In recent years, English Catholicism has been on the rise - partially likely to do with European immigration. Even Tony Blair got in the act post-Prime Ministerial duties, with a swift conversion.

It should be said that it's not that the average interpretation of the Catholic doctrine has got any more sensible or relevant to every-day life. Although the Poorhouse is sure that there is a compassionate minority, the high-and-mighty within the organisation still tend to have wacky and dangerous views on hot topics such as abortion, medical science, gays, contraception, backed up by a guy who by definition is always right, even should he come out with anti-scientific hate-speech.

Unfortunately, a recent exercise in untraditional Vatican transparency has only revealed more dangerous ludicrosity, if one believes the reports.

Readers of recentish news, both proper and tabloid, will be aware that the UK is suffering a profusion of stabbings amongst the younger members of the population. Now some may question at this stage as to how much of this is real, and how much a classic moral panic (or possibly that it is becoming more frequent in London, which as UK-peeps will know often seems to be centre of the news), but without a doubt some kids are stabbing other kids with knives. In fact at the time of writing one such story is on the BBC news ticker. This is not good.

But now we (well, at least the 8 million daily readers of the Sun) know why they do it. What else has risen alongside the increase in southern knife-crime? Why, Facebook usage of course!

Big stories here and there for a while about John Darwin, a guy who faked his own death, even to his kids, in the name of future insurance fraud. But the most useful thing that the Poorhouse learnt from this came from an article in the Independent.

The jury was told that Cleveland Police accessed John Darwin's Yahoo account and found a total of 1,012 emails, of which 923 were unread. Police rules meant officers could only look at the 89 opened messages.

As you'll have heard, the UK Government in recent times has loved throwing around bits of extreme valuable and confidential data about us, its mere citizens, to the four winds / identity thieves ([1],[2],[3],[4] [5] amongst many, many others.

This bothered quite a few people, but not, it seemed that should-be-the-most-annoying-person-ever but sadly is sometimes really quite funny real man that is Jeremy Clarkson. Well, not at the time anyway.

There are a lot of nasty bad evil scammers out there, more than happy to take money of desperate vulnerable people. This is of course A Bad Thing. However now and then one comes along with such a incredulous, and perhaps even genius, scam that you have to admire them for their sheer boldness if nothing else.

The Poorhouse's favourite scam along these lines in recent times was that that Stacey and Brent Finley pulled to great success - $US 989,898 no less.

The Poorhouse is no stranger to the sneaky afternoon (or morning for that matter) nap at work, but has always felt that that is one of the many, many features rendering him unemployable for anything that could be described as high status and even somewhat deserving of the odd berating. Perhaps this was a mistaken assumption.

That bastion of society, the judge, apparently has a fair enough chance of being allowed to snooze in the workplace. The precedent was perhaps set with an Australian Judge Ian Dodd who was the sentencing judge in a drugs case, where the two defendants were sentenced to 13 and 10 years respectively, whose attentive nature was somewhat akin to the Poorhouse's workplace demeanour after "two pint Tuesday".

Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary in the UK, has recently been giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee investigating the latest raft of arguably rash and dictator-esque counter-terrorism proposals. One in particular the Government likes to harp on about forever is allowing detention without trial for a good long period of time. 90 days is one favourite figure of theirs.

Yep, they claim that it is fine, in a civilised democracy, to allow people to be locked up for 3 months without any charges being brought against them, any appearance in court or the other checks and balances against abuse that the legal system should maintain. It's nothing new mind, a couple of years ago the 90 days suggestion led to Blair's first ever defeat in the House of Commons.

Well, the Poorhouse had hoped that Britain's new, if rather unelected, Prime Minister Gordon Brown would be a least a sizeable improvement over the previous one. It seems on matters of drug policy this isn't going to be true.

The Poorhouse almost couldn't be bothered to read about the latest shenanigans regarding cannabis classification but in the end capitulated to find that Brown is ordering a(nother) "consultation" as to whether cannabis should be reclassified from its current class C to the more punitive class B. How pointless.

Time for a bit of book-reading now perhaps. Don't worry, it won't be over highbrow. You may recall a certain Mr O J Simpson, previously heralded as a sportsman and actor but is now far, far more famous for having erm....not killed his wife, the Poorhouse supposes. Or such was the verdict in the (televised) criminal trial anyhow, although he was somehow found guilty of "wrongful death" in a later civil trial.

Despite the fact that the official "innocent" was perhaps the least expected court case result ever - up there with Michael Jackson's acquittal some courtroom sceptics might say - OJ decided he needed to push it just a bit further by writing "If I Did It"; a "novel" where he details exactly what would have happened and how were it to be the case that he did kill his wife and Ronald Goldman. Funnily enough, it fits the real evidence really quite well, creative writer that he is.

Regular readers of this web-monstrosity will be aware that the Poorhouse is a little sceptical as to the reasoning and benefit behind the increasingly ridiculous drug laws in the UK. To summarise for anyone not from around here, in common with much of the rest of the world, a fairly arbitrary set of substances that people like to use recreationally are banned. If you possess them you get to face jailtime. If you possess other, often more harmful, recreational mind-benders such as alcohol you're just fine.