English as she is spoke.

A recent news bulletin referred to a package which the authorities said was "potentially suspicious".  I would suggest that you can't have anything which is potentially suspicious - it's either suspicious or it's not.  The word potentially means having the potential to become something which at the moment it is not, so "potentially suspicious", if it means anything at all, means that it's not suspicious at this point in time, but may become so in the future - which could apply to just about anything, and so is meaningless.  If you have reason to believe that the package may be dodgy, then it's suspicious - simple as that.

Lateral thinking?

Nobby Stiles (don't you dare say "who's Nobby Stiles?"!) puts his World Cup medal up for auction.  It is bought by Manchester United - his old club - for £188,000-odd and will have pride of place in the club's museum.  So far, so good and a nice story, but what occurs to me is why didn't he offer it to the club privately in the first place?  I'm sure it is probably where he would have wished it to go, and that way both he and the club would have avoided having to pay commission to the auction house.  They're the ones coming out of this rubbing their hands!

My old man said follow the van...

I don't know whether I'm getting hard-hearted in my old age, but this row over housing benefit got me thinking.  If for whatever reason I found myself unable to afford to continue to live in my present home, I would have to leave and move to somewhere I could afford.  It's something I would not wish to do, and indeed it is something I would find very difficult to do on an emotional level, but it would have to be done.  I would not expect the State to come along and say "Don't worry, you can stay where you are, we'll make up the shortfall".  And yet it seems to me that that is exactly what the situation is regarding these people on housing benefit.  The cry is that if their housing benefit is capped many of them will have to move home because they will not be able to afford to live there any more.  But surely the point is that they can't afford to live there now - they are only able to do so because they are being "subbed" by the State.  If they have to move as a result of their benefit being capped it will simply highlight the reality that was always there, surely?

Kindling a further interest?

It was about a year ago that I posted a fairly negative comment about e-books, but one aspect which did somewhat attract me was the concept of the e-book lending library.  The idea is that instead of having to physically go to your local library and look for books, you would go to their web site, search for the book you wanted and then download it onto your e-book reader.  And the really neat part of all this is that you wouldn't have to worry about remembering to take your book back or face the possibility of a fine, because the book would be automatically deleted from your reader once the loan period was up.  Brilliant!  But wait - it seems that publishers are not keen on the idea and are threatening to restrict or withdraw access to the e-books they publish.  This needs sorting out - not least because libraries, like all public services, are going to have to make significant savings, and web-based e-book lending would be an obvious way of achieving some savings.

R.I.P. - The Emperor

So what about the shooting of this stag - supposedly the largest wild animal in the country.  Are we right to feel uneasy about this?  Or is it just another example of what I have referred to in the past as Disneyfication - the idea that animals think and feel as we do, and therefore should be treated as we would wish to be treated?  No, I think we are right to feel uneasy - not simply because an animal has been shot, not even because a magnificent example of his kind has been shot.  After all, the culling of deer is something that goes on all the time - with no natural predators their numbers have to be controlled by selective killing.  But this is killing from necessity - no-one takes any pleasure from it  Whereas, if the reports are correct, some "sportsman" has chosen to shoot this stag - and even perhaps paid good money to do so - simply because he could, and in order to have him as a trophy, and I think many people would find that extremely distasteful.  I certainly do.

TV - my head hurts!

Am I alone in thinking that "Fringe" has taken a step too far?  The idea of a parallel universe full of doppelgänger was OK provided the two were kept apart but now we have "our" Olivia Dunham over there and "their" Olivia Dunham over here it has, at least for this viewer just become too much to handle.  It may be that Americans can pick up on the nuances to be able to tell whether we are dealing with "here" or "there" but (unless they show that shot of the zeppelin) I can't and what used to be a good sort of new-style X-files has just become too complex.  And as for "The Event".....!!

The Lazy Cook

I have a cafetière - you know, one of those jugs with a plunger that takes the grounds down to the bottom.  So here's an idea - put in half and half of ground coffee and drinking chocolate, and you end up with a sort of poor man's mocha.  I like it.

