I didn't quite catch that...

Isn’t it hilarious that the government are spending so much time and effort on a doomed project like the ID card? It’s never going to be taken up, but they’re still worrying about Norn Iron-ifying it.

People in NI who identify themselves as Irish will be issued with a different version of the ID card which the Government is planning to introduce.
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The Home Office said the scheme must “recognise identity rights” as laid out in the Belfast Agreement.

That means Irish nationals living in NI will be issued with a “personal ID card” rather than a national ID card.

Have a wee read of that; to me it sounds like they think that people who in no way think of themselves as UK citizens will be so desperate to have a UK Identity Card that they’ll settle for one without any of the supposed benefits.

Wishful thinking much?

However, I think that it’s a wonderful new get out clause for those of us willing to forsake our UKish passports should an ID card become compulsorily linked to said passport. Well done, Mr Johnson. You (inadvertently) did a good thing. Your first in your current post, if I recall correctly…

I’ve said many times before that I’m a fan of the beautiful red cars. I’ve also said before that I’m not particularly a fan of Schumacher.

But I have the utmost respect for his talents and his record, so him claiming the vacant seat for a few races can only be a good thing.

Not that I think that he’ll single-handedly turn the performance of the team around. Nor do I think that he’ll adapt too well to the new set-up in the very short term. But I do think that he’ll do wonders on the development side; that’s always been his big contribution to the team, and I can imagine that he’ll know just who he has to kick up the arse if he’s presented with a sup-par car.

Also, I think that it’ll be interesting to see what the fella can do with KERS. If anyone could make a go of it, etc etc.

Oh lookee! Those lovely people in parliament have rejigged their expenses to give themselves a little more without having to prove receipts. And they’re also tightening up on second jobs. Both of the above are bad things.

Allowing any increase in expenses (or salary, or any remuneration for the position of MP) is entire against the will of the population – I can’t think of a single person who would agree with it. So that’s self-evidently a bad thing.

And tightening up on second jobs is ridiculous. It can only be a good thing if MPs earn money outside Parliament – it means that they don’t need to claim as much from us. And it means that they have a working life outside politics, which is essential. They need to be associating with people outside the bubble, or they eventually start judging everything by the skewed standards of SW1. And that’s what got them into this mess in the first place.

To my mind, the less political a politician is, the better a leader they are. The more ways people see MPs doing things other than stabbing their granny in the back to get votes, the more respect they will have for them. And the more MPs learn from a real world that has consequences, the less likely they are to rush through bad laws with no thought of how it’ll effect things in the long term.

Or, we could just encourage people to be nothing but politicians, and care about nothing more than the next election and keeping the whips happy. Because that’s doing us all so well…

The idea of paying £10 for a single bottle of beer doesn’t exactly make me jump for joy, but the more I read about this beer, the more I think that it may actually be worth it.

With an 18.2% alcohol content, a 330ml bottle of Tokyo*, made by BrewDog, contained six units of alcohol – twice the recommended daily limit.
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The brewing company’s latest product uses jasmine, cranberries, malts and American hops, and is then fermented with a champagne yeast to make the high alcohol content.

First of all, making a beer that strong (18.2%!) is a wonderful technical achievement, and it needs to be celebrated. Technology needs to keep moving on, and brewing is just another technology. We salute your ingenuity, sirs.

Secondly, something that strong is going to pack a hell of a kick. So it’d be worth it just from that point of view.

And thirdly, it is pissing nanny off something shocking. And the more they rail against it, the more silly they sound. A limited edition run of a beer that costs £10 per 330ml isn’t going to contribute anything to the binge drinking culture; it’s going to be enjoyed by a very small group of enthusiasts. Not the sort of people to end up in A&E of a Saturday night – they’ve invested too much to get it pumped back out again…

Incidentally, I like the quote from Alcohol Focus Scotland (a lovely fake charity): “This company is completely deluded if they think that an 18.2% abv, (alcohol by volume), beer will help solve Scotland’s alcohol problems” – I very much doubt if the brewers give a shite about solving an alleged alcohol problem – they care about building their brand and making money. And that is how it should be.

Apparently, the human body glows.

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

Now, if we can only focus and harness this light, we can do away with a lot of wasteful electric lights. Which will please AlGore no end…

Hey, I wonder if fat people glow more than thin people? If they do, then maybe we can just use AlGore to light up Times Square. Genius.

Over the years, I’ve been plenty supportive of Formula 1. I love the shape of the cars, I love the support infrastructure behind them. But I don’t love the overly nannying nature of the sport.

