Well known belly dancer Luli Blue commissioned us to create a new website which showcases her expertise in the Egyptian style. After applying the final touches and completing all the pre-launch testing, we finally published everything today.

Merry Christmas Luli!

...at the George was a good one. Nice to see familiar faces I haven't seen for awhile. Also nice to see that the future is lookin' good for a great team, who are riding off into the sunset, but shortly to return better than ever!

See you all at the 2009 launch.

And remember...

Slide!

Silly season is here again and despite the economic doom and gloom, most of my work colleagues are mentally preparing themselves for the last weekend of shopping before Christmas.

They are all looking pretty grim at the prospect of having to fight their way through crowds of similarly miserable folk, in order to get those last few bits and pieces that they all seem to view as essential to their enjoyment of the day. Many of them seem to be trying to psyche themselves up into having a good time with it all; you can almost hear them muttering: "Christmas WILL be fun" repeatedly through clenched teeth. I can imagine there will be more than a few stressed, twitching staff in the office on Monday.

Which is why I'm bloody grateful that I'm not joining the zombie shopping throng.

Some years ago, Su and I decided that the whole Christmas thing was just not worth the hassle. We don't have kids and my family are 14,000 miles away in NZ. Likewise, Su's family are all up north and even her nieces and nephews are now mostly getting to the age where they know that Santa is a myth.

And neither of us enjoys shopping at the best of times. The idea of having to spend a day traipsing around soulless, crowded shopping malls to get some bit of tat that neither of us gives two figs about anyway is just not on the table, especially at this time of year. We both mostly tend to plan the shopping we are occasionally forced to do (at least if we want to eat) like a military exercise; work out what we need, then work out how to get in, get it and get out as quickly as possible.

We don't bother with any of the other trappings either; no tree, decorations, xmas dinner et all. Christmas dinner in our house is normally a jointly-cooked stir-fry with whatever ingredients happen to be in the cupboards and the fridge, while a little Miles Davis plays on the stereo and we work our way through a half-decent bottle of wine (one for the pot and one for the cooks ). This is mostly followed by a DVD or a little guitar for me and a good book for her. We even manage to have a conversation or two.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not Scrooge; I enjoy catching up with a fair number of friends I haven't seen for awhile during the break and I equally enjoy the opportunity for a bit of time in self-contemplation, without the urgent need to do something or be somewhere. I just don't feel the need to spend large amounts of money I don't have, on crap I don't need.

This approach has now become so normal to me that I'm finding myself starting to view the traditional Christmas as one of the weirdest times of the year. I mean let's face it: it's the only time of the year when most folks sit around a dead or dying tree that they've dragged into their living room, eating candy out of their socks!

Anyway, here's hoping that the rest of the western world manages to get whatever they feel they need to give them all that warm glow of pointless consumerism and that they don't forget to save the receipts and get extra batteries for all the new toys.

Meanwhile, I think I'll open a bottle a few days early.

Cheers!

Jaysuz! Ya couldn't make it up could you? Just when you think that the finance watchdogs of the western world couldn't fuck up any worse, along comes the story of Bernard Madoff and his 50 billion pyramid scheme.

Not only did the SEC fail to perform even a spot inspection of this geezer as a matter of routine, they appear to have entirely ignored / failed to act on information received from an apparently reliable source, advising them of the large-scale Ponzi fraud being perpetuated by Madoff for years!

Not that the investors in the scheme looked any closer! If they had, they might have picked up a fair number of red flags including:-

• Madoff's own brother was assigned to monitor checks and balances in at least one part of the hedge fund.
• Madoff's auditors were a one man and his dog operation housed in a 13ft by 8ft office in Rockland County, New York.
• The management fees being charged by Madoff were significantly lower than any being offered by his Wall street competitors.
• Hardly anyone was ever allowed to meet Madoff in person and the few that did always came away completely clueless as to how he made his money.
• In the more recent turbulent times when every investment on the planet was being shaken and stirred, Madoff's fund continued reporting a 0-2% value increase per month
• And let's not forget the man's name itself! I mean...seriously, would you invest your cash with a guy called "Made off"? You can say this about the bloke: he has certainly lived up to his name.

This colossal financial farce could have been taken directly from Charles Dickens' "Little Dorrit" - except you can guarantee that the thieving bastards responsible won't see the in side of a real debtors prison...they'll just spend a few months in a country club version when the golf course doesn't open until 10am and the Château Grand Traverse is served at room temperature.

Perhaps what we need to do is bring back the Victorian concept of the debtors prison...but only for those who defraud hapless investors on a large scale. We could set a benchmark of...say...a million bucks or more. Then we ensure that the prison is staffed entirely by investors who got royally screwed by these gits and are looking for some serious payback.

Inmates would be obliged to directly perform all their own cooking, laundry, cleaning and ablutions with no access to recreation facilities except:-

• A single chess set with 31 missing pieces
• A single knitting magazine with a pull-out supplement on crocheting bobble hats.
• A single crossword puzzle book with all the puzzles completed
• A single copy of the film: "Wallpapering, pasting and stippling: a DIY guide"

In addition, inmates would be put to work once weekly on a chain gang, digging ditches, building roads etc. Pay will be 1 buck per inmate per day (tax paid ), sent to their creditors. Attempts by inmates to avoid their obligations or bribe any prison official in any way will result in a minimum punishment of an hour's electric shock therapy and waterboarding, the time increasing exponentially on each subsequent occurrence.

Oh - and inmates will serve a minimum of 5 years, the sentence increasing exponentially for every additional million they steal.

Put this system in place and then sit back and watch the honesty bloom on Wall Street!

'Winter'
by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

Shit it's COLD!

The End

Today is my Dad's birthday and he's away on holiday with my Mum. I would normally call him in NZ, but this year it has to be an e-mail which I hope he will be able to pick up from somewhere.

While writing the e-mail on a cold December day in the UK, I began thinking about my relationship with him and remembering a few of the things that have always made him - in my view at least - a good man and great father.

My dad is the oldest of 6 kids in a working-class family and grew up in a pretty rough part of Auckland. Like most men of the day, my Granddad exercised his fatherly duties largely through a combination of discipline at the end of a stick or belt and a hefty number of chores around the place. And as the oldest child, my dad was often expected to shoulder extra responsibility for his siblings from an early age, which of course he did. Rough neighborhoods breed tough kids and my dad was no exception. Any kid that bullied a member of the McKenzie clan could expect to be paid back with interest!

With six kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, money was always pretty scarce and like all kids of their generation, my Dad learned from an early age how to make his own entertainment with very little. One year he and two of his brothers built a soapbox go-cart, using a few bits of scrounged timber, the wheels of an old pram and a handbrake consisting of a lever and rope arrangement. After testing it a little they found they could ride it down a hill and slide into their driveway, by yanking the handbrake, which also brought the go-cart to a stop. As their confidence grew, they proceeded further and further up the hill until they reached the top. During their last run, the brake rope snapped and the go-cart with all aboard proceeded to crash through the garage door. Granddad was apparently far from pleased and by all accounts a sound thrashing was administered.

Despite the lack of lucre and a relative scarcity of encouragement for education, my Dad earned himself a place at Auckland university (the only member of his family to do so) where he studied the natural sciences with a major in chemistry. I understand that he largely financed himself with various part-time jobs. Later, he also undertook a range of further education. He had also learned to play the piano and partially supplemented his uni studies by gigging a local band or two.

After my folks were married, my Dad left Uni, but continued pursuing his studies in other fields. He learned the fundamentals of both accounting and the law and also put his chemistry expertise to work studying pharmacology for awhile. In the years that followed, he was able to draw on all these skills in one way or another.

He had other interests too; he was apparently a pretty fair rugby player in his youth by all accounts and still enjoys watching the game. He also did a fair bit of diving, beginning with the old-fashioned canvas/perspex mask and surface-based petrol pump arrangement and later switching to the new SCUBA technology, which he used for a fair bit of spear fishing alone. He also enjoys photography and built his own darkroom in a small cupboard in the basement of our place in Glenfield. He got a few wedding and birthday gigs where his photos helped to supplement the family income a little further in later years.

I was born in Auckland and we lived in Glenfield, when I was pretty young. One of my earliest memories happened on the 20th July, 1969 when the Apollo team landed on the moon. My Dad picked me up and walked out onto our veranda, pointed at the moon and said to me: "There's men up there now son".

All young families struggle to make ends meet and my family were no different. But my brother's illness added extra pressure on the family finances. My dad worked three different jobs to make ends meet. He would get up around 5am and clean the toll booths on the Auckland Harbor Bridge, then go to work with my granddad all day digging drains. After a brief break for dinner and a wash, he would then drive to a pub after closing time and clean it. Finally returning home around 1am, he would collapse into bed and begin the whole cycle over again the next working day.

We moved to Te Puna, about 15 miles north of Tauranga when I was 6 and my brother 4, where my folks put down roots for the next 40 years. Dad always had an impressive aptitude with most things mechanical (and in later years electronic) and is pretty much an all-round handyman. There's not a lot of DIY skills that you can teach a man who built his first house from the remains of a steel-girder barn structure in six weeks!

In the years that followed, both my parents worked extremely hard to make the orchard work and to raise their two boys, one of them very poorly. They both worked long hours, 7 days a week to make ends meet. But as they were both working from home, both my brother and I had ample opportunity to spend time with one or both of them (mostly working at whatever job we had been tasked with).

Like all McKenzie men, Dad has a real temper and his wrath was often terrible to behold. I can remember many occasions when he was struggling in the shed with some particularly stubborn piece of misbehaving machinery (with the doors firmly shut) when there would be a roar and a string of expletives, followed by the clang of a spanner being hurled at the offending item. At these times, we wisely gave the shed a wide berth until his rage was spent. He would eventually emerge from the shed in a calmer frame of mind, but we would still mind our manners until we were sure his anger was fully subsided.

Dad has always been a fairly straight talker, not afraid to voice his opinion and with little time for "authority for authorities' sake". This of course has not exactly endeared him to a fair number of folks who are used to being treated with more deference, for which he mostly cares not a jot. Sometimes however, his views have been expressed in ways that even the more generous hearts amongst us would be hard pushed not to be offended by and Mum has been forced to make the odd blushing, red-faced apology on his behalf over the years (most of the offended parties being too shit-scared to demand an apology from him directly). He and I are very much alike in this respect; we sometimes need to be told reminded by our nearest and dearest that there is a difference between "frank/forthright" and "bloody-minded/insult".

But this general refusal to "suffer fools gladly" has a positive side; a passion to see right prevail and justice done, not just through the machinations of the government, but also with some level of active participation as a citizen in a modern democracy. It was Dad who taught me from an early age that rights and privileges come with responsibilities which must also be accepted and undertaken. It was my Dad who took me to the local polling station on election days, where he explained why it was important for me to be active in the democratic process and if necessary to protest and fight to retain my rights. But he was also unafraid to break the law when he felt (rightly in most cases) that the law in question was about screwing money out of people without providing anything in return. He once told me: "If a law is patently wrong or unjust, it is every honorable man's duty to break it". It's a maxim that in later years I have proudly taken to heart.

While my Mum was often the daily disciplinarian (a job that understandably taxed her sanity), Dad's no-nonsense approach concerning bad behaviour was something that made both my brother and I quake. Many was the time that he would hand me a pair of secateurs and send me to the bottom of the orchard to cut a willow stick, with the promise that if he lashed the stick against a fencepost and broke it, I would be sent to fetch another and a double helping of corporal punishment would be administered on my return. Often the eventual stripes I received were inconsequential, compared to the walk which he wisely knew gave me the chance to contemplate the error of my ways and was for me at least, the harshest part of my punishment. But once punishment was administered, as far as he was concerned the slate was wiped clean and no more was said. I always respected him for that...

When I was 13 or 14, the family were playing a game of Monopoly and he accused me of cheating (I hadn't been) and told me to get showered and get to bed. I marched through to the bathroom and while showering and in a fit of my own righteous anger, I punched the formica-covered chipboard wall with all the strength I could muster. A clean, size-12-fist-sized piece of wood vanished into the space between walls.

When I had dressed and mustered my courage, I went to tell my Dad. He examined the hole and without a word disappeared into the garage, returning minutes later, armed with an electric jigsaw, a tube of sealant and a plastic soap dish. The hole was squared off, the soap dish fitted and sealed in similar silence and he simply looked me straight in the eye and pointed to my bedroom. Needless to say, I hastily complied with his obvious order! No more was ever said about that incident for years.

Both he and my Mum always made time for us. But being boys, it was generally Dad who took a more active interest in our various boyhood hobbies and interests, with poor Mum often (but not always) on the sidelines at times. I can remember many games of bushel-box cricket with wooden tangelo cases as wickets, set up on a sloping strip of land alongside the shed. Dad mowed a small square of empty nursery land in the bottom block, which was used by the whole family both as a makeshift tennis court and boomerang throwing arena and we all spent a fair few happy hours there. Dad also helped us collect matchbox cars, build model airplanes and even constructed a large chipboard table in our attic on which we built a fairly impressive model railway setup.

