Category Archives: General

This is the general category for posts and blog entries about this site, admin tasks or for things that fit in too many other categories.

Some sort of tribute

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Benoit Mandelbrot died on 14th October.

(Non-breaking news from me. i.e. Probably 4 days after everyone else knows it. A good tribute on the BBC by the way but the images are poor.)

He was the main man for making maths beautiful, even to mathematically challenged people like me.. Fractal mathematics is the mathematics of life. In fact, for atheists, fractal maths is pretty much a direct route to what simpler people call looking at the face of “god” .

Here’s a beginner’s guide to what fractals are with links to some image galleries.

In the mid-nineties there were any number of graphics packages that let you play around with creating fractals, from a standing start, on a 486…. Especially the venerable and respected fractint.

I found a version that’s still online. version 20. It’s been updated to work on Windows 3.0…. Hmmm, even my PC isn’t quite that elderly.
(Wahay. I found a 2008 ftp site. Must try it out again.)

Here are a few fractal image links from tinterwebs.

* The classic Mandelbrot set.From a site that explains why it isn't evidence of Intelligent Design

I like the source that I got this image from. It points out that someone might see a visual representation of a Mandelbrot set as evidence for “Intelligent Design” and answers

But in fact, the Mandelbrot set is the product of a relatively simple mathematical equation.

That’s the non-divinely miraculous nature of fractal images. A few simple changes in start conditions and/or a slightly different equation and another infinite set of magical things appears.

* A fractal vegetable.

from wikipedia- image of a romanesco broccoli

Romanesco broccoli


Ok that’s cheating. Pretty much any living thing is “fractal.” The difference is that romanesco broccoli LOOKS like a generated fractal.

* The coastline of Norway
Space view of the coast of Norway

The coast of Norway looks like a generated fractal too. But, then, any coast is fractal. Zoom in and it breaks up into infinitely recursive self-similar patterns.

In fact, everything is pretty much fractal. Incredibly simple and endlessly complex. And we can see this mainly thanks to teh work of Mandelbrot.

Bonfire night

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Today’s strong contender for the coveted WhyDontYou Cup for Extraordinary Governmental Effort in the Service of Irony* has been spotted by the Guardian

Government’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’ plan will cost as much as it saves
Exclusive: Private papers reveal multi-billion pound bill to close up to 180 quangos – and savings might not be felt for 10 year
….. private papers reveal that in several cases the liabilities from pensions, redundancies and rental contracts could outweigh any of the savings being claimed for up to 10 years.

This would be funny if it wasn’t also tragic. Don’t they teach Remedial Maths at Eton?

The quango bonfire is just the overture before the main cuts action.

The statement came as more details of the job cuts within Whitehall emerged, with departments told to make up to a third of their employees redundant. The education department is understood to be looking for a 30% reduction in staff.

The same mathematics will apply. Massive cuts and no net savings.

There is a little ironic satisfaction in that the Tories’ natural supporters are going to get hammered. And not only in a “we’re all in this together so we’ve got to accept a few minor inconveniences like the loss of our child benefit” way.

What is closer to Middle England’s heart than the belief there is somehow a natural right to get ever richer through the ever-increasing value of houses?

But even the threat of public sector is already having an impact on the housing market. The headlines are:

Housing market crash feared after average house prices take record plunge
Halifax tries to allay fears that prices are poised to nosedive amid impending cuts to public sector jobs

Reality check for Mail readers: The more people are unemployed – whether ex-nurses or ex-teachers or even ex-estate agents – the more tax anyone who still has a wage will have to pay. Where is the money going to come from for the next round of big bank bailouts?

“And so it begins….”, as they used to say on Babylon 5.
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* A new award that we’re working on.
It’s going to be hard to choose a winner, in such a strong field. The smart money would normally be on Boris except that he’s only in local government. A tough act to follow but his crowning ironic achievement** seems amateurish in comparison to the efforts of his Bullingdon Club chums.

