Spontaneous and synaptic excitation of paramedian reticular neurones in the decerebrate cat

DISCLAIMER

For the avoidance of doubt, this draft blog is a draft, and has not been reviewed by a responsible adult. It is likely to contain shoddy grammar, spelling errors, badly drawn graphs, poorly manipulated photos from the web, spurious comments and improvised recommendations, based on an indifferent understanding of the basic subject matter. This draft blog is not based on fact.

All numbers, graphs, diagrams and other pictorial representations however formatted herein are fictitious, and any resemblance to the financial performance of any business, trading or insolvent, is purely coincidental.

This draft blog is not a blog. Or a draft.

This draft disclaimer was prepared late at night in a vain attempt to get compliance off their back, may contain material factual errors. The draft blogger will not accept a duty of care nor assume a responsibility for any decision or action taken as a result of reading this draft disclaimer.

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After six weeks of hell in a data room, I'm back. But not properly until tomorrow, since I have a couple of dozen more coloured graphs to draw.

Our worldwide rallying cry...

Considerable upside potential

Lovely weather we're having

Great balls of fire

Stelios is a busy man

Work makes me free

Radio silence recently due to the fact that I have a pile of work to do, dammit. Service to be resumed soon, I hope.

Wa-hey

Today's posting is unashamedly sexist...

23 inches satisfied me

I'm referring of course to the frame size of my new, XXL bike, which is up and running, or perhaps wheeling, like a dream. And this time, it's double locked to the bull bar of a partner's SUV in the double locked basement senior management car park, so come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, bike thieves.

Lots of macho talk of the Marathon des Sables in the office today. Let's face it, the most exercise most of us get is running out of the office at 6.30pm. Luckily, chat has now moved on to the SBH, an abbreviation which deserves to brought back into common usage.

So a bunch of junior New Labour lickspittles who no-one has ever heard of have resigned in protest at Tony Blair. You'd never catch me resigning just because I don't like the way the boss runs the place. Talk about a futile gesture.

College Green was buzzing with activity this morning as a result - half a dozen TV crews milling around, trying to get someone to comment on whether today will be the day on which a date on which the date will be announced will be announced. Or something.

As ever, Jack Straw has clarified the situation, telling a grateful nation on Radio 4 this morning that "we're not clear what the counterfactual is", and referring obliquely to "coalitions of uncertainty." Give that man a knighthood.

Saw a poster pasted to the back of a bus (that nearly killed me - the bus, not the poster) saying 'Cancel Israel' this morning. How does one go about cancelling an entire country? Is there a call centre? Does a Customer Retention team then call you to try and persuade you to change your mind?

On the subject of death, deathtimer.com has calculated my EDD (estimated death of demise) to be 7 March 2039, at the tender age of 66, which is distressing, since my life reached its halfway point on 13 February this year without my even noticing.

Better get a move on if my half-formed plans for world domination are ever to come to anything. Looks as if my working assumption that I'm gonna live forever may need to be revised downwards. Note to self: ensure that you light up the sky like a flame before dying.

Remaining characteristically gloomy, what's your favourite synonym for death? The Dead Parrot Sketch still contains the longest list, although my own personal favourite is 'to hand in one's dinner plate', which comes from my wife's family, and is one of the few things on earth that Google doesn't know a thing about…

Time is not an unlimited commodity

Today's graph of the day shows the temporal distribution of the contents of my iPod - for some reason 2001 was a vintage year. The arrival of my fourth decade closely followed by babies has decimated my music buying.

So instead of figuring out how to stop our involvement in the Middle East turning into an even bigger catastrophe, growing the economy and generally making life better for we poor serfs, the good people at Chateau Blair have spent the last few months working out how to make Tony's departure so unforgettable that we'll all wish he stayed (which of course we will once GB takes over GB).

The "always leave them wanting more" strategy would have worked fine until about five years ago, but I fear it may turn into a disaster. Highlights will include:

• Appearances on Blue Peter, Songs of Praise and Radio 2
• Visits to the 20 buildings opened or redeveloped since 1997
• Overnight trips to half a dozen cities across the country
• High-profile tours of schools and hospitals
• Visits to Wales and Scotland to argue devolution is a success ahead of next spring's elections
• Monthly set-piece interviews to foreign newspapers to boost international standing
  

Sounds too much like a beauty parade for his next job. Still, the poor fellow needs to scrape together 15 grand a month for the mortgage, and money doesn't grow on trees.

