Difficult week

Things have been difficult. The car died on the way home from work on Friday so I had to call out the recovery people. They were very ice and carried me home. I booked the car into the garage and tried to drive it there last night, but only made it about 200m. So I had to call the recovery service again. I thought they would tell me I wasn't covered because I was starting from home, but they didn't. Anyway, car is now in the workshop. Blasted thing is firing on about 2/3 cylinders.

I'm having to use the worst and most expensive train service in Christendom to get to the office. What's worse is the fact that I had a £9 voucher that I could have used to buy the ticket, but I forgot, doh!

There's been an outbreak of head lice at the boy's nursery, so we're looking forward to a family infestation. I bought some louse killer shampoo on the way home yesterday. The nice lady in Boots said that I should buy the newest brand on the market because the lice don't know about it yet.

I have a cold or flu or something, but it's just not quite bad enough to take time off work. I'm coughing and things ache.

On the plus side...

My knee is officially mended. I saw the consultant on Mondsay and we're all happy that the job is done.

The Labour party conference has gone badly and a recent poll actually put the government in third place behind the Lib Dems. Even the Sun has withdrawn support for Gordon and thrown its weight behind Mr Cameron. The Sun likes to think it can influence the result of general elections. In fact the paper really only switches allegiance in response to reader opinion. It is however a sign that the Labour party is indeed a sinking ship. There must be an election before the end on May.

***

In other news; the Irish vote again on Friday on the Lisbon Treaty. An awful lot rides on this vote. If they vote no again it will effectively kill the Lisbon Treaty. Not only that, but the Tories have guaranteed a referendum on the treaty if it hasn't been ratified by the time they get to power. That would put Europe in a very awkward position. If the Irish vote no again, the treaty simply won't be ratified before the next general election. That means that even if they do what they always do and offer the Irish a few concessions if they vote yes, the treaty will still get trashed when the British vote against it. Like I said, if the Irish vote no on Friday, it kills the treaty. On paper it looks like they will vote yes, but it is close, and last time they voted it also looked like a yes vote. So, it's interesting.

Cameron is under pressure to offer a British referendum even if the treaty is ratified, but he doesn't want to. To be fair, it would cause a lot of trouble to vote on a ratified treaty because Euro leaders would essentially claim it to be an in or out vote. He's so far refused to make any commitment, but he hinted yesterday that he would not put it to the vote if ratification had already been achieved. It's not as straightforward as it seems. The Germans, Czechs, and Poland still haven't signed. The Czechs may try and hold things up because they have a Euro sceptic in power.

If I had to guess I would say that the Irish will vote yes on Friday, the Czechs will ratify, Cameron will come to power, and there will be no UK referendum. There will have to be something though. Tony Blair is absolutely desperate for the Lisbon Treaty to be ratified because it creates a Euro President job and he would sacrifice his children for it. That in itself should be enough to get the Irish voting no and teh Czechs stalling if you ask me.

Roman Polanski has been arrested then. I can't believe the number of people who seem to be supporting the man. It would seem to me that anyone who ran like a coward after being found guilty of "unlawful sex with a minor" deserves very little support. As far as I can tell the original charge was rape, and he agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge. Apparently he gave a 13-year-old girl drugs and booze before raping her in every orifice. I don't care how good he is at directing films, I think the world would be a better place without the scum bag.

Some of the celebrity quotes are astounding:

Whoopie Goldberg said, "I don't believe it was rape-rape". No, Whoopie, it was drug-fuelled, child arse-rape. Does that describe it any better?

Debra Winger said it was a, "three-decades-old case that is dead but for minor technicalities. We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece." And those minor technicalities would be what? The fact that he hasn't faced justice?

Movie Mogul Harvey Weinstein said Polanski had been the victim of a, "miscarriage of justice". Got that? The hyper-rich film director with the villa in the South of France is the victim. And here's me thinking it was the child he raped! Incidentally, how can you possibly call it a miscarriage of justice when he plead guilty?

