Super Fat Tuesday!

Happy Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day and Super Tuesday, all in one!
It's Fat Tuesday in New Orleans, Super Tuesday lots of other places. (Louisiana's primaries are on Saturday.
In other Election 2008 news:
Deadheads and surviving band members unite for Obama.
Democrats Abroad this year are sending 11 delegates to the convention. Caucuses are being held even as I type in Oxford and London.
I guess you've heard about the endorsements of Obama by Caroline Kennedy, Senator Ted Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, and from the other end of the spectrum, Susan Eisenhower, grand-daughter of Ike.
And in other Shrove Tuesday news:
An Anglican bishop wants us to give up energy consumption for Lent
The nearby (to me that is) village of Atherstone has its 810th ball game between the "serfs of Warwickshire" and the "serfs of Leicestershire".

Leicester Tigers are heroes in the flood

In the course of jazzing up my customised Google home page, I added a feature called Mood News that was supposed to be a newsfeed of only good, uplifting, positive news. It didn't work at all and I had to delete it; it was just giving me the same old depressing news as any feed only more weird and random. But I serendipitously found this piece of lovely upbeat news - about a terribly depressing subject too - on the newsstand in the W. H. Smith at Leicester train station.

Leicester Tigers stars turned heroes to help victims of the worst flooding
in living memory.Ben Kay and Martin Corry carried motorists and trapped
villagers to safety, and pushed flooded cars out of the path of rising waters
after they became stranded in a Gloucestershire village on Saturday.The pair
were heading back from England training duty in Bath when they were caught up in
the flooding in Weston Subedge, near Chipping Camden, where more than five
inches of rain had fallen.Today, it emerged they spent hours carrying people out of
danger.Afterwards, Martin, 33, and Ben, 31- both strapping forwards standing 6ft
4in and weighing more than 17 stone each - were forced to spend the night in
their stranded car.

Dirty Old Town makes national news

Just as I was about to switch off the tv and go to bed, I heard the name of the little town where I live being mentioned, and it was not even the semi-local "East Midlands Today" programme, but the Nightly News itself on BBC2. It turns out that Robert Kilroy-Silk MEP (Ind) had chosen a rather posh-looking venue here in Hinckley to announce his official break with UKIP, the party under whose colours he was sailing when elected to the European Parliament. As I was wondering where in Hinckley this elegant assembly room was located, in which Mr. K-S was addressing about 60 former or disaffected UKIP members, they happened to mention it was the private golf club, which is only a few hundred yards from my front door! Across town at the Red Lion, the embittered husk of the UKIP local Bosworth branch was holding its official meeting, and holding forth to a national TV audience about what a sneaky old traitor Kilroy-Silk is. The whole story is far too tedious, convoluted and jejune to go into. It's always amused me that the more fringe and irrelevant a political organisation or movement is to begin with, the more likely it is to splinter into even tinier and more ridiculous factions, and this is just a banally unremarkable example of the phenomenon, featuring a main "personality" who is just embarrassing to watch.

Sensitive Light: A dogs life

A touching little post from a local photoblogger (who, besides living a few scant miles from me, is really very good.)