Taking a leaf out of TB's book, I am currently planning my own farewell tour ahead of the sorry day when I leave my current employer. Highlights will include the following:

• Appearances on the Corporate Social Responsibility intranet site and on posters by the coffee machine
• Visits to the meeting rooms downstairs that still smell of sewage, despite having been opened or redeveloped since 2005
• Overnight trips to a couple of depressing provincial cities to add up numbers in a spreadsheet
• High-profile tours of the 8th floor canteen and partners' car park in the basement
• Visits to a couple of gloomy regional offices to remind myself that it's not so bad in London after all
• A slightly awkward interview with someone from HR who has no idea what I do, to explain why I'm leaving

In the absence of any natural intelligence in the area, some guy called Rollo in Norfolk has been beavering away for years on artificial intelligence, and has come up with something called "George the chatbot" (depicted above), who is apparently rude and non-sensical in 40 languages.

George's lack of warmth and empathy with real humans has got banks and cable companies across the realm very excited thinking of all the call centre operatives that could be replaced by a computer that gives even less of a shit about being yelled at by frustrated customers than an underpaid single mum.

I wonder whether he'll be programmed to respond to customers using his native Norfolk dialect?

George: He'yer fa'got a dickey, bor?
Customer: What? Hello? My bastard broadband has packed up, and I've been waiting in a queue for 45 minutes
George: Arr, there be no need to mob a'rum'un
Customer: What?
George: You's may be suffin'savidge, but oi jez be doin' me jarb
Customer: Look, are you going to fix my broadband, or will I have to come round and rip you a new throat?
George: You'llm be needin' a ding o' the lug
Customer: Argh! etc

Wikipedia will today enlighten us about German humour. Here is an example:

Two thick feet are crossing the street. Says one thick foot to the other thick
foot: "Hello!"

Absolutely bleedin' hilarious.

A even worse example of "Vorsprung durch Slapstick" is to be found at German Joke of the Day, which is rendered even less funny by the fact that they're trying so hard.

Cultural cringe

What on earth does…

…"quintessentially Australian circumstances" mean? In the case of London-based Aussies, it more or less means stooping over a spreadsheet from 8 until 6, chasing a ball around the park for a couple of hours then going to the Walkabout to moan about how crap London and Londoners are.

I was lucky enough to be listening (whilst chock full of Chablis) to a cockney geeza on cabbie FM in the small hours of this morning, discussing the recent demise of Steve Irwin. He started his sentence "I don't want to speak ill of the dead but…" (similar to "I'm not a racist but…"), before spending the following ten minutes calling the unfortunate croc guy a waste of space who had it coming. Shame on him. In a similar spirit, the kind hearted Grauniad is doing more or less the same.

Today's lesson according to St Wikipedia is a list of, um, private practices between consenting adults, that I'd never, ever, heard of until today. Note that this section should be regarded as having a Parental Advisory warning:

• Outercourse
• Interfemoral (or intercrural) activity
• Bagpiping
• Chinese fingercuffs
• Teabagging and/or Windmilling
• Bukkake, and finally
• Snowballing

As Hugh Grant once said to the awful Andie McDowell, "Christ…I don't know what the f*ck l've been doing with my time. Work, probably. Yeah, work. I have been working late a lot."

How can a man if a man can't can?

Today's gloomy Monday column (delivered late due to IT problems) is dedicated to Andre Agassi - you cried like a girl when you lost yesterday, you need to put some weight on, and when you had any, you always had questionable barnet, but we'll miss you nevertheless.

So in addition to giving every reader a free glossy poster of garden birds, the bloody Indie has published a 'Good List' of bloody do-gooders doing bloody good.

Without wishing to sound too much like Heinrich Himmler, the graph shows a strong correlation between what the Indie deems to be 'good' and the left wing causes that millionaires in North London worry about from behind their security fences.