Astounding, truly astounding ladies and gentlemen.

Pervy Nude Entry

Lets talk about nudity...

I'm planning to take part in the World Naked Bike Ride next June. I've probably mentioned this before. It has been in my mind for a while and friend Dickie expressed and interest in partaking earlier this year. Dickie has since whimped out due to some namby-pamby prior comittment, but I still want to do it. I really want to do it on the unicycle, but frankly 5 miles bareback on one wheel is not trivial. Anyway, the reason I'm putting this down here is to remind myself not to forget about it and let another year go by without doing it. I also accidentally got a young lady from my office interested in doing it as well, so I really don't have an excuse.

I discovered today that New Zealand stages a Great Naked Tunnel Race every year through the Homer Tunnel. The tunnel is apparently 1.2Km in length, unlit, and took nearly 20 years to complete. There doesn't appear to be any reason for the event. It would seem that 50 participants a year do it simply for kicks.

Australian police have been allegedly been caught running naked round a police vehicle stopped at traffic lights as it transported the men to a stag party. Sounds like it was probably a good party if you ask me. It seems some busy-body member of the public dobbed them in anyway and an investigation is now under-way.

This crazy Germans are planning to open the world's first naked ramblers' footpath. The 11 mile path in the Harz mountains has apparently already been "tested" by some hardcore naturists, and signs have been erected to warn people of potential nudity ahead. The plan is to open it officially next May.

Naked rambling is of course not something only those crazy Germans do. We have our own very famous British naked rambler, Stephen Gough. I imagine we have a few less flamboyant characters as well. Mr Gough is something of a self publicist and has successfully managed to hike naked from Lands End to John O'Groats, landing himself in jail several times on the way. He would appear to be mid way through another jail sentence currently.

Back in January it would appear that the Swiss government got very excited about the sudden proliferation of naked hikers. I'm not sure I believe this story. Switzerland, January, naked, outside - does that sound unlikely to anyone else?

Funny thing nudity isn't it. It's illegal, or nearly illegal, just about everywhere, but there are so many examples of nudity happening anyway, and it's often tolerated by the authorities. For instance, total nudity is permitted in the UK World Naked Bike Ride events. The police have now given up trying to get people to keep their clothes on while performing on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. PETA seem to launch a naked protest just about every week somewhere and no one gets arrested. Spencer Tunick has done his nude installations just about everywhere and I've never heard of any complaints about them.

There is no specific law that prohibits nudity in England and Wales. Indecent Exposure is an offence, but it's only an offence if the nudity is intended to upset or shock, and the complainant has to prove this. Nude people have also been charged with Public Order offences, but there you have to prove intentional harassment, harm, or distress. Exhibitionists can also be charged with "Outraging Public Decency" and I have no idea what constitutes an outrage. Read about it here anyway.

Photo Realistic

I came across the work of Alyssa Monks today. If you want to see, it's possibly not safe for work, but here's the link. Her work is amazing. She paints pictures that look genuinely just like photos. The effect she manages to achieve is incredible, but I can't help wondering why she does it when a camera can do the job just as well. It's not really art is it? Maybe it is. It's certainly interesting, but I find it rather soulless. I don't mean that to sound negative. I quite like the paintings, I just can't see them as paintings. They're too real.

The boy was up all night throwing up. Great being a parent isn't it! I was up all night with him of course. We were half expecting this because his little buddy Jonny had the same thing at the beginning of the week. If it's the same he should be getting better by tomorrow, which is good because I will need sleep by then. Thank God the weekend is coming.

There's a story all over the news this morning about a 12 year old boy who is to undergo a sex change procedure. I wonder whether this story is true because it appears to originate in the sun and no one is named. It would seem that the child left his primary school last term as a boy, and started her secondary school this term as a girl. The child's name has apparently been changed from a boy's name to a girl's by deed poll, and he/she is to undergo hormone therapy. As I said, I'm doubtful as to how much of this story is true, but at the risk of sounding obvious, isn't 12-years-old too young to make a decision like that?

