Space flights, quotations, trans people, death row and car parks

19 April 2025

The really big news this week is that Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceflight programme launched one of their phallic-symbol pods ‘manned’ entirely by ‘chicks’ into space for 11 minutes so they could ~~patronise~~ show the world how enlightened they are. Blue Origin is, of course, targeted at the tourism industry rather than any serious exploration of spacei.

Wouldn’t it be better if space programmes were crewed by the people who could contribute most to scientific research regardless of what gender was assigned to them at birth (which is known to be an arbitrary judgement in some cases)? Sadly, as Bob Dylan said “I don’t think it’s liable to happen / Like the sound of one hand clappin’.”

Donald Trump has of course banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs so they can happily exclude females, with or without penises, in future unless the PR justifies it.

Bezos’s Amazon gave $1m to Trump’s 2024 election campaign and Bezos himself stopped the Washington Post publishing an editorial supporting Kamala Harris. By a complete coincidence, Trump’s gang has just awarded a $2bn contract to Blue Origin.

(I’ve a friend who, as far as I know, doesn’t have any particular problems with his own penis but gets tremendously agitated about where trans women should be allowed to ‘wash’ if they haven’t undergone a full physical transformation; I can only think this is because he thinks he’s a traditional man who knows how to protect chicks better than they do themselves.)

The same friend also seems to think that I must support Labour because he’s sussed I’m not a great fan of Trump or Elon Musk – why does my computer keep printing Muck when I’m trying to write Musk? – or any of the 22 Conservative leaders we’ve had in the last few years (fact checkers should note that I have guessed how many leaders the Tories have consumed in the last 35 years and 22 might be wrong).

In fact, I think Labour’s proposal to reduce benefits is stupid and their decision to take the gender assigned at birth as definitive reminded me of the old saw “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong”.

Last week, I also came across a quotation from the 20^th century economist Walter E Williams who said “Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.”

More interesting reading is likely to be found in Corinna Lain’s book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, which is to be published on 22 April. She describes her motive in writing this as “I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day”, something I’ve often wondered.

Her answer is that a significant factor is who performs the executions and she offers Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of the state’s 65 executions, as an example; he has since boasted that “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have.” There are a lot of words that describe such people, most of them ending in ‘pathy’.

Prisoners on death row were allowed to employ lawyers to carry out a (limited) inquiry into Doerhoff’s experience and, under oath, the executioner testified that that he had problems mixing the drugs “so right now we’re still improvising”. He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers” and that he was dyslexic (he later denied this saying he just sometimes just got numbers muddled).

In Arizona, one of the ‘IV team executioners’ had once been a nurse but their licence was suspended after they’d been arrested multiple times for Driving Under the Influence while impaired by alcohol or other drugs. In one 10-day period in 2007, they were arrested three times in Arizona.

Another member of the team had no medical licence and also had a record of DUI as well as bouncing a cheque. Their only relevant experience was once serving in a military medical corps (although they hadn’t actually inserted an IV for 15 years).

Aren’t these people on the wrong end of the needle?

As at 1 January 2024, 2,241 people were on death row in America; 58% of them are not classified as ‘white’.

Not all states use injections for executions so perhaps frustrated British shooters who are being stopped from killing wildlife on peatlands over here would like to satisfy their urge to kill by applying for these jobs?

For some reason, this brings to mind a recent article in Which? magazine on the different types of parking tickets issued in the UK. This was all new to me and I can do no better than quote from their article:

“Most parking tickets will be one of these three:

Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) or Excess Charge Notice (ECN) – usually issued by the council on public land, such as a high street or council car park.

Parking Charge Notice – issued by a landowner or parking company on private land, such as a supermarket car park.

Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) – issued by the police on red routes, white zig zags or where the police manage parking.”

They are enforced in different ways and the private parking companies have the empathetic public-spiritedness of Hitler’s Waffen SS. Even when they allow people 20 minutes free parking, if you spend 10 minutes there, then spend 9 minutes finding a working payment machine and queuing behind people trying to get it to work, then take 2 minutes getting back to your car and leaving the car park, tough. Leave it and £1.90 goes up exponentially – the highest I’ve heard of so far is £180.

Which? also offers advice on dealing with usurious increases, but there are no guarantees of success.

Billionaires, greed, sewage, Trump, fêtes, bells and trees

13 May 2023

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is a book written by the independent senator Bernie Sanders, the great white hope of the American left. In it he asserts that billionaires shouldn’t exist and, when questioned by Chris Wallace on HBO Max recently, he was asked: “Are you basically saying that once you get to $999m that the government should confiscate all the rest?” His reply? “Yeah, you may disagree with me but, fine, I think people can make it on $999m. I think that they can survive just fine.”

Why are there so few of us who are tempted to cheer when we hear this said publicly and have no desire to be billionaires ourselves? I too believe everybody could scrape by on $999m (we manage well on a tiny fraction of that), and I think it’s sad that so few otherwise intelligent people agree.

So many company directors seem to over-value themselves that it’s become acceptable for them to take obscene amounts of money out of the company. This week pig-in-chief seems to be Ken Murphy, boss of Tesco. Last year, Tesco’s profits fell by 50% despite charging customers 7% more, and dividends paid to shareholders (the owners) were cut by 12%. The company said it’s been an “incredibly tough year for customers” (but failed to add the management had done very nicely thank you.)

