Duty on cider is to rise at 10% above the rate of inflation - The Wurzels are apparently furious, and intend to lobby hard for a combine harvester scrappage scheme to compensate.

Last week I was forced, by dint of my continued reluctant dependence on BBC’s news and sports channel Radio 5 Live**, to listen to much of the Cheltenham racing festival.

One of the races was rather amusingly called the “Ryanair Chase”, sponsored by everyone’s favourite airline. I don’t know a lot about horse-racing, but judging by the name of the event, I assume a) that although it’s part of the Chelteham festival, the race is actually run at another course 50 miles or more away (like, say, “Cheltenham Wincanton”), b) that instead of having an orderly start, the jockeys just gather around where they think the race will happen half an hour beforehand, jostling for position and bitterly regretting the £20 they spent on “priority horse-mounting”, c) that jockeys are charged £25 for every kilo they’re overweight, d) that owners pay a surcharge of £1 every time their horse takes a dump, e) that spectators, for the duration of the race, are denied the racecourse’s normal refreshments facilities and instead have to pay £3.95 (plus £2.50 credit card fee) for a lukewarm cup-a-soup, and f) that if any of the jockeys fall off during the race, they somehow make their way to a big “lost jockeys” warehouse on the outskirts of Dublin and are never heard of again…. (etc…)

(* - I’m honour-bound to offer VP points when a title pun is as oblique - OK, as shit - as this. So 10 aforementioned bijou pointettes to anyone who can name the famous female co-writer of the song I’m referencing).

(** being nearly 40, vegetarian and fairly dull, I should of course be listening to Radio 4, or ideally sitting in silence.)

No, nothing to do with the tune Henry VIII might have composed had he been born with a lisp; this is a frankly bizarre article which appeared in the papers this morning - a piece of pseudo-scientific excreta which looks as if it were destined for the Daily Mail, but got lost on the way and somehow ended up in The Guardian.

The thrust, for anyone too idle to click through, is that a “study” has proved that consumers who buy “green” products are “more likely to cheat and steal”, because they feel entitled to do so through something which the report’s authors call “compensatory ethics”. This numb-nutted accusation seemed like the crudest sort of headline-grabbing to me, but it was left to someone who’s actually BOTHERED TO READ the report to clear things up in the comments section -

“The study didn’t track down ‘green consumers’ and measure their morals. It took 95 participants - students doing this for credit - and assigned them randomly to spend hypothetical money in either a green or ‘conventional’ shop. The ‘green consumers’ were those participants assigned to the green shop.”

So the study’s evidence, running to an impressive TEN AND A BIT painstaking-research-tastic pages based on the behaviour of a few dozen uninterested students paid $5 (Canadian), obviously leads to the conclusion that everyone who ever bought a pack of recycled bog-roll spends their spare time dreaming up Ponzi schemes to rip off war veterans and each other’s grandmothers.

But what REALLY worries me, quite apart from the utter lack of science on display, is that when you scroll down to the comments section, it appears “green” has joined “liberal” as a term of abuse in the minds of some fairly intelligent people. This is to be expected in America where good news is harder to come by (and where most people are fat and thick); however, it seems that many over here, even the readers of august publications like the Times and the Telegraph, are happy to take their lead from the likes of Glenn Beck and to dog-whistle-name-call on the basis that “green” is perforce bad. Do they all REALLY think that having no care whatsoever for the world around us a sensible course of action? Do a couple of exaggerated claims on Himalayan glacier melting REALLY prove that the environment is nothing more than a figment of some lefty-liberal-elf-and-safety-Marxist-Leninist’s conspiratorial imagination? (Sigh…)

Blog writer experiencing a growing sense of desperation to break the duck of a fortnight of bone-idle post-free inactivity? It can only mean one thing; two brand new COSPJs for you lucky, lucky people…

Q - What did J Robert Oppenheimer say when he lost his hearing aid?
A - “Now I am become Deaf”.

Q - What do you call a read-only computer document patented by Adobe Systems which shows an unhealthy interest in younger computer documents?
A - A PDF-file.

Terrible (if expected) news this morning, with the BBC confirming that it’s pandering to the bullying - sorry, lobbying of Rupert Murdoch and his paid underlings in the Tory party, and making drastic cuts. The most notable casualties will be 6 Music and the Asian Network.

To be fair, the response of many people, even fans of the BBC, has been along the lines of “You can’t cut 6 Music! You should cut (X) instead” - X being something they don’t particularly like, be it 5 Live because they’re not into sport, Radio 3 because they’re not into classical music, or Top Gear because they’re not into watching the tragic results of a mad scientist’s experiment 50-odd years ago to cross-breed a human being with an arsehole.

So the perception that BBC expenditure needs to be cut is pretty pervasive, even amongst its allies; however, I think that ditching entire channels is a terrible shame, unless they’re clearly total rubbish, which 6 Music clearly isn’t (I know nothing about the Asian Network). Money should be saved elsewhere - trimming bureaucracy / fewer expensive imported programmes / reduction in output (e.g. turning some channels off at night).

Cutting whole channels will be like a red rag to the bull(shitters) in the red-top rags: soon they’ll be after more. Modern-day Whitehouses at the Sun and Mail will complain that BBC3 is “too sweary”, Times readers will moan that BBC4 is “too intelligent” etc, and soon the corporation will find itself having to justify its existence on a channel-by-channel basis.

The BBC may not be perfect, but it’s still excellent value for money. The overwhelming majority who love it should be careful of complacency; Murdoch has his eyes on forcing its sale (bit by bit if necessary) or dismantling it altogether, and he has a lot of friends in what is likely to be our next government. Killing off 6 Music and the Asian Network sets a dangerous precedent.