Diana Watch

I want to begin with a bird feeder update. As you know, because you read this nonsense every week and I thank you for that, I have a birdfeeder and it was being ignored by my local feathered friends and I was wondering how long I should wait before being offended by the tiny little feathery, ungrateful gits.
Well I no longer have to worry about this most modern of dilemmas as I have seen one bird on my new bird feeder; it was a Robin thank you for asking. Of course, just because I have only seen one bird on it doesn't mean that others have not been flocking around it whilst I'm not there or when I’m looking the other way (they are sneaky you know). Now, you may think that I am slightly deluded but just ask any good religious person and they will confirm that, just because no one saw it and there is no evidence for it, in fact there is evidence against it, does not mean that something didn't happen.

I am still keeping up with the “Diana Watch” element of this blog and I have for you one Daily Express front page photo of Princess Diana.

So NICE says we can’t have a bowel cancer drug that seems to work (a bit). This is an emotive subject and I can see both sides of the arguments. If you were dying you would want any chance of increasing the length of your life but is infinite cost ok? Of course it isn't. (Interesting side point, when NICE said no to the £30,000 a year drug the company that makes it offered to renegotiate the price. So that's not how much it costs then? Was it just a number you made up?)
You can't have this drug that has been shown to work (in some cases) on the NHS but you can have some homoeopathy at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital if you like.
The rest of us use evidence based medicine (but what's the evidence for that?) and we only use treatments and medicines that have been shown to work but one part of the Health Service is allowed to give it's patients little vials of water and sugar pills claiming that it will make them better with no evidence to support that statement. There is actually quite a lot of clear evidence to show that it really, really doesn't work and it's just silly.
So you can't have real drugs that have been shown to work but the NHS is more than happy to fund Quackery.
On the subject of Homeopathy, there was a Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee hearing this week that discussed this subject and you can watch it here if you like.
Boots the Chemist were represented at the hearing because they sell some homoeopathic products. Under questioning the representative from the company admitted that they had no proof that it works (not a great surprise there) but they sold it because their customers wanted it and believe it works. Well that's ok then, it not as if you are a trusted Pharmacy that is known for primarily selling medicines that have been shown to work then is it? Oh no, wait a second, you are! Even the anti-dandruff shampoo has to be shown to work before it can be advertised and sold as anti-dandruff shampoo but not so homoeopathic “remedies”.
Pure consumerism in action there. Sell stuff that is known not to work just because some people think it does and completely forget any moral element of separating people from their cash for a useless product. Here is an open letter to Alliance Boots for the Merseyside Skeptic Society.
If it works then let's test it, independently, with double blinded trials and then it can be regulated properly. I'd want in then because the money you can make from selling this stuff would be massive, it's so cheap to produce.


