Q: "Hal - where the f*** have you been?" A: "Failing to Kill Slugs".

Hello again after another (more than) 2 week layoff... so what have I been doing that's so important that I couldn't post for all that time?

failing with a beer trap.


I made the trap for the slugs that are really laying into the cabbages we are trying to grow over the winter. Filled a plastic container with some Quilmes Argentinian lager (it was all I had left over from the BBQ we had last week), and sunk it into the soil next to the cabbage patch. Result after 48 hours: a beer trap with two wasps, three beetles, one worm, and no slugs. The bastards are too clever for me. Luckily I have some other alternatives without resorting to chemicals - a border of crushed eggshells (easily available from most garden centres or you could indeed make your own if you eat enough eggs) works well. Note to self: use bitter, instead of lager, in the beer trap in future. Maybe these slugs are CAMRA members.

Never mind... courgettes and squashes are now doing very well and the slugs don't seem to go for them. More excitement from the garden to come in the autumn...

I'd like to say that was all I'd done for the last two weeks. But it would be a lie. I somehow like the idea of someone spending 2 weeks laying a beer trap and then failing miserably. The Lottery will probably give me money to make a film about it with some ex footballers.

Topical blog of the day: quilmes.blogspot.com

(Expect at least one of these with each post from now on. I am trying to find the most genuinely lame and useless blogs out there - and it seems to be surprisingly easy.)

Apologies for this extended interruption to the service

Been no post here for almost 2 weeks which I'm well aware of.

This is mainly because I am going on holiday next week and I have so much crap to sort out before that. But I will make regular posts next week and beyond... you can count on that.

Also... it's a one man show from now on. I killed off Seth and Barney. I put an axe through their heads. I've got... tapes of some of it. Harold... I killed a lot of people. Perhaps, like "Horselover Fat" in Philip K Dick's Valis, they never really existed at all. Perhaps they were honest Tory MPs.

Never mind. Giroscope is now just Hal Berstram... in time for its 1st birthday.

For rock'n'roll, dope and frowning in the streets.

Piece and frakkin'. BEE LEAVE - don't sting me now.

Cheers all. Until the next shot of coherence, give yourself a laugh and try my new technique; rather than pushing 'next blog' to go to a random blog on Blogger, try inputting a well-know (or little known?) word into the browser, followed by 'blogspot.com'.

Some ones I tried today (with varying degrees of success):
Eno
Heavy Metal
Heavy Rock
Namlook
New Labour
blogspot.blogspot
I Like It (possibly the weirdest one)
Space 1999 (weak)
Blakes Seven (possibly even weaker)
Cress (enthusiastic)

Try it... please report back if you find anything interesting.

The Proms are great... shame about some of the audience

Went along to The Proms last week - although it's mainly rock'n'roll that is in the spotlight whenever music is discussed on giroscope, I'm partial to a bit of the old classical (most of it, anyway). Prom 18 was the one we went to - Delius's Song of Summer, Tippett's Triple Concerto and Vaughan Williams's Symphony No 5. All the pieces were great and well performed. The Delius and Vaughan Williams pieces were pastoral and quite approachable (an avant garde composer and contemporary of VW once dismissed him as 'cowpat music' but I do think that's very unfair). The Tippett was a much more '20th century' sounding piece - dissonant, challenging, not taking it lying down. As the reviews on the BBC site for this Prom show, some people in the audience found the juxtaposition of two different styles of composer too challenging to take. For example, here's a review by James Dixon:

First, Delius. A magical piece, which should by rights be a Proms staple. Then Tippett, and the problems began. I don't know if new Proms controller Roger Wright reads this page, or if anyone in contact with him does, but if so can I tactfully suggest such sharply juxtaposed programming has long outstayed its welcome. I have tolerated some pretty bizarre clashes in the past - Maderna and Tchaikovsky, Nancarrow and Bernstein - but this really was the worst yet. I am nearing 40. I have had time to work out roughly what I do and do not like. Having struggled with Tippett in the past, I decided to give him one last go, but like fellow critic 'Steve', I found the only pleasure came from the realisation I need never suffer this arid chaos again. I believe the majority of the audience felt likewise. The applause spoke of admiration for the soloists' technical accomplishment, but little else. Faces of bemused disappointment predominated in the bars during the interval. Genuinely catholic (schizophrenic?) musical personalities in the Rattle-Kenyon mode are very rare, and this policy of 'you can have your Beethoven when you've eaten up your nice Birtwistle' is patronizing in the extreme.

What's "patronizing in the extreme" is the suggestion that the Proms audience is too bone-headed to appreciate more than one style of classical composition on the same night. Why don't people like Mr Dixon and 'fellow critic Steve' go home and listen to Classic FM or their Haydn box sets if they don't want to hear something innovative? Who says Birtwhistle is the thing you have to sit through in order to listen to Beethoven? For me, it would probably be the other way round. Birtwhistle is certainly not an easy listen, but I'd rather stick my head in the washing machine than listen to an early Beethoven symphony. I would also advance the thesis that the washing machine has somewhat more musical merit than early Beethoven. And where the hell were these 'bemused faces in the bars during the interval'? I think it was only people who'd looked at the prices - £3.90 for a can of draughtflow Guiness ferchrissakes! Now that is the real outrage.

