Flaming Gizmos

I'll never understand women! Yesterday Hayley received a new phone - or rather it arrived while she was out. Did she rush home on being informed of its arrival to start playing with it and reviewing the functionality? No! When she got home, did she caress it and start drooling at the mouth? No! It was about a couple of hours before she even looked at it, and even then she simply put a few numbers in it before tossing it to one side. Incredible! 

I note the Olympic flame went out yesterday during the ceremony of the lighting of the torch in Greece. Not sure whether that's a prophetic indictment of Greece's future or the UK Olympics.

Sassoon

The Chairman is saddened to hear that Vidal Sassoon has died.

Heard an interview with him last year - it may have been on Desert Island Discs. He certainly led a colourful, interesting and fulfilled life. That's a lot more than you can say about most of the celebs around these days.

Relaunch?

Is it perhaps prophetic that the ConDem coalition relaunches itself in the year of the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic?

Austerity Loses Out to Populism

The French have voted against austerity, as have the Greeks. The Brits too had a poke at austerity with the local elections.

What do you do when you have no money in your current account? You rein back on your spending, naturally. But the electorate seems to think this is a bad idea and that government should spend more, purloining cash from whatever sources it can (and that usually means the well off).

Politics does seems to pander to the worst in us, and we therefore get what we deserve - or what we vote for. 

Democracy is fine when there's plenty of money in the kitty, but I can't help feeling that some other form of government is needed it times of crisis. Perhaps the position of dictator, as constituted under the Roman Republic. 

Unfortunately, the word dictator has come to assume a pejorative connotation, despite it working admirably for 500 odd years under the Roman Republic.

I wonder if Angela Merkel would be willing to accept the position on behalf of Europe?

Propaganda for Risotto & Traditional Conservative Values

We went out for lunch yesterday at a nice little place in Nailsworth called Wild Garlic. Highly recommended; however, Hayley had a risotto that was made of potatoes, which is a new one on me.

Risotto is an Italian word and is derived from 'ris', which is rice, and 'otto', which everyone having a knowledge of rudimentary Itanglish knows means hot (when speaking English, the Italians tend to drop the aitch and add a spurious vowel at the end - ususally an 'a' or an 'o'). Oh, and they wave their hands around expressively; not at all English!

Ref my comment yesterday about Cameron's constant bleating about the mess he inherited from Labour wearing a bit thin; I did a bit of rudimentary research and discovered Barak Obama says exactly the same things about the 'mess' he inherited from the Bush administration - and Obama is socialist.

Seems everyone currently in power wants to blame the global financial melt-down on their immediate predecessors' politics - regardless of whether they were to the left or the right and the actual truth of the matter. I suppose that's what's called politics; I call it political propaganda.

Following their massive defeat in local elections, backbench Conservatives are now saying they should return to traditional Conservative values. These are:

Natural law and transcendent moral order.
AKA CofE homophobia and misogyny and: "We know what's best for you - God told us."

Tradition and custom.
AKA a reactionary stance; a return to fox hunting and hanging.

Hierarchy and organic unity.
AKA feudalism and the class system.

Agrarianism.
AKA huntin', shootin' and fishin'.

Classicism and high culture.
AKA theatre, opera and art galleries funded by cuts in social spending.

Patriotism, localism, regionalism.
AKA chauvinism, imperialism and foisting elected Mayors on the big cities where Labour or the Liberals have control, in the hope they can have a 2nd go at wresting control back.

There's nothing really wrong with that, in fact I welcome it; at least you know where they stand, rather than this inexorable chase after the mass middle ground which makes all parties look similar, masks their true intent and doesn't provide a real choice for the electorate.

I think that's what people abhor about politicians today - they are rapacious wolves dressed in the sheep's clothing of the middle ground. Mmm - I like that turn of phrase.

Art for Art's Sake in the Pursuit of Democratic Superbugs

A bit of builder graffiti I found in the house (click to enlarge):

It could be called naive art. I must add that it's on a spare bit of plasterboard.

Colin and Barry are our builders, but so too is Blaine, who is Barry's son. Blaine does not partake in the rivalry or ribaldry and merely turns up an hour before anyone else and just gets down to it.

There's a report in the news that hospital staff washing the crap off their hands has had a great effect in tackling superbugs. I'd never have guessed that - never realised that pathogens were dangerous, but there again, I guess some hospital staff were oblivious to that too.

You know, the irony of all these Labour council gains is that Milliband will interpret it as a vote of confidence in his leadership, which I'm 100% certain it ain't. Wish the bugger would just disappear and make room for his big brother. Ed is just riding a wave of anti-Cameron sentiment.

As far as the London Mayoral election goes, no matter which of the two main candidates won, it was a dead cert that the winner would be a twit. The only reason the Tory twit won was because he is one of the few Tories who has openly criticised Cameron's policies.