Now these figures are known and the value of customers’ Tesco points is being cut by a third Murphy’s likely to get at least 15% more next year, around £5m.

But are all the accusations of irresponsibility and greed beginning to shame them?

The chief executives of Yorkshire Water and Thames Water and the owner of South West Water have declined bonuses this year because of the publicity given to their practice of dumping unwanted sewage into rivers and onto beaches.

And the Post Office has reluctantly admitted it was wrong to have paid large bonuses to its directors after it falsely charged more than 900 local post office operators with theft between 1991 and 2015 because the PO’s own Horizon computer systems didn’t work properly.

Nick Read, the CEO has now agreed to return some (not all, naturally) of the bonus he got last year and Lisa Harrington, who chaired the committee that approved the bonuses, has ~~resigned~~ (sorry, in a fit of optimism, I misread that) apologised.

Back in America, Donald Trump has finally been proved a sexual predator even though the jury didn’t think there was enough evidence to convict him of rape. Nevertheless, he was fined a punitive $5m, about $2m for the sexual abuse and close to $3m for defamation by branding E Jean Carroll a liar.

Almost 40 other criminal charges against him are currently being investigated, from fraud to theft (fiddling his taxes), including an earlier outstanding claim from Carroll but the more criminal he’s shown to be, the more popular he seems to become. Are convicted criminals allowed to serve as president over there?

Last weekend, my younger son came down from London with my daughter-in-law and grand-daughter (known by my wife as ‘the pocket rocket’) to avoid the coronation so I took them to the village celebrations.

As so often happens at these things, we were joined by a retired couple and started talking. They said they were “Russian British” who had both been university lecturers until they moved here 9 years ago. He turned out to be interested in Russian science fiction which is part of one of my son’s specialist subjects.

She’d taught applied maths and IT so we talked about AI and quantum computing; well, she did while I prompted her with suitable questions about how ‘spooky action at a distance’ and the complementarity of electrons might affect technology.

On Wednesday Big Ben failed to sound at 1pm when the clock stopped and it was 1.47pm before the hands had been moved forward to the correct time.

When I was even younger than I am now, our local church didn’t have bells but it did have some large loudspeakers in its spire and a gramophone down below where they’d play records of bells to attract the faithful to worship. I’m not going to say where it was but if any of you were ever woken late one evening by the Everly Brothers’ boogie rock rendering of ‘Lucille’ played very loudly, I hope you enjoyed it.

Some interesting work is going on in a Utah forest of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens. Scientists are wondering if they are actually just a single organism and the ‘trees’ are the branches of a single interlinked root system.

This week also sees the publication of a new book, The Power of Trees, by the German forester Peter Wohlleben who also published The Hidden Life of Trees in 2015. It describes trees’ ability to help cool the earth with the volume of water released from the leaves: a single beech tree can ‘breathe out’ 500 litres of water a day. This release of water also lowers the atmospheric pressure round the tree, drawing in air as a slight breeze.

In forests, the change in air pressure sucks in air from the oceans which then returns water to the trees as rain in a natural virtuous circle. On Primrose Hill, the air under a single tree can be 2^o cooler than in the open park and the temperature in an ancient woodland can be 15^o cooler than in the centre of a city. Next time you’re passing a tree, give it a pat and say “thank you”.

Tuesday’s Guardian reported that, in June 2022, the then Prince Charles and the then prime minister Boris Johnson had argued because the “… Prince of Wales had criticised the plan to deport people travelling across the Channel to Rwanda”. I’ve travelled across the channel quite a lot but have never yet come ashore in Rwanda.

I have to explain this because I showed it to a friend who didn’t see the syntactical problem. Mind you, this is the same friend who heard someone talking about contraception and decided the best type of oral contraception would be to say “NO” very loudly and, in case this didn’t work, he offered a few choice phrases that might convey the message more strongly.

Failing memories, words and swearing

5 November 2022

Losing a word when I was in my 30s wasn’t a big deal, I’d just stop and say “you know … what’s the word? … begins with a P”. And, some hours later, I’d be ironing a shirt and I’d say “pernicious, that was it”.

As I’ve grown older and stopped ironing shirts and still lose words, I inevitably wonder if this is the beginning of the end and am comforted only by the facts that I’ve always done it and I’m still learning new words (we have a new friend who also likes words so we swap exciting discoveries, my latest being bruxism which luckily isn’t something I suffer from).

I’ve always loved words and regular readers will have noticed that I occasionally make up words because I think they sound a bit different from the obvious one. For example, I recently made up the word ‘coronated’ for fun because it was so obviously wrong. At least, I thought I’d made it up but, a few weeks later, one of the weekend newspaper pedants complained that it was being used quite widely by people who should have known the word ‘crowned’.

(There is actually one word which is filed in an ambitiously inaccessible part of my mind: ‘eponymous’. Obviously I know the word but it’s surprising how often I can’t think of it when I want it.)

My own pet peeves at the moment are the increasing use of ‘likely’ instead of ‘probable’ and using the wrong preposition, as do people who say they’re bored OF something.

But. (There has to be a ‘but’ and not just one that leads to a rant about starting sentences with conjunctions.) I love the English language’s willingness to incorporate new words, to extend the meanings of old words and to distort ‘proper’ grammatical constructions for effect

For example, I like “Never an hour goes by without I think of her” because it’s less predictable than “Never an hour goes by without my thinking of her”.

