Connection?

Two stories in the news -
1. Tube drivers are to be balloted on taking strike action after rejecting the offer of a bonus of £500 for working during the Olympics (see post dated 15/9/11).
2.  London Mayor Boris Johnson has plans to introduce driverless tube trains within the next few years.
Wapping all over again?

Where does he stand?

Richard Dawkins' statement that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist seems to have surprised a lot of people.  So just what is the difference?  Both words come from the Greek a- being a negative prefix, theos meaning god, and gnossis meaning knowledge.  So an atheist is one who maintains that there is no God, whereas an agnostic is one who does not know (and maybe doesn't care).  Of course, as there can never be any absolute proof of the existence or non-existence of God, atheism is as much a matter of faith (belief without proof) as the contrary stance that He does exist.  And as a scientist, by definition, is one who arrives at conclusions by the gathering and examination of facts, it is difficult to see how any scientist true to his trade, could be an atheist.  Given that, as he himself said, Dawkins cannot be absolutely certain that God does not exist (just sure on a scale of  6.9 out of 7) then he has to be agnostic.

How churlish!

If you want to know what's wrong - or at least what I think is wrong with football today consider the following. After just scraping home in the Carling Cup on penalties against a team a full league below them in a match they were expected to win with relative ease, Liverpool's manager Kenny Dalglish was interviewed for the BBC.  "What a hard way to win a cup" said the interviewer.  Dalglish looked at him and shrugged.  "The name's on the trophy - that's all that matters".  

Brrring, Brrring.

The Prime Minister has jumped on the bicycling band-wagon - if you get what I mean.  I haven't ridden a bike for over 40 years but as a driver I do have a point of view.  Cyclists are the only road users who don't have to pass a test, or indeed even have any sort of instruction.  One of the first things any driving instructor will tell you is that the secret of safe driving is to not put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And yet how often do you see cyclists coming up the inside of cars or lorries waiting at a junction - about as dangerous a place to be in as you could imagine.  And if there is an accident it is of course always the car or lorry driver who gets the blame - "they should have seen me" is the cyclist's cry. Whereas they need to be told that they should have used their brains and not put themselves there in the first place.  I don't want to go down the line of licences for cyclists, but I think basic cycling "nous" should be part of the school curriculum. Not that long ago I used to regularly see kids from the local primary school on their bikes wearing fluorescent jackets out for a cycling "lesson" - doesn't seem to happen any more, which I think is a backwards step.  Mind you, my experience is that it's usually the adult cyclists that do the stupidest things!

Madness at Molineux

I'm sure you're not in the slightest interested, but I feel I must have my say on the farce which has been playing out over the last ten days or so over who should replace McCarthy at Wolves (see post dated 15th Feb).  It quickly became apparent that McCarthy had been sacked with no contingency plan in mind - surely a piece of crass management.  Then over the next week or so it equally became apparent that nobody wanted the job - at least not on the terms on offer.  And the outcome?  They've appointed McCarthy's deputy - the man who was there all along, and who has to bear his share of the responsibility for what went before.  Doesn't make any sense to me.  What's going to change?  They might just as well have stuck with Mick - in fact I wish they had.

Rewarding failure?

Heard a lot about this lately - mainly in regard to people getting what are perceived as unwarranted bonuses, but the Civil Service are past masters in the art.  Make a bit of a mess of your job, and you risk being demoted or maybe even sacked, but make a complete Horlicks of it, and you'll probably get promoted!  Any Civil Servant of any experience can almost certainly quote examples of this - I sure can.  So I was not really surprised to see that the Head of the Border Agency - which has been slated for consistent failures over passport and visa checks - has been promoted to chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs.  'Twas ever thus.

Here we go again.

The Education Secretary apparently intends to ban parents taking their children on holiday during term time. We've been here before (see post dated 28/8/09) and sadly nothing seems to have changed.  Those selling holidays still double or treble their prices in school holiday weeks with apparent impunity.  And what about parents who have to take their holiday allowance when it suits their employer - which may well be during term time?  Once again it seems that the official mind sees children existing for the benefit of schools rather than the other way round.

As she sees it.

Difficult to know just what to say about the news that Amanda Knox ("Foxy Knoxy") is to receive some £2.5m for writing - or co-writing - her autobiography, essentially telling her side of the story of how she found herself in court in Italy charged, convicted and then cleared of the murder of Meredith Kercher.  There does seem to be something morally dubious about making money on the back of the brutal killing of a young woman, and yet it needs to be pointed out that her family are some £1m out of pocket as a result of financing her defence, and this (presumably) will put them back in funds.  What we can be sure about is that we shall not learn the truth from this book - just Amanda's version of events.  What will be interesting will be to see what she has to say about the behaviour of the Italian authorities - there have been consistent suggestions that this was a case where they had decided early on what they thought had happened and thereafter massaged the evidence to fit their theory.

Football - bloody hell....

...as Sir Alex Ferguson once said.  It has all the makings of a pub quiz question for years to come - which team scored four goals to their opponents' three, and yet lost the match 6-1?  The answer is Brighton who were at Anfield to play Liverpool in the F A Cup last Sunday.  The explanation is that three of their goals were into their own net.  Quite bizarre.

Listen to the people!

As an ex-Civil Servant I liked this one - the Land Registry office in Coventry were having problems with delays in post-opening.  In true modern managerial fashion, they asked the staff what should be done.  "Get more people opening the post" came the reply.  But management thought this a little too simplistic, so they set up a review at the cost of a few thousand pounds which looked at various aspects of the task, including a study of the ergonomics - whatever that means - and considering cutting edge post-opening equipment and such like.  After four months, the review body came back with its recommendation - get more people opening the post!