No less than 70% of the people on the list are "committed" to "causes", with the gold medal going by a country mile to John Bell, who as well as being religious is concerned with poverty, debt relief, race relations, environmentalism, disarmament, and gender / sexuality issues. Does this man find time to sleep?

Second and third places in the right-on parade are held by Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis, whose combined net personal worth is in the tens of millions.

Don't get me wrong, these guys have undoubtedly made the world a better place, but they don't have the monopoly on 'good', do they?

No sign of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, who together have donated countless billions to charitable causes. The fact that they're white, American, global capitalists places them well beyond the Indie's pale.

One of the gents on the list, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, runs the Muslim Council of Britain, and said in a recent interview with the Torygraph that,
"Modesty is very attractive…arranged marriages are a good idea… pre-marital sex is wrong, cohabitation is wrong… Britain would definitely be better off without alcohol."

This presents a dilemma to the average Telegraph reader - they would instinctively want to agree with these sentiments, which closely mirror traditional Christian values. Yet they're expressed by a representative of 'the enemy'. At the same time, the average liberal Indie reader would rather run over foxes in SUVs than support something as old fashioned as 'modesty'.

Today's wikipedia lesson is from Robert Macnamara, and is entitled "11 Lessons from Vietnam"

1. We misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine…
6. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
7. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
8. After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

I don't hold any strong views about whatever the hell it is that's going on in Iraq, but one could argue that we're doomed to repeat history as things stand.

By the way, the "season of mists" season discussed in last week's blog is well under way, with the good old Indie top of the list...

Tomorrow's blog will be much more lighthearted.

Making lemons into lemonade

Today's jolly Friday column is brought to you in association with David Hasselhof, living proof that you can make a fortune from people laughing at you rather than with you, and still be a boozing wife beater. Hoff, I salute you.

So, it's September - I would like to take the opportunity to be the first to use the phrase "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", which will appear in every third story in the UK press over the next six weeks or so. More prosaically, six months of commuting in the dark beckons.

Nevertheless, most serious journalists are still dozing in Cornwall, Tuscany or Barbados, releasing column inches for such earth-shattering stories as the bunch of firefighters (didn't they used to be called 'firemen'?) getting into trouble for refusing to dole out fire safety leaflets at Pride Scotia 2006. They now have Archbishop Mario Conti weighing in to support them. I'm not sure whether refusing to hand out leaflets anywhere should result in disciplinary action, but given that the alternative is mandatory diversity training, maybe it's better to stand there for a couple of hours and take the verbal beating.

I wonder what the Gay & Lesbian committee of the Fire Brigades Union makes of it all?

On the subject of diversity, I'm struggling to see how a government clipboard nazi can determine whether I'm 'welcoming' rather than merely 'accepting' diversity. Is there some sort of test? A great time to be a lawyer, I should think.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have decided that aeroplanes are bad, and are busy advocating 'painful tax rises'. Good to see that they are still determined not to win an election. Even the Great Gordo wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'painful', except perhaps in the context of his awful public grinning these days.

Apparently the way to spend our way out of environmental disaster is to build a MagLev train line to Glasgow, at a cost of £30billion and a couple of million gardens, fields, meadows, copses, lakes and woodlands churned up and cemented over. Good work boys.

The ongoing dressing down I'm receiving at the hands of my over-achieving 16 year old cousin continues. She looked decidedly underwhelmed when I explained to her what my job entails this morning (Q: "So do you just count things all day?" A:"er, not really, I'm kind of like a surveyor, but of companies not houses"), then suggested in rather strong terms that A-Level Business Studies (yes, I've got one of those) is a complete waste of time, "like psychology". Also, aeroplanes are evil, as are the Conservatives. Sounds like Cameron's boys still have some work to do on the youth vote.

Luncheon sausage

Thanks to our resident office Kiwi for the title of today's bloggage. Since it's a quiet day, there has been a degree of discussion about what luncheon sausage (as it's known in NZ) actually is.

Our friends at Wikipedia have done some legwork on this, but it's damned difficult to find any pictures of the stuff anywhere on the net.