Music Man

Somebody has started a Facebook campaign to have John Cage's composition called 4'33'' installed as Christmas No 1.  The joke (at least that's what I assume it is) for those who are not conversant with the piece, is that it consists of four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence.  I think it was Stravinsky who said "I look forward to hearing his longer works"
.

It's not fair!

Following on from yesterday's post, the burning question seems to be whether or not the cuts are fair - the Government say they are, the Opposition and various single-interest groups say they are not.  To me it's a pointless argument - of course they're unfair, the whole bloody situation is unfair!  We find ourselves having to pick up the tab to get ourselves out of a mess that was not of our making - how can that be anything other than unfair?  Indeed the fundamental problem didn't even originate here - we imported it from across the pond.  So let's stop this silly idea of fairness or unfairness - it's all about sharing the pain, of ensuring that the unfairness is spread about as evenly as possible.

The axeman cometh.

I suppose I should say something about these spending cuts, as the news has been full of little else since Wednesday when they were announced.  The problem is that I'm a pensioner, and as such on the face of it am in the fortunate position of being little affected by them.  On the other hand, perhaps that allows me to look at things in a more dispassionate way.  And the first thing which strikes me is that people - including the media who really should know better - are reacting as though these cuts are going to happen in full tomorrow, whereas the Government have made it clear that this is a five year plan (and doesn't that have a wonderfully old-fashioned communistic ring?).  So you have to look at these figures over a five year period - still pretty draconian but perhaps not as earth-shattering as some are making out.  The other rather depressing thing is that everybody seems intent on fighting their own corner, with little regard for the bigger picture - it's all about how this will affect me or those I represent rather than whether it is right for the country as a whole.  Perhaps if I were more personally involved I might feel differently, but I hope I could keep a sense of proportion.

Fractals etc.

The death of Benoit Mandelbrot the other day brought back memories of my ZX Spectrum taking about half an hour to produce the famous "Mandelbrot set" and of how I would sit there fascinated watching it emerge line by line.  Now on my current computer it takes just a few seconds.  My other memory concerning his work was the answer to the question "How long is the coastline of Britain" - and it turns out that it's infinitely long.  It all depends on how detailed you want to be - the more detail you are prepared to accept, the longer it is, and as the amount of detail is infinite, so is the length.  Fascinating stuff he came up with, though I didn't understand a tenth of it.

Friends and neighbours.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel has declared that multiculturalism - at least in Germany - has been a failure.  So what about here?  The original idea was integration - people coming here from other countries and cultures would become British by osmosis as it were.  But that didn't work, mainly because immigrants tended to band together with there own sort, and you quickly got areas of towns and cities (usually at the bottom end of the market) which were predominantly Asian, or West Indian or whatever, and obviously if you are living among others of your own race there is less need to be able to speak English or to comport yourself in a "British" manner.  So multiculturalism was born - each to his own, everybody free to do their own thing, and everybody respecting everybody else's right to do so.  Except human nature doesn't work that way - you very quickly get a tribal attitude, a feeling of "us and them".  So no, I don't think multiculturalism is working - but don't ask me what the answer is!

It's a snip!

There are representatives of an American charity going round London offering £200 to any drug addict who agrees to be sterilised.  The logic (if you can call it that) appears to be that such people are unfit to become parents, and the charity is therefore preventing the putative future abuse of the children these addicts might otherwise have.  It's certainly true that you can look at some families and say "these people should never have been allowed to have children" but identifying such people in advance is an entirely different matter, and doing so by categorisation smacks horribly of the Nazi "untermensch" philosophy.

Book post.

