I was lucky enough to see Mark Thomas perform live last night. For those who haven’t heard of Mark, he is part investigative journalist, part comedian and part campaigner.

Mark’s research and knowledge on things he investigates upon is tremendous.  For example, the SOCPA legislation which includes provisions to prevents demonstration near Parliament without a license – a crazy law that was passed ostensibly to help protect parliament from terrorism, like a terrorist would worry about small legal issues as that. The definition of demonstration means that for one or more people to demonstrate about anything requires a license to be issued by the Police. So Mark, related how he addressed this organising individual demonstrations on subjects like ‘the decline of surrealism’ and going as far as arranging for several hundred people to demonstrate together, all demonstrating for their own thing on the same day – creating hilarious results.  For more about this see Mark’s website here.

Then there is the question is celebrating Guy Fawkes night, actually an act of glorifying terrorism now?  If so, how many years will you get sent down for if you wave a sparkler about?

Although these things may not sound very funny, Mark’s humour comes from relating back the characters that he comes across, on his travels and the juxtapositions of some of the situations he finds himself in when investigating or trying to highlight issues.

The tour in part is to help promote his new book about the arms trade and the extent that they will go to circumvent national and international legislation.  I got an autographed copy of the book last night and started reading, initial impression is that it is as both entertaining and informative as his live show – so would recommend it, even if you don’t agree with his views.

The Times have a review of an earlier performance in the tour here.

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originally uploaded by Phil & Catherine Wilkins.

We have been fortunate enough to have won a pair of tickets to see the Scissor Sisters as part of their Red Square concert in Trafalgar Square, London. I got to try my Sony Ericsson K800i phone camera in anger for the first time, and this is one of the results (a complete set is on our Flickr site http://photos.mp3monster.org)

The Guerrilla Artists Banksy is getting a lot of press at the moment, with another article on the BeeB news site.  I found it rather amusing that in the BBC article some of the people interviewed couldn’t get their head around some of his simple messages.

If you’d like to see more interesting work, then check out his website here.

There seems to be a rising number of cases of people trying to do something (illegal) about speed cameras. The cases that I’ve seen have actually resulted in the individual(s) end up being hurt or prosecuted for more serious crimes and receiving greater punchishment as a result. So I’d like to suggest a new form of Darwin award for motorists where nominees end up beig prosecuted for more serious crimes as a result of trying to avoid speeding charges.

Here are my first nominees:

• Manchester Bomber (story here)
• Caught in the Act (story here)

Feel free to post links to more nominees in the blog comments 🙂

The BBC have an amusing article on their news site.  It appears that somone has tampered copies of her album replacing the artwork and CD with their own take on her work.  More here.