During my college years, I developed an interest in the then emerging field of computing. My school was one of the first in NZ to get a small compliment of Poly workstations, but because my math's grades were not up to scratch, I was not permitted to undertake formal classes. It was my Dad who spotted an ad in the local paper for a "Learn to program in BASIC" course, being offered by the Manakau Technical College just outside of Auckland. He took me out of school for a week and we attended and completed the course together. He then shelled out for an early TRS-80 clone with a promise that I would repay my half of the cost by working it off on extra chores around the place. In the years that followed, it became an interest that we continued to share and which I would eventually make a career out of.

We've had our disagreements over the years as I'm sure all fathers and sons have, some of them slight and some serious. My teenage years were marred with the sorts of things that most angry young men seem to go through; a fair bit of boozing (and not a few drugs), a lot of street fights in the local town on a Friday night, a couple of brushes with the law and one serious car crash. In short I was a particularly difficult little bastard who seriously tested the patience of both my parents at times. But my Dad seemed to understand that this was part of the growing up thing for boys and when he was forced to square up to me and set me on my arse, he mostly tried to do it as painlessly as possible. When at 17 I made the decision to leave home and move to another town, he never tried to impose his will, although he was worried about the direction I was taking. He simply did what he had always done; he listened to my plans and offered what help and advice he could.

The strong work ethic that my folks both instilled in me from an early age, together with my Dad's philosophy of justice and righteousness, have served me well ever since. It's no exaggeration to say that a fair portion of whatever success I have been had in this life is due in no small part to him and what he taught me.

Thanks Dad.

Happy birthday.

Love you.

I've been thinking about buying a collapsible guitar that is suitable for stuffing in a large suitcase for some time now. After looking at what was available and chatting with a few enthusiasts of various models, I settled on the Yamaha SLG100S.

Collapsible guitars are suprisingly hard to get hold of; I looked at buying one from an online retailer, but couldn't find a supplier that either a) was based outside the UK but willing to deliver to a UK address or b) was based in the UK, had one in stock, with a decent reputation and was able to deliver one in a reasonable time frame.

Geez! You'd think that in the so-called credit crunch, these guys would be falling all over themselves to supply what is effectively a luxury (and not inexpensive) item.

Today, on an impulse, I popped into my local music shop and got chatting with a very knowledgeable sales guy who got on the line directly to Yamaha. After haggling out a deal, which included a competitive price and a promise of delivery within 10 days, I finally ordered one.

Anyway, here's a quick YouTube clip about it. Enjoy!

Yesterday's news about the DNA database was most welcome to those of us concerned about the growing infringement of civil liberties here in the UK.

In one of the most decisive rulings to ever come out of the European Court of Human Rights' (a unanimous ruling by 17 judges), the current policy of the Home Office to store DNA data of over 800,000 innocent citizens has effectively been shown to be what it is; a breach of civil liberties, which cannot be reasonably tolerated in a democratic society.

The Home Office had previously argued that the process of retaining the DNA data for arrested individuals was necessary on the flimsy pretext that someone arrested but not charged or convicted of one crime, may very well be guilty of another.

But common sense says that this approach taken to it's logical conclusion, would plunge us all into the sort of police-state world that George Orwell wrote about over half a century ago.

The Home Office claims that there have been occasions, where the DNA database has proven useful in identifying the culprit of a serious crime, who had no previous criminal convictions and this assertion formed the basis of their justification for the approach.

But as the Home Office has failed to make public, accurate statistics regarding these assertions, it is understandably difficult to validate these claims. And since even the European Court of Human Rights dismissed this, it would appear that it was a very flimsy claim indeed.

My cynical nature makes me believe that there are two agendas at work here, both of which are largely unrelated to the concept of justice; the first is that the current procedure effectively provides the Home Office with a method of bringing in a national ID database by the back door. The second is that obtaining fingerprint and DNA information from individuals who have merely been arrested instead of charged and/or convicted makes things easier for a few box-ticking coppers and Crown Prosecution Service staff to remember.

But a couple of relatively small changes in Police procedure could perhaps help the Home Office find a balance between the need to preserve civil liberties and the legitimate need to maximise the effectiveness of the DNA database.

The first and most significant change should be made to the procedural order. If an individual is arrested, they should not be obliged to supply DNA material until they are formally charged. If charges are dropped (especially for lack of evidence) the DNA information should be immediately deleted from the database.

And if the CPS fails to bring a successful prosecution against the accused, the judge should have the power to either instruct the Home Office to delete the DNA information or alternatively retain the DNA information for a specified period of time, if he or she feels that the nature of the alledged offense warrants it. This would provide a "retention window" for the most serious criminal cases such as terrorism, sexual assault, hate crime, rape, murder, serious organised crime and pedophilia.

A maximum statute of perhaps 15 years could be introduced with judges being given discretionary powers to impose a retention window in line with the seriousness of the charge, the previous criminal record (if any) of the accused and the evidence presented in trial. The CPS and the Home Office would have the right of appeal if they could demonstrate that the retention window chosen by the courts was not sufficient.

Finally, all those with current criminal convictions should be obliged to provide DNA for the database if they have not already done so. Parolees should report to their local police station and convicts still doing time could be processed en-masse within the confines of their prison by mobile forensic teams, in much the same way as the rest of us give blood.

The end result of al, this would be that we might actually end up with a DNA database that is fit for purpose and a system that is all about justice.

And who knows...maybe the Home Office will follow.

After months of head-scratching, endless policy committee meetings and (no doubt) lots of expensive conferences and retreats at the taxpayers expense, Jacqui Smith our latest "Home Office Hero" has presented plans to further criminalise men who pay for sex.

And no surprise that after all the hoo-hah we find that the half-baked proposals, presented to the public are pretty much exactly like Smith herself; well-intentioned...but entirely unfit for purpose.

After all, this is the Home Secretary who just last week made the gobsmacking not-from-this-planet claim that people 'can't wait for ID cards'. The cards will start to be really pushed on us all from 2012 but Smith said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long." Who exactly? Ed.

So when Smith outlined new legislation to oblige the clients of the sex industry to ensure that the sex worker has not and is not been trafficked, my first thought was: How exactly can this be achieved? I mean seriously, how exactly would a punter go about this? Is simply asking the question: "Are you being trafficked?" enough? Is a written Affidavit required? And how exactly will this be policed? or prosecuted?

Unfortunately, Smith seems to think that the demand created by the punters can be destroyed by a few signatures on a parliamentary bill. If you criminalise the punters she claims, you destroy the demand and solve the problem.

But in true fence-sitting style, Smith and her Home Office "Ho's" have backed away from the Swedish solution (on which they have based their doomed bill), which was to make it illegal to pay for sex...full stop. This has apparently worked in Sweden and at least there is no ambiguity. But Smith has refused to go this far, ostensibly on the basis that the Swedish sex industry is considerably smaller than the UK's and it would be more difficult to police.

But how much more difficult is it going to be to obtain a successful prosecution on the basis of the wishy-washy legislation she is proposing?

I don't think any sane person would argue that human trafficking of any description is a horrific thing and as a (somewhat) civilised society, we are obliged to do our best to eliminate this terrible practice and help protect and support the victims of the trade.

But if history has taught us anything, it should have taught us that you cannot legislate morality. Every time we try to do this, not only do we fail to solve the problem, but we end up making the problem much worse!

Not only is Smith's legislation in it's current form unlikely to help the victims of sex trafficking, it is more likely to harm them further, as tighter legislation forces the trafficking rings further underground, making it's victims less visible and forced by economic imperatives to service the much more sociopathic end of the punter scale. So says the English Collective of Prostitutes, in a BBC article published over a year ago when Jacqui started climbing her political beanstalk.

Frankly, it's no surprise to me that countries with a more liberal approach to the sex industry seem to have a proportionally lower rate of serious sex crime and instances of trafficking. The Netherlands for example has long had a policy of tolerance towards it's sex workers. They can legally operate from brothels, under the watchful eye of the authorities. The workers are required to register, undergo regular health checks and pay taxes. This makes it much more difficult for pimps and traffickers to operate, because the sex workers band together and protect each other. It also offers an equal measure of protection for the punters from blackmail and extortion.

And because the sex industry is more socially permissible in Holland, sex workers and punters alike are not regarded as pariahs within Dutch society and are taken seriously by the police when reporting genuine criminal offenses. This of course encourages victims to come forward, provides a framework to properly protect victims and witnesses, increases trust and helps maintain workable community relations in an atmosphere of goodwill.

So if we seriously want to curtail human trafficking in the sex industry (and we can't avoid the over-riding urge to create yet more legislation), why aren't we looking to restructure our current legislation along the lines of the Netherlands?

One last point to mull over: Jacqui Smith claims that almost 70% of sex workers operating in the UK are being trafficked (a statistic disputed by the English Collective of Prostitutes who claim the figure is much lower). But let's give the old bat the benefit of the doubt for the moment...

How is it that the Home Office is capable of obtaining such allegedly accurate statistics and yet has been unable to use this intelligence to smash the trafficking rings themselves?

Answers on a postcard to:-

Ms J Smith
c/-
New Labour (Detached-from-Reality dept.)
Bullshit-and-Pointless-Spin Division
Houses of Parliament
London

(the first 3 correct entries win a free trip to Hollyrood)

The US election results announced today are a significant milestone in many respects.

Beyond the obvious landmarks such as Barrack Obama's ethnic background and the strong shift in voting trends from Republican to Democrat, today's events herald a resurgence in many of the fundamental ideals and beliefs that the US has purported for many years, but has failed to live up to. Concepts such as freedom and liberty have throughout most of the post-war years been subverted by a series of administrations for the purposes of US hegemony, to the detriment of people the world over.

And the result has been that those of us living and working outside the zone between the big apple and the big orange have increasingly viewed the foreign policies of successive US governments with a growing level of distrust and cynicism. In recent years especially, we have often heard the US government use words such as "freedom" and "liberty" in situations where the actions that follow those words are the diametric opposite of what is claimed.

The Bush administration has been particularly guilty of this type of hypocritical spin; whenever Dubya used these words, you just knew that he and his Whitehouse cronies were about to perpetuate another crime against these concepts, such as the Iraq war, Guantanomo Bay and the infamous Patriot act.

But Dubya and his cohorts are still merely the latest in a long line of US administrations who have talked the talk and then done exactly the opposite. Most previous US presidents have been much the same, waxing lyrical about freedom while implementing foreign policy that suppresses countries, cultures and governments who are not willing to bend their beliefs to favour the business interests of corporate America.

But as with any democracy, the ultimate faults of the leadership are (at least partly) the fault of the voters.

Someone once wrote: "We get the government we deserve". This has been particularly true in many of the G8 democracies in recent years, where a combination of self-interest, media spin and voter apathy has resulted in leadership which rarely reflects the interests, hopes and aspirations of the many and instead provides a system for the filthy rich to get richer...and always at the expense of the rest of us.

The election of Barack Obama therefore represents something more fundamental and noble than a mere shift in the political status quo or the fulfillment of important aspirations of African Americans. It represents a desire and hope by the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised by the likes of Bush and the big business lobbies, to make the long-held US ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy mean something more than just empty terms trotted out by grey-suited government mouthpieces.

Obama's campaign pledges include:-

• Closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center, rejecting the Military Commissions Act and adhering to the Geneva Conventions.
• Withdrawing US troops from Iraq in a controlled manner.
• Removing the political factors influencing the US intelligence network, which directly led to the Iraq war.
• Properly safeguarding all nuclear material under US control within four years, stopping development of new nuclear weapons and strengthening nonproliferation treaty legislation.
• Increasing regulation of the financial industry, reforming the bankruptcy laws and improving consumer credit protections.
• Acknowledging the impact of climate change and committing to begin moving the oil-addicted US economy to more sustainable alternatives.
• Implementing policies to ensure that key government posts are filled, based on experience and expertise in the applicable field, instead of political affiliation and cronyism.
• Restricting the power of special-interest lobbyists, bringing an end to no-bid government contracts and disclosing contractor lobbying publicly.
• Fighting for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations.
• Working to make sure China plays by international rules.
• Providing universal health care to all Americans who need it.

Mr Obama certainly has his work cut out for him; he will shortly inherit the heaviest national debt in US history, a faltering economy with spiraling unemployment and poverty and keeping even a good portion of his pledges may prove difficult or even impossible. Still, with a Democrat majority in Congress and a Republican-controlled senate with a fairly narrow majority, it may very well prove possible for the Whitehouse to push through many of the proposed reforms...

But the mere fact that the pledges are being made (and supported by the voting public who turned out in record numbers) is a very positive sign.

For the first time in years, there appears to be a ray of hope that the US will start to move away from it's doomed policies of unwarranted political and military interference, Ivy-League cronyism and commercial usury and start moving back to the kind of nation that it's founding fathers and presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy had the vision and foresight to commit their lives to.

In his book: Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, Noam Chomsky argued that the last surviving obstacle to the total domination of repressive regimes is public opinion.

I reckon he was right.

A few days ago, I was listening to one of a seemingly endless series of radio discussion programmes about the credit crunch. Most of these programmes have a fairly low-to-middle range annoyance factor, but this particular programme really got my blood boiling, because the interviewee had the gall to state:

"this has caught everyone by surprise; it's just impossible to say with any degree of certainty that this could have been prevented"

Let's briefly visit the not-too-distant past and look a little closer at some of the red flags in more detail...

Anyone remember a guy called Nick Leeson? The North-London barrow boy whose increasingly desperate attempts to conceal ever-growing trading losses in the futures market eventually resulted in the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995?

