Cloud day

Further to my post of 27th April...

Click Neg persists in his delusion that the only way to save us all from something is to save himself.

In that he will  be successful. The humiliation which awaits him will not penetrate.

Frankie Holland says he'll change everything and the many cheer. Sour Cosy shows that he always could fake humility but just couldn't be arsed until he saw advantage in it.

The LABOURed sTORIES still insist they can interpret the runes of public opinion - "what the public is telling us is..."

And the BSkyB clowns at the cloud continue to provide a substandard service. It just threw me off the net for no apparent reason and then announced that my password is incorrect. It wasn't. I remember worrying it was insecure -- bastards. Well, it's changed to something much more complex. Much good may it do me. Every day it seems I waste time coping with the incompetence of their dunghead coders.

Which brings as us back to STORY I T policy which conflates writing a small spreadsheet and writing a profitable adventure game.

style is all

Interesting moment on R4 Today this morning. The journalist Matthew D'Ancona, described as  a friend of Boris Johnson, was speaking of the differences between David Cameron and Johnson.

He said "To say it is a difference of personality would be to understate it. It is a matter of style."

There you are then: personality as a subset of your style.

The elect

Well the electorate, some of it, has had its mutters and mumbles and the sold mouths have been on the radio -- and on the tv, I am sure; but what would I know of that? --  telling us what it means, sometimes in great detail. They are generally talking shit.
Harriet Harman wasn't so bad as she has been this morning.
Hague was jabbering about cutting the debt left by the dreadful labour government within seconds.
I went for a piss and let fly a few farts. That got rid of him.
And now we carry on.
A few corrupt MPs have suffered; but most survive, voting with the pre-pack.
One tells us we are as guilty as the banks for cooperating with the banks.
Now that...
I could condemn him, call for flogging and crucifixion; but let's take it as it stands; and say therefore all the MPs who have ever cooperated with the sales of arms or in encouraging corrupt regimes, including our own, are, as he says, consenting adults and guilty of complicity in terrible crimes.
Now we can talk about punishment

GM crops and evasion

Depressing item on Today regarding GM
They brought together an anti and a pro and didn't give them enough time
The pro found the anti tiresome and kept changing the question or point he was answering before giving his answer. He called the anti a naysayer and seemed in some ways to think that was a complete argument instead of an hominem attack, albeit mild.
Now in some ways not accepting a question can be excellent and admirable. Arthur Scargill used to be a master of not accepting the terms of the tyrannical question; but that is not the same as not accepting the terms of the question that you do not like because you cannot answer it without embarrassment.
At this point, the role of the chair becomes crucial.
Much as I am in favour of the BBC, it is a role they nearly always duck.
As here.
I was thinking deeply about something else entirely when this item was broadcast; and, as so often, have not retained the essential points verbatim. I usually can, or used to be able to; but as Customer Care evasion becomes more sophisticated -- and other factors occur to me -- I find it hard to retain dialogue designed to camouflage guilt and intention.
It was I remember to do with how beneficial GM could be; but the question concerned the likelihood that we do not know all the effects of genetic modification and so do not know fully how beneficial or detrimental the modifications are. This was not responded to and the chair timed them out. Thanks, not for nothing, but for something; but we don't know what.

The same thing had already happened with regard to the privatisation of hospitals. The CEO of one that's fallen into the sticky hands of an organisation fronting hedge funds came on and said that before he answered he'd just like to say --- and then answered a completely different question, an assertion actually, a straw person, he had authored himself.
This was challenged by the chair; but then the worm restated his own version of what their topic was -- in *his words, how to improve the hospital -- and that was not jumped on. He went on to say they were improving the hospital (without stating criteria of course) and so evaded the point on which he had been challenged.

Unlikely body parts

Recently I have noticed a couple, perhaps three, newspaper articles where the meaning of the sentence is probably the exact opposite of what the author intended. I meant to blog them and deplore the collapse of culture; but forgot and then lost the paper.

There was one last night from a journalist -- this is all The Guardian --  which spoke of what a voter said after the journalist had been campaigning for some time; but she, the journalist, attributed the campaign to the voter -- they just can't handle subjects of sentences over any verbal distance. I imagine, but do not know, that the response would be to say that we know what she means. And for that reason, that supposition, it gets it mentioned here; because that is the fashionable response.

But the reason for this blog is actually another kind of grammatical idiocy.

The same paper, The Grauniad, today speaks of debris from the big Japanese tsunami arriving on the coast of USA, under the headline UNLIKELY BODY PARTS WILL BE WASHED ASHORE

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...