That Brown Cabinet

One of the good things we can say about Brown's accession to the top seat is that it should spell the end of Charlie Falconer's frontline political career.

Of all the New Labour faces who have annoyed me over the years, "Lord" Falconer is the one who gets me shouting at the telly the most. Why? Well, say what you like (or don't like) about Ruth Kelly, Charles Clarke and co, but at least they were elected. Elected by morons, most likely, but that's the beauty of democracy.

Falconer, on the other hand, failed to get a seat in 1997 - the only Labour party member who didn't that year - and as result was elevated to the peerage by Tony Blair. What had he done to deserve this position of power? Er, um, well, he is a rich lawyer and oh, was also Tony Blair's flatmate in the 1970s.

Falconer was Blair's best mate and was a government spokesman on issues from the Dome to constitutional reform, before becoming Lord Chancellor. To see someone with so little apparent merit wielding such influence in public life wound me up no end and I'm thrilled to see him go.

Let's hope GB isn't tempted to make a legislator or cabinet minister out of any of his old school chums, and that Falconer and his bloated ego have blighted the Today programme for he last time.

Ok, rant over. Anyone see this about former Durham graduate, Jonathan Edwards? Finally I can fully respect him.

Not Gathering Moss

The fact that I have to work today (normally Mondays are a sacred free day of idleness) is a real bastard.

However, the suffering is somewhat mitigated by the fact I'm off to see these grizzled veterans tonight. 45 years and still rocking, not bad by anyone's standards - to think that about a dozen years ago I thought I'd missed my chance to catch them live (or alive):



I said "yeah, yeah, yeah, woo!"

A Maidenhead Story

Another evangelical Christian is whinging about her rights to express her primitive, misguided beliefs. Lydia Playfoot, of Horsham, wants to wear a "purity ring" to school, in contravention of its no jewellery policy.

My first reaction is, why don't just wait until you die and get to heaven, then you can have the last laugh. Bloody hell, sex is fun and nothing to be ashamed of.

Unfortunately that's not the attitude Lydia Playfoot (or more likely, her parents - daddy's a happy-clappy preacher) is taking on these things. The case is being heard in the High Court today.

If she wins the case, and girls are allowed to wear the rings, there could be some practical implications though: are there going to be hymen inspections to check that the girls really are as "pure" as they claim? If there are, who is they going to pay for them? Will schools start advertising for maidenhead monitors?

As a footnote, some people might be wondering whether teenage boys would be allowed the same dispensation to wear the rings, but this is a red herring. If anyone can find a teenage boy who "wants" to remain a virgin until he's married, I'll eat my slippers.

Save the planet - move to Portugal

So, I finally calculated my carbon footprint, using the brand-new government website (as trailed by Dizzy and the Devil) - the good news is it's working now, boys; bad news is it's slow as a dog and quite flawed. I'm not sure why for the home section it doesn't just ask for my total electricity and gas usage as listed on my bills. Surely that's all that is needed to calculate my home carbon consumption as a whole. And as it takes about half an hour to go through the process, DEFRA could save some me and the planet some electricity by speeding up the website.

Anyway, the good news is that my footprint is about half the national (UK) average, probably because I live in a warm country, require no central heating and I don't drive. Considering it includes flights to and fro I think it's quite a good set of figures. That doesn't stop the government giving me an even more stringent target to aim for, mind.

Your carbon footprint

Congratulations. You've successfully completed the Act on CO2 calculator. This table represents your CO2 emissions from all three areas of your lifestyle.

Your CO2 result is 2.46 tonnes per year

Your target footprint total is 1.97 tonnes per year

Everybody likes to have a target to reach their goals. Here we have given you an aspirational 20% reduction target to reach. This is spread evenly through your three areas of Home; Appliances and Transport, however, if you can see that your transport CO2 emissions are high, you can concentrate on reducing that area.

The national average total is 4.47 tonnes per year

CO2 emissions from all three areas of your lifestyle
---------------------------Home---------Appliances-------Travel
Your Carbon Footprint-------0.6-----------0.16------------1.7
Target Footprint------------0.48----------0.13------------1.36
National Average------------2.00----------0.68------------1.79

Tonnes per year

End of term's coming, let's watch a video

Sorry, more YouTube.

Is this the creepiest number one ever? Chain-smoking Bond villain serenades decapitated head:



via BoingBoing

Northern comics...

Bernard Manning wasn't funny, but this is:

La Dolce Vita

Via Norm, this is a very funny little animated piece about how life in Italy is a little different from the rest of the world.

The next few days

For the next few days I'll be entertaining guests, so I doubt I'll be posting much.

I suggest you go out and enjoy the summer weather while it lasts.

Until next week...

Lisa Loves London

Someone has asked me to comment on the new Olympic logo. I don't think I can surpass this from Towcestarian on the Daily Telegraph's blog:

Once the organisers realise that it looks like Lisa Simpson doing something very rude on her knees, it will be dropped very sharpish.

Here she is:

It was ninety years ago today...

I'm making a flying visit back to the UK this weekend to celebrate a special anniversary.