How exactly did he manage to do this? By acting as both a front-office trader and a back-office contract manager, he was able to effectively remove all checks and balances within the Singapore office of Barings. And thanks to his smooth sales talk and apparently impressive ability to knock up a good-looking balance sheet, his mistakes went entirely undetected by the army of accountants at the head office in London...until it was too late.

Although Leeson claimed to have never profited personally from his trading fiasco, he was certainly motivated - to some degree at least - by his bonus structure, as were his superiors in the London office, who had become obsessed with profits, completely ignoring the fact that high profit schemes by their very nature carry an exponentially high risk. Their failure to properly examine Leeson's claims and figures (especially in a new office in an emerging market) were contributory negligence of gigantic proportions.

At the time, I was working in London, providing technical support to the Foreign Exchange / Money Market (FX/MM) division of Citibank. When the news broke, I expected that the shockwaves would rock blue-chip banking and financial institutions to their very core. We all expected to be deluged by an avalanche of new rules, procedures and auditing policies which would have to be built into the software and the office geared up for these expected changes. But a year later, very little had actually occurred. The tidal wave of new regulation that we expected never arrived and apart from a few tweaks and twiddles around the margins of the system, bugger-all actually seemed to change.

Although Leeson was a prolific gambler with other people's money, his motives could be seen - at least in part - as trying to redress his mistakes. In other words, he wasn't deliberately skimming the till, purely for personal profit. If a desperate trader like Leeson could do so much damage just by trying to cover his arse while he attempted to gamble his way out of trouble, how much damage could someone who was geniunely stealing from a large corporate entity do?

Take a look at the WorldCom and Enron scandals that occurred in 2000 and 2001 respectively.

Both these scandals involved deliberate attempts to protect the assets of key figures at the head of both companies. In both cases, the books were deliberately cooked to drastically inflate the value of the companies - at least on paper. And far more worryingly the books were allegedly cooked with the active aid and participation of key figures within the accountancy firms assigned to make sure that all was present and correct.

The Enron scandal involved the active participation of the firm: Arthur Anderson - at the time one of the world's largest and most trusted accountancy firms. The firm was convicted on obstruction of justice charges when it emerged that they had deliberately shredded documents relevant to an investigation by the US Justice department.

A key figure in the Enron scandal was it's CEO Kenneth Lay. Lay was one of the US's highest-paid CEOs, earning, for example, a $42.4 million compensation package in 1999 and a close friend of soon-to-be-kicked-out Whitehouse incumbent George Bush (who affectionately referred to him as: "Kenny boy").

Both Worldcom and Enron went Chapter 11 and when Lay and his Enron cronies realised the game was up, they collectively dumped some $300 million in stock, while encouraging employees to buy more stock, telling them the company would rebound. The resulting investigations into both scandals were cut short by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which not only focused the world's attention on other matters, but (if some conspiracy theories are correct) indirectly resulted in the destruction of vast quantities of key documents being stored on or near the target site by the SEC. In the aftermath of these terrible events, neither scandal was fully investigated. And so nothing changed...

Moving into more recent times again in the US. In 2007 we started hearing nasty news stories about the collapse of the housing market in the US, due largely to something called: Sub-prime mortgages.

But what exactly are sub-prime mortgages?

In essence, they are a form of lending that comes as close to loan-sharking as it's possible to get within the current US legal framework. Banks made large loans to hapless customers (who had little or no deposit and an income that could not possibly meet the repayment schedule), to buy houses that the banks knew they could not afford. They charged ruinous interest rates and demanded that customers purchase overpriced and badly-worded insurance plans from the bank to cover their own arses six ways from Sunday. Then all they had to do was to wait like a pack of hyenas for the customer to default on the loan...and when that inevitably happened, they simply moved in for the kill, foreclosing on the property and seizing whatever other assets to recover their "investment". Insurance covered any shortfall in their balance sheets, which meant that the mortgagee sale of the house was pretty much all profit.

As every loan shark knows, you can make a lot of money by targeting the poor; there's lots of them, they are are often a bit financially gullible and they are therefore easy to get money out of. Worst of all, especially under the Bush regime, the poor have no-one to protect them...easy meat in the eyes of the bankers. The entire concept of sub-prime lending not only flies in the face of common sense, but is - in a moral sense at least - a hideously sick practice, which only a sick and twisted mind could have come up with.

But this time the bankers came unstuck. Their profit margin was tied up in the sale of the house after picking the bones clean and it was based on the market value of the property. But by now, so many thieving, scheming bastards were in on the game, that more and more mortgagee sales were becoming the norm. The supply/demand see-saw tipped over and suddenly repossessed properties were only worth a fraction of their perceived value. The bankers, blinded by their profit projections and bonus expectations had started to believe their own fantasy figures - until they suddenly took another look and realised that (just like their victims) they too were up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe.

And so they collectively blackmailed governments around the world to bail them out...and the rest as they say is history.

There have been plenty of warning signs over the last 10-15 years, which have been ignored by both governments and regulatory bodies to a degree that is way beyond accident or circumstance. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that they have been part of a deliberate and systematic attempt to avoid learning from these mistakes and putting adequate economic and legal safeguards in place to prevent the situation we all now find ourselves in.

And as voters and consumers, we too must shoulder a proportion of the blame. We who have been brainwashed by the corporate spin-doctors and ad campaigns into believing all these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies. We who insist on designer labels, the latest mobile phones, flash cars and big houses, all of which is financed by an ever-growing mountain of credit card accounts and personal loans. And we who have refused to live within our means must now face the reality of what we have helped to create...

So for chrissake let's wake up and get real. Let's start by doing a proper, honest appraisal of our individual circumstances. Let's work out a budget, cutting back on all the frivolous shit we spend all day working to obtain. Forget the X-boxes and WII consoles, cancel your satellite TV and glossy celebrity magazine subscriptions. Trade the gas-guzzling 4x4 in for a more economic model and use any cash rebate to pay off a chunk of your next credit card bill. Start buying more of the no-frills brands in your shopping, install long-life bulbs in your home and turn down your gas (cold? put a bloody jumper on). Collect those discount coupons and store those loyalty points. Start living within your means - it's folly to earn a quid and spend 2 quid.

Most importantly, remember who the rich bastards at the top are and which of your elected officials help them out with tax breaks and deregulation. Demand action against those responsible, but also demand the reinstitution of proper regulation, overseen by independent auditors so the bastards can't get away with it so easily in the future. Oh - and when the next election rolls around, get off your arse and vote!

Let's start taking back the world we have been conned into giving away...

When the skies suddenly cleared and the sun burst forth in an unusually enthusiastic style this weekend, Su and I knew it was too good to miss and headed out for the day on Sunday. We had decided to visit the Hawk Conservancy Trust, located near Weyhill, just outside Andover. Neither Su or I had visited the Trust before, but Su had heard glowing reports from friends within the Sealed Knot.

Just before 1:30pm, we strolled through the visitor's centre and into the main grounds, armed with a complimentary copy of the trust's highly informative booklet and map. We immediately headed up to watch the "Valley of the Eagles Flying Display".

Once settled on comfortable benches overlooking a wild flower meadow, we were all introduced to our commentator, Mr Ashley Smith (son of founders Reg and Hilary) who kicked off by explaining a little of the history of the trust; founded as the Weyhill Zoo by smallholders Reg and Hilary Smith in 1966, the trust evolved to specialise purely in birds of prey towards the end of the 1970's.

Since that time, the Trust's facilities have been greatly expanded, as have their reputation and stature. They have also been acknowledged with a number of awards, including a silver award in their category in the "England for Excellence Awards" and a commendation from the Federation of Zoos of Great Britain and Ireland for their new hospital facility (both in spring 2002).

Ashley is an excellent presenter and the audience quickly warmed to annecdotes about his father's earthy and frank approach to the occasional hapless visitor who, ignoring the "do not enter" signs, wandered into the field during a demonstration (thus disrupting the presentation). He then moved into the first of the demonstrations, with a Peregrine falcon, which swooped over the heads of the audience, between handlers stationed on both sides of the display area. Ashley explained that the flight of the Peregrine falcon reputedly inspired R.J. Mitchell in his designs for the Spitfire aircraft.

Next was an aerial display of a team of six vultures which Ashley explained were highly intelligent and social birds, who often got a bad press rep. This particular squad had learned that instead of flying just over the heads of the audience, they could fly right at their heads, knowing that the spectators would duck and we were all advised to do just that, in order to avoid getting a face full of surprised vulture. Needless to say, we took his advice!

Other spectacular participants in the display included Harris Hawks and Black kites and the display culminated with the arrival of a majestic pair of American Bald Eagles (accompanied by the musical score: Conquest of Paradise by Vangellis). After this first-rate display was complete, there were opportunities to talk to Ashley and the staff, take photos and get up close to the Bald Eagles.

A quick snack followed in the well-equipped and spotlessly maintained picnic grounds opposite the entrance / coffee shop and then it was time to head off to the second display of the day; the woodland owls and hawks display. Nestled under a canopy of native trees and flora, we were treated to a second excellent performance, featuring a Great Grey Owl, Little Owl, Barn and Tawny Owls among others. The handlers skillfully positioned themselves to allow the stars of the show to again fly low over the heads of the audience, criss-crossing the seated area so that everyone got an equal chance to see all the birds. As with the Valley of the Eagles display, visitors had the opportunity to take photos or ask questions after the performance. They could also hold a Tawny or Barn owl.

The staff were all friendly, enthusiastic and very knowledgable. It is clear that they all have an equal committment to education and conservation, as well as entertainment and we certainly left both displays better informed about these amazing creatures. I was interested to learn that the eyes of many owls are fixed within their sockets and they are unable to move their eyes in the way that many animals can. To compensate, they are able to rotate their heads through an axis of approximately 270 degrees. Additionally, their large eyes and proportionally small heads generally means they have a small brain-mass to body-mass ratio (so much for the "wise old owl" stuff!).

The origins of the predominantly western idea that owls are wise apparently has it's connection to the Greek temples of Athena: the Godess of wisdom. Temples were of course not just places of worship, but were also centres of scholarly study and owls would sometimes roost in the temple eaves. The local people noticed this and concluded that the owl must be a wise bird. This was also immortalised in the name of the Owl genus: Athene. I am reliably informed that in other parts of the world, calling someone an "owl" is something of an insult, the inference being that the subject is not too bright!

We spent the remainder of the afternoon wandering around the different aviaries. One simple and interesting idea that the Hawk Conservancy Trust has hit upon, is a kind of collection scheme for kids; When kids arrive, they are given a booklet and as they walk around the aviaries, they can place a stamp in their booklet for each bird they see.

The Trust also operates a number of regular day events, including "a day with birds of prey", "conservation days" and "photographic days", to name but a few. They also run a number of special events such as "Owls by Moonlight" on Friday and Saturday evenings during the spring and autumn months (I'm certainly going to be checking this out). They also do a number of corporate and special occasion events, ideally suited as birthday, anniversary or christmas gifts for that hard-to-please recipient. There's a whole lot more information on their website, which I suggest you check out for yourself.

All in all, an excellent day out, thoroughly enjoyable and well worth the admission price. We are both keen to revisit soon.

See you there.

Check out our Photo Gallery of the Hawk Conservancy Trust

Very sad news today about the death of Rick Wright, talented keyboard player with the legendary Pink Floyd and often under-appreciated musical craftsman.

Wright was part of the core talent of the Pink Floyd sound, having first formed the band together with Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, back in 1967. He was a key part of the sound, recording and performing with the Floyd from their debut album "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" onwards. His musical contributions to the band included moments of sheer genius, when he wrote "The Great Gig In The Sky" and "Us And Them" for the classic 1973 album "Dark side of the Moon".

Following an acrimonious falling-out with Waters during the recording of "The Wall" in 1981, Wright was fired from the band by Waters but later toured with the Floyd on their Wall tour. Ironically, as a salaried musician, Wright was the only band member to make any money from the tour.

Between times, Wright produced some excellent solo work, including the commercially unsuccessful but interesting "Wet Dream" album in 1978 and "Broken China" in 1996, which he was inspiried to create after rejoining Pink Floyd in 1984.

Rick Wright was an exceptional musician and an integral part of the Pink Floyd sound. David Gilmour said: "In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick's enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognised Pink Floyd sound."

He died after a short struggle with an unspecified form of cancer.

Another diamond fades to black...

He will be missed...

As most people will be aware, the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider is due to be switched on for the first time, this Wednesday the 10th September.

When the LHC switched on, it is hoped that the data collected from the collision of sub-atomic particles will go some way to providing information on how the universe began, right back at the dawn of time, with the big bang.

Beyond the initial benefits to the pure science fraternity, the information gained from the experiment could conceivably provide the foundation for a whole new technological age. Previous advances in Physics such as Quantum Mechanics gave birth to a huge range of technological advances, including the subsequent development of modern computer and network/telecommunications technology. That in turn blossomed into advances in everything from medicine to space travel. Imagine what an advance of this magnitude could provide?

It's also been theorized that it could create a series of micro black holes, any one of which could swallow the entire planet in a matter of minutes and then the rest of the solar system for good measure.

The odds of this are of course super-miniscule and scientists are expounding the phrase that is printed in large friendly red letters, on the front of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("DONT PANIC!")

I don't know about you, but I feel better

I guess the only solace we can take is that if the white-coats screw it up badly, we'll all cease to exist before we get a chance to lodge a complaint.