Four days earlier, the European premiere of Brett Dean's Vexation and Devotions, paired with Beethoven's 7th Symphony, attracted similar criticism on the BBC site. This is a fantastic piece which uses recorded messages from call centre phone lines - "your call is very important to us... please hold" juxtaposed with some harmonically challenging orchestral and choral lines to make a statement about the sheer insanity of modern living. The most amusing review I found wasn't even about the music - it was about the way the orchestra and conductor dressed:

Proms 13 and 14.Musicians' dress is not unimportant in the presentation of music at public performances. Sadly, the dreary black shirt and black tie of the BBC Symphony Orchestra detracted from their superb perfomance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, - a situation made worse by the conductor, (David Robertson) with his lack of even a black tie to his casual black shirt. If his orchestra is made to dress properly in white shirt and tie, why can't he?

The Haydn concert the very next day saw the choir, orchestra and soloists superbly dressed in white tie for men, and black dresses for ladies, with the lady soloist in a beautiful concert gown, with a sparkling necklace. Oh dear, what did the conductor,(Sir Roger Norrington) wear? A crumpled black jacket buttoned up to the neck - (no tie of course) - which he immediately tore open three minutes into the concert. Most concert-goers expect a dress code befitting the grandeur of Classical music. Why do conductors arrogantly scorn the dress code of their musicians? What are they trying to tell us, and why should they be allowed to do so? While I'm at it, please put the BBC's magnificent Symphony Orchestra back again into formal evening dress with white tie and tails?

I give up, I really do. The Proms - Great concerts pretty much every time, but can someone do something about some of the audience?

In praise of Paul Giamatti

Feeling a bit guilty about not posting anything for 10 days so let's go for two in one night. Irregular but prolific...

I always dig 'in praise of...' in The Guardian. This is a paragraph they have at the bottom of the comment column where the leader writer offers a good word in support of something - or someone - they think is worthy of such positive analysis. Partly I dig it because one of my friends writes some of them, and he did perhaps the greatest ever 'in praise of' - on the live Guilty Pleasures concert that BBC London DJ Sean Rowley put together at the Hackney Empire back in April.

Anyway, if I was in the lucky (unlucky?) position of having to write an 'in praise of', it would have to be the actor Paul Giamatti. I've watched one and a half films with him in the lead role this weekend - American Splendor, which a mate of mine was kind enough to lend me on DVD, and Sideways, which is currently on Film4, and he is absolutely brilliant in both of them, in completely different roles. This is the kind of versatility that all actors probably should be in command of, but sadly very few are. It's kind of weird that I've never noticed Giamatti in any movie before this - even though he's been in loads - but then I'm extremely unobservant, so that's probably it.

American Splendor deserves a blog post all of its own - and indeed there is a strong argument for setting up a 'reviews' site to allow me to write at greater length (and in a more structured manner) about some of the key films, records etc of the current and previous eras. The site would be very old skool - the sort of thing that was springing up on the web in 1995/96. If I get round to it it'll be a great project. But you should give Splendor a shot if you're looking for a genuinely off-beat and original film which is nonetheless very accessible. Fantastic stuff.

Sideways, based on the 60% or so of it that I've seen, is interesting because it's the first film I've seen which offers a detailed treatment of what it's like to be a wine buff. It's not a film about wine but the mechanics of wine tasting play a key role. It's obviously a key influence on that BBC documentary that featured Oz Clarke (the Paul Daniels of the wine world) and the guy from Top Gear - May? [can't remember his first name. Sorry but whenever I think about Top Gear I feel a strong urge to go out and purchase a rifle just to kill or maim Jeremy Clarkson. Then I remember that sadly, this isn't the USA.] The Clarke/May documentary was surprisingly good, mainly because Clarke was an unbelievable prat and May just wanted to drink some bloody wine. He couldn't stand Clarke's bullshit and he was right. If May was in charge of Top Gear rather than Clarkson and they made it a programme about what the best wine for drink-driving was, it might be worth watching. Just.

Anyway, Sideways has given me the idea for a nice little British movie which I'm sure I could get Lottery funding for. The plot would be quite similar to Sideways except that instead of California, we're in East Anglia, and instead of visiting vineyards, we're going to breweries and beer festivals. Best of all I already know about half a dozen people who would be perfectly cast for a film like this as they would essentially be playing themselves. How do I apply for Lottery money for such a project?

Blowing back on politicians and dope

Another stage in the ongoing saga over politicians admitting they smoked dope at university a couple of days back... Jacqui Smith, Alistair Darling, even the notorious Opus Dei plant Ruth Kelly had been at it once upon a time.

Contrary to popular belief it was possible to go to uni in the 80s/90s and not smoke gear... based on my experience it just depended who you hung out with really. If you were with a reasonably relaxed crowd who weren't either people who never left the bar (the darts team?), postgrad South Africans who were never off the rugby pitch, or the square science students who used to pack their own lunch box to take to the lab every morning, there was normally a plentiful supply of drugs, both soft and indeed hard, available.

