(via Hattie at Comment Central)

I recently stated that this is my favourite piece of Obama merchandise.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to retract that statement, because I’ve just become aware of a greater achievement in this field.

Chia Obama (chia is apparently American for cress)

Here’s the advert:

And finally I must just quote this from Hattie’s post, because I think it’s great:

Ways in which Mr Cress Head and Mr Obama are similar:

Once universally adored, recently falling out of fashion.

Ways in which Mr Cress Head and Mr Obama are dissimilar:

Obama has legs. And a body. And (as far and we know) inedible hair.

His hair isn’t green, either.

This morning on Radio 4’s Today programme, they had a brief feature on the boardgame ‘Pank-A-Squith’, which went on sale in 1909 and is once more on sale today at Bonhams auctioneers in Knightsbridge.

The game itself is basically an enhanced version of snakes and ladders, but the winner is the first to reach universal suffrage, rather than just the top of the ladder. On the way, you get to chain yourself to Asquith’s railings, throw yourself in front of a horse and these other things from the official lot description:

Square 6 shows a suffragette breaking the windows of the Home Office, Square 16 has a notice: “Any player landing on this space must send a penny to Suffragette Funds”, Square 18 depicts Bow Street magistrate’s court, Square 32 represents Holloway Prison, and Square 43 to the forced feeding of Hunger Strikers.

The game was created to raise funds for the Suffragette movement, and is an early, if not the earliest, example of political fundraising through merchandise. Take a look at the board for yourself:

Compare this with the ubiquity of Obama merchandise: there are thousands of examples of this kind of thing all over the web. It serves its purpose, and some of the images are really funny. My favourite that I’ve come across is this:

It’s funny, but I think I prefer the boardgame, but it does seem that hilarious puns (pank-a-squith/yes we can opener) never get old.

Tom Ridge, Bush’s secretary for Homeland Security and former Governor of Pennsylvania, currently promoting his book in New York, admitted to the New York Post that he and his aides made sure not to select his ties in colours that could be linked to the colour-coded threat level.

He said that “all I wanted was to make sure I didn’t wear an orange or red one.” This has set me thinking about the role of the tie in politics. This extremely perceptive analysis on the subject from the Belfast Newletter points out that politicians, if not voters, seem to think that the colour of a tie makes some kind of statement. And this is the case – as a man in a suit, the one opportunity for the overt display of one’s preferences comes in the choice of tie. Do you, predictably, go for the colour associated with your party? Or, less predictably, with the colour of your opponent’s party? Or with a neutral shade? Or with a daring ‘comedy’ offering? On a slow news day, this kind of thing is all we’ll read about. But is anyone going to associate the colour of a tie with a potentially elevated threat level? Yes. Journalists are.

Of course, this is a dilemma only faced by male politicians. Women (see the reaction to Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin for examples) are judged on all aspects of their apparel, not just what they choose to knot around their necks. We know that image is everything, so why not make it easy for the journos to interpret and wear something like this:

No one could be in any doubt as to where you stand. It’s now my dearest wish to see Newt Gingrich in one of these.

Incidentally, this came from a site called ‘tackyobamastuff.com‘. If you want to buy a pair of Obama briefs, or some Obama-head Russian dolls, this is place.

On ITV1’s Loose Women recently, panelist Lynda Bellingham called for a revolution against people like Gordon Brown and Sir Fred Goodwin who are ruining our economy and ‘walking rough-shod over us’:

(I lifted this from Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe. I recommend it very highly.)

Fred Goodwin’s house was attacked yesterday. I’ve no idea how much influence Lynda Bellingham has over the anti-capitalist movement that claimed responsibility for the attack – could this be the beginning of a Loose Women-lead revolution?

Lots of people have expressed disgust at the new Facebook layout, and for a variety of reasons. Some feel it’s a shameless rip-off of twitter, others just think it’s impractical and irritating. Some of these complaints are quite funny. I found this comment on one blog post on this topic:

I just “became a fan” of you on Facebook. But I’ll tell you what I’m not a fan of… The new Facebook layout. It can go swallow some rat poison. IMHO. Of course, I’ve been on Facebook since you used to have to receive an invite from someone else to even be on the thing. So, I guess I’m sort of one-sided on the deal and am un-accepting of the new… But, I don’t have much of choice other than quit using. Naaaaaaah.

Actually, the best response I’ve seen has come from twitter. Someone called Mokokoma commented that “i love the way i hate the new facebook layout – it saves me a lot of time + bandwidth.”

Hilarious. But there’s now a much more serious reason to consider giving social networking sites a miss altogether: the government has plans to try and bring them under the remit of their “intercept modernisation programme” which is already supposed to collate information about email and internet usage.

This has been in the pipeline for a long time; the EU Data Retention Directive which came into being following the June 2005 bombings in London has prompted proposals of this kind for the purposes of monitoring potentially terrorist activity.

Since use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace has rocketed in the past year or so, the Home Office have now decided to include them in the database’s remit.

However you feel about civil liberties and even without getting into the whole ends versus means discussion, it is still slightly strange to think that the government can know things about your electronic correspondence that you didn’t actively tell them. Strange, and worrying.

If it’s any comfort, the database won’t actually store the contents of your messages. Just when and to whom you send them.

That’s acceptable, right?

Take a look at the ‘most read’ articles at TimesOnline (it’s the white box over on the right of the page).

Topping the list is this article, about the identity of ‘The Stig’ from Top Gear.

Below that, is this – surely the most important and interesting thing happening right now in the world?

And yet, there are more people (or Times-readers, rather – there’s a difference) who want to read about Top Gear than the Inauguration.

Baffling. But it does provide a new perspective…

UPDATE: Now Michelle Obama’s dress is the most important thing to Times-readers. That’s more like it.

Photo: Callie Shell for Time

Barack and Michelle Obama eating breakfast in a diner in Pittsburgh on the morning of the Pennsylvania primary.

I find this picture very funny, and also very scary.

It’s funny to imagine the other customers in that diner on that morning — did they try to carry on eating as if they are accustomed to look over their morning paper to find the world’s media tucking into the bacon, or did they openly reveal their excitement that a piece of political history was eating pancakes just a few feet away? Or perhaps they were too busy trying to conceal their intense annoyance that the cameras weren’t pointed at them. Secretly, I think we’re all just a little bit jealous of Obama.

It’s terrifying to try and think yourself into his place: every moment of the next four (or eight, hopefully) years will be like this. Instead of faces around him, there will be the unforgiving glint of a thousand lenses.

Only 7 days to go.