Have just ordered a copy of The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by the American journalist Neal Bascomb. According to the reviews, Bascomb turns the story of the breaking of the four-minute-mile barrier into an heroic contest between Roger Bannister, at medical school in England, Wes Santee, a farm boy working his way through Kansas State University, and John Landy, a student at Melbourne University.

In case you didn't know it, on 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds on Oxford University's track at Iffley Road. For athletes, this achievement is ranked among the epics. Today, then, the 50th anniversary of the record-breaking race, is an occasion for celebration. To honour Bannister's achievement, yours truly will run a mile on the local track this evening. Completing it in less than seven minutes is the modest goal.

The great man himself, now Sir Roger Bannister, will be back at Iffley Road for a restaging of the original meeting later today. John Landy will be present as well. The race starts at 6 p.m., the same time as the record-breaking run, and Sir Roger will ring the original bell used in 1954 to signal the final lap. Congratulations!

It was a game of two halves. Honest. Despite the cliché, it really was. For the first 45 minutes, Chelsea were electric, turning defence into attack in fluid movements that flowed up and down the field to the delight of the home spectators. Joe Cole went all out on the left wing and Jesper Gronkjaer owned the right side of the field. When the Danish winger put the home side into the lead in the 21st minute with an arching shot into the far top corner that left Roma clutching at air, it looked as if this would be Chelsea's night. Confirmation appeared to come in the 42nd minute when Frank Lampard produced a great finish after some sharp build-up play from Melchiot and Gudjohnsen to put Chelsea 2-0 up. Champions League Final, here we come, thought the Stamford Bridge crowd. This pleasant state of affairs ended in the 45th minute when Morientes looped a header over Cudicini. The ball came back off the post and struck Ibarra on the arm before crossing the line. Anders Frisk, the Swedish ref, awarded the goal, and rightly so.

The game that began so gloriously for Chelsea effectively ended in the 59th minutes when the excellent Morientes worked a one-two with Lucas Bernardi before driving a low shot past the helpless Cudicini. Monaco were now leading 5-3 on aggregate. In stark contrast to the first half, nothing went right for Chelsea in the second period. Gronkjaer's crosses were suddenly too high or wide and when he got an excellent pass from Bridge all he could do was blaze over the bar. Gudjohnsen, who hit the bar in the first half, barely made contact with the ball for the remainder of the game. Chelsea coach Claudio Ranieri introduced Johnson, Parker and Crespo but all they did was show up the limitations of the side. This is a team that lacks a world-class striker and Ranieri knows it. He won't be around, though, when Roman Abramovich purchases that player.

Unlike Ranieri, Monaco coach Didier Deschamps, a former Chelsea midfielder, has created a unified team that's strong at the back and deadly at the front. His side should start as favourites when they meet Porto in Gelsenkirchen on 26 May.

For two weeks, twenty male participants are hired to play prisoners and guards. The 10 "prisoners" are locked up and have to follow rules, and the 10 "guards" are told to maintain order. The experiment gets out of hand and things turn unpleasant, then ugly and finally shockingly violent. This is the premise of Das Experiment, an entertaining German film starring Moritz Bleibtreu, which was released in 2002. The film is based on the infamous 1971 "Stanford Prison Experiment" in which a makeshift prison (complete with cells and surveillance cameras) was set up in a research lab. The planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situation did to the students who participated. In only a few days, the guards became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

People change under situational pressure. Some become drunk on power and do terrible things. This is what happens when you put good people in a bad place. It goes without saying that the results are much worse when you put bad people in a bad place.

Never quite popular country, more personal country, Mary Chapin Carpenter has always stood apart from the Nashville mainstream. Still, by working folk and pop influences into her music, she's found an appreciative audience, as 12 million album sales testify. Her new album, Between Here And Gone, is her most individual statement yet.

Mary Chapin Carpenter was in New York City on 11 September 2001 to tape a TV show in lower Manhattan and she witnessed first hand the awful events of that day. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, she heard a National Public Radio interview with an ironworker who was one of the first on the scene. What he experienced prompted him to make a pilgrimage to Grand Central Station so that the souls of the departed could follow him there and on to their trains home. Deeply moved, Carpenter responded to the story with the song "Grand Central Station":

As the body artistic, as opposed to the body politic, comes to terms with that terrible but defining moment, we can expect many more statements about 9/11.

Nick Denton, the expat Brit and ex-FT hack turned serial blog-publisher, has expanded his gossip empire. First came Gawker, which covered Manhattan's insider scene. Wonkette, with its focus on Washington power, was next and now we have the brand-new Defamer. "LA is the world's cultural capital. Defamer is the gossip rag it deserves," says the blog, which Patric King has designed in a style that's just right for the subject city.

What would Marshall McLuhan have made of it all? Perhaps he anticipated Nick Denton in his groundbreaking Understanding Media, published exactly 40 years ago:

Nick Denton's blogging ventures, with their focus on gossip, fit perfectly in McLuhan's reading of dynamic media — telegraph, radio, moves, radio, TV — and his latest decision to concentrate on "those persons who have been accorded some notoriety existence" in Los Angeles is in perfect accordance with the great thinker's vision. We don't really know if blogs will become the political pamphlets or the broadsheet ballads of our time, but their ability to act as the gossipmongers of the global village is undisputed, as Nick Denton is now proving.