Even if you hung out with the smokers you could 'just...say...no' in the Patrick Bateman sense. One of my mates at uni - let's call him Thomas Jerome Newton on account of his David Bowie fixation - simply refused 'a toke' for 3 years straight. He just didn't want to know, and in retrospect, I salute his courage and indefagitibility. For TJN, it simply wasn't a part of The Good Life in the way that hard drinking, or sugar free Tab Clear (a well known soft drink of the time) was.

So it wasn't inevitable to end up with a spliff in your hand, but I must say it was extremely enjoyable. Which is why all these politicians saying "I smoked it... it was wrong... I regret it... I am a terminally boring asshole who would probably lose an election to ITV Digital's 'Monkey' [sadly missed!] under a fair electoral system" are taking out of their bottom.

Why can't we have a sensible conversation about cannabis use in this country (or most countries?) Why is the government looking into reclassifying dope from class C to class B?

We're told it's because super-skunk, or whatever hydroponic concoction is avaiable on the street, is 40 times stronger than the stuff these ministers were smoking in the 70s and 80s. Personally I can well believe that prolonged exposure to the really heavy stuff could be hazardous to mental health. But if alcohol was a banned substance (and I'm sure some ministers would love to ban it), we'd be having exactly the same conversation. There would be super-strength spirits, illegally distilled in labs, doing the rounds. They'd be several times stronger than the homebrew cider that ministers were drinking in the 70s and 80s, and we'd be looking to reclassify alcohol to class B...

The long and the short of it is that these bozos are too thick to realise that it is the illegality of marijuana which causes super-strength derivatives to be doing the rounds. If the stuff was licensed and produced on a commercial, quality-controlled basis, reasonably priced, no-one would bother with skunk (except maybe as a home growing project.) We'd be better off because we wouldn't have to live in fear of being charged by the police for smoking a plant which can be grown wild in any British garden. The government would secure a wodge of tax revenue. And the consumer would be guaranteed a quality product.

I just wish some politicians would have the guts to campaign for full legalisation. There may be some doing that in the Lib Dems or maybe on the libertarian right of the Tory party - I don't follow the debate closely enough to know - but we never seem to hear from them when the matter is discussed in the news.

With the debate over drugs as dumb and ludicrous as it is now, is it any wonder 40% of the population don't bother to vote?

F*** the Queen

So the BBC edited some footage of a documentary in the wrong order to make it look like the Queen walked out of a photo session after she was asked to remove her tiara.

Who gives a damn? Documentaries are always edited in post-production. In any case whichever way the footage was edited, her majesty comes across as a complete cow - totally out of touch with reality. But what do we expect from someone who never had to do anything to get where they are, but is just there by accident of birth? The idea that the controller of BBC One should resign over this is totally ridiculous. If the BBC had any real balls it would tell the Queen to f*** off. But of course since being neutered in the wake of the Hutton Report, with the resignation of Greg Dyke, the only Director General in decades to fight openly on behalf of BBC workers and BBC viewers, it's been a shadow of its former self.

If the Queen had a shred of honesty and integrity she would resign immediately - as would anyone in a position authority who hasn't been democratically elected to it. Imagine it - a "Cut the Crap" day. All these unelected SOBs - monarchs, CEOs, religious leaders, Gordon Brown? All forced to ratify their positions via the popular vote.

Many people criticise the monarchy on the grounds that it's an overhang from a medieval, undemocratic age - which is true - but then we only live in a democratic age in a very limited sense. We get the opportunity to vote for bland corporate-friendly leaders every four or five years, local politicians who are indistinguishable from each other, and MEPs we never hear anything from. Meanwhile many of the most important decisions are taken by unelected international bodies like the WTO and the European Commission, and multinational corporations that no-one ever voted for. Sounds rather feudal to me. Maybe an absolute monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship is the most conducive form of government for capitalism. The Chinese government certainly thinks so.

I do not recognise the Queen as the legitimate head of state here, and if I was asked to attend a function at the Palace (very unlikely) I would write back saying so. I don't want to meet these people and I don't want to associate with them. They can piss off as far as I'm concerned. If only the BBC had the courage to use this incident to start a real debate on the future of the monarchy...

Spin That Wheel - Blairites Get Real

Partly this is a post title I've been wanting to use for ages...

...but the thought has been increasingly occurring to me - isn't it great that we don't have Tony Blair on the box every day now?

It will obviously take several months before we can know whether Brown is really going to be able to win the next election - initial evidence suggests he can, but then initial evidence suggests that estate agents are trustworthy people who will Do The Right Thing by you. The poll bounce is interesting as it's something that was predicted to happen if Brown had managed to replace Blair at the height of party discontent over the post-Iraq fallout, in late 2003, but Brown didn't want to split the Labour party (the charitable interpretation), or he bottled it (my interpretation).

Since 2005, though, most of the opinion polling has suggested that there would be no 'Brown bounce' - in fact, if anything, Brown would go further behind.

This has proved completely wrong. Many of you will be sensible and wise enough not to take any notice of opinion polls - you will remember 1992, a few old stagers may even remember 1970. But for the weak-willed, obsessive and candy-starved among us they are bread and butter, the political equivalent of London Lite free newspaper. And it is highly amusing that Labour has gone 3-4 points in front on some polls.

