My mental circuit breaker

I have a circuit breaker in my brain. It trips when I try and read thinks like this which plopped into the work mailbox:

The mid-year performance review provides an opportunity to reflect on the progress you have made in the first half of 2011 and to consider any adjustments you need to make in order to deliver against your full-year targets. Please take the time to actively reflect on whether your activities are completely aligned with our strategic goals and effective in delivering for clients. For those of you who are new to the business in 2011, please ensure that you discuss performance objectives with your Line Manager and clearly understand how your contribution will help us build for the future.

Honestly I can't read stuff like this without my brain shutting down - I figure it must be some sort of defence mechanism that stops me wanting to tear into tiny shreds people who use that particular brand of "... aligned with strategic goals for delivering to clients..." management speak.

My activities are completely aligned with making sure my office chair is at just the right height, that my morning sausage sandwich is at the right temperature and that I can sneak out the door at 5.20 most days; oh and making sure that my code doesn't fall over in a steaming heap of fail because I hate fixing live faults. Hope that's strategic enough for you Mr Management person who needs to get the "all my underlings did the utterly pointless mid year review that now has zero bearing on your compensation since you got rid of the bonuses for coding monkeys like me" box ticked.

Salus populi suprema est lex

It's Latin for "The safety of the people is the greatest law", a quotation from Cicero and a principle of justice since Roman times.

I noticed this quotation on a blog I follow, Guido Fawkes' blog as it happens (link over there on the left in the blogroll) whereby the normally sane Guido completely loses it over the Milly Dowler murder and calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, simultaneously piddling all over his "libertarian" credentials in the process.

Look it's clear to me that Levi Bellfield is a truly evil git with all the redeeming features of a rat on PCP and what he did was truly evil. However hard cases make bad law and our laws are based on meting out justice, not vengeance; if I may be allowed some more Latin¹ Dura lex sed lex

Much as our human sensibilities, outraged by what this individual has done, call out for his destruction it is some measure of our civilisation we no longer act on these impulses; that the judge in this case has imposed a whole of life tariff is to my mind sufficient much as my inner dragon would like to turn the breath weapon to "simmer" and slowly roast the fuck to death over a few days. We cannot, we must not ever allow the state to have the ability to kill any of its citizens for they cannot be trusted with that power. How many people died at the end of Albert Pierrepoint's rope whose convictions were subsequently found to be unsafe or which were clearly wrongly allowed to be executed to suit a politician who wanted to look "tough on crime"?

If we bring the death penalty back how many more Derek Bentleys will there be because the Home Secretary² doesn't want to be seen to be letting a nasty evil peedofil off because the Daily Mail will turn on him?



¹ All dragons are required to speak Latin. It's in the code of conduct right alongside to setting fire to estate agents and advertising creatives.

² Not the current one, obviously, as he is a wet as a ducks' underwear.

How about a "Just Sod Off" button?

This little gem popped into my mailbox the other day (you'll need to click on it to see it properly).



Quite clearly it's missing something, the "Look will you just sod off and leave me alone to do my job. That's what I come here for, I do the work and I get paid. I'm not here to "engage" with the organisation that's trying to look all responsible and cuddly in the community, I'm not here to tick some middle manager's "look I got my staff to support the official Banko Di Haggis charity" tick box for his next appraisal. I turn up, wrangle code and I piss off home; end of. Now bugger off out of my in-box" voting button.

And anyway you don't want to deprive the grumpy dragon of his morning coffee. No seriously, don't. I breathe fire.

Ring out the solstice bells

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. My little iPhone app says the sun comes up here at around 4.30 local time.

I am so pleased that I stopped being a Wiccan. Back in the day come the solstice I used to have to haul my arse out of the sack at three in the morning and stand on a hill in a park in South London with a bunch of other fellow numpties offering thanks to a large ball of burning hydrogen 150 million kilometers away.

Yeah like it cared... "Oh thanks for that guys. I do appreciate it that you like me fusing these atoms together and making all that light and heat. In fact I'm so happy I'll carry on doing it for another year."

Ah well, at least most of the folk were OK, some good times were had and we didn't fuck anyone's life up or tell you what to believe and if you didn't Epona would come round and leave horse-poop in your letterbox and you would be condemned in the afterlife to toil in Her underground carrot mines. We were deluded but harmless deluded, bit like the elf guy.

