In Mind

Even Educated Fleas Have Got It...

2011-03-04T20:16:00.005Z

I came home from work today and there waiting on the doormat, along with my weekly copy of Powerplay (a British ice hockey magazine) and the new Elbow album, was a leaflet:

It turns out that it is the AV voting system (apologies for the poor quality pics, I couldn't find my camera and had to take them on my phone).

Yes, this was a leaflet telling me to say No to AV when the referendum takes place…erm, when is it…let me have a look, surely this leaflet will tell me…ah, here we are, it says “next May”. This is early then, they can’t mean May 2011, or the leaflet would say “this May”, wouldn’t it? Hang on, let me have a look on google or something. Oh, it’s May 5^th this year is it? Well then the leaflet’s wrong and misleading there then.

This wrong and misleading tone is kept throughout the whole leaflet. Here’s some more examples of the twaddle it contains, and my thoughts on that twaddle (which are in italics).

Why Our Current System Works

1)It creates strong governments – The system creates strong accountable governments and means that coalitions are less common, with no horse-trading behind the scenes.

Granted, but look at some of the decisions our last strong government made, from civil liberties to the war in Iraq. Look at some of the decisions made by this coalition government - imagine what wholesale changes the Conservatives could be doing if they actually had a mandate to govern. Strong government does not mean correct government, hopefully now the Lib Dems have seen how the public thinks of them in the Barnsley Central by-election, they may start instigating the checks and balances on the Tories that most of us that voted for them hoped they would be.

2) It's simple to understand - Each person votes for the candidate that they support and the candidate that they support and the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner.

AV isn't exactly A Brief History of Time you know. Who do you support? Mark them with a 1 then. Who would you support if your first choice is eliminated? Put a 2 next to their name then. And so on.

3) It excludes extremist parties - Parties such as the BNP have never been able to get enough support in a single constituency to have one of their candidates elected as an MP.

Well it's probably likely that these minority parties will continue not having enough support to get an MP. AV is not PR. I don't support the BNP by any stretch of the imagination, but the solution to diluting their influence is to challenge what they stand for, not to maintain an electoral system that gives them next to no chance.

4) It's cheap - Staying with our current system means we will not need to spend money on expensive vote counting machines.

Anything looks cheap when you're comparing it to figures you've pulled out of your arse.

5) It's fair - One person, one vote - unlike AV, where supporters of minority parties end up getting multiple votes.

So do supporters of major parties. If necessary, AV takes up a series of rounds. Everyone gets one vote per round. If your chosen candidate is eliminated, your vote is transferred to your next preference candidate. If your candidate isn't eliminated, your vote is for that candidate in the next round. Everyone gets the same amount of votes, unless you choose to only vote for one candidate - then your vote is discarded if that candidate is eliminated.

6) It's the most widely used system in the world - People all over the world have copied our tried and tested system. It's used in Canada, India and the USA among many others.

So what? So those countries haven't had electoral reform either. Although if you want to get picky, India also uses STV for election to it's Upper House. Even in the UK, the majority of elections don't use First Past the Post anyway.

7) It's quick and easy to count - Because of its relative simplicity, our current system is easier and quicker to count than the AV system, which can take some time.

And in that rush to get a quick result, mistakes can be made. The country survived for 5 days without a government last May, so I don't see the harm in waiting for results to come through.

The winner should be the winner There's a very simple principle in politics and governments - whoever gets the most votes wins. It's wrong that the person who came second or third can overtake the person with the most votes and be allowed to win because the second and third choices of the little parties are counted again. Imagine applying the same principle at the Olympic games and giving the gold medal to the person who came in third!

This is a shit analogy. As I've said, the AV system is, if necessary, made up of rounds of counts, so if you're going to have an olympics analogy (because next year is of course olympic year and so everything must be tied in to the olympics, the same as every advert has a football theme whenever there's a world cup), the modern pentathlon is probably the best event to compare it to, where the person with the best score after five rounds is the gold medal winner.

AV would have no effect on safe seats - In the 2010 UK General Election, over a third of MPs were elected with more than half of all votes cast. If the AV system were to be adopted, second and third choice votes in these seats would never be counted. This supposedly 'nationwide' reform will have absolutely no effect for the 15 million people living in these constituencies.

So that's two-thirds of constituencies where AV would come into play then? With an effect on around 45 million people? The above is a perfectly valid argument for PR, but not for First Past the Post.

The leaflet also mentions only 3 countries currently use AV, one of which it says is Fiji, which has "had enough of AV and (is) about to ditch it. Seeing as Fiji had a military coup in 2006, and hasn't had an election since, they may have more pressing things on their minds.

The rest of the leaflet pretty much repeats the arguments above in a slightly re-worded form, so I'm not going to repeat my arguments again. If you've received the same leaflet and you're thinking "ah, but what about this?", please leave me a comment. There probably is a decent debate worth having on voting reform, but while half-truths like this, and false dichotomies like the ones Steven Baxter has covered, are presented, the No to AV group don't seem interested in having it.

David Cameron always reads his reports...

