A combination of lack of inspiration, Christmas, and reading for and starting my new Open University course, (A210: Approaching Literature) has made me miss an entire two months of posting. Or almost: I posted about HST’s death. Oh well, a roundup here, and I’ll try to do better in future.

The other big time-sink for my evenings recently has been a dangerous addiction. We signed up for LoveFilm, an online DVD rental service, a few months ago, and soon started catching up on something that we had missed when it was first shown, and never wanted to join in the middle: The West Wing.

At the time of writing we have recently finished season four, and it has raised the bar so much on TV programmes that I could hardly be bothered to watch the excellent Desperate Housewives the other day. Actually, I think it may also be that the latter has gone on too long without having enough to reveal, but we’ll see.

I didn’t call you here to talk about TV programmes, though. Rather, I have a few links to post. First, if you were a fan of John Peel and you didn’t hear it on Radio 4‘s The Now Show — or if you did, and want a copy to keep — you should grab A Minute’s Noise, by Mitch Benn. It’s the perfect tribute; and in particular a lot more honest than those biographies that were knocked out in time for Chrstmas.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on them: I did glance over one of them in a bookshop and found it quite moving. But they came out so soon after his death that its hard not to use the word ‘unseemly’.

You should all be aware of WriteToThem, by the makers of FaxYourMP; a generalised way to contact your UK MP or other representative (local councillors, for example); and all done as a free software project intended to be easily-transferrable to other countries’ political systems.