I still got up a stupid o' clock mind you. The dogs needed walking.

Failbook - You can check out any time you like...

... but you can never leave.



Rather amusingly this was presented to me after I had given my reason for deleting my Failbook account as "privacy concerns".

Lies, Damned Lies and the Central Limit Theorem

Children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to regularly get drunk themselves, a survey of young teenagers has suggested.

Poor parental supervision also raises the likelihood of teenage drinking, said the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

And in other news Pope Ratzinger confirms the catechism of the Catholic faith and a bear in the woods said "I say, do you mind, I'm having a crap".

That must have been the easiest piece of research in the universe. I hope to The Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUH) that none of my taxes went to fund this shite.

Also we have this gem from the same "report"

In a survey of 5,700 children aged 13 to 16, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, researchers found one in five claimed to have been drunk by the time they were 14.

Yes and I recall back in the 70's when the moral panic of the day was "video nasties" that some asshat came up with a survey that showed 50% of kids under 16 had seen a splattery gore movie. Well that was until another team did a similar survey and put in a whole bunch of fake but plausible titles like "I spit on your zombie apocalypse" and, surprise, a whole load of kids claimed to have seen those too.

"Yeah I'm 13 and I've been drunk loads and shagged seven girls" - no you haven't you're just bigging yourself up you nauseating adolescent, now get back to your WiiBox360 won't you.

Whilst the rest of the adult world prepares for yet more taxes on booze because we have to "protect the little kiddies"

Slow Motion Train Wrecks

The first of these happened between 5 and 6 pm yesterday when Labour leader Ed Milliband for some utterly unfathomable reason decided to get "hip" and "down" with the youth and host a "Ask Ed Milliband" session on microblogging site Twitter (follow me! go on, there's a little button over there on the left). Now if you're not on Twitter you might not know that generally the posts on there tend to lean more to the left than the right so do doubt some fresh faced SpAd^* in Millipede's office thought that this would be a wizard wheeze for Red Ed and he'd get a nice smooth ride.

Wrong. Very Very Wrong.

What followed was everyone, nicely anonymous, proceeded to fire of a metric fuckton of generally witty put-down questions poking holes in the pretentious prat who was no doubt expecting fawning questions along the lines of "Why are you so brilliant and the nasty Tories so rotten at everything?" Generally speaking we really don't like politicians, especially when they make such obvious faux "engage with the people" stunts as this so what he got was more along these lines:

• "If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill?"
• "Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll."
• "Was Brutus an honourable man? Discuss."
• "If you fell through a crack in the universe would anyone notice?"
• "Lenin or Trotsky?"

And my favourite, which I retweeted "How would you solve the Kobayashi Maru scenario"

After answering six or seven questions and managing to lie on one of them (he claimed to have not voted for Labours' planned 90 day detention whereas he supported it fully) he buggered off, probably to fire the SpAd who came up with the idea in the first place.

And speaking of firing brings me nicely along to the second train wreck of the evening. my guilty pleasure^** of the schadenfreude which is "The Apprentice". Now if you've never watched this show what happens is that they pick twelve or so of the most loathsome "young enterpeneurs" they could corrall into a cage and then arm them with knives and the one with the most sticking out of their back at the end of the programme is declared the loser and is ritually humiliated by a man who gave the world shitty cheap lousy sounding HiFi systems and the em@ailer - a device so utterly pointless you really do wonder how nobody actually said "Er Alan... about this souped up telephone, you do realise that it's a pile of crocodile shit don't you?" to him at any point.

Anyway last nights episode was poetry in motion as one of the more loathsome charcoal-grey suited cretins, the one they are bigging up into the series bad-guy steered his team to spectacular defeat by not only creating a magazine more offensive and patronising than the rival's team mid 90's eaa "Loaded" rip off but proceeded to cock up the "sell ad space" bit of the task by failing to do that most basic of business activities, negotiating on the price. "He's gone," says Mrs Dragon as he gets hauled into the boardroom and poked by Lordsugar, "He has to go, his mag idea, his design, he lost the sale"

"Not a chance, he's here to the interview stage, he's this season's Tre Azam, the series baddy, they'll keep him in"

And they did. The Apprentice is a pure entertainment show, they don't even make a pretence at it being fair and you know damned well the winner has been selected before the cameras begin to roll on episode one.

