The Long Arm

We hear that an English teenager was visited at his parental home by the rozzers on the basis that he'd been very rude to Barak Obama in an email he had sent in a fit of drunkenness.

As we understand it, and the story is mainly one that comes from the youth in question, he didn't make any threats - he simply disagreed in a particularly Anglo-Saxon way. And I'm sure many of us are guilty of drunk-mailing. I know I am. It is the nature of the result that disturbs. And this is merely another example of a trend that is, frankly, dangerous.

The result being that one of the US security agencies - probably the FBI - having intercepted the mail, which I'm sure would have been flagged like a battleship at a coronation, then 'requested' that the UK authorities take action - that this 'request' was routed via the Met (most likely Special Branch or Anti-Terrorism) to the local bobbies, who then had to go round and castigate said hung-over spotty youth (m'lud).

Common sense prevailed - they left him without so much as a caution, but apparently DID take a photograph (why?) and left him with the thought that he was probably never going to be allowed to travel to the US again. Of course, this might have been a joke. Or it might have been an unwise remark based on certain knowledge. Given the nature of the Patriot Act, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Land of the Free has taken umbrage.

Hands up anyone who'd like to see Barak repeal this piece of discriminatory nonsense?

Hands up anyone who'd like to see the UK police stop acting on orders from Quantico?

(BTW, I have to add that I speak as one who discovered his phone was being tapped by MI5 shortly after 9/11)

The French Unveiled

The latest news from our Paris correspondent is that the upper house of the French parliament has also approved the legislation that makes wearing a face veil illegal.

To many of us, this must all seem rather inexplicable. Apparently, a woman found in public wearing a garment that covers the face will face (har har) a fine. And a man found to be forcing a woman to do so will also face the wrath of the law.

There are, of course, imbecilities in this. Covering up your face is illegal. The government defines what clothing you can and can't wear. But only if you're a woman. What if you were a man wearing a face veil? I don't know how many cross-dressing Islamic traditionalists exist, but surely there is a loophole here. How comfortable will it be for French police to stop and fine women in the streets for choosing to uphold their traditions and beliefs?

Oh, for sure, there will be many Muslim women who are expected to wear veils by their significant others. And by their male-dominated community values too. But what we seem to have here is a piece of painfully discriminatory legislation designed to combat.... discrimination? Well, maybe, but that argument has been weakly put. In truth, this is all about integration French-style.

We hear that word applied here on the same issues. We want immigrants to integrate. What that actually means is entirely open to interpretation, but in the UK we seem to feel, nutters excepted, that this means mutual respect. So we're not so bothered if a woman wants to maintain their traditional garb and religious views, but we are bothered if they never learn English, or are found to be treated as slaves in their community. And we understand that anyone can wear pretty much what they want, just as they can say pretty much what they want, inside a broad limit of decency. By and large, we seem in the UK to be willing to enjoy the rainbow effect that such immigration brings. Just so long as there aren't very many of them.

In France, the interpretation of liberty, egality and fraternity is somewhat different. Looking at what happened to the North Africans is a good viewpoint. The idea is that anyone can come to France (if they're allowed), but once there, it is expected that any cultural differences will be abandoned in favour of La Belle France, on the philosophical basis that France, embodied by those three words and a republican constitution, is a place of 'egal': "people should be treated as equals on certain dimensions, such as religiously, politically, economically, socially, or culturally..." (Wiki). And that translates as: 'we won't let you be different'.

This has already backfired spectacularly - just look at the Paris Banlieue. You can't let people from utterly different traditions and cultures come and live in your place and expect them to be exactly the same as someone from Nantes (or expect the same from them in contribution). The end result was that these people were disadvantaged from the start. And hence the riots.

It is evident that the French have learned nothing. Or perhaps it is the reactionary knee jerk of a society under tremendous pressure to change. As Joseph Maila of the French Foreign Ministry said 'To hide behind the veil is to barricade oneself against society.'

Right. So you're legally not allowed to be antisocial?

What makes me laugh is that the French Constitutional Council, which does all the oversight for legislation, has repeatedly said that it will almost certainly have to strike down the bill as unconstitutional.

Idiots.

How Do I Scan?

Hello.

Today, I'm going to burble about three completely different things in a way that is like 'stream of consciousness' but not sufficiently for me to want to use what has now become a terrible cliche... Everyone is emitting SOC these days - the papers say so; so does the TV; it enters into casual conversation ('Would you like a drink?' 'No thanks - I just put one out' 'My, that's very stream-of-consciousness' 'Erm... sorry, I wasn't listening'). Russell Brand is said to be a SOC comic. I think he's actually just a prurient arsehole who has 'arrived' at a time when everyone who is anyone is wearing the Emperor's New Clothes.

