And there was me thinking the Mars mission was the big news. Instead, Bristol City chairman Steve Lansdown effortlessly caps NASA by announcing our splendid new stadium. They must have been gutted in the White House.

It sounds like the bees knees. It'll have a capacity of 30,000 - 40,000 (which reminds me of Frankie Boyle saying his beloved Stenhousemuir ground could hold 3,000, apparently), and Lansdown reckons it'll be much easier to attract quality players if they've got somewhere nice to play in. If everything goes to plan we can move in in four years. If it's another Wembley, the first game there will be about the same time as the Mars mission.

Grand stadium-building plans often come with an element of hubris, and Lansdown says he wants a capacity of 40,000 so we can bid to be an official tournament stadium if England get the 2018 World Cup. To be honest, it's a bit hard to imagine the FA choosing us before Villa Park or the Stadium of Light, but the mere suggestion of it shows how far we've come. With Rovers still squatting inelegantly at the rugby club, all parties must surely now acknowledge that there are at most one and a bit teams in Bristol.

And they're not coming in. He specifically ruled out the idea of a groundshare with Rovers. The last thing we need is those scrofulous blue-scarved bastards coming in stinking the place out, he could easily have said. Good for him. Or me, in this case.

The precise location of the stadium remains a mystery. According to the club website, the ground will be in the south Bristol area and not too far from Ashton Gate. They've bought the land, but they're not letting on where it is.

So it's time for a competition. Where do you think it will be? My guess is Hengrove Park. There would be an outcry, which would explain why they were keeping it under wraps. They've already got the council on board, and they've secured the land, so maybe they've secured council land. That's my guess. Now it's your turn.

The prize is the honour of winning, and yes that is enough. Honour is its own reward, you know. Fill the comments box with your speculations.

My buyer has pulled out. My house is no longer sold, and the Sold sign has been replaced by a For Sale sign again. The excited tension has been replaced by tense foreboding of doom, which is a surprisingly similar sensation. According to my estate agent, this is the latest he has ever known a buyer pull out. At last, a record of my very own. And I'm a shoo-in for most teeth grinding ever without the aid of amphetamines.

Meanwhile, Anne Widdecombe has said she won't do Have I Got News For You again, because of Jimmy Carr's potty mouth. What was that Oscar Wilde quote? Something about the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible? Something in the soul wilts at the prospect of being forced to side with either of them.

Carr is in many ways my guilty secret. I shouldn't be amused, but sometimes I am. He ain't never gonna make Humanitarian of the Year though.

What with one thing and another, everything has been shit since England lost to Croatia. I just dread Christmas, and the fresh horrors it inevitably brings. Already town has become a hyperreal pantomime of the grotesque. If I drew a Venn Diagram of town, it would read David Lynch ╚╝ Mike Leigh ╔╗ both their creativity. But at least humanity is going to Mars.

They've even got a date. It's February. February 2031. That's not very soon. As I'm sure you can see, it's really not soon enough. I just hope there's a live feed in the nursing home, or they'll have a hard time getting me to eat my mush, that's all I can say. Mmm, mush.

It sounds like a good plan though. They're going to send supplies and a habitat in advance, and grow their own fruit and veg on the way. Someone's been reading their Kim Stanley Robinson. Apparently they're going to practice on the Moon. Which, as we've previously established, isn't halfway. Not even nearly.

At least now I'm not moving I'll still have time for all of you. Don't expect upbeat for a while though.

I'm moving house. I'm going from Barton Hill in Bristol, to Easton in Bristol. From this house to my new flat is a ten minute walk, and that's including the dogleg to get round the rail track, but as other Bristolians know it's a psychogeographical trek and a half.

I still don't know when. It may be Friday, it may not be for a couple of weeks. What do I pack now? What do I do about utilities? More importantly, what do I do about Premiership football?

I'm not going to be posting much for a while, because I have to sort out lots of deeply boring things. I may come by and moan.

The good news is, my new flat is cheaper than my old house. So much cheaper that once I've moved I won't have a mortgage. Hooray!

Did you notice? After I'd previously said I couldn't do accents, yesterday I typed pliés. With an é. It's because I remembered which Alt Key character it was. More accurately, I ploughed through all of them to see. It's Alt-130.

You may not be aware of this trick, but you can get symbols by holding down the Alt key and typing a number. Try it now. Open a text editor, hold down the Alt key, type 130 and then let go of the Alt key. You've got an e acute - an é.

There's loads of them. You can even draw pictures. Here's a block of flats, made out of Alt-186 to Alt-205.

╔════════════════════════════════╗
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║
║                                                                        ║
║                                                                        ║
║          ╔═══╗          ╔═══╗         ╔═══╗          ║
║          ║       ║          ║      ║         ║       ║          ║
║          ╚═══╝          ╚═══╝         ╚═══╝          ║

It's less rectangular than flats should be, and intolerably boring to do even by my obsessive compulsive standards, mainly because the proportions in my shitty blog text editor are completely different to what you actually see on the screen. Still, you get the general idea.

