward and a lot of my friends do, I can be assured of plenty of help. Nevertheless, it looks like it will be all hands on deck from here on out campaigning both for myself and organising my branch of Conservative Future in the run up to the big day. I can't quite decide whether I'm excited or terrified!

While I'm on this subject, I'd just like to thank my friend The Barfly for stepping up and taking on the thankless task of being my Campaign Manager, and to also extend my best wishes to my friend Andrew Allison, who is also standing for council in Hull.

On top of all of that, I'll be blogging and preparing for my exams. Let it never be said that my life is in any way dull.

Why else but to tweak the funnybone on occasion?
Well there had to be a reason for it somewhere along the lines, I suppose! This one is as as good as any.

So what has the President of Iran got us for Easter? No, it's not the return of our illegally impounded servicemen - that's a minor detail. What is the real "gift" being so graciously given to us? Ah yes - a great big pile of humiliation.

And apparently we're going to just have to take it. How telling.

No, this wasn't a victory for diplomacy and it wasn't an indication that conciliation techniques are ever going to work on Iran. The fact that the Foreign Secretary was making announcements that the process could take a long time practically hours before they were released proves that she had no idea what was going on. Indeed, that Channel 4 News got to speak to Iran's National Security hotshot Ali Larijani one on one before, apparently, the government did (if they ever did) speaks volumes in itself as well.

Sadly, we have had no hand in any part of the proceedings and, perhaps deservedly, this leaves our already fragile world standing in tatters. This was an aggressor taking hostages (President Ahmedinejad has experience with this sort of thing if some sources are to be believed), parading them for the public gallery and then gaining world attention by pardoning them of their imagined crimes without warning. All in all, as publicity stunts go, it was a hell of a good one.

If only that was all it was. Obviously, more than anything else, it was a test; one performed with calculated timing, enacted in order to see how we and our allies would behave under certain pressures. What did Iran learn from this? It must be obvious.

One by one we rolled over. The UN stalled as it always does, the EU postured and did nothing as it always has, Britain ran to the US like we always do, and the US did us little good, as it never does of late. Now Iran knows for sure that it has no limits. And if that doesn't bother you, read this and think again.