Today is 121 days after Gerald Ford's 93rd birthday. He has therefore outlived Ronald Reagan, who died on 5 June 2004 at the age of 93 years and 120 days. To pre-empt press coverage he issued this (largely unreported) press statement on Friday:

"The length of one's days matters less than the love of one's family and friends. I thank God for the gift of every sunrise and, even more, for all the years He has blessed me with Betty and the children, with our extended family and the friends of a lifetime. That includes countless Americans who, in recent months, have remembered me in their prayers. Your kindness touches me deeply. May God bless you all and may God bless America."

If he can make it to 9 November next year, he will beat the record of 33 years 118 days set by his old boss, Richard Nixon, as ex-Vice-President to live longest after the end of his term.

But meantime, congratulations, Jerry!

I am stunned by the attention being paid to the new opinion poll which shows Sinn Fein's support down by 4% to 20% (as El Blogador would have it, echoed by Slugger O'Toole.

I may not agree with them on much else, but the Sinn Fein supporters in the comments threads to both posts have it right; SF tend to be very much underestimated in their support in polls, not (as Blogador seems to believe) because people magically change their minds in the run-up to polling day, but because their supporters or likely supporters are shy about revealing their view to nice men or women with clipboards. I don't have any moral problem with this, actually; your views are between you and the ballot box, and pollsters have no automatic right to truthful answers.

El Blogador does raise the prospect of SF becoming so "respectable" that this effect will disappear. We've seen the process in reverse in recent years - it used to be that the Alliance Party's rating in polls was twice its election results, but now people who want to sound more moderate than they really are choose different lies to tell the pollsters. Some day SF suporters will feel thaty can be honest with the pollsters, but the fact is that their party's current poll rating is consistent with previous poll ratings for the party, and should be compared with those poll ratings rather than the last election results.

The commenters in the Slugger post make much of the 2.6% support for Republican Sinn Fein as evidence that Gerry Adams has been damaged by the St Andrew's Agreement. I doubt it; I don't think Ruairí Ó Brádaigh's lot have a visible public profile, and I would bet that at least half of the people who chose RSF in the BBC's poll thought they were indicating support for Adams as against the Stickies, rather than for Ó Brádaigh against Adams.

In summary: "Opinion poll shows SF support down 4% from last election" is simply not a news story worth reporting.

While going through the lengthy but not awfully engaging task of putting redirects from the old website to the new yesterday I watched this 1966 Doctor Who story in the background (multitasking as ever). Fan lore generally is pretty negative about this story; perhaps this shows that I wasn't concentrating sufficiently, but I really rather enjoyed it.

In particular, I very much enjoyed the one thing that those who dislike this story universally single out for criticism, Jackie Lane's acting as the newly arrived companion Dodo Chaplet (who walked into the TARDIS at the end of the previous story). I thought it was great to have an assertive young companion - the first really since Barbara's departure (apart from the brief appearance of Sara Kingdom) - and for my money she rose to the challenge. Hartnell is on top form, and even his fluffs seem much more in character with the Doctor than with the actor. Peter Purves as Stephen has some great lines and even a mild love interest.

The other feature of this story universally mocked by the critics, the Monoids, actually seemed not too bad to me, for 1966 anyway. Certainly far far better than the forest creatures at the end of The Chase. They reminded me a bit of the Ood from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Their transformation from silent servitors to sinister overlords is creepy but compelling. And they supply the great punchline to episode two, when the TARDIS crew discover that the statue the Ark's human crews were building has been complete, but with a Monoid head.

I even liked the look of it. The gradual revelation that the forest has (as we are warned in the title of the first episode) a steel sky is well done. The Roman-style costumes of the human Guardians deliberately make us think of the Monoids as slaves. The surface of the planet Refusis, and its invisble inhabitants, are well done. The scenes of planets and suns in space are, at least, not too embarrassing.

This is from an era of Doctor Who (Season Three) that has had a bad press, but I've found myself very much enjoying three of the other nine stories (Mission to the Unknown, The Dalek Master Plan, and The Savages) and would probably have enjoyed The Massacre more in a different format. I also saw the last (and only surviving) episode of the following story, The Celestial Toymaker, on the Lost In Time DVD set, and thought it was great. So I shall look out for Galaxy 4, The Myth Makers, the rest of The Celestial Toymaker and especially The Gunfighters and The War Machines both of which apparently survive in full.