It seems that all you read in the press may not be true. There have been several stories recently that seem to have been, let's say, a little exaggerated. Well, maybe even untrue.
We can start off a little gentle “misreporting”. MP Sir Peter Viggers got a duck house on House of Commons expenses didn't he? Well, no. I know it is only a technicality but he only claimed for it. He filled in a form and asked “might you pay for this?” and the Commons Authority said, “Umm, no. No we won't.”
But that was not how the story was spun in the papers. Ok it was a silly claim but it wasn't paid. When the Express reported it they admitted that the claim was refused but only sort of. They wrote “However, it is not clear whether he was in fact reimbursed for the duck home, as a Commons official wrote "not allowable" by the side of the claim.” So it was not allowed but they tried to insinuate that it might have been paid anyway. Nice.
Then there was that incredibly indecisive Gordon Brown (if you want to see indecisive hand me a menu. Get yourself a snack; this is going to take a while). He was asked about his favourite biscuit on a webchat he did for Mumsnet (for some reason this has become the communication medium of the moment as David Cameron has done it several times) and he didn't answer the question. The press laid into him. All of them. “He can't even decide on a biscuit. This man is a disgrace.” was pretty much what they went with.
The thing is it didn't really happen. Someone on Mumsnet did, indeed, ask Gordon about his favourite biscuit but he didn't receive the question. There was an IT problem at No. 10 and the question didn't get through so he didn't see it and so couldn't answer it. Not many of the papers reported that bit but the lady who runs the website/chatroom confirmed the techy problem.
Do you remember Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross? They rang an old man and left messages on his answering machine. There was a little bit about in the papers, I'm not sure that you would have seen anything about it.
Well it turns out that they probably didn't leave any messages on his machine. Well according to Comedienne Richard Herring who claimed to have heard this when recording “Never Mind the Buzzcocks”.
And then there are the things that they don't tell you. The News of the World was fined £800,000 this week at an industrial tribunal in a case bought by a former Sports reporter for that paper.
If you read most of the UK's daily papers you probably don't know this because they haven't printed it. This little interesting tit-bit is explained here by Alan Greenslade in the Guardian, the only paper that printed the story.
What isn't pointed out in that article, but is in the rest of their coverage of this story, is that the man at the head of the paper when this bullying was taking place is the same man who was in charge whilst the paper was hacking the mobile phones of people that you may have heard of. That man was Andy Coulson. He is currently the Tories Director of Communications & Planning. So he was fired from his paper for mobile phone hacking and now is found guilty of bullying, just the sort of person David Cameron wants to have around.

This is a plea really. Articles in most of the papers this week report that people in the UK is still not donating enough organs. Why not? You don’t need them, you’re dead!
There has been a very large rise, a doubling in fact, in Surgeons using organs from donors that are described as “marginal”. These include the elderly, cancer victims and those with a history of drug abuse. Now, I have nothing against any of these groups of people, actually some of my best friends are elderly, tattooed (higher hepatitis risk), cancer suffering drug addicts, (not fun to be with but they tick so many boxes), but I wouldn’t want their organs.
So to those of you who are not on the donor register, click here and go and do it.

The Award for Heart-warming Sports Story of the Week,

We have joint winners for this as I couldn’t decide between them.
Firstly Gretel Bergmann has had her German National high jump record restored after 73 years. On June 30, 1936, in Stuggart, she jumped 5ft 3in but this record height was removed from the record books by the Nazis because she was Jewish. She was also barred from the German Olympic team. She left Germany in 1937 and emigrated to America.
Whilst it has taken a little bit of time the German track and field association has decided to reinstate her record.

The other story is about Wigan Athletic (who are a football team, sort of). They played last weekend and they lost 9-1. That is not the heart-warming part, unless you are a Spurs fan (the team that beat them). No, the nice bit is that, after this thrashing, the players have said that they are going to reimburse all of their travelling fans who came to the match and who saw their team get royally spanked.


The Award for I’m Not Sure How I Feel About This,

In Nepal they have started their festival to the goddess Gadhimai. The celebrations included fortune-telling robots, a ferris wheel and stalls broadcasting music and offering tea and sugary snacks. Oh and they also sacrifice 250,000 animals. Yes, you read that correctly, I didn’t add any extra numbers. 250,000 animals will be slaughtered, including 10,000 buffalo. That is a lot of buffalo.
I’m not sure how I fell about it because whilst a lot of the animals will just be killed, at least the buffalo will be sold on and used for their meat and hide etc, so they are not going to waste.
If you are going to kill an animal in this coming week, the least you can do is eat it all up.

The Award for Changing It Everytime You Say it,

This goes to Radio 4 and the BBC in general. The family of Jean Charles de Menezes have accepted an undisclosed amount in compensation from the Metropolitan Police. I hope this helps to soothe their pain some what and that they understand that the entire country is sorry for the death of their son. I hope that they feel that they can move on with their lives. I also hope that news reporters can go back to not trying to think up new ways of pronouncing his name. I’m pretty sure that every time I have heard them try, they have said it differently.