** (Londoners elected a man on the basis that they recognised him from his appearances as a rightwing buffoon on a Have I got News for You,)

Fail (epic, even)

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“ineptness.” I don’t know if it’s a real word but – if it is – look up its meaning in a Picture Dictionary and you should see a photo of George Osborne.*

The welfare “reforms” that he presented today don’t make sense in any terms. But, specifically, as far as I can see, they make no sense in the “saving money” terms in which they are presented.

The Chancellor has announced a few unthought out welfare policies: cutting child benefit benefit to higher earners and capping welfare benefits paid to the sick and unemployed.

The child benefit cut is likely to be a smokescreen to distract attention from the latter and to present an image of us all being “in this together” – both rich and poor apparently having to put their hands in their pockets to pay for rescuing the banks. So far, so predictable.

But it’s the consequences of these half-arsed plans that are the most bizarre.

The media has already identified the clearest ones. A Channel 4 news blog points out that a couple each earning £40k will still get child benefit while a single earner on £45k will lose it. At the margin, a few pounds wage increase might cost someone thousands a year. On a BBC blog, it was pointed out that poor families with several children could be much harder hit by the benefit cap than those with few children.

But no one seems to have yet spotted that the whole reform nonsense runs directly against its supposed main purpose of saving money.

Universal benefits, such as family allowance, are actually much better at reaching the poorest people than are means-tested benefits. (Take up is close to 100%. Small sums are worth proportionately more to the poorest recipients so are of more benefit to them than to the better off. ) The fact that the very richest people also got child benefit was a small price to pay for this. It is dishonest for the defenders of this plan to spin it as making money available for the poor by taking it from the greedy middle classes.**

Alongside this, the admin costs of a universal benefit are minimal for both recipients and the state. To process a child benefit claim involved looking at a birth certificate and setting up 16 or so years of payments. That’s pretty well all the admin that a universal benefit needs.

Imagine what enormous admin costs will be involved in the projected scheme. Everybody who gets child benefit or lives with a child benefit recipient will also have to provide proofs of income for each of the 16 or so years.

People whose incomes vary dramatically from one month to the next or one year to the next will have to keep constantly updating the child benefit office with evidence. In particular, the self-employed and employees who change jobs frequently will spend lots of time collecting and submitting evidence and appealing decisions. Couples who separate or form new partnerships will have to keep updating the authorities.

This will require a bureaucratic army.

There are currently no mechanisms to collate income information with child benefits. A whole new adminstrative structure will need to be set up and maintained permanently.

(Civil servants facing job losses because of the coming cuts might find this quite cheering.)

Is it remotely likely that enough savings can be made by cutting the child benefit of a few parents to cover the costs of setting up a whole new bureaucratic infrastructure that serves no other purpose?

(Rhetorical question. The answer is “obviously not”)

The other plan – cutting back welfare benefits to the level of “average family income of 26k” – is equally ludicrous, although it will play better with the condem’s core constituency, whose newspapers tell them every day that people on benefits are better off than the average worker.

I am already confused. Is this £26k before or after tax? What is the “average” “family”? What is a “family” on benefits?

There must be a tiny number of people who get more than £26k a year in benefits. To achieve this £500 a week, benefit recipients would have to be mentally or physically disabled, have a fair few disabled children and maybe a seriously ill elderly relative or two – and probably live in a rented home in the south east. (If you doubt this, try looking at normal benefit rates.)

Could this money be saved by making disabled people or people with disabled kids homeless – refusing to pay for their housing? Hardly. Then the state really would have to kick in, assuming that we still have some claim to be a first world country. Which would be very much more expensive.

