Strangely Perfect

No Problem The towns of Workington and Cockermouth are now effectively isolated because all the bridges are down, washed away in the floods. However, they are ONLY bridges, and bridges can be made and rebuilt.  The problem is the lack of communications for the towns and surrounding villages, which affects everything, not least the provision [...]

What IS Going On? I’ve just come across an old post of mine in which I referred, briefly, to the Russian Pravda website, presumably a modern-day version of it’s communist paper past.  I say presumably because, as I already said, it’s more like National Enquirer…! On top of weird births and alien spaceships in the [...]

How Bad was Thatcher’s Recession compared to the Current Economic Slump? Q. Well, how would you find out, exactly? A. Surprisingly easily.  This graph here compares historical economic slumps with the current one, on a month by month basis.  It’s taken from the “National Institute of Economic and Social Research” (NIESR) website here.  Notionally, it’s [...]

Introduction Many years ago when I was living in France and during a prolonged period of French atomic weapon testing on the Moruroa atoll, the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in a New Zealand harbour. Initially, it was thought to be an accident. Now, as soon as this happened, I thought “who has [...]

Humphrey Hawksley in an article on today’s BBC News website has reported the (blindingly obvious, some might say) results of a 25-year American study into the effects of air pollution (specifically vehicle and industrial) on life expectancy. City air pollution ‘shortens life’ Basically, it’s bad! I live next to an A-class road, busy with holiday [...]

Death Search Four men, old enough and with enough experience of life to be able to look after themselves, have gone missing in Loch Awe.  Two have been found dead and the search is still on.    This of course is tragic, but I can well understand their situation. Colony Holiday When I was 16, [...]

Chinese Censorship: As part of the BBCs “take” on the international views on the new, 44th President of the United States, their China correspondent Michael Bristow has reported that his inauguration speech was censored in China. Apparently, the English version on the Xinghua News site is okay, but the Chinese version for the locals has [...]

Two news items this week display the different fortunes of different sorts of pirate. First we have a Pirate ‘washes ashore with cash’ from Monday when the Somali pirates en route home from collecting their ransom for the Sirius Star super-tanker capsized.  Most swam ashore without the loot, one kept the loot and drowned – [...]

What indeed? Today, we’ve had two (at least these are the ones I’ve spotted) news releases from the Department for Transport (DfT) that presage some changes in the future: Advisers urge fast action on speed limiters – FT Drivers ‘face health tests every decade’ – Guardian Now all we have to work out is, “What [...]

Truly this car is the pits. -and here’s how.. The engineers seem to have responded with the most short-term planning possible to a demand from the BMW marketing department to make the company look green now that sales of their monster cars are down 40%.  Some “ad” bloke has said “clean electricity, that’s the way [...]

This is not a rant comparing the US military against others for effectiveness.  It’s purely my observation of events and appearances surrounding the current (10 years!) piracy problem on the high seas. This is the homepage of the US 5th Fleet above. All clean and big and modern and powerful and heroic (Take My Breath [...]

Gary Glitter, former prince of glam-rock; Paul Gadd, convicted paedophile.  They’re one and the same. Now wait, recent events around Gadd-Glitter remind me of happenings a long time ago in Ancient Egypt…. Most folk have heard of King Tutankhamun, the boy-king with the gold death mask. Not so many know that his (probable) dad was [...]

The “news”, Phone taps ‘prove Georgia’s case’ that Georgia’s President Saakashvili has discovered phone tap evidence that “proves” he was trapped or lured into his Invasion of South Ossetia by the Russians would be more credible if it had come out at the beginning of August.  But really, I mean; even I, with no Eastern [...]

The latest in the long-running sage that the British Government is trying to spell out called: Why We Will Win The “We Are the Best People to Put All Your Information in an ID Card and Lose It” Competition. http://www.itworld.com/security/54342/uk-justice-agency-loses-45000-personal-records goes the story.  In a FOI release the Department of Justice has said it’s lost [...]