Are we becoming consciousness-incontinent? Obviously, to paraphrase your GP, we need to get out of it a bit more. Or maybe just shut up. Yet here I am...

So, today I had an MRI scan.

It was jolly interesting, too. All in the name of research, I hasten to add - some chap at Glasgow University wants to find out if loonies' brains light up differently to squares' brains when subjected to the same stimuli.

Consequently, I spent an hour pushing the same button over and over while stuck in a helmet not unlike Richard Chamberlain's in The Man in the Iron Mask, lying in a very narrow tube and having extremely loud, Frankenstein-like noises made by a bloody enormous electro-magnet. Encouragingly, I was told that I was also surrounded by LOADS of liquid nitrogen, which explained why the place was so fecking cold.

In the end, and bizarrely, I nearly fell asleep. The technician greeted me with the news that (a) he always falls asleep inside the thing and (b) (very tiredly) I do, indeed, have a brain.

He was so convinced of the latter that he let me have a look at myself, and a very odd specimen I was too, with my spherical eyeballs sitting on stalks looking like they weren't attached to much at all. It was, I concluded, a bizarre and amazing experience and I vaguely considered that maybe the NHS should charge people to have a go for fun. I recommend it.

With a mighty leap - ebay. Or is it Ebay? Or eBay? Bugger it, I hate this playing about with the rules.

Ebay has put its prices up again, and, staggeringly, they are trying to make out that this is a price CUT!

Once upon a time, ebay was the world's greatest online car boot sale. That was the whole idea. Ever since then, the company has been ceaseless in its mission to push out the hobbyists and make the place an Internet High Street.

The latest wheeze involves cutting insertion fees for a listing by 33% (for most of us, from 15p to 10p - by the way, these reductions mean that it is proportionately much cheaper to have a high starting bid, which is supposed to be unwelcome). The flip side is that they are increasing their commission on sales from 5% to 7.5%, which means that anyone who doesn't operate a shop, basically, is going to pay loads more for every sale.

The jolly anchorites have the gall to advertise this as a price cut because they've brought out a discount scheme where you can get from 20 to 40% off your commission charges. How do you qualify? By being a high volume seller of course!

And so another great idea bites the dust - watch as everyone but the sellers of CDs, edible underwear and office equipment drifts away to find something else to do. Like going to a car boot sale maybe. Anyone who wants to compete with ebay, now is your time, people!

So, the Department of Work and Pensions then.

I've had quite a bit to do with these guys over the past year and a half, as a recipient of state aid, and while I can say that claiming benefit has never been fun, it has now been reduced to some kind of (I don't want to say it... ooooh...) Kafka-esque (bugger) farce.

There are Jobcentres and benefit offices - but the latter also call themselves Jobcentres... but you can't go in them. You can go in the former, but they can't deal with your claim because they aren't allowed to. And they aren't allowed to talk to the benefit office either... but they are nevertheless the place where you have to sign on, go for interviews and what not. But not if you want to make a new claim. No. In that event you have to phone up a special number and speak to a call centre, who put you through the whole application process over the phone... and you are encouraged to do this in public, at the Jobcentre.... but all they actually do is (a) tell you if the computer says 'no' and (b) send you a form, which carries all the wrong details, for you to give to the Jobcentre, who then ask you all the same questions again... and then send it to the benefit office because it's not up to them... who then ask you the same questions... who call you to be interviewed at the Jobcentre by someone who says they are your case worker, but who can't answer any questions because that's the job of the benefit office... who take the traditional bloody ages to do anything, and then don't tell you what they've done.

One of the main reasons why none of this works, asides from the normal organisational lunacy involved, is that Government ministers have been unable to stop fiddling with the system (in the same way as we now have a shambolic education system thanks to a couple of generations of non-stop tinkering for tinkerings sake) and won't put in the funding to support their brave new initiatives.

If HMG really wants to reduce the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants, I strongly suggest that they spend some money on letting DWP staff do their jobs. My local friendly IB Adviser has a caseload of nearly 100 claimants and is so over-worked she can't service them (that means 'work on getting them off benefit'). If you look around the offices of any Jobcentre these days, what you will see is a bunch of desperate people, and they are all the staff members.

Which is why I was so pleased to hear that Caroline Flint MP, having just moved on from the DWP, is keen to try out some of her great ideas from her former role on public housing - like getting people to work for their homes. Asides from the moral issues, how in ****'s name does she think this will work?