I’m also quite tolerant of spelling mistakes, especially in emails when one’s typing speed overtakes the need for textbook language (and emails get less editing than these mutterings). Indeed, spelling can be irrelevant:

“Aoccdrnig to a rsceearh pjrocet at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it denos’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat lteerts are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

I asked a friend who is a specialist in ageing if people with larger vocabularies were less likely or slower to suffer from age-related dementia but she said she didn’t think it worked like that.

Scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences have discovered that it may be possible to spot signs of dementia as early as nine years before patients it is diagnosed. Their project collected background information from different tests, including problem solving, memory, remembering lists of numbers, reaction times and grip strength, as well as data on weight loss and gain and on the number of falls experienced. Subjects were then assessed again after five and nine years.

The results showed that the people who remained healthy had done better in the tests than those who went on to develop Alzheimer’s who were also more likely to have had a fall in the previous 12 months.

As someone who shops from a list and will forget to get anything not on the list, however important it is, I wonder if I’m heading that way. My problem is compounded when I can remember I’ve got three things to do but can only remember two of them.

However, I take comfort from Professor Bruno Dubois, Director of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease (IMMA) at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, who has said that “if you’re aware of having memory problems, you don’t have Alzheimer’s; if you have a memory illness or Alzheimer’s, you won’t be aware of your shortcomings”. If you’re OK, the information is still stored somewhere there, it’s the system that searches for it that’s just slowing down or taking a tea-break.

Here are three tests:

1. Find the C in the table below:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2. Find the 6 in the table below:

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

96999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

3. Now find the N in the table below:

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMNMM

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

There, that was easy wasn’t it! If you too found the three odd ones quickly without using your finger, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.

I’ve always managed to go upstairs and wonder what I came up for so I stopped worrying about this and will only start worrying again if I can’t remember where the stairs are.

A 20-year research project carried out by Dr Robbie Love at Aston University into the use of ‘bad’ language, and how it relates to the user’s age shows some interesting changes in the prevalence of certain words in conversation. For example, the word ‘bloody’ is much less common than it used to be while the words ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ (and their various derivatives) are much more widely used.

The former word is thought to have been printed without asterisks for the first time in 1960 (in what had, until the previous year, been called the Manchester Guardian) in a report on the result of the obscenity trial of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and was broadcast for the first time in a live TV debate in 1965 when theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was reported to have said “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

A new paper published by Elsevier BV contains encouraging news for those of us who swear quite a lot. It claims “Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use” and “It generates a range of distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical.” These include “emotional force and arousal; increased attention and memory; heightened autonomic activity, such as heart rate and skin conductance; hypoalgesia (pain relief); increased strength and stamina; and a range of distinctive interpersonal, relational and rhetorical outcomes.” Experiments showed that subjects who swore could keep their hands in a bucket of ice for longer than those who didn’t, and chanting a swearword improved muscle strength during physical exercise. (Go down a treat at the gym, that would.)

The increasing popularity of ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ possibly contrasts with the decline of ‘bloody’ because both are more versatile and easily combined with other words to produce powerful new words and phrases, such as ‘clusterfuck’ and ‘gobshite’, but even in their unadorned forms they can ease the discomfort when one has hit one’s thumb with a hammer, or dropped something messy.

There are (arguably predictable) demographic divides in the use of swearwords: women tend to swear less than men and older people tend to swear less than younger people but, although I can’t help change the image of women, I’ll continue to disprove the ageing theory.

The context is also important. A constant stream of swearwords just becomes meaningless while a carefully placed swearword can add something to what is being said, but some people are (or have been conditioned to be) seriously shocked by ‘bad language’ so we need to edit our ‘ruder’ pearls of wisdom in their presence.

Since I assume anybody who’s read this far isn’t too bothered by swearing, let’s all reassure ourselves that we can delay the onset of dementia if we say “Oh fuck it” every so often.

(And don’t forget to keep your fingers crossed for democracy in America’s mid-term elections this week.)

Another anointment, broken records, an underdressed climber and winning insults

23 October 2022

What a wonderful week for cynics – if you didn’t finish reading any day’s paper, you could put it out for recycling and go straight on to the next day’s paper because so much had changed again overnight.

What we tend to forget is that all MPs work for us as public servants and we pay their salaries and fiddled expenses. They have no right to our respect, they need to earn it by doing what’s best for the country. Which is not what they’re doing at the moment and why, when my wife called out “She’s gone!”, our cleaner punched the air and said “Yeah!”

By resigning, Truss can now claim two records by becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister ever and by reducing support for the Conservatives to the lowest level ever seen in the polls. At least she had confirmed to parliament on the previous day that the triple lock on pensions would remain, although she failed to confirm disability benefits would also rise in line with inflation; which just goes to show the priorities of a government that relies on the geriatric (sorry ‘grey’) vote and couldn’t care less about people with disabilities.

Until she resigned, the shortest-serving prime minister was George Canning whose sole term lasted 119 days in 1827 but he at least had the excuse that he died of TB. (The BBC website originally reported that “Canning had served for 119 days after dying in 1827” but, sadly, somebody spotted the error and corrected it.)