But what I want to know is, how does this all relate to ASCII, and Unicode, and all that stuff? I thought there were 256 of them, but when I got to 257 they kept coming. I read the page on Wikipedia, but I decided I'd make you tell me instead.

In exchange, here's another number trick. Pick a number, any number. Let's choose 4698. Add up the digits. 4 + 6 + 9 + 8 = 27. Add up the digits again. 2 + 7 = 9.

With any number, if you add up the digits and they come to nine, the number can be divided by nine. 4698 ÷ 9 =  522.

Try 5631. 5 + 6 + 3 + 1 = 15. 1 + 5 = 6. So 5631 doesn't divide by nine. But if you subtract the result of adding the digits, 6, you get 5625. 5625 ÷ 9 = 625. This always works.

There you go. Now tell me about the Alt keys.

There was a nice little curiosity on the Guardian puzzle page yesterday. To follow it, just pull out a calculator. The Windows calculator will do fine, and I'm sure other operating systems have something similar. You'll notice that the numbers 1-9 are arranged like this.

Take any rectangle within that grid of 3 by 3, and count round the corners clockwise. You can have 1452, 1782, 1463, 1793, 2563, 2893, 4785, 4796 or 5896. You can also start at any point, so instead of 1452 you could have say 5214. You could even, if you were so minded, go anticlockwise, and have 5412.

Any number spelt out by this method will be divisible by 11. This is why.

If you take any number which can be divided by 11 and add the odd placed digits (the first, third, fifth digit, and so on) and the even placed digits (second, fourth, sixth ...), you get two separate numbers. These two numbers may be the same, but even if they aren't, the difference will always be 11.

Take 4521, for instance. 4 + 2 and 5 + 1 both equal 6, so you know 4521 can be divided by 11. In fact, it gives you 411. With 2948, 2 + 4 = 6 and 9 + 8 = 17. 17 - 6 = 11, so again you know 2948 can be divided by 11, this time to give 268.

With a rectangle of digits on the calculator, the second digit will always be 1, 2, 3 or 6 higher or lower than the second, depending on whether you're jumping one or two rows or columns. Whichever it is, the third digit and fourth digit will always have the opposite relationship. For instance, with 1452, 1 to 4 is plus 3, while 5 to 2 is minus 3. Therefore, the first digit plus the third will always equal the second digit plus the fourth. Therefore, the number will always divide by 11.

Which amused half of you, and bored the rest. Whatever I write about, I will always be putting some of you off. Which brings me neatly back to the football.

I was all set to write about something else, really I was. As with any great tragedy, there's a mourning period, and then you get back to your life. Unfortunately, in my life every second Saturday is spent at Ashton Gate, which meant I spent yesterday watching my team being outclassed in the mud and rain, struggling to find any attacking creativity and defending like dorks, and losing at home. It was just too much like Wednesday to be borne. Now I'm back where I started. Or not. Yes, lo and behold, Leeds have just lost 1-0 at Cheltenham. Yes, that's Cheltenham, the well known football powerhouse, originators of total football and catenaccio. Now I'm actually even sulkier than I was in the first place, which means you've got more football writing to come.

Except that football is shit. I've seen the light, and from now on, I'm going to watch Saturday afternoon ballet. Not that it will help. Inevitably, whichever ballet troupe I choose will be constantly outshone by the visiting ballet team, with their pliés, entrechasses and deft flicks into the penalty area while my cutprice Baryshnikovs just hoof it up to the big tall ballerina at the front, and - no, I think that will have to do. I really can't go on.

Still, there is a silver lining. My friend Simon assures me that I write better when my teams are losing. Apparently, when they're doing well I'm all smarmy towards them, but when they're rubbish the vitriol dripping off the keyboard takes it to a higher level. He also suggested that when I'm writing about sport, the objectivity and precise reasoning that I value when writing about science or philosophy may be slightly less in evidence. I can't imagine what he means.

So there it is. As the old line has it, I have to suffer for my art, and now it's your turn.

There's a vacancy in English football, as you may have heard, and top managers around the world are fighting their way to the nearest microphone, desperate to declare their lack of interest in it. No one wants to do the noble thing, it seems. No-one wants to cry 'I'm Spartacus!', not if it gets them pilloried, scourged and crucified. Even Paul Jewell is taking no chances, although to avoid public ridicule he's been forced to rule out the Ireland job instead.

Maurinho's name had been touted about, but he's declared he's not interested, and so have Alan Curbishley, Sam Allardyce, Steve Coppell and Martin O'Neill. This last has left me particularly disappointed, as I've always had a fondness for O'Neill. He managed to completely outflank the BBC pundit team last World Cup, when he compared the Italian offside trap to the Roman triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. His erudition fell upon deaf ears on the studio, Alan Hansen in particular being reduced to tears of mirth at the idea that anyone might be interested in knowing things, but I was impressed, even if they weren't.

