I've had the decoraters in.

Some of the more observant amongst you may have noticed that the background has changed from brilliant white to a sort of pale blue. There's no great political reason for this it's just of got one of those new LCD monitors which makes all the colours brighter and sharper. So bright in fact that it was making my eyes hurt while proof-reading. I tried a range of colours including various shades of yellow, green and pink before I settled on the blue because it seemed to be the least headache inducing. Of course the new background does make the text, the banners and the headers look a bit crap so there may be some more tweaking and fine tuning if I can be bothered.

In other inconsequential news the curse of St Valentine means that over the last couple of days I've seen my birthday, an aunts birthday and my father's birthday. Due to everybodies diary commitments and me being more then a little underwhelmed by the whole business it was planned to have a very small celebration next week. Sadly things didn't quite happen that way so I've been forced to pretend I'm massively enjoying myself and have to look forward to going through it all again next week. To make matter worse my dad's got a massive cold he's decided to treat by taking a cocktail of drugs making him even more detached from reality then usual. This has caused conversations along the lines of;

Q."Are we going to go shopping today?"

A."I've just washed the floor."

The big story of the day is that as all of last week's stories were coming to the public attention the Saudis decided to forgo the protection of the US Navy and sail one of their oil tankers through pirate infested waters off the coast of Somalia. Funnily enough the $100million of oil caught the pirates attention and they seized the ship causing statements like "Pirates hijack worlds largest tanker!" and "British Crew on hijacked ship safe!". All this shouldn't come as much of a surprise after the Saudis are certainly stakeholders in this whole Al-Qeda/ war on terror/Iraq/Afghanistan business but sadly it does mean MI6 are going to have to go and play with the big boys again. The story does warrant a special mention of this guy who way back in the 1990's noticed that there was a correlation between a decrease in the number of pirates and an increase in global temperature. Now with global temperatures falling and incidents of piracy increasing I think it's time he received a massive research grant because he's clearly light years ahead of his time.