2011-01-14T13:27:00.002Z

I’m a bit late with this, but I was reading through Lord Young’s report on Health & Safety today and found this. In David Cameron’s foreword to the report, he says:

"A damaging compensation culture has arisen, as if people can absolve themselves
from any personal responsibility for their own actions, with the spectre of
lawyers only too willing to pounce with a claim for damages on the slightest
pretext"

If you go on to read the part of the report that deals with compensation claims, you find this statement from Lord Young:

"The problem of the compensation culture prevalent in society today is, however,
one of perception rather than reality”

Mind you, Lord Young also says “I have agreed with the Prime Minister that I will continue in my role to deliver all the reforms identified as being necessary”, and we all know what happened there…

15 Albums I've Played to Death

2010-09-29T19:15:00.004+01:00

You may have noticed I've not exactly been too proficient with the blogging this year. Over the past few months I've been thinking about expanding the remit of the blog, as when I tend to get ideas for blogposts they tend to be a little way away from the stuff I've done in the past. One thing I want to do in particular is blog a bit more about music. Hopefully you should start to see a few more posts appearing on here for now on. Whether this is a good idea, given I'm about to start a nine-month OU course, remains to be seen. But I'll start with this and see how we go.

This has been a meme on a few blogs I've read today - 15 albums I've played to death. No making complicated lists with dozens of options and hours of agonising, just write down the 15 that come to you. So, although not in any particular order, here we go:

1) Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures I got into Joy Division during Sixth Form, although this was about 18 years after Ian Curtis killed himself. The sparseness of the recording drew me in, and the lyrics were perfect for my 17 year old, slightly melancholy self. Amazing to think that there was just 13 months between the release of this and...

2) Joy Division - Closer "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders", goes the often-quoted lyric from Decades. This is children becoming men stuff, Ian Curtis was just 22-23 when recording the album, but had to cope with being a husband, a father, an adulterer, a rock star, and an epileptic. His lyrics were his way of trying juggle all this, and they are magnificent. The music as well is fantastic, Colony and A Means to an End standing out for me in particular.

3) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Levez Vos Skinny Wrists Comme Antennas To Heaven I'm never entirely sure where to put that exclamation mark. Pretty much an instrumental album, unless you count field recordings of shopping mall announcements, children singing in French, and a man pining for the glory days of Coney Island as vocals. The absolute pinnacle of the post-rock genre, this is at turns menacing, joyous, saddening, and breathtaking. Recently reunited, I managed to get a ticket to see them in December, and I cannot fucking wait.

4) Slowdive - Just For A Day Recently it looks like Slowdive are getting reappraised, which is great because more people need to hear their slow, ethereal beauty. Most Slowdive fans prefer Souvlaki, but this record holds more memories for me as I played it pretty much once a week throughout my first year at Uni, so its shimmering guitars and whispered vocals are linked to a lot of memories I hold dear.The Cherry Red reissue of this contains a disc with their EP tracks on, which makes it well worth getting for extra tracks like Avalyn and Morningrise.

5) My Bloody Valentine - Loveless Bought on the same day as Just For A Day, and although both are lumped in to the whole "shoegazing" thing, for me they're two different sides of that coin. Loveless is the hard, spiky, noisy cousin of Just For A Day, and one of the few albums where I genuinely thought "What on Earth is this?" when I put it on. I can listen to it and still find stuff I hadn't noticed before, so packed are the tracks, To Here Knows When especially.

6) Oasis - Definitely Maybe I got into all of the above albums a little while after they were released (ranging from 1 year late to Levez... to some 18 years for Unknown Pleasures), but here is one I got in on the ground floor with. For all its sins (and boy there were some... Northern Uproar, Heavy Stereo...) Britpop was my movement, and it was incredibly exciting to be 14/15 and see so many bands come through with albums that defined my life at the time. One of them was Definitely Maybe. Literally everyone in my year at school owned this and (What's The Story) Morning Glory, even the kids that were more into hip-hop and dance music.

7) Pulp - Different Class Not as many people at school owned this one, but then that wasn't the point of Different Class. Not being one of the coolest at school (I know, you can't believe it can you), I took Mis-shapes to my heart, and for a couple of months at least really believed in it. The fact that this, in all it's spoken-bit-in-the-middle, slightly seedy, Daily Mirror-outraging glory, was actual, proper, pop music, made the autumn and winter of 1995 so much better. The first band I saw live as well.

8) Elbow - The Seldom Seen Kid I'd been an Elbow fan since their first album, Asleep in the Back, and having listened to Guy Garvey's show on 6music for a while as well, and growing to love the guy, when Elbow won the Mercury Music Prize in 2008 it felt like my football team winning a Cup Final. It's an album I badgered my Fiancee with that year, giving her a copy and simply telling her "This is the best record that will be released this year". She's now pretty close to agreeing with me, which, given her ipod is mostly Fleetwood Mac and Glee, I class as a result. Obviously Grounds For Divorce and One Day Like This are the big tunes on it, although my personal favourite is The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, which is one of the most majestic songs of the past five years.

9) The Auteurs - Now I'm A Cowboy A slow-burning masterpiece. I'm currently re-reading Luke Haines' Bad Vibes - Britpop and My Part in it's Downfall, and it's brilliant. If Haines ever decided against writing, acerbic, literate pop songs, he could do worse that start writing acerbic, literate books.