Coppell, Curbishley and Allardyce's denials come to a question I personally hadn't asked, although I'd have taken any of them before I took McClaren. They're all good managers with a proven track record, but none of them have managed at Champions League level, and when it comes to international management a nice little run in the UEFA Cup really doesn't count. In fact the only Premiership manager really making waves at the moment is Sven Goran Eriksson, and it might be a bit embarrassing asking him. Apart from anything, we'd probably have to pay him another salary on top of the one we're still paying him not to do it. What with McClaren's payoff, you'd think being a failed England manager entitled you to alimony, and if we carry on like this we'll be paying out more than Henry VIII. Actually, that does sugggest a solution to the problem.

So who's going to do it? All I can say is, if Gary Johnson isn't on the manager's bench tomorrow I'll be worried. Hang on though, here comes somebody plausible. It's Fabio Capello. Having previously managed AC Milan, Roma and Juventus, he was sacked from Real Madrid at the end of last season. You know what that means. He was considered good enough to manage them in the first place. You wouldn't find Steve McClaren geting the sack from Real Madrid. And he did win the league - he was sacked for Madrid's boring style. After Wednesday's fiasco, we could probably stand a bit of boredom.

And he's interested. In fact, he says he's 'fascinated'. As he told the BBC, It would be a very difficult challenge but a very exciting one. He hasn't really said why he's keen, and I'm buggered if I know, but if he wants us, we'd be fools not to want him.

So there's my recommendation. Get Capello. And hang on in there all my overseas readers. I'm going to get over it soon, I promise, and when I do I'll write about something else.

We won't be on our own. Lots of countries haven't made it. And I'm not just talking about the Andorras and San Marinos of this world, either. They never go to the ball, and they're well used to watching the party from the servants quarters, but countries with motorways and more than one art gallery have also been knocked out, and they're feeling the loss of face just as keenly as we are.

From Group A, Belgium and Serbia miss out after they managed to finish below Poland, Portugal and even Finland. With the exception of Milosevic's presidential palace, Serbia haven't exactly set the world on fire since Holland beat them 6-1 at Euro 2000, back in the days when they were still Yugoslavia. Belgium have now failed to qualify for three tournaments in a row, and this could have been their last chance, as they may well be the sovereign nations of Flanders and Wallonia by the next tournament. Flanders is the Dutch speaking bit, Wallonia the French, and they've not been getting on brilliantly well of late. Finland will also be disappointed, after they'd punched above their weight all the way through. Armenia and Azerbaijan had to cancel their ties for 'security reasons', which roughly translated means their deep seated mutual loathing. UEFA said if they couldn't play together nicely they wouldn't have any points, which made no difference to anything, as they were no competition in the football stakes, although they head the group for tedious ethnic bickering. Despite some strong competition.

In Group B, Scotland are the new Finland and Ukraine (apparently that whole thing with saying the Ukraine is an English affectation, and really annoys them) are the new Belgium. Be honest, now - it was all very romantic and everything, but would you really prefer to have Scotland at Euro 2008 rather than Italy or France?

Groups C and D see Norway and Ireland respectively fall by the wayside, and top losers in Groups F and G are Northern Ireland, Denmark.and Bulgaria. All these countries have history at the top competitions, but we know as well as anyone how little difference that makes.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Arsenal, Man Utd and Chelsea play Wigan, Bolton and Derby respectively. None of these games will be the mismatch of the week.

I really don't.

I hate football anyway, it's a bloody stupid game. I don't know why you all get so excited about it.

I'm staring at the BBC football home page, and I'm looking for an article, but it's not there. Steve McClaren hurls himself from Wembley arch, it might have been called.  His final words, 'Thus I atone for my grave error', echoed around the stadium as his body lay crumpled across the centre circle. Meanwhile, with a banzai shout, Scott Carson fell on his own sword, and missed. But no. McClaren defiant after England defeat. Well, he's had plenty of practice. It also says FA to meet over McClaren future, which shouldn't detain them long enough to need a tea break. I bet James I had a meeting to discuss Guy Fawkes' future as well. A good racking, that's the answer. And fire. Lots of fire.

I remember the last time this happened. 1994 it was, when Graham Taylor was in charge. They compared him with a turnip. Which root vegetable is McClaren? I'm not sure, but it's definitely the last one in the shop.

Because that's how we got him, if you recall. We wanted Scolari, but he ran away as fast as his dumpy little legs would carry him. And there was nobody else. Just between friends, it came down to a straight choice - him or me. And I turned it down flat.

For who would want such an accursed job? Imagine what it's like being a top manager, with the pick of Europe's great teams. Not me, fool, that was poetic license. But if you really did have the opportunity to manage Barcelona, or Juventus, or Arsenal, why would you want to run England? Look how much we had to pay Eriksson to do it.

