Speaking of the election, here's a thing.

My MP is Glenda Jackson in Hampstead and Highgate.

Now, I probably would like to vote Green, as I can't believe that global warming/carbon emissions/road pricing/energy/etc is not top of every single election agenda. Who will care about the NHS and education when we are all knee deep in an artic winter and have run out of fuel or it cost £100/gallon?

Of course, some say I'm just glass-half-empty/expect the worst. Some may be right.

So my Properly Green Friend (PGF) used to be a road protestor and knows his stuff, and he tells me the green party haven't been up to much since Jonathan Porrit left in the early nineties. I believe him. Glenda has a stonking majority, so I don't know whether a tactical vote (I'd so like to teach Tony a lesson) will help, and frankly, I can't bring myself to vote Tory on their current immigration platform (of which more later), so I decided to find out Glenda's record on the green stuff.

I check out online, and find nothing special, try Camden town hall who tell me to call Westmister, so I call the Houses of Parliament, and they - quite rightly - tell me she's no longer an MP, but give me a local constituency number. It's voicemail, and I leave a message to say I'm interested to find out if there are any local hustings, and I leave my number. This was Friday a couple of weeks back, just after Parliament had been dissolved, about 1.45.

At 2.15 my phone rings.

"Hello, may I speak to Sasha F____, this is Glenda Jackson, with information about hustings."

Glenda Jackson returned my call. Hell, with a 27,000 majority, who wouldn't chase every vote?

"Hi Glenda," I respond, "thanks for calling me back. I was really interested to know your views on a couple of issues, so seeing as you're on the phone, can we just talk?"

Glenda trots out Labour received wisdom on Kyoto and climate change (all front, no behind) but does the business. She says she can "print out their green stuff" and post it to me; I suggest she emails it, to save some trees. She asks me for my web address. I say does she mean email? She says she's not very technical (like, yeah?) and as I tell her my address, she says "is that all lower case?"

Yeah, Glenda, all lower case.

Now this isn't fair, because she did everything I asked, and charmingly, but I asked her one more thing.

"Glenda, I wondered if you have a weblog?"

"What's a weblog?"

"A blog, an online diary, of your thoughts and stuff." I hate saying online diary, but when someone doesn't get it...

I sidetracked by telling her I'd found a fake blog and she really didn't understand me and told me that of course she has a website on that internet thang.

So I'm impressed she called me back, but we need to get her to one of those LearnDirect internet classes. This is the online era, and you want my vote. Work for it, baby.

I don't usually even read indymedia, and probably wouldn't link to it, but a buddy (J) sent me this, and I googled around for it... island in the sun // dj moniker election special.

As a person who's just returned from Cheadle, the UK's most marginal seat, the election is surely on my mind.

JibJab's "Matzah!"... this is how I feel.

My friend S is in town from NY and all I can do is meet her for a drink of water.

However, the allegedly simplicity of pesach is doing me good.

Another weird google maps thought.

Say you google-map sashinka.

Go on.

Well, what you find out is

that I went to the Dolphin in Euston in 2002 to go to some geek event... so it's linked from XCom to Haddock to me...

that I'd like to go to Dennis Severs House...

and that I'm involved in Limmud...

So all these things are about googlejuice. I've linked hundreds/thousands of sites in my time, but these are the ones with the most linkly-love and that's what makes them google map results.

I'm guessing.

And I'm slightly nervous.

I've tried it on a few famous/online types, and I don't want to mess with their privacy, but you can find out a lot about people from this. A lot.

You can run (or in my case, not) but you can't hide.

And I wrote Urban Junkies a coupla weeks back.

I wrote Urban Junkies yesterday.

So I've pesadickied my kitchen (aside, when I was a kid, I thought there were a few people my family knew, called Pesach Dick and Yomtov Dick), bought more chopped fried fish balls and cheese variants than I really need to, (sub-contracted) the cleaning od my house from top to bottom, and valetted my car.

I am spiritually cleansed, clearly.

And I've covered all my work surfaces with heavy-duty kitchen foil.

I followed Jonny Cohen (which one, you ask?) around a series of kosher shops in Golders Green, Tescos, the toothbrush section. We are leading parallel lives, except mine is in Kilburn and his is in Finchley.

I believe Pesach is about simplicity: it's more about not eating cake and remembering the Exodus (from Egypt, since you ask) than about making seventeen different kinds of potato-based faux cakes.

So I have four place settings of cheap crockery, one pan, and two serving dishes. It's kinda nice. And I've resolved not to eat cake. And go easy on the matzah. Because, as we all know, it's not exactly good for your gederim.

But this is the best: ShaBot's Seda' Club.

Peace, man.

The word on the street (get that pun?) is that google maps is here in the UK and multimap are dead in the water. And streetmap. And whoever.

But I'm feeling like it's still in betatest. Functionality is still a little, er, shit. I fancied sushi in W1 tomorrow, and typed sushi wigmore street. I know, Kurt Geiger is the perfect place for sushi. Or maybe Nordic Interiors or Amplivox and Ultratone?

Guess that algorithm needs a little work, fellas.

Here's a little pre-Paschal fun: I'm number one on google for COCONUT PYRAMID.

It's a cliché-driven election, dontcha know. Checkout Clichéwatch.

And, I can't even delete comments spam.

All my technology hates me.

I am in technical melt down.

I have a stuck message in my mobile phone outbox that leaves an annoying icon and means I can't send texts. I have not received any of the six simcard updates my provider tells me they have sent, but I have been on hold for like two hours

I can no longer synchronise my palm and outlook so I am living in two parallel universes

My IMAP is broken in a way I don't quite get, but it's terribly tempermental

The Institute for Backup Trauma. John Cleese at his best.

Nike are disclosing their supply chain list, in an effort to jumpstart disclosure in the industry. So, no pressure from the anti-globabalisation brand haters, then.

And we'll all be sure to nip down to Davenport Knitwear plc in Hinckley, Leicestershire to check there's no slave labour going on. Don't want to devalue the fight, just wonder why they're doing business with one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies, if it's all about squashing suppliers.

While I don't really believe in writer's block, I'm getting increasingly interested in the whole Lifehack Movement.

Remind me to write about my personal hacks (start with writing a list. Put write list at the top of the list. Cross it out when you've finished writing your list. See, you've done x% of your tasks).

I never knew that Frankie McCourt's brother Malachi wrote a book too:A Monk Swimming.

Like me, you probably heard the frankly barking debate on this morning's Today Programme about One Book For Stevenage - where Stevenage, a small town in Hertfordhsire is encouraging everyone in the town to read the same book, to increase literacy. All well and good, what's barking is that - after rejecting Nick Hornby - the book chosen is Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn, set in a mythical land resembling medieval Japan. So magical realism wins the day.

I'm going to start One Book For Kilburn, and it's going to be Angela's Ashes.

This is a really sad day: the final demise of MG Rover, the last British car manufacturer in the UK.

I know that the UK is a great place to make cars, and lots of overseas manufacturers tak advantage of that, but I'm biased. I drove an MGF (British racing green, of course) for nearly ten years, selling it last year when my environmental genes got the better of me.

I never get jingoistic - I didn't care about the Falklands, or the Empire, or anything else British - but I had immense enjoyment driving a car that was a classic of British design (even if the engineering wasn't quite up to scratch). I know all the arguments about how we can't maintain a competitive manufacturing base anymore, and we're a service (read: call centre) economy, and I don't even think the Government should necessarily have bailed them out, but I just fee sad. It's an ending. Endings are always sad.