About an 8th of the population of Bristol has voted to have a Mayor - God alone knows why! More self-publicists vying for a position of power in an elective dictatorship that is totally unnecessary and has the potential to emasculate local councillors. It's an extra cost burden too - haven't we got enough politicians as it is? We may as well have an American style system where we vote for the PM as well as MPs - utterly senseless and anti-democratic, if you ask me.

The ultimate democracy is where each citizen is represented individually in government. Now that's not feasible in anything except an ancient Greek city state where only a very few were eligible to vote in the first place. Pragmatically we thus vote for a local person to represent a group of us. Each step toward the voting block becoming larger is a step away from democracy; each step toward more localised voting is a step toward democracy, as it almost guarantees representation. A mayor from only one political party is inherently less democratic than a council comprising many local representatives of different perspectives.

Just think about it - the Republicans are not currently represented at all in the office of the US Presidency, but they are in the Senate. Similarly, Labour and the other parties are not represented in the London Mayor, but they are in local councils. I can't think of a single benefit that an elected Mayor brings.

Cameron's mantra of: "The financial mess we inherited from Labour," is starting the wear a bit thin now, don't you think. It's not as if the entire western hemisphere was governed by Labour at the time of the financial crisis....

What is Good Art? A Shiny Thing!

Overheard in the Pub:

Caravan has just commented about that awful daub of a dummy by Edvard Munch fetching $120m and The Chairman had given vent to his usual (and predictable), reactionary rant against Expressionism.

Hay: "That's the purpose of art; it should challenge the viewer."

Chairman: "The Mona Lisa didn't challenge anyone."

Hay: "It challenged Mona Lisa - she didn't look anything like that. She was really pissed off by all accounts."

Good art is like good food - totally subjective. The problem is that some slavishly follow what the art critic (or collector) says. Oh, and it also gives you something to argue about down the pub - like religion and politics.

I see the new Samsung shiny thing is out. Time was when mobile phones were as large as a brick and the aim was to miniaturise them down to a nano-particle. Now the aim seems to be to make them the size of these massive TV screens.

On-Line Drawbacks for Celebrity MI6 Plods

Discovered a major drawback of on-line insurance companies. 

Want to insure the new build, but our address (despite having been registered with the Post Office a while ago) doesn't yet appear on the automated address system of Go Compare. Obviously they only update their system infrequently in batch mode. It's going to have to be a manumatic high street insurer!

The Queen visited somewhere hereabouts yesterday and it was all over the local news. I detest the celebrity culture that follows these people. Even their weddings are screened on TV - how tacky can you get.

The police are a bit pissed off that MI6 had crawled all over the belongings of that intelligence officer who was found dead in a bag and failed to hand over some evidence. I'm hardly surprised it wasn't handed over - the last thing you want is for national secrets to fall into the hands of your average Plod. The police seem to be as leaky as a collander, especially given the recent stories about certain people in the force being a bit too close to newspapers, etc.

A couple of swifts nested in the house last spring, as there were no windows in it at the time. They've come back again this year and are circling the place looking for a way in. Hay swears she saw one trying to lift some slates off the roof with a crowbar.

Rolf Harris was on The One Show last night and was asked to critique some 'paintings' by three six year-olds. I was bitterly disappointed when he didn't award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize, thereby permanently crushing the fragile self esteem of at least two of the kids on national prime time TV in a character-building exercise that would prepare them for real life.

Come On, If You Think You're Tough Enough!

I hear the Americans have given Al Qaeda an even larger target in New York in the form of a building called One World Trade Centre. Apparently it's the highest building in the western hemisphere, which kind of says to Al Qaeda: "Come and get us." They've even put a large metal pinnacle on it to aid radar identification from the air. 

Rupert Murdoch has been branded as 'not fit to run a major international company' by MPs. Despite it not being a Murdoch paper that broke the MPs' expenses scandal, one can't help feeling there's a bit of pay-back contained in this. Although I'm no great fan of Murdoch, the words pot kettle and black come to mind with respect to MPs - I'm certain there is a large number of MPs who are not fit to be MPs, or Lords to be Lords.

Despite No.1 son having an ethnically Latvian mother and an Anglo-Dutch father, I'm considering applying for Irish citizenship for him in preparation for university.

Seems it's rather dangerous to be an athlete at the moment - they're dropping dead like flies. Footballers, hurlers, cyclists, swimmers - must be the Olympic Effect and all those missiles.

Olympic War Games in Badminton Garden

Surface to Air missiles at strategic sites around the Olympic venue! Whatever next - Polaris subs in the swimming pools?

The Badminton Horse Trials, just up the road, have been cancelled due to the weather. Was thinking of inviting them to hold it in our field, but it would make a helluva a mess!

Screed went down yesterday. At first it looked like someone had tipped the entire contents of their garden into our living room. Looked just like rich, dark soil.

However, once smoothed out it looked superb.

Walk dry in 48 hours and then an additional day per millimetre, of which there are 75. I think I may have said that in a previous post.