Oh and the real kicker this year is that Lordsugar (I preferred Siralan) has had enough of employing the winning numpty and this year is giving the winner £250,000 to start their own business. But even accounting for the fact that £250,000 isn't actually a whole load of money these days to start any sort of business that needs any kind of capital spend up front it's not all cold, hard cash because the quarter million is in "cash and value" and I'm guessing the "value" is several hours of Lordsugars time (charged at 500 quid an hour) so the winner can benefit from his massive business brain.

The winner might want to take a long hard look at that e-m@ailer before he or she uses that "value" part of the deal


* Special Adviser: basically some young spotty gopher who one day wants to become a real politician and make shitloads of money off mine and your backs. They should all be rounded up and shot.

** Along with the Eurovision Song Contest, riding bareback and collecting 80's era digital synthesizers.

This blog really is being written by a dragon

There seems to be a big fuss in the "Blogosphere" at the moment that for some reason has leaked out into the mainstream media for some unknown reason. Basically what's happened is that somebody was blogging pretending to be a lesbian in Syria protesting at the government and it turns out that it was really some bloke in Scotland making it all up. And now someone who ran a lesbian website with the truly awful name "LezGetReal" has been exposed as a straight bloke and not really "Paula Brooks" who wore comfortable shoes and really liked watching tennis. Here's al-ja-beeba on the subject

Anyway everyone seems to be getting their panties in a bunch about this, how it's "deceitful" and "harmful" and other bad things ending in "ul". Er guys, this is the Interwebs here? What on earth made you think that everything on it has to be true? I think the problem here is that a lot of people using Teh Intertubes have become conditioned to think that it's all real. Nothing could be further from the truth; I'll bet that a good proportion of websites and blogs are at the very least "embellished" versions of reality if not out and out fictions (call them "exercises in creative writing" if you like). The (in)famous website 4Chan has a banner over it's famous /b/ section which reads "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact." Maybe that should flash up on everybody's browsers when they open them up.

However I can assure you that I really am a very well disguised small green dragon and I do live behind the water-pipes in Norfolk. Honest. Would I lie to you?

A fiver in the collecting tin

There's been quite a lot about foreign aid in the news recently thanks to CallMeDave's commitment to ring-fence 0.7% of GDP on dishing out handouts to, well, basically anyone it seems including China who are building themselves an aircraft carrier when we have just had to scrap ours and borrow one from the Frenchies because we're broke and rather "amusingly" handing money hand over fist to India who are happy to pocket development aid and spend it on a manned space programme.

Now I've nothing against space exploration but when that nice Mr Osborne comes along and rapes my wallet every month I'd like to think that any space exploration is being done employing British engineers, scientists and astronauts and not a Mr Patel from the Mumbai Space Lab whilst, not 5km from Mr Patel's gaff, some baby is starving to death in a gutter.

And don't even get me started on Africa.

So what to do. The problem here is, I feel, money, Or rather "cash". It's easy to stick your hand in your pocket and shove a fiver into a collection tin - makes you feel a bit better about yourself and that you're "doing something" and not really caring that maybe up to 80% of that fiver has gone on "admin" or "paying the people who run the charity a big fat salary and renting those prime offices in the middle of London and of course those Herman Miller Aeron chairs don't buy themselves darling", for that is what "admin" actually means. So it is with governments. CallMeDave and every other fuckwit politico can look all big and generous on the world stage, a great philanthropist (with other people's money though - ours) and he really could not give a crap that 80% of this is going to end up in President Mwombawomba's "I need a new jet because the Lear-45 is so last year" fund and Mrs Ouagadougou and her four kids are still going to be living in the same mud hut with no sanitation or running water in five years from now.

No. What we should send is not money, but people. We have a lot of those, some of them quite clever and well educated. Instead of sending out a metric fuckton of cash why not send out accountants, bankers and policemen to help sort out corruption and the money supply, send some more bankers (see they are useful for something) to teach the locals how to set up credit unions and microfinance, teachers to raise literacy and educate especially women (something proven to reduce poverty), geologists and engineers to show the locals how to drill for water and run an electricity grid that works more than 4 hours a day.

Sure it costs money but look at all those kids coming out of university with all those newfound skills and a shedload of debt. How about HM Gov. saying "OK you go out to Durkadurkastan for two years, we pay off your student loan and tuition fees and pay you minimum wage for the duration - now go help build a sewage plant and teach the locals how to run it."