With their recent repeated failures in choosing competent leaders, even the Tories must now be beginning to wonder if there’s a better way to choose them. It’s a pity their rules don’t have an emergency clause to cover the loss of a leader within (say) three months. This would cover the sudden death of a newly-elected leader and could allow the person who came second to take over as prime minister. It would also help avoid yet another undignified scramble for power.

Actually, a general election would be the fairest way of finding one that a majority of the electorate actually wants but the Conservatives daren’t do this because they’ve made themselves so unpopular that they might disappear up their own ballot boxes. What they are doing this time, with their usual blithe disregard for everybody, including party members, is abbreviating the process to leave only three possibles, each of whom will know only that almost 75% of their MPs didn’t want them and voted for somebody else.

With their backs to the wall and all polls showing the Conservatives would be obliterated at a general election, this would seem the ideal time to change the electoral system from ‘first past the post’ to proportional representation. A PR voting system would almost certainly give Conservatives more seats than the polls are suggesting they’d get at the moment and it would ensure fair representation of Tory (and other) voters for the foreseeable future.

However, they’re now so desperate that there’s even talk, apparently serious, of resurrecting the compulsively deceitful Boris Mimi MiToo Johnson, the man who fractured the Conservative party, dithered throughout his term, made stupid decisions, abandoned some 50,000 people in Afghanistan, was ultimately fired for having been caught breaking the law and whose conduct is still subject to another investigation. So he’s scuttled back from a beach in the Dominican Republic with indecent haste to round up the loonies.

May it please all the gods anyone can think of, don’t let them be so stupid as to let Boris loose again.

The health secretary Thérèse Coffey has admitted (as she puffed on a fat cigar) giving leftover antibiotics to a friend and has been accused by one doctor of “monumental stupidity”. Even I remember that we’re told to complete the course so how come she had any spare?

The only saving grace they managed to find this week was when Jeremy Hunt, the latest Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked a reasonable question in parliament and just said “I don’t know but I’ll find out” before sitting down again. What a brilliantly honest response, something even his greatest critics can surely accept as a point in his favour. He’s not standing for PM but wouldn’t be nice if whoever gets the job feels able to show the same honesty?

Other news included Ghislaine Maxwell saying of Prince Andrew “I accept that this friendship could not survive my conviction. He is paying such a price for the association. I consider him a dear friend. I care about him.” With friends like her, who needs enemies?

She then went on to complain about the service offered by her prison …

In South Korea, the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi shinned up a wall without wearing the headscarf ‘required’ by Iran’s male theocracy (who are so insecure they think they’d lose ‘their’ women if other people could see how beautiful they are). She said her not wearing a hijab was “unintentional” but, on her return to Tehran, she was hailed as a hero by people demonstrating against the arrest of Mahsa Amini for being improperly dressed and her subsequent death in custody. Rekabi’s friends and supporters now fear for her safety and her brother has been summoned to an intelligence agency office.

British protestors from the climate action group Just Stop Oil blocked a motorway and were attacked by Suella Braverman, who was still home secretary at the time, who said “I’m afraid it’s the Labour party, it’s the Lib Dems, it’s the coalition of chaos, it’s the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati* – dare I say the anti-growth coalition that we have to thank for the disruption we are seeing on our roads today.” The patronising berk then had to resign after she admitted sending classified material from her personal email account.

Truss had invented and condemned an “anti-growth coalition” that she thinks lives in North London and takes taxis and Boris Johnson dissed the “Islington remainers”* in an attempt (which seems to resonate with many on the right) to blame Brexit remainers for failing to accept the vote and causing the covid pandemic and the economic chaos that helped him onto the slippery slope to dismissal. All the remainers we know regret the stupidity of Brexit but accept we have to live with it and try to find ways of minimising the economic and political problems it’s caused.

How sad that senior Tories have to stoop to pointless soundbites in their attempt to regain popularity.

A letter in the next day’s Guardian asked if King Charles III might have more prime ministers than his mother.

Now, to take our minds off the Westminster shitstorm, here’s a thought for you: I (and probably you) have more than the average number of legs for a human.

* In the interests of full disclosure, I must say I have never voted Conservative, I read the Guardian, I like tofu, I once lived part-time in Islington and I voted remain.

Siberian Sunshine holidays, non-parties, non-doms, welcoming migrants, genocide and peregrines

17 April 2022

Boris Johnson, prime minister of a small archipelago off the EU’s north west coast, visited Ukraine last week and met Vlodomyr Zelenskiy in a vain attempt to show what a great leader he is, Johnson that is, we already know that Zelenskiy is. Sadly for him, this was swiftly overshadowed by Downing Street’s confirmation that he’d received a fixed penalty notice and been fined £50 for infringing the Covid laws that he had himself introduced. Rumour also has it that at least three more Penalty Charge Notices with his name on them are in the offing.

His defence against people claiming he misled parliament may be that he genuinely believed he wasn’t committing an offence but this would be tantamount to admitting (a) he’s stupid – he didn’t know what his own law said – or (b) he’s stupid – he thought a birthday party with a cake was a legitimate work-related meeting.

Vladimir Putin’s response to this blatant insincerity was to ban him and several of his cronies from ever visiting Russia and they’ve all had to cancel their Siberian Sunshine holiday plans.