Despite recent events, the sport is still dangerous, and people still volunteer for it. Massa volunteered for it, despite knowing the dangers. And he seems to have gotten caught in some of those dangers.

I hope that he’s OK, but the fact that he’s in the middle of serious cranial surgery would suggest that he’ll not race again.

So his career is over. Because of an accident that nobody could have predicted. Dead with it. And move on.

Well, that Norwich by-election was a real shocker, wasn’t it. Low voter turnout, and an easy Tory victory. That’s all as expected.

However, there is clearly a downside to this news.

The Tories have taken Norwich North from Labour with a majority of more than 7,000, in the first Westminster by-election since the MPs expenses row.

Tory candidate Chloe Smith won with 13,591 – more than twice as many votes as Labour’s Chris Ostrowski.
…
Ms Smith, who at 27 will be the youngest MP in the House of Commons, paid tribute to Dr Gibson in her victory speech saying she hoped to serve the voters “with the same honesty and conviction”.

Yes, for the first time in my life I am now older than the baby of the house. And that terrifies me; I know that I’m not old enough or wise enough to sit on a parish council, and people younger than me are about to sit in the Commons.

It’s all downhill from here, people. For me, and for the country.

Why is it that no matter how well intentioned a law is, this government just can’t do it correctly?

For instance: forced marriage legislation.

The aim is very good; to try and cut down on the number of children (or at least very young adults) taken from their home against their will and married to people they don’t want to get married to. To save said children from a lifetime of likely abuse. To try and stop the cycle perpetuating itself. All very worthy.

However, it’s obvious that the law has been badly written, badly researched and badly implemented.

Nineteen-year-old Canadian Rochelle Wallis married her Welsh husband Adam in November 2008, two years after they first met and fell in love.

But now Rochelle is about to be deported from the UK and has been told that she will not be able to come back to see Adam until she is 21.

She has become the first unintended victim of changes to UK immigration laws which were designed to protect young British Asian women from being subjected to forced marriages.

See, it would appear that the government did what it does best: ignore both the shape of the hole and of the object trying to fit into it. Instead of either taking the time to write it properly, or leaving it flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances, they imposed a blanked ban. Which will screw up the lives of many people, and then the law will be remembered for the mistakes rather than the good it did.

Pretty much par for the course for this particular government, isn’t it?¹

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¹ – That is, if you can think of any good it did…

Interesting… Clarkson, May and Hammond may be doing a random little exercise beneath Belfast soon.

“Hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea,” was the sentence made famous by Michael Caine at the end of the Italian Job.

But it might also apply to the Top Gear team as they have come up with a plan to copy the famous film by racing Minis through Belfast’s sewers.

Apparently it’s actually an idea thought up by Northern Ireland Water, who have messed up everything they’ve been involved with. So my hopes of it happening aren’t exactly very high. But it would be very cool if it happened.

I wonder what good, God fearing Belfast folk would make of Clarkson in the flesh…

What are the odds? The government gives itself (and it’s local government pals) a new power, gets caught abusing said power, gets a slap on the wrist, and then a year later is still misbehaving.

Local authorities in England are still spying on suspected minor offenders despite being banned from doing so by law, an official report has warned.

Since 2003 they have only been able to use undercover methods against those suspected of breaking criminal law.

If councils are breaking the law, then they need to be punished. At least heavy fines, but preferably prison time for the people who are continually authorising this practice, and for those carrying it out.

But the bigger lesson is this: once government has this power, it is never going to give it up. And the use of said power will become more and more widespread, because that’s what always happens with draconian powers that are brought in.

So, the moral of the story? Don’t let people get these types of power in the first place. It’s the only way to restrict their use at all.

Governments, and the political parties that shape those governments, have always used fear to get away with things. Fear of foreigners, fear of new and challenging ideas, fear of attack, fear of obsolescence; all have been deployed at one time or another to let that government do what it wants, in the face of all sense.

In the last decade or so, the UK government has really pushed the boat out on the fear front. Fear of foreigners kicked in over Sangette. Fear of differing opinions has lead to bans on travel. Fear of embarrassment has caused it to be illegal to protest outside the seat of our democracy. Fear has lead to an awful lot of really bad and permanent infringements of our liberty.

Fear of terrorism means that all our aviation infrastructure is on an effective permanent war footing – major airports are divided into fire plans and containment areas for police with automatic weapons to patrol while we remove our shoes. The fear caused by less than a dozen attacks has caused our cities to turn into a series of fortified islands in a way that dozens of attacks a year for thirty years didn’t.

