Blog day afternoon

> Read Anthony Cox's post on the polio epidemic now threatening to spread to Darfur.

> Jeremy asks that you update your links to Who Knew? with the new Who Knew? URL - http://www.whoknew.us

> Is the Socialist Party of Great Britain turning into a mass party? It's just a thought based on the fact that my acquaintance with SPGB bloggers has suddenly doubled. There was already the 'so ultra-left even Pannekoek's own mother wouldn't recognise it' Reasons to be Impossible; now there's also the 'out of step, out of time and out of breath' Inveresk Street Ingrate. Not one of Mel's ten albums would make it into my own top 10, but I do agree with his judgement on The Stone Roses making number one in that Observer poll: 'a good album but it is not even in the top twenty in a just world'. I've been known to say it myself, as my daughter Jenny will confirm.

> Being a disputatious sort of guy, Chris Young has taken issue with one of my posts. Again. This time he's outdone himself though, responding to one post with two. It's the towel controversy. First Chris makes an argument of his own against me - if argument it can be called, appealing as it blindly does to pleasure, and disparaging my view as perverse - and then he digs up a Socratic dialogue on the subject, dating back some years. Discerning readers will note that neither Chris nor Socrates even addresses my central argument, much less the telling military analogies which I deployed.