This all led to what might be called mild dissatisfaction within his loyal band of supporters and Lord (David) Wolfson, justice minister, resigned following the news; not only because of Johnson’s own conduct, he said, but also because of “the official response to what took place” and because so many people had “complied with the rules at great personal cost, and others were fined or prosecuted for similar, and sometimes apparently more trivial, offences”.

He might have been thinking of, David Wilson, a Blackburn restauranteur, who was fined £1,000 in May 2020 for hosting an outdoor party he believes followed the coronavirus rules. He’s still contesting this but fears his family business will have to close if the fine is enforced.

Next time you’re caught speeding, say you weren’t, and if you were, it wasn’t intentionally, and you misread the speedometer, and anyway it was only for ten minutes. That’ll do the trick.

Rishi Sunak, the money man, also had a bad week, collecting a PCN of his own immediately after it had been revealed that his wife, Akshata Murty, had (legally) saved herself an estimated £20m of UK tax on money received from her billionaire father’s Indian IT company. Once her arrangements had become public, Murty decided to pay tax on all her worldwide income from April last year, saying her tax arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”, adding that she appreciated the “British sense of fairness”. What a pity her tax arrangements only became incompatible with her husband’s job after they’d become public knowledge, and that she’s not back-dating it.

Sunak wrote to the prime minister asking for his own tax affairs to be investigated so he could be seen to be squeaky clean. Followed by which, he admitted that he had a US green card (as has Murty) and had declared himself a “permanent US resident” for tax purposes for his 6 years as a UK MP, including his 19 months as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Even the Telegraph took a dim view of all these shenanigans but just said “People have the right to expect better”. The front page of the Daily Mail ignored the Chancellor and tried to distract attention from partygate by shouting in large capitals “DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?” Yes mush, but it’s not our war, and we’re already funding arms for Ukraine.

We’re also preparing for World War III by upgrading military bunkers so they can be used to store nuclear weapons for America for the first time since 2008. This ensures that the UK will be a target for some of Russia’s bombs, leaving fewer to fall on American soil. Anybody worried about surviving a nuclear war should move as close as possible to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.

Mind you, Johnson’s latest brainwave beggars belief. After Priti Patel, the home secretary, had flown there, Johnson announced that men seeking asylum here will be flown 4,500 miles to Rwanda for their claims to be processed and Patel hopes they will be so enchanted by the country, they’ll want to stay there instead (on their own). A Downing Street statement described Rwanda as having “one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa which is recognised globally for its record on welcoming and integrating migrants” – no mention of its human rights record.

Rwanda? What’s the first word that comes to mind when someone says “Rwanda”? To me, it’s “genocide.” Remember the estimated million Hutus and Tutsis who slaughtered each other in 1994?

Luckily the outrage at this decision has been expressed by everybody from the UN to the Archbishop of Canterbury and right down to MPs.

In Moscow, an artist has been locked up and will be held on remand until 31 May. Alexandra Skochilenko’s crime was to replace supermarket price tickets with small pieces of paper protesting against the war or, in the words of a new law banning fake news about Russia’s armed forces, publicising “knowingly false information about the use of the Russian armed forces”.

In court, she was smiling and made victory signs at the courtroom although, if she’s found guilty (if??? – this is Russia we’re talking about!), she could face a fine of up to 3m roubles (£27,000) or between five and ten years in prison. Remember Vladimir Putin jailed Pussy Riot for singing.

On a lighter note (spoiler alert: pun intended), a highway patrol in San Francisco pulled over a car for driving without its headlights on and found it was empty – one o’ them thar autonomous vee hykles. It then sped off into the middle distance and the police lost it. Why do I find that slightly worrying?

And a Korean doctor has been quoted as saying that people who haven’t had covid yet probably have no friends. Although my wife had it, I didn’t so, if you’re in the same position, let me know and we can be friends together.

And Royal Mail last year received more than 1m complaints from householders, the most for 10 years. To celebrate this unworthy achievement of a company that was privatised to save the government (i.e. taxpayers) money, they have just increased the cost of a first-class stamp by 12% from 85p to 95p which, for those of us old enough to remember when all letters went for 3d, is 19/-; or for those who aren’t old enough, 76 times as much. Just think of the work this is saving you: back then, you would have to write to Uncle Mac 76 times to spend what you’d now have to spend to write to him once.

And I recently visited an ENT consultant who confirmed his diagnosis in a letter to my doctor. There was a disclaimer on the end saying “elements of this letter have been generated using voice dictation software” but I was comforted to know that a fibreoptic nasoendoscopy had revealed “normal you station tube openings”.

And finally, more than half the peregrine chicks that fledge don’t survive their first year and those that do tend to stay within 60 miles of their birthplace. However, Osmund, the only male chick born in 2020 on Salisbury cathedral’s tower, has been seen on holiday in Guernsey.

Male peregrines are often called tiercels (from the Latin word for a third, because they’re about a third smaller than the females). Peregrines are, of course, the fastest animals on earth when stooping: they close their wings and drop from a great height to spoil the day of some poor unsuspecting rodent out for a stroll. In 2005, an American peregrine falcon was clocked at 242 mph while dropping from nearly three miles in the air.

