I didn't quite catch that...

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.

–
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.

For several years, people in law enforcement and criminal justice have been saying that people have unreasonable expectations of them, brought on largely by shows such as CSI. People expect critical evidence to be found at every crime scene, and for the people who are studying it to be able to find out exactly what it means within days of the crime. They have also come to expect certainty from the criminal justice process, which isn’t something that happens very often.

So people expect to see smartly dressed people with expensive cameras and funky modelling equipment at the scene of the crime within hours of it happening, and are disappointed when they get a couple of people in cheap suits making a mess with the fingerprint powder three days after the fact.

The police, and the lawyers and the judges, aren’t supermen. They make mistakes, and they work at the rate they work at not at the pace set by a 52 minute show limit. But still, you’d expect more than this:

The Police Ombudsman has recommended that two police officers be disciplined after they failed to find the decomposed body of a man in his home.

And where was this body?

When he came outside a neighbour told the officer that the man ate and slept in his living room and that a Housing Executive official had previously found him asleep under a blanket on the sofa.

“The officer returned inside and found the man in the position described by the neighbour, his body decomposing,” said Mr Hutchinson.

Not checking a sofa for a known alcoholic? Seems a bit silly. And not carrying a torch for a check of a home? Horatio would never let that happen…

It is an oft-repeated claim that Norn Irish school kids punch above their weight when it comes to school test results. So they must be doing something right in schools.

Nevertheless, the teaching unions demand more is done.

The unions say one in eight pupils in Northern Ireland is being taught in a class of more than 30 pupils although the average size is just over 20.

The INTO and the UTU have been working closely together on the campaign and say reducing class sizes would also provide posts for newly qualified teachers who cannot find jobs.

Now, when I was at St Malachy’s, many of my classes were of 31 students, and it didn’t exactly cause the school to stop. So I’m not entirely convinced by the class size argument.

What is more telling is the last line of the quote: the unions are admitting that a large driver for this is because they want more jobs for teachers. When it’s quite obvious (through the wonders of supply and demand showing where the demand is) that there are too many teachers in Norn Iron for the population. As opposed to over in England, where’re they’re crying out for new teachers. Perhaps, INTO and UTU, you could recommend that for the best start to their careers, these new teachers could go to England for a few years and get jobs there until they felt the need to come home? Or would that hurt your membership numbers too much?

I’ve mentioned (many, many times) that I’m not a fan of Apple. I don’t like the styling, and more than that I don’t like the attitude of the company and of those that evangelise for it. No, you’re not a fucking “genius“, you’re tech support and with a pretty narrow range of tech to support. That sort of thing.

But it seems that there may be another reason I’m not massively a fan, and another reason why I’m perfectly happy with my not-an-iPhone.

Does this surprise anyone? New research shows that your choice of smartphone reflects your political persuasion: Left-wingers, it seems, favour the iPhone – while those on the Right prefer BlackBerrys.

I don’t have any love for either the right or left in California politics, but I do know which side I have less love for on the big issues. And that fits with this little survey.

But does the survey result hold for other Apple products? Do Apple owners have much in overlap with deranged lefties? Do they both, for example, feel all warm and gooey when they’re offered another slice of same from the paternalistic organisations they worship?

I dread the answer, really…

Do you ever read a news story and think: there’s either a big chunk missing here, or it just doesn’t add up.

Such was my reaction on reading about Met commander Ali Dizaei, who’s just been sent to jail for corruption.

Mr Dizaei has been in the news for a long time; he’s be vocal in his belief that the Met is very difficult for non-whites to reach high rank in, and he’s a talking head about a lot of other things. He’s also been in the dock for corruption and abuse of public office. In short, the only thing that has attracted more publicity than himself is the faint whiff of impropriety that has surrounded him for years.

So, what doesn’t add up is: if there’s so much doubt over his attitude, how did he get into this position?

I see a few choices:

• He’s actually a brilliant cop, and has reached the higher ranks through hard work and skill. However, his publicity seeking ways and his vocal condemnation of the force is embarrassing, and there’s been a campaign from within to rid the MPS of him.
• He’s an alright cop, but because of his public voicing of allegations of racism, nobody has had the balls to stop his rise within the organisation. So he hasn’t earned it, he’s just kept rising because the first person to deny a promotion will end up in court accused of racial discrimination.
• He’s been a fairly decent cop, but character flaws and a propensity toward big-man-ism has been uncovered as he reached the ranks where he could do most damage. In short, he’s been Peter principled.

Which do you think is the most likely?

The picture below the fold was submitted by a primary school child. They were asked to bring in a picture of what their parents did for money. After it was marked and the child brought it home, she returned to school the next day with the following note:

Dear Ms. Davis,

I want to be very clear on my child’s illustration. It is NOT of me on a dance pole
on a stage in a strip joint. I work at B&Q and had commented to my daughter how
much money we made in the recent snowstorm. This picture is of me selling a shovel.