To aid in this fear, the government helpfully created a Fear-o-meter, which shows how expected an unexpected attack is. Since no government will ever say that fear is unnecessary, the bottom two levels will never be used; for most of the lifespan of the Fear-o-meter we’ve been in level 4 (“Oh fuck, we’re almost certainly GONNA DIE”).

But the fear bug has moved on. In this case, it’s moved on to an actual bug, to whit, the flu. And it’s a particularly flu-like flu, in that it’s easily transmitted and in the vast majority of cases can take up to a week to get over. But it has the name of an animal in the title, and government has decided that we should fear it like nothing else. All our fear is to be focussed on it; we are not to fear targets, for they will be suspended for the duration. We are not to fear the police state, because they’ll all be either busy or sick. We are not to fear foreigners, because nobody will want to come here anyway because we’re all sick.

Basically, all the fear we have is to be focussed on the flu. And to ensure we get that message, the government is helpfully lowering the severity of the Fear-o-meter (to “Oh fuck, we will quite likely die”). Clearly they’re worried that we’ll just get fear fatigue, and stop paying attention. So they’ve helpfully ensured that terrorism is not to be feared as much.

Convenient, n’est pa?

I have a wonderful gift; I can get sunburnt in just about any light unless I’m really very careful.

I tend to be careful when in hot climates; it’s only sensible. So I’ve been in Egypt in high summer and not gotten burnt. I’ve been in Morocco and only gotten a mild bit of colour. Ditto Madeira. When it’s more local, though, I tend to be less sensible, out of not noticing that the sun is bright enough. I’ve been painfully (and, according to TLG, hilariously) burnt in Jersey. Back in the day, I was really painfully burnt in Donegall. I’ve recently gotten a bit burnt after waling round Belfast for an hour. And only yesterday, I added Monaghan to the list of places where I’ve gotten a little bit of skin damage.

At the same time, I broke out some mementos from a little trip to Croke in 1989; a few Antrim keepsakes from the last time they were in any sort of a final. Yes, then it was hurling, and yesterday it was football, but that’s not the point.

They were good, for a team that hasn’t been in a final for decades. And considering that they were playing the All-Ireland champions. And they could walk out with their heads held high, because they drew in the second half. Got massacred in the first, but that’s not the point, is it…

Yesterday, I decided that what I really wanted to do was nothing.

I didn’t have anywhere to be, I didn’t have anything specific to do. I didn’t have any boxes needing ticked at all.

So I sat back, relaxed, read, watched a bit of TV, and ate. And it was good. Not something I could do too often (‘cos I’d go mad), but every once in a while it just hits the spot.

In the course of my relaxing, I did a bit of pondering. Nothing massive; my life is ticking along quite nicely without being thought about too much. But I pondered about the words I read, and the images I watched. And I came up with a simple explanation about why something has been bothering me. The botheration has been caused by Lady Gaga. First of all, where did she come from, and why the fuss? And secondly, what is up with all the stupid get-up?

I’m pleased to say that a little pondering came up with answers to both. Some of the get-up is explained by Lady Gaga clearly trying to copy the Madonna route to success despite not being an obvious star. And the similarities between her and Madonna have got her noticed, and thusly partly explain her rapid appearance on the scene.

But the rest of the get up – the strange costumes, the over-the-top makeup, the jerky dance routines and the general motion that draws attention away from the face – is there for another reason.

That’s her on the left. Do you see any similarity to another famous person?

Yes, she’s distracting attention from her face because it suffers from the same problem that Liza Minelli’s does: all the features on their own are fine, but taken together there’s just something a bit off.

And with that revelation, my brain shut down for the day and I fired up the playstation. I didn’t want to have worked too hard on my day off, after all…

I like my modern phones, I really do, but it’s far too difficult to get anything like a plain ring. Kudos to the HTC Magic for having a couple of sensible rings on it, but recent Nokias and SonyErricsons have been woeful in that regard.

I’m rapidly reaching a place where as soon as someone says a measure is to be taken to protect children, I start thinking a) where’s the money? and b) no, let’s not do that.

Where’s the money? because there is inevitably a massive cost to such measures, and it’s a cost that must be paid, because it’s for the children. But then you notice that a lot of money must be spent to comply with new measures, being paid to unfit and pointless government data services, being paid to the NSPCC for their well-salaried consultants to share their training expertise, being paid in admin costs. And for no return – all the training, all the systems, all the increased costs boil down to this: if you think a child is in danger, act on it, and explain why. And I think that those 14 words are over complicating the issue: one of our prime instincts is to protect children, and we should run with that. We shouldn’t pay for pointless training sessions to tell us this; that money could be better spent on just about anything else. Or, better yet, not collected as taxes in the first place.

