Meeja has been languishing rather neglected lately - so much stuff has got me riled up that I don't know where to start. So, instead, here is a calming item.

When you're weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all

Tune your DAB radio into Birdsong: a loop of recorded birdsong from a garden in Wiltshire. Instant calm, bliss and reduction in blood pressure - just the thing if you've had a workload like mine over the past few days.

You can also listen online - though after the recent plug for this on the Beeb, the servers may be overloaded!

On Saturday, I was reading an article in the Grauniad about how some savvy manufacturers (including Nike) take advantage of fan and derivative products to promote their own brands.

By contrast, the Beeb is harrying someone who has published knitting patterns for Dr Who monsters on her web site.

They have all the stultifying lack of imagination of a monolithic corporation without any of the accountability to "customers". A pretend commercial enterprise funded largely by the taxpayers of the UK.

Humphrey Lyttleton - jazz maestro, comedian par excellence and broadcaster - died yesterday; and like many others I suspect, I feel I have lost a good friend - or perhaps a slightly risqué but much-loved uncle.

So join with me in listening to the memorial broadcast of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue tomorrow (Sunday) at 12 noon on Radio 4.

We'll miss you, Humph.

From some recent spam (my comments in italics):

"Please only reply to the email links in the text below.
Why can't you put the proper reply-to address in your email - or is that too difficult to set up?

"Are you looking to improve your website performance? Yes, then please take a moment to read this email.
If I was, you'd be the last person I'd ask.

"We can offer you a free website performance review, all that we ask in return is that you consider using our very competitively priced services to make the relevant improvements.
I can offer you free advice on how not to p*ss people off by offering them services they can do themselves, as would be perfectly obvious if you looked at the web site rather than buying a mailing list
 
"If you are interested please email us at ukbestwebsite-designing@lycos.com to request our free review form.
Hmm: web designers that can't afford their own mail domain and use a free service.
 
"Our work is always our best advert, so please email us at ukbestwebsite-designing@lycos.com if you want to see our design portfolio.
And they don't have their own web site to advertise a portfolio either?
 
"Thank you for taking the time to read this email. We look forward to working with you.
Dream on, Buster.
 
"If don't want to receive email from us, we apologise for any inconvenience caused and ask that you simply email ukbestwebsite-designing@lycos.com putting remove as the subject."
Too late: this is the third copy I have had and you have already really annoyed me. The last thing I shall do is to confirm that you have a genuine email adress, silly persons.

While I drank my afternoon cuppa just now, I watched a TV ad for InjuryLawyers4U - a piece I found rather nauseatingly self-righteous, urging us to go out and sue someone for something we probably brought on ourselves by being clumsy or not looking.

Personally, I abhor all this litigation culture stuff: people ought to take responsibility for their own actions rather than always blaming someone else for accidents. Of course, sometimes there is gross negligence and that ought to be punished in the criminal courts - but not the everyday stuff that can happen to us all.

So, I am proposing a new strapline for their next campaign to go with the green eagle in the ad: instead of "InjuryLawyers4U - fixing the spiritual balance",

InjuryLawyers4U: Pecking the liver of Justice since 2002

http://www.injurylawyers4u.co.uk/

Can you get the link to the new ad to work? All I got was a blank screen, and the browser window was resized to fit. How dare they?

OFCOM has just released a report considering the future of public service broadcasting in the UK, and the possibility of giving some of the licence fee to commercial TV to make more of it.

What PSB, I ask? Apart from the odd Attenborough documentary here and there, the Beeb and its "competitors" are stuffed with lifestyle documentaries (100 best plastic surgery fiascos), reality TV (Celebrity slipping in pig muck), wobblycam dumbed down "science" programs (Violent volcanoes - aren't they exciting) and news so vapid that a 6 year old could better analyse the stories (see below for an example).

Why does my licence fee subsidise a weekly programme that is nothing more than a free plug for Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example? That's PSB? I think not. And Kevin Spacey agrees with me.

The dead thing in question is not equine, but a frequently reported corpse.

Yesterday on the Today Programme, the lovely Charlotte Green was reduced to helpless sniggering by an incontinent producer's larky remark in her earphone.