BBC Political Research Editor David Cowling says in the aforelinked article:

I have yet to find anything Labour did between January and June this year that satisfactorily explains, to me at least, the eight point improvement in their standing on the NHS.

Er... Tony Blair getting the hell out of No 10 maybe?

It would show real balls, or indeed semi-recklessness, were Brown to exploit this poll bounce by going for an autumn 2007 election, with the Tories still having no real policy platform to speak of besides a commitment not to abolish grammar schools but they might build a new one in areas which already have them if people really really really want it. Or something...

Strangely enough, I think that going to the country early - by Spring 2008 - would be a good option for Brown. Because if the poll lead were to continue into, say, autumn 2008, it's quite possible Cameron might face a backroom coup of the type that did for Iain Duncan Smith back in '03. And if he did it's probable a hard-right challenger like David Davis could take over - and he might be harder to beat than Dave. Yes, I know the Tories failed twice on a hard-right agenda with Hague and then Howard, but it could be third time lucky. There may just be enough nutters worried about immigration/high taxation/overweaning government to vote in a Tory on a hard right extremist ticket'. Call it 'the Sarkozy Effect'. Or, perhaps we remember Britain, 1979? With enough nutters worried about immigration/high taxation/overweaning govt? As a friend's dad once said about Star Trek, "it could 'appen".

Just to get back to the title of this post as I've gone on long enough... there's been a refreshing lack of Blairite voices saying how bad a job Brown is doing, "we told you you'd miss Tony when he's gone", etc. Maybe "we're all Brownites now", as they say. But this is just some advice for the Blairites I know are hiding out there someplace (in the form of a 'free verse' poem:)

'spin that wheel - blaiRIGHTS get real'

by Seth B Ramal (with royalties donated to Technotronic).

**New for 6 July: battlestarred, URLed remix version** after worries about the impact of senseless profanities on pensioners, and remembering the Nixon tapes.

the wheel hath spun,
and yer man hath frakked the frak off
(as Malcolm Tucker would say.)

(as Nathan Barley would say:)
"YER DEAD YER F***ING DEAD..."
so keep your orifice backed up
or
jump-shift to blair MK2 - dave ca"MORON".
(which is where you sensible, friendly people should have been in the first place).

[Ah, that feels better now.]

TB->GB: that Blake's Seven Series Three feeling

Today, when looking at Gordon Brown's first speech as PM, I had that Blake's Seven Series 3 feeling.

You know, the one where one of the two main characters has left the stage and suddenly it's a one man show.

Blair, like Blake, started off with the best of intentions, but many people died as a result of his actions. He believed it was worthwhile, in the pursuit of freedom and the war against terror (represented in the series by 'The Federation').

Meanwhile, Brown as Avon... brilliant, yet strangely aloof, ambitious but not a natural leader. However, Avon got better scripted lines than most of what I've heard from Brown... so far, at any rate.

David Miliband would make a good Orac.

Was Iain Duncan Smith Space Commander Travis?

And who is Servalan? Maybe Patricia Hewitt?

A more serious post on Brown when I don't have to work 16 hours a day to finish this bloody report I'm writing for work. That'll be in about two weeks, then...

(p.s. this post won't have made any sense to those of you not acquainted with Blake's Seven. In which case I can only recommend that you do get acquainted with it. In the meantime, "indulge me"...)

"Classic Britannia"... another classic

I end up watching TV more Friday evenings than I'd like to admit, simply because the pubs in London are so damn busy on Friday nights that it's the last time you'd want to go out for a beer, and people we know locally in Essex never seem to be around on Fridays. Usually it's absolute cack, but BBC4 will often throw something exciting into the mix, and so it was with Classic Britannia. This was the first in a series of three hour-long programmes that look at classical music in Britain between 1945 and the present day. This one covered the period up to the early 60s and featured a lot of Benjamin Britten (whose work I know to some extent), William Walton (who I was clueless about), the tail end of Ralph Vaughn Williams's career (a Benny Voller favourite), and early works by Harrison Birtwhistle and Peter Maxwell Davies (reassuringly avant garde.) The surviving composers were all interviewed specially for the programme and this was combined with a lot of good archive footage including Britten's War Requiem (which I was lucky enough to pick up as a vinyl box set from a charity shop in Clacton last year), at its premiere in Coventry Cathedral in 1964. Anyway the programme was brilliant and follows hot on the heels of Jazz Britannia, Soul Britannia and Folk Britannia. All we need now is Barber Shop Britannia and we're done.

Seriously though, BBC4 is an oasis of quality programming in a sea of cack. Many people don't like the licence fee but I think just this channel on its own makes it worthwhile. Perhaps I'm an awful elitist? Who gives a f***. Benny V, you need to watch this program as soon as you can (I'm sure it'll be repeated. Nice Pink Floyd post by the way son. So what did happen to the Post War Dream?


See y'all down The Proms next month.

Bemard Manning dead?

...it's a fucking disgrace.

I don't believe it for a second... it's been made up in a newsroom... by sick bastards.

Shove the paper back in their face and tell them to f*** off.


Posted by guest reporter Ted Maul, who is doing his best Hal impersonation.

Hal goes AWOL, but the garden's doing great....

