As I watched the Revd Jeremiah Wright’s Obama-busting comments to the Washington Press Club I couldn’t help thinking of one of my all-time favourite films, Bulworth.
It was this quote from the Revd that especially rang a bell:
“Politicians say what they say and do what they do because of electability.”
Reminds me of Jay Bulworth in a moment of truth telling an audience that he makes promises at election time then forgets about people in between. Then there is this classic quote:
Audience Member: Are you sayin’ the Democratic Party don’t care about the African-American community?
Bulworth: Isn’t that OBVIOUS? You got half your kids are out of work and the other half are in jail. Do you see ANY Democrat doing anything about it? Certainly not me! So what’re you gonna do, vote Republican? Come on! Come on, you’re not gonna vote Republican! Let’s call a spade a spade!
A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”
I leave to your imagination the subsequent comments, sourced directly from the ‘Carry-On Lexicon of Double Entendres’…
A scene in Victoria Street today reminded me of the huge gap that still exists between the socially included and excluded in London.
On one side of the road, a guy is eating scraps from the bin outside Macdonalds (I guess he is one of the many people who stay close to Westminster Cathedral as a source of help and sympathy).
On the other side, I can look up to see through the smart new glass frontage into the clean and stylish environment, complete with exercise balls, of a modern corporate office. At the window, several of the staff are looking down and gossiping about the activities of the man in the bin.
I received my leaflet for the election of the Mayor of London this morning.
The pages from the BNP made me nervous.
Apparently, they want to London to be for ‘real Londoners’ so it can go back to the joyous place it ‘used to be’ (presumably in the days when even the criminals were ‘decent’ folks like the Krays).
Where would that leave me as a recent arrival from Sheffield? Would the BNP put me in second place behind the Afro-Caribbeans in my area who are real Londoners having been born and brought up here?
Perhaps not. Their advert also includes a quote from an attractive young Irish student called Samantha. (And there was me thinking that the BNP were a bunch of stupid, evil, racist thugs, but how can they be when their supporters include someone who is female, good-looking, a student and foreign?)
Samantha tells me the BNP ‘are the only party that cares about the indigenous peoples of these islands’.
Now, I’m thoroughly confused. Who comes first the ‘indigenous peoples’ or the ‘real Londoners’?
Of course, silly me. I am supposed to add the two together and understand that only ‘indigenous peoples’ can be ‘real Londoners’.
Oh, what subtle political messaging! What skill in inference and innuendo! What complete and utter cr*p…
At work the other day I was asked why I was not using the MacBook that I had started taking in to the office a few months back. I was instead using the Lenovo X61s ThinkPad that work supplies.
I answered, truthfully, that it was the convenience of the ThinkPad in the work context that made me pick it up, but that I switch back to the MacBook at home every evening.
The ThinkPad is very small and light and has all the standard work apps on it (many of which are Windows only). I had figured out how to do everything on the MacBook (including using the excellent VMWare Fusion) when I had an older, slower ThinkPad but stepped back from this when given a new one.
I realised on saying this that I do also like making the switch from work to home. It is like getting out of a suit and into jeans, which is the first thing I do when I walk in the door of an evening.
So, really when I pick up my MacBook and start to tap away at the keys, this is the computational equivalent of ‘darling, just let me just slip into something more comfortable….’
I have signed up to Twitter to see how this is being used by PM Gordon Brown. Having found DowningStreet and asked to ‘follow’ it, I received this response:
DowningStreet is now following you on Twitter!
Hi, ricallan.
DowningStreet (DowningStreet) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out DowningStreet’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/DowningStreet
Best,
Twitter
–
Turn off these emails at: http://twitter.com/account/notifications
I hadn’t quite anticipated the following being two-way. I’m sure that Downing Street will not actively read my every move, or those of the other 1300 odd people following them, but it makes you think….
Sometimes there is a story of a tragic happening around the world that hits you because it is in a place that is personally significant. The news today of 5 British students being killed in a bus crash between Quito and Puerto Lopez in Ecuador has such a meaning for me.
Back in 1987-8, I spent around a year in Salango, the next village along from Puerto Lopez, excavating archaeological sites. As you might imagine, this was quite a formative experience for me, as these students must have been hoping it would also be for them.
I remember well the bus journeys down from the Andes to the coast as I took that route several times. This somehow makes the loss feel more personal though I have no connection with the group.
Words as ever fail on such an occasion and you can only find some time to feel for their families and friends.
Yes, folks, it’s RateMyCop.com. The team used freedom of information requests to get the names of police officers in local forces across the US. And those who receive ’services’ from said officers are now invited to give feedback on their experiences.
There are a lot of very positive comments such as this:
Well spoken and well behaved durring entire incident.
Seemed more concerned about our well being than just getting the job done.
(tempting to think this was from his mum)
And others that are less complimentary, and also appear to reflect a culture where libel law is not so strict, such as this:
This officer has lied under oath and has deliberately caused undo stress on many people.
If you have a few minutes to spare, it’s worth a read.
Like the baggage handling system at T5, the Tax Credits system had been thoroughly tested. But the testing had focussed on the technical aspects of the system. These worked fine so all was thought good to go.
But a system is only as fast as the speed of the slowest component. Where there is a bottleneck anywhere then this can bring the whole thing down. Fast conveyor belts and super-efficient software can’t perform as expected if the people needed to man the system are held up because of car parking or security check-in problems.
This may become a recurrent theme in new system deployments. That the emphasis in testing is on the difficult bits of the system, typically the details of the technology, while assumptions are made about the supposedly less complex aspects, typically those involving people.
When these assumptions prove incorrect then all the state-of-the-art technology in the world won’t help, as BA and thousands of people in Heathrow are finding to their cost this week.
There are few references to the status of the tag in Internet Explorer (it is clearly not recognised at present by my IE) though I did find this reference to its exclusion from IE7.
So, at present, ‘prefetch’ seems to be a Firefox only tag, and even then only used by certain sites such as Google.
You can clean up any cookies that are delivered as a result of its use - thanks for the comments to my last post with tips on this - but will still leave a trail in system logs to suggest you visited the sites that were prefetched.
This system log record is not something you can delete at user level. As the law moves towards requiring the retention of such logs over long periods of time for use in investigations then we all have an interest in what is being stored there.
For example, an investigation could be launched into a particular website hosting terrorism-related material. ISP logs would be trawled for the IP addresses of everyone who accessed that website. If you had visited another website that retrieved the suspect website home page using a prefetch tag then you would appear in the logs even though you had never consciously chosen to go to the site.
And given that links may not be obvious in a page then you may be unaware of having been anywhere near a site that now appears in the traffic logs.
For example, this article includes a hidden link to the Labour party website in the following character
: I have set the prefetch flag so anyone reading this article using Firefox will now appear to have looked at the Labour Party website. This should not ordinarily be a problem, but what if the link was to the BNP site, and the access was from a work network which checked logs and reported on this?
