Pandora

LUCKY LABOUR Party supporters can look forward to their very own postcard from Tony Blair during the governing party's Bournemouth conference this year. Activists armed with bundles of these loving missives are being urged to knock on supporters' doors and deliver them personally. Suggestions as to suitable messages from the Prime Minister include: "Wish you'd been there during the Euro elections" and "Doesn't Bournemouth look just like Tuscany when the sun's out?"

POSTCARDS ASIDE, signs that Labour is still taking the performance of its media machine for granted are obvious from one communication to members called Keeping in Touch - Annual Conference 99. It reads: "As we all know, annual conference allows us to take advantage of the excellent publicity that the party receives during conference week."

THE BIG cheeses from the, er, cheese world will congregate on London's Kings Road next month. The occasion is the British Cheese Awards. "Against a backdrop of 600 cheeses, more than 75 cheesemakers [bless them!] from Britain and Ireland will be exhibiting, providing visitors with a unique opportunity to taste more than 250 cheeses," boasts the programme. What happened to the other 350 is not explained. However, there are a number of mouth-watering seminars to tempt the Cheddary classes attending. The seminars include "Making cheese pay for your business - how a cheese board and cheese focus can add to your business's bottom line". Lord preserve us - in brine.

TOM JONES has launched an online computer game. "Reload" is named after his new album of celebrity duets. While other pop stars' games, such as the Wu Tang Clan's, feature the normal beat-em-up martial arts fight-fest, Tom's game is far more pedestrian. His is a driving simulation where you "test out your driving skills as you help Tom (pictured) pick up his friends, as they rush to the recording studio!" Your prize? A signed Tom Jones album.

SO THE Daily Telegraph, the dusty dowager of Fleet Street, now embraces Darwinism in all its atheistic glory. This week it is serialising Darwinist Matt Ridley's latest tome, Genome, and last week it serialised Professor Steve Jones's reworking of Darwin's classic, On the Origin of Species. This from a newspaper that once suggested that people should vote against a London MP because he gave Darwin's work a good review. Nice to see things finally moving on at The Telegraph.

THE SCORES are even in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani to become New York State's senator - at least on the Internet. Mrs Bill's campaign to be NY State's senator was recently parodied by supporters of NY City Mayor Giuliani, who created a website called HillaryNo.com. Now a spoof website called YesRudy has been born. The graphics of the California-based site are a near-perfect copy of the official site while the textual content takes a good few swipes at Giuliani - reminding readers of statements he allegedly made about Haiti in 1982. Of the infamous Jean- Claude Duvalier, Haiti's deposed dictator, Rudy is quoted as saying: "Yup, everyone thought Baby Doc was pretty darn bad... Everyone except me."

MEANWHILE, BILL Clinton is to narrate a Steven Spielberg film to celebrate the millennium. The film, scored by John Williams, covers 100 years of American history. The duration? A generous 17 minutes. How much time will be swallowed up by the Monica Lewinsky affair is not clear.

OH DEAR, boys will be boys. For today's mind-led-by-appendage award, Pandora nominates ridiculous rocker David Lee Roth on the art of the pop video: "Let's see some busty babes with glasses get naked and wrestle a giant statue of Beethoven. Now you've got what I call conception."

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