Laughing in the face of all the Tories’ “broken society”/”family” rhetoric, what would the adults in any 2 parent home that gets more than £26K a year in benefits do, when they face a cut back in their joint family benefits? Split up their household, obviously. One parent would move out, take a property and collect their own income. Which would be capped at 26k. Another £26K

So, it would be much better financially for reasonably well-paid parents to cut the amount of work they do, so that they don’t risk their earnings going over the cut-off point. It would be much better for the handful of people who get more-than-derisory welfare benefits to keep two homes at the taxpayer’s expense than one.

The Tories claim that they are going to cut public money, discourage idleness and strengthen the “family.”

The likely outcomes seem to be the exact opposite. Aren’t these “welfare reforms” going to involve paying out public money to reward idleness in the rich and to split up poor families?

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* There are many other words that could be defined by a picture of George Osborne’s face. I am feeling too polite to list them. Plus, several of them might stop you being able to read this blog in work.
**If that was the real objective, surprisingly, it turns out that there is already a mechanism for redistribution. It’s called direct taxation.

Who benefits?

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The UK government plans to “overhaul” the benefits system. A scheme to cut the enormous deficit caused by the misbehaviour of the very rich (the banking crisis) by taking from the very poor.

“Some unemployed people say they are better off on benefits than working – leading to accusations that the current system encourages long-term welfare dependency.” (from the BBC

The words “some..people say” are like a big red flag to indicate “we made this up on the spot.”

However, I’m going to take this at face value and pretend – purely for the sake of argument – that there are a fair number of people who are better off on benefits and who aren’t too physically or mentally ill to work. (These must be people who can magically pay for food, heat, light, water, fares, cleaning products, household goods and clothes from less money than the average City worker spends on an evening out and a few lattes.)

There are however many millions more people who are desperate to stay in work or to find work. Any alleged “recovery” will be sustained only until the full force of the threatened October cuts. The cuts will mean that workers from both the public and private sectors will massively increase the numbers of the unemployed.

Precisely the time when you’d think that a government stick to force the unwilling into work was least necessary. Not to mention, reducing the number of taxpayers by converting them to benefit recipients seems to be exactly opposite to the actions of a government that plans to cut its debt.

So, who would benefit by forcing the unemployed to seek work – thus making sure that there are EVEN more people fighting for every job?

I can’t see any sane answer to this. The immediate answer would seem to be “employers,” who will be able to force down wages. But, at the moment, even this doesn’t make sense. We barely produce anything in the UK. All goods and services that can be produced by cheap labour are already produced by cheap labour abroad.

UK business generally now expects to make its profits, not by producing and selling goods but by brokering foreign-made goods and services to the UK population. Which depends on there being a critical mass of the UK population with disposable income.

Despite the bullshit emanating from the government and the media, welfare benefits barely cover frugal heat, light and food. Replacing a winter coat constitutes a major drama. There’s precious little left to put toward a Bang and Olufsen home cinema or an i-Pod.

In fact, there’s bugger all left for any retail spending. Which must be a major issue for a country which has long been acting as if building massive new retail outlets constitutes a sustainable development strategy.

Even the financial sector – pandered to for twenty-odd years – will be hard pushed to get blood from a few million stones. Although the appearance of tv ads offering loans of derisory sums at rates of interest so high that you assume they’ve got the decimal point wrong (2,265% APR, ffs) suggests it’s going to have a bloody good try.

So English capital as a whole isn’t going to benefit by massive job cuts. It goes without saying that workers aren’t going to benefit. And, no matter how much I try to bend my head round this, I can’t see any rational way to see hammering the longterm unemployed as anything but a true anti-solution.

Genius

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Facing the dole because of the cuts that have made the IMF so pleased with the Condem government?

(Who knew the IMF had a UK vote? To be honest, I prefer IKEA’s furniture.)

Well, you can now retrain for an easy and rewarding new career as a science journalist, thanks to Martin Robbins in the Guardian who has provided a template for any and every science article you’ll ever write.
This is a news website article about a scientific paper

It’s brilliant.

Eztra: I forgot to mention the links which are pretty funny too.