Sorry to go on a bit this week. Hope you enjoyed my rambings and are going to register on the Organ Donor thingy, I'm off to obsess over my bird feeder.

Diana Watch

“It's a hectare of badger mayhem!”

So, embarrassing incident of the week then. It isn't an award, I just thought I'd start with it. We pulled into Fleet Service station on the M3 on Saturday morning in order to avail ourselves of the facilities. As I wondered into the Men's I noticed that I had dry lips and decided, sub-consciously obviously, to lick my lips. As I did so I made eye contact with some bloke with his winky out, having a wee. He looks up from his task to see a skinny bloke licking his lips in his general direction. Oh dear. Then I headed straight for him to use the urinal next to his. I'm not sure I could have made it look any more gay if I had tried. Well maybe I could have offered to shake it for him when he'd finished, but apart from that, not much more gay. Ah well.

So this is the week that Gordon Brown did his best Amy Winehouse impression. By this I do not mean that he developed a life threatening drug habit or released a critically acclaimed soul album influenced by 60's girl bands. No, by this I mean that he said “no, no, no”. Sorry, that was a poor joke.
He started off by saying “no” to Titan prisons because they would cost a lot and not because they are a spectacularly poor idea. Have you seen how bad giant American prisons are? Gangs rule the roost and the guards only exist to stop them getting out, not to bring any form of discipline and rehabilitation. As with last weeks point that privatised home care is a bad idea because the contract goes to the lowest bidder who then has to make a profit so corners are bound to be cut, the same would be true for a private super prison. Money would be spent on cheap things like razor wire and saved on things like education and staff training. And by the way, isn't “Titan” a type of gay condom? Available in all good motorway service stations. I've said too much.
Then the Government seemed to back down over their plans for a giant database to record all our email addresses, mobile phone contacts and websites visited. This is a good thing, a great thing even but instead they just want your ISP to give them information that they wanted in the first place. So not so good then. I did sign up for a email campaign that I heard about through Twitter. The idea was, before the welcomed Government climb down, that on the same day we would all CC the emails that we sent to Jacqui Smith. The thought being, you want to read them, well here they are. Might bring down the Home Office servers though. Oh well, a small price to pay for National Security isn't it Mrs Smith?
The third “no” of the week was one of the hastiest political U-turns for quite a while. On Sunday of last week Gordon Brown released a video on Youtube, you know, that well known forum for in depth political debate and calling other people “cunts” via the medium of anonymous comments, telling us how he wanted to change the MPs allowance system. He wanted to replace the second homes allowance (a system introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1983, see I do my research for this, sometimes) with a daily payment for just turning up. There was to be very little debate and let's ignore the review that Gordon set up himself into the expenses issue and just cobble something together in order for some positive headlines.
By Wednesday night these plans had been dropped from Thursdays vote. And who says that this Government can't get anything done? That is speedy backtracking in anyone's book. All the Tories have to do to win the next election in shut up and let Mr Brown repeatedly shoot himself in the foot. All right thinking people pray to the God of all that is good that they won't but let's be honest, it's starting to creep into the back of your mind. We have about a year to go until the next election and unless the Economy recovers spectacularly and our Prime Minister wins this series of “Britain's Got Talent” with a note perfect rendition, the singing kind not the extraordinary kind (poor political satire there), of “My Way”, “Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, not over my plans to reform MPs expenses”, it is likely that an Eton boy with little experience life other than in Westminster will be our next Leader. I think I'd rather be in this mess than in that one.

