Sofas, fizzy drinks and the Tory Party

The UK Conservative Party has announced its new advertising strategy. It switches away from the negative attack ads of recent years and aims instead to emulate successful ad campaigns for commercial goods.

Patrick Barrett, Tories swap vitriol for humour in bid to unseat Blair. The Guardian, Tuesday March 23.

It's an Halibut

(Apologies for the obscure Python reference; my excuse is that I've spent the last week or so trying to figure out Plone, which uses the Python language, whose creator frequently alludes to Cleese & Co.)

I received an email this morning from someone who'd come across some of my lecture notes for Keio on marine research and development. The page, which basically consists of notes from reading William Broad's excellent The Universe Below, mentions some top-secret missions by US submarines—including the Halibut—to intercept Soviet signals and recover weaponry from the Sea of Okhotsk and elsewhere. My correspondent's father took part in some of these missions. Too bad he didn't make a written record of those days, even if they couldn't be published for a long time.