Sunday morning tv

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Only a person who forgot to do anything appropriately debauched on a Saturday night would be awake and watching tv at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Bah, that would be me then.

Lo and behold, a show that cost about 50p to make, focussing on the topics that are guaranteed to bring froth to the mouth of a Daily mail reader. Is Sunday Morning Live the future of public service religious broadcasting under financial heavy manners?

The format: A studio discussion of ethical/religious issues. Webcam contributions from the public. A bottom of the screen rolling feed of quotes from viewers’ emails. Meaningless text message yes/no polls. Etc.

The wisdom of crowds. On the cheap.

As it says on the show’s page, today’s issues were:

This Sunday we’re back on air and we’ll be asking:
Should prostitution be socially acceptable?
Are we soft on Islam?
Should we allow gay marriage in church?
You can debate live with Susanna, our studio guests, and other callers

“Are we soft on Islam” turned out to be a photo-opportunity for Stephen Green of “Christian Voice.” A chance to reel out a load of untruths about how Christians are persecuted in the UK – sacked for waeraing crosses) and Muslims get all manner of advantages. (I think he mentioned providing a few women-only swimming sessions at some public baths as the evidence for this.)

Yes, it’s that Stephen Green unwilling star of a Channel 4 Dispatches exposé that I can’t find on tinterwebs or there’d be a link here.

His organisation is wonderful at getting the media to misrepresent its extremist views as a mainstream Christian viewpoint, despite the fact that he represents a tiny minority of Christians. He was described as a “disgrace” by the moderator of the United Reform Church.

He complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the atheist bus ads. He failed to make this complaint stick but, by the grace of the all-powerful god Irony, the ASA banned his advert that claimed that the cervical cancer vaccine caused infertility.

He’s a chap with an appetite for the law but a distinct unwillingness to pay the costs involved in using it. He prosecuted the BBC for showing Gerry Springer the Opera, then demanded that the BBC pay his costs when he lost :-D.

And now, here he is popping up on the BBC – even getting an appearance fee, I fear – presenting his noxious views. Truly the man is an Irony bishop.

Viz comic gave him a well deserved award in 2006.

New outrage scale needed

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Turn the dial to 11. These news items show the inadequacy of any existing conceptual scale to the task of measuring your daily justified-outrage level.

(1) The pastor and congregation of the Dove World Outreach Center have engaged in an Al Qaeda recruitment campaign. I doubt that they know enough French to translate the phrase agent provacateur but they seem to understand the concept well enough to to play this role. Albeit, well out of reach of the actions they plan to provoke.

Charitably, I will assume it is just a bid to put Dove World Outreach Center in every standard dictionary, whenever there’s a need for an instant definition of “unbelievable stupidity”, “religious bigotry”, or “armchair warrior”. (Plus a few other words and phrases that wouldn’t make it into a school dictionary. )

Maybe they think their god is too slow in hastening Armageddon and needs a helping hand.

The guardian had a ludicrous anti-Dawkins piece the other day, with the writer claiming that:

He has become the mirror image of the theological dogmatists he despises.

There’s nothing like the Dave World Outreach Center to show that – if anything – Dawkins has been pulling his punches.

(You don’t need a link from me. This story is everywhere as they clearly planned.)

(2) And this story that seems equally designed to boost the membership of fundamentalist armies by a factor of several thousand. The Guardian headlines:

US soldiers ‘killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies’
Soldiers face charges over secret ‘kill team’ which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war

Dare I hope there’s a holdall somewhere with the names of these soldiers and the Gainesville pastor on it?

They never learn

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The Team directly responsible for the Iraq War / selling off UK public services to private companies / destroying civil liberties / turning at least a blind eye to torture losing the last election really haven’t got the message have they?

Mandelson and Blair are telling Labour party members – through the privileged medium of the public press – who to vote for in the upcoming election. Well, who not to vote for, anyway. And that is a category that seems to include everyone except David Miliband….. They both regard a potential win by Ed Miliband as a potential electoral disaster.

