I didn’t quite catch that…

Once again, a big fuss is being made of NIrish politicians going to the US for St Patrick’s Day. Where they’ll soon be joined by their southern counterparts.

I know I’m not the only one that thinks this is a bit cheeky, spending the national holiday in a foreign country just because there’s likely to be more famous visitors there. But people have been bitching about this little jaunt for as long as I can remember, and none of the politicians seem to be listening. This is a relatively minor thing, and politicians just ignore the public feeling on it. So how do we expect them to listen about the actual important things?

Last weekend found TLF and I attending something called a pre-marriage course. Something that apparently increases the chances of a long and happy marriage¹. And it was alright, nowhere near as bad as initially feared.

Hell, they even communicated by emoticon.

click to embiggen

Of course, what with TLF being the woman she is, and me being the five year old child I am, most of the rest of the day was spent communicating by trying to get the faces just so, as per the sheet above.

Most were easy, but I’m afraid that I was arrested for racism while attempting ‘meditative’.

And that’s most of what I remember from the day². Seems that we didn’t approach it in the proper fashion…

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¹ – Am I the only one who thinks that there’s a certain post hoc explanation for this? Nope? OK then…

² – TLF would like it to be known that the day cost £60 and that they didn’t even give us lunch. The emotion you’re looking for is to be found third one down on the very left.

When is something a sign of Big Brother, and when is it a sign of a backlash against Big Brother?

Normally, this is an easy thing to decide. CCTV cameras, Big Brother; Burning of CCTV cameras, backlash. ID Cards, Big Brother; campaigns to opt out, backlash. Summary Care Records, tending to Big Brother; thebigoptout, backlash.

Simples.

However, when it comes to ‘banning’ council jargon from public documents, is this an example of Newspeak (banning unsavoury words) or of an effort to constrain newspeak (restricting the use of new words when perfectly good old language exists)?

“Why do we have to have a ‘webinar trialogue for the wellderly’ when the public sector could just talk about caring for the elderly instead?

My own thinking on why such jargon is used is this: primarily, users of jargon do it to emphasise their speciality, especially to others who don’t actually know what it means. So they get to say that their area of expertise is a bloody important thing which nobody else can do, and it’s not for the likes of the plebes to understand. Secondly, by using jargon to describe job roles and responsibilities, people get to dodge accountability: if nobody can exactly pinpoint what a job is, then how can anyone be accused of not doing it properly?

So I’m leaning towards this being a backlash. And thusly a good thing. Which is unusual, the LGA is usually one of the worst offenders in this area…

To begin with: I did a decent thing, and cooked for TLF and I. Nothing too strange about that, happens a lot of the time. However, this time round it was merely the first in a sequence of steps that resulted in a lot of our evening being spent enjoying the sights and sounds of Lewisham’s Accident & Emergency department.

The dinner was nothing special; a little chicken kiev with some new potatoes and a bit of salad on the side. However, as TLF had just set her plate down to put some salt on it, I made the grave error of offering her a few more potatoes. Hideous crime, as I’m sure you’ll agree, for while I advanced towards her with a ladle of said delicious tubers, she took a step back and this resulted in her entire plate falling edge on onto her big toe.

The next stage cannot be repeated here, but rest assured, the Not Happy dance was done, and pain was experienced. A diligent observer may even have noticed some sobbing, and not just from me.

Enter, stage left, the NHS Direct service. Staffed by clinicians and experts with much training, their official opinion was “oh, the computer is saying that you should go to A&E”. Which, to be fair, a trained monkey could have told us. Way to spend millions of quid on a service.

Hence: A&E. Wherein your protagonist and TLF got to move a couple of time in the waiting room (because of a guy with the DTs and a wandering hand), discuss plans for St Paddy’s day with a harmless drunk named Colin (who had a most excellent smell), get seen by a triage nurse (who looked at it, went “oh” and sent us on our way to something called the Primary Care Suite), get seen by an actual baby doctor called Sue who talked of all the pretty colours that a bruise goes, and get an X-ray to rule out a compression fracture. Oh, and then a bandage administered by a slightly sadistic nurse, a compression fracture caused to my hand by excessive squeezing, and advice regarding pain control.