10) Belle & Sebastian - Boy With The Arab Strap I've been in two minds as to whether to go this or Tigermilk, but Simple Things won it for this. I remember just before this was released there was a massive hype about the band simply because they didn't do interviews, there were no pictures of them, and you hardly heard them on the radio. That and the tunes, which were fantastic. This album is no exception, it's perfect indiepop.

11) Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas Another band that had that "What the heck?" effect on me. Swirling guitars, great vocals, slightly indecipherable lyrics. They were so good at shunning publicity that, having got into them in 2000, I didn't see a picture of the band until about four years later. Of course now you just type the band's name into Google images and you get loads, but there was so much mystique and drawn veils on their album sleeves I didn't really want to know what they looked like - I was fine imagining the music had been beamed down directly from another planet, it sounded so unlike anything else.

12) The Pipettes - We Are The Pipettes Put simply, a bloody fun pop album. A direct descendent of the Shangri-La's, the Ronettes, the Marvelletes and all those great 50's girl groups.

13) The National - High Violet Only came out this year, but oh my what an album. I hope I won't experience it, but it feels like the perfect break-up album, especially Sorrow ("Sorrow hit me when I was young....I don't want to get over you"). At the moment, definitely my vote for album of the year.

14) Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights When bands like Interpol, The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives et al broke, I was about 19, with a student loan, and a great independent record shop down the road (The now sadly departed Sonic Sounds in Lincoln's Stonebow) and a weekly indie night at clubs both at Uni and at home in Essex. God knows how much I spunked on records, but of the big (at least to the NME) names of the time, this is the album I turn back to the most. I remember driving out of a deserted Reading Festival car park with NYC on the stereo, and it felt like I was in the final credits of some incredibly earnest European film.

15) Ladytron - Witching Hour In any sane world Ladytron would be massive. How Destroy Everything You Touch didn't go straight to number 1 and stay there for three years solid is one of the mysteries of the age. It's great - a pounding, Pet Shop Boys meets Wagner epic. The album is a great mix of Goldfrapp and ooh, I don't know, Ride? Or maybe Lush. Either way it's stunning.

For a Spotify playlist of 14 of these albums (Unfortunately Levez Vos Skinny Wrists Comme Antennas to Heaven isn't available) click here.

2 Teams Good, 8 Legs Better

2010-07-08T14:23:00.003+01:00

Paul the Octopus has been causing quite a stir in the press, having correctly predicted the outcome of all of Germany's World Cup games. I've been doing a bit of thinking and I don't think it's as unlikely as it seems - in fact I believe the odds may be as low as 1/10.

Although in each group game the probability of him picking the winner is 1/3 (although Paul wasn't (as far as I know) given the opportunity to pick a draw, the possibility of there being a draw still remained), and each knockout game the probability is 2/1, that doesn't mean that the probability of Paul guessing all the games correctly so far is 1/3 x 1/3 x 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2, because the possibility of Paul picking the winner of one game relies on him getting the previous guess correct. So, for example, if he had guessed the result of the 1st knockout game wrongly, he wouldn't have got the chance to guess the winner of the Quarter-Final. So the options of what he could have done are (what Paul actually did is in bold):

Guessed first game correctly
Guessed first game wrongly (Germany Lose)
Guessed first game wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed 2 correctly
Guessed first correctly, second wrongly (Germany Win)
Guessed first correctly, second wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed 3 correctly
Guessed 2 games correctly, third wrongly (Germany Lose)
Guessed 2 games correctly, third wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed 4 correctly
Guessed 3 correctly, fourth wrongly
Guessed 5 correctly
Guessed 4 correctly, fifth wrongly
Guessed 6 correctly
Guessed 5 correctly, sixth wrongly

So he has had 6 outcomes from a possible 15. At first, I thought that 6/15, or 2/5, were the odds, but if at any point Paul has got all his guesses right, he will guess the forthcoming game, so any previous outcome involving him getting them all right can be discarded. This leaves:

Guessed first game wrongly (Germany Lose)
Guessed first game wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed first correctly, second wrongly (Germany Win)
Guessed first correctly, second wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed 2 correctly, third wrongly (Germany Lose)
Guessed 2 correctly, third wrongly (Germany Draw)
Guessed 3 correctly, fourth wrongly
Guessed 4 correctly, fifth wrongly
Guessed 5 correctly, sixth wrongly
Guessed all six games correctly

Which gives us 1 in 10. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

How to Deceive Your Fans in One Easy Step

2010-01-16T14:01:00.004Z

No doubt you all know of the furore over the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Telegraph reporting that IOSH (the Chartered body for health and safety professionals) advice over clearing snow from your drive. If you don’t, Anton Vowl and uksceptic cover it well.