But then they are such popular chaps, these two – Blair and Mandelson….

Any remarks by Blair will be a mixed blessing for David Miliband: Blair has not been forgiven by many Labour activists for the Iraq war and the involvement of the private sector in public services. From the Guardian

Indeed, all the candidates united in publicly expressing distaste for Mandelson only two months ago.

Former foreign secretary David Miliband, who is believed to be Mandelson’s preferred candidate for the party leadership, described the memoirs as “destructive and self-destructive”.
He compared Mandelson’s appearance in a TV advert for the book to that of Bond villain Enst Blofeld, saying all the former minister, nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, needed was a white cat to stroke.

And he’s Mandelson’s chosen candidate….

I can detect only minimal difference between Millidum and Millidee. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that Blair & Mandelson’s support for Milliband_A was just a cunning ruse designed to leverage (;-) the mass force of Party members’ anti-Blair&Mandelson revulsion to ensure that Miliband_B was elected.

.. Mandelson said anyone who tried to take Labour back to the era before Blair’s election as leader in 1994 would wreck the party’s chances of a swift return to power. (from the Guardian)

(I didn’t even know that any of the candidates had a time machine. )

This implies that the Labour party that is just power-seeking machine. What is supposed to be the point of seeking power? Pre-Blair Labour supporters might have said something about social justice. The Blairite camp would just snigger at your naivete for even posing the question.
In a video on the Guardian’s website, Diane Abbott talked about the massive contrast in campaign funding between her campaign (a couple of volunteers and a £1000 in the bank) and Miliband_A’s. He, on the other hand, has received over £200,000. Plus the poisoned-chalice free support of the New Labour big guns, of course.

Spot the odd one out: Candidate’s voting records…..
Diane Abbott
David Milliband
Ed Milliband
Ed Balls
Andy Burnham

Mmm. Only one of these candidates hasn’t spent the past few years kissing leadership butt and supporting the sort of policies that have brought the Labour Party into such disrepute among its natural supporters.

There’s one candidate with clean hands. And (simulated surprise) she doesn’t have big money from big business.

As Andy Hamilton said on Have I Got News For You last year (from memory)…

“I can’t be doing with these new metric politicians like the Millibands. I much preferred the old imperial ones like Michael Foot..”

Product stop press

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This blog having temporarily started acting like Which Magazine’s Provisional Wing, I have to draw your attention to another amazing wonder-product….:-) It costs more in a their real-world shops, but you can apparently make a saving if you buy Boots Hot Weather Cooling Spray online. Only £3.89 for 125ml (plus £2.90 delivery charge for delivery in 4 days, though free if you pick it up from your local shop.)

£31.11 per litre. (Not counting delivery costs.)

What’s the magic cooling ingredient?

Hmm, water. Well , “Aqua.” Not even bloody drinking water. Just water in a spray can.

As a random comparison of the cost of fluids, you can buy a 70cl bottle of 10 year-old Isle of Jura single malt whisky from Waitrose for £27.59.

OK, it wouldn’t cool you down much (indeed, it could make you smell pretty rough if you sprayed it on your face on a hot day) but it would be the product of centuries of brewing and distilling skills. It would have had to sit round using up caskspace for a decade. It’s lavishly bottled and packaged. And it manages to pay a huge cut to the revenue and still appear on Waitrose’s online shop for less than the cost of a litre of spray-on water.

Quite apart from the bottles of Evian and Highland Spring, Boots sells expensive water in many more forms. In the homeopathic department, anyway.

Water converted into pill form even. Or “pillules”, “pills” and “tablets.” (The distinction may be technical.)

Their homeopathic remedies actually contain water so expensive that it makes the cooling spray seem relatively cheap. Because they are pills (sorry, pillules) so they are dry, containing only the memory of the water that was used in making them. But that water itself only contains the memory of the active ingredient that was used to make it, many dilutions in its past

But, as the the water’s magical healing powers get stronger with each dilution, doesn’t it follow that you could increase its potency by another order of magnitude by dropping one of these dry pillules in a bath full of water.