All in, a fun night. For your entertainment needs, I heartily recommend Lewisham A&E: does exactly what it says on the tin. Just very slowly.

see more Funny Graphs

On the plus side, it does look mighty good in that box on the top of the wardrobe…

I’ve gotten out of the habit of reading Clarkson’s columns. Dunno why, but it might be something to do with the fact that I don’t normally have all day Sunday¹ to sit reading the entire of the Sunday Times, but that’s not important right now…

However, sometimes I end up reading Clarkson. And this week, I’m mighty glad that I did.

As we know, one man once got on one plane in a pair of exploding hiking boots and as a result everyone else in the entire world is now forced to strip naked at airports and hand over their toiletries to a man in a high-visibility jacket.

In other words, the behaviour of one man has skewed the concept of everyday life for everyone else. And we are seeing this all the time.
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What good did all the airport legislation achieve? None. It simply means that you and I now must get to the airport six years before the plane is due to leave and arrive at the other end with yellow teeth, smelly armpits and no nail file. Did it prevent a chap from getting on board with exploding underpants? No, it did not.

Happily, however, I have a solution to the problem, a way that normal human behaviour can be preserved. It’s simple. We must start to accept that 5% of the population at any given time is bonkers. There are no steps to be taken to stamp this out and no lessons to be learnt when a man with a beard boards a plane with an exploding dog.

Government officials who are questioned on the steps of coroner’s courts must be reminded of this before they speak. So that instead of saying the current law is “not fit for purpose” and that something must be done, they familiarise themselves with an expression that sums up the situation rather better: “Shit happens.”

That’s actually the most sensible thing that politicians should learn. Instead of always saying that something must be done, just accept that no set of laws will ever protect everyone from everything. No system is perfect, and spending time chasing that zero will just leave people with a massive burden of regulation, an illusion of safety and absolutely no sense of self.

Instead of making new stupid rules, just use the existing ones to deal with the actual risk and see how they go. It’s the only way of stopping the entire system from falling over; too many laws will just make it impossible for people to actually obey them, after all…

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¹ – Most recent random Sunday strangeness: walking along the south bank of the Thames, TLF, A N Other and I nearly walked over David Cameron and family. Which was a bit unexpected.

Well, isn’t it nice that HBO are doing their bit for the NIrish economy?

US broadcaster HBO is to begin filming its epic fantasy adventure series Game of Thrones in Belfast in June.

The series pilot was filmed at locations around the city.

Nine more programmes based on the first book of George R.R. Martin’s multi-volume A Song of Fire and Ice series have now been commissioned.

Yes, they’re making a TV series of the first of the Song of Ice and Fire books, which could be very interesting. It’s a most excellent (if fucking complicated) series of books, and if any TV company could make it work, then my money is on HBO doing it properly.

The only problem is that if they plan on making the whole series of books into shows, then they’ll have to get Mr Martin to hurry up. I mean, it’s been five years since the last instalment, and he’s running the risk of never finishing the damn thing. Which would be bad. As I’ve been saying for most of those five years:

One of the things you hear about the people who go on school shootings is that they sometimes can’t really distinguish between their fantasy reality and their surroundings. So they don’t see that their school isn’t an extension of their gaming, or their stories, or whatever.

Seems to me like the people complaining about this business have a similar inability going on.

Australians have expressed outrage that a company which uses schools for weekend war games has promoted them as being “perfect killing fields”.

One parents’ association described the promotions, in the state of Queensland, as totally inappropriate.

Let’s be clear: the company is basically talking about laser quest here. Which is just a fun game, in which you don’t even get bruised. Their literature is just that: stories to get people interested in playing a grown up game of tag.

And I don’t see a problem in it. Hell, back in my younger days (anything up to about 27, really), I often found myself in buildings wondering just how good they’d be at hosting paintball. Belfast Odyssey Pavillion, for example, would be good from a sniping point of view, but less good for getting up close work done. Warwick Students Union would be excellent for mixing both kinds of work, but would also be too easy for those of a camping persuasion. That sort of thing. And yet, I never once actually went mad with a gatling gun in either of these buildings.

Maybe, perhaps, that’s because I’m not a moron who equates playing with reality. But that apparently puts me in the minority…

There’s something about the campaign to save 6music that annoys me.