As you can see on Anton’s first post, Richard Madeley sent forth the notion that this was another case of health and safety gone mad. When IOSH printed a correction on their site, I tweeted the link to Richard, asking him:

@richardm56 Any chance you could tell your followers that the Mail & Telegraph got it wrong over gritting? Ta. http://tinyurl.com/ybtdjch

I didn’t hear anything from him (not that I was really expecting it) and he didn’t tweet anything about how the papers had got it wrong. To be fair to him, he has got over 11,000 followers, so probably gets a number of comments a day. He may have missed it. So on Wednesday I tried again:

@Richardm56 Richard, can you tell your followers that the gritting stories were wrong please? Thanks. http://tinyurl.com/ybtdjch

Again, nothing from his twitter feed, except some nonsense about him taking his Christmas tree down a week late. So on Thursday, I tried another tack:

Asked @Richardm56 twice if he can tweet the correct facts re http://tinyurl.com/ydea78y. Nowt from him. Obviously likes spreading ignorance.

This antagonistic post didn’t raise anything either. Now, this isn’t supposed to be a post about how I can’t get a reaction from a celebrity, but some clarification from him would be nice. As I said earlier, Richard Madeley has over 11,000 followers. The Richard and Judy book club can propel books to the top of the bestseller lists. A lot of people listen to him. If he’s propagating myths, then I believe he has a responsibility to also let people know when he is wrong. Other people on Twitter are only to happy to issue corrections when they have got something wrong, Graham Linehan for example.

In a way, it’s not really about Richard Madeley either. All sorts of celebs make stupid claims that are taken as read by people. Look at Jenny McCarthy and the furore over her anti-vaccination claims. Imagine if someone like Robert Pattison or Jonas Brothers came out with something like that – I’m willing to bet that the vaccination rates amongst teenage girls would fall dramatically. If you know that what you say will be read by thousands of people, surely you have a responsibility to make sure what you are saying is correct? This is why promoting critical thinking is important - so people know that they shouldn't just trust what they read in the papers, or what somebody else tells them, but they should investigate these claims, and make up their own minds.

Conkers Head sends readers goggle-eyed

2009-12-09T19:42:00.007Z

An interesting piece in the Comment is Free part of the Guardian today, as Shaun Halfpenny, head of Cummersdale Primary School in Carlisle, tells the truth about the "Schoolchildren wear goggles to play conkers" story that, frankly, spawned a monster. Mr Halfpenny, it turns out, was the man who initiated the wearing of goggles whilst playing conkers. Unfortunately, thanks to some digging by Guardian readers, developed in the comments section, it turns out that what he's actually writing is, at best, poorly remembered, and at worst an attempt to completely revise the whole history of the event.

In the Guardian piece, Mr Halfpenny says "It was a child who actually asked if they could wear goggles". This, however, is not what was reported at the time. The BBC covered the story by quoting Mr Halfpenny as saying "I said they would have to wear goggles to play, mainly because they could get bits of conker in the eye. They thought it was a great idea."The Cumberland News also reported that "Mr Halfpenny said he had no choice because of health and safety rules...'The children asked to play conkers in school and I thought it would be really mean if I said no. These days you cannot be too careful, especially when health and safety inspectors are watching.'"

"What are they doing?" "They're playing conkers, without wearing goggles." "Fuck it, that's too dangerous. We're going in."

The BBC also quotes Mr Halfpenny as saying "It's just being sensible", to which the only correct reply is "No it fucking isn't". A few people have said to me "Oh, Health and Safety is just common sense", which is fine, until you spend 30 seconds thinking of some of the idiotic things your workmates do, and then realise that you may have to rely on their "common sense".

The thing that really baffles me about this Guardian piece though is that after having kids wear goggles, Mr Halfpenny then went to the media and told them about it. The "Health and Safety has gone completely over the top" attitude was well underway by then, as shown by this article by Jeremy Clarkson. How the Head didn't realise that the story was going to run and run is frankly, remarkable. It seems in this case, the Head didn't use his, well, head.

Tories go after health and safety, brick by brick

2009-12-01T13:05:00.004Z

In the time that has passed since I last updated this blog (apologies for that), I turned 28. Time to start getting respectable, stop dressing like a student and acting like a proper grown-up and everything. Well, no. As exhibited by my choice of advent calender, which this year is Lego Pirates (I suppose technically the fact I have an advent calender at all is really an indication that I haven't really grown up yet, but there you go). Honestly, it's great, you get a few bits of Lego each day that make up a character or some Pirate furniture or something. Behind the first window was a cheery Pirate captain. I noticed that the stud at the top of the head of the character was open, presumably so that if a child swallowed it, they wouldn't choke (as much) on it as air would pass through the head. I mentioned this at work, which was obviously a mistake, as people started off on the "Oh, how did we survive all when we were kids" bollocks, before someone launched into an anecdote about how they were in a shop that wasn't allowing anyone under the age of 21 to buy crackers because there's a bit of gunpowder in them and how health and safety has gone too far nowadays. I said it was probably something that the shop had bought in itself, and wasn't part of actual law, a bit like when it was claimed that "Health and Safety" (by which most people mean the Health and Safety Executive) had banned kids in school playing conkers, when that hadn't happened and it was the head of one school that had made children wear goggles when playing conkers until someone had said to him "Don't you think that's a bit daft?" Unfortunately it seemed like the only words of my explanation my work colleagues heard were "goggles" and "conkers" and they went away now believing that all schools had to put kids in some sort of protective coccoon before they went outside, and I was left banging my head against my desk in frustration (metaphorically speaking, obviously).