Fair enough - we are all entitled to such human responses. What I find irritating is how this has made its way to the status of a real news item. It was re-broadcast later in the same programme by listener request (sad gits); then it made the ITN News at 10pm the same evening (a gloating affair complete with interviews with actors about corpsing and how to avoid it), and was mentioned this morning in the newspaper reviews again so it has spread to the print media too. And now I've compounded the error by reporting it here.

People are being murdered in Iraq, starving in Zimbabwe and Somalia, ruthlessly oppressed in Tibet - and we are obsessing about a minor gaffe on the radio. Dear God.

For a real treat, listen to the infamous leg over incident from Test Match Special - click the audio clip next to the late great Brian Johnston's photo.

Idly Googling for inspiration, I came across a web site for a company called Meeja. This single-page opus informs us that

"Meeja is a publishing company whose team has a strong and intimate understanding of the creation and distribution of media in a digital World."

Its understanding obviously stops short of the need for a compelling and informative web site, it seems. Perhaps a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes? [edited]

Find out - very little - more at http://meeja.com/ - or be mystified by http://meeja.net/

"I ordered a StyleBook from your website for one of my best friends. The album was for her to remember her hen do. We presented it to her at her wedding and she cried..." - customer testimonial on PhotoBox web site.

So would I if I was reminded of being horribly drunk on lurid cocktails and watching male strippers with lots of shrieking friends.

One of the pleasures of Sunday afternoons in my pottery is listening to Open Book - one of Radio 4's better literary efforts. Presented by the wonderfully husky Mariella Frostrup (please will she come and read me some bedtime stories?), it often features reviews of books or authors I'd never otherwise read.

Last Sunday's got off to an interesting start with an interview with Richard Dawkins, who isn't as trenchant about literature as he is about what he sees as the misguidedness of religion (he wrote The God Delusion).

However, I was spluttering into my tea when I heard this exchange:

Mariella Frostrup: 'He [Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, 1998 Nobel Prize winner] often writes in parables, doesn't he?'

Amanda Hopkinson: 'Yes, and one of his most parabolic novels is Blindness... '

Ms Hopkinson is a translator, so one might imagine that words are her profession. Maths obviously is not!

Although I didn't ever formally study stats at university, I like to think I have a reasonable appreciation of their simpler points.

So, I am always surprised at how ignorant most otherwise intelligent people seem to be about probabilities. BBC's Working Lunch featured a piece on the cost of insurance following the summer floods in Yorkshire. Rob Pittam spoke to Sheffield's Floods Czar (now there's a title to impress the girls with!).

As the Czar stood on the banks of the Don, pontificating about the high cost of business insurance after the floods, Rob replied that if he made a claim in his own insurance, he expected to pay higher premiums. Mr Czar said something along the lines of "Well, it's all based on the risk, isn't it? You could say that we're at less risk than other places because we had floods this year, so we probably won't get any more for another 100 years."

No, stupid. The actual risk is just the same every year.

I do wish interviewers would pick up on daft talk like this and correct it.

BBC lunchtime news is appealing to the great unwashed for "their stories" in a rather weedy attempt to be relevant and cutting edge. Yeah, whatever.

As a result, we get non-stories like today's, in which we learn that "Student Kris Athi has spent two months trying to delete his MySpace profile while he applies for jobs."

As if that wasn't newsworthy enough, we are told that, actually, he could just have made his profile private to hide it (RTFM, Kris), and [allegedly: Ed] the only reason he didn't get the "are you sure you want to delete your profile" confirmation email was because it was spam-trapped.

Call me stupid (or even too clever by half) - but if said Kris is really an IT graduate - shouldn't he have known that this was a very likely explanation? I for one won't be rushing to recruit him. [Ed: see below for why, in the light of feedback on what really happened] What a clueless wally.

Read the 'news' story here

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 had me spluttering into my tea this morning, with news of a new genus of palm recently identified in Madagascar by botanists. Apart from its large size, the main point of interest is that it flowers and then dies. So - let's make that really exciting for our stupid listeners and call it a "self-destructing palm" shall we?

No mention of the proper botanical term for this - monocarpic, nor of the well-known century plant, which does very much the same and is well known for it!

According to The Telegraph - which to be fair to the Beeb makes the same silly observation - "The palm will be called Tahina spectabilis which is Malagasy for blessed or to be protected. Tahina is the name of one of Xavier Metz's daughters."

