Slightly delayed, due to industrial action by my digital camera, here are two of the defining images of my trip to Slovenia. Firstly, if anyone can help me deduce what on EARTH this warning sign, found by the riverbank in Maribor, might possibly mean, then I’d be eternally in your debt:

And secondly, a “smoking cubicle” at Ljubljana Airport. It’s a glass construction with an extractor fan at the top, wherein evil smokers - no more than four, mind - can stand and practice their ghastly craven habit whilst the clean people outside point and laugh - here evidenced by SJulk1 and myself. SJulk and I were having quite a chuckle at first until a third smoker - a gruff, semi-bearded intangibly-threatening Slovenian hard-nut - joined the party, forcing us to shuffle nervously into a corner and smoke much faster. It’s possibly the most unappealing booth since Cherie.

Just read something in the local paper about Asperger’s Syndrome causing “difficulties in social interaction” and “restricted, stereotyped interests”. Now, I’ll freely admit that it’s not my favourite vegetable in the world, but the worst it ever did to me was make my wee smell a bit funny…

After months of intertia from me, and after a flood of literally 2 or 3 inquiring comments from you since the idea was first mooted 18 months ago, it’s time for the Realoplane to take off!

I suggest a typical drinksy / mealy affair in central London on a Friday evening; either 23/5 or 30/5. This will hopefully allow less workshy types to make it after their suit-and-tie office antics without impinging too much on the weekend.

Obviously, attendance is mandatory for all UK readers - TM, LZ, Pal / Susan, SJulk1, Prof, Chez, Harry, JonR, beebebebbebeebebe and anyone I’ve who’s ever visited the site in passing by mistake will all be there - and I’m sure that our US / Japano-Canadian contingent will be booking time off and round-the-world flights within minutes of reading this.

More realistically - if you could let me know yes / no / which date you’d prefer by means of a post or an e-mail, that’d be great. And LZ - if you could go into some detail as to the nature of the shorts / skimpy towel combo you’ll be wearing in order to stimulate a bit of interest at this early stage, that’d help too.

So, Londoners have elected Boris “BJ” Johnson as mayor, eh? Let’s hope he doesn’t blow the job (guffaw!) Actually, I’m disappointed that the Tories should attempt to reduce elections for a reasonably powerful office to the status of a comedy-value contest, and even more so that so many Londoners fell for it. Still, since I don’t live there any more, ultimately I don’t care if they elect Anne Widdecombe, Paul Merton, Brian Blessed or any of Johnson’s other colleagues from “Have I Got News for You”.

Londoners might, however, be concerned as to the new administration’s management of the capital’s finances when they hear how careless the new mayor is with his own security. Regular site contributor and tireless critic of my editorship SJulk1 told me recently about the time he found himself queueing at a ticket machine in Waterloo Station behind Mr Johnson, who was on his way to watch an England rugby game at Twickenham. BoJo was apparently slow and inept in extremis with the automated machine, giving it all the expected “oh, piffle and balderdash, bloody hellfire…. we didn’t have to put up with this in the days of the Empire, what what what” (etc). His son, squirming with embarrasment, told his dad to hurry up and enter his PIN details on the keypad, whereupon Boris brushed back his fringe, took a step away to enable as much daylight as possible onto the machine, and in clear sight of SJulk1 (and at least half the other queue-dwellers), slowly and deliberately keyed in his PIN whilst saying the numbers to himself sotto voce (or as sotto voce as an albino human walrus can manage).

As a result, we know what Boris’s PIN is (we think). Any nefarious types (Albanian mafia, Private Eye satirists etc) who might want to profit from this info - by all means e-mail me your best offers, eBay stylee. Alternatively, if anyone in Boris’s coterie of racist lunch-club buffoons and opportunistic right-wing-press immigrant-bashers is reading this - a year’s supply of Oyster buys my silence. (Of the travelcard variety, rather than what’s on your Ascot brunch menu).

Some of our more assiduous readers may have noticed (or not) that the site’s been down for most of the last 24 hours. Apparently, our hosting company was to blame. But Technical Monkey has done the relevant spanking and, much like Robbie Williams’s agent on the eve of Gary Barlow’s autobiography release, will try and give fair warning if there’s any prospect of an impending massive outage.

Apologies also for my laziness since my return from my bank holiday boot fair bonanza; however, as soon as the entire Very Poor Being-Arsed Department stops lazing around in the sunshine, I can promise you a fairly tedious tableau of the tawdry world of said boot fairs - I can promise you long-awaited details of the realoplane meet - AND I can promise you EXCLUSIVE revelations into new London mayor Boris Johnson’s financial affairs. Really.

I’m setting off for the bright lights of Croydon in a few minutes to stay with my internet-free sister over the weekend, so will be blogless (as well as godless) until Monday evening. But please feel free to keep setting the world to rights in my absence. Hope you have a more enjoyable bank holiday than Gordon Brown will…

There’s been one helluva hullaballoo about a pic of Miley Cyrus (daughter of Achy Breaky fart Billy Ray, and star of “Hannah Montana”, a Disney programme which obviously I haven’t seen, but which is doing huge business) which appeared in “Vanity Fair”. The picture, showing 15-year-old Miley with dishevelled hair wrapped in a towel which shows most of her back, was taken by Queen-irritator Annie Liebowitz. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it can be found here.

