Loose Score for Cafe Nero

Neglect various children around a public space. The children should be noisy – let them drop things loudly and vocalise – and the parents should ignore them until the children make an unbearable noise. Unpredictable piercing screams are best.

Occasionally  the parents should utter the sound ssshhh and look delighted. The more the children scream, the more delighted the parents should be, verging on worship.

As people object, they should retort “These are children! All children make a noise.”

If anyone disagrees, the parents should become aggressive and ask “Are you saying I don't raise my children properly?”

Just as it might seem that someone will become violent, a dog should start barking.

Now enter the lead vocalist, who says, without being invited “It's all right, I certainly don't mind”

The dog should be encouraged to howl, perhaps by being kicked by a child who should be made to scream piercingly perhaps by being threatened by the dog

All smile and say how nice it is

A month off and nothing's changed

Well, a little over a month since I last posted, imagined reader, and what has happened? Lots of things and nothing. Fashionable idiocies still determine much public action.

An email from Avaaz tells me that the source of the death of bees may have been identified. Bayer is marketing an insecticide which kills them -- as a by-product effect.

Sounds likely. The much referred to law of unintended consequences is actually the lore of unconsidered consequences. One ambition at a time and no thought to what ensues apart from that. Playing chess by draughts rules, as I have said before -- somewhere, probably the pub.

You solve one problem and then firefight the unwanted results, usually by deploying your acquired skills in English for Outwitting Customers to deny there are any unwanted results. That's the same isn't it.

Tell Bayer, I am imagining, that their products kill bees and the response from them and the sheep, shortly to be served as food for the obedient, is "But this is business; you are putting the standard of living at risk."

Meanwhile another dead soldier has been returned for waste disposal. Doing his job says a puppet or string-puller -- how do you tell the difference? -- without mentioning that the job is ill-conceived, counter productive and immoral. "Never mind all that," says someone, "let's get upset because someone pissed on a body. That'll take our minds off it all."

It's ok to kill the enemy, but you mustn't piss on them after. Course not.

That wouldn't happen if we were only allowed to use truly modern weapons; then the bodies would be ready-vapourised. No offence, no funerals, no bad publicity.

Did someone say "simples"?

So Bayer were banned from selling this shit in Germany; but they export it.

But when I logged in today it was via The Cloud. I have spoken of The Cloud before. This time it has a new website and also denies having heard of me. Probably a skilled programmer -- well how was he supposed to know the user database is important?

So I registered again and it was as delighted as always that I had joined and offered me the moon and stars and 23 hours 59 minutes before I needed to ask for more. Within an hour, everything was working oddly and windows said I was no longer linked to the internet.

I had to reboot and here we are again.

I try to work offlline; but recoding bits and pieces on a website small enough not to warrant a complete rewrite kind of needs net access.

While I was getting back on, I had a look at The Cloud's "about us" -- they're all from BSkyB

Well...

A bunch of Jeremy Hunts then.

Even back online it's odd. They clearly haven't the bandwidth and rely on people not knowing enough or not having the confidence to trust their knowledge. At one point I thought maybe the whole of London University might have been nuked and that I might now be an unaware ghost.

Not only was my college mail server not really responding but my google to pick up the current faults page had been trying to load for 7 minutes. Saturday wobble, I thought, preparing to do something else in case it took time to fix; and then remembered it is Friday.

No, it wasn't them. It was this shower of Murdochspawn offering a free service that doesn't work properly.

And after about 9 minutes I got the page I wanted.

By which time I didn't want it.

Now I'll just save this lot to RAM in case I am no longer connected...

Cruddas and crud

The resignation speech of the Conservative Treasurer Cruddas uses a technique fashionable among the PR and customer care community

He apologises for an "impression of impropriety".

It is the same formula used by those who write and say "We are sorry that you found our service less than satisfactory"

In both cases it restates the specifics of a charge into an abstraction (e.g. "late train" becomes "service below the standard you had expected" just as "selling access to the Prime Minister" becomes "an impropriety" AND it seems to apologise, because it uses some of the diction of apology, but is in fact expressing regret for the complainant's state of mind.

It distracts you from the crime and from the culprit. The expression of concern for the complainant -- I am sorry that you found our service to be below standard -- is just a mild form of locking up dissenters in the asylum: you disagree with us, therefore you are wrong / mad.

It is a further dishonesty.

Francis Maude's suggestion on Sunday -- some or other radio programme -- that Cruddas resigned because he had boasted and said things were not true is a further dishonesty. He resigned because he was recorded being perfectly honest, though we might well consider his proposal, that about which he spoke with candour, to be dishonest.