With ignorance like that, it's no wonder newspapers spray the "Health and Safety gone mad" routine all over their print and web editions. It's so much easier to believe the lie or exageration than to actually find out the truth. What's even more depressing is that the Tories have swallowed all those lies and are now using them to try and win votes. The anecdotes used by Cameron in his speech (and, as uksceptic once said to me, "remember, anecdotes ain't worth shit) are a mixture of half-truths and some rare, slightly over-officious people. But just because a few people are a bit over the top shouldn't taint the whole health and safety industry - you wouldn't say that the guy that you got in to do your bathroom, who made a right mess of it is an example of "plumbing gone mad".

Cameron goes on to say:

The Health and Safety Executive enforces 202 statutory instruments – or regulations: two thirds of these were passed in the ninety-nine years before Labour came to power...

...a third of them in the twelve years since.

Some of these over-officious, bereaucratic nonsense regulations bought are to do with (list from the IOSH website):

Control of asbestos
Decommissioning of nuclear reactors
Offshore safety
Control of lead
Pipelines safety
Control of major accident hazards
Control of noise at work
Export/import of dangerous chemicals

According to IOSH, 180 people died last year in accidents at work. 180. The Health and Safety Executive lists some of them here. That is the real work of the HSE, preventing those deaths and injuries that are all too easy to stop. But Cameron has decided to focus instead on lies and media exaggeration instead.

Flintshire Councillor is a bit of a Richard

2009-09-08T20:21:00.005+01:00

Canteen staff at Flintshire County Council have renamed Spotted Dick "Spotted Richard" or "Suet Pudding", basically because they're sick of people continually making jokes about the name. Of course, you can't change the name of anything anymore without someone uttering the phrase "Political Correctness gone mad", and filling this role admirably is councillor Klaus Armstrong-Braun. He's not happy, and neither, rather predictably, are the commenters at the Daily Mail's site. Honestly, over 100 comments about the changing of a name of a fucking cake?

Seriously, how stupid does someone have to be to be uptight over staff changing the name of a dessert? And how is it political correctness? Let's face it, reading the article, it seems there's a good few Colin Hunts in the canteen repeating the same joke over and over every single time Spotted Dick is on the menu. Frankly I'm surprised the canteen staff have taken the route of changing the name of the pudding, my tactic would have been attempting to batter the twat to death with his own tray. Maybe we should make councillor Armstrong-Braun endure the bad jokes every single day and see how long it takes for him to stay sane.

Unbelievable, Jeff!

2009-08-27T10:57:00.010+01:00

I was, frankly, waiting for this. After the violence that surrounded the West Ham - Millwall Carling Cup game on Tuesday, Jeff Powell, in - of course - the Daily Mail, reckons that the days of hooliganism in football are back again. Jeff's argument seems to be that the recession we are currently in (or may be coming out of) means that the jobless are taking out their boredom and anger on the terraces. Which was, funnily enough, also his theory in October last year, when Millwall fans clashed with Leeds fans and someone threw a coin at Harry Redknapp (which is strange because allegedly Redknapp is no stranger to receiving money. Maybe it's because this time it wasn't in a brown envelope). Of course, I'm sure you can remember the onslaught of violence in football grounds that occured after these events last season. I myself was caught up in fights with over 26 different "firms". Oh no, hang on. That's not what happened. What happened is I went to some football matches and didn't see any violence whatsoever. I even shared a tram back to Sheffield train station with some Sheffield United fans, and no-one got glassed, head-butted or drop-kicked in the face.

This being the Mail, of course, there's bit of good old-fashioned class hatred. Obviously those that lost their jobs are from the working classes, and the working classes are the "underbelly, in this case bulging and tattooed, of British society" that love fighting. Powell speaks of "the mob" and "yobs" like a Seventeeth Century writer describing the Gordon Riots, despite the fact that a lot of these people fighting will be the same people that fought in the 1980's, now with middle-class jobs in the city and middle-class houses in Essex and Hertfordshire. And he's appalled that the "...more chic, corporate enclaves of the game [are not] immune. While there is a history of violence between West Ham and Millwall, residents of west London complain of disorder outside their million-pound homes when Chelsea play at home", clearly forgetting the days of the Shed End and the Chelsea Headhunters.

As an aside, Jeff also seems to want to take the credit for all-seater stadia in England, obviously forgetting about the Taylor Report -

"... I went to No 10 and began urging then-Prime Minister Thatcher to enforce all-seat stadiums in this country."

I'm not suggesting that the scenes at Upton Park and the surrounding area were welcome. But let's get some perspective here. A small percentage of people have been taking their cues from Green Street, Danny Dyer documentaries and the Hoolie-porn of Cass Pennant and his ilk. It is not a sign of impending doom in our national game. Jeff Powell, lest we forget, is a man that feels that the birth dates of former England players should influence the selection of teams for World Cup qualifying matches. The sooner he is pensioned off, so he can sit in some care home wanking himself into a stupor over the 1966 World Cup, the better.