The bathwater would then be imbued with the memory of the memory of the memories of the first water, but made even more memorable after conversion into and out of dry water-memory states in the middle stage. And so, these remedies could be strong enough to wipe out all disease on the planet….

New business plan – to take homeopathic remedies and sneakily intensify them by this method, then sell them as being EVEN more effective than the ones you can buy from a high street chemist, if that were indeed possible.

Genius, huh?

Making up numbers

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Nothing provides more authority to a policy than supporting it with made-up numbers, it seems. Here is a shameless example:

The communities department estimates that it costs each taxpayer £35 a week to keep people in affordable homes, and it is argued the tenancy for life is an inefficient use of scarce resources. from the Guardian

I don’t know how much income tax you pay but I’ve just worked out – very roughly, based on the allowances and basic rates on the HMRC site – that a single person earning £20k a year pays £52.03 per week in tax. So, the Prime Minister is saying that 67% of this tax goes to “affordable housing”?

And £20k isn’t a great wage. (It’s slightly below the median wage but easier to calculate from.) But it’s much higher than minimum wage.

Millions of people earn minimum wage. A yearly minimum wage is £12,234.40 (from October 2010 anyway, when it rises to £5.93 an hour) So a single person on minimum wage will pay £22.53 tax a week. The magical £35 a week is 1 and a half times their entire income tax bill.

This doesn’t just defy credibility. It spits in its face with a mocking sneer.

These numbers seem to be targeted directly at that section of Middle England which expresses views of the kind that can be seen at their most typical on the brilliant Speak You’re Branes site. (Ie., people dumber than a box of nails. )

The imade-up numbers may be used to obscure the fact that Cameron’s plan actually implies evicting tenants if they have an empty bedroom or if they earn wages.

Cameron did’nt even bother to explain how this is supposed to cut down on the imaginary costs. In fact, he gave a pretend-egalitarian, justification for this mad policy: that there are millions of needy people on waiting lists. .. who would presumably then move into the vacated houses and … start eating up their own share of the taxpayers’ £35 a week.

This makes no sense at all as a deficit-reduction plan – even if the numbers were real. And even if the social consequences wouldn’t be predictably horrific.

Cuts in housing benefit – to a level lower than the “affordable” rents charged by many social and private landlords – already threaten to put thousands of unemployed and disabled people into serious arrears and to drive many into homelessness. When these people are joined by workers earning a bit more than minimum wage and older people whose children have left home or whose partners have died – i.e. the people Cameron is presenting as stealing taxpayers money – it looks as if tent cities will have to start springing up all over the country. We might then get to see what a truly “broken Britain” looks like.

Reading Rapture Forums so you don’t have to

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On Rapture Forums, David Reagan argues against competitors for access to the wealth souls of the differently-mentalled.

Even fundamentalist type groups have gotten caught up in cultic doctrines

“Even” indeed. By definition, surely.

“What is a cult? The typical dictionary definition is so vague and general that the term could be applied to any religious group”

Indeed.

Recognising that this might leave some understandable confusion in the minds of Rapture followers, he proceeds to define a cult. It seems that he is talking about defining cults as millenarian cults, but that bald definition might pose something of a problem, (What with them being the very essence of a millenarian sect.)

So there’s a list of attributes that define “cults” then a list of those religions that qualify and some that are “borderline” sects. The distinction rests on whether they have “an orthodox view of Jesus as God in the flesh.” The list of sects has:

..among others, the non-instrumental Churches of Christ, the United Pentecostals, and Catholics.

Cults always have some weird doctrines that are not Biblically based.