A regular Friday morning feature of the Rainy Day routine is reading the regular Friday morning profile at normblog. The profiles are part of an ongoing series being conducted by Professor Norman Geras, whose bio is very wittily presented as "I of the Norm" as opposed to "Eye of the Norm", which is something different entirely.

For profile No.32 in his series, Norm questioned star blogger Andrew Sullivan who writes a column for Time, the New Republic, the Sunday Times and the Advocate. A few of the exchanges:

As I said, it's a Friday morning thing.

To combat voter apathy in the run up to the European elections in June (yawn), the Party of European Socialists (PES) has launched a blog. Party president Poul Nyrup Rasmussen chose May Day to kick off and he'll be posting regularly until polling day. Here's a sample:

If Howard Dean could blog to the left, so can the Euro Socialists, seems to be the thinking. And this is well and good, but the execution on this side of the Atlantic is simply comical. The blog is part of a site that uses frames (ultimate horror!) and readers who get worked up about Rasmussen's posts are invited to "Comment in the forum". Forum? What's a forum got to do with blogging? That's not how you do it, comrades. If this absurd parody of a blog is indicative of how the Party of European Socialists goes about its business, voters would be well advised to laugh at its candidates come election day. Meanwhile, here's one socialist, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who knows how to blog: La Gauche en Europe.

Sadly, it's too late now for Rainy Day to enter its European Blogging Band (EBB) in the race, but the next time the seats on gravy train to Brussels, with a lengthy stop is Strasbourg to stuff the pockets, are up for grabs we'll be there. That's our first electoral promise.

Your blogger had a Roger Bannister moment yesterday when he ran a 10K race in 46 minutes and 12 seconds. Taking age and weight into consideration, and the fact that he suffered a very nasty ankle injury two years ago that threatened to end his sporting days, this was a very satisfactory result indeed. Sincere thanks to coach Carol Scheunemann for all the time and training she devoted to helping make yesterday's performance possible. A series of 10K races is planned for this summer and the goal is to reduce that 46.12 appreciably.

For the dedicated runner, a more perfect start to this momentous week could not be imagined. You see, this is the week in which we mark one of the great moments in the history of athletics — the breaking of the four-minute mile barrier. On 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.4. at Oxford University's track at Iffley Road. When he was asked to explain the art of record breaking, Bannister said: "It's the ability to take more out of yourself than you've got." Anyone who has run a personal best time in any event knows exactly what Bannister meant.

A total of 865 posts later, Rainy Day celebrates its second birthday. A very sincere thank you to all those who have visited and commented during the past two years. Going forward, we welcome your attention and participation.

Hitting the old blog road was the first post, and on our first birthday, we quoted the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who said: "I've always thought that the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder."

With European Union expansion from 15 to 25 nations just hours away now, let us look back at one of those forgotten figures from history who was at the very centre of European consolidation. We're talking of Lavall Nugent, who was made a Magnate of Hungary in 1826. When the glasses of Tokay are being thrown back in Dublin tonight as the Irish Presidency welcomes Hungary to the EU, let's hope someone will raise a toast to this remarkable character who was present at the Battle of Solferino on 24 June 1859, at 82! As a volunteer!

Born on 1 November 1777 in Ballincor, County Wicklow, Ireland, Lavall Nugent proved that upward mobility is not unique to our times. On his 20th birthday, on 1 November 1793, he was appointed a cadet in the Austrian engineer corps and served as lieutenant and then captain until February 1799. He later distinguished himself in the battles of Monte Croce (1800) and Caldiero (1805) during the Napoleonic wars. Promoted to the general staff of the Austrian Army in 1809, he led the conquests of Croatia, Istria and the Po region. He commanded the Austrian troops in Naples in 1816 and was subsequently made a prince of the Holy Roman Empire by Pope Pius VII. A decade later, he became a Magnate of Hungary. Nugent became a field-marshal in November (his lucky month!) 1849, and died at Bosiljero, near Karlstadt, on 21 August 1862 bearing the grand title of Count Lavall Nugent von Westmeath. Why Westmeath and not his native Wicklow, the records do not state.

Nugent is fondly remembered in the Croatian port of Rijeka, on the northern side of the Kvarner Gulf. As the local web site puts it: "Dvorac je proširen za vrijeme Frankopana, a 1826. austrijski vice-maršal Laval Nugent dao ga je restaurirati u neogotickom stilu." And as the local translation has it: "The burg was expanded during the rule of the Frankopans, and in 1826 it was restaured in neogothic style by the austrian vice-marshall Laval Nugent." In the local museum, there's a fine portrait of Nugent by Francesco Beda (1840-1900), who was born in Hungry and died in northern Italy. He taught painting at the Academy in Venice as did his son Giulio Beda (1879-1954).

So, as we prepare to welcome Hungary back to its rightful place at the heart of Europe, let's remember Lavall Nugent, a fighter and an upwardly mobile emigrant who was still turning up for work at 82. Could there be a more perfect role model for a European Union?