Hope to see you back here on Thursday.

Another contract completed and it's time to move on again. I'll miss the team and the interesting work but not the pre-dawn commute to beat the traffic.

Feels a bit weird to be largely unemployed again...the last 2-3 contracts have been largely back-to-back and have all been pretty busy, so I've not had a lot of time to focus on other things. It's going to take a couple of days to get into another groove.

Ah well, on we go...

Courtesy of one of my work colleagues at UCB-Celltech in Slough, is my very own South Park Character (the whole team has one). It's been reworked with Su's help (she thinks that I've downplayed the grumpyness element of my character, but it's my character and I can have what I want! )

My own Strat is black (and has all 6 strings) and the glasses I drink from are generally larger, but it's otherwise there. The T-Shirt is an AC/DC shirt; I don't own one but I love the band!

This has also inspired Su to create Southpark characters for all Bandanna club members as well as a few of other much loved friends.

You can make your own South Park character by visiting: www.sp-studio.de

Still here? What are you waiting for?

A few days back, a particularly dim Republican God-botherer called the "Rev." James Dobson (interestingly, an anagram of his name is:"Demon Ass Job" ) asked his so-called "Christian" parish to pray that torrential rain would disrupt Obama's acceptance speech, at the Democratic convention in Denver.

But it seems that the Lord got a mite pissed off with that request.

Instead (s)he seems to have sent the huge Hurricane Gustav ripping through the Mar De Las Antillas (the stretch of water that includes Haiti, the Caymans, the Dominican Republic), up through Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico, heading straight for Louisanna...where ironically the Republicans are having their convention and where Dubya is due to deliver his speech...about the time the hurricane hits the coast!

I'm not sure what the Haitians, Cubans et all have done to piss off God (or maybe God's aim was simply a bit off the mark this time), but it certainly looks like the Republicans are going to get theirs. Unfortunately, so will a huge number of innocent bystanders, who are either already facing the aftermath or are currently being evacuated from the hurricane's path.

Maybe when they are back on their feet, the Haitian, Dominican and Cuban governments ought to consider suing Dobson...it would certainly be an interesting court case (especially if God was sent a subpoena! )

God's sense of irony seems to also be coming into play on a couple of levels. Hurricane Gustav is due to hit the US mainland coast almost 3 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina pretty much levelled New Orleans. It makes you wonder if God is just against the rebuilding of a city 20 feet below the water table.

Whatever the reason, I can only hope that republican bigshots are at this very moment kicking Dobson's ass up and down the halls of party HQ and issuing statements to all the other greasy, bible-thumping hayseeds throughout the US Gorm-belt to stop with the praying-to-screw-the-democrats thing, when the Almighty seems to have leanings in the opposite direction as a result.

Amen!

August the 20th is always a tough day. It's the anniversary of my brother's death and I always phone home. It's hard to hear your mum cry from 7,000 miles away and not be able to give her a hug.

David was born in October 1968 with Cystic Fibrosis, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs, liver, pancreas, and intestines and of course has a major effect on virtually every aspect of it's victim's life. At the time, there wasn't a lot known about this disease even by doctors and he was mis-diagnosed for the first two years of his life as suffering from colds, flu, suppressed immune system, asthma and God knows what else, before a canny GP referred my worried parents to a consulting professor at Auckland Hospital, who was delving into CF and recognized the symptoms.

Once a correct diagnosis had been made, David had to start a regular programme of hospital visits, which lasted the rest of his life. We moved out of the suburbs of Auckland, down to the rural environment of Te Puna, just north of Tauranga when I was six and David was four. My folks felt that the fresh air and wide open spaces would be good for him and they were right. Hospital trips back to Auckland hospital (now some 200kms away) reduced from weekly to fortnightly, then eventually became monthly, but not for some years.

Every fortnight there would come one Friday evening after we had returned home from school, where we would all bundle into the car and drive up to my grandparents place to stay the night. The following morning David would attend his hospital appointment.

The hospital appointments varied to a small degree, but for David were mostly the same endless list of tasks, seemingly designed to induce pain and strip him of his dignity. First he was placed on an IV-drip for two hours and force-fed pills beyond count. Then a course of hard-core physio, where his back and chest were literally pounded for up to an hour, in an attempt to loosen up the accumulated fluids enough to expel them from the lungs. This was followed by a draining exercise, where David bent over the end of a hospital bed, his body from the waist up, hanging upside-down so he head almost touched the floor. Sometimes he had to do this for up to an hour, his face going purple as the blood rushed to his head.

Beyond the treatment, there were the tests. David and other kids like him were press-ganged into the hospital CF research program, which was trying to identify a reliable genetic test (to determine if someone is a carrier of the faulty gene) and whether they liked it or not, they were to assist research staff as guinea pigs for many years to come. There were blood tests with test tube after test tube filled, sweat tests conducted using low-level electric shock treatment to induce sweat. Every time the poor kid turned round some medical person seemed to want him to stand up, sit down, roll over, stick out his arms, give samples of this bodily fluid or that skin scraping.

Anywhere between 2 and 4 hours after we arrived, David would leave, with the inevitable sticking plasters over needle marks, clutching this month's prescription, which he and my mum would take to the hospital pharmacy to be filled, while I walked down to the carpark with my dad. Then we'd pile back in the car, pick up Mum and David outside the pharmacy and either head back to my grandparents or head directly home, only to turn around next month and do the whole thing over again.

In between visits, David had another regime of pills to take before and after all meals (I one worked out that he took up to 70 pills a day), a de-mister, from which he inhaled steam laced with antibiotics, looking like a turkish sultan puffing on his hookah, daily physiotherapy and draining and a compound called Myverol which tasted like runny candle wax and had to be spread on bread and eaten between meals. CF is hard on the digestion and David was understandably a very fussy eater and often had no appetite at all. Many foods contain saturated fats which his system found hard to cope with. This made him very thin and he had to dig deeper than the rest of us to find reserves of energy.

On top of the hospital and between-visit home regimes, he was also expected to work on the orchard, do chores, attend school, do his homework and all the other things that a kid growing up in the country is expected to do. When the harvest came, he was expected to do his share of both the picking and packing. Between times, there was never a shortage of jobs to be done round the place and he got drafted by my Dad as much as I did.

This routine (to a greater or lesser extent) went on for years...and in all that time, I never heard David complain about the cards life had dealt him...not even once. I know he wanted to - sometimes, I would catch a look in his eyes that spoke of the pain, anguish and indignity he was forced to endure, then he would bite his bottom lip and look away from everyone (at a wall, out a window, at the ceiling) and when he looked back, he had somehow wrestled it under control again. There's only one term for it: courage. pure, undiluted courage.

Compared to my brother (at least in terms of pure teeth-gritting determination) Jesus got off lightly and Superman was a fairy!

David loved to cook and was very good at it. During one school holiday break when he and I were seconded by my mum to domestic duties during a particularly busy time on the orchard, my folks came indoors from a hard days work, to find a splendidly layed table, complete with candles and wine and we sat down to some truly sumptuous meals. By comparison, my efforts were of the "Baked beans on toast" variety. David wanted to be a chef, but his illness precluded this as a career possibility because of the cooking fumes, smoke and the like.

Beyond his seemingly limitless reserves of courage, he was a real character. Although he struggled throughout his academic life (mostly due to all the time off school for hospital and such) he was far from stupid. He inherited my dad's aptitude for mechanics and mechanisms. One day when he was off school ill (and had been confined to bed under the threat of dire punishment from my Mum if he was to surface), he pulled his old-fashioned table clock apart until his bed was littered with cogs, springs, tiny screws and other mysterious metal bits from the clock's inner workings. Then, with perfect presision, he assembled it all, with not a single part left over.

He had a rapier wit and could easily hold his own in most conversations. Woe betide you, if you pissed off my brother, because he could cut you in half with his tongue without blinking an eye.

Whenever we argued, I invariably lost and sometimes when he cut a little too deep for my liking, I'd lose my temper and with a bellowing roar, I'd chase him out the back door, cursing and swearing (for which my dad would clip me round the head as I passed) and down towards the back of the orchard.

He'd continue to taunt me, laughing merrily all the time and staying just a step of two ahead of me. This of course made me even madder and I'd redouble my efforts to get him...but he would always make the first row of citrus trees and from that point he had won totally. I could sometimes run him down over open ground, but as soon as we reached the trees he would duck and dive, dodge branches and weave between trees, changing direction without warning, much the same way as a rabbit does when being chased by a dog. I was bigger and slower and eventually I ran out of puff, while David returned to the house as a victor, having once again vanquished his foe!

He didn't always have it all his own way (and he got a good hard thump or a rotten tangelo rubbed over his head on the rare occasions where he made a mistake and I caught him), but if I'd ever bothered keeping score, I'd have been mightily embarrassed at the gulf between his tallies of victory and defeat.

We had very different personalities and truth be told I sometimes resented him for all the attention he got (not being mature enough to accept it was because he needed it!). Likewise, I think he envied my relative health, the fact I was the oldest and got to a fair bit of stuff first. This translated into quite a nasty sibling rivalry, which continued throughout our childhood years (it got so bad that by the time David prepared to start college, my parents had already firmly decided to send him to another school, far from the clutches of his bullying older brother).

It was to my everlasting regret, that it wasn't until I left school and started work that he and I finally buried the hatchet and started to develop a mutual respect. Perhaps it was because we had both established ourselves within our own circle of friends and felt less need to compete with each other, perhaps it was just that I had finally started to grow up a bit. I only know I'm grateful we didn't continue our little war and wish we had made the peace years earlier (if we had, we could have run rings around my folks! )

In his mid-teens, David developed an interest in amateur dramatics and had minor roles in a number of local rep productions. I ended up helping out backstage a bit and so we got to spend a bit of time together between his scenes. His wit and natural charm quickly endeared him to the better class of luvvies and he often got scolded by one director or another for making the girls giggle backstage.

One morning he woke up suffering from a fever and by lunchtime, his temperature was so high that mum called for an ambulance. He became delirious, not recognising any of us - or even being able to recall his own name. Then, just as quickly as it arrived, the mystery fever suddenly broke and he was back with us, exhausted, but more compos mentos. The ambulance was cancelled and he slept for a few hours. Shortly before 6, I headed into the theatre with instructions from mum to tell them that he was ill and couldn't make it. You can imagine my huge surprise, when 15 minutes before his stand-in was due to go on, David arrived at the theatre with mum, looking pale and shaky but determined to go on. Mum later told me that he had insisted that she drive him, threatening to drive himself if she would not oblige. He performed his role on cue and then immediately took his leave, returning home to bed where he slept for almost 48 hours.

Shortly after my 17th birthday, I left home for good, moving first to Wellington, then to Auckland and onto London as my career progressed. David remained at home, close to my folks in Tauranga. He had a number of jobs, most of which he did well, but his health precluded him from many roles and in the shaky economic climate of the mid-80's, many jobs didn't last long anyway. He never complained, but I don't think he really found a job he liked a great deal...certainly not enough to turn into a career.

One day while working in a local DIY shop, he suffered a collapsed lung but with his usual grit, drove himself to the local hospital. He was transferred to Greenlane hospital in Auckland to recover, but something in him started to change around that time. He began to withdraw into himself a bit and stayed closer to home, working with my Dad most days on the orchard.

Times improved and in his late teens, he did many of the things that most young men do. He bought himself a sporty little Datsun Cherry, which was his pride and joy. With my grandfather's help, he bought a nice little place of his own, met a girl, fell in love, got married and settled down into something resembling a normal life. We kept in touch by letter and occasional phone calls and he flew down to Wellington to spend a bit of time with me.

When my dad started a small trucking/transport business, hauling fresh produce from the local farms to markets all over the North Island, David joined the business, initially accompanying my dad and acting as a relief driver so my dad could get some rest and later on driving solo. He was an excellent driver and seemed to enjoy the sense of solitude and responsibility. No matter what was thrown at him (mechanical breakdowns, flat tyres on a full load, heavy storms and severely flooded roads to name a few) his natural fortitude kicked into play and he got the problem dealt with.

In 1994, his health started to take a turn for the worse and he was admitted back into Auckland hospital. I flew home and visited him at his house after he was released from hospital and returned home to convalesce. We talked around his health problems, but never directly about them. He seemed to know that the end of the road was in sight, but still wanted to walk the last few miles and see the journey to it's very end.

A week after I returned to the UK, David was re-admitted to Auckland Hospital and on August 20th, 1994 he passed away.

His funeral was held about shortly afterwards and was attended by a huge crowd, which packed the chapel to standing room only. His life was a lesson in courage, strength, inner hope and unbending, uncompromising determination to meet any challenges head-on, without complaint.

14 years on and I still miss him...

And so, on the 20th of August every year I remember how he died.

The rest of the year, I try hard to remember how he lived.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that in general I couldn't care less about the olympics.

While I can appreciate the committment and self sacrifice that individual particpants make in order to be the best they can be (and if at all possible, the best in the world), I loathe the inevitable dirty politics, shady dealings and backhanders that are now so interwoven into the whole spectacle, that they've actually become part of the fabric.

When was the last time we had an Olymic games not marred by drugs scandals, huge cost over-runs, civil right clamp-downs, forced relocations or environmental issues?

...erm, probably never. Stupid question really.

