What politics means today ...

Condoleezza Rice has released an exercise video - no, not quite like Jane Fonda; it has been interpretted as a sign that she is trying to make herself look more "human" with a presidential, or vice-presidential, race in mind.

The US Secretary of State has invited cameras into her departmental gym to record how she squeezes fitness training into her busy schedule. NBC began broadcasting the three-part series yesterday, featuring a warm-up of “easy spinning” on an exercise bike followed by shots of her abdominal routine. Today, breathless (not to mention sweaty) viewers will be told about “the one time her weight got out of control — and what she did about it”.
Friends say her svelte conditioning is down to a good diet as much as exercise. “She's not a puritan type who lives off one lettuce leaf a day by any means,” said one, “but she eats sensibly.” So she must, given a job which entails diplomatic dinners most days of the week.

Certainly sounds like a political run in the modern era to me.
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There's not too many signs of spring in London now (today it was, for the second day in a row, quite seriously snowing at the same time as the sun was out - not something I've seen before) but when it does arrive it seems a Bronze Age "clock" could tell us.

THE ENIGMA of a priceless Bronze Age disc seems to have been solved by a Hamburg scientist who has identified it as one of the world’s first astronomical clocks.
The 3,600-year-old Sky Disc of Nebra, which surfaced four years ago when German grave robbers tried to sell it on the international market, shows that Bronze Age man had a sophisticated sense of time.
Ralph Hansen, an astronomer in Hamburg, found that the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars. It was almost certainly a highly accurate timekeeper that told Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time.