Hmm, nothing at all weird about these things selected at random from Rapture Forums:
then. The Ages as viewed from different standpoints , Scripture Numerics, the Tribulation 101 Science facts and foreknowledge from the Bible

These drawings and words seem to have been generated from a mindset oriented about 45 degrees from standard human thinking.

So, what do you call an organisation that has “weird doctrines that are Biblically based”?

Hmm, tough one. Maybe, it’s a “Rapture Forum”?

Numberwang on the web

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The Guardian has a Data Blog with the subtitle Facts are sacred..

Tempting as it is to wander round the epistemological byways here (What’s a “fact,” for a start?) I’ll spare you that. Instead I’ll express bafflement about the factualness of some specific facts on government websites posted yesterday.

A decorative graphic has blobs to represent the costs of UK government websites. There’s a clickthrough button to get the data from Manyeyes.

The data is shocking, on first view. For instance, it seems to have cost the UK taxpayer £154 for every visit to the Cabinet Office site. Cue horror. Except that these appear to be made-up numbers, with the calculations done on a solar powered calculator sitting at the bottom of a deep well.

Here are a few columns that I took from the data, applied simple maths to and lo! most sites cost a few pence per visit.

I’ve left the original numbers so you can work out costs per visit yourself. I’ve shown my calculations on a blue background.

Details from the govt webcosts spreadsheet

Details from the govt webcosts spreadsheet

I fear I’m doing the post a disservice when I scroll down and find a link to Google docs that offers the full data. Download the full list as spreadsheet doesn’t work for me but, when I look at the data on this sheet, it makes a lot more sense. Costs per visit are down to pence rather than tens of pounds. Not that I can replicate this either. But I get a lot closer.
UK govt web costs, as held in google docs

Ah ha: At the end of the Guardian post there’s a caveat:

UPDATE: an error in the cost per visitor column has now been corrected

Sorry, not when I looked at it it. Which, surely must be after it’s been corrected, or else I wouldn’t be able to see the correction note.

In any case, the original costs are dubious. Some of these sites must be new and have not got a full year’s data. The basis on which any given department has costed its sites might be wholly individual. I am forced to conclude that these are pretty well just made up numbers from start to finish. Although that doesn’t excuse the failure for anyone to notice that a simple division has been borked.

Any reader would gasp at the idea of sites that squander 3 week’s unemployment benefit on each visitor. That “information” sticks in the mind. Few readers would be finicky enough to look at the detail.

It says Facts are Sacred in bold letters at the head of the post. You could be forgiven for absent-mindedly taking it that someone had made sure that these were sacred facts.

A paranoid person might easily assume that the release of such spurious data was part of a propaganda offensive to convince UK voters that the public sector is so bloated and wasteful that the planned public sector cuts will not affect anything important. They’ll just involve stopping stupid and wasteful spending….

Like the imaginary huge (6-year-salary!) redundancy payments to inherently idle public sector workers that another Guardian blogger treats as a representative of the true position. Then characterises the head of a public sector union as a rabid militant for opposing the destruction of his member’s jobs and employment conditions.

I initially, and charitably, assumed this was a random Comment is Free post, maybe by a freelancing Daily Mail journalist.

But it appears that the writer is a senior figure in the Guardian. He was the Guardian’s political editor for 16 years. From his profile:

Michael White is assistant editor and has been writing for the Guardian for over 30 years

I see I have been spending £300 every ten minutes on buying the Guardian and it’s only ever worth it on the increasingly-rare days when Charlie Brooker is side-splittingly funny and Marina Hyde isn’t engaged in electoral enthusiasms for former presenters of shows about amusing vegetables. I begin to think a 40% cut in my Guardian spending is long overdue.

Shilling for free

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I did warn you that there might be a bit of an unlikely folk dancing theme developing here. So I am proud to act as a temporary (unpaid) shill for a film about morris dancing. Here’s most of the press release:

Despite rumours circulating earlier in the year, Morris Dancing (yes Morris Dancing), is very much alive with thousands of participants across the UK and is the subject of the hilarious film Morris: A Life with Bells On, premiering exclusively on Blighty (Sky channel 534, Virgin Media 206) on 29th May at 8pm.