The men's lavatories at work were flooded again this mornig so we had to share the ladies'. Actually I think the ladies in the office were requested to use the disabled one. We have more boys than girls you see. It's odd using the ladies. You have to go into a little cubicle. Can't just pee in a hole in the wall. I remembered to put the seat down when I finished.

The new bedroom we're having built for the boy has been postponed. Work was suppose dot commence last week but the builder says he's been held up so he can't start for another two weeks now. I suppose it doesn't matter but I rather wanted to have it done before winter.

It looks suspiciously like someone is trying to fix the Bulgarian National lottery because the same six numbers came up in two consecutive draws. Statistically that's apparently unlikely to the tune of 4.2 million to 1. Pretty long odds. Of course it isn't clear what has happened here. If someone is trying to fix the lottery, they'd be pretty stupid to try it with the same numbers two weeks in a row. It could be a stupid mistake on the part of a fixer, but it does seem slightly strange that an unprecedented number of players (18) chose six winning numbers in the second draw. You'd think that no one would enter a combination of numbers the week after they were drawn.

Here's a theory; lets say that the lottery machine is like the British one. It tosses loads of balls around until one randomly falls through a hole and comes out. You replace all the balls except the six you're going to bet on with larger ones. The six original balls will fall through the hole and be drawn, in some random order. The others are too big to fit in the hole and will never be drawn. The plan is to collect your win in the first week and vanish so you don't need to take the large balls out again. However, you can't do this alone. You have to have accomplices to get access to the equipment. These people all know what you're doing and chance their luck the second week because they know the balls haven't been changed back. Just a theory.

An Entry About Gullibility

I keep reading this story about members of a "sex cult" in Papua New Guinea who have been persuaded by their leader to have sex in public because it will increase their banana harvest 10-fold. Police apparently tracked down the leader to a hut which they surrounded, but the man made a dash for the wilderness with around seven naked followers. I don't know what to say really. I'm genuinely astounded by the gullibility of people.

Staying on the subject of gullibility, I just read about a study at Warwick University that suggests people are prepared to sign a statement saying they saw someone doing something illegal, even if they didn't actually see it, if presented with doctored video evidence apparently showing the crime. In the study the subject was put in a gambling scenario. When it was finished they were told the person next to them had been cheating even though it wasn't true. One third of the subjects were also told that the person had been caught on camera, and another third were shown doctored video footage that apparently showed the cheating. In the group that were shown the video, 50% signed a statement saying that they saw the cheating take place.

This is interesting. It's being suggested that the results are surprising. On the face of it that's a fair assumption since 50% of subjects who saw the doctored footage swore that they witnessed something which never happened. But think about it, if you're put in that position where you are told someone cheated and you are then shown footage of it, there are only two explanations; either the footage is faked, or your memory has failed you. Memory failure is common, happens every day. It's more likely than someone faking video footage. I'm going to carry on thinking about this.

I know why Lehmans crashed

I want to read this book. It's written by a neuroscientist and it's a collection of short stories about the afterlife. It must be weird. I'm going to swing by the bookshop on the way home if I get time. Actually, I have to finish The Greatest Show on Earth before I start my next book. I may try and order it online actually.

Apparently it's been one year since the Lehman's collapse. I had to sit through a lecture from George at work about why it happened. George has a doctorate in maths from Oxford and specialises in mathematical modelling of credit risk. He is fabulously clever, and probably right. He's difficult to get on with though. Actually, I quite like him. I don't think he feels threatened by me. He says the Lehman's collapse was all down to credit derivatives and the fact that the people dealing them didn't understand them. He tried to explain derivatives to me once, but I don't really understand.