Mrs. Harrington

More »

The excellent West Wing once taught me an excellent term: christmas tree bill. The meaning of which is explained thusly:

In the United States Congress, a Christmas tree bill is a political term referring to a bill that attracts many, often unrelated, floor amendments. A Christmas tree bill consists of many riders. The amendments which adorn the bill may provide special benefits to various groups or interests. The term refers to the proposed legislation being subject to having each member of Congress hang their own amendment on it.

I think that this wonderful new justice/policing deal might well fall into that category. Minus the US Congress angle, of course.

It took 130 hours of negotiation, and things as unrelated as a failed saving scheme seem to have been included. Which just goes to show: the supposedly idealistic and blinkered politicians that run Our Wee Country are just a greedy, opportunistic and unprincipled as those in other countries. They’ll do what needs to be done, sure, but only if you place enough pork into the trough for them and their constituents.

Impressed? Not much…

Don’t you just love how the BBC can spend their time (and our money) looking in depth at something and totally not getting it?

Last year, in a series of “town-hall meetings” across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms.

What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.

Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.

But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to help.

The problem, of course, is that the assumption of the article is that the proposed healthcare reform, by dint of being the idea of St Obama and the Democratic party, is good for people. That is not necessarily the case.

And they then decide that no matter what the objections, people are being bamboozled by a lack of numbers on the part of the Republicans, and that they’re definitely voting against their own interest. Which is both annoying and patronising, and thusly entirely in keeping with the BBC…

This day last week, I lamented the poor timing of Gordon. He’s just not lucky, and he doesn’t have the gift of arranging things to make it appear that he just cruises into the area to sort out the last minute things before claiming credit and buggering off home.

Seems that he hasn’t picked that up in the last seven days, either. So much so that he’s still hiding in London and trying to fix Norn Iron by phone. Probably the best way; we all know what the personal touch by Gordon does: causes things to fall apart and generally set everything back by a year or two.

The talks at Hillsborough Castle on the devolution of justice and policing power continued late into Tuesday.

Sinn Fein and the DUP have been arguing over the timing of the transfer of justice powers to Belfast.

I’m confused: that is one issue. How the fuck can it be taking this long to talk about? Are they sitting in stony silence for hours at a time, playing snake on an old Nokia? Or are they hard at it, whiling down the difference? I can’t see how – in the time they’ve been talking, they could have seriously considered every single calendar day between now and 2020.

Or, maybe, they like to feel important and pretend that they’re talking about serious matters of state. When really they’re just big kids in the playground arguing over who gets to kick off the game of football.

The Department of Health has – finally – gotten around tom pulling their head out of their ass and dumping IE6.

The Department of Health has told trusts using Windows 2000 or XP to move to version 7 of Microsoft’s browser.

In a technology bulletin published by the department’s informatics directorate on 29 January 2010, it advised NHS trusts using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on either Windows 2000 or Windows XP to move to version 7 of the browser.

“We’ve advised NHS trusts to upgrade to IE7 as early as possible,” said a spokesperson. The guidance said that IE7 works with the department’s Spine applications, and provides additional security.

As moves go, this is approximately three years late. IE6 has been a pain for web developers and the like for many, many, many years, and needed to be put down long before Microsoft even got around to replacing it. And even MS got round to killing it a while back.

The downside? PCT IT departments are notoriously anti- any kind of change that they don’t come up with first. And they’ve been fairly rigidly enforcing the IE6 standard in the face of common sense for a long time now. How long it takes them to get round to rolling out a decent replacement¹?

So I’m not sure that I’ll be getting anything on my desktop soon to improve on the IE6 experience. But here hoping that it isn’t another three years…

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¹ – Note, the DoH is busy recommending IE7. Which isn’t the current offering from MS at all, let alone the best out there for people to use. Probably because they spent a fortune putting together poor efforts at websites back in the early 90s that they don’t have the money to fix…

You’d think that being under new ownership would get an airport to sharpen up its act, but no. Gatwick’s shiteness strikes once again, this time in the form of being unable to cope with a simple thirty minute delay by an easyJet flight from Belfast.

The short version:

1. Plane arrives in Shatwick just over half an hour late, having made up time from an earlier Gatwick-inspired delay through a bloody quick turnaround and favourable weather conditions.
2. Shatwick’s ground controllers send said plane to the international terminal to park.
3. Somewhere between forty and forty five minutes pass before the fecking airport deign to send a bus to get us to the domestic terminal.
4. Further delays occur between doors taking too long to open and passengers thinking that wheeled suitcases are the way forward in small spaces – most emphatically, they are not.
5. The half hour delay by easyJet and the much longer delay caused by shatwick result in me and TLF not getting back into the house until after 1am.

In short, I am grumpy today. Boo.