Unbelievable!

I am constantly surprised by the inability of local bureaucrats to see what's under their noses.  I've posted before about diversions due to roadworks creating traffic chaos because no-one has thought through the consequences of the diversion and taken the appropriate steps to ease the situation.  Now here's another one.  We have a children's playground - swings and slides and such - and the local authority has decided to upgrade and extend it, and to this end it has to be temporarily fenced off.  So far, so good, but when did they decide to schedule this work?  You've guessed it - in the six weeks' holiday!!

Go on the "B" of Bang?

So the new false-start rule denied us the chance to see Usain Bolt in the 100 metres final at the World Championships, and not surprisingly there have been calls for the rule to be looked at again.  This is I think the third different rule we've had in the last ten years or so, which gives some indication of how difficult it is to come up with a rule which satisfactorily penalises false-starters while not spoiling the race as a spectacle.  Can I suggest that one possibility could be that the penalty is directed more to the outcome?  If a false-starter was allowed to run, but was penalised one place (or maybe in the 100 metres, say a tenth of a second) for any false start, then you could still have the race run as intended - just the outcome would be adjusted to take account of any false starts.

I have a round thing with a hole in the middle - is this a record?

It seems that the film industry and High Street outlets like HMV are bemoaning a fall in the number of people buying DVDs.  Partly I think this is due to the industry not moving with the times, and partly because DVDs are scandalously overpriced.  But I think it's more a matter of not moving with the times.  The days when people amassed libraries of films on DVD have long gone - after all it's not many films you watch more than once.  And with all the movie channels about, most recent films are available to watch on TV, and even more can be downloaded or streamed to your PC.  So why would you go out and buy something which is going to be watched once, and then sit around cluttering up your shelves, when you don't have to.  HMV seem to have accepted that the audio CD has pretty well had it's day, and I think they are going to have to do the same with the DVD.  Time marches on...

Och aye, the noo!

I hope my friends north of the border will not take offence if I suggest that Scottish football is not only second rate at the moment, but that, with a few notable one-off exceptions, it has always been second rate?  Just look at their record in the World and European Cups.  There are continual calls for the top Scottish sides - certainly Celtic and Rangers - to play in the Premiership, but the harsh truth is that they would probably struggle to maintain a place in the top half of the table.  It has always seemed to me that the Scots have a very inflated sense of their own worth when it comes to football - perhaps the money isn't there, perhaps the talent is too thinly spread, but the record speaks for itself.

Ha ha

As a follow up to yesterday's post, here's a Yorkshire joke - 

A Yorkshireman walks into a vets and says, "I've come about t'cat". The vet says, "Is it a tom?".
And the Yorkshireman replies, "No it's down here in t'basket".

Ey up lass!

Anne Hathaway's attempt at a Yorkshire accent in the film "One Day" has come in for much criticism and ridicule.  I haven't seen the film, but I bet most of us in this country who live outside Yorkshire would struggle to imitate the accent.  The question is of course, why did they choose an American actress for the part - I'm sure there must be many actresses born and bred in Yorkshire who could have filled the role.  Is this another example of the American public not taking a film seriously unless there is an American actor or actress playing a lead?  Remember the way the story of "The Great Escape" from Stalag Luft III had to be rewritten for the film so that an American (Steve McQueen) could take a completely fictitious central role?

English as she is spoke.

List in the paper the other day of words which have been left out of the latest edition of the dictionary as not being in common usage anymore.  I was sad to see that among them was "charabanc" - I don't know about other parts of the country, but certainly round here we still talk about "catching the sharra" when we go on a trip.

Yes it is - no it isn't.

Has the time come when news programmes should come with some sort of health warning?  Recently - and in particular concerning the goings-on in Libya - a lot of speculation and rumour has been presented as fact, only to need a retraction - within hours in some cases.  I appreciate that you can hardly have a news bulletin which starts "There's something going on in Tripoli, but we're not quite sure just what..."  but I think it should be made clear which statements can be substantiated, and which can't.

Why did it happen?

I've had my say about the causes of the recent street riots, but it's interesting to see what the politicians are making of it.  David Cameron sees it as evidence of a general "moral decline", Ed Miliband says it is all down to "social deprivation" whereas Tony Blair blames specific families who, as he sees it, have deliberately chosen to live "outside the pale".  I think that Cameron and Blair are in fact saying much the same thing in two different ways, whereas Miliband is simply trotting out the traditional Labour line that anything bad must be the result of social inequality.  The problem with the Cameron/Blair argument is that it presupposes that there is such a thing as morality (Cameron) or defined norms of behaviour (Blair).  We last seriously had this argument in the late 50s over the question of whether to decriminalise homosexual activity between consenting adults.  Lord Devlin (the most articulate Law Lord there's ever been) and Professor Hart slugged it out in print, and the generally accepted outcome was that there was really no such thing as a completely shared morality or any fundamentally accepted ways of behaving, and that there will always be those who see things differently.  Of course, how they choose to express their "difference" is what is at the root of the problem.

Taxing problem

Vince Cable has this thing about a "mansion tax" doesn't he - keeps coming back to it.  Problem is - and this is a bit strange coming from a LibDem - that such a tax takes no account of the ability to pay.  You can live in a big house worth a lot of money, and still be hard up financially.  A better idea which I heard suggested the other day, would be to make the sale of property subject to capital gains tax on any gain of say over £100,000.  Not sure whether the amount it would raise would be worth the cost of administering it, mind.