So, in a lighter (and hopefully sharper) view, I present a few olympic-themed links from across the Blogsphere, all of which capture (at least in my view) the true spirit of the 2008 games. Each image clicks through to it's original article source. Enjoy!

Images used in compliance with non-commercial copyright regulations (Fair use - satire/parody)

Judging by today's police raid on a cannabis factory in Nottinghamshire, the union of illegal drug producers has scored some major concessions recently.

The ex-chicken factory apparently had separate rooms for staff quarters - each with their own flat screen TV. There was even a fully equipped gym!

All they needed was a profit-sharing scheme, a couple of team building junkets and an annual BBQ (complete with bouncy castle for the kids) and they would have been the envy of downtrodden workers throughout the country!

Maybe I need to negotiate extra benefits when my contract comes up for renewal.

Yesterday, I had a light-hearted dig at a number of American chainstore franchises, which I think are pretty naff. A possibly-American reader, identifying himself only as "Dave", took slight exception to this and pointed out that on this side of the pond, we aren't much better.

While Dave seems to have missed the joke (that Australians occassionally have surprisingly good taste - honestly, it's no fun if you have to *explain* it!) he's absolutely right. The UK is likewise full of chainstore franchises and big businesses, at least as naff as their American counterparts...and in many cases even worse.

An article in today's Independent, about British Airways lousy lost bags record is a classic example. Apparently annual figures from the Air Transport Users Council show that in 2007 British Airways lost more baggage per flight than almost any other airline in Europe. I wonder if that includes the T5 fiasco?

Perhaps BA ought to resurrect one of their old 1989 campaigns, with this newer twist.

And I suppose that you can say that at least the Yanks have a certain flair for setting up chainstores and franchises, in a format which is just never properly implemented here in Britain.

Take fast food for example; in the US, fast food stores at least have a small number of redeeming features (which are especially important for the weary traveller or the teenage road-tripper):-

1. The food is cheap
2. It's served fast
3. You get the same standards of quality pretty much wherever you go

But here in old Blighty, I suspect that some lesser known government department (probably the "department of total bastards from hell" or some such), carefully removes these few benefits with a precision that most brain surgeons would envy.

The result is that the same US fast food franchises in the UK:-

1. Are expensive
2. Are slow
3. Vary wildly, especially in terms of both quality and cleanliness.

I confess I've never had food poisoning from a US fast food joint in the US, but I have had a dose or two from US fast food joints in the UK.

And of course, this naffness factor is not confined to the food sector. Many other examples abound (such as the Royal Mail, high street banks and the rail network, to name but a few).

I think Dave and I can agree that crap franchises and naff businesses are not confined solely to the US and that when they are exported to the UK, they are even worse.

But that still doesn't excuse the Starbucks coffee.

Why do Australians call XXXX 'four-X'? Cos they can't spell "Koala p*ss".
What's the definition of Australian Foreplay? "You awake Sheila?".

(I'm stopping there before I get lots of hate mail, full of sheep jokes)

Despite their reputation for a forthright and truth-speaking approach to life, this week the folks from the other Great Southern land have shown themselves to have remarkable taste and style...

...they've turned their backs on Starbucks in droves.

Today, the beeb reports how Startbucks is closing 61 of it's 85 Australian branches. And it's put a smirk on my face that will probably remain there most of the day.

I've tried the coffee in Starbucks about half a dozen times and it's always been the same, I'm afraid. In my experience, it's lousy!

The Starbuck's coffee I've drunk, has been burnt, gritty and bitter. It's been served by people who look like they've listened to too many Leonard Cohen albums, but haven't worked up the courage to slash their wrists yet. The shop seating has always been cramped and generally furnished in a horrible Ikea-McDonald's hybrid of knee-cracking tables and kiddie-size chairs. The musak played over their tannoy made the back of my eyeballs itch maddingly.

Frankly, I never could understand why people seem to flock to the place.

And the Aussies certainly haven't. Instead, they've opted to take their morning coffee at thousands of little independent local coffee houses, who have a better atmosphere, friendlier staff and most important, freshly brewed coffee that doesn't taste like it's been drunk once already.

Let's hope the rest of the world follows suit and starts to wise up to these crap yank franchise outfits. I can see a glorious future of high streets and town centres where there isn't a McDonalds, Starbucks, Burger King, Wendy's, Subway, Dunkin' Donuts, KFC or Krispy Kreme to be seen! We'll all be healthier, wealthier, wiser and happier for it.

And Starbucks can bog off back to the US, where they have very little sense of taste anyway...

PS: If you're in London and fancy a decent coffee, try the Tinderbox in Euston.

I'd like to think this could only in the UK, but I suspect that's not true...

Yesterday, I reported on how Centrica / British Gas had jacked up it's prices by 35%, less than 24 hours after it revealed it made almost a billion quid operating profit in 6 months.

Unbelievably, when I got home this evening there was a package from British Gas sitting on my doorstep. The package contained...wait for it...four long-life lightbulbs, and a booklet containing energy saving tips (which were mostly straight out the the bleeding-obvious manual).

An accompanying letter explained that:-

We're sending a total of 52 million light bulbs to all of our customers. It's just one way we're giving Britain the green light to start saving energy and money.

Now call me an ungrateful git if you want, but I have a couple of problems with this...

Firstly, in view of the recent price march (which is like a price hike, except it's vastly larger and lasts much longer) and the obscene profits reported by C/BG, this gesture seems to be taking the piss on a previously unheard-of scale. It's a little bit like having a burglar break into your house, nick your TV, stereo, cash and jewellery...and then send you a package containing a free Chubb lock and a booklet from Neighbourhood watch on improving home security!

Secondly, since when do I (or any of us) need the "green light" from Britsh gas to start saving energy? I get the meaning, but the letter seems to imply that we somehow need permission and/or leadership from British Gas on how to save energy!

Oi Vay!

What's next? Tobacco conglomerates sending out cartons of low-tar cigarettes with an accompanying organ donor card and NHS voucher? Oil multinationals sending out free cans of WD40 along with a discount coupon for National Tyres? Biotech companies sending out free samples of GM soyabeans?

Can someone please pass me a knife? I'm having trouble cutting through the irony of life!

Yesterday's announcement by Centrica-owned British gas of a record 35% price increase would have been enough for most of their long-suffering customers to content with, if it had been the only rise this year.

But it's not of course. Let's not forget the 15% retail price increase in January of this year, the 12.4% increase in September 2006 and the 14% increase in 2005. Taken collectively, they represent a non inflation-adjusted (but still gobsmacking) 96% rise in the last 3 years!

Of course British Gas blame the soaring costs of the wholesale gas market...and not all the wasted fuel, time, and effort for their moronic engineers to make 6 different visits to your house to fix your central heating system (this happened to a colleague of mine recently). And it's got nothing to do with the £1.9million pay packet of Centrica chief executive Sam Laidlaw.

And most importantly, it's definately got nothing to do with the fact that as a producer of gas as well as a purchaser, Centrica/British Gas is allegedly in a position to make unprecedented windfall profits on both sides of the equation...but since they don't reveal the profits they make as a gas producer, we probably will never know the full picture.

So we can all be rest-assured that the Centrica group profits of £10billion (not to mention the £992million operating profit) reported in Centrica's interim profit statement (June 2008) have absolutely nothing to do with any form of price gouging by a bunch of thieving, greedy, selfish, small-minded, myopic, fat-cat bastards, whose only purpose in life is to screw every penny of of those of us unfortunate enough to be their "customers".

Isn't that nice to know?

The energy saving tips from the Centrica website are of course rather useful (though hardly earth-shattering), and I'd like to add a couple of my own, starting with this:

Change your energy supplier as soon as possible

...and now the finer detail

1. Have separate suppliers for your gas and electicity. Remember that bloke in the suit that you met outside your local supermarket awhile ago? You know...the one who persuaded you to get your gas company to also supply your electricity? Sorry - but it was largely a con! You haven't saved very much and worse - you are now completely at the mercy of a single supplier. If you get stroppy with them, they can now cut off both your gas and electricity!
2. Compare your options. It's much easier now than it was even a couple of years ago. There's a number of websites such Switchwise that will help you figure out the best option for you in terms of usage, price etc. So turn off that TV (it's all crap anyway!) and get surfin'
3. Use a green electricity supplier. When you decide to switch your electricity supplier, consider a green alternative such as Ecotricity, who not only use renewable energy resources to generate electricity, they also reinvest a hefty portion of their earnings into expanding their wind farms. This has allowed them to offer a competitive pricing tarrif, which also helps lower carbon emissions and best of all, it takes money out of the Pockets of Sam Laidlaw and his Centrica cronies.
4. Produce your own juice. The technology to produce your own electricity has moved on in leaps and bounds. Companies such as Bioplex Technologies are developing small-scale versions of industrial composting facilities, suitable for use in offices, prisons, hospitals, schools and...eventually...homes like yours. Not only do they make compost, but they also produce enough methane and biofuel to meet a sizable portion of your energy needs. It's not all the way there yet, but it's not far away so keep an eye on the news...

Oh - and here's a few other general tips you might find interesting.

Good luck and remember...every quid you take from Centrica is worth almost two quid in non-inflation adjusted profit.

News today that the Welsh town of Aberystwyth continues to ban Monty Python's classic film "The life of Brian" almost 30 years after it was first released, made me laugh out loud.

According to the BBC, this came to light after Sue Jones-Davies (who played Brian's girlfriend in the movie), became mayor of Aberystwyth and was "amazed" to find that the cult film was still barred from cinemas there.

And local christians including Mr Bell, vicar of the town's St Michael's Church, say the restriction should remain in place. Of course Mr Bell has never actually seen the film, but no doubt God has described the plot to him (it is by all accounts one of God's favourites).

Apparently, a committee of church leaders in Aberystwyth recommended a ban in 1979 which was approved by Ceredigion council. The council of course have the power to lift the ban, but by all accounts no-one in the licensing department even knew the ban was still in effect. Let's hope they rectify this silly sitch and drop-kick the ban out of one of the last bastions of medievil mentality, left in this green and pleasant land.

Oh, and a couple of points for Mr Bell and his "supporters":-

• Congratulations! The recent publicity about this ban has probably guaranteed a small rise in DVD sales of the film.
• The film is a comedy but is NOT a comedy about Jesus (though he does have a small cameo role).
• Jesus is big enough to laugh off any parody or satire. Honest!
• Welease Bwian!

Fantastic clip of the Beeb's website today of 13-year old Calvin Prior, who is minting it in as a busker, playing his electric guitar on Brighton's seafront...and making an average of £70 an hour.

And when you see the video, you can see why!

Cal's dad (who plays in his band because Cal can't find other musicians of his age who can play well enough) says he practices about 6 hours a day...and he mastered a number of popular riffs (including the eponymous GnR classic 'Sweet child o mine') in the first few weeks of playing!

Cal is currently saving for a a new £1100 marshall amp, which he hopes to have saved enough for, by August. His £2000 guitar has already been paid for, from previous busking.

Cal even receives the ultimate compliment in the vid (at least in British terms)...two kids busy eating ice cream pause long enough to say:

..."yeah, he's good"

Way to go Cal!

Quite stunned to read this morning about the family court in New Zealand who were forced to make a 9-year old girl a ward of state, in order to help her change her name legally from...get this: "Talula Does The Hula".

Sheesh!

Now, I've personally known a couple of good Kiwi blokes with dodgy names including: "Donald McDonald" (bad) and: "Dwayne Kerr" (worse! much worse!), both of whom have always had my heartfelt sympathy and honest respect...especially after years of bullying (which only served to make them both harder than a coffin nail and certainly capable of cheerfully beating the living crap out of anyone who took the proverbial), but by comparison to this poor kid, they got off lightly!

Not only should the court have taken the action it did to help this poor kid, but they should have also jailed the parents for inflicting mental and emotional damage on her.

Weirdly, New Zealand (a country sensible in most respects) seems to turn these out every now and again...in the past we have had people legally name their kids things like:-

• Benson and Hedges (they were Twins!)
• Number 16 Bus Shelter
• Six-cylinder Ford cars
• Violence

No idea what makes them do it...perhaps it's something in the water (or...more worringly in the beer!), but whatever the cause is, we need to fund some sort of research program, in order to identify the cause and cure.

And in the meantime, we ought to chain the guilty parents to the nearest cell wall and let their long-suffering offspring bitch-slap them into a coma.

A couple of weeks back, during one of our occasional evening chats, Su was telling me about a book called "Time Enough for Love" by noted Sci-fi author: Robert A. Heinlein.

In this book, the main character Lazarus Long (who as part of a genetics rejuvenation experiment has managed to live over two thousand years) has a conversation, in which he states:-

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Hmmm...well I can certainly do/have done a fair few of these, though admittedly it's been awhile since I helped butcher a hog and I've yet to conn a ship, design a building or die gallantly (how the hell would you do that anyway?).

I'm not sure I agree with Long's rationale or particular list, but it did get me thinking about what my own list of things a human should be able to do might include and why...and since my writin' time is limited (as is your readin' time), I thought I'd better limit it to 10 items max. You can take the diaper changing and cooking items from long's list as a given.