Barney with news on why the posts are so damn infrequent at the moment...

Greetings all, and if you're reading this as regularly as I think you are, I hope you're enjoying 2008. We've been a bit slack at giroscope of late... formula posts every week or so, a touch of the boxtickers about it all.

Partly it's because Hal has disappeared off the scene completely and we're worried about him. Since a rather random post on the topic of widescreen TV on 3rd June, Hal has not been seen on the web apart from a comment on a dilate.choonz post today. If the truth be told, Hal's never been happy with the role of a sports reporter, and yearns for the grit of the political coal-face once again. Anyway if you're reading this, Hal, do get in touch. We miss you...

So in the meantime what's Barney been up to? Gardening, mostly. We've got a good collection of stuff growing in the garden now: turnips, kohl-rabi, courgettes, squashes, onions, broad beans, beetroot, sweetcorn... all very exciting. I would have taken some pictures tonight but the heavens opened and the plants weren't in their best light so that's a project for the weekend. In the meantime, I've found a lot of good allotment blogs out there; I like the ones with the really bland titles like Dave's Allotment and Mike's Allotment best, as they seem to have the most exciting content. Suddenly, pictures of (for example) squashes being planted out start to look quite exciting when you're trying to do it yourself. Or maybe it's just me...

I must reserve a special mention for the compost heap which is going great. Got a very good mix of 'greens', 'browns' and 'activators' (nettle leaves), and the bin itself, which we made out of 4 pallets we got from some very kind neighbours who were doing their house up, is just brilliant. I'll post some pics of that as well. There are some good composting blogs out there - this one looks good, for example. But what we really need is a mechanism which takes old, abandoned blogs full of verbal rubbish and converts them into useful words and phrases you can insert into your blog to pep it up a bit. I've not seen such a device yet but I live in hope. Anyone got any ideas?

"one"... everybody do the Chivers Chase

Join the fight to track down an elusive rail boss...


The Essex Chronicle is probably not the most exciting local paper in the country (in fact it's amazing how, in many people's eyes, putting the adjective 'local' in front of anything is enough to elicit sniggers and damnation in equal amounts. Think about it... local paper, local radio, local government, local shop for local people, local loop unbundling... you know you don't like any of 'em. A sad and sorry state of affairs...)

But the Chronicle is fairly good at pointing out the deficiencies with the ludicrously named 'one' railway... every months or so the crapness of the rail service provokes a headline. This time it was 'one hell of a train service' which is very similar to the giroscope post title from the last time I talked about this topic. I don't come back to it that often because it's too easy a target and nothing every really changes - the trains are always crowded, there aren't enough at peak times, they get slower and slower as more 'long term speed restrictions' are added in, and the fare increase is always more than CPI. The bastards just get more and more smug and unreachable. However my interest has been piqued by the sheer unreachability of new 'one' managing director Andrew Chivers.

Chivers took up his post in January and apparently agreed to meet a reporter from the Chronicle to discuss the inadequacies of the service. However, after this initial agreement in principle, requests for an interview date were never answered. At the start of April, the Chronicle's assistant editor wrote to Chivers personally requesting an interview. Several weeks later Chivers's PA called to say she was unaware of any previous interview requests but said it would be fine if a Chronicle reporter called to arrange an interview. He left 'numerous messages on her answerphone' over the next few weeks, none of which were returned. As the Chronicle reports,

more than six months after Mr Chivers took over, we are still chasing that elusive appointment.

Whilst the story is highly amusing, and an indictment of 'one', the aforementioned journalist and assistant editorChronicle seem to be unimaginative lame-asses - or maybe they're just on a tight budget. 'one''s address is at:

Olivers Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1HQ

[These guys might not be able to run a train service but they can sure grab a fancy postcode, eh?]

All the reporters have to do is get on a train up to London (admittedly it's quite expensive and I don't know if regional journalism pays at all well) and take a newscrew from the local BBC or Anglia News with them (there is very rarely anything interesting on the local news here - for example, the headline one day was a piece about 'rats on the roundabout' at Ditchingam in Norfolk - I kid you not). Then do the most basic imitation of Michael Moore: go to reception, ask to speak to Andrew Chivers, and if he isn't there, blockade the entrance/exit for the day until the guy has to go home. (Best to turn up in the afternoon probably). For extra man/womanpower they could take some of the long suffering commuters with them. I'd certainly turn up. And voila! Instant headline story. I'm going to write to Watchdog with the story about Mr Chivers's reticence in any case - it will be highly amusing if it gets on TV.

I will also try writing to Chivers, although it's unlikely to do any good. I wrote to a previous managing director, Tim Clarke, a couple of years back. All I got was an identikit response from some poor bastard working in the 'customer services' (ahem) department which managed to be both patronising and incoherent at the same time. The only employee there who has ever responded to queries personally is Theo Steel, who was the 'Projects Director' (what on earth does he do I wonder?) but he is now retiring. I wish him all the best and it's probably a good time to leave. I wish I could... (i.e. stop commuting), and maybe I will. Just walk away from the f***er... I've got a dream about buying some land (like Gerry Rafferty said on Baker Street. But prices weren't as high relative to incomes in 1978, y'know.)