A film that will have even the most cynical viewer reaching for their white handkerchiefs, Morris: A Life with Bells On is directed by Lucy Akhurst and stars Charles Thomas Oldham (who also wrote the screenplay) as Derecq Twist, along with Sir Derek Jacobi (The Golden Compass), Naomie Harris (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), Ian Hart (A Cock and Bull Story), Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen), Sophie Thompson (Eastenders) Harriet Walter (The Young Victoria), Aidan McArdle (The Duchess), and Greg Wise (Sense and Sensibility).

Described as This is Spinal Tap meets Calendar Girls, the film follows the fortunes of an avant-garde Morris team in their struggle to push the boundaries of the venerable, ancient dance. Set around the country pub The Travellers Staff, the docu-style comedy proves that Morris is not just an innocent pub pastime involving hanky-waving and bearded men with staffs, but also that it has its politics-laden, ultra-competitive side too.

The Millsham Morris men and their leader Derecq Twist are determined to achieve Morris perfection. But Derecq is also preparing to set the Morris world alight by performing the ultimate dance within the Morris firmament, the legendary Threeple Hammer Damson. As if this is not enough, he is in addition pioneering an innovative, daringly freeform brand of the dance dubbed “Extreme Morris,” drawing the anger of traditionalist elements within the Morris community. When Millsham unveil their creation in competition, the Morris Circle – the governing body of Morris in the UK – bans Derecq from future competition. Totally devastated by the decision, Derecq embarks on a global odyssey through tragedy and triumph, which gravely tests his passion for Morris.

I am impressed beyond words by the concept of extreme morris.

They embedded some clips with the press release. I’m not sure how well they’ll work here.


It looks as if it will be funny. (Don’t blame me if it isn’t. I haven’t seen it yet.)

The other clips are basically “DVD outtakes”, of which I’m not the world’s greatest admirer, so I’ve skipped them. If there’s any demand I’ll post them. I’ll have to put one of the publicity pictures, though, because it looks as if it came straight from the school of Zoolander Morris….

a publicity show for the film

I think this is Dereqk..

Taking security seriously

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Authorities in Doncaster airport – aka Robin Hood Airport – have been acting in a way that might have given even the Sheriff of Nottingham pause. Or, at least, shown him how wonderfully easy controlling the peasants would have been if he’d just had the sense to wage The War on Outlawry.

An mildly jokey throw-away tweet line by a frustrated traveller has earned him a criminal record and cost him his job and just under a thousand pounds.

The offending tweet said:

Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

Note that this was just a tweet, presumably meant to be read by people with enough knowledge of the English language to recognise the normal conversational use of figure of speech. It wasn’t a “threat” delivered to the airport. Obviously the tweeter never imagined that anyone connected with Robin Hood Airport would read it. Nor, guessed that EVEN THOUGH everyone involved on the airport side says they knew full well it wasn’t really a threat, that he would still end up destroyed by it.

Or have terrorists now got into the habit of casually tweeting their intentions?

In that case, the ruination of one ordinary man’s life is a small price to pay for winning the War on Terror. Or the War on Twitter.

Or the War on Photography, even. As, it seems the “potential terrorists” are still up to their old dastardly tricks of taking photographs of well known landmarks. So, it’s a great comfort to us all that the police are still on the ball and stopping professional photographers from getting shots of London buildings.

How thoughtful of the City of London police to keep us safe. Carrying on with the good work of Robin Hood airport. (When you find this post through a google search, Mr Hood, you’ll see how impressed we are with your vigilance. And clearly, you won’t detect any irony, as you don’t recognise figures of speech.)

If imaginary figures can turn in their graves, there’s a man wearing a green hoodie rotating at mach 1 somewhere in the residual bit of Sherwood Forest.