I just listened to The Gun Club’s first album, Fire Of Love. They’re a band that I heard of all through my student years – at least one good friend was a fan – but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It’s a scorchingly good album, and I’d recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?) to download it from Emusic forthwith.
I’m trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a WordPress Plugin called QuickPost .
Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple. I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.
And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).
Edit: No, that won’t do at all. One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.
I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do. Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.
Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out. But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect. That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.
I probably don’t need anything more than the title for this one. I mean, who the hell would ever think it was a good a idea to let McDonald’s issue qualifications “equivalent to A-levels”? I’ve nothing against on-the-job training, of course: that’s a good thing. And businesses sponsoring people to study for recognised qualifications, and so on: all good.
But letting businesses issue qualifications that have that equivalence? I thought we were supposed to be worried about the devaluing of A-levels; it seems unlikely that allowing commercial interests to issue them (or their “equivalents”) will do anything other than further lower their value.
And I feel bound to say: would you like fries with your certificate, sir or madam?I see that Tony Blair has become a catholic. No surprise there. But as an ex-catholic atheist myself, I’m feeling down with Nick Clegg.
In other catholic-related news, there’s a fine analysis of ‘Fairytale of New York’ on the BBC website, after the Radio 1 farrago. And I hadn’t realised that Shane McGowan’s birthday is Christmas Day. So as well as Newtonmas, we can also celebrate McGowanmas on Tuesday.
Rationalism and excess: what a fine seasonal combination.I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on ‘Thought for the Day’. He was talking, since it’s St Andrew’s day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.” That’s, “Here’s to us, who’s like us? Damn few, and they’re all dead,” in case you have trouble with Scots.
Thing is, Bell was bemoaning the attitude he thinks it represents. He thinks it means, “The only people we can emulate are dead.” He thinks it epitomises a ‘national inferiority complex.’
That’s not how I ever understood it.
Rather than looking back wistfully on past glories, to me it was triumphal, celebratory, even arrogant, if you need a negative adjective. It said — it says — “We’re here, and we’re great; there’s no-one like us.”
So happy St Andrew’s day: we rock.
I had a slightly weird experience with train bookings a while back. Twice I’ve booked tickets via The Trainline between London and Glasgow (once on my own, once for the whole family). On both cases the tickets arrived with the legend “No Seat” printed in the spaces for the seat details. In both cases I phoned the company and was able to arrange seats (with greater or lesser difficulty and need to switch services)
But the weirdness to my mind is that on The Trainline’s website, you have to select specific trains when you’re booking (even if the ticket you are buying is flexible enough that you can travel on a different service in the end). So you’re always “booking” a particular train; but not, automatically, booking a seat. What, exactly, does it mean to do that?
I mean, let’s assume that all seats on the train are full when you get on, as they usually are on routes like London to Glasgow; is there a particular circle of floor space that is yours? You have a booking on that service, after all: it must mean something.
I recall, years ago, when I used to travel up and down these lines a lot, that there were a lot of services, especially at weekend peak times, on which seat bookings were “mandatory”. There were still people without bookings who got on and crammed in between the carriages, so I’m not entirely sure what that meant, either. But at least it meant that when you booked a ticket (at a station or a travel agent: no web in those days), you also booked a seat.
And having booked it, you nearly always got it; British Rail had its problems, but incompatible systems between the booking agents and the different train operating companies wasn’t one of them, as it seems to be now. The Trainline’s other strangeness was that, after phoning to add the seat bookings, I was sent the details for the outgoing service (on Virgin Trains), but not those for the return (on GNER). When that happened on the first of those trips, I assumed it was a mistake, so I mentioned it when I phoned for the second one. I was told that it was unavoidable because GNER use a different system, and they (The Trainline) were only able to book on paper (and then, what, post the details to GNER?)
I blame the Tories, of course: privatisation was always an appalling idea.I flew up to Scotland the other weekend, by RyanAir. On the way back the plane was a 737-800. It was the same kind of plane as on the flight up, but the inside was dramatically different.
Flying north we had standard velour-covered (or whatever you’d call it: fuzzy cloth) seats, and standard seat-back pockets made of criss-crossed bungee cord.
But southbound we had nasty vinyl-covered seats. Vinyl! Who’d have thought you could still cover seats in such a thing? It looked like the inside of a 1970s Vauxhall Viva!
Worse than that, though: there were no seat-back pockets at all! None!
This arrangement means that the little bits and pieces you want to have to hand — bottle of water, MP3 player, book or magazine, notebook — all have to go on the floor under the seat in front when you’re not holding them.
As well as being inconvenient, those things on the floor all now constitute an added safety risk: if there was some kind of problem before takeoff or after landing, they’d all be sliding about, just perfect for people to trip over or slip on.
