Snowing again
… and once again the whole country grinds to a halt.
The scene outside my window doesn’t look anything like this picture, but all over town there’s complete chaos as roads are blocked and drivers struggle to get up and down hills. At it’s thickest, the snow is maybe two inches deep but that seems to have been enough to cripple us and confine everyone to town.
As I mentioned last time it snowed and everything stopped, surely as a technologically adept society we should be able to deal with a bit of snow – especially snow that has been forecast for the last few days. It’s not July, people, snow isn’t that much of a surprise, surely?
Formula One – May The Farce Be With You
You thought that I’d given up writing, didn’t you? It has been nearly a month since I last wrote anything, so I apologise for that. I’d like to say that I think it has been worth the wait, but I think we all know that’s probably not true.
Formula One has been in the headlines a bit recently, with the Renault F1 team being found guilty of ‘race-fixing’. Flamboyant Flavio Briatore has been banished, possibly forever, Pat Symonds is out for five years and the team has a suspended two year ban.
It’s a very serious situation and needed to be dealt with severely, but I don’t think that it has been. Nelson Piquet Jr, the third point on the triangle, has basically got away scot free – given immunity from prosecution for providing evidence. But why should he? The whole situation only came to light after Piquet was dumped from the Renault F1 team for not achieving results. He attempted to play the hard man and blackmail Flavio to regain his place and when Flavio told him where to go, he threw his teddy out of the pram and went to the FIA.
But the whole thing could not have happened without his involvement and his complicity. If he wasn’t happy about doing it, he should have gone to the FIA at the race last year. But he didn’t. Instead, he risked his own life and that of spectators and marshals and then kept quiet about it all.
And Max Moseley’s contention that parent company Renault should not be punished, as it was not their responsibility? Sorry, that doesn’t wash either. Ultimately, they are responsible for everything that their employees do – whether sanctioned by them or not. The team, the parent company and all of the individuals directly involved should have been banned with immediate effect.
Of course, the reasons they weren’t are commercial ones. If you exclude Renault from F1, then a number of other teams are going to be unable to compete because they won’t have engines. And then Bernie and Max’s little money-spinning empire comes crashing down around their ears.
On the face of it, though, that wouldn’t be all bad – having seen Bernie’s tap dance today when being ‘interviewed’ by the BBC at the qualifying session for this year’s Singapore race, my opinion of the man has not improved – we need someone straight running F1,
Brief Notes
Once more, a little round-up of stuff that really needs to be commented on:
1. Apparently, 40% of all Twitter traffic is babble. As Stephen Fry has eloquently stated, that’s the point; Twitter isn’t supposed to be great debate or interesting chat, or even adverts for companies – it’s supposed to be a way to tell the world what’s happening in your life at this moment. Of course, that’s also the reason lots of people think it’s a complete and utter waste of time.
What bothers me about the report is that someone has gone to the trouble to analyse Twitter’s traffic in the first place. What, exactly, was the point of that?
2. It was the Eastbourne Airbourne show last weekend. Surprisingly (well, for the Council anyway – not for anyone with any common sense) now that it’s free again, the event was packed.
What I saw of it was pretty good, but the overall impression seemed to be of an event that doesn’t know where it’s going, isn’t as big as it used to be and isn’t amazingly well run. There seemed to be lots of commercial opportunities going begging, for instance.
Given that the show loses upwards of £70,000 each year – and over £360,000 last year when they tried to charge for it – someone really needs to take it by the scruff of the neck and kick it back into shape.
Either that or get rid of it for good. After all, the only connection Eastbourne has with planes is that it was bombed in the war…..
3. The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been released from prison today, on compassionate grounds – he apparently has cancer. I imagine that a number of the victim’s families may feel that, actually, he should die in prison and you can shove your compassion up your arse.
4. Given all the furore over recent times about MPs expenses, you’d think that they would have learned their lesson and would keep their heads down about pay, etc, for a little while. But you’d be wrong.