Their eyesight must be much better than mine, spotting a small snack from 3 miles away …

Covid testing, signing ‘HELP’, climate change, government sleaze, a bunch of good news and autocorrect

14 November 2021

It’s amazing where these mutterings seem to reach! Having written a fairy story about Grenfell Tower last Sunday, the Housing Secretary (Michael Gove!) announced on Monday that he planned to “pause” government plans to recover cladding restoration work from leaseholders. Giving evidence to a Commons committee, he said “I’m unhappy with the principle of leaseholders having to pay at all”.

A friend also pointed out that I’d omitted from the list of the culpable the building regulations people who approved the dangerous cladding.

On Tuesday, I had to go to London (for the first time in almost 2 years) for a medical appointment. Despite being double-vaccinated and boosted, I decided to travel first class and keep my mask on for the whole journey. Despite a lot of signs saying that masks should be worn and people without them might not be allowed to travel, about 60% of passengers weren’t wearing masks and even more weren’t in the crowded streets. There’s nowt so queer as folk.

I’m now testing myself for Covid for another 10 days or so, not because I’m worried about getting Covid but because I’m a carer and can’t risk being incapacitated.

(Did you see that Jeff Hoverson, the Republican state representative for North Dakota, organised a rally to oppose vaccinations, and then couldn’t attend it because he’d got Covid-19?)

This is the first time I’ve self-tested so I read the instructions, something my wife claims I never do, and was taken by the bit that says “Open your mouth wide and rub the fabric tip of the swab over both tonsils … (use a torch or mirror to help you do this) …”

“Or?” Did they mean “and”? Why don’t people get proof-readers to check what they’ve writted?

Much more usefully, I discovered there’s a discreet and unobtrusive “Help me” signal you can give if you’re in trouble, whether it’s abuse or harassment or anything, which will alert people who see it to call for help. It can, for example, be discreetlyused during a video call or conference, or through the window of a house or a car.

What you do to show you need help is:

1 Hold your hand up with palm facing the other person

2 Tuck your thumb into the palm

3 Fold your fingers down over the thumb, rather like a peace sign.

Everybody should know this so they can use it if they feel threatened, and they can act if they see someone else using it. What you should do if you see the sign obviously depends on the circumstances but ringing 999 is generally a good way to start.

It saved a woman in a car in America when somebody saw her sign and called 911; the driver is now in custody. Tell all your friends if they don’t already know.

This week’s news has mainly been about the Cop26 conference on climate change. Some sort of agreement was reached although China didn’t send anyone and India said it couldn’t reach the target in time. These two countries together contribute 60% of the electricity generated by coal worldwide, and America produces another 11% (the EU produces 5%).

But we all make their controls more difficult: just think how much of the stuff we buy is made in China or India. Should we boycott them and refuse to buy their goods? What would this do to their economies?

Boris Johnson was stupid enough to fly 400 miles to the conference in a private jet. In fact, of course, he had to do this because he absolutely had to get back to London for a booze-up with some old mates, but the outrage was so great that, second time, he went by train.

Other headlines exposed even more sleaze in the Tory party and Johnson was forced to reverse his plans to take over control of the independent cross-party group overseeing the maintenance of parliamentary standards.

Even the Tory-faithful papers were outraged by his original proposal. The Daily Mail’s leader said “So now we know the lengths to which a venal political class will go to protect its own” and the Times’ leader said “It would be good for parliamentary democracy if this time [the prime minister] were made to pay a price.”

Then we learnt that Sir Geoffrey Cox, MP for Torridge and West Devon and the former Attorney General, has been given nearly £6m for moonlighting (I refuse to say ‘earned’ – nobody can ‘earn’ that much), which included spending time in the British Virgin Islands where he’s been defending their prime minister and other government figures during an enquiry into claims of misgovernance and abuse of office. Poetic eh?

(Remember that this is the man who included a 49p bottle of milk and £2 of tea bags in his expense claims in 2015.)

Meanwhile, Richard Ratcliffe’s hunger strike has gained a lot of publicity for his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s imprisonment in Iran for the last 5½ years, reputedly as a result of a comment by the then Foreign Secretary, one Boris Johnson, who had failed to read his briefing papers or just forgotten that she was actually on holiday visiting her family.

Her confinement is, of course, linked with the £400m that the UK has owed Iran since 1979. The good news is that the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was officially authorised (when he was still a back-bencher) to write to Richard Ratcliffe to confirm the UK acknowledged that the debt had to be paid. However, it still hasn’t been paid and Ministers and officials refuse to say why.

Then the Queen sprained her back and couldn’t attend the Remembrance Day commemorations in Whitehall this morning. (One wonders how a queen can sprain her back. Picking up corgi poo from the royal carpets? Or sneezing perhaps?)

But there is more good news:

Boeing has admitted responsibility for the crash of its 737 Max model in Ethiopia in 2019 after an investigation found faults in the sensors and that the new flight control software had not been explained to pilots;
America has set a precedent with new defence for first degree murder: the Pentagon has said that the US drone attack in August that killed 10 Afghan civilians was “an honest mistake” and no laws had been broken; killers can now say “it was a genuine mistake, I meant to kill someone else”;
Julia ‘Hurricane’ Hawkins has set a new record at the Louisiana Senior Games by sprinting 100 yards in 1:02:95 minutes, the fastest time for women aged over 105;
music can calm dogs frightened by fireworks and a study by the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow found reggae and soft rock worked best;
the world’s youngest winner of the Nobel peace prize, Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for blogging for the BBC about increasing Taliban activities in Pakistan, married her partner, Asser Malik, on Tuesday in a small ceremony in Birmingham – long life and happiness to them both.