1. Make a fire - without the aid of any form of accelerant. Matches / lighter permissable but that's it. You should be able to otherwise build a fire from tinder, to kindling, right through to a hearty blaze, at least suitable for cooking.
2. Build a shelter - With the aid of simple tools such as a knife, hatchet or small saw. It should be strong anough to see you through a bad storm for a couple of days.
3. Communicate in a non-native language - doesn't have to be a spoken language - it could just as easily be something like sign language. And you don't have to direct a light opera or anything...the main criteria here is just to be able to communicate a few simple things ('hello', 'goodbye', 'please', 'thanks', 'what's for dinner?', 'where's the loo?' that kind of stuff) in a language that is not your native tongue.
4. Create something - paint a picture, write a poem or play, carve a piece of furniture, perform a dance, play a musical instrument, program a computer - whatever! Just something that occasionally allows you to make something, no matter how good, bad or intangible it may be.
5. Perform basic first aid - patch a cut, treat a burn, tie a splint or sling, stop bleeding, perform CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
6. Do basic maths in your head - add, subtract, multiply and divide basic integer values. How else can you be sure you get the right change in the shop, your tax return is correct or the interest payments on your loans are competitive?
7. Make something grow - from a lovingly tended Berkshire garden spanning acres, to a windowbox full or herbs in a council flat in Brixton. It's pretty easy and it's a great feeling. That of course includes your kids.
8. Look after an animal - know how to properly treat and care for a pet, whatever that may be to you. No matter whether your pet is a horse in a field, or a goldfish in a bowl, the important thing is knowing how to look after the pet and doing it.
9. Drive a vehicle / perform basic maintenance - applies to everyone who is physically fit and able enough to do so. You should be able to safely change a tyre, check all fluid levels and identifiy exhaust / emissions issues.
10. Make a reasoned argument - listen to both sides of a debated issue, and then be able to ask questions, analyse the answers and formulate an informed opinion. Know how to research an issue and how to verify sources. Be able to rationalise a short train of logical thought (be able to think from A to B to C)

...what would your list include?

You know it's funny...every time I think that Sir Humprey's snivil servants and the Whitehall worms can't possibly screw up anything else, I read another story which illustrates even more monumental failings.

The recent reluctant admission by the Ministry of Defense, that more than 100 USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence since 2004, is a new low in data protection balls-ups.

And if the memory sticks weren't bad enough, the MOD also admits that nearly 650 laptops have also been stolen from their offices in the same time period.

Of course the MOD didn't make this announcement voluntarily. If it hadn't been for Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather tabling a question in parliament, we probably still wouldn't know about it. Furthermore, the laptop figure at least only includes laptops identified as stolen...but not the number that have been lost (that probably needs another question).

And despite all the evidence to the contrary, the MOD continues to insist that it's security policies were "generally fit for purpose".

This comes only a couple of days after the Sunday Times and the Beeb both reported that there are now more than 1,000 laws and regulations which permit officials to force entry into homes, cars and business premises.

Does anyone out there still believe that:-

a) The government can be trusted with our personal details for use with ID cards?

b) Much of the more recent legislation, ostensibly created to "prevent terrorism" was indeed intended to do just that and is not intended to give the snivels ever more power over us peons?

If you answered "Yes" to either question, please send me your e-mail address, so I can reply with the name of a good shrink (or I can try and get you in on the ground floor of this great pyramid scheme I've heard about).

This probably goes some way to explaining why a growing number of us feel more and more like extras in some sort of bizzare Chaplinesque comedy...that happens to be in colour and have sound.

If we are really serious about defeating terrorism and simultaneously protecting human rights, the best thing we could do would be to box up all these arseholes and ship them to Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Within a month, they will have lost Mugabe's vote count tally's, Kim Il-sung's porn collection and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear blueprints. At the same time they will have introduced a whole raft of new laws which deny any form of privacy to the masses, who - since they aren't British - will rise up and kill them all.

...and the rest of us will live happily; if not ever-after, then at least for awhile.

Our new blog is finally online ... albeit with only some of the previous comments at present (I'm still trying to get to grips with the new B2 blog software), but enough to be going on with ...

Enjoy!

Photos now available - Check em out!

What can I say? A good gig (especially Sunday). Beautiful weather, excellent music from both classic and more contemporary acts. A little more commercial now that the Hard Rock cafe have taken over but not unbearably so.

All in all, a great weekend, spent with good friends in a pretty cool place.

Thanks folks!

Last night the Government hammered home the final nails in the coffin of the Planning application process, to ensure that the public no longer had any grounds for objection. And in their usual chicken-shit style, they have also fobbed off responsibility for the unpopular decisions to an unelected quango, in a vain attempt to sheild themselves from a voter backlash next election.

The process of disenfranchising the general public from the planning application process has of course been proceeding quietly, but steadily for quite some time now. Even back in 2003 when we were objecting to the building of a waste incinerator just 2 miles from where we live (and right next to grain fields, a primary school and shopping center), we found that many legitimate objections were largely ignored and over-ridden in order to serve the self-interests of both the developer and their lackeys on the Hampshire County council (our suppsed "representatives") and their application was largely railroaded through.

But at least we were permitted to formally object on health and safety grounds. Subsequent amendments to the planning process now exclude these as grounds for objection from the public (even members of the public who are acknowledged experts in the particular areas of concern). Now, the only grounds that the public can object to in the planning application of an unpopular development, are largely grounds of asthetics.

In a nutshell, your concerns about radiation from the proposed nuclear power plant, toxins from the incinerator or pollution from an airport or bypass are no longer taken into account...but you are permitted to pick the colour the developer will paint the buildings!

Yesterday, on Radio 4's "Today" programme, Planning minister John Healey attempted to spin his way out of the situation, by claiming that the public would retain "the right of consultation".

But what exactly does that mean?

Government: We are going to build a nuclear waste dump in your village
People: But what happened to our right of consultation?
Government: What do you think this is?

If these recent changes were likely to result in the approval of new wind or solar farms, new anaerobic composting facilities or other renewable energy/environmentally sound developments, I might be a little more enthusiastic. But sadly, I think that with the current medieval mindset of the senior civil servants who set policy, I think all we will see are more coal fired power stations, incinerators, toxic waste dumps and new airports coming online after sliding through a planning process as slick and slimy as a tapeworm's douche bag.

Communities Secretary Hazel Blears argued that developments which could boost the economy and Britain's energy security were being "clogged up" in "antiquated" planning processes.

All we can hope for now that the public is largely denied the right to object to anything, is that the next step in steamlining the process will be the resignation and suicide of the smarmy civil servants and politicans on the take.

Written in the wake of this week's visit by the evil bastard...

You started out with buying off Republican selection,
you had your cousin rig the votes in Florida's election,
your daddy talked to his old pals, Donald, Ken and Dick,
and they agreed to help you give democracy a kick.

On your Inauguration Day your motorcade ran flat,
as hundreds of your countrymen rose and turned their backs,
your secret service driver put his foot down to the floor,
to drive you past the flying eggs, the shouts of "shame!" and more.

You loaded up the Whitehouse with all your daddy's cronies,
along with failed businessmen, sycophants and phonies,
you waited out the recount and the Al Gore situation,
then you headed down to Texas for a 6-month long vacation.

When 9/11 happened you were visiting a school,
in a PR exercise designed, to show you weren't a fool,
your puppet masters realised that the time had come,
to bury news and settle scores...and do it all in one!

When it emerged your Saudi friends might be the ones to blame,
you rounded up their relatives and got their asses on a plane,
despite the FAA blockade and FBI protests,
that plane left US airspace...at the Saudi King's behest.

To divert the public gaze away from Enron and the Saudi's,
you started making speeches about Muslims gettin' rowdy,
your cronies then began by forumulating a new plan,
and in the meantime you sent token troops, to Afghanistan...

Your next step was to kick the US media into line,
and make sure no dissenting voice got a minute of air-time,
the US constitution was the next to be attacked,
by sweeping civil rights away, with the Patriot act...

Like Hitler, you had finally consolidated power,
so then the propaganda runs, hour after hour,
in churches in the midwest, they preach both light and dark,
so you can redirect their wrath, at Saddam in Iraq...

Your speeches started taking on a new note that was chilling,
as you vainly tried to form a coalition of the willing,
with bribes and threats and blackmail, you threw your weight around,
but the UN didn't back you, so you retreated to safe ground...

You got the Aussies and the Brits to join you in your war,
by promising them a tonne of cash and oil rights galore,
you bullied tiny countries into joining on your side,
to bolster up your numbers, in an attempt to turn the tide...

But still the UN said: "No way! it's evidence we need",
and so you started bullshitting with WMD,
you hadn't caught Bin Laden and with your public getting sore,
you cried: "Screw the UN" and you sent your troops to war.

In the months (and years) that followed, we all watched in growing dread,
as your war tore Iraq clean in half, leaving half a million dead,
who were mostly just civilians and for every one that's died,
you made survivors sympathetic to the other side.

Now terrorism is growing at a geometric rate,
as the Islam fundamentalists preach revenge and hate,
so rather than protect the world with your illegal war,
you've made us all more vulnerable than we ever were before.

And even though your home support is fully off the boil,
your engineers remain in force there, sucking up the oil,
and Haliburton's execs grow rich on stolen gains,
while Iraqis and US troops alike, suffer further death and pain.

Your entire Whitehouse history brought the Presidency to shame,
and the US voting public must also share the blame,
for returning you to office, on the weakest sales pitch,
of detention in Guantanomo and tax breaks for the rich.

They killed Old Abe and JFK, they simply shot them down,
while a truly awful "chief" like you remains above the ground,
to continue with your global greed, a killer and a thief,
that fact that your still breathing is quite beyond belief.

But now your Lone Star's on the wane, your end days drawing near,
and the US public's finally sick of endless death and fear,
new Saudi contracts now set up, to trade more oil for arms,
leaves you free to figure out the next way to do harm.

Your days are truly numbered, as are Dick's and Donny's,
now they've stolen billions, (and still they're making money!)
so count your swag, then pack your bags and stack them on the floor,
then f*ck off back to Texas, and on your way out close the door!

Photos Available - click here

It was a gorgeous sunny day, our options were working in the garden or a day trip somewhere interesting ... there was no contest. I suggested the Child-Beale Trust. I hadn't been there in years and Phil had never been. The Thames valley and surrounding area is particularly picturesque, so it seemed like a good idea.

Beale Park was formed by Gilbert Beale in 1956 who decided to donate this beautiful 350-acre park to 'the people' by converting it from private farmland into a non-profit making, charitable trust. More information about the history of the park is available on the Beale Park website.

After getting lost, we realised that it was now called Beale Park, so a quick turn round later and we arrived. We picked a busy weekend as there was the annual Thames Boat Show going on. However we got in pretty quickly, even with a large queue and the staff were pleasant and helpful.

Once inside, my priority was for an icecream as it was a hot day. However, there were no kiosks or places for food that I could see. A little dismayed we walked around.

The park is very well laid out, unusual statues greet you at random moments and it was a pleasant walk around on a summers day.

Of particular interest was the pavillion/model boad collection. Saying that Beale family were model enthusiasts, is a massive understatement! The models were extremely detailed and painstakingly created. Sizes ranged from a few inches to several feet and included models of a wide range of both ships and aircraft.

I remembered my last visit as a child when I had my picture taken standing by a huge stone frog. I couldn't find it at first then realised, in the intervening years, that it had become obscured with mature trees ... feeling my age now!

The Italian fountain was a good photo stop, but we were disappointed that it was not switched on. However, further down the path was an elephant fountain standing in a rock pool, which was quite spectacular.

We eventually ended up by the paddling pools, and sand pits when low and behold I found the restaurant. Hoorah!

Although two Cornettos set us back a fair sum, we were then distracted by a sign which advertised river cruises. Run by Thames River Cruise, the half hour trip on the "Lady Caroline" takes you down to the Swan Inn at Pangbourne and back again. Apart from Phil doing battle with a giant hornet which flew into the covered boat, and a somewhat boggy approach to the boat across a strip of grass. We had a pretty relaxing cruise, taking photos and annoying the crew with our questions. However, they were friendly and good natured about it.

Back at the park, we wandered off to view some animal enclosures. The first was the Australasian enclosure, full of exotic palms and a large flock of Zebra Finches, which were quite tame and didn't seem to mind the visitors milling around. I got the idea in my head that if I just held out my arm that one might land on it, but after standing there with my arm held out at an awkward angle and feeling pretty daft I gave up. Phil, sniggering, had moved on taking more photos.

Next was the South American enclosure with small primates, including Squirrel monkeys and Tamarinds. They were mostly hanging around inside their dens, but as these had glass fronts so you could view them pretty easily.

I was quite keen to see the Ring-tailed Lemurs after watching the film "Fierce Creatures". The Lemurs seemed to be happy to sleep in the sun and the chance of a photo opportunity faded. Then, happily they started wandering around. There is a glass fronted viewing booth which enables you to take photos with no bars in the way, so trying to avoid the reflection glare I snapped away.

The last stop was to see the Prairie dogs and Meercats, reminding us of the Dilbert "cube farm" cartoon as they stood on their hind legs to scrutinise the area for predators.

Our weary feet and rumbling stomachs signalled a retreat to the Swan Inn at Pangbourne, where we had a leisurely late lunch. The food was superb and the pub boasts a patio bordering the river. A great place to chill and rest after all that walking.

We've had more exiting trips, but Beale Park on a sunny day, plus the Swan for afterwards was a very pleasant and interesting way to spend a day out.