*The blog may not get updated for a while now (so what's new?), as I'm off on holiday to the US from tomorrow until September 7th. I may blog from there if I get a chance, although given the itinery the Missus has planned I doubt I'll have much time. If not, I'll try and make some notes as to my thoughts over there and blog about them when I return. It might be best if I take a different notebook to the one I'm currently using, which has the design of a cover of a Leon Trotsky book on the front.*

What the diddly-damn-doodly?

2009-08-24T20:00:00.003+01:00

So, from what Channel 4 have cut from The Simpsons, the broadcasters aren't keen on hanging (cutting Ned Flanders attempting to kill himself in Viva Ned Flanders), but have no problem with Bill Clinton screwing pigs (Homer to the Max). Interesting.

A thought on the release of the Lockerbie Bomber

2009-08-20T15:11:00.003+01:00

Part of this afternoon has been spent trying to put in to words my thoughts on the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber. Then I read the words of Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, and find he says it better than I could:

"Mr al-Megrahi did not show his victims any comfort or compassion. They were not
allowed to return to the bosom of their families to see out their lives, let alone their dying days. No compassion was shown by him to them."

"But that alone is not a reason for us to deny compassion to him and his family in his final days. Our justice system demands that judgement be imposed, but compassion be available."

"Compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs the we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as a people - no matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated."

Buckingham Palace goes Health and Safety Mad

2009-08-14T10:18:00.004+01:00

No idea how I missed this one, but a few days ago, the Daily Mail, among others was aghast over Buckingham Palace discarding one of the traditions relating to the Royal Family. So, what tradition was this that has ended up on the scrapheap due to our Politically Correct Loony Left overlords? Maybe the rising cost of stamps has led to the Queen scrapping the sending of letters to people who are celebrating their Hundredth birthday? Have those bonkers bureaucrats in Brussels killed off the changing of the guard due to the Working Time Directive? Are animal welfare groups demanding that Ravens be allowed to leave the Tower of London?

Well, no. The tradition that is being scrapped is the tradition of walking backwards away from the Queen. It's Health and Safety gone mad! Well, maybe. The Mail states that the tradition has become "the latest victim of Health and Safety regulations". Now, it's probably apt for me to admit my interest here. I work as a Health and Safety Officer. As part of my job I have to keep an eye out for any new regulations that may affect the company I work for and make sure we act on them. The best place to find them tends to be here. Although meeting the Queen doesn't really fall under my remit, I'm sure I would have noticed regulations coming through mentioning not walking backwards away from the Queen. So it's not a regulation then. It's a recommendation. Possibly. There's no direct quote anywhere in the piece from anyone described as being involved in the decision, except for a Buckingham Palace "spokesman", who states that "there was no major decision made...the tradition just melted away".

The decision to stop the practice is apparently to stop people bumping into things as they exit and suing the Palace if they get injured or something. Now, I would think that you've got to have balls the size of the Commonwealth to sue Buckingham Palace, but let's be fair, meeting the Queen isn't something that happens to you every day. No matter if you're a fervent royalist, or a republican, you're going to be quite nervous about meeting the Queen. There's a possibility that you may be concentrating so much on walking backwards, you could crash into something and break the antique vase that was a gift to George II from Louis XV. Which would obviously be quite embarassing. So I can see why it might be thought sensible to do away with it.

As any seasoned Daily Mail reader will know, the last couple of paragraphs of a story will often contain the kernels of truth following the foaming hyperbole of Mail reporting. As is the case here. Robin Cracroft-Brennan, from the Heraldry Society, states

"The present Queen has always hinted that she's not particularly fussed by it... I think she takes the view that it's far better for someone to walk normally than to fall over."

Which sort of makes you wonder why the Mail gets that bothered, really.

They'll be Dancing in the Streets of Field Electrical Tonight...

2009-08-10T20:51:00.007+01:00

The Elite Ice Hockey League champions, Sheffield Steelers, are no strangers to controversy. From their days being managed by former Rotherham United chairman Norton Lea, to their play-off win in April, British Ice Hockey's most hated club are never far from the headlines (or what passes for headlines given the small amount of coverage the sport gets). Today they risked enraging many of their fans by announcing via the Sheffield Star that they are dropping the Sheffield part of their name to be replaced by the name of their principal sponsors - they will, for this season at least, be known as the Field Electrical Steelers.

Steelers' General Manager Mike O'Connor defends the name change by saying that, given the ongoing move from Sheffield Arena to the Rother Valley based YES! Project site, it would be not be apt for the team to keep the Sheffield moniker. Which would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that work on the site hasn't actually started yet, so the Steelers will be still in Sheffield for at least 2 years. But moving out of the area needn't stop you keeping the name - O'Connor clearly hasn't been paying attention to the Don Valley Stadium, just 100 yards or so from the Arena, which now houses Rotherham United FC, after the club made the reverse of the journey the Steelers will be undertaking. Sheffield FC, the oldest football club in the World, don't currently play in Sheffield, they play in nearby Dronfield. Grimsby Town have been playing in neighbouring Cleethorpes for years. Even moving away from football and back to ice hockey, former Elite League, and now English Premier side Manchester Phoenix are located in Altrincham, and Newcastle Vipers will be playing half their games in Whitley Bay this season.