George Osborne

I dislike George Osborne

Dungheads at ASDA

Five days on, I have just been emailed

BUY DISNEYLAND ADVENTURES AND SUPPORT MAKE-A-WISH

but nothing else

Leveraging

I've noticed this word coming back in the last few days. It means or meant, as far as I can tell, using the same money over and over so that it bubbles and persuades you that it is worth much more than it is, beyond all standard, even the shit standard. Jugoslavia did that through the eighties -- Serbia lent to Croatia who lent to -- all the way round, till say Slovenia lent to Serbia who lent to Croatia.

Then the USA did it in a much more er leveraged way.

Now it is being used widely, a very fashionable idiocy.

One gets letters that initiate discussion with the words "I can confirm" though nothing has been mentioned before; because confirm is thought posher and more impressive than tell you.

And many other words. That one just occurs to me.

Now it's leveraging.

On Today (R4) today it was leveraging the costs of improving roads by tolls and other scams. Leveraging? Like what brought about the collapse of faith in the money system? But what does it mean here?

None of the famous Today interviewers asked.

Nor did they challenge an assertion that improved roads will get us out of the recession.

I thought the recession  was a product of loss of faith in money due to leveraging, not because the roads are so narrow they need leveraging.

Oh and the Post Office needs modernising. That'll be good, won't it. Well... it depends what modernising means. No one asked.

The story of my misfortunes 5

The first thing that happened was that all sorts of demands arrived via my solicitor while  "friends" passed on the information that she was still trying to think about what to do, after all this was a very serious matter and she had a duty to other women to protect them. Clear blackmail.
When I didn't respond, it went quiet for a while and then the police arrived and arrested me. They had a photograph of her covered with bruises. They were impressed by that.
They didn't tell me it was taken about a month after the attack.
My difficulty was that I didn't know where she had gone that night. One possibility was that she had gone to the man with whom she had hoped to live; and it seemed entirely possible to me that he had beaten her up. I knew that he was wearying of her. Most people did. I told her he would.
Later, at the trial that followed he said she had turned up and he wasn't best pleased because he did not want to be involved in anything any more.
That was one of her witnesses. The pekinese, asked to clarify an answer, shouted "Don't you call me a liar!"
Her doctor, when pressed, admitted that she had not actually carried out an examination and unfortunately couldn't find any notes; but she was sure that her report saying that MW was the victim of domestic violence was accurate.
The MW herself responded to questions with "How can you do this to me, as a woman" and then turned her back on the court and refused to speak.
Among the things she was declining to comment on were copies of correspondence between her and me which contradicted her evidence and a map of the house showing the impossibility of her account -- the police had not thought it necessary to visit the scene of the crime.
Before that, though, came my police interrogation. Off the record they virtually said they thought she was making it up. The sergeant explained that he couldn't be seen to be doubting a woman accusing a man and was greatly offended when I told him what I thought of him ethically for charging a  man he thought innocent. He didn't quite say "but what about my pension". Then they drove me home in case she was there and told me to take care.
CPS decided to prosecute and increased the charge to ABH, thereby guaranteeing a jury trial.
In the interrogation, they kept waving their photo of MW covered in bruises. I explained that I did not consider that to be  evidence against me and I am sure they were genuinely confused. "But look at the photo."
If her new man had hit her, he was hardly likely to say so. I was in trouble.
In fact, when the forensic scientist testified, he said that none of the injuries was serious and none inflicted by another; and that those which were not the kind of accidental injuries we all incur were self-inflicted. She seemed to have hurled herself against a vertical surface that night, he said; and indeed she had, as I had testified; and the rest she had done to herself a couple of weeks later.
No one had punched her in the stomach though she said I had. No one had karate chopped her, though she said I had.
And thus I was acquitted. An estimate of 50000 pounds cost to the public was made. She was not charged with perjury.
On the way to that situation I changed solicitors. The first ones had told me to plead guilty and that forensic evidence was not available. The police refused to release the tapes of my interview saying the law wouldnt let them. When I complained to the Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, he referred it to the local plods; and the local plods wrote to me "I advise you not to write aggressive letters to the police".... and then sent me the tapes.
The first item in the defence testimony was a playing of those tapes i.e. the tapes that had decided CPS to prosecute me were the first evidence offered of my innocence.
Perhaps the CPS were impressed by the photograph; they certainly fought tooth and nail to stop them being examined forensically.
When the police admitted how long it had taken them to take their photographs and were asked why they said "I don't know" and that seems to have been considered adequate.