No real surprise that last night the government managed to push it's new anti-terror legislation through Parliament, albeit with the narrowest of margins.

Despite the fact that this bill is likely to be killed before it reaches the statute books (either in the house of Lords unless the government invokes the parliament act, or in the EU human rights commission, which the government can't influence too much), I can't help but wonder what the hell the Whitehall worms are thinking.

Here we have a piece of legislation, which is universally unpopular, to the extent that several key departments in the home office itself (including the Crown Prosecution Service) have publicly stated is not required or necessary. as well as the CPS, some of the most senior chief police officers from across the UK have condemned it. Not a single member of ACPO has come out in support of it. Some of the more respected Law Lords have also said it is just plain illegal.

In order to push it through the house, the government have bribed, threatened, cajolled and intimidated MPs on an unprecedented scale. By the time voting began, they had made more concessions that a closing down sale in a used car lot.

Yet despite their best efforts, the legislation scraped through the first round with only a 9-vote majority.

Of course, this did keep the media spotlight largely off the other piece of government legislation issue - a little known clause in the terrorism bill which give the home secretary powers to remove juries from some inquests and would also enable the home secretary to change the coroner if deemed to be in the national interest.

This effectively signals the end of open inquests in controversial cases such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and gives license to the Home office to act with impunity. It also provides a major ass-covering facility which will allow culpable police forces to avoid public censure in the future.

So while we can probably look forward to the 42-day clause being eventually given the kicking it deserves, it's unlikely that the Whitehall worms will withdraw the secret inquest clause.

...which is probably what they wanted in the first place.

Already being done in New Zealand, but worth a look:-

Algae biofuels

...and this is worth a look too:-

GM bacteria that excretes crude oil

Dear fellow voters,

I'm sure you enjoyed (as I did) watching the worms at Whitehall squirm as they got their arses roundly kicked in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election yesterday, as they also did in the recent local elections.

I'm certainly no fan of either the government or the Labour party in general, but before we start down the road of handing the next election to the Tories, let's take a quick stroll down amnesia lane...to the last Tory-held government of 1990 to 1997...

(insert squiggly line scene fade and surreal music here)

Let's not bother to look at the appalling mess Thatcher created with the Poll tax and her subsequent ousting from No. 10 by Tarzan and co...which eventually backfired and dumped the Prince of Greyness, John Major on an unsuspecting electorate. Let's forget that Major simply changed the Poll tax to be property-based (so it could be enforced) and rebranded it as "Council tax" before selling it back to the ever-gullible British public.

In the 7 years that Major and his cronies ruled the country:-

• The country was plunged into the worst recession for years following the events of Black Wednesday, thanks mostly to Major's chancellor of the Exchequer who wasted billions of pounds in a futile attempt to prop up the currency's value.
• A record number of Major's cabinet colleagues and senior Tory figures including Jeffery Archer, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken were convicted of a range of dishonesty charges including fraud and perjury
• Less important but notable series of sex scandals involving David Mellor, the Earl of Caithness, David Ashby, Alan Amos, Tim Yeo and Michael Brown. Hardly a week wenk by without some article or another about weird ugly Tory Mp's and their kinky fetishes.
• Sleeze reached a climax with the introduction of an almost never-ending series of quangos, loaded with Tory yes-men busy feathering their nests at the public's expense.

And what policy initiative is Major best remembered for by Joe Public?

A traffic cones "Hotline"

...return to the present

...and let's think TWICE before voting for EITHER tory or labour in the next election...

Lib Dem, Green, UKIP, independent - whatever is available in your electorate, let's make sure that we all do our best to knobble this crazy, corrupt and hypocritical party bolitics!

Nice to see bonnie Prince Charlie talking about protecting the rainforest from ever-increasing deforestation.

Most importantly, Charles is talking about the introduction of a rainforest tax, paid by wealthy countries to countries such as Brazil, in exchange for not continuing with the unrestricted chop-slash-and-burn approach.

Just over a year ago, we suggested the same thing

Looks like we are still ahead of our time

What a noticeable difference between the responses of the Burmese military junta to the recent devastating cyclone that ravaged large parts of the Irrawaddy Delta and the Chinese government response to the 7.8 earthquake that hit Sichuan province earlier this week.

Both countries have been run by totalitarian regimes masquerading as one-party "democracies". Both governments have a long history of human rights violations and both have not hesitated in the recent past to use lethal force against their own people while the rest of the world mutters "shame" and continues to do not very much at all.

Yet the response by the Chinese authorities to the earthquake at least gives the appearance of being proactive. They responded fairly quickly by airdropping rescue workers, supplies and followed this up with a coordinated mobilization of troops, medical staff, equipment, food and medicine within 36 hours.

And unusually for the Chinese government, realistic facts and figures seemed to have been released to the world's media and foreign journalists have been permitted to enter China and record the disaster first hand, reporting from very close to the epicenter itself.

In contrast, the Burmese Junta seemed much more interested in pushing ahead with their "Constitutional" referendum. Of course "Constitutional" in Burma, means consolidating the government's nefarious hold on power and outlawing organised opposition (in this case formally excluding the main opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from office).

Meanwhile although supplies are being taken from the international community, no foreign aid workers are being permitted to enter the country. The foreign media has largely been excluded as well and the casualty figures released by the Burmese government are laughable.

So why has the Chinese government's approach to a national disaster been so radically different from previous events and the Burmese approach?

Could it be that they are scheduled to host the Olympic games in August?

When this thought first popped into my head I laughably started to dismiss it and then paused to reconsider...

First and foremost is the prestige factor, which is of particular relevance here. Anyone who knows the Chinese people knows how much value they place on "face" and after the controversial Olympic torch protests last month, China is keen to present itself as a progressive nation, moving towards compromise and dialogue.

This at least partially explains their approach to the earthquake. Knowing that the eyes of the world will once again be focusing on China and how it reacts to a humanitarian crisis, the authorities know they have to be seen to be organised and proactive. And so far they are doing just that.

Secondly (and far more important than the Prestige, even to the last offical bastion of communism) is of course the MONEY. China believes that the Olympics will be an economic bonanza of foreign income, which will also seal China's place as a legitimate tourist destination and launch their fledgling tourism/leisure industry.

As readers of earlier entries in this blog may know, I'm not a big fan of the Olympics. I generally see them as an opportunity for building contractors and souvenir manufacturers to make a fortune (paid by our tax) for a short-term PR exercise that takes 20 years to repay.

But in this case it looks like the Olympics has had some positive impact on a national disaster (albeit unintended).

Perhaps we should give the Olympics to more countries run by dictatorships...and with the money we save we can maybe splurge on a few luxuries (like roads, schools, hospitals, the environment and suchlike).

Meanwhile, if the despotic Burmese authorities are going to continue to sit on the parliamentary side of their arses while up to 2.5 million of their people perish, I think the UN should start deploying troops into Burma. If the government there won't help their own people then the rest of the world must step in - and if that means shooting a few Burmese generals then so be it!

What do you reckon?

Click to view Photos

Another grand day out, this time to Greywell in Hampshire which is just a short drive from Basingstoke.

For all those that believe Basingstoke is unattractive, well the surrounding countryside is spectacular. With trees dressed in their new spring green and cascading with blossom, the air was full of fluffy seeds that shimmered in the sunshine and dusted the water; giving a slightly mystical atmosphere to the afternoon.

Greywell is a charming picturesque village and even though it is the smallest parish in the district, it has many buildings of special interest and much of the locale has been designated as a conservation area.

There are two waterways adjacent to Greywell. The Whitewater river and the Basingstoke Canal. Both are quite beautiful and taking advantage of a sunny Sunday afternoon we stopped at the Fox and Goose public house at Greywell for a pint and a ploughmans, then headed off to find the canal.

We got somewhat lost and ended up at the Whitewater river instead; however this was quite fortunate because it was a very nice walk along the river.

Passing by the 12th Century church of St Mary's the Virgin and following the footpath sign from the road, we ambled along the riverside boardwalk. It is quite a marshy area and the footpath was a little muddy in places from the recent rain, so a sturdy pair of boots is a good idea. The footpath leads you past Greywell Mill, which is an attractive 18th Century brick built flour mill with it's wooden water wheel still in evidence (although it ceased working in the 1930's).

Once we realised that the Canal was nowhere in the vicinity, we backtracked to Greywell, then set off in the opposite direction from the pub where we found the foot bridge over the canal (Greywell tunnel) and then took a leisurely walk down the towpath.

The Greywell tunnel, built in 1792, had a somewhat chequered history and in 1932 a partial collapse shortened it's navigable length until in 1949 commercial traffic ceased. Now the tunnel is a haven for the largest population of bats in the British Isles. The canal itself was constructed around the same time in the late 18th Century and although it was supposed to connect London to Portsmouth, financial concerns meant it stopped short at Basingstoke.

The Pinkerton Narrow Boat was in evidence, picking up passengers for a canal trip and we stopped off at Odiham Castle (also known as King John's Castle). This is a 12th- Century ruin and the place that King John set off from on his way to sign the Magna Carta, in June 1215.

Originally built as a fortified hunting lodge in 1207 by King John, the castle was attacked 9 years later by Prince Louis of France. On its recapture a year later it was rebuilt with a unique octagonal tower (of which the ruins are in evidence today). The current site is owned and maintained by Hampshire County council.

Finally, our aching feet deciding the issue, we walked back to the Fox and Goose and had an excellent evening meal washed down with a large jug of Pimms (with the pre-requisite fruit salad garnishes). The staff were very friendly, the food was good and the weather was superb.

Perhaps not a terribly exciting way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but certainly a very pleasant one.

Spring has sprung in a spectacular fashion in Basingstoke and today we took a walk around The Vyne House in Sherborne St. John. See the Photos.

We've been promising ourselves a spring trip to the Vyne House and surrounding forest grounds for a number of years now to photograph the bluebells in their full glory...and this year we actually managed it.

Britain in spring is truly marvellous.

Result!

Despite the suggested small increase in voter turnout, today's local council elections got me to thinking about a different way of doing things...

Firstly - let's assume that Douglas Adams was right: the mere fact that someone wants to represent you in parliament should immediately exclude them from ever being allowed to do so.

But if no-one who wants to be an MP or councilor is allowed to be and assuming we agree that at least part of the job is necessary, how do we decide who does the job?

Perhaps we should follow Camelot's lead and create an election lottery.

How would it work? Every person of voting age who:-

• is physically able to perform the job and
• not in prison
• or in a mental institution or similar
• has a clean criminal record for at least 5 years

...gets automatically entered into the system and names are drawn at random. From that point onward, the process follows the "Jury duty" model; You can be excused on some grounds, such as personal hardship etc.

Once someone is selected, their salary for acting as an MP / Councilor for the next 4 years is based on an overall average of all the MPs / Councilors' salary at the time of the election. Some will be winners and others will be losers, but that's life.

Once someone has served their full 4-year term they should have the option to opt-out of the system for life. They've done their duty and we certainly don't want them getting keen on a second term (see Doug Adams' ref above).

Finally, each constituency should be able to define a list of objectives, based on poll results of the voters who live there. These can cover a range of the usual topics covering everything from repairing potholes to reducing unemployment within the constituency etc.

Each elected representative will be designated objectives which have to be completed by the time the next election rolls around. If they manage it then a healthy bonus is forthcoming. If not, they walk with only their salary.

During the time someone serves their term they may not:-

• Sit on the board of any company or commercial organization (although registered charities and other worthy causes would be permitted)
• hold more than a nominal number of shares in any company or commercial organization.
• employ close friends, family etc in any advisory capacity.

This system would have a number of advantages. Chief among them is the destruction of the party politics element of government. In the process, we could also go a long way towards eliminating special interests lobbying, QUANGO's and nepotism.

Each elected representative would therefore be free to vote on each issue, on the basis of what is best for those in their constituency.

In theory at least, the option that is best for the most constituencies is best for the country as a whole.

Now that's democracy!

Would you consent to your phone lines being permanently bugged or all your mail (in and out) being read, so you could be sent advertising leaflets matched to the information gained on your personal interests?

Would you as a business person, allow someone onto your premises (or to bug your phone / read your email) whose ultimate aim was to collect details on how to contact your visitors and customers, in order that your direct business rivals could thus target them with their own advertising?

No? Well you might then be interested in what is currently happening on the web to do with a company called Phorm, a service called Webwise and an ad delivery system called OIX (Open Internet Exchange).

Phorm (an ex spyware distributor - believe it or not!) is currently negotiating with three of the UK's top ISPs (Virgin Media, BT and Talk Talk which supply circa 70% of the UK market) in order to install profiling software on the ISPs' servers. If you are a customer of one of these ISPs, then this software will intercept and profile every webpage you visit, including specific page contents. It will then associate you with the website subject in order to serve you with relevant adverts when you visit a website that has signed up with the Phorm advertising system (OIX).

Surely there is some sort of protection from such communication snooping? Yes, in actual fact in the UK there is. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) states that for interception of a communication to be legal, certain conditions must be met. When this interception is by an ISP it appears that it would be necessary to gain consent from both parties (sender and receiver - website and surfer).

If you are a customer of one of the three ISPs mentioned, then presumably your Terms and Conditions will be amended to make your consent a part of your contract. But this doesn't solve the issue of consent from the sender (ie the website owner).

