Gosport

Some junior editor at BBC News seems to have discovered Google Earth in recent weeks - even the meanest stories with no possible geographical angle are being introduced with a by-now-obligatory whizzing 3D map. The graphic on the right, for example, was used by BBC South Today to illustrate a particularly riveting tyre slashing story.

So, back to the shower room at work. The place is plastered with little laminated notices telling users what they may and may not do, signed by important sounding people (the most notable of which is the instruction to proceed immediately to the second floor in the event of a fire. Have they thought that through? What if the fire's on the second floor?). The problem is that absolutely no-one pay any attention to the ever-more numerous and complicated rules (resulting in sweaty pants and damp towels draped over every available surface), despite increasing resources being thrown at the problem. Rather like modern Britain in fact. So in summary, my argument is that silly government rules are the, er, sweaty pants smothering the shower room of life. Either that or I'm annoyed because persons unknown from the smoking room next door keep coming into the changing room to take a dump whilst I'm in the shower.

Saw a road sign in Hertfordshire yesterday that had once said "Speed camera ahead". So far so good. Then someone at the council decided that this was too emotive, so ordered that all such signs be redesignated "Safety camera ahead".

It must have taken a bus load of clipboard Nazis the best part of a year to locate all of the offending signs, put out a tender to sign-makers for three dozen small metal signlets saying "Safety", place the order, fiddle around for a couple of weeks whilst they were being made, miss the delivery from the Post Office because they were out playing croquet, hire a big truck to carry the signs, hire some guys with hammers and nails, then drive the length and breadth of the county replacing "Speed" with "Safety" on each of the signs. There's a small town somewhere in Hertfordshire whose entire Council Tax moolah for a year was spent doing this. Just to make drivers more calm and understanding next time they're automatically shaken down for £80 when they break the limit by 4mph on an empty, dry, straight road in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe this idea has legs. "Income tax" is very negative, isn't it? Perhaps "Social cohesion contribution" would be better. "Waiting lists due to budget cuts" are just so, well, unpleasant, aren't they? How about "resource optimisation due to the popularity of world-class services?"

Finally, a warm welcome to the blogosphere to the President of Iran . He's put some thought into the look and feel of the site, but the content needs a bit of patience to work through. Worryingly, he posts in the small hours of the morning (4.12am) - not pleasant to think that the fellow who
(a) isn't keen on we decadent westerners and
(b) may or may not be developing a long range nuke

is making important weapons-based decisions without getting enough sleep to think straight.

Graph feature to return tomorrow