It’s reported that Captain Pickard, or, in real life, Patrick Stewart, is to be knighted in the New Year honours list. I can only agree, and say “make it so”. A very varied and talented actor, he is.

In other news, we are hearing more confirmation that Schumacher is close to an F1 return with the Mercedes team – though nothing yet from the man himself, or the team. I’m in two minds about this return. I wouldn’t want it to be a damp squib, because he left on a high, but nor would I relish the return to his utter dominance. A good scrap would be interesting.

Loads of peeps were trapped in the Channel Tunnel last night, after freezing temperatures on both sides of the tunnel contributed to a mass break-down of the trains. It appears that on-board staff had not been properly trained in what to do, which is not great. Think everyone is out now, but they were stuck for some time. Not great at all.

Lastly, WordPress 2.9 is out, with bucket loads of new functionality. If you run WordPress on your blog site, you should upgrade now. Make sure your host meets the new requirements first, though – the MySQL and PHP version requirements have increased to 4.1.2 and 4.3 respectively.