It actually physically hurts. My chest feels like it's being crushed. Oh, I'm not suggesting that women who have been through childbirth should be falling over themselves to feel sorry for me. It's not like I've got a cold. But it does hurt.

You know the scene in A Bridge too Far, when Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine and Elliot Gould are stood on a high building, watching the battle through their binoculars and trying to work out why they've fallen just short, having come so far? It was Nijmegen. It was Eindhoven. It was the weather. It was the one road. That's how I feel. It was Macedonia. It was Israel. It was Carson. It was the penalty in Moscow. And the truth is, it was all of it. The whole thing. It's been like a Restoration farce, but stretched out to Wagnerian lengths.

Well, at least we get the misery over with now. Come next summer, we'll be over it, and we can laugh at all the other countries as they all get knocked out, one after the other. All except one, obviously, but that was never going to be us.

The other countries. That's Poland, Portugal, Italy, France, Greece, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Germany, Croatia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Romania and Holland. Plus Austria and Switzerland, the hosts. Not us. We stay at home with the other comedy teams.

I'm really not talking about it.

As promised the other day, here's the real history of Vlad the Impaler. If you want the juice on Dennis the Menace you'll have to find it yourselves. There's juice enough in this one though, in fact so much juice I'm splitting it into two.

Our Vlad, Vlad Dracul, really was the Vlad that Dracula was based on. Of course, the real story has nothing to do with vampires, sweet transvestites or vicious murdering antelope (that was Vlad the Impala).

He was born in 1431 in Sighisoara, in modern day Romania. Although Sighisoara is just inside Transylvania, Vlad went on to rule the province of Wallachia, to the south. He ruled as a voivod, or pince. You may have heard of the province of Vojvodina, in Serbia. The name simply means Princeland. Incidentally, just to give you an idea of the absolute futility of ethnic state building in that part of the word, this is a map of Vojvodina by ethnic population.

The Danube marks the southern border of Wallachia and Romania. This will be important in our narrative, because the Ottoman Turks had reached the Danube in their long campaign to strengthen their grip on the Balkans (ooh-err). From their starting point in central Turkey they'd spread west, conquering Thrace (eastern Greece), Bulgaria and Serbia. This was the period of the battle of Kosovo which the Serbs make such a fuss about, with about as much historical legitimacy as the British claim to Calais.

Throughout the time of Vlad's reign he was at war with the Ottomans, the Hungarians, or rival claimants to his own throne, and this constant state of conflict may have contributed to the harshness of his world view. His father and brother were assassinated when he was sixteen, on the orders of John Hunyadi, ruler of the Empire of Hungary. The assassin (the Assassins! There's a topic you're going to get) peeled the skin off his father's face before he killed him and blinded his brother then buried him alive, so Vlad's life was informed by a sense of the grotesque from early on.

Not that he was all that keen on his old dad, who'd sent him to the Turks as a hostage when he was a boy. The Turks often maltreated him, and he came to hate them, but that didn't stop him accepting their help to seize the Wallachian throne after his father's murder.

Hunyadi pushed the Turks out of Wallachia, and Vlad fled to Moldavia. Then he made a tactical shift, known in our times as a betrayal, and joined with Hunyadi, murderer of his father and brother, to get his country back. Hunyadi gave him the support he needed, then conveniently died of the plague, leaving him in control of an independent Wallachia without owing loyalty to anybody. Which was nice for him, but perhaps less of a pleasure for everybody else.

This really is the story with everything. Treachery, torture and plague, that's proper history for you. And nobody's even been impaled so far. An unfortunate omission, which I promise will soon be rectified.

Well blow me. There we were, the ropes cutting into our flesh with every jolt of the tumbrel on the cobbles, staring hopelessly at the Very Sharp Thing looming up ahead. All of a sudden up through the knitting needles pops the Scarlet Pimpernel, in the unlikely form of Israeli striker Omer Golan, and with one goal we were free. Nearly.

Yes, it's the football again. Bye bye the rest of you. Don't worry, I'll be rude about God tomorrow. Today, though, there were two crucial games for England. Not that we were actually playing in either of them, but a victory for Russia and a draw for Croatia would have seen the final, steel curtain descend on our hopes for qualification.

To the European Championships. Next summer, in Switzerland and Austria. Are you still here? I'm not suddenly going to switch to science you know. Although this is a very nice interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's talking about the difficulties in communicating science to -

Now I think you know I'm a bit long in the tooth to be caught like that. Back to the football. All this redundant hyperbole is because Israel beat Russia two one, scoring in the final minute with a counterattack after Russia hit the post. I didn't see the game, but thanks to the miracle of the BBC I did get to see Alan Hansen telling us he'd seen it, and apparently England were dead lucky. If that Russian shot had crept inside the post instead of bouncing back off it we'd be dead and buried, but Golan's goal means that we only need a draw at home against Croatia on Wednesday to qualify.