I, for one, am getting sick and tired of junior politicians using their postings to trumpet ridiculous schemes in order to get themselves noticed. Once upon a time, civil servants were able to squash these before any damage was done. Now that the CS is merely the politicians' whipping boy, we are all suffering the results, across the board.

It doesn't really matter what shade of voting belief you hold - the fact is we are drowning in unnecessary law and regulation, much of it badly composed and often actually illegal.

NB: Check out how many times the present administration has broken the law and ignored court rulings.

Have You Seen the Metal Man, the Metal Man, the Metal Man...

Some photos on Flikr (I'm so with-it) took me back a few years, to the time I visited Tramore in Waterford County, Ireland.

My friend and I were kinda circumnavigating the Republic in an effort to sell nylon bushes to engineering companies (hot stuff). Actually, to be honest, Patrick was doing the selling. I mostly just drank Guinness and smoked. Nevertheless, we both conspired to enjoy one of the funniest trips ever.

First of all there was the bizarreness of Patrick being of solid English stock, yet having been conceived in the hotel at the end of the Dingle Peninsula, and needing to visit the spot. On a gorgeous day, we crunched badly shelled crab sandwiches in the public bar and I worried about whether he was going to insist on seeing the actual bed.

But I digress.

We went to Waterford, and then to a B+B in Tramore, just along the road and smelling of slurry. And right nearby, on the cliff edge overlooking the wild Tramore Bay, were these three enormous stone pillars looking like decapitated lighthouses. There was a couple more across the other side, miles away. Odder still, on top of one of our three, there seemed to be an equally huge Toby Jug of a Victorian sailor, pointing out to sea. I cannot overstate quite how bizarre a sight this presented. We were utterly nonplussed.



We shortly discovered that these 60 feet high pillars represented a local take on shipping warnings - they identify the notoriously dangerous Tramore Bay, while the gaily painted monster rounds the message off. Keep away.

The Metal Man dates back to 1823, is about 14 feet high, is made of bronze and wears something of a jaunty expression for a portent of doom. Maybe it's his paint job that keeps him happy.

Up the hill a little way stands an equally lonely-looking pub with the unlikely name 'Rocketts of the Metal Man'. Perversely, this turned out to be not only seriously popular, but also just as bizarre. A large and empty bar, with a great sea view, girded out half as El Ranchero, and half as community hall, completely hid from view one of the most popular restaurants in all Ireland, as you could only reach the glorified dinner hut by leaving the pub by the back door and walking over a courtyard. Three choices - roast chicken, spare ribs or pigs trotters. We played safe and enjoyed an outstanding roast dinner for very little expense, while spectating the looks on stranger's faces as they were presented with half a pig's rib cage, boiled grey and served with cabbage. I'm sure it was very nice. And the trotters seemed popular too, but see above for appearance. Not for us.

It seems from a web search that the bloke on the pole hasn't changed one bit, but the pub has been gentrified, which is a great shame. It just looks like everywhere else in the brochures now.

Arcade Company Uses Strong-Arm Tactics

You couldn't invent it...

Updated: 7:19 p.m. ET Aug. 21, 2007

TOKYO - Lose a game of chess to a computer, and you could bruise your ego. Lose an arm-wrestling match to a Japanese arcade machine, and you could break your arm. Distributor Atlus Co. said Tuesday it will remove all 150 "Arm Spirit" arm wrestling machines from Japanese arcades after three players broke their arms grappling with the machine's mechanized appendage.

"The machine isn't that strong, much less so than a muscular man. Even women should be able to beat it," said Atlus spokeswoman Ayano Sakiyama, calling the recall "a precaution."

"We think that maybe some players get overexcited and twist their arms in an unnatural way," she said. The company was investigating the incidents and checking the machines for any signs of malfunction.

Players of "Arm Spirit" advance through 10 levels, battling a French maid, drunken martial arts master and a Chihuahua before reaching the final showdown with a professional wrestler.

The arcade machine is not distributed overseas.

Now I wanna have a go!

That Reminds Me of the Time...

Did you hear the about the friend of mine who was rather destitute and awash in debt following a prolonged illness?

I bet you haven't.

So, this friend does the right thing and talks to his creditors and signs up for welfare and goes job hunting. He even joins some local employment programs (you know the kind of thing - government-sponsored irrelevance on a stick).

Which is how, a week later, he found himself being given a job as a contact centre operative by one of his creditors, and was thus put in the unusual position of having to phone himself up to chase a debt.

No kidding.