That way I see it, everyone wins, the folk of Durkadurkastan get clean water and learn how to run the infrastructure so they can make more, our raw graduates get shedloads of practical experience they can use when they come back and CallMeDave still gets to strut around the world stage like some superannuated peacock. The only people who lose out are the President Mwombawombas of the world which is no bad thing. Hey we even get to spread some of our culture around the world - well if it's OK for the rest of the world to bring their culture here then it must be fine for that traffic to flow the other way, right?

But it's all a bit harder than metaphorically sticking your hand in your wallet and stuffing a fiver in the tin. So it'll never happen.

Thirsty

Well down here behind the water pipes in Norfolk I can't help noticing that there's not so much water in said pipes at the moment and al-ja-beeba tells me this morning that we are officially in drought.

Well yes it has been dry, the paddocks look like shite (not got any horses on them at the moment which is lucky or they would be going hungry) and all my lettuce and rocket keeps bolting to seed but the cool stuff is still coming out of the taps for now.

Apparently the practical upshot of this "official drought" is that farmers won't be able to abstract as much water out of the rivers to water crops. Interestingly that doesn't seem to be much of a problem for the farmers around where the dragon's lair is as they aren't watering their crops that much. Normally the diesel pumps would be running 24/7 this time of year if they were growing their normal potato crop but everyone seems to have switched to wheat and its not hard to see why:


The price of wheat for forward delivery (that's essentially what a "future" is - a contract to deliver wheat at a set price at a future date) had doubled in the past year so it's natural that they're going to grow what makes the most money.

Shame though - there were always a few maris pipers left over after the harvest that if you wanted to you'd never need to buy a potato again.

Doing your thinking for you

So I haven't written much recently. So what, neither has Shakespeare.

Well I've been thinking about getting back into blogging recently (and was kind of goaded into it by my fellow blogger Steve over at Natural Yoghurt). Mainly I took some time out as, well, I used to just grump about the government and general fuckwittery of my fellow inhabitants of planet Earth and a change of government last year kind of felt like a breath of fresh air. Well that air is getting rather stale and this week it took on a decided whiff of "hang on, doesn't this smell like the same bullshit we had before".

First up we have the latest "oh no, evil peeeedofils! Little kiddywinks are dressing up in "suggestive" clothing and being sexualised" - whatever the feck sexualised means. Of course the answer here is not to look at why there is a demand for a padded bikini top for an eight year old - because all the shops are doing is responding to that demand from their customers - but of course reach for the ban hammer, the first, last and only weapon of the lazy, mob-ruled politician.

Maybe if we took a good luck at what our culture has become, little more than panem et circenses which teaches us all you need to be a success is to kick a pig's bladder around or perform some "raunchy" dance routine and win a talent contest (that's rigged anyway, see here) we might see why kids want to look "cool" and "sexy" because that's all that seems to count. Education, manners, learning to be a decent and engaged citizen? Nah, I'm gonna win celebrity come X factor's got talent and get rich and shit, innit.

And fresh from pandering to this along comes the British Board of Film Classification, a bunch of middle class cunt-trumpets who apparently have this amazing insight into the processes in my brain and have determined that if I watch a certain film by the name of "Human Centipede II" I will be so mentally damaged that I'll start going around and stitching human beings together with Mrs Dracunculus' Toshiba sewing machine ¹. OK now having glanced at the plot of this film which seems to involve masturbating with sandpaper, coprophilia and rape with fencing materials I can tell you here and now that I won't be "damaged" at all by this piece of crap because I will under no circumstances be watching it as I would like to retain the contents of my stomach but surely that, as an adult, is my decision and not that of some faceless committee meeting in a room in London somewhere. I've no problem with them placing "ratings" on films, saying "This film contains explicit scenes of X, Y, Z and Justin Beiber and is therefore only suitable for adults and throwing in the bin" so parents can make an informed decision on what their kids see but a flat out "you can't see this, we think it will warp your tiny little minds you ordinary people" is as offensive as the movie they just banned.

Meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss.



¹ Which as I have utterly failed to figure out how it works on no less than three occasions would mean some very lumpy and misshapen aberrations walking around Norfolk - not that anyone would notice.