[business wear] on the tube in this gear

Oh yeah!

This is a must for going for job interviews. Throw away your ASDA George outfits with the variegated stitching and get into this, man.

There's a nice little pink number too if you'd prefer. Sensible wear for sensible people. I can see our fellow bloggers in it now.

[around bloghounds today] the people are hurting

Richard Havers:

It's about fairness and unfairness. It's about providing support to those who played by the rules but are struggling with rising prices. It's about making sure that a fair chance is provided to all.

Andrew Allison:

Like many of you I am sick and tired of being described as a racist the moment I bring up the subject of immigration. Articulate some views about gay adoptions that do not go along with the liberal consensus, and you are described as a homophobe and are squeezed out of the debate. If you don't go along with the jolly view that everything is wonderful in EU land, and you are a bigoted, little Englander. Politics has gone from the grassroots and is ruled centrally.

Sackerson:

All I'm looking for is a FISCAL conservative... And by the way, whatever happened to "moral suasion"? Why does everything have to be banned or compulsory? ... And maybe US demographics, like here in Britain, would be very different if the slaughter of the innocents hadn't happened - but we are all bending under the weight of a thousand daily coercions.

Cassandra:

With Palin we say, "pray (...) that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." That would be far much more attractive than the "world historical events" cabal who pretend their machinations are Acts of God, while they are actually thought up and steered by their own One World Totalitarian Collective agenda.

Daily Referendum:

Before I go any further I want to point out that neither Harry (to my knowledge) or I are raving anti Muslim loons. I am however worried that we could be running two very different systems of law. We have a system of law in this country and it should apply to every citizen regardless of race, colour, sex or religion. This story is running in the Sunday Mercury.

Debacle:

Having given up trying to have any decent, normal, honest, straightforward dialogue with public bodies, the obvious thing to do - apart from exiting the planet - was to write. The vital importance of keeping good records became obvious: these public bodies are exceptionally skilled at obfuscating and distorting and sending you off on wild goose chases and round and round the roundabout that, without a clear record, they can also send you round the bend. I reckoned that I may as well share it all publicly.

[implosion] might not be such a bad idea

When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. (0700 GMT) on September 10, disaster scenarists will have little to work on. In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction. If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one CERN researcher, "will be little ones."

Right. I don't actually believe Europe is going to implode from this thing and yet did anyone see Terminator 3, with Skynet?

Different thing of course. isn't it? That one was about machines becoming sentient. OK, what about Deep Blue Sea? Saffron Burrows represents all that we love to hate - a know-all scientist who puts the experiment and funding before human lives, so much so that they had to redo the end of the film:

In the film's original cut, McAlester [Burrows] lived, but test audiences made it clear how much they disliked the character (going so far as to shout "Die, bitch!" at the screen) as her actions had caused all that had gone wrong. Thus, the decision was made to re-shoot the ending so that her character died.

The Mummy series springs to mind in this context as well. By the way, does anyone know Saffron Burrows' real life persona - interesting. Read her mini-biography.

Real life is a bit as if we're all living in some giant progressive tragedy where we know who the baddies are and the supposed goodies [humanity] and it all inevitably occurs, despite warnings. Doom and gloom soothsayers are labelled, mocked and vilified, then it all happens and the scientist supposedly says, as Woodrow Wilson did, "What have I done? What have I done?"

Does anyone know of one of these experiments where it actually ... er .. worked and brought peace, love and really good things to humanity?

[birmingham] and stephane dion

The beauty of Birmingham

How well do you speak English?

Canada's main opposition leader Stephane Dion says his biggest handicap as he campaigns for votes in the country's snap elections is his difficulty communicating in English, which he blamed on a "hearing problem." "I have a hearing problem and it may be linked to that," the Liberal leader said in an interview with the Globe and Mail newspaper