Anyway, it seems that NZ butchers give the stuff away free to kids to eat in sandwiches. No wonder the whole of NZ has bailed out and come to London. The taste of a greasy Caledonian Road kebab after a night out kicks nine kinds of crap out of whatever the hell it is they're giving away on the streets of Wellington.

Incidentally, it's known as 'polony' in South Africa, which may or may not be racist anti-Poland talk. Polony isn't half as good as biltong spread by all accounts; the thought of this has got our resident saffies (from both sides of the boerewors curtain) salivating wildly.

On the subject of food, there seems to be a creeping nazification of the nation's youth. Whereas German children of the mid-1930s were persuaded to inform the authorities if their parents didn’t hate Jews enough, the UK is raising a generation of enviro-foodie fascists. Can I present any evidence to support this? Well, some.

• Exhibit A: the weekend before last, when I was staying with friends in the deepest West Country (amongst other things listening to a live rendition of "Combine harvester" whilst tucking into a Cornish pasty - you've gotta live the rural dream), a five year old told me in no uncertain terms that 'only stupid people like crisps and chocolate'. Pass the grated carrots.
  
• Exhibit B: my 16 year old cousin yesterday expressed outrage that her history teacher had thrown a, *gasp*, blank sheet of paper into the rubbish bin, not the recycling bin. Apparently this was in an effort to illustrate the worthlessness of Weimar-era currency. Still, my cousin then made up for it by telling me that Chris 'n' Gwyn's kid's first word was 'houmous'. My personal objective is to ensure that both of my children's first word is 'luncheon sausage'.

Enough sausage, pasty and houmous talk.

My week long absence is explained by my being struck down with a disease of advanced middle age, which you needn't know about.

Our great NHS is a source of mystery to me - in some places (five star hotels, for example), you always get great service, because the system is designed to benefit the customer. In other places (I'm thinking Argos, which, incidentally, means 'slow' in Greek), the service is crap, because the system is designed to benefit the people who run it .

The curious thing about the NHS is that it's so fiendishly complex and dysfunctional, it seems to have been designed with neither the end user or the people who run it in mind. The patients, sorry, 'customers', hate it. The medical staff are exhausted and baffled. No one seems to benefit.

Anyway, I've been referred by my (brilliant) GP to a specialist, which now involves something called 'patient choice', much beloved by that nice Mr Blair. Under the old, inefficient system, I would have been referred by my GP to the specialist in the nearest hospital, who would have sat on the letter for three months then claimed never to have received it, requiring the GP to re-refer me (this is also a handy way to keep waiting lists in check).

Under the shiny new online system, called 'Choose and Book' (which has paid for a couple of hundred thousand shiny new Mercs for IT consultants up and down the country), nothing will ever be the same again. I simply log on, look at the available appointments online, compare average waiting lists in each hospital, pick a time, and book it. Simple as that.

Well…

Having got over the initial hurdle of not having a user ID or password (the receptionist probably broke the Data Protection Act and contravened someone's Human Rights by divulging this information over the phone), I managed to log on, to find out the following:

• my nearest hospital refuses to treat me because it doesn't have enough staff (slamming and locking the door is a great way to 'manage' a waiting list)
• the other two 'available' hospitals don't want to use the online system. So they don't. So it seems that you can neither choose nor book.

Goodbye to £6.2 billion of IT investment. Hello to phoning both hospitals and waiting in massive queues before they 'lose' my appointment sometime in November and oblige to start the whole thing again.

Let's hope it's not serious.

On a lighter note, the latest Muse album is great - give it a listen.

Never judge your fellow man...

...until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
At that point, you can call him whatever you want, since (1) He's a mile away and (2) He doesn't have any shoes.

You've gotta love South African humour. Thanks, Baron.

Normalised EBITDA

Friday's graph of the day looks at how successive generations of students have fared at the A-Levels with which I wrestled in the dark days of the Major years. There's no point in reheating all of the annual arguments about dumbing down, but nevertheless, the numbers tell a story…

Whoo-hoo

Well, this is my last blog, since I'm off to spend my bonus on wine, women and song.
Not bad for a year spend adding things up in Excel.

