The subtitle (or aston as it's known in the trade) which appeared on screen when I was on Stormont Live this afternoon referred to me as Mark Devenport MLA. I don't think it identified which party I was representing.
This weekend we took the children to the Ulster Orchestra's Christmas Concert, featuring a rendition of the "Snowman" whilst the film played in the background.
At the end of the concert, a cloud of massive white balloons floated down onto the audience's heads, much to the children's delight. Without pausing for a moment, a man in a nearby seat, who I didn't know, quipped "I suppose you must have lots of experience dealing with big balloons."
Now was he referring to our MLAs, or my ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ colleagues?
It's okay to call a Stormont politician a "lapdog". That was the ruling from the Assembly Speaker Willie Hay today after a complaint from Sinn Fein's Raymond McCartney. Mr McCartney objected to the catcalls (or should that be dogcalls) aimed at his colleague Paul Butler when he rose to defend Caitriona Ruane's vision for education last week.
Today the Speaker asked MLAs to ensure their barks are no worse than their bites (well he didn't use that exact metaphor), but declined to rule that "lapdog" is unparliamentary per se.
I suppose it would be a different matter if an MLA picked on someone who is quite obviously a debating rottweiler (David Burnside for example) and called him a "lapdog". Then they would be misleading the doghouse.
So when the US President met the First and Deputy First in washington he paid tribute to them, adding ''these two men have dedicated themselves to embettering Northern Ireland through courage and conviction and desire to put aside the past and focus on a hopeful future." When I put the word "embettering" into the spell check on my computer it suggested i should change the text to "embittering". But I am sure that's not what President Bush had in mind.
I'm 