So, reduced comfort, convenience and safety. Nice on, RyanAir.Totally not sure about this one. Someone emails their MP and gets an accidentaly-sent response (in the MP’s name? Not sure) calling the constituent’s mother-in-law “snotty”, and saying, effectively, “don’t rush to answer this, since they don’t like the government.”
So far, so unsurprising (though your attitude towards the government should not affect the service you get from it). But the MP has just been on the radio refusing to apologise.
She was very good on defending her staff: they’re professional, but they’re human. Fine, people make comments that shouldn’t become public, and mistakes get made. But surely an apology for the mistake would be in order?
I suspect that more will come of this.
This Week, BBC1’s late-night political discussion programme, had a piece last night from Colonel Tim Collins, who used to be “Britain’s most senior soldier in Iraq”. He was saying that Saddam Hussein should hang as soon as possible, and that we should have the death penalty in Britain.
I won’t reiterate the many general arguments against the death penalty here, but consider these. Collins tried to justify the execution of Saddam by citing the brutality of Saddam’s regime. The thing is, you don’t demonstrate the wrongness of a brutal regime by exercising the most brutal form of punishment. You don’t win that way: at best you draw, and who wants to draw with a dictator? You win by showing that you’re better than that; by behaving in a civilised way.
He went on to say that it’s “incoherent” that Britain should have nuclear weapons, but not have the option to execute terrorists. I see absolutely no logical connection between the two, and neither did Michael Portillo. Nor could Collins make the connection in a way that made any sense.
Using the death penalty isn’t a sign of strength: it’s a sign of weakness. The truly strong can both show mercy, and behave in a way that separates them from the caveman.To Glasgow, then, and a weekend visit to my Mum. The kids and I caught the train to Stansted on Friday afternoon, to find the security theatre in full force. Although we made EasyJet’s last checkin time with a good ten minutes to spare, I really thought we would miss our flight when we joined the back of one of two or three giant, slow-moving queue. Especially so when, after a few minutes, we realised that we were in fact at the back of a queue for another checkin desk. We weren’t alone in this error, though: the queues mingled, and quite a few others had made the same mistake.
But in the end it wasn’t that bad. The queue began moving fairly quickly — or smoothly, at least — and while it was frustrating, it was bearable, as long as you didn’t let yourself get frustrated. The passport/boarding-pass-control desk looked a right mess, though, covered as it was by abandoned bottles, cosmetics containers and what have you.
To be honest, I’m not actually sure why the queues were so long. The only things that have changed in security terms compared with a few months ago are the prohibited items in hand baggage, and the enforcement of the “only one item” rule (I’m sure this has been the rule for decades, but it just wasn’t strictly enforced). Both of those issues should be dealt with at checkin, so when you get to the security gates you should be ready. Every bag and coat is x-rayed, as before: but there should be fewer bags; everyone goes through a metal detector, just as they always did. There was a “please take off your shoes” section after the metal detectors, but as we paused at it, one security guy called, “Not everybody, not everybody,” and waved us on. I suppose people were randomly chosen, and incidentally, everyone I saw taking their shoes off was white. This may, of course, just mean that people who look like terrorists (whatever that may mean) are not travelling, from fear of being hassled.
I conclude that the only reason for the giant queues must be stupidity: there must be people who, even though they are asked about prohibited items at checkin, and even though this stuff has been in the news for weeks, still have drinks in their hand luggage, and then have to stop to abandon them at security. Or who try to take more than one item on, even though they’ve been told not to. And yet, I didn’t see much of that happening. I really don’t understand why the queues got so big. There were plenty of security staff on duty, too.
Coming back, things were much less fraught at Glasgow Airport, as they generally are at smaller airports, in my experience.
Throughout, I have to say, all the security staff we encountered were cheerful, polite, and helpful, while doing a largely thankless, probably quite dull, job, filled with seemingly-arbitrary rule changes handed down from above. I can’t really fault them, no matter how daft some of the things they have to enforce may be.
A last thought: we are being conditioned to accept travelling with photo ID, even within the country. It was strange to see everyone queuing up to get onto a flight to Scotland, with their passports ready. Now I’d be quite happy to see EU passports issued by the Republic of Scotland (as long as it was a republic), but for now, it was still a journey within the UK.
And the strange thing is, it seems to be the airlines that are driving this, not the authorities. I have had to show photo ID on RyanAir and EasyJet, but a few months ago — this year, certainly — I flew to Scotland with BMI Baby, and not only did they not ask for ID, but I didn’t even have to see a human to check in: hand baggage, a credit card, and a self-checkin machine, and there I was. That was before all the recent fuss, true, but RyanAir (and possibly EasyJet) have been asking for ID for years. Are they secretly being used byt the government to get us used to carrying ID cards? And if so, why is it only some airlines?
Or am I being unreasonably paranoid? ‘Cos I only want to be reasonably paranoid, you know.