There are also things called credit default swaps which apparently played a part. They are much easier to understand. It's like an insurance policy against a client defaulting on a credit deal. But there are some cases where your CDS reward for a client default is preferable to them not defaulting, so it would seem that in some cases these products mean that it is beneficial for a bank to let a client go bust. That's what George says anyway.

Patrick Swazye appears to have died today. I suppose that's sad. He was only 57. That would be 15 years older than me. If I died a the same age, my son would be 18. Nothing like a celebrity death to bring one's own mortality into focus. Keith Floyd has also fried his final omelette it seems. He was 65, same age as my mother. Not very old really. He lived fast though I think. He's been looking old for a long time.

Update: I tried to order the David Eagleman book online, but they seem to be out of stock and waiting for a reprint. There is a handy function on the web page however that lets me see if there are any copies in my local shop, and there are apparently. So I rushed home to get to the bookshop before it closed. They confirmed that they do have a single copy, but they couldn't find it. Damn!

Bear-Trap

I started writing an entry on Friday but it never went anywhere. I can't believe how little I write here these days. We are however entering the second half of the month which does mean I have more time to waste at the office. I will attempt to apply this time to writing the odd entry.

The dragon is taking driving lessons. Poor girl is scared of British roads. I don't understand why. She has ridden an alarmingly unsafe scooter around the streets of Taipei for years. That's dangerous, like dangling your wedding tackle in a bear-trap and tossing rocks at the release mechanism. She also has a car licence for Taiwan, though she hasn't driven for years. She doesn't like driving on the left though, or roundabouts, which is unfortunate since Swindon is the roundabout capital of the world.

My knee is going down again. I can't remember if I wrote this already. I went to have the stitches out last week and the doctor decided that I had an infection. It was warm and swollen. They gave me antibiotics and it has started to go down again. In fact it almost looks normal again now. It's still a little warm however.

Did you see Derren Brown predicting the lottery numbers last week? It was a good show. He appeared to predict all six numbers before the draw was made. His follow-up show, that promised to explain how he did it, was a wash-out however. He claimed that he employed 24 people to guess six lottery numbers each and then averaged them out. He also made some wild claims about automatic writing. It was all bullshit. I don't mind him not giving the trick away, but trying to pass off an illusion as something scientific is really beneath him. I was disappointed.

I mentioned briefly last week about a primary school which ran a farming project for the kids. They got to raise some animals including chickens and sheep. Some parents were up in arms when they learnt that the kids voted to have the sheep slaughtered and sold for meat so that they could use the money raised to buy more animals for the following year. The situation prompted several animal sanctuaries, national newspapers, and a local transvestite comedian to offer a home for the animal. I'm happy to say that all offers were rejected and the sheep was slaughtered.

Here are the facts as I see them:

The project was to educate the children in the food cycle and all aspects of a farm and everything that that implies. Keeping a 'pet' sheep achieves neither of those objectives.

The kids got to decide the fate of the lamb. You can't give the kids the opportunity to make a decision and then tell them they can't make a particular decision because you don't like it.

I think it's great that kids find out where lamb chops come from. Most children seem to think they arrive by magic, wrapped in cellophane on Tesco shelves. This is exactly what they need. Here's the Telegraph report. If you take a look at the BBC website report they also have an interview with the head teacher. Good woman, we like her.

Seems 92-year-old Dame Vera Lynn has managed to reach number one in the British album charts with a "best of" collection of songs. She is outselling the like of Jamie T and the Kings and Queens. The media are quick to congratulate her on this amazing achievement, and it is a worthy achievement, but I think it says something about the quality of contemporary music if you ask me.

No one noticed

There aren't enough hours in the day dammit. I had my stitches out yesterday, but the fact that my knee is swollen and warm caused much excitement. I am now on a course of antibiotics. I take the view that a mild infection is probably not as bad as the operation failing. My original fear was that the swelling was simply the original problem returning. I think it has gone down a bit though, so I am hoping it will go back to normal by itself. On the downside, I have a blinding headache, which might be down to the pills, and I am not supposed to eat or drink dairy products, alcohol, or tea or coffee. I've had two cups of tea today already though.