No, let’s not do that is fairly self explanatory as well. There’s all sorts of stupid ways that our freedom has been curtailed, all for the supposed good of the children. There’s the immense widening of criminal records checking, which make everyone who even meets children regularly effectively introduce themselves by saying “I am not a rapist, and I can prove it”. While completely ignoring the reality that the really bad and dangerous criminals and abusers are the ones that have not yet been caught – they’re not on any system, which is why they get away with it for so long.

Oh, and that sort of thing conditions both us adults (into accepting that we will constantly have to prove innocence, rather than have it assumed) and children (into assuming that all adults are a serious and immediate threat unless proved otherwise). I don’t like it when the government, or anybody for that matter, tries to condition an entire population. Especially when it’s nothing more than a knee jerk reaction with no real thought for the long term consequences.

There’s also all the climate change nonsense, being put forth so that our children can have a better world. A less free world, a less productive world, a world with less ingenuity, but also a world with infinitely more smugness and with hippies in the driving seat. Which is better, apparently…

It’s a sad effect all this has; I react the way most people do to a child in distress – I try to help. But now when someone claims to be organising such an instinct into policy, I question the motives and tend to think that they’re doing the wrong thing based on their incorrect assumptions. I don’t think I’m alone in this little mindset either.

It’s a bit odd, but some random connections have been causing me to think a little bit about flying, and the way that most of us choose to do it these days.

One of the connections was a conversation prompted by my recent facebook status bitching about easyJet being poo recently; I’ve flown with them six times in the past fortnight, and each time they’ve been very late. Another connection was a conversation at work that I got dragged into. And another was this post at Samizdata yesterday.

The general gist of other people in these conversations has been this: discounted air travel, despite its cheapness, is deeply unpleasant.

Whereas my feeling is this: discounted air travel, despite its bluntness, is fantastic.

For the most part, cheap airlines provide, today, a better quality of service than the big carriers did ten years ago. Yes, the big carriers smiled a lot, a gave you a lot of tiny perks, but they were relatively unreliable, inflexible, and hideously expensive.

easyJet, Ryanair et al aren’t that flexible, but the breadth of their timetables make up for that. And they really kill on the reliability (recent woe aside) and the expense.

Back In The Day (TM), I endured delays of many hours on flights that I’d paid literally hundreds of pounds for; the worst I’ve had to endure recently is a three hour delay on a flight that cost about £40 all in. Back in the day, I had to put up with terribly smug BA people doing everything in their power to apologise, but nothing to help; nowadays you get someone in a bright orange jacket with a bright orange face pointedly failing to apologise, but actually offering alternative ways to get to where you want to be.

So basically, my choice these days is not if I fly low fares, it’s which low fares airline I fly.

I tend to prefer Ryanair – they’re normally a tad cheaper, they’re more honest about their priorities, their planes are newer and cleaner, and there’s more space under the seats. Also, I’m entirely a sap for an elegant design, and the 737 just looks more complete a design than the A319. I get the feeling that the design committee had someone at the head of it with a strong sense of what a good plane should be and how to draw things together to make said plane.

However, easyJet isn’t without its benefits. They have less obtrusive advertising, and they give you a net to put your drinks in on the back of the seat. Also, they fly out of Aldergrove, which in recent weeks has resulted in me seeing a couple of Typhoons and listening to the roar of a Nimrod on takeoff. Why any of those were flying from a helicopter base on the wind-down is beyond me, but I’ll enjoy the geekery.

Other airlines have things wrong with them too, of course. FlyBe is too expensive to be no-frills, and too unreliable to be worth the monry. Aer Lingus is always just that little bit too expensive for any given route. Air Berlin is alright, but has moved from Belfast. bmi Baby is damned uncomfortable. bmi grownup only flies to Heathrow, and I ain’t giving no bastard my retina scan or fingerprint without a good reason.

So it comes down to Ryanair or easyJet, pretty much every time. And I’m more than happy with that, because as long as you know what you’re paying for, then you get it.

Things that I think are both obvious and true in this study:

• Facebook is more useful than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter;
• Twitter is, in fact, a bit silly and pointless, even more so than Facebook;
• Mobile internet is not being used for anything creative at all; it’s all about the Facebooking.

A third of young people regularly access Facebook and Twitter via their mobile, a new report has found.

The study, published by mobile research firm CCS Insight, found that access to social networking sites was driving the take-up of mobile internet services.