And a final tip: it helps if you imagine autocorrect as a tiny little elf in your phone who’s trying very hard to be helpful but is in fact quite drunk.

Progress on Covid-19, volunteers and the NHS, extremists’ psychology and the misuse of words

28 February 2021

Boris Johnson’s biographer has had a good week. Commissioned to write a book called “Truth-telling and Triumphs” ten years ago, there’s been nothing to write about and all that had been written so far was “As a child, Boris was ~~abused~~ ~~spoilt~~ ~~worshipped~~ indulged and, henceforth, he expected no more of life”.

Then suddenly, in late February 2021, Johnson stepped right out of character and didn’t promise the pandemic would all be over by Easter / the summer / Christmas / Easter / the summer; nor did he even promise impossible dates while his medical advisers looked away and tried to pretend they weren’t with him. Instead, he said that releasing the lockdown would be phased and, while they wouldn’t happen before particular dates, their timing would depend on the situation at the time.

Then Matt Hancock, the health secretary, praised and thanked the large numbers of volunteers (which, crucially to the government, means unpaid) who are helping roll-out the vaccination programme, and he went on to say they were hoping to keep this volunteer force active when the pandemic is over. What a brill … hang on a minute, these are people who offered to help because the government has cut NHS funding so much in the last 10 years that it no longer has enough staff.

I’ve spent my life paying money national insurance, VAT and income tax so that the NHS, the benefits system and other public services are properly funded and we can all can use them for free. Relying on volunteers is just another way for the government to avoid having to make up NHS funding, even just to what it was before they came to power.

However, the latest poll shows that support for the Conservatives has increased dramatically since Monday. I wonder if Johnson will spot the link between his support falling after he was so weak this time last year and its bounce following his newly-found caution.

Meanwhile, the US Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve a third new vaccine produced by Johnson & Johnson* for emergency use and Joe Biden has confirmed that America has increased vaccination rates to £1.7m a day and is on track to deliver 100m shots within his first 100 days. What a nice change from Dogsbottom’s failures**.

The Germans have created some new compound words to honour the pandemic, from coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to balkonsänger (someone who stands on their balcony and sings at passers-by) but my favourite describes stockpiling lavatory paper and baked beans: hamsteritis. (While I was checking that the German for ‘hamster’ really is ‘Hamster’, I came across a wonderful example of how the word can be used in a German sentence that translates into English as “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries” – no, me neither.)

Our government has at last agreed to prioritise people on the learning disabilities register for vaccination, but only because Jo Whiley got a lot of press coverage for her sister’s genetic disorder. What a pity it took somebody famous enough to get a lot of media coverage before they would act on what seems blindingly obvious to the rest of us.

Interestingly, researchers from the University of Cambridge have found that, in a sample of 330 US-based participants, people with extreme political, nationalist or dogmatic views tend to see the world in black and white and perform poorly on complex tasks that require intricate mental steps.

Dr Leor Zmigrod at Cambridge’s department of psychology said “Individuals or brains that struggle to process and plan complex action sequences may be more drawn to extreme ideologies, or authoritarian ideologies that simplify the world.” Such people are prone to take simplistic views and are resistant to accept credible evidence that doesn’t support their world view, but this seems to be because they have a genuine problem with processing information, even at a perceptual level.

In some of the cognitive tasks, participants were asked to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible. People who leant towards (small c) conservativism tended to approach every task with caution and react more slowly, giving more detailed responses that meshed with their beliefs while those with less rigid beliefs produced less contextual answers faster.

Because the “psychological signature” for extremism across the board appeared to indicate a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies, the researchers are hoping that these results may help identify people most at risk of radicalisation.

So, basically, extremists can’t help themselves but Shamima Begum has still been refused permission to return to the country of her birth, even though she was only 15 when she was radicalised. Which of us never did anything when we were 15 that we might now wish we’d done differently? Get the beam out of your own moat before you throw one in somebody else’s.

I mentioned recently that I’ve exchanged a couple of letters with a far-right climate-change denier in our local paper and apologised publicly for having teased him after he’d obviously thought I was serious about how the comparative volumes of frozen and liquid water could affect sea levels. Last week, he claimed he’d realised I was taking the mickey (ho yerss) and, having completely missed the point of my first letter, said he was glad my heart seemed to be in the right place. I don’t propose to respond – I’ve had my fun – but I wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night.

In the same issue of the paper, there was an impressive example of how the omission of a comma can give a misleading impression. One sentence read “She was the middle of three sisters born to Edwin Gove Trump* and his wife Ruby on May 7, 1918.” How interesting, I thought, the sisters were triplets, it must have been quite rare for all three triplets to survive in 1918. Then I read on and it became clear that the omission of a comma after “sisters” wasn’t intended to imply they were triplets. It would of course have been even clearer if the first seven words had been moved to the end of the sentence …

I also came across an advertisement that said “Your debit card lets you spend up to 8x cheaper than a bank”, which has baffled me totally. Even correcting “cheaper” to “more cheaply” didn’t help. What does it mean? I rather doubt it means you get stuff for one eighth of the price if you use their debit card. All suggestions on what it’s trying to say will be welcomed.