An hour later, we were dead lucky again. Macedonia beat Croatia 2-0, and now if we win by three goals on Wednesday we'll actually top the group. Talk about jammy.

Which is more than you could say for Scotland, who are out. They did give it the old Highland heave-ho though, losing their final game 2-1 to World Champions Italy.

It was one of those typical Hampden nights, full of patriotic pride and just pissing it down. What the sons of the Mediterranean must have made of it is anyone's guess. The last time they'd been this far north, screaming hordes of woad-painted Caledonians had driven them back to Hadrian's Wall. Now they must have thought it was happening again.

Today's blue hordes warmed up with a rousing chorus of Flower of Scotland, led with gusto by Some Old Scots Guy and delivered can belto style despite the downpour. After that they got Rockin' All Over the World on the bagpipes, which the BBC spared us. Thanks, BBC. I've always had a soft spot for the pipes, but there are limits. Talk about pathos to bathos.

Although it was the anthem that did the real damage, as Scotland got caught dreaming of Bannockburn and went behind after a minute. Proud Alex's army trudged back to the centre spot, to think again, and this time they came out focused on the game. They had a lucky escape when a perfectly good Italian goal was ruled offside, and then in the second half a virtually identical goal for Scotland was given, even though theirs actually was. Offside, that is. Which most of you don't really understand, so remind me to explain sometime.

They did have a stonewall penalty for handball turned down though, which Cannavaro should have been sent off for, and the last minute winner came from a free kick which should never have been given. All in all, the whole game was a massive argument for video replay in football.

Overall, you have to give the Scots credit. They were drawn in a group with Italy and France, the finalists in the last World Cup, plus Ukraine who made the quarter finals. To get that close to qualifying is a remarkable achievement.

Northern Ireland clung on to their faint hopes by beating Denmark on a pitch that would have been a bit damp for growing rice, never mind top level international football. The UEFA delegate said the pitch was useable 'because fifty per cent of the pitch is unaffected'. Some teams like to be able to use the whole pitch, but I suppose qualifying has to be wrapped up by Wednesday, so they'd have played on a melting iceberg if they'd had to.

Under such conditions it was hardly surprising when each team managed to bundle home a scrappy goal early in the second half. Bendtner scored first for Denmark when he used his superior wading technique to get to a loose ball first, then Feeney equalised with a header. This seemed like the best approach, until wonder boy David Healey somehow managed an inch perfect chip whilst surrounded by defenders and facing the wrong way in a swamp, and earned them the win. They could still go through, but they'd have to beat Spain in Spain while Latvia beat Sweden in Sweden, and frankly Irish reunification is looking a much more likely prospect.

So next summer is taking shape. We have twelve teams confirmed - host nations Austria and Switzerland, plus Italy, France, Germany, Holland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Croatia, Poland, Greece and Romania.

England or Russia, Sweden or Northern Ireland, Portugal or Finland or Serbia, and Turkey or Norway will join them. We'll know who on Wednesday.

And it's high fives all round for Leeds United, who beat Swindon 2-1 and are now fourth on 26 points. Given that Carlisle are top with 28, and bearing in mind the 15 point deduction I believe I may have mentioned once or twice, I'm sure you'll all agree that Boethius's wheel is finally turning for them.

In other sports news, courtesy of zombizi, whose appetite for the extreme clearly remains undimmed, here is a drunk Aberdeen fan doing something quite vile. He also sent me some anarchist cricket, which is a bit more uplifting.

Tomorrow, why God is a moron.

Ooh, this is a good one. It's an open source project to create software that will eliminate stupid comments automatically. It's called StupidFilter. They say this.

StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back.

Eternal September sounds like the coolest guerilla army ever, but actually it's net slang for the persistence of online dumbness. The term comes from the very early history of the Internet, back when the Internet was called Usenet, and was the exclusive, and exclusivist, domain of American universities. Every September there would be an influx of new students who'd never used the Internet before, and didn't know how to behave on it, so September was known as the month of greatest online ignorance.

In 1993 AOL started up, and suddenly the Internet was full of hoi polloi. The old guard call the modern age of the Internet Eternal September, because they see it as a torrent of newbie ignorance, so far unmitigated by the passage of time. Some of them imagine that one day the Internet will again be sensible, mature and educated, and they refer to this longed-for day as October 1, 1993.

I've no time for that kind of elitism, actually. There is a problem, but ordinary people aren't it. As our regular commenter Keren showed in this post about Big Brother, people in the mass are much smarter and nicer than is often suggested. The problem, as I've previously argued in this piece about Guardian comments, is a small minority of people who spoil it for everybody else. No, it actually is. I know that's the kind of thing public school headmasters used to say when withdrawing tuckshop privileges, but in this instance it really does apply.