It may be the way that people keep bringing out the platitude that the BBC is doing things that nobody else does, ignoring the fact that pirate radio is nothing but DJs playing what they want; playlists only happen in the UK because the BBC want them to, so it’s hardly a big thing that one twentieth of their output on one twentieth of their stations isn’t playlisted.

It may be that the people who are campaigning for it to be kept seemingly outnumber the people who actually listen to it; it’s the same as the Daily Mail outrage scandal things where fifty people complain about something that only three people witnessed.

Or it may be that the BBC is going for the Red Arrows defence; when faced with the prospect of budget cuts, the RAF always said that the Red Arrows would be the first thing to go, and no government would want to say that they killed the Red Arrows. So the BBC may be trying to get a big enough momentum in front of them to make sure that nothing is cut in the end.

The thing is, I don’t care about 6music, or most of the BBC stations. I think that out of the five main national BBC radio stations, there is really only enough content for two or three. So cuts need to be made, and someone needs to decide where. In the face of a world where we can all decide when we’ll listen to the radio, having stations that are on 24 hours a day is unnecessary.

So cut something, and stop with the worthy play-acting. It’s getting vexing.

According to a not-at-all-lefty thinktank, excluding¹ schoolkids should be banned. Which is a fantastic idea, honestly.

Excluding badly behaved pupils from school should be abolished because it punishes vulnerable children, a report by a think tank says.

Demos says current exclusion rules, which hand difficult pupils over to local authorities, affect children with special educational needs.

And it may well do. But it also allows schools to get rid of violent and disruptive pupils whose only problem is that they’re bad little fuckers. It allows the school to remove a violent child from their victim. It allows headteachers to have a tool they can use to get parents to control their child.

It’s clearly too valuable a tool to use too often, otherwise it loses its deterrent effect. But it’s also too valuable a tool to discard as well. What would teachers have to use instead of exclusion should that tool be taken away?

So, dear brainfarttank, please to shut up. k thnx.

¹ – As far as I can tell, they mean the formal expulsion of a child from a school, rather than suspension, but you have to get to page 26 of the report before they clear that one up.

It is 1940. Europe is falling under the control of a single government, a government of almost unimaginable evil. They have taken over lands to the east and to the west; they have allies to the south and are sending armies to the north. The entire continent is in danger.

Except, for some reason, for one small country nestled in the hills. Switzerland was able to deter being attacked by the Nazis. They were able to shoot down Luftwaffe aircraft and intern any who strayed across the border. They were able to hold off the mightiest military of the day with the threat of inflicting massive losses.

Flash forward seventy years, and someone has clearly forgotten that fact.

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi has called for a jihad, or holy war, against Switzerland, as an ongoing diplomatic row between the two nations heats up.

He criticised a recent Swiss vote against the building of minarets and said Muslims must boycott the country.

This headline has prompted much in the way of “eh, what the fuck?” style comments, for understandable reasons. Libya is many miles away, and Switzerland is somewhat protected by mountains and other countries. However, I’m sure that the Swiss generals are drawing up careful plans to stop the marauding hordes from overrunning their land. Maybe they’ll even bring back the bicycle corps…

The following have all appeared in church magazines so let us thank God for church ladies with typewriters.

• Next weekend’s Fasting & Prayer Conference in Whitby includes all meals.
• Sunday morning sermon: ‘Jesus Walks on the Water’
  Sunday evening sermon: ‘Searching for Jesus.’
• Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale. It’s a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
• Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community.
  Smile at someone who is hard to love.
  Say ‘Hell’ to someone who doesn’t care much about you.
• Don’t let worry kill you off – let the Church help.
• Miss Charlene Mason sang ‘I will not pass this way again,’ giving obvious pleasure to the congregation .
• For those of you who have children and don’t know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
• Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.
• Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
• At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be ‘What Is Hell?’
  Come early and listen to our choir practice
• Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
• Scouts are saving aluminium cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
• Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.
• The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.
• Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM – prayer and medication to follow.
• The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.
• This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
• The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.
• Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.
• The school drama group will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Church hall on Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
• Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

Ta to Alex for sending that one in.

Over the last few years, I rediscovered the idea of going off things for Lent. I got bored of the idea back in school, when going off something you liked was pretty much enforced. But nowadays I tend to go off something that I know I really over indulge in; for the last couple of years I’ve stopped caffeine, which was bloody hard work. This year, I’ve decided to cut out the chocolate for a few weeks.

