The Mayor of Liverpool announced that there would a extraordinary 5 minute silence held across the city tomorrow at 12 noon. A special religious service will be held at the Anglican Cathedral and the two remaining Beatles will reunite and record a special version of ‘(Please) Let It Be (disallowed)’. Robbie Fowler will indicate the start and end of the silence by holding up five fingers. This is the number of European Cups that Robbie Fowler has watched Liverpool win on TV. ...

Yesterday, I had a credit card transaction rejected which is always a little embarrassing. Thankfully, this was over the phone and not in a shop where embarrassed people would quickly avert their gaze, thinking ‘Poor man, he’s probably lost his job. Just look at his clothes’. Normally, such rejections happen because the card number or expiry date was incorrectly transcribed and are quickly resolved - ‘No I said 6079 at the end’. ...

Mark Burgess once introduced ‘Here Today’ with these words. I just read on The Chameleons message board that Mancunian musician, Bryan Glancy, died at the weekend. I didn’t know Bryan Glancy. I never met Bryan Glancy. I just happened to see him supporting The Chameleons in Camden back in November 2002. Just very sad for his friends and family to think of another young person gone before his time. Elsewhere, four young people are convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for kicking a man to death in a random attack on London’s South Bank. ...

Amazing news - whales have feelings and can understand humans. ‘How a wave of human compassion will have comforted the whale in his final hours’ ‘He’d have known we’re trying to help but it couldn’t save him’ But what was really amusing about the bottlenose whale stranded in the River Thames story was that a friend recently returned from a holiday in Canada where he went whale watching. He was unlucky and saw absolutely nothing apart in a whole day apart from the bobbing waves. He then returns home to London to find one sitting on his doorstep.

GreatNews, in fact. I just discovered this RSS reader which is a Windows desktop RSS reader but can synchronise with Bloglines for Web based access. GreatNews is fast, has a clean logical interface, with an integrated browser, highly configurable (2 or 3 pane display), supports newspaper style for reading groups, drag’n’drop for organising folders, auto feed discovery and perhaps most importantly, displays as much content as possible (no ads), enabling you to quickly focus on what is of interest. ...