Anyway let's bombard this wanker Chivers with audio-visual assaults. Maybe it's time to do a Michael Moore on the bastard. I might take matters into my own capable hands. As Morrissey (and King Crimson) once said, "We'll let you know"...

p.s. I would have linked to the Essex Chronicle website for this story, but their write up of it was so pithy that I couldn't be bothered. Their site is bloody crap. Obviously they have no money for a decent web designer as well as train tickets!

p.s.2 - In the course of my research for this post I found an informative and entertaining blog about being annoyed about trains here.

p.s.3 I can't afford one of them yet and I would be crap at the games even if I could.

Respect going out to people who can't use their widescreen TV properly

because Hal likes a laugh at the expense of people who are techno-illiterate...

Not being able to face a post on the Labour deputy leadership campaign due to its extreme dullness (oh, for the excitement of the 1981 campaign! Why can't Hilary Benn be more like Tony?) I had a choice between writing about recent gardening work I've been undertaking or a post that caught my eye on IDWID. This is the blog that the guy who does the Jammer's Reviews TV sci-fi reviews site does in his spare time (or maybe he does Jammer's Reviews in his spare time. But anyway they are complementary.) The post was about people who get the aspect ratio wrong on their widescreen TVs and display 'full screen' (4:3 aspect ratio) programmes using the full 16:9 ratio screen, which means everybody looks very fat. Anyway the post is a hilarious and cutting exposé of the widening gap between the capabilities of modern TV equipment and the audience's capacity to use them.

It's not all the audience's fault, however. Manufacturers and broadcasters have to shoulder some of the blame for the fact that there are a load of people watching 4:3 programmes in widescreen. One of the pins on a SCART cable (the standard audio-visual connector in Europe until high-definition came along) is designed to carry a signal which 'switches' the TV between 4:3 mode and 16:9 mode. This works OK provided that:

1. the TV manufacturer has wired the SCART input to recognise the signal;
2. the DVD/set-top box manufacturer has wired the SCART output to produce the signal;
3. [for TV broadcasts] provided the broadcaster includes the signal to switch the aspect ratio as part of the programme broadcast data.

This is the set of conditions that needs to hold for the consumer to be able to enjoy the right aspect ratio on all TV programmes even if he/she is completely clueless. In practice, there's no consistency as to which manufacturers/broadcasters observe these standards. And so we're left with a situation where a lot of people are watching distorted fullscreen pictures on a widescreen telly.

I hate SCART anyway. The idea of a single, two way A/V connector seems good in principle but the manufacturers often don't implement it properly, a good quality SCART cable costs about fifty quid, and they fall out all the time. Part of the reason we had to get a new TV was that the SCART connectors stopped working on our previous one which was only 6 years old. OK, so it was an el cheapo 4:3 CRT set but so what? You shouldn't have to change your TV because the bloody input socket has stopped working! It's like Neil Young said - a "piece of crap." Anyway, that's all for now on the subject of people who can't use their TV, which I have pretty much exhausted - for now. Next stop'll probably be a gardening post from Barney Ruddle, 2007's answer to The Lawnmower Man.

Cornwall report... Ruddle hits the farm cider... maybe it's time to buy a B&B?

Back after a 12 day break in Cornwall... 'twas strangely nice to be gone, with no internet access and not writing one of these posts every few days. I'll get back into it though... nothing worse than a blog with no entries for several weeks, or indeed months. Actually there are worse things than that... one of them is the episode of Newsnight I've just seen which featured all the candidates for the deputy leadership contest. Well, Jon Cruddas was pretty good. As was, perhaps surprisingly, Harriet Harman.

But I can't be bothered to talk about that now... maybe tomorrow. You can watch the deputy leadership debate on Newsnight here if you really want to.

2 things struck me in particular about Cornwall. One was how good farm cider is. Just the basic stuff you can get in a plastic bottle in some of the more adventurous off licences... or even from the farm itself if they're selling. I found "Hayes Farm Cider" particularly impressive, at around 7.4% abv.

The other was how nice it would be run a B&B down there. I've checked out the financial logistics of this and at current housing prices down there it's impossible unless we were to win the premium bonds jackpot or something. But to be able to say f*** off to travelling into work on a crowded tin box for 2 hours a day and the insanity of the nutters in London trying to shove a free paper in your face every five metres... that would be a real killer.

We're also getting quite into growing our own vegetables at the giroscope house in deepest Essex. Broad beans are doing particularly well at the moment and we are getting some kohl-rabi action as well. I'll probably post some pictures up later in the week. It would be good to be able to do this on a slightly bigger scale but the garden ain't that big and so we are rather limited here. But a little self-sufficiency is certainly better than none at all...

Anyway, enough escapist whimsy for one post-holiday comedown... time to get back in that f***ing tin box again and take my punishment like a clone. According to the guy in Star Wars Episode II the clones are very impressive, so I guess that's something. Now get on with your work.

Taking a break from all your worries (incorporating blog review #20 or thereabouts...)