Having said that, there is a real problem that the good people at StupidFilter are trying to address. Not in here, obviously. You're my lovely readers, I won't hear a word said against you. Nor on 'quality' sites like Pharyngula, where the conversation is reliably informed. Nor even on mainstream low brow sites, inasmuch as it wouldn't be an actual problem if they sank beneath the cyberwaves.

No, I'm specifically referring to highbrow sites that are still mainstream enough to attract comments from the monobrow fringe. Actually that sounds like a haircut you regretted, but you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Guardian.

StupidFilter have an interesting approach.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Bayesian analysis is a kind of probability theory, and in this case appears to mean that comments will be assessed by their similarity to comments which have been rated as stupid, plus some hardwired rules.

By assigning their sites a comments stupidity threshold of 1 to 5, admins will be able to set a threshold for what is and isn't allowed. One could imagine a gradation something like this.

Stupidity = 0  The argument in this piece is flawed, because [good reason]
Stupidity = 1  The argument in this piece is flawed, because [stupid reason]
Stupidity = 2  This piece is crap, because [no reason]
Stupidity = 3  The author is a jerk, and should be killed
Stupidity = 4  Random tirade of abuse
Stupidity = 5  Bigger penis will open exciting new horizons of sexual pleasure for you

And by setting your filter accordingly, you can filter out abuse, spam or gibberish.

I used to be against anything which might be construed as censorship on the Internet, but after ten years of nonsense I weary of my hard line. If anyone can give us back the Guardian, I'm all for it.

Not that my good friend GH would say so. Being of the post-modernist persuasion, he would probably rather consign it to a box marked bourgeois factualism or some such, along with fairly much everything else I hold dear. He it was who at a recent social gathering accused me of blind faith in science.

Ironically, this is precisely the quality that actual practitioners of blind faith find me most lacking in. It's often struck me that the best strategy against enemies of reason is to wave all the other enemies at them, and suggest that they try to form some kind of broad front.

Here, then, is my defence of science. It starts with a concession, that there are philosophical problems with any attempt to claim that science is true. The postmodernist version is that meaning is a human construct, so concepts like heat or spin are projections of meaning from the human mind onto the physical universe. I will also admit this.

But it doesn't follow from that admission that science is independent of the physical universe. To demonstrate this, imagine a planet, outside of our solar system, with simple organic life. Let's suppose America, Russia and China each send missions to this planet, in complete isolation from each other. Each mission lands, takes soil samples, and analyses the chemistry of the simple life forms on the planet. Would they come to similar conclusions?

It is clearly apparent that they would, and yet the simple fact of this convergence radically undermines the argument that science is purely a social construct. Such convergence of data from different sources is common in scientific research. One thinks perhaps of dendrochronology (the analysis of past weather patterns from the thickness of tree rings) and the study of ice cores, which yield compatible climate histories. Or of rock dating by fossils, which produces a similar evolutionary time frame to the rate of mutation in haemoglobin molecules. Or of harvest mites.

Of course, you could argue that if an alien ship turned up, from another planet altogether, then they might have a completely different approach. They might have some inconceivable alien alternative to number, to logic, to the whole idea of analysing the world through the projection of meaning onto it.

But so what? Aliens might have, but the people who hypothesise them don't. They're as stuck in the mire as we are, except that their habit of dissing the only worthwhile device we've ever come up with to navigate our way through it forces them to substitute alternatives with the same problem, and no useful solution.

Take for instance the famous postmodern gibberish to the effect that in claiming that e = mc2, scientists are demonstrating a patriarchical obsession with energy, which stands for the male urge to power. Why, in that case, did the experiment measuring light passing near to the sun produce exactly the right result, years after Einstein's death? Scientists claim that e = mc2 because experimental results from a variety of sources support that conclusion.

More tellingly, the argument assumes patriarchy in the same way that relativity assumes time and space. How do we know that women are discriminated against? Because we can produce data that says they are. If it wasn't for the data, the claim would be just that - a claim. Because we can produce evidence, it is more than that.

The real clincher, though, comes in this post from the Neurophilosophy blog about insect-robot interfacing. It's a robot, with a moth in the middle of it. The robot is controlled by a microelectrode inserted into the moth's brain, so that whichever way the moth looks, the robot moves.

In your face, cure for cancer. Imagine having slagged off science, then seeing this come out in the same week. Imagine the tears you'd weep. Tears of joy for the thing in itself (TIP: post-modernists hate it when you talk about the thing in itself), then tears of guilt for your ingratitude and disrespect.

And to be fair, the enemies of science realise the error of their ways. That's why they get on planes.

Sorry about the less frequent posts. It was a busy weekend, and right in the middle of it City lost 6-0 at Ipswich, which dread tidings drained me of my creative impulse for about a day. Also, it's quite cold and my brain is sluggish. This always happens. I write my best stuff from June to October, then I go into something of a slump.

