John Lanchester

Presumably there are people out there who admire John Humphrys’s interviewing style. I’m not one of them, and yesterday’s grilling of Neil Kinnock on the Today programme was an example of why not. Humphrys went after Kinnock on the subject of Labour’s 1992 loss, and whether there was a parallel with the current contest. The gist was: people didn’t vote for you because there was something about you they didn’t like. People might not vote for Brown because there is something about him they don’t like. How does that make you feel? So we had: ‘Your personality played a very large part in your campaign, you think it helped bring about your downfall, do you think that’s going to be the case with Gordon Brown?’ And then: ‘What they did was they looked at you as an individual and apparently they didn’t much like, or at least a lot of them didn’t much like what they saw. They will do the same with GB won’t they?’

Finally! The production we’ve all been waiting for, Mr Brown Goes to the Palace, has opened at last. There’s something very British about the way everyone has known for months that the election was going to be on 6 May, but that it’s only now that we officially know it. This point is so obvious it tends to be overlooked, but in the last thirty years, the incumbent party has only lost the election once. There have been five wins for the party in government, one win for the challenger. That was in 1997, when John Major took the power to declare an election whenever he liked it to one extreme: it was declared on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, and held on 1 May. That’s a full two weeks longer than the current campaign. Maybe Major thought that if the country had a long hard look at Blair, they would recoil in revulsion. He was right, in a way, it’s just that it took ten years for the effect to fully kick in.

It's fair to say that almost everybody spends at least part of the day wondering what would be the result of a football match between a professional team and a hundred primary school children. Thanks to the internet, we need speculate no longer. The evidence is now in. The J-league team Cerezu Osaka can be seen here playing 100 schoolboys. The Metafilter link takes you to the goals but it's also worth seeing the moment at 4:50 when the two teams come out. I don't want to give away the result, but among the various points of interest is the extravagant way the professionals celebrate when they score against the children.

To file in the department of 'Can this possibly be true?' – a piece from the New York Times about Wall Street's fascination with curling. That's right, curling, the mesmerically boring sport which is basically bowling on ice with heavy flat stones. After the closing bell in the markets, CNBC switches to showing the curling from Vancouver. Apparently the chilled-out boringness is why the moneymen like it. The guys on the Street say it is 'like chess on ice'.