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“... 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 ...”

“... Relief at the fact that this general election campaign is over will for many of us be tempered by the fact that it also, most likely, isn’t over – in the sense that we probably won’t wake up tomorrow morning knowing the identity of the next government. There’s one important thing to bear in mind today. For most electors, most of the time, it isn’t true that every vote counts ...”

“... I’m still in New York – back tomorrow – where the story playing biggest right this moment is about the Goldman executives who are testifying in front of the Senate. Of the various things which are astonishing about Goldman, one aspect which really stands out is their demeanour. They really do a very convincing impersonation not just of not giving a shit, but of seeming to go out of their way to be disliked ...”

“... Well that was a downer. It’s a good thing that the Labour party didn’t suffer a generational wipe-out of the sort which seemed possible a couple of months ago. But the prospect of real structural change seems remote today, as the parties jostle and try to find a way of stitching up the Lib Dems with a referendum on electoral reform that they are sure to lose ...”

“... Right from the start of the MPs' expenses – sorry, ‘allowances’ – scandal, I think we’ve all had personal favourites. The multiply-flipping Labour ministers may edge the contest in terms of the outrageousness of what they’ve done, but the Tories have had the upper hand in terms of vivid details. The wisteria was good, the manure was better, the moat-cleaning was better still, and then best of all was the £1645 floating island for Sir Peter Viggers’s duck pond ...”

“... The big news here in New York is that I’ve bought an iPad. I’ve been fooling around with it and enjoying the general awesomeness. My preliminary verdict is a. that it is a beautiful toy, objectively expensive but not dear for what it is, and b. that in a couple of years, say by version 3, the tablet will have replaced the computer for most of us, most of the time ...”

“... In Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, there’s a story about Gladstone. Someone tells him an anecdote about two brothers having an argument about an inheritance in Derbyshire on Christmas Eve; the younger one, with the help of the butler, attacked the elder and caused GBH. He was put on trial, and fled the country on his solicitor’s advice. Told those bare facts, Gladstone immediately said that seven points were ‘especially worthy of attention’, and went through them at length ...”

“... Considered purely as a piece of politics, both the content and the timing of Brown’s resignation were masterly. He gave the Tories time to not-quite make a deal – four days, the same amount of time Wilson gave Heath in 1974. Then he did two things which fundamentally alter the equation for the Lib Dems: he removed himself as problem and he made an offer on the alternative vote and PR which the Tories can’t match ...”

“... With everyone and his Labour dog calling for tactical voting, the always-good-value Tim Harford made an important point on the Today programme this morning. He says that about 10 per cent of voters report having voted tactically in previous elections. That might not sound like much but in most constituencies it is usually more than enough to determine the difference between coming first and coming third ...”

“... Front page of the Guardian: ‘Labour buoyed as Miliband edges Cameron in snap poll.’ Front page of the Telegraph: ‘Miliband flops as outsiders shine.’ The Mail: ‘Runaway jihadi’s father is Labour activist.’ The Sun, over photo of Miliband: ‘Oops! I just lost my election.’ ICM scored it as a narrow win for Miliband, YouGov for Sturgeon, Comres as a three-way tie between Cameron, Miliband and Farage, and Survation the same except with Farage a point behind ...”

“... I’m in New York for the 30th anniversary of the LRB’s American launch. While this fact is not rocking the foundations of our democracy, it does mean that I had to listen to the second leaders' debate over the radio. As everybody knows, radio can have a dramatically different impact from television. The famous example was the Nixon-Kennedy debate of 1960, won by Nixon on the radio and, decisively, by Kennedy on TV ...”

“... The BBC is encouraging its specialist reporters to blog, as a way of going into subjects at greater length and a greater degree of wonkery than they can manage in their broadcasting. The results are often interesting, especially on the economics side, where writers such as Stephanie Flanders and Robert Peston often allow themselves to get more technical than they can when they're appearing on any of the Beeb's various news outlets ...”

“... As far as I can tell, there’s very little actual news at all in the papers today. Yards of speculation and comment, but hardly any actual news. The only thing I can find is a Sunday Times report that the Lib Dems and Tories are discussing a ‘preferendum’, to set a menu of options for electoral reform before voters. This would happen during the next Parliament, as a precursor to a referendum on whichever specific reform the voters chose: Tory sources insisted their proposal was a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity for the Lib Dems ...”

“... The news that the bond markets were having conniptions about Greece, and also about Portugal and Spain, was a suitably gloomy frame for the final, economics-oriented debate. If the new government cocks things up, we’re en route for the IMF to come in. So it was time to hear some detail about the parties’ plans to prevent that. Instead there was the usual theatre, in which the three men picked on each other’s proposed spending cuts and made a meal of them, in a manner analogous to that of grooming chimpanzees ...”

“... Yesterday I mentioned some of the various bizarre, horse-tradey outcomes which might arise from a super-close electoral result. Here’s one of my favourites: that the Tories win either 323 or 324 seats. This result would leave them one or two short, because there are 650 seats so the winning line for a majority is 325. Except that because the five current (and presumably future) Sinn Féin MPs don’t take up their seats in Westminster, the winning line for a majority in the Commons is in fact 323 seats ...”