This morning I was late for work. No one noticed. The A34 was doing its impression of a long, thin car park. Some selfish bastard decided to crash into another car and a van some 5 miles ahead of me. It brought traffic to walking pace for ages. I drove past the aftermath. There was a slightly mangled Renault Clio or something. It looked a mess, but I imagine the driver walked out of it unscathed. It reminded me of a news story I read yesterday. Apparently police in Bristol shut the M5 motorway, leaving motorists stranded between exits for over 6 hours. This was because some nutter was threatening to jump off a bridge. He jumped anyway it seems.

Can you believe that? Six hours! Apparently traffic was backed up 35 miles! Imagine spending 6 hours in a car with a three-year-old. I use that road regularly with my three-year-old.

Here's a great story; parents are up in arms because their children's school is selling raffle tickets. The raffle prize is meat, lamb in fact, and the lamb was hand-reared by the kids at the school. Apparently the school has a "council" of pupils which voted to have the lamb slaughtered to raise money for more animals next year. I think this shows enormous maturity. These kids, all under 11, have shown an understanding of the food chain, farming practices, and sustainability. That's wonderful.

According to the BBC one mother said, "I feel this is the same as my daughter coming home from school to find her pet rabbit bubbling away on the stove in a stew. My daughter was told it was no different to buying lamb from the supermarket." Madam, you could learn a lot from your daughter.

And the story in the news today that amused me most was this one from the BBC site. It seems a South African IT firm got fed up with the poor service provided by their internet provider and they decided to see whether their ADSL service could transfer 4GB faster than a pigeon carrying the same data on a memory stick. The pigeon won. It carried the memory stick to the destination 60 miles away in the same time that the ADSL service had transferred 4%.

The Scar!

I'm writing this at lunchtime, but my intention is to take a picture of my knee tonight after I shower. I mention this as an incentive to include said picture in this post, when I finally get around to posting it.



See, told you I would. There it is. Five stitches, count 'em, five!

Friday came round quickly this week. I suppose that's because Monday was a bank holiday and I worked from home on Wednesday. Days go by faster when I don't have to go to the office. So, tomorrow is the weekend and we have nothing planned. This is good. It means we can have fun.

Quite often on Saturday lunchtime we go to the local Chinese restaurant. You can eat as much as you like for just £6.50 each. The boy gets in for half price. I really like the place. It's called Cosmo, but I read yesterday that the council has slapped a compliance order on their arse. It seems they kept prices low by saving money on cleaning products. This upsets me greatly. There are no details. I'm hoping I haven't been eating fly shit and cockroaches for the last six months.

OK, interesting news stories today:

In a telegraph, a schoolgirl has claimed she chose to lose her virginity in the school lavatories because she was convinced the world was going to end when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. Does that sound suspicious to anyone else? I think the fact that someone seems to have videoed it and then distributed it is probably significant.

According to the BBC website, two Bangladeshi newspapers were taken in by a spoof story from the Onion which claimed that Neil Armstrong's moon landing was faked. Why were both papers from Bangladesh?

And my personal favourite today, The Sun claims that Lady Gaga could be a hermaphrodite because she appeared to have a penis when she got off a motorbike on stage at the Glastonbury festival.

And a final thought; think of the hundreds of thousands of teenage boys who have been consumed with lust for Lady Gaga and turned to self-manipulation beneath the bed sheets each night with her in mind. If she has been concealing a secret weapon under those PVC dresses, are we going to see a spike in the suicide rate

Five Stitches

Over the last week I have started to write something here several times, and never actually completed anything. It's the beginning of the month. This means that wasting time on these pages in the office is not easy.

The most significant thing to happen in my life over the last week is probably my knee surgery. That deserves at least some mention here. I went under the knife on Friday to remove a "bursa". I didn't know what one was either. It's a fluid filled sack found in joints apparently. If you missed the stunning picture that I previously posted, here it is...