I am confused. Is the French Mr Metz's daughter given a Malagasy name? If so, that makes sense in part - but spectabilis is a very common Latin specific name meaning "showy". So a bit more care in constructing the sentence to make it clear what that tricky "which" refers to would have been worthwhile.

Read the story at The Telegraph, and the BBC - and weep

Another jolly wheeze from the Beeb that I have noticed, to make our licence £££s go a bit further:

Find a documentary programme being aired later in the schedule, and invent some tenuous connection with current news, then put in a few edited segments to pad out the coverage.

Example from today's lunchtime news:

It's been raining lately, and there are some flood warnings. So our announcer perkily tells us that we can see some previously unseen footage of the floods last summer. Clue several minutes of Mr Plod telling stupid motorists not to be stupid. How is 'police camera action' footage from last June news, pray?

<< Part I

On the BBC lunchtime news, there was a piece about the current norovirus outbreak. The presenter blithely pointed to this garish CGI graphic of a red, blue and yellow lumpy ball and said, with a completely straight face "This is what the virus looks like under a microscope".

Does she actually think that a virus really looks like this - or understand that you'd need an electron microscope to see such detail? If so, she is strangely ignorant for a health correspondent; if not, she is patronising those of us who are not complete dunces, and misleading those who might benefit from knowing more.

In either case, it is rather pathetic - but entirely to be expected in these days of dumbing down, especially for "difficult" topics like microbiology.

Read the full story here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7169347.stm

I don't normally listen very closely to the broadcast church service on Radio 4 on Sunday morning, but today's was interesting as well as tuneful. Coming from Durham, it examined the origins and traditions of carols.

Interestingly, they used to be secular songs connected with celebrations of the winter solstice, and were not allowed in church because of their pagan associations. It wasn't till the 14th Century that Franciscan friars introduced Christian carols.

Another interesting fact: While Shepherds Watched was originally set to the tune called Cranbrook - which is better known as the tune for On Ilkley Moor bah't 'at. Listening to this was a bit like a serious version of "One Song to the Tune of Another" from I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue!

You can listen again for a week here - including Cranbrook and a lovely Mediaeval hymn Angelus ad virginem.

In past years, I have got unnecessarily exercised about the barrage of furniture sale and holiday adverts on TV that bully us from Boxing Day onwards. I thought that was bad enough.

But today - I've hit a new low. I just received an email from the BT Shop entitled "Huge January Sale Now On! Grab a deal whilst stocks last".

"Dear Lois,

Christmas is a time for giving and it's no exception at the BT Shop because we're giving you the bargains! That's right, our huge January SALE starts right now! So get clicking for rich pickings in the BT Shop January Sale!"

Is it just me, or are they just a bit premature with this?

And a merry January Sale season to you all. Hmph.

'Tis the season to install flashplayer, ready to view the electronic greetings cards from clients and service providers.

Today I had 2 such missives. The first from the Design Council, a relatively tasteful and mercifully almost silent eco-plea, to save trees by sending virtual cards.

Happy Christmas Trees

The second (how apt: number two!) was from Business Link Southwest, who tell me that they "commissioned a South West based creative to design a holiday animation to celebrate the season". I hope they didn't pay him/her more than sixpence for this over-long, noisy festival of tat and cheesiness - or perhaps it was really the office boy wot did it. My son knocked out this sort of thing when he was about 10.

Santa's Workshop - then and now

It starts with an outright lie "(best watched with sound...)" - unless they forgot to put "turned off" at the end.

If you actually get as far as 'Now' - have you any idea what the bastard child of a JCB and an industrial robot is supposed to be doing behind the conveyor belt? Watching a tennis match perhaps...

Have you noticed how stuttery many digital tapes are these days? In the bad old days of analogue recordings, you got other problems of course, but not what I call the Max Headroom effect.

Does this happen on digital TV? As a diehard analogue viewer, it might be my aging technology: I am sure they are pinching some of the signal to try out digital transmissions ready for 2009, as it's often very thin and we have letters missing from Ceefax, even though we are in clear line of sight to the local transmitter at Stockland Hill and used to be able to pick up a good picture using a bent coathanger. No longer though.

Perhaps the tagline for another story - 'digital gremlins ate my hamstersignal'

Meet Max Headroom - and note the site's nifty icon. Neat! Or watch him interviewed by Terry Wogan on YouTube.

... And the transmitter even has its own web page - I'll get me anorak!