{"id":2077,"date":"2009-01-16T16:29:24","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T16:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=2077"},"modified":"2009-01-16T16:29:24","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T16:29:24","slug":"im-off-for-a-couple-of-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2009\/01\/im-off-for-a-couple-of-weeks\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m off for a couple of weeks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I picked a bad time to be insanely busy, what with the traffic leap brought by the Weblog Awards shortlisting coinciding with the latest round in the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Russia-Ukraine_gas_dispute\">Russia\/Ukraine gas dispute<\/a> (something I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on for a few years now), a rumpus over <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/europe\/0,1518,601209,00.html\">a silly bit of &#8220;art&#8221;<\/a>, and now the uproar over <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/europe\/7827477.stm\">the EU&#8217;s ban on (some) pesticides<\/a> (which according to many hysterical parts of the British eurosceptic press is as good as a death warrant for the carrot, giving them another handy load of fruit&#8217;n&#8217;veg-based nonsense to go on about now that the <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1872\">straight bananas and curvy cucumbers<\/a> myth&#8217;s finally been killed off).<\/p>\n<p>And now I&#8217;m buggering off to Japan for two weeks (a trip that will see the number of times I&#8217;ve been to Tokyo overtake the number of times I&#8217;ve been to Paris, which doesn&#8217;t seem right at all).<\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;m gone, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.netvibes.com\/nosemonkey\">EUtopia Netvibes Universe<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1708#eublogs\">EU Blog Directory<\/a> should keep you entertained &#8211; and I&#8217;m planning a long-overdue update of these when I get back, so please leave any suggestions for new entries in the comments. I&#8217;ve spotted quite a few new EU-centred blogs since the start of the year, but have probably forgotten to take a note of most of them &#8211; and there&#8217;s about to be a bunch of new ones on the scene courtesy of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkaboutit.eu\/\">Think About It<\/a> EU blogging competition. <\/p>\n<p>Oh, and after an absence of a few years, it looks like the UK&#8217;s got a new <a href=\"http:\/\/e4u.org.uk\/\">pro-Euro campaign<\/a>. For reasons best known to themselves their report is only available as a (256 page, 4.5 meg) PDF at the moment, and their website is nothing more than a very basic Wordpress job that looks like it was knocked up in 5 minutes, but <a href=\"http:\/\/e4u.org.uk\/?page_id=46\">the list of contributors<\/a> includes some good names. Should be worth a read &#8211; I haven&#8217;t had the chance yet, but plan to have a look through on the plane. (If that doesn&#8217;t send me to sleep, nothing will&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>Back February. Keep an eye on things for me, eh?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I picked a bad time to be insanely busy, what with the traffic leap brought by the Weblog Awards shortlisting coinciding with the latest round in the Russia\/Ukraine gas dispute (something I&#8217;ve been keeping an eye on for a few &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2009\/01\/im-off-for-a-couple-of-weeks\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nosemonkey-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2077"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2078,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2077\/revisions\/2078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}