Today, though, isn't the kind of day that should pass unmarked. Firstly it's St Brice's Day, an important milestone in the history of ethnic cleansing. On this day in 1002, Ethelred issued a decree commanding that all Danes in England should be murdered, and Saxon death squads traversed the length and breadth of the land putting villages to the sword.

I might as well take the opportunity to correct two enduring myths about English history. Firstly, even before 1066, things still used to happen. Secondly, whilst Ethelred was known as Ethelred the Unready, it doesn't mean he was unprepared. The name derives from the Old English word rede, meaning counsel or advice, so Unready just means unadvised, or badly advised. Aethelred, the correct spelling of his name, means noble counsel, so the nickname is by way of a pun.

The bad advice thing definitely applies to the massacre, which was supposed to solve the Danish problem for ever but only served to trigger new hostilities. When Ethelred died in 1016 (on April 23, which incidentally isn't Shakespeare's birthday, but I'll do all that then), the Danes took over again in the person of King Canute.

Today isn't just St Brice's Day though. It's also the square root of winter.

Now you may think winter begins the first day you have to put the fire on in the daytime and ends when Man United get knocked out of the Champions League, but you're just slack. In my world winter is considered to start on November 1st and last until March 31st, which makes it 152 days long.  Thus, twelve and a bit days into November, at the precise time indicated for this post, is the square root of winter. I meant to tell you in advance, because it's not like anyone else is going to make the effort to track this vital stuff, but I forgot, and now you've missed it. Sorry about that.

Congratulations to Dave, by the way, whose fiftieth birthday party was on Saturday night. Karaoke has never really been my thing, but when a hundred people are singing along to I Will Survive at the tops of their voices it would have been churlish to stand apart. And it did teach millions of jilted women to change their locks, just to be on the safe side. It was a great night, and served to illustrate one of life's great lessons. If you go through life being a nice guy that everybody likes, then your birthday party is the time when that strategy really pays off.

You may or may not have heard of Antony Flew. He's a philosopher and well known atheist, who has recently had a very public recantation, and apparently embraced a form of deism. Deism is usually taken to mean a belief in God through personal experience of the divine, rather than through revealed scripture. The term also embraces people like Einstein, who was in the habit of making vague and frankly rather pointless remarks about God being in the beauty of the physical universe, without necessarily being a conscious being.

This last argument is surely one of the feeblest ever offered in the field, being analagous to the claim that one's football team has won if they've played elegantly and entertainingly, even if the other side scored more actual goals. The most straightforward refutation of it is the argument by expostulation, which in its most concise form can be stated as Why don't you just fuck off? I remain unclear as to which part of Einstein's position survives that simple rebuttal.

Flew now appears to believe that God really does exist, but that He doesn't speak through the Bible, the Koran or any of humanity's other millstones. This conversion happened some time after his 80th birthday. To be honest, his change of opinion makes little difference either way, as people move from one side of the argument to the other all the time. It's a shame, but not a tragedy.

What is tragic is the way Flew is being used. A book has been published under his name, 'with' one Roy Abraham Varghese, called There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. It has since emerged that Varghese actually wrote most of the book himself, and his evangelical ally Bob Hosteteler wrote the rest. All Flew did was approve the proofs. This would be normal practice for a celebrity biography, but for a distinguished philosopher with many published books under his belt it's a little odd, to say the least.

More seriously, it has been alleged by Richard Carrier that the book itself contains evidence of Flew's mental deterioration with advancing age, especially when combined with an interview by Mark Oppenheimer for the New York Times, and that many of the arguments it contains have previously been refuted by Flew himself. In other words, not only have Varghese and Hosteteler taken advantage of an increasingly confused old man to stick his name on the cover of their book, it may well be that the book is of such poor quality as to seriously undermine Flew's academic standing among philosophers, whichever side of the debate they may be on.

Since I first started sounding off about the God squad in here, I've actually been a little shocked by some of the things they've been prepared to do. Quite apart from my own relatively trivial experience of censored debate, Christians have spliced together video footage of Richard Dawkins from different sources and rearranged it to make him appear unable to answer simple questions, Islamic clerics faked some of the cartoons which started that whole Danish farrago, and statements made in the course of debate are routinely misused in ways that must be understood to be deceitful by any even vaguely intelligent person. And that's before we get onto the hotels, the cocaine and the rent boys. Although to be fair, and to paraphrase Dylan Moran slightly, if you do find yourself in a hotel with some rent boys, what else are you supposed to offer them?