Facebook is more popular than Bebo, MySpace and Twitter combined, it found.

Its study – into mobile usage among 16 to 35 year olds – also found that the service most youngsters wanted on their phones was the BBC iPlayer.

Things I disagree with:

• Young people != the 16 – 35 age bracket. 35 is pretty bloody old, I’ll have you know.

However, it should be said that I’ve noticed the mobile web thing starting to take off a bit more than it has been doing; personally, I’ve been using WAP since the 7110 back in 2000, and every phone I’ve had since has been deployed in such a fashion. None as much as the Magic, but then that represents the massive increase in functionality that the Magic has over my prior phones; hell, it even does have the iPlayer on board.

So the reason that the take up of mobile internet is gaining pace is likely because the ease of use has finally become what it should be. And who’s to blame for it taking this long, eh? I mean, there have been WAP phones for a decade now, it’s not like it’s new technology at all. Sort it out…

There is a tradition amongst the popultion of Norn Iron: lots and lots and lots of us leave the country on the weekend of the 12^th. And so it was with me. I did the whole thing – park in a field in the overflow area; fight through the massive crowds, deal with the inevitable easyJet fuckup.

But then, I get a wonderful nice long weekend with TLG, and it’s all more than worth it.

I also get to wander around the roads of London, and a little bit of spending time with some mates, eating a lot of really, really nice food, and watched a blast from the past. Labyrinth is still excellent, however the acting is so much worse than I remembered…

Oh, and there was also a random bad idea that cropped up during Top Gear. It was all very entertaining, as always, but there was also the problem of Top Gear taking part in the confiscation and destruction of property. It’s a little bit creepy, and to be honest I thought that TG had enough of an anti-dodgy government position to avoid getting involved with the official panem et circenses. Disappointing, to say the least. I thought better of them.

I’m a fan of bouncers; having been one for quite a few years, and having seen what people get up on the average Friday night, I can see the need for people willing to stand about for the evening and tell twats to stop being twats. And it’s vastly preferable to do this in the simple way of throwing people out, and not by involving the law and/or paperwork.

The law, and the paperwork associated with it, make things much less simple, and much more serious. The vast majority of bouncing situations can be solved just by removing the problem people from the bar. It’s elegant in its simplicity.

Unfortunately, the law hath, in its wisdom, decided to screw with that.

Bouncers in Norwich’s notorious nightclub district have been given the power to issue on-the-spot fines without consultation with judges or magistrates.

Now they fear the move could undermine attempts to deter persistent trouble-makers in the city’s Prince of Wales Road area where two men have died this year.

The Norfolk police initiative, aimed at training and accrediting members of the community to bolster their work, has seen selected door-staff given powers more commonly associated with police officers.

What could go wrong? Giving semi-police powers to people without police powers of arrest and detention is really very stupid. If there is something serious enough to justify a fine, it’s serious enough to involved the police. If it isn’t, then why bother with the powers in the first place?

Or you could just roll out this, and litter wardens, and other stupid things, and dilute the respect that the average Joe in the street has for the state that little bit more.

If it gets diluted much more, then we’ll have to invent a new mathematics to measure it… What goes beyond millionths?

I don’t live in England, but I know the number for NHS Direct. Because it’s almost painfully easy to remember: 08 45 46 47.

But that doesn’t mean that the regulators don’t think that we should do away with it and use 111 instead. Because it would cut down on the amount of non-emergency calls that were made to 999.

However, that’s not what entertained me about that story.

UK regulator Ofcom has proposed allocating the number 111 for non-emergency medical advice, arguing that no-one can remember the number for NHS Direct.

The proposal runs to 61 pages but boils down to the idea that people dialling “111″ anywhere in England should be connected to NHS Direct. Scotland should follow soon, while Wales thinks about it and Northern Ireland considers introducing something along the lines of NHS Direct first.

Yes, Norn Iron doesn’t have something along the lines of NHS Direct. And, to be fair, we don’t seem to be suffering from it too much. People call their doctor for whatever imaginary diseases they have instead, and get triaged rather effectively by the receptionists. Which probably works out considerable cheaper – there was a story a couple of months ago that each call to NHS Direct cost an average of £20, which is running quite close to the cost of a face to face GP consultation. A phone call to a receptionist is likely a bit cheaper than that.

So Norn Iron will do what it does best: wait until England has made a working system (which can take a very long time), and then plan to implement it on the cheap by buying the English version. And then screwing it up so that we end up with a lesser system at a higher cost, but that’s not important right not…