Of course, most fans will probably believe that the name of their team has been changed for purely commercial reasons, to highlight the name of their main sponsors this season. But the club have, in previous sponsorship deals, been known as the Unison Sheffield Steelers, the Liberata Sheffield Steelers, and last year, the Eurologix Sheffield Steelers, so why they can't just be the Field Electrical Sheffield Steelers, heaven knows. The problem with abandoning the geographic location from your name though, as has been shown before, is that people will just ignore it. Due to sponsorship deals, my club, Chelmsford Chieftains (just to clarify, I mean the club I support, I don't own the team) were known as the Wavetek Chieftains for a couple of years in the early/mid-nineties, and the previously-mentioned Newcastle Vipers were known last year as the Mincoff Vipers. Outside of official club documents, however, it made absolutely no impact on fans, media, or indeed the league tables, both teams were still known by the location of the team. Fans of both the Steelers and other teams will still refer to the as "Sheffield", and given the record of the Steelers for going through title sponsors (they've had a different title sponsor each season for at least the last five years), they'll no doubt be known as something slightly different next year.

I understand that UK Ice Hockey is in a tough situation cash-wise, but Sheffield Steelers are one of the biggest clubs in Britain, and surely some things are sacrosanct.

UPDATE - 17/08/2009

The Steelers now confirm that they will retain the name Sheffield Steelers, for now, anyway. After a campaign by the Sheffield Star and fans, it seems there are some clubs who listen to their audiences after all.

Doncaster starts flushing itself down the toilet

2009-08-07T14:33:00.000+01:00

Recently elected Mayor of Doncaster, Peter Davies, has been in office for about two months, and has already been making headlines. He was the English Democrat candidate for the position, standing on a platform of cutting "PC non-jobs", cancelling funding for Doncaster's Gay Pride march, and reducing the number of councillors in Doncaster to a third of what they were before his election. Before he had even managed to take up the role, he was pretty dramatically batted about by BBC Radio Sheffield's Toby Foster, and he has since done an about turn on one of his election promises, as Doncaster Council has now released the funding they had earmarked for the Pride march. A great start then. Boateng & Demetriou have a look through the rest of his policies here, as well as making predictions as to how successful he will be.

Mayor Davies is striding ahead regarding one of his manifesto points, though. The Sheffield Star announced today that Davies has brought in Laura and John Midgeley, heads of the Campaign against Political Correctness, to go through the services the council offer and decide which ones are PC, and which ones aren't. Apparently, the couple are "experts on the subject". One look at their website, which appears to have been designed in 1997 and shows no signs of being willing to come into the 21st century, will tell you otherwise. The Campaign feasts on half-truths and myths (the changing of Christmas to a Winter Festival by some councils is a favourite, even though such a thing has NEVER HAPPENED), believing that a few people occasionally getting the wrong end of the stick or being a bit jobsworthy constitutes a menace to society. My favourite part of the site is "Not in my name", where you can send in your details of who you are, and why you're against PC, and they'll detail it in a nice little table for you, categorising you by your minority, and thereby completely missing the whole point. They've even got a Twitter account, although they've not actually said anything on it. Or maybe they have, and it's been deleted by the PC Brigade.

One of the PC departments the CAPC are targeting is the Ethnic Minority Welfare Rights Service, which assists those of Ethnic minorities to gain benefits they are entitled to. This was set up following the Gus John Report of 2002, which showed that black people in Doncaster felt keen racial divides in the city and that the Council was institutionally racist and would not give the same assistance to ethnic minorities as it would the white population of Doncaster. The report itself was seen "as a watershed in Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council's relationship with black and minority ethnic communities". Now two people want to
close down something that is attempting to bring minorities into the community.

Not just 2 people though, two people unelected by the people of Doncaster. A better place to have this debate would be in the council offices of the city, where people of the borough, elected by people of the borough, could discuss it. Bringing in 2 people who don't live in Doncaster, who have no ideas of the needs of the people of Doncaster, and who have a pretty obvious agenda already, and letting them put big marker-pen crosses against jobs with the words ethnic, minority, and diversity, is not a great way to run a democracy.

And he brought forth the people that were therein...and made them pass through the Brick-kiln...

2009-08-04T23:19:00.000+01:00

Do you love Lego? Do you also love the Lord Jesus Christ who died on the cross for all our sins? Ever wondered how you could possibly combine the two? Well fear no longer, I have just the website for you. The Brick Testament is basically a version of the Good Book using scenes made entirely out of Lego. Frankly, as someone that's never really grown out of Lego, and owns all 3 Lego Xbox Games (Lego Batman is the best, by the way), I think it's hilarious. My favourite so far? Has to be the story of Cain and Abel, if only for this shot.

Sinister Characters in the Background - Manipulating the public for over 200 years!

2009-07-31T22:14:00.000+01:00

Via a Twitter post from Phil Plait, and following a couple of links, I ended up reading a post on the website of David Icke, everyone's favourite goalkeeper turned tinfoil hat wearer. Now, the vast majority of it is your typical "Swine flu was released by the Illuminati/Bilderberg Group/Reverse Vampires to cull the population" batshittery, but part of the post talked about, well, I can't really put it better than David himself:

"The Illuminati plan for the world includes...the microchipping of every man, woman and child. Microchips would allow everyone to be tracked 24/7, but it goes much further than that.