Prezza

Buns of steel

It's bonus day shortly, and I'm proud to report that my own share of the swill in the corporate trough this year is a whopping 0.0001% of the total London payout for the year. Nevertheless, a lot of people in this town are earning a ton of money. Which begs the question - how much is a ton of money? Today's graph would have answered this, but either (1) the site's not working, or (2) the Feds are onto me. I'll try again later...

Whilst on babysitting detail last night, I had the pleasure of watching "Rambo:First Blood Part II", for the first time since watching it illicitly at a friend's house at the age of 12 (my Christian parents unreasonably objected to my watching legions of gooks getting wasted instead of doing my Religious Studies homework).

So what if most of it was filmed in Colorado (with WalMart palm trees plonked in the foreground), and that the CIA baddy is the dude from the 'Good Old Boys' in the Blues Brothers and therefore difficult to take seriously?

It's pure Reagan-era escapism, complete with Vietnamese guys apparently wearing WWII era Japanese uniforms, and Stephen Berkoff heading up a squad of evil Russkies. But tell me this - having spent 100 years and millions of lives trying to shake off the yoke of imperialist aggression, how come Victor Charlie allows the Russkies to march all over them as soon as Uncle Sam walks out?

NB the moral of the story is that of the little guy prevailing over both the 'goddam bureaucrats trying to cover their asses' and the military might of a superpower. Something for the insurgents in Iraq to learn from that.

Turning briefly to nostalgia, it was fifteen years ago today that I received my A-Level results. It would have been round about this time of day that I cracked open the first beer, as life stretched before me. Wonder what August 1991 me would say to August 2006 me? "Loser," I should think. Rude b#stard.

At the risk of giving the fat buffoon the oxygen of publicity, the oaf Prescott has shoved both feet in his distended gob again. So Dubya is 'crap', and 'nothing but a cowboy in a hat?' Look in the mirror, Giovanni, look in the mirror.

Some Baz at the Institute of bean counters has launched an online Nozin' Aroun' : "it's an online magazine made by YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS for YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS and concentratin' on all the subjects that YOUNG ACCOUNTANTS are into. It's our world too! Right! Okay". Take a look. It's brilliant

Finally, my one year old daughter made it to another key development milestone yesterday, by sending her first SMS from my email phone (no, it's NOT a BlackBerry - it's LIKE a BlackBerry, but DOESN'T WORK MOST OF THE TIME). Anyhoo, my colleague from the office was surprised to receive the simple but elegant message "Gfthly". Three new appointments also appeared unexpectedly in my diary for today ("P" from 8am to 9pm, "Ooee" at 9am, and "Y" at 10am).

No good sleazy blood-sucking pointless thieving scumbags...

..have stolen my bike. Me Dick Van Dyke. Within 100 feet (although 50 of those are vertical) of my desk. My beloved Trek was 'alf inched and ridden away but some Camden Town tosser(s). I only hope that the height of the saddle (I'm 6ft4) ripped their privates in two, and that the chain falls off. A lot. In a bus lane. With a massive bendy bus bearing down on them. W#nkers. I hope they die. B%stards.

I've calmed down a bit now.

I suppose I should be philosophical. It's about the seventh bike I've had stolen in my life, forming an almost unbroken chain from the Peugeot Elan (seen above) nicked from school back in about '88 (had to borrow my brother's bike for the paper round) through the Chinese racer stolen from the railings of my uni hall of residence 14 hours after I first arrived in London in '91.

And I suppose I did buy my bike, er, "second hand" from a slightly shady outfit in Balham, so it may just be possible that the old girl had been forcibly separated from her previous owner. Nevertheless, I'm more filled with impotent rage than a Daily Mail reader.

The worst bit was having to take the train home in rush hour wearing my somewhat perished spray-on lycra cycling shorts (size large, naturally). Still, it's always summer on the Victoria Line - although only 20 degrees at street level, it's always a comforting 37 degrees below ground. Despite the fact that heat is supposed to rise. Hmm.