(see post 18/11/06)

Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not - 7
Patricia Cornwell - The Scarpetta Factor - 6.5
Linwood Barclay - Fear the Worst - 8
Imogen Robertson - Instruments of Darkness - 9
David Baldacci - True Blue - 8.
Dan Brown - The Lost Symbol - 7
Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - 8.5
Tom Rob Smith - The Secret Speech - 7.5
John Hart - The Last Child - 8 
Simon Brett - Murder in the Museum - 7

The Lazy Cook

My latest acquisition is a slow cooker - actually I'm sure we used to have one years and years ago, but I don't know what happened to it.  Anyway it's a useful piece of kit - you just bung everything in first thing in the morning, turn it on and by tea-time you've got a nice tasty casserole.  There are lots of recipes on the web, but the basic idea is that you chop meat and vegetables up into bite-sized pieces, and put those in with some garlic (optional), some herbs and spices (the packet casserole mixes are a good time saver here) and some liquid - water, wine or stock.  And that's it.  You can fry the meat off for a few minutes first to seal it if you like otherwise the flavour tends to go into the liquid rather than stay in the meat, and one little tip from personal experience - don't overdo the liquid.  My cooker is 1.5 litres (more than adequate for one) and I've found that around 150-200ml of liquid is plenty.

Never mind the result - how much profit did we make?

The shenanigans at Liverpool FC just go to prove - if indeed further proof were necessary - that football has ceased any pretence of being a game, and become simply a business.  And it's only on a business level that you can make any sense of what has been and is going on.  Sad, really sad, but the writing's been on the wall for years now, though perhaps never in such large and vivid letters.

I can make you a star...

It seems the Chilean miners will become celebrities as a result of all the publicity surrounding their ordeal.  Haven't seen any sign of Max Clifford yet, but it can only be a matter of time!

Ha ha.

I've got these pills that are supposed to help prevent memory loss.  Problem is - I've forgotten where I put them!

What do you mean - it's no good?

I am sure Sir Philip Green is correct in saying that the Civil Service could save a significant amount of money by negotiating central contracts for goods and services (but isn't that what HMSO used to do?).  A word of warning though - there will be a natural tendency to go for the cheapest option, and the words "cheap and nasty" spring to mind.  I remember my Department deciding to negotiate a central contract for photocopiers - so every office would have the same make of photocopier - there would be big savings on the cost of maintenance and repairs.  Problem was, these photocopiers were, to put it bluntly, crap - and the worst aspect of this was that some offices had already had these photocopiers in the past and knew how rubbish they were, but "them up there" didn't know that - or didn't ask! - so we were lumbered with them.  And this is the problem with centralised contracts - the people negotiating them are so removed from the shop floor that they may, with the best of intentions, make bad decisions which everybody is then stuck with for the duration of the contract.

I want justice!

When something bad happens, it's human nature to demand that someone is held responsible.  Two stories in the news illustrate this from two different perspectives.  Firstly there is anger that two Iraqis put on trial for the murder of a group of military policemen in 2003 have been acquitted - indeed one newspaper speaks of "betrayal".  The brutal fact is that if the evidence is not there you can't convict, and in a situation of mob violence - unless someone is prepared to blow the whistle - it will always be extremely difficult to determine exactly who did what - remember PC Blakelock?.  Then there is the inquest which has opened on the July 7th bombings in 2005.  Here we know exactly who was responsible - problem is, they're dead.  So we search for someone else to pillory - in this case it's the police and/or the intelligence services who will find themselves subjected to "wise after the event" scrutiny.  Pretty pointless really, but like I say, human nature.

Phew!!

Well - was I lucky?  When we went on holiday to Lanzarote in May, I was put in charge of getting our foreign currency, and I used Crown Currency Exchange, and it all worked well and by ordering in advance I got a really good rate.  So I was upset to see that they had gone into administration. But the hairs really stood up on the back of my neck when I heard that they were known to be having problems as far back as February - so they were iffy when I was dealing with them.  And - I suspect like many other people - if I thought about it, I assumed that if anything did go wrong, I would be protected under some scheme of other.  To find that I wouldn't have been....  like I say, was I lucky?!

Let's not be silly.

Today of course is 10/10/10 (whichever way you look at it).  So does this make it special?  Nah!!

Joined up thinking.