Computer technology communicating with the chips has the potential to manipulate people mentally, emotionally and physically. This could be done en masse or individually through the chip's unique transmitter-receiver signal. Killing someone from a distance would be a synch (sic)."

Apparently these chips are, due to the wonders of nanotechnology, so small as to be able to be injected into people along with their tamiflu jab. Anyway's, the interesting thing about that quote was that it reminded me of the strange story of James Tilly Matthews, who I read about roughly this time last year. Matthews was a Welshman, working as a tea broker in London in the last 10 or so years of the Eighteenth Century. He is also pretty much acknowledged to be the first recorded case of paranoid schizophrenia.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm by no means an expert regarding the brain, and I'm not suggesting for one moment that David Icke is mentally ill. However, the parallels between Icke's "They'll control us from afar" reasonings, and the ideas Matthew's had that led him to be admitted to Bedlam Hospital, are striking.

Matthews believed, as revealed in John Haslam's 1810 book Illustrations of Madness, he was under attack from a gang of criminals who were could manipulate his thoughts and ideas by use of a gigantic machine called the Air Loom. The "Air Loom Gang", as he called them, consisted of Bill the King (the ringleader), Jack the Schoolmaster, Sir Archy (a woman dressed as a man), and the Glove Woman, who operated the Air Loom. The Air Loom itself was located in London Wall in Moorfields, not far from where Liverpool Street station is today, and was drawn by Matthews during his treatment at Bedlam:

(I've always thought that image would make a good album cover, by the way).

When Matthews "saw" the Air Loom, he could never make out the top parts of it, as they were so high up, which is why they are sketched rather than drawn solidly. It may well be that the character in the top left of the picture is supposed to be Matthews, if that's the case, it's the only picture of him we have.

The Air Loom worked by combining chemistry with the new "science" of Animal Magnetism. By mixing a number of frankly disgusting substances, including seminal fluid, "effluvia of dogs", "putrid human breath", and "gas from a horse's anus", the Glove Lady was able to alter the flow of magnetically charged air around the patient, causing ailments including "thought-making", or pushing the ideas of a person out of their brain and replacing them with thoughts chosen by the gang, and "lobster-cracking", increasing the pressure of the magnetic atmosphere around the victim, which would stop his circulation, "impede his vital motions", and kill him. But it wasn't just Matthews they were after. He believed that there were dozens of similar gangs all around the capital, working their influence on the important people of the day, including then Prime Minister William Pitt. Indeed, so sure of the influence of these machines was Matthews, that he was originally admitted to Bedlam after entering the public gallery at the House of Commons and shouting accusations of treason at Lord Liverpool, the Home Secretary.

So what had started off these illusions in Matthews' mind then? Why would a tea broker from Wales suddenly become convinced he was being got at by a secretive gang intent on using him as they wished? After the French Revolution, there was a real chance of France starting a war with Britain. It seems Matthews travelled over to France with David Williams, who was well known to the Girondists who originally made up the government of Republican France, to try and broker a peace deal between the countries. Matthews gained the trust of the Government, and also of the Government of Britain, but was thwarted when, whilst he was back in Britain, the Girondists were usurped by the Jacobins. Upon returning to France, Matthews was arrested due to his connections with the previous government, and was imprisoned in France for three years. He was released after the French became convinced he was a lunatic, and returned to Britain. However, the UK Cabinet denied having any knowledge of him, leaving Matthews to send two letters to Lord Liverpool accusing him of treason, and eventually his House of Commons outburst, which led to his incarceration in Bedlam. It was once in Bedlam that he was looked after by Haslam, who later released his, and Matthews's own, notes on Matthews in Illustrations of Madness (you can see excerpts from the book here). After some years in Bedlam that were almost as eventful as events proceeding, but can't really be covered in a 1100-word blog entry, Matthews was moved to London House in Hackney, where he died in 1815, aged 45. In the last 15 years or so, his case has moved slightly more into the public eye, and has been the subject of a play, and a novel, as well as getting a mention on CSI. In 2002 artist Rod Dickinson built a full-scale Air Loom, which has been displayed in Newcastle and Heidelberg, Germany.

It's interesting to note that almost 200 years after the publication of Illustrations of Madness, David Icke believes, like James Tilly Matthews, that new science is behind sinister plots to alter the way people think and behave. As writer Mike Jay says, "For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them through fillings, mysterious implants or TV sets, or via hi-tech surveillance, MI5, Masonic lodges or UFOs, James Tilly Matthews is Patient Zero".

If you're interested in looking at James Tilly Matthews's story in more detail, you couldn't go wrong with Mike Jay's book "The Air Loom Gang", available at Amazon here. Pictures of Rob Dickinson's Air Loom can be seen at this site. Finally, author Robert Rankin took the idea of the Air Loom Gang and weaved another of his tales of far-fetched fiction around it, which is how I came across James Tilly Matthews. The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code can be bought from here.