I'm going to ignore Swine Flu, or Mexican Flu as Israel would like us to call it as Jews and Muslims consider the pig to be an unclean animal and don't like the sigma attached to catching swine flu but are happy enough for an entire nation to be stigmatised, always thinking of others the Israelis, as after only 7 days it seems it's not as bad as they thought it might be. The rules of diminished returns here. Every time the WHO cries “Wolf!” and we all panic (when I say we, I mean the media and an Asian man who I saw in Canterbury today wearing a mask) and then nothing happens they loose a little bit of credibility. One day we might stop listening and there may be some killer bug. Someone should write a cautionary tale about this sort of thing, you could call it “The Organisation Dedicated to the Improvement of World Health that Cried There Is a possible World Influenza Pandemic Coming” or something snappier involving a wolf.
OK so I'm not going to leave it alone but I did try and it was better than the rise in Card fraud since the introduction of Chip and Pin, which is what I was going to do. The news kept saying that Chip and Pin was bought in to reduce crime which is not entirely true. It was bought in to shift liability for that crime from the Bank to the Card holder, if some one gets your PIN (not PIN number, that's a tautology, what do you think the N stands for) it's your fault not theirs, some your have to pay for it.

OK, onto the awards then as I have dribbled on enough. Oh, new netbook by the way, very cool.

The Award for Publicity Stunt That Went So Wrong of the Week,

What could be nicer for the American People to see during these difficult times then a picture of an icon, in this case Air Force 1, flying low past another icon, say the Statue Of Liberty? They did it with Mount Rushmore and the afore mentioned plane, why not again with the Statue. Well, for one reason because of incredible amounts of Presidential security it was decided not to tell anyone that they were going to do it. Another might be because you would have to fly a very large plane low over a densely packed metropolis but that will be OK as long as haven't recently suffered from some sort of plane based terrorist act. Where is the Statue of Liberty, oh yes, it just off Manhattan Island. Still, won't go that badly will it? Oh yes it will. People running out of buildings screaming I'm lead to believe.

The Award for My Most Favourite New Thing of the Week,

I love a podcast and I have found a new one this week, well was told about. It is called “Answer Me This” and I love it, very funny indeed and Sony Award nominated. There is nothing nicer than finding a new podcast and then finding it has a massive back catalogue.

The Award for Selling Your Principles To The Highest Bidder of the Week,

A report this week pointed out, again, that breakfast cereals aimed at children have quite a lot of sugar in them. When I say quite a lot, I mean up to 37% sugar. This was reported on BBC Breakfast and they had a Doctor, well nutritionist who seemed to be called Doctor, from the Breakfast Cereal Defence League or some such in order to defend Coco Pops et al. “Sugar is a Carbohydrate and Children need energy”. Really, is that what you have been taught or did you read that on the back of a cereal packet?

The Award for Excellent Taste By An American State of the Week,

I know absolutely nothing about the great State of Oklahoma other than the wind comes rushing down the plain there and the band Flaming Lips are from there but it seems that this State had a vote to find a State song. I'm sure there was a fine choice of excellent songs but the good people of Oklahoma, where the wind comes rushing down the plain, decided upon “Do you Realise?” by the aforementioned Flaming Lips. It is a beautiful song that points out that we will all die and it really is a good idea to tell those that you love that you love them before its too late and they die without knowing of your love. I know it sounds depressing but it really is uplifting. It's on their album “Yoshime battles the pink robots”, do check it out on Spotify.
Anyway, back to the vote, the people of Oklahoma, where the wind comes rushing down the plain voted for this song but the States House of Representatives, always in touch with the Electorate, voted to ignore the will of the people because, now wait, this is good, because the band have a reputation for “Using obscene language” and wearing “Offensive T-shirts”. Why is this important to them? It wasn't important to the voters who were voting on a SONG! It wasn't important to the Governor who over ruled you with an Executive Order. An indie band is the subject of an Executive Order, how cool is that?
This is one of the things that confuses the rest of the world about America. It seems that, to them, swearing is the worst thing in the world. Yes, it is a little poor but really? The worst thing? Guns, OK. Massive Governmental abuses of power, OK. But if anyone swears? Throw stones at them and ostracise them because they are the spawn of the Devil.

Have a good week. I'm on holiday this week and intend on spending most of it at the allotment and then watching the last 5 episodes of Series 1 of The Wire.