I had a "light general anaesthetic" for the procedure and was kicked out of hospital the same day. I've been put under general anaesthetic a couple of times before in my life, and it has never been a great experience. I've always woken up feeling as though I'd slept in a ditch after a night of copious alcohol. This time however, I woke up feeling all ready to go.

The anaesthetist was clearly mad and spoke so fast it was difficult to understand him. He was chatting away as he administered the anaesthetic and I decided to try and have an intelligent conversation with him for as long as I could before it kicked in. He told me that some people dream under anaesthetic, and I asked him if anyone ever talked. He told me they didn't. After that I remember nothing until I woke up in the same place one hour later. I was actually wondering if anything had happened, only the large bandage on my knee was confirmation that it had.



I now have a 5cm scar and 5 stitches. The stitches come out next week. I had to wear the huge bandage for 72 hours. Now I'm just wearing a tube-sock thingy. I can walk properly again and I have almost no pain. I'll maybe post pictures of the wound in coming days.

In other news, the government continues to dig itself into the most ridiculous hole over the release of convicted Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Mohmed al Megrahi. The British government has attempted to distance itself from the affair, but every day sees new evidence that suggests the PM was keen to see the guy released in exchange for trade deals with Libya. It now looks for all the world as though the Scottish parliament was merely doing Mr Brown's dirty work. I can't see how any trade deal with Libya could possibly be worth the fallout. The government is now trailing the Tories by 14% in the opinion polls with an election only months away. What are they playing at?

I love the Anthony Gormley "One and Other" project in Trafalgar Square. In case you don't know, a plinth exists in Trafalgar Square upon which anyone can stand for one hour and do whatever they want as long as it isn't dangerous or illegal. The project has been going for several weeks now. People have played instruments, sung, thrown hundreds of paper aeroplanes, read poetry, and just stood there doing nothing. I think everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before someone took their clothes off. To my knowledge, three people have now done so. The first was a woman who took her top off. A few weeks ago a man appeared totally naked until police asked him to put his underpants back on, and on Sunday another man was allowed to complete his hour totally naked. That link is probably on the edge of safe for work by the way. There is a video, but it is censored.

In the case of the Sunday nudist, it would seem that a passer-by asked police to intervene. But after contacting superiors, the police claimed they couldn't do anything because nudity is not illegal in Britain. Ironically, the gentleman who made the complaint, Mr Williams-Thomas, is a former policeman himself. He claimed that his three children between eight and 13 years old were "very shocked and embarrassed".

Mr Williams-Thomas is also quoted as saying, "I fully expected that the surrounding police or organisers would stop this man. To my total surprise they stood by and did nothing."

He added: "This was a public place and therefore I should be able to take my children without the fear of them having a man naked exposing himself."

He went on to claim that the man on the plinth had comitted an offence under common law by exposing himself.

I had to look up what "common law" meant. It seems common law is "law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals (called case law), rather than through legislative statutes or executive action, and to corresponding legal systems that rely on precedential case law." Thanks to Wikipedia for that quote. If you read the rest of the article it turns into something very complex indeed. In essence however it would seem to confirm that the police were right when they said that no specific legislation exists forbidding nudity.

I think the interesting thing here is the fact that Mr Williams-Thomas claims that his kids were "shocked and embarrassed". I wonder whether in fact their father was more embarrassed. I cannot see how someone else being naked can possibly be embarrassing. It occurred to me that foul language is like nudity in that it can be anti-social, yet there is no legislation that bans the use of specific words in public. However, if I walk my three year old through my town centre I generally don't have to wait long for high volume foul language. No one cares, but I would far rather walk my son through a crowd of naked people than a crowd of swearing people. Indeed, I have taken my son to naturist events and I can confirm he was neither shocked nor emabrrassed. Would Mr Williams-Thomas have alerted police to a swearing person in Trafalgar Square? I doubt it.