Conservative moms in the States have predictably gone apeshit, calling it “child pornography” - Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph makes a half-arsed attempt to jump on the bandwagon without ever really sounding as if she means it.

But if this is child pornography, then it’s absolutely rife in every corner of every magazine and shop in the world, and it’s bankrolled / actively encouraged by Disney and thousands of other “wholesome” (and less wholesome) business interests. Not only do many of these companies use images of adults who look like children (Kate Moss and other models) to peddle products and aspirations to adults, their marketing men are also constantly aiming to sexualise girls as young as 7 or 8, because if they’re encouraged to want to look a certain way (i.e. like older role models), they’ll want to buy more stuff. Tesco, for instance, sell a padded bra for 7-year-olds .

Furthermore, if you google images of “Miley Cyrus”, you’ll see hundreds of pics of her sporting cleavage, wearing a micro-skirt and wearing wodges of make-up / hair product; all before the age of 16. Germaine Greer analyzes the whole thing far than I could in The Guardian.

Child pornography this pic certainly ain’t; nonetheless, Cyrus has since judiciously “apologised”. However, I suspect that her people knew EXACTLY what they were doing - this marks the start of her, erm, “adult” career, and she’s now known to hundreds of thousands of people like you and me who hadn’t previously heard of her. It’s a marketing masterstroke.

As for the right-wing righteous types who are so indignant - maybe they think she’d look more appropriate in a hijab?

Confirmation from my mobile phone yesterday of what football-haters have known for years: if you type in “footie”, it comes up predictively as “ennui”, before giving up entirely. With the upcoming Champions League final likely to involve Chelsea and Man U (like last year’s catatonic FA Cup final), I fear that the prediction may be all too accurate.

It’s a quiet Saturday night, and I’ve just finished watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. (For those who haven’t had the, erm, pleasure, it’s a John Hughes teen cult film from 1986 or so. Hughes also did “Pretty in Pink” and “The Breakfast Club”, both of which I’ve seen, so I was slightly curious.)

Frankly, it was a bizarre experience. I know that teen tastes are more changeable than most with the passage of time, but “Ferris” just left me completely nonplussed. It isn’t tragic or funny. There’s precious little plot (boy, best friend and girlfriend take the day off school and muck about, teacher tries to catch them but fails, and that’s literally it) and the characterization is non-existent (Ferris is lucky - which is a circumstance, not a character trait - his friend is uptight, and his sister’s angry at his good fortune, and that’s literally it). The acting is particularly abysmal - especially from Mia Sara, who plays Ferris’s girlfriend. She delivers her lines deadpan and stares vaguely into the middle distance throughout - she could be contemplating love, homework, the possibility of interplanetary space travel or haemmorhoids for all we know.

Weirdest of all is the complete lack of any moral compass or message - Ferris, who has rich parents and friends, stands for absolutely nothing apart from “taking it easy”; he’s not even rebelling against anything. All he does is skip school, go to a museum, have lunch in a fancy restaurant, lounge around in a hot tub and sing a couple of karaoke numbers at a parade, then get back in time for tea. He doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs, and he fully intends to graduate and go to college. His actions have no consequences (and we’re not shown what becomes of his hapless friend who has trashed his dad’s priceless Ferrari) - but more importantly, they don’t seem to have any purpose either; nothing is achieved, none of the characters learn anything. And if the message is supposed to be “par-taaay”, then frankly I think I’d have more fun at a meeting of the Folkestone and District Table-Tennis Committee than Ferris manages on his “Day Off”.

The film was reasonably successful (Stateside at least), and John Hughes retains some cachet as a “cult” director, albeit very much of his time; I’m interested to know what our American correspondents made of it. Am I missing something deep, or is it just completely vapid?

Radio 5 Live has been “going big” in the last hour or so on the fact that over 100 MPs have admitted to employing their family members “at the taxpayer’s expense” (as R5 had it, obviously with frequent references to disgraced MP Derek Conway).

Shock, horror? Well, not reeeely - surely it’s the most natural thing in the world for someone in that kind of distance-managed, multi-tasky job to share the burden with their partner / family. I’m nowhere near as pressed as an MP, but you can be certain that as soon as my folks move back from Italy, I’ll have them doing my menial eBay stuff so I can concentrate on some serious sleeping.

Let’s be clear - MPs employing family members is 100% legal, and a long-standing tradition. As long as they haven’t got their snouts in the trough like Conway (and, I daresay, sundry other Tories), I can’t see that our elected representatives are doing anything wrong by employing family, or even friends, to help out (meaningfully, of course). Your nearest and dearest are obvious candidates when your work requires trustworthiness from colleagues.

MPs do a very demanding job for not all that much money, and it’s really dumb of the BBC to fuel a “Daily Mail”-style bonfire of ill-informed righteous indignation against the whole political system by claiming this as some kind of “revelation” of “malpractice”. You could almost suspect that the Beeb is exacting a protracted revenge on Labour for the whole Greg Dyke / Hutton thing. Shame on you, Auntie.