Senior Tory Sir Patrick Cormack has said that, in return for scrapping MP allowances (second home sponging, spending sprees at John Lewis, that sort of thing), MPs pay should be doubled. Given that your bog standard MP earns nearly £65,000 I must admit to being utterly lost for words. How can he think that it is even remotely acceptable to reward fraud and corruption in that way?
5. Apparently, researchers in Canada have concluded that an attack by zombies would wipe out civilisation really, really quickly. It doesn’t seem to have put them off that zombies don’t actually exist.
They’ve tried to defend their work by saying that it “could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations”. The problem with that is that they based all of their assumptions on movies and books and, I hate to tell you this guys, that stuff is all made up. So, any conclusions reached based on made-up ‘facts’ are also made-up and therefore not worth the paper they’re written on.
And the professor who adds a ‘?’ to his name so he won’t get mistaken for the lead singer from The Cure? He’s a complete dick.
6. Finally, as a bit of a geek it always warms my heart when real geeks start to sound off about how the pretend universe depicted in popular science fiction movies wouldn’t really work. The latest one is an attack on the Star Wars universe. It may or may not be intended to be a joke – it’s often hard to tell with geeks – but, if they are serious, could I just point that (as with zombies) it doesn’t really exist, it’s just made-up to entertain people. You really should go outside more!
Brief notes
Some that slipped through the net yesterday:
1. New Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, seems to be picking up where his predecessor left off, at least as far as expenses are concerned. It has just been announced that he’ll be charging around £20,000 of “refurbishments” to his grace-and-favour flat to the British taxpayer. Mr Bercow, though, is “happy that this information is in the public domain, that the public know how this money has been spent”.
Would the public be quite so happy about it, I wonder? The £20,000 includes over £6,000 for a new sofa, £3,600 on planters for the terrace and over £1,000 to redecorate one room. Given that former Speaker Michael Martin spent nearly £725,000 of taxpayers money on the flat between 2000 and 2008, some might say that enough is enough and if Mr Bercow wants to redecorate he should do so from his own pocket (he is, after all, paid over £140,000 a year).
2. Lloyds / HBOS have announced losses of £4 billion, in the same week that both Barclays and HSBC announced profits of £3 billion. Lloyds / HBOS, of course, is the only one of the three to have been bailed out with taxpayer’s money, so it looks like we got value for money doesn’t it?
Brief Notes
Another quick batch of stuff that I can’t help commenting on:
1. An E.coli outbreak in Wrexham that has left a woman and a three year old girl seriously ill has been traced to one particular fish and chip shop. And it turns out that this establishment had “poor hygiene conditions and major non-compliance with food legislation” in a Council inspection a year ago.
Which rather begs the question, why was it allowed to stay open? Why was it only recommended for annual checks, rather than being immediately shut down and not allowed to re-open until all problems had been addressed?
2. An American woman is suing her college because she has been unable to find work since graduating. She says they didn’t give her enough career development advice.
It may be just me, but haven’t the college completed their obligation by giving her the education she paid for? She graduated – a bachelor’s in information technology – so surely they’d done their bit? Isn’t the rest up to her?
Of course, the fact that she’s suing them has nothing to do with the fact that she’s got $70,000 of student loans to repay.
3. Apparently, UK consumers are being tricked into buying shoddy goods, by fake UK websites – according to a report by Trading Standards. It seems that a number of websites that end in .co.uk are not, in fact, based in the UK but China and rather than selling real merchandise, they sell cheap knock-off rubbish. UK consumers are, according to Trading Standards, being lulled into a false sense of security by the .co.uk suffix and think they are dealing with a British company.
Which just goes to show what a bunch of idiots UK shoppers can be sometimes. If you can’t be bothered to take some elementary precautions when shopping online – like finding out who you’re buying from – then you deserve everything you get. And let’s face it, these sites are only popular because they’re cheap – if the consumer wasn’t trying to get something for nothing, then we wouldn’t even be talking about this. Let’s be clear – these people got what they paid for.
I said it recently but I’ll say it again – it’s the internet; have some common sense.
Wolfs Helpers