However, the Home Office seem to be of the opinion that by publishing a website and therefore consenting to have that content publicly viewed in the normal way, this also may mean there are 'reasonable grounds for believing' that website owners consent to having their content intercepted and profiled. Which nicely circumvents the need to gain permission.

The RIPA does mention the issue of 'reasonable grounds for believing' regarding consent and that then interception may be legal. However, we feel that 'reasonable grounds' assumptions in this specific case is critically flawed.

Let's take the example of a commercial site. When a business publishes a website, they do so to promote their own business enterprise in some way. It may just be advertising, it may be to sell online or to inform their customers. However, what a business could not just be assumed to want by publishing a site, is to promote the business profits of their direct rivals and possibly to lose a sale or potential customer by doing so. It is hard to understand why anyone would believe that a business would spend time and money, gaining important traffic/visitors etc, in order that their competitors may use this information to promote their own products/services in such an advantageous way.

Well there seems to be some kind of thought from Phorm that they are only doing what everyone else does, by surfing the net, i.e. viewing content. But that ignores a vital issue; they are not just viewing content, they are associating that content with a visitor in order to benefit commercially. Gaining privileged information on a competitor's customer/visitor base is a completely different thing, to directly viewing a web page for your own requirements.

Another issue which comes up is that telecommunication organisations are specifically mentioned in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and that interception - if it is a part of their service - can be lawful. However the interpretation of a 'telecommunication service' in the Act is quite clear and it is to provide a connection. Providing relevant advertising is not a necessary part of this core connection service (it is a valued added service). So our understanding is that to intercept for advertising purposes would indeed need specific consent from both parties of that communication.

So can you as an end user and customer of one of the ISPs say no? Well currently you can opt out. Yes, that's correct! You have to opt out, rather than opt in... as you will be opted in by default*. The opt out uses a somewhat critisized method of an opt out cookie, which must stay on your system permanently. Lose it and you opt in automatically again, use another browser (or another computer) and you need another cookie. Opt in on your system and anyone using your PC may also be opted in, possibly without even realising it. Even with opt out, apparently data still gets intercepted...and you have to rely on your ISP not to use it!

As you may guess there is a huge furore from tech savvy people and privacy advocates, website owners and customers of the ISPs, as the implications of this system are potentially far reaching, not to mention unnecessarily intrusive of personal privacy.

Speaking personally, we would deny any Phorm-interested ISP our business. It may be that an ISP implements a correct opt in procedure, but even so any ISP who is even seriously considering such an intrusive system as this, is one we simply would have little trust in.

As website owners we will also be including a specific 'no consent to intercept' message on all our sites (this site is the first). We don't believe that such detailed information on our site visitors should be available to Phorm and it's minions, or that anyone should benefit commercially from our own hard work and financial input without our specific permission.... and that doesn't even address the issue that such a preferential benefit may equal a loss on our part.

As a web surfer, if you care about preserving your browser privacy or you simply don't want to be inundated with ads every few seconds then help us oppose Phorm by visiting: www.dephormation.org.uk to learn more, contact your MP and download useful firefox protection plugins. You should also consider signing the petition against Phorm

If you are a webmaster, who cares about protecting your hard-built content from the Phorm freeloaders, then visit www.badphorm.co.uk and start taking steps to protect your site content.

*The Talk Talk ISP seem to be the best of the bunch of the three, as, although they are still implementing the Phorm system, they appear to be at least trying to find a way to make sure that the opt out is actually a real opt out so that no browsing data is even passed through the Phorm software.

News this week that Poole council has used legislation designed to combat terrorism, to spy on a family suspected of trying to cheat the school catchment system is the first publicly reported abuse of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), but I'm sure it won't be the last...

Civil rights groups such as Liberty (rightly it now appears) have expressed concerns about these powers since the tabloid-led knee-jerk reaction policy frenzy, which followed 9/11 and 7/7 which created acts such as RIPA. They argued that existing anti-terrorist legislation already in place in the UK since the early 1970's to combat terrorist attacks by IRA cells were still relevant enough to be used to deal with the new threat of Islamic extremism. There was therefore no need to introduce further legislation.

Unfortunately the Daily Mail-reading public and the government disagreed and railroaded through a raft of new legislation, ostensibly to address the new terror threat, but which - from a practical perspective at least - has done little more than to revoke the civil rights of millions of law abiding citizens. The warnings that legislation such as RIPA would be open to misinterpretation and abuse by government agents fell on the usual (deliberately) deaf ears.

And instead of bringing to account, the council responsible for this gross infringement of civil rights of the very citizens they are supposed to represent, the government has remained strangely silent, preferring to conveniently consider this issue as a 'local' matter.

Furthermore Poole council hasn't even made any form of token apology or acknowledgement that legislation designed for use in extreme life-threatening cases has been blatantly abused by an over-zealous council in an out-of proportion response to a minor clerical issue. And they don't seem the least bit sorry about it!

Fortunately for the average citizen, the government seem to have again shot themselves in the foot (who needs terrorists?) - this incident has come to light, just as the government attempts to push through a further change to the law to allow the Home Office to hold terror suspects in custody up to 42 days...and the backlash is becoming apparent.

I suggest you contact your MP and make it clear how YOU want them to vote on the amendments to the Counter Terrorism Bill.

PS: The family investigated by Poole council were found to be entirely innocent of the allegations made by the council.

This morning we woke up to the rather picturesque sight of an unexpected snowstorm on Saturday night. 4 to 5 inches of snow and not a tyre track or footprint to be seen.

See the photos.

It's not unknown to have snow in April, but it's been a fair few years since we had such a heavy dusting, especially after such a mild winter and with an early spring.

The view certainly beats any TV rubbish and being on a Sunday I didn't have to drive in it (result!)

Shortly after the photos were taken, the sun peeped out between a break in the clouds and within an hour it was all slush. Never mind...

While driving home on the M4 a couple of weeks ago, I heard a story on the radio that the department of transport is extending use of the hard shoulder to more motorways up and down the UK, in an attempt to reduce congestion.

A week later the news reported that an increasing number of prisoners are now being released earlier than expected, in an effort to reduce overcrowding. An recently, the Ministry of Justice reported that The prison population in England and Wales has exceeded its highest normal level for the first time.

Just before Easter, the Beeb broadcast a story about many hospitals across England turning away women in labour because they were full. The same day they also ran a story based on reports from an ex-air traffic controller who claims passenger safety is being put at risk in the skies over London, because air traffic controllers are under so much pressure to maximise the number of landings.

On Easter Sunday, delegates at the annual National Union of Teachers conference in Manchester said excessive class sizes were a "national scandal". There have been proposals for class sizes of up to 70 students...

Why do the authorities suddently seem to have decided that we need to use every ounce of spare capacity in the system?

There's a reason we have a small amount of spare capacity built into almost all our key infrastructure; it's called MoE; Margin of Error. Humans are highly fallible and make a great many mistakes. When we have a little bit of MoE, we often have the opportunity to extricate ourselves from our mistakes without at least killing anyone in the process.

What the hell happens if you breakdown on the motorway now? Or if emergency vehicles need to get to an accident scene in heavy traffic? Without the hard shoulder, neither we nor they have anywhere to go. Doesn't releasing prisoners early not only jeopardize public safety, but also make the threat of prison terms somewhat laughable? Will this act as a deterent? Do we want our babies born on roadsides or in WC's? And when they are old enough for school do we want them "taught" in monster class sizes?

Do we want to have a mid-air collision with another aircraft while returning from our cheap holiday in Spain?

So why are we letting the government and Civil service get away with this cheap con? Well, probably because in a shaky world economy, we don't want to be faced with an even higher tax burden that the government would undoubtedly claim was necessary to deal with these issues properly.

Remember that this is the same bunch that are contributing to the $100million-a-day military/security bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. The same bunch that are forking out our taxes left right and centre to bail out Northern Rock and other short-sighted greedy bastards who got their fingers burned on dodgy deals that no self-respecting student of finance would have touched with a barge pole.

And how do they get away with this? Because we are all too lazy to stop them...and the worst part is that it will probably take a major calamity to wake us up to the stunts that these slimy little shits are pulling.

*sigh*

On my way into work this week, I was listening to an interview on Radio 4.

The interviewee was talking about the US primary candidate elections and was singing the praises of the US system for it's ability to make politics "Exciting to the masses". he even favoured the idea of a similar system in the UK, which he felt might re-engage people in the political process.

Hmmm....

Last night I was sitting at home, watching an interesting political performance...

It occurs against the backdrop of a large auditorium, which is bedecked with red and white streamers interspersed with silk flags. The room is packed full of adoring faces, hanging on the speaker's every word (and cheering wildly every time the speaker paused).

The speaker stands before a podium, which is draped with a flag and set against a brightly lit backdrop. In the background a number of key associates and colleagues stand shoulder shoulder to shoulder in obvious support of the speaker, whom they too are totally focused on. The crowd knows them all and respects them, but it's the speaker who has really drawn them here.

The speaker talks with the talent of a trained orator, raising and lowering vocal pitch to emphasise particular points. The speech itself touches on a range of topics, but only in a broad, general way which is designed to appeal to the lowest common intellectual denominator. The topics cover issues such as patriotism, race relations, the economy and unemployment. The obligatory accusations against the incompetance of the current administration are also hurled. The crowd cheers especially loudly.

The speaker builds to a cresendo and at exactly the right moment, an unseen stage manager plays music over the tannoy; music that has been shown in focus groups and polls to provoke an especially strong emotional response. The crowd almost weeps in adulation as the speaker takes a step back from the podium, arms spread wide in an almost mesiah-like gesture and the crowd roars it's approval.

...then a uniformed associate steps up to the podium, thrusts his right arm out and shouts: "SEIG HEIL!"

...and as one voice, the crowd return the salute.

It's been interesting, but my time back in the smoke is over (at least for now). I'll shortly be starting work in Slough (nowhere near as nice but a lot closer and cheaper to get to) and I just the traffic wont drive me too mad.

Farewell web team - it was nice working with you.

Following yesterday's National Sickie Day where an estimated 300,000 people in the UK skived off work, it seems that today the machines are following suit.

My train into London was delayed this morning due to signal failure. When I finally reached London Waterloo, I discovered that a power failure on the Jubilee line had created the usual tube chaos.

In desparation, I fought my way through the throngs to the Bakerloo line, only to be delayed there due to some unspecified problem or other, for 20 minutes. Eventually I switched back to the Northern line to be told that passenger congestion at bank station (caused by ongoing escalator problems) meant I was delayed further.

Finally, the train limped into London Bridge and I was forced to leg it into my office...only to find that the security system that reads pass cards was faulty and 3 out of 5 of the elevators were not working.

Eventually I made it to my desk, where my PC refused to boot correctly and then hung twice before I yanked out the power supply and proceeded to bash it repeatedly with the nearest solid object that came to hand (my desk phone).

But - two hours after I was normally at work and being productive, the system finally seems to have got it's shit together. Who knows - maybe someone asked it for a sick note!

It's sure been a memorable Shrove Tuesday

...and I'm not looking forward to going home tonight!

Friday's announcement that British Gas is increasing it's prices by 15% would have been a bit easier to swallow, if it wasn't for the increase in February 2007, the 12.4% increase in September 2006 and the 14% increase in 2005.

This represents an overall increase of 61% in the last 3 years, with a 37% increase in the last year alone.

While most of us would partially accept the offical line from British Gas CEO Mark Clare, that higher oil prices and demand for gas on the international market are to blame, I find it hard to believe that British Gas are not using this situation to put the squeeze on their hapless consumers and increase their £1.25bn profits, as reported in August 2007.

And how come when wholesale gas prices fall, we as consumers don't see a reduction in our usage rates for 6 months or more, when wholesale gas price rises seem to be implemented immediately?

Personally, I'm already taking steps to reduce my usage; I've turned the temperature down on the hot water tank, switched off the central heating (if I'm cold, I throw on a jumper) and I'm now looking at switching to a more competitively priced supplier.

Perhaps you should do the same...

...nuff said.

Well - that's 2007 done and dusted. A mixed year for us and many of my friends have said the same. A few high moments, mixed with a fair number of lows, with a large dollop of indifference and daily grind/slog (especially in the 2nd half of the year).

Meanwhile there are a few ominous rumblings for 2008. The fallout from the Northern Rock fiasco and the impact of the credit crunch both continue to make headlines, as the one or two of the better known high street stores such as Marks and Sparks report some fairly bleak results as shoppers begin to half-heartedly attempt to rein in their spending.

More importantly, the government once again has shown the level of contempt it has for the British public, by railroading through plans to build a new generation of Nuclear power stations, despite promising a full public consultation less than 6 months ago. Apparently the official concerns about terrorism in the UK only extend as far as infringing our civil rights and definately don't include the security implications of plutonium finding it's way into the hands of islamic extremists.

In London, 2008 will be an election year and already the Tories have managed to find an olympic-class buffoon in the form of Boris Johnson to oppose our favourite newt lover Ken Livingston. This contest if of course small potatos compared to the upcoming US elections, between the main candidates; a tosspot, a crawler and a crawling sleazy tosspot.

On the home front, I'm trying to muster enough enthusiasm to lose a chunk of weight and get a bit more exercise. Beyond that the only resolution I have this year is to try and find something to feel passionate about. Most days, it's all I can do to get my ass out of bed in the morning.

Interesting times are ahead, I'm sure...