Still, there are limits. I'm no saint myself. I'm often snide for the purposes of entertainment, I like a drink, I get a bit tetchy from time to time. But I wouldn't ever do the things they do. Obviously I've never had cocaine and rent boys in a hotel room - I go camping - but also I've never indulged in any of the intellectual chicanery mentioned above. I suppose opportunities to misrepresent bewildered elderly philosophers are rare, and I can't point to any evidence of temptation resisted, but I still feel reasonably confident that in the event I'd rise above it. And so would you. These are no high claims that I make, they're the everyday stuff of ordinary decent folk like us. These other people though, these holy rollers - how do they live with themselves?

I can't think of anything hugely entertaining off my own bat today, so here's one somebody else prepared earlier. It's a TV clip from a Japanese candid camera show, courtesy of the Guardian YouTube roundup. The premise is that the world speed walking champion, one Jefferson Perez of Ecuador, is trying to set a new record on a Japanese track, when five actors dressed as Samurai run into the stadium, pretend to cut down the security guards with their swords and chase after him round the track. Will Perez break the sacred code of the walker, and run on the track?

Well what would you expect? Not only does he run not walk, he hares off across the grass in the middle in a direction carefully calculated to maximise his chances of staying alive.  The fact that the question had to be asked at all says rather more about the TV show than it does about Perez. And why are they two samurai short? Cheapskates.

The samurai pursue him in a big loop round the field as he flees in terror, while the commentators talk disparagingly about his slow running. Um, the man's a walking champion, not a running champion. Under the circumstances, I think it's safe to assume he's doing his best.

At the end, the commentators describe how they had to explain to Perez that there weren't any samurai in Japan any more, as if running away was an act of cultural imperialism on his part. I was amazed by how well he took it. If it had been me, I'd have punched someone.

Talking of which, here's Dennis Leary socking it to Mel Gibson at a Red Sox game. Not literally, as Gibson was in rehab at the time, but refreshingly different from the sanctimonious garbage we get on the baseball feeds Channel 5 carry.

I don't wish to seem ungrateful, and it's nice that they've made the effort to write, but this morning I received twelve emails, all offering to help me with the size of my penis. Really, a man could get a complex. True masculinity is impossible without a substantial volume of male meat, they warn. Do you feel a great disappointment every time you recollect the dimensions of your pen!s? Actually I find women are normally quite kind about such things, but maybe they're just being polite.

I don't know what part of the world these little packets of insecurity come from, but they specialise in a kind of strangled English that's never been spoken down the Old Kent Road. Do you believe in magic? they ask. We think you're likely to give a negative answer. It's gramatically correct, but you'd never say it.

And nothing about the prose is making me rethink my scepticism of the occult. The action of this remedy on a human phallus cannot be called otherwise than a Miracle! The action of this sentence on my brain cannot be called otherwise than a short circuit, frankly. Asking yourself how to augment your meat stick? they ask hopefully. Not especially, but I wouldn't mind a go on your Thesaurus.

Occasionally they do it in rhyming couplets, or at least try to. At last you've found a girl that's hot, You wanna screw her tasteful twat, they declaim Byronically. I don't think rhyming is necessarily their forte. And imagine writing that and using the word tasteful.

Bizarrely, each email begins and ends with a William Burroughs pastiche. the danger I put Ryan Hollweg in and the damage I have A gas line at Lake Weatherford, Texas exploded Monday the completely out of it. murder. democratic values of France, his role and says one of them. They've caught the feel of The Soft Machine quite remarkably, if you ask me.

I't's probably an attempt to fool email filters, which perhaps are in the habit of just searching the beginning and end of emails. At random moments, though, like monkeys let loose with the cut and paste, it almost yields information. Azerbaijan played host to second place Finland 63 seats are required for a majority government in. 63 seats are required for a majority government in where? I have to know. An assembly with 124 or 125 members, but who? A single currency would stabilize European year. Why should he turn over a new leaf now? This is very post-modern in the way it hints at meaning without ever quite resolving itself, but it's making me anxious. Britain stayed out of the single currency - are our years now unstable? What about the implied threat to Christmas? Not that I even like Christmas, but won't somebody think of the children?

Sometimes you get some quite tantalising titbits. Wednesday, March 21, 2007 North Korea agreed on February 13 to dismantle their. Dismantle their what? Unusually for this kind of email, It could actually be quite important. It could even be thematic. Are the North Koreans agreeing to dismantle their enhanced penises? If so, will they be allowing the Inspectors in?

Not that any of it is persuasive. There's a note of hysteria in each one which clashes with the message of virile self-assurance that they're trying to put across. These are not the words of men who are supremely happy about their penis.

So on balance I don't need your assistance, thanks for asking. Thunderbird thinks these messages are junk, and I'm inclined to agree. And if the first fifty emails failed to move me, I'm not sure why you think the fifty first is going to have any effect.

Still, it makes a change from the other emails I get all the time. The ones with a suspiciously similar font and layout, telling me how I can get hold of some Viagra. All I need now is some glans mascara, and I'll have the whole penile package.

Incidentally, some dinosaurs breathed like penguins. Just thought you ought to know.