You can't have your cake and eat it too - I fully support the Culture Secretary's comments that people who have children they can't afford to support should not be able to look to the public purse to bail them out.  However if you're going to take this line then it is an essential concomitant that abortion is available on demand, without any preconditions.  Many of these "problem" children are the result of unplanned - and maybe unwanted - pregnancies, and if you're going to withdraw financial support, you've got to allow such mistakes to be rectified.

Just what is it?

I am struggling to understand this concept of the Prime Minister's "Big Society".  If it simply means people looking out for each other more - a sort of return to the spirit of the war and immediately post-war years - then all well and good, although I have to say that that spirit was driven more by necessity than altruism, and although he may see the necessity today I'm not sure other people do.  But his idea seems to go beyond that - it's more that people should seek to take a greater part in local matters - and quite apart from the question of having enough time, the danger as I see it is that the sort of people who are most likely to push themselves forward will not necessarily be the most suitable or desirable, and as by definition they will not be elected, how the hell do you get rid of them?

Child benefit.

There's an inversely proportional relationship between cost and fairness.  The fairest systems are the most expensive - the cheapest systems are the most inequitable.  So it depends on what your priorities are.  Clearly the coalition's priority is to save money, so they've gone for the cheap and simple approach of saying that higher rate tax payers will lose their child benefit, even though this will produce perceived unfairness in some circumstances.  The alternative (assuming you accept the principle that child benefit should no longer be universal) would have been means testing, which, while producing a fairer result, would have been horrendously expensive.

R.I.P.

Norman Wisdom - what is there to say?  Probably the finest physical comic since the silent film days.  And as far as one can tell without knowing him personally, a thoroughly nice bloke.  I imagine Albania will be declaring a period of official mourning.  A life well lived.

Harvest Festival

If you watch the BBC news then you're probably already aware of this, but it came as a surprise to me to learn that what we think of today as the celebration of Harvest Festival in churches, with fruit and vegetables piled round the altar only goes back 150 years or so and started in a small church down in Cornwall.  Of course, man has marked the getting in of the harvest with celebration and jollity since time immemorial, and the Catholic Church used to (and perhaps still does) have a festival called Lammas (a contraction of Loaf Mass) when bread baked with the new season's flour is brought to church to be blessed.  The report on the BBC was concerned with the fact that these days less and less fresh produce is brought to church, and what you are more likely to see is tinned and packaged stuff.  The reason for this, to me at least, seems obvious enough - people simply don't grow stuff in their own gardens like they used to.

No No NO!!

Cannot believe that the question of giving the police the right to strike is even being discussed.  I would go completely the other way and make it illegal for firemen and ambulance crew to strike as well.  These are the emergency services for which we have the 999 system and it is essential that they are there when we need them.  As a quid pro quo their conditions of service have to be protected from the vagaries of economic or political interference but we can't have them holding the country to ransom whenever they feel like it.

R.I.P.

Tony Curtis - to my way of thinking never really got the respect he deserved.  Perhaps because he was seen as simply a "pretty boy" (which he most certainly was) his talent as an actor tended to be rather overlooked.  But his range was immense and he was one of those rare actors who never turned in a bad performance (OK, so he took some time to lose his Bronx accent - everybody remembers "Yonder is de castle of my fadder" but even then his acting was good).  Best thing he ever did?  Has to be "Some Like It Hot" - a perfect film in every way.  And, thank goodness, film stars never really die because we can always slip a DVD into the player and then they live again on screen.

Ryder Cup.

It's Wales, it's October and it's pouring down with rain - well, who'd have thought it!

Half a job?

No real surprise that Milliband D has decided not to join the Cabinet.  The real surprise to me is that he has not gone the whole hog and resigned as an MP.  If his reasons are honest - that he doesn't want to be a distraction to his brother's leadership - then it seems to me that he's likely to be as much, if not more of a distraction on the back benches than he would be in Cabinet.  You know the old saying that it's better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.  Can't help feeling that, whether he wants it or not, he's going to find himself the focal point of any future "anti-Ed" brigade.