And the oxymoron of the week was in a report on a man who was defecting from North to South Korea: “He was apprehended after surveillance equipment spotted him near the town of Goseong at the eastern end of the DMZ, a 248km-long (155-mile) strip of land strewn with mines that has separated the two Koreas since the end of their 1950-53 war.” Since when has a minefield been considered “demilitarised”?

But my favourite use of words this week was a picture of a woman wearing a sweatshirt printed with the words “Underestimate me – that’ll be fun”.

* No relation (as far as I know)

** Doesn’t Dogsbottom sound like one of Shakespeare’s yokels, or the name of an English village, just to the west of Loose Chippings?

Dracula, 366-day years, “buy a new house, donate £66,000 to the developer”, ABdePJ still climbing, coronavirus, Finnish football and more kindness

1 March 2020

I had a routine blood test this week which apparently showed slightly raised levels of iron in my blood. My doctor assured me this isn’t serious but, not being a medic, I started thinking that there’s a lot of oxygen in my body and the inside of my body is quite damp (over half my body weight is water and blood can be about 80% water) so there must be risk that I’m going to rust away from the inside out.

I then started to imagine my crumbling and blowing away in a convenient breeze, like Dracula at the end of the eponymous 1958 film. The film is well worth a watch just to see how film-making and acting styles have changed. In one scene, our heroes have searched the whole house for Dracula until somebody says “We’ve searched everywhere except the cellar.” Van Helsing dramatically claps his hand to his forehead and says “The cellar. My God! We forgot the cellar.” Brilliant! I’d have started with the cellar but I suppose the film would have been a lot shorter.

Anyway, raised levels of iron can indicate haemochromatosis and the best way of getting rid of the excess iron is to lose a lot of blood. Come back Dracula, all is forgiven.

Also this week, I had what appeared to be a Boris Johnson-inspired offer to extend the warranty on my computer. Part of it said “if your factory warranty expires on 31/12/2019 and you purchase a one year Post Warranty Care Pack on 31/4/2020, your new HP Care Pack extension will be valid from 31/4/2020 through 31/4/2021.” That is so groovy: 366 day years so people have to work one extra day every year for the same money – sheer genius.

On which subject, I was impressed to learn that Persimmon, the housebuilders who chucked out their previous chief executive last year even though he voluntarily reduced his bonus from over £100m to a paltry £75m, have just chucked out his successor (with a bonus of £45m).

I was even more impressed that their profits exceeded £1bn for the second time and that, despite critical problems with the quality of the houses they build, their average house sold for more than £215,000 and each one made them a profit of almost £66,000.

That’s one of the reasons we should all be capitalists, so nobody would need be on benefits. I mean, if people can’t afford to make a donation of £66,000 to the property developer when they’re buying a £149,000 house, then they don’t deserve a house anyway. It’s why Iain Duncan-Smith introduced the universal credit scheme and left so many people with no money at all for 6 weeks to encourage them to get jobs, or die of starvation. It’s a funny old world (“funny” in the sense of ‘aaarrrggghhh’).

Then the head of the Home Office resigned and will be claiming constructive dismissal from the government after his boss, Priti Patel, was even more unpleasant than she usually is. When Boris Johnson was asked if he retained full confidence in his home secretary, a Downing Street official said: “The prime minister has complete confidence in all of his cabinet.” I’d give her a week.

And the Pentagon carried out a military exercise simulating a “limited” nuclear exchange with Russia to prove that it’s possible to use nuclear weapons in a battle without causing a world-ending conflict. Next week they simulate an exercise in which fairies cure cancer.

After claiming the coronavirus (possibly to be known as the Nehivirus in America?) / Covid 19 outbreak was a democrat hoax designed to prevent the best president ever being re-elected, Donald Trump, a self-confessed germophobe, handed responsibility for dealing with the epidemic to Mike Pence, the Vice-President. Pence is a devout Christian who has said he believes that “someday scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe” (so, logically, the epidemic is God’s doing and trying to contain or cure it would be opposing the mysterious ways in which God works).

According to the World Health Organisation ‘sitrep’ yesterday, there were 85,403 confirmed cases worldwide and it would seem that the average death rate is about 2%. I originally guessed there might be 250,000-500,000 cases worldwide but am now wondering if there be could be ten times that number.

Trump has assured Americans that they are “very very safe” so it’s obviously Pence’s fault if they’re not.

The Finnish Football Association (Suomen Palloliitto in Finnish, as I’m sure you knew) is one of the few football organisations that has equal pay for their men’s and women’s national teams. Now they’re going a step further and the country’s top division of women’s football will be called the National League instead of the Women’s League in a push for “full equality”. Finland leads the way yet again!

After the suicide of TV presenter Caroline Flack, one of her Instagram posts in December was shared widely and has since gone viral. In it, she said “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.”

Also as a result of her death, someone who just called themselves Emma contacted Simon Key, who runs the Big Green Bookshop (http://www.biggreenbookshop.com/), offering to pay for a couple of copies of Matt Haig’s memoir about depression ‘Reasons to Stay Alive’ so they could be given to other people. Key, who already runs a “Buy a Stranger a Book” scheme online, tweeted about this and was overwhelmed by requests for the book and by donations, some small, some large, from people who wanted to give the book to those who’d been brave enough to ask for a copy.