The plugged-in amongst you will spot that the title of this post is stolen from an episode from the last series of Battlestar which I haven't managed to see yet because it's on Murdochvision and no bloody way am I giving that bastard any of my wonga. EVER. I only ever read the Times if it's given to me free on a GNER train. And even then, it sucks. I read the Sun sometimes at my wife's nan's house, but then they have all the quality papers - the Sun, the Mirror, the Mail, the Princess Diana memorial circular.

But Murdoch-bashing is too easy and satisfying to make good copy... Anyway, the long and short of it is that the editors are off on holiday to Cornwall for a week and a bit, so there may well be no giroscope until May 29. Having said that, we'll have a laptop with us and I am assured that the wi-fi scene has percolated into the extreme south-west, so who knows? There could still be text-based adventure for you next week, fellow shipmates. In the meantime, can I thoroughly endorse this week's randomly chosen blog, Rainbow Pills.

"Rainbow Pils" with just one 'l' would be more promising (imagine: the wacky adventures of a barman at Yates's Wine Lodge with access to the beer lines and several litres of industrial dye... "that pint looks green!" Nah mate, it's just the weird lighting we got in here.) Instead we get a lot of detail about IKEA and a lot of stuff about not being able to sleep. All I can say is that if blogging apparatus had been around when I was 15 or whatever I'd have been far more shit than this. Such is life. See ya soon!

John McDonnell = R5D4

"Well come on red, let's go!!"




[splat...]


Before they were hunted into hiding and near-extinction in the dark days of the New Labour empire, the fearless Jedi warriors of the Campaign Group controlled Labour politics. John McDonnell wanted to be their Obi-Wan Kenobi, returning from obscurity to mount a brave challenge to Gordon Brown's Darth Vader.

But instead, he secured only 29 nominations from his fellow Labour MPs - 16 short of the number required to get on the ballot - and he became the R5D4 of the Labour leadership campaign, shorting out with a bad motivator at the first hurdle.

I was going to carry this Star Wars - British politics analogy a lot further, but after noting the curious resemblance between Hazel Blears and Salacious Crumb, I was too distressed to continue...













Incidentally, in the course of research for this post, I discovered that R5D4 has his own fan site. There are some wonderful, kind souls on the internet, doing sterling work like this every day, catering for the hard luck cases of the golden age of film sci-fi. Respect goin' out to ya.

This Is a Formica Table... Brown Is Its Colour

(with apologies to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me fans. But we're going to have a lot of Gordon Brown post titles over the next six weeks and I thought I'd get the rubbish ones out of the way first.)

It's true... Gordon Brown did look a bit like a formica table when he delivered his opening shot in the Labour leadership 'campaign' on Friday. He was hiding behind the autocue and it was the classic slightly stilted Brown performance.

And thank hell it was stilted... something real for a change. We've had 10 years of a 'charismatic' and 'inspirational' Prime Minister, and look where it got us. Cynical, manipulated, betrayed and maybe damaged beyond repair. Brown was stressing substance over style, which is the same thing poor old Ming Campbell tries to do every week, but Brown somehow seems to do it with a lot more gravitas. And he is the low side of 85, which helps.

Ironically, of course, there was next to no concrete policy in that Friday speech. There have been a few ideas since then: 'eco-towns' (anybody got a definition of one of those?) and giving Parliament the right to decide whether to go to war or not (although of course they did vote in favour of Iraq, so it wouldn't have made any difference in that case.) It's still very thin pickings at the moment. But then we are only 5 days into the 'campaign' so best to wait and see.

I use the inverted commas round 'campaign' deliberately as it looks likely that John McDonnell, the Hugo Chavez of Hayes & Harlington (and coming from me that's a compliment), is not gonna get the 45 nominations from Labour MPs he needs to stand. Which is a shame, but it was always going to be a tough call to convert the present Parliamentary Labour Party to the socialist cause. You almost feel McDonnell would have a better chance mounting a leadership bid against Dave Cameron; certainly Ming Campbell's post is there for the taking. I think he should resign the Labour whip and convert to the Green Party (along with the 40 or so backers he will probably be able to get), which would deprive Labour of a majority. Then it would be time for a 'rainbow coalition' of Tories, Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Greens (plus whatever Northern Irish support they could muster), which would make life very interesting. And probably annoy Brown intensely!

Fortunately, it looks like Jon Cruddas is over the hump for the deputy leadership contest. Cruddas isn't quite as "out there" as McDonnell; talking 70s prog bands for a moment, if McDonnell is Magma - so prog he has his own language - then Cruddas is more like Supertramp; he can take it "outside" once in a while but he knows when to reel it back in, and crucially, he knows how to write a political hookline. Basically, JC's shtick is: the Labour party is dying on its feet and we need to haul some serious ass to get it back into a healthy state again. Which is a very powerful message, with resonance for a considerably broader spectrum than just the left. I don't know if Jon Cruddas can win, but he can certainly galvanise the contest and ask all the right questions.

Anyway enough vapid speculation for tonight - except to suggest that Jon Cruddas uses Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit" as his campaign song. and "McDonnell Cruddas", besides being a great name for a folk-rock band, sounds a bit like McDonnell-Douglas, the old American aerospace company. You know it makes sense...

Watch out for Tony's last stand

Reports suggest that Tony Blair will announce a timetable for his resignation tomorrow at his constituency.