Not the birth of Edward Elgar, nor Thomas Hardy, nor the Waugh twins, nor the Marquis de Sade. Not the release of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, nor the first running of the Derby.

Nope, today is my grandmother's 90th birthday - which is about the age you should start really celebrating them. She is of course, partly to blame responsible for my existence on this planet, so I guess she could claim some hand in this blog (although I doubt she'd want to...).

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Nana, and I'll see you tomorrow at the party!

It's not sport, but it is incredible

Every Thursday, the Guardian's excellent online sports section has a YouTube blog. It features classic video moments from sport, with readers invited to send in their own favourites. It's a very cheap way of producing a "newspaper", i.e. getting the readers to write it for you, but sometimes the results are worth that risk.

Usually, the column descends into rival compilations of the greatest or most obscure goals from football leagues around the world, but amongst this today is a fascinating video that isn't really sport at all. Well, unless you count the tug-of-war in the middle.

From South Africa's Kruger National Park, the real "rumble in the jungle":

Lion v. Buffalo v. Crocodile

Those Diana Pictures

So Channel 4 is at the centre of another media storm. Its decision to show pictures of Princess Diana as she lay dying in that Paris tunnel nearly a decade ago has managed to raise the hackles of both Anne Atkins and David Aaronovitch this morning - no mean feat.

I won't be able to see the programme here in Portugal, so what I'd like to know is whether the pictures are better quality than these, which were published in an Italian magazine last year and are easily available on the internet?



(source: kierenmccarthy.co.uk)



(source: bobsob.com)

My personal opinion is that these are quite harmless pictures of Lady Di's last moments and the moral fabric of the UK will withstand their being broadcast on national TV.

The other question, of course is whether they are more offensive than these pictures of Britney Spears with no knickers on (NSFW).

The Diabolical Defined

I had a stroke of good fortune yesterday. I went to Fnac in Lisbon in the hopes of perhaps picking up a bargain, and lo one presented itself in the form of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. I concluded that it was a bargain because the price in pounds (£12.95) was much higher than the price in euros (€8.91).

The book is one that I've known about for several years. Since my teenage afternoons watching Countdown, in fact. Sometimes the actor and director Philip Franks (best-known, to me at least, as Charley from the Darling Buds of May) would appear in the Richard Stilgoe dictionary corner chair and read Bierce's words for our edification. As a young cynic, I remember being quite struck by the dry wit of the entries, such as this for dentist:

A prestidigitator who, putting metal into your mouth, pulls coins out of your pocket.

More recently, I have seen the Devil's Dictionary referred to in numerous English coursebooks - presumably to encourage the humourists amongst the teenagers of Slovakia, Portugal and the rest of the world - although few include its definition of learning (with which I cannot disagree):

The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

Reading the book now, it's very interesting to see that although it's over a hundred years old, many of the definitions have lost none of their edge:

VOTE, n.
The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

CHRISTIAN, n.
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

KORAN, n.
A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

PIANO, n.
A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

RATTLESNAKE, n.
Our prostrate brother, Homo ventrambulans.

As with everything these days, the Devil's Dictionary is available online. If you're interested, click here.

A British victory in Greece?

Not sure if this should be taken as an omen for tonight's Big Cup final, but The Guns of Navarone was on telly here this morning.

If James Robertson Justice and David Niven can inspire an unlikely English victory in Greece, why can't Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard do the same?

My prediction: 1-0 Liverpool in a terrible "shit on a stick" match. C'mon you reds!

UPDATE: Oh well, from what I saw of the game, a narrow Milan victory was just about fair. I didn't catch the first half (some of us have to work, you know), and although Liverpool huffed and puffed in the second, they didn't really create many decent chances. One thing I did notice: the pitch was pretty poor. It played very slowly and seemed to have cut up a lot during the game (I assume it was in good nick at the kickoff). If it had been in better condition, I'll bet the passing wouldn't have been so erratic.

What's on your iPod?

An interesting development from a department at the forefront of managerial competence:

Twenty top civil servants in the Home Office have been given top of the range iPods to provide them with lessons in leadership.

In a pilot scheme the department has spent almost £9,000 on the gadgets as part of a “constant” way of finding new means to give staff training.

Home Office officials were last night bracing themselves for a barrage of criticism over the purchase which was described by one source as “a wacky idea”.

Well, if the criticism is on the grounds of cost, I think it will be misplaced. In fact, if you look at the cost of a training session or a paintball weekend for a bunch of mandarins, it would be well over nine grand. As a spokesperson says:

“The capacity on one video iPod represents the equivalent of three days’ worth of classroom training. In addition, material on the video iPods can be recycled, whereas classroom training cannot.”

A Home Office official said that providing iPods to top staff was a much more economical means of providing leadership skills than sending staff on management courses which can cost £1,000 a day.

Fair enough.

However, I am not sure that using the iPod as a learning/teaching tool is particularly effective. I have an iPod and have uploaded a "Teach Yourself Portuguese" CD onto it. Have I listened to it? Well, er, actually guv, not yet.