This is something of a struggle for me. I like chocolate; I have me a lot of it. When I go shopping there’ll normally be a couple of chocolate bars there in the basket; when there are three Crème Eggs in front of me, it’ll only be about 90 seconds until there are none; when there is a box of Quality Street nearby then I can’t help myself. People rarely would go out of their way to offer me any chocolate (at least, not twice; I’ll normally have taken their hand off at the first offering), but I’ll find some and get rid of it anyway. So, I thought, I’ll stop it for a little while and then see how it goes.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t think that it should be easy for me.

• Wednesday – First day off chocolate; someone at work buys me a KitKat despite me expressly telling them not to. It is passed on to other people.
• Thursday – Day 2; a big ol’ box of chocolate appears in the middle of the table at a meeting. It is studiously ignored.
• Friday - Boss comes back from holiday and comes bearing foreign chocolates for all. I have to leave the room.
• Saturday - A trip to the family of TLF, who proffer much in the way of chocolatey goodness. A box is taken, and stored in the kitchen cupboard for later.
• Sunday - A nice walk through areas of SE London near to the house; in a random Tesco, TLF absent-mindedly picks up two Crème Eggs, one for me and one for her. TLF ended up having two.
• Monday - A patient at work brings in some Eclairs for all to share. They are passed on to others who nearly fell over at the sight of me not taking part.
• Tuesday - The first day when the world didn’t offer me chocolate on a silver platter.

And now we’re a full week in. And I’m getting bored of it. How long do you think I’ll last?

Also, it’s interesting how different it is to be in London and explain to people that you’re going off something for Lent. People look at you rather weirdly.

One of my friends, who takes politics seriously and got certificates in it and everything, has often told me that once a politician answers a question, they’ve failed to manage the story. And once they issue a denial, they’ve really lost control and are way off message.

Now, I pretty much despise that that is accepted as a good thing; the background level of spin that is included in politics makes me want to strangle people with their own entrails. But he’s right; that standard is the one that politicians are judged by and it is by that standard that Brown is in the shit.

Britain’s top civil servant has said he did not confront Gordon Brown about “acting in a bullying or intimidatory manner” towards Downing Street staff.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell also said there was no need for an inquiry following newspaper stories about the PM’s treatment of colleagues.

The stories about young Gordon are endless, and the one that sticks the most seems to be that he tends to throw mobile phones at his underlings when he doesn’t get his way. Now, that may be made up, but it has stuck. And so for three days, Brown and his ever diminishing clique are having to issue denial after denial, and get others to issue more denials. Brown is NOT a bully. Brown is NOT violent. Brown NEVER hit any of his staff. Brown is NOT mental.

It’s hilarious, because when a politician spends so much time denying something, then most people start thinking that there’s smoke so there must be fire somewhere. If he keeps it up, then the NOTs and the NEVERs will just become silent to most people, and they’ll take ever subsequent denial as an admission of guilt.

Which amuses me somewhat.

Over the last couple of days, TLF and I have been having a to-and-fro about the definition of a word. Not one of the usual words that couples will disagree about, now, since we don’t actually tend to do that. Not the sort of word that people should actually argue about normally. Just something that results in a little disagreement when certain things are on television.

The word? Sport.

Personally, I think that there are many things out there that are called sports, but aren’t actually sport. Darts and snooker, we both agree, are not sports. Football, rugby and ice hockey, we both agree, are sport¹. Those are the easy ones, but there are a few that have resulted in serious disagreement and loss of tea-drinking privilege.

Ice dancing and gymnastics are the strongest points of contention. I hold that they aren’t sport, TLF says that they are. I say that there is too much subjectivity, too little immediate competition and not enough element of gamesmanship; she says that there is sufficient physicality, commitment and discipline required to compete at the highest level to qualify them for sport. I then say that this is nonsense, and say that physical commitment is required to work on a building site, but that doesn’t make plastering a sport. She retorts that I smell like wee and shall be sleeping on the couch. And so it goes on.

However, things were recovered (as is so often the case) by turning on the television to see some coverage on the BBC of ski-cross. And both of us looked at this and said: this is madness. This is excellent. This is somewhat scary. This, in fact, is sport.

