After several months and an embarrrassing number of comments sometimes from strangers about the absence of a faculty page for me, I’ve finally entered the 21st century with a webpage of my own. It’s here. It contains a lot of the normal information, a page with links to some papers on the web (all but one of them by me), and a page with links to various of my journalistic pieces as well as my favourite CT pieces (again of my own). Each page has a not-completely-out-of-date photo of me (that was my wife’s idea, she being responsible for most of the layout and design). I can’t imagine I’ll update it for a while, but if anyone has useful suggestions (which have to be implementable by a Luddite with limited command of Dreamweaver) go ahead…

Shopping with a 5-year old on one arm, 2-year old on the other, saw a sale VCD of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, snagged it (don’t ask with what appendage). When we got home I was surprised to discover it was a minimal 1992 production, with Walter Matthau narrating. Walter Matthau as Cindy Lou Who is a hoot. Animation-wise, it’s just barely. Mostly just shots of the original Seuss illustrations with eyes that roll and horns that toot and a cut-out grinch who creeps along to a snow-crunching sound. (But done tastefully and appreciatively, as cut-out grinches go.) It comes packaged with a similarly minimal “If I Ran The Zoo” narrated by some kid who does sound as though he gets Gerald McGrew’s motivation. I sort of like this style. Camera-crawls over a kid’s book, with good voice-over. There’s a lot to love in the plain old Seuss drawings. Of course, it’s a bit hard to keep Karloff out of the back of your head. But I think my scaredy 5-year old and 2-year old might not be quite ready for the classic 1966 version – superior though it unquestionably is. Walter Matthau completists can get this strange version from Amazon. (I mean if you are that sort of person, you’ve already watched A New Leaf to death and are ready to turn over a new leaf. If they’d gotten Elaine May to be Cindy, that would have been funny.)

People interested in the Litvinenko affair should take a look at today’s Guardian/Observer. First off, there’s an extraordinary photograph of Litvinenko taken to celebrate his citizenship of the UK. He’s standing in front of the Union Jack, wearing a Scottish bonnet, and wielding Chechen swords and KGB gauntlets. The story is about Litvinenko’s alleged intent to use KGB/FSB documents about Yukos to blackmail unnamed individuals, working with a US-based ex-KGB and associate of Berezovsky. This information is courtesy of a Russian graduate student at the University of Westminster.

And the Italian angle is developing, via UKIP MEP, Gerard Batten, who says Litvinenko told him that ‘Sokolov’, a 1970s Russian agent, “was the key link between senior Italian politicians and the KGB.”

Either the plot is thickening or this story has been news-free just long enough for the disinformation to begin.