[blogfocus saturday] motley crew

1 The Wife in the North shows why she's attracted a large readership in a short space in time:

It was a bad day and the reason I know there is a God is because I have lost the car keys. Usually my husband loses the car keys. And after everything I said about him persistently letting the car run out of petrol. All I spend when that happens is time and an impressive amount of bad language. Replacing the car keys is going to cost more than £1,200. (I should actually say "car key" because obviously we do not have a spare. Why would we have a spare? It is not like we are ever going to lose it. )

It is going to cost this huge amount of money because you have to reprogramme the car's "brain" and "send away". Who knew the car had a brain? I find the fact that the car has a brain almost as worrying as the fact mine is missing along with the car key. I would so love to blame the children.

2 Dr. Michelle Tempest asks if the spindoctors have spun the doctors:

It has been said that doctors are not very politically savvy as professional group. However, when the government announced their ‘Modernising Medical Careers review result’ exactly 24 hours before the long Easter weekend, I heard many doctors asking about 'a good day to bury bad news' and 'the political theory of spin'. After all, the day before a long weekend is inevitably extra busy in any job; and especially so in hospitals, as patients get reviewed prior to a bank holiday. News releases about work have a tendency to lose impetus as people relax with family over the long weekend.

3 I just had to include my old friend the Flying Rodent once again:

It's one of the most commonly asked questions in modern politics, but one that is worth revisiting often - whatever happened to the Lift? While the nation has changed radically due to globalisation, privatisation and streamlined capitalism, the Lift has been unable to advance. It remains trapped, capable of rising and falling, but never of going forward.

The problem is plain to see - the Lift lacks inclusiveness, with little room for manoeuvre within its narrow confines. One could wait expectantly for decades for an innovative suggestion, but the Lift has nothing to offer but the same simplistic formulations that it has offered since Attlee was a boy.

4 Heather Yaxley shows that PC afflicts even her own PR profession:

Watson highlights the problem of promoting best practice examples of public relations by including measures of advertising value equivalent

[AVE, for the uninitiated involves calculating the worth of editorial coverage generated in PR campaigns against the cost to buy it as advertising - plus usually a factor multiplier to reflect editorial’s greater credibility.]

It is a ridiculous measure since the worth of advertising isn’t what you pay for it, but whether it delivers any enquiries, sales or other measurable outcome. Surely then assessment of editorial coverage should also be outcome-related.

5 Colin Campbell addresses that most terrible of afflictions and the particular Australia conditions conducive to it:

We have friends here in Australia, who have cancers dug out of their bodies regularly after a youth of sun over exposure. Australians are generally very cautious about this. Our kids always wear sunscreen and hats. Even on overcast days, the ozone rating can be extreme. I used to be more keen to get a tan when I was in Scotland. Now I don't care so much.

6 Just quietly, I don't fancy getting on the wrong side of Trixy. Here she finally lets loose on an iniquitous anomaly over the same issue of cancer and how it's addressed:

Anyway, Cllr Gavin Ayling left a comment saying: Maybe we should wait for the result before slinging mud at the party who was doing the employing? Maybe ... And I didn't write another word about it.

However, now that I know that the Tories have lost their case and the cancer suffering lady in question, who has been told by doctors that she does not have long to live, has been awarded J40,000 damages for her unfair dismissal, the other side have to pay costs.

So, especially in light of how the Tories rubbed their hands with glee in the case of the UKIP being blackmailed by a man with plastic knees, who completely made the story up, I am going to do the same to the Tories.

7 The Select Society's Cleanthes touches on the Iran Hostage Crisis:

If we trust the other guy, then [we] can reach an agreement about who is in the wrong and why. In which case, you aren’t offering concessions - you are making amends. If you don’t and you can’t, the concessions are meaningless and may even be counterproductive.

We will not increase our stock of trust with the Iranians however this dispute is resolved. We can only increase our stock of trust in other dealings with them that are not forced upon us as a result of a dispute. In the context of avoiding a war between the UK and Iran, the work has to be done elsewhere.

8 Which leaves Wolfie to add one final comment about said conflict:

So another round of the Great Game draws to a close but the good news is that in this round nobody got hurt and its a win-win situation, unless you are an Iranian dreaming of regime change of course.

So Happy Easter everyone and enjoy the holiday break.

May I add my own best wishes to you for a lovely last half of the break.