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¹ – although we probably disagree on the relative qualities of the three sports mentioned…

There was, buried in the past decade and a half of stupidity, a half decent idea. The idea of a controlled parking zone was, to begin with, a seemingly good way to stop people being unable to use their own streets to park in because other people were using it as a base for commuting.

Of course, like every rare good idea that government has had, it became fucked up. Instead of being used to control parking in small, troubled areas, huge swathes of towns are being declared as special zones. Often for no good reason, and with no actual consultation. For example, round the corner from our flat (which has been in a CPZ for a long time) they’ve extended another zone to meet this one. Meaning that there isn’t actually a street in about 300 yards that you can park in without a permit. Oh, and when they brought it in, they had the signs up and the road markings changed long before the period of supposed consultation ended. So the council were really open minded about it. Honest.

A little further away, and even further from anywhere that has a parking problem, the same council are at it again. But someone seems to have noticed.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this one…

Space: the final frontier¹. A place where mankind has been maintaining a small outpost for quite a few years now, most recently in the International Space Station.

But what’s the point of having an outpost like the ISS in orbit if they can’t really enjoy the view?

Good job that they finally got round to sorting that…

See, it’s views like that that make the $100,000,000,000 price tag seem almost reasonable.
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¹ – Except that of course you can’t have a final frontier, because there’d be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate… – Name that reference, please.

For actual years, I’ve been saying that the West should be building more nuclear reactors. Because they work well, and they’re reliable, and they don’t depend on Russian gas or volatile crude oil prices.

It seems that Obama agrees with me¹.

President Barack Obama has announced more than $8bn (£5bn) of federal loan guarantees to help build the first US nuclear power stations for 30 years.

Two new plants are to be constructed in the state of Georgia by US electricity firm Southern Company.

Of course, the problem is that in the UK we’re not quite at that point. Despite the way that we need the reliability even more US, our politicians are so terrified of being branded un-environmentally friendly that they’ll just sleepwalk into a place where we have rolling brownouts and the like.

But then, Brown et al are all so fond of emulating Obama that they might just try his one as well. Which would be almost smart.

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me¹ – and that may well be the only time you ever hear me say that.

Over the weekend, a thinktank said that they’d come up with a genius idea: cutting the working week to 21 hours to fix everything.

The working week should be cut to 21 hours to help boost the economy and improve quality of life, a left-wing think tank has said.

The New Economics Foundation claimed in a report the reduction in hours would help to ease unemployment and overwork.

The think tank said people were working longer hours now than 30 years ago even though unemployment was at 2.5 million.

And they said this while missing several important points. Such as, y’know, reality, and that sort of thing.

As far as I can tell, the 21 hour week would consist of three days working. Which, as we all know, is a sign of massive economic success and forward thinking. How this would do anything to benefit the economy, I don’t know – less time for wealth generation means less wealth generation, as far as I can see. That’s certainly been the case with France’s working time limits, which have since been diluted.

Maybe they’re talking about improving the NEF’s own metric of performance: the Happiness Index. Not sure that it would work, though – a four day weekend is a great thing once in a while. If it was every week, how’d you know the difference?

Scene: late one Sunday evening. Your humble narrator is in bed, at the point of falling asleep in preparation for another week of fun at work.

In the darkness, a screen lights up, and a mobile phone rings.

*ring* *ring*
Humble narrator: Hello?
Voice on phone Hello, is that Mr Hillan?
Hn:Er, yes. Who is this?
VoPThis is Constable Bob, off of the PSNI.

At this point, the usual strange thoughts run through my head: who would put me down as an ICE, and who of them is in Norn Iron at the moment? Why would a cop ring me at this time? After that, I silently accept that the likelihood of me getting any sleep is quite low…

Hn:OK, why are you ringing me at this time of night?
VoPAre you the keyholder for property at xxxxxxx, belonging to xxxxxxx?
Hn:I was, but I moved out of Belfast about six months ago so they were supposed to take me off the list. Suppose they had other things on their minds.
VoPOK, it’s just that the alarm is going off, the primary keyholder isn’t about and the secondary keyholder has forgotten the alarm code.

A-ha! A simple one. Solved with a phone call to a place where the local time is 2am and an alarm code is sourced. And then a nice, fitful sleep, brought on by the nervous energy that only a late night phone call from law enforcement can inspire…

In related news, I’m feeling a little bit shattered this morning.