And the other example of an organisation using the iPod to train its members is also less than convincing:

The Home Office decision to pilot the use of iPods as a way of training staff comes just two months after the England cricket team was able to study footage of the World Cup opposition on their iPods. Mark Garaway, the team analyst, uploaded packages of information about New Zealand on to a central base, allowing players to pick and choose the files they believed would be useful.

England lost that match by six wickets with nine overs to spare. In other words they were thrashed.

If government departments are starting to take their lead from the England one-day cricket team, they may be more badly run than we ever feared.

Tonight's Fat American Story

It's been a while since I've posted about our weighty friends across the pond, but here's quite an amusing tale from Scotland:

An obese American tourist who fell ill on a cruise ship had to be carried off by helicopter because of his size.

The man, who weighs 32 stone (203kg), was onboard a luxury five star cruise ship anchored in the Firth of Forth when he suffered gastric problems.

(For Americans, that's 450 pounds)

Forth Coastguard realised he was so heavy that its usual rescue procedures would have been impossible.

It called in an RAF Sea King helicopter to winch the man off the boat before carrying him to hospital.
...
The Sea King Rescue 177 is often used for search and rescue, but was originally designed for military use - including anti-submarine warfare and general tasks including heavy lifting.

After winching the sick man from the Century Cruise Liner, run by Celebrity Cruises, it flew him to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where fire crews were on standby to transfer him into the building shortly after 0600 BST on Saturday.

The headlines write themselves really, but what I want to know is whether the man was the full 32 stone before he got to Scotland, or if he gained some of the weight as a result of the famous Scottish cuisine he encountered on his visit. One can see how a few deep-fried Mars bars or haggises, washed down with a few cans of Special Brew, might cause gastric problems.

Dobry Den

This time last year I was fortunate enough to be working in Eastern Slovakia. It's a nice enough place, and the people were quite friendly, although it's not somewhere to save for your retirement.

Anyway, this piece in the Times just reminded me of the way people think in that part of the world, particularly in reference to their neighbours:

We start talking about which Eastern European countries are worth investing in. Kat gives me a quick rundown. "In Poland they are getting a bit cheeky, I think. They have already had their boom in telecommunications. The economy is more advanced. Prices are higher. But you must be very careful. Sometimes when you buy a house, you may also buy the owners’ debt. That would not be good." What about the Czech Republic? "They are always one step ahead. Everything is 20 per cent more expensive there. Before the split [of Slovakia and the Czech Republic] everything was made here. We are stuck with the factories. So the Czechs are ahead of us." She is not a fan of Romania: ‘"Ridiculous prices. Like London prices. Lots of Americans are going to Romania. I don’t understand it. Why? I would have thought the prices would be better than here. But they’re not. Ridiculous!" The Ukraine is another no-no: ‘The mafia will rip you off." Hungary? ‘Nice people. Nice wine. But not much work opportunity. I’m really not sure about Hungary."

She probably added that there are bloody gypsies everywhere, but I suspect that got edited out of the final article.

Shining in the shit

Most of the stuff on YouTube is rubbish. I should know because I regularly link to it on this blog. Usually if one looks for something, one finds only self-indulgent clips of midwestern teenagers playing air guitar to their favourite Linkin Park tracks. However, amidst the dross, there are videos that lift the spirits and make an ordinary Wednesday so much less boring.

From the golden age of television, I give you "What's My Line?", with Salvador Dali:



via Boing Boing

Whoops, he did it again...

Philip Hensher should read this blog.

If he did, he would know that Patricia Hewitt did not make any comment about Seaman Faye Tunney lighting up during the recent hostage crisis.

Unfortunately he doesn't, so in today's Independent he makes the same mistake that Christopher Hitchens made yesterday. I quote:

The skewed thinking and bizarre sense of priorities which has driven so many of this government's initiatives was beautifully captured when Patricia Hewitt, commenting on the capture of the navy personnel in Iran, said: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people." Quite a lot of people went on wondering, in the light of this comment, whether Mrs Hewitt might actually not be human at all.

In fact, quite a lot of people might have seen the date of this quote (April 1st) and drawn their own conclusions.

Honestly, these columnists - they get paid thousands of pounds, and use an April Fool's joke to support their arguments.

Whoops...

The usually excellent Christopher Hitchens makes a boob in the Guardian today. Speaking against the upcoming English smoking ban, he says:

If I had wanted an encapsulating anecdote for my argument, it would have been provided by our glorious secretary of state for health, Patricia Hewitt, who commented on recent events in Iran: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people." Yes, I think that just about expresses the anti-tobacco mentality. It is all-enveloping and all-inclusive, utterly patronising and completely, laughably literal-minded.

Unfortunately for Hitch, Patricia Hewitt never said this. The quote was from an April 1st piece from Telegraph Columnist, Christopher Brooker. Many people took this literally and ended up believing it to be true. But as Brooker said himself a couple of weeks later:

On April 1 this column alleged that Patricia Hewitt had said, of a TV appearance by Leading Seaman Faye Turney, that 'it was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.'

This was quoted by other newspapers and even mentioned on Have I Got News For You. I am happy to offer Miss Hewitt my apologies for setting this fictitious hare running but suggest that she looks again at the date.

I hope the Guardian clears up this small error for its readers.