Diana Watch

I think we have to have a new agreement. There haven’t been any mentions of Princess Diana for months so unless there is one I’m going to stop mentioning it but I will still call this Diana Watch though because I am still looking out for them.
The Olympics start on Friday, well actually they start on Wednesday if you’re a footballer but the opening ceremony is on Friday, and it seems that the air is finally clearing, both physically and metaphorically. The air around Beijing does seem to be getting better, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, and some journalists can now get full access to the internet. Why do they need this? The fuss was made about human rights sites such as amnesty but they are sports journalists, why do they need these sites? No, what they want to see is porn whilst they work. Personally I think that it is unfair to politicise the games. I can see why it happens, what with China’s human rights record and the huge amount of money and publicity they will make/get from the coverage but the athletes have nothing to do with this. They have trained and sacrificed, sacrificed and trained in order to get to the highest competition in their chosen field. This is the culmination of their life’s dream and no hand wringing should deprive them of this. Let them run their race and we should cheer them as loud as we can.

I had a nice experience this week as I was trying to sell my PSP in the shop Game. They were offering me a reasonably small amount of money for it and the several games that went with it, the man behind me in the queue overheard the amount they were offering me and offered me the same. Should I give a chain shop a healthy profit or sell it to the nice man behind me? Can you guess what I did? Of course I sold it to the man behind me, we trotted off to the Cash machine and money and technology were exchanged. A good day out I think you will agree.

It seems we have the power. The power to change things. Well ok, I don’t think that my ramblings on here are of any import but I wrote a while ago about tips being used to bring the pay of waiters and waitresses up to the minimum wage but this week the government announced that they were going to ban this practise which is fantastic news I think you will agree.

And so to the weekly awards,

The Spectacular Over Reaction Of The Week,

This goes to American law enforcement. A Scottish gentleman by the name of Gary McKinnon has been charged with a “malicious crime” after hacking into 97 US military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002. He claims that he was looking for information about UFOs. The American government doesn’t see it in quite the same way and claim that he was hacking in order to intimidating the US government. They wish to extradite him to America using anti-terrorist legislation and if found guilty he could be imprisoned for up to 70 years. A little over the top don’t you think?

The Oops, I Don’t Think That Was Your Plan Award,

Tony Blair’s daughter Kathryn’s personal profile on the social networking site Facebook was left unlocked, allowing access to highly sensitive details regarding the former Prime Minister with just two clicks of a button. As you can imagine this sparked a major security alert because the site contained information about her family’s holiday movements. The Blair’s security arrangement currently cost the tax payer about £2 million.


Just a quick point, the sale of British Energy PLC to EDF Energy has fallen through, well for the moment anyway, but the sale it’s self doesn’t make sense to me. Look at it in this way, the largest single share holder and major driver of the deal is the British Government and EDF is owned by……………… the French Government. Why when we are being told that we need energy independence are our government selling our generating capacity to a foreign power? Odd if you ask me.