Personally I don't believe what "reports suggest" that often anymore, so I'm not hopeful. Possible options for what might happen tomorrow:

1. Tony declares martial law, on the grounds that Gordon isn't up to the job. John Birt is brought in as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Or maybe Peter Mandelson will be brought back from Brussels.
   
2. Tony stays on as the puppet head of a national government with Dave Cameron as the right hand man (I floated this idea back in September)
3. Tony walks into the spaceship and ascends to the heavens, a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
   
4. Tony walks on water and ascends to heaven, a la "The Second Coming".
5. It is revealed that for the past 24 years Tony has been an automaton controlled by Ming Campbell, who is actually "Ming the Merciless" from Flash Gordon.
6. Someone blows up a secret transmitter and Tony and most of the New Labour cabinet are revealed to be hideous aliens (a la They Live).
   
7. Someone blows up Tony.
   
8. Tony announces he's decided to accept the vacant manager's job at Newcastle United.
9. It is revealed that in a secret deal just before leaving office, Tony has sold the entire country to a private equity group headquartered in Dubai. The top 100 millionaires in the country are all given $2 billion of stock options each and told to work very hard. The rest of us are put on minimum wage and told to work even harder, or shipped out to Belarus if we complain. The CBI issues a statement saying "it's good for employment."
   

What's it gonna be then, Tony? My money's on something a bit violent - 6 or 7, or 1 if it turns nasty. Note the caption in the BBC article linked to above:

'Mr Blair will fire starting gun in leadership contest'

That suggests Tony will be the source of the violence. Maybe we should add:

10. Tony shoots Gordon (but how if he's not up in Sedgefield as well?) turns and grins smugly at the camera, says "OK, whatcha gonna do now, ya baz?"

Love it.

Where's Guido? Day One

Readers of the Guido Fawkes blog may have been following his series Where's Gordon? which followed the whereabouts (or otherwise) of Mr Brown through the recent General Election campaign and beyond.

Sadly, however, a surf to www.order-order.com as of 8pm, 9 May, reveals:

Not Found

Error 404

Have the New Labour web police got the bugger at last? Let's hope it's just a temporary outage. In the meantime you'll have to content yourself with Guido Fawkes 2.0.

Update @ 9pm: Guido's back. But he was down for about an hour, possibly more. I wonder what happened?

Reflections on various polls

Not my best post title, but it's (reasonably) late and I'm severely lacking energy.

News has just come in that Sarkozy has just won the French presidential election. It may well turn out to be a moment similar to the election of Thatcher in 1979 in the UK, or Reagan in 1980 in the States, with similarly calamitous consequences. Then again the guy might just be a complete hick who fails to accomplish anything and is voted out at the first possible opportunity. His general demeanour reminds me of Jose Mourinho, which can't be a good thing at any time. It's too early to say yet - more on this one as it pans out. A shame about Segolene Royal, who seemed OK. But then we seem to be in a nasty, vicious phase in international politics where 'seeming OK' is the easiest way to lose an election. How else to explain how a small-minded bastard like John Howard in Australia, for example, can win about 4 times in a row?

Meanwhile, the post-mortem from the local elections for Labour continues. It's hilarious to hear Tony Blair going on the radio and saying it wasn't that bad a result. In huge swathes of England it was atrocious. For example, in my neck of the woods in Braintree the Tories went from 27 councillors to 42 out of a total of 60. I've no particular liking for the Conservatives - they are, as Hunter S Thompson said about the Republicans, "cheap greedy killers" - but Gordon Brown had better hope this is a 'kick Tony Blair out the door' result, a big mid-term protest, and once the electoral cycle swings round to 2009, things will improve. It's not clear that'll happen, though. I can't see that the economy's going to be doing much better 2 years from now and it might well be doing worse. All the polls asking how people will vote when Brown takes over from Blair show a shift away from Labour, not towards. And there seem to be very few 'big ideas' in the pipeline short of stopping the crazy dismantling of key public services in the name of 'reform'. Actually, just doing that - stopping Tony Blair's crazy sabotage programme - might be enough to win next time. That, plus the fact the electoral system is ridiculously biased against the Tories.

Of course the interesting thing is that who you vote for in local elections seems to make very little difference in terms of how the locality is run. A key case in point: fortnightly bin collections to encourage recycling. The Daily Mail is up in arms about this - as with everything else. Fair enough - in a well-functioning democracy, one might think that at election time, one party (or parties) would be saying "let's have fortnightly bin collections and charge you less council tax" and another party (or parties) would be saying "let's have weekly bin collections and charge you more". What you find instead is that there is no coherent pattern at all in terms of which councils have introduced fortnightly bin collections, which parties are backing them and which are pledging to reintroduce weekly ones. The Mail likes to blame fortnightly collections on Labour but Braintree council was already run by the Tories (with independent support) when they were introduced! All the election literature which came round (and only 2 parties bothered to, or could afford to, produce any) concentrated completely on national policies with no mention of local policy. I couldn't name a single local issue where I knew that the Tories in Braintree had an identifiably different policy from Labour - and I actually take the trouble to read this kind of stuff (most of the time). Is it any wonder people can't be bothered to vote except as far as it shows two fingers to Tony Blair?