I'll round off with a selection of curses from the net, each of which are directed a thousand times at the bike rustlers of NW1:
1. Biblical: Hear this, O thou son of a Philistine, for you will be whipped with a thousand scorpions
2. Elizabethan: Thou rank boil-brained coxcomb
3. Random: May your underwear be filled with the fulvous eructate fingering from the refuse void of a Abysmian Whippinthig
4. Irish: Go bpléasca na gráinneoga cealgrúnacha do bhall fearga ("May the malevolent hedgehogs blow up your manly part")
and finally:
5. Arabian (well, sort of): "May a quartet of dyslexic dingos puke monkey crazy glue over your delicious log"

Spamwatch

Spam - it used to be slimy pink meat, but is now used to mean the torrent of unwanted emails flying around the globe, most of the time on the subject of, ironically, a gentleman's slimy pink meat.

The above summarises the 178 emails that were inserted into my box over the weekend, of which an amusing 69% were sex-related spam.

There's a particular sub-language associated with spam, examples of which include:

• empathetic description of intimate problems ("Lack control over your squirting?". "Why don't you prevent premature creaming?", "You always dreamt to rock hard erections")
• preying on your innermost fears…("Don't let your partner leave you", "Have you some doubt?", "Many of us know the bitter feeling of not being able to deliver", "Hate seeing her unhappy face after you finish too quickly?")
• …then providing the answer ("You won't hear another word of reproach from her!", "Tonight you’ll prove your volume", "She will never leave you", "She will love the new you", and best of all, "You will be counting days before your rod will be almost reaching your knees.")
• earthy proverbs ("Why bark when you can get a dog to do it?")
• unlikely-sounding email addresses (chickenarmpit@priest.com, armfulchunky@samerica.com, cowslipannoy@rome.com)
• blatant lies, especially in conjunction with man-made tablets ("lose weight naturally", "Join thousands of satisfied customers")
• spelling errors, deliberate or otherwise ("peenis", "ppenis", "pennis", "peniis", " ejacculatte" - one for Starbucks, maybe)
• unusual grammar ("Good afternoon and the results will impress your girl", "notice huge differences in the way they you operate your beef machinery.")
  and
• downright insults ("Stop being a two pump chump")

~

Something odd was going on on Clapham Common last night as I wheezed by. A dozen groups of twentysomething Northcote Road types (boys separated from girls) wearing numbered bibs were doing rather pathetic imitations of press ups and star jumps under the supervision of wiry guys with camo trousers and backpacks (containing bricks to make things more challenging).
Maybe the situation in Iraq is so desperate that the army is drafting conscripts from the ranks of trainee accountants, junior lawyers and up and coming hedge fund managers of SW11 . I can't imagine that the 1st Battalion of Her Majesty's Greedy Young City Types would be much good for anything other than braying into mobile phones, wearing pink rugby shirts with the collars turned up (good for visibility on the streets of Basra), and arguing drunkenly with minicab drivers on a millionth of their salary about the fare home. Perhaps we're just trying to bore the Iranians into submission.
A more likely explanation is that this was some sort of test for the Duke of Edinburgh's award, or some other 'gap year' activity used to bolster the already overloaded CVs of the scions of the upper middle classes.
Whatever was going on, the instructor I rode past who was "supervising" a group of eighteen pink and glowing girls bouncing through their paces definitely had a glint in his eye.
A white courier van was lurking at the gates of Downing Street this morning - maybe our friends at Al Qaeda have given up mucking about in the woods outside High Wycombe and gone for the direct approach - Fedex the bomb directly to the head of the capitalist snake.
Only just resisted the temptation to yell "Banzai" at a squadron of Japanese tourists milling about in the bus lane on Whitehall whilst approaching them at speed this morning, but in the light of today's anniversary, decided not to.

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

Yuppie quotient

1 in 3 of my loud, skinny, tanned South African neighbours are yuppies - a greater proportion than both London and England as a whole. But, as I'd always suspected, proper yuppies tend to steer clear of my area, and live in Wandsworth proper. Maybe it's the rapper gang murders and jellied eel stall on the main road that puts them off.

Scary to think that there are 6.1 million people in England spending 365 days a year watching daytime TV whilst on benefits. If they ganged up with the next 6.5 million doing the worst jobs imaginable, there might even be a workers' revolution. The problem is that they'd actually have to work once the glorious revolution has turned the gutters red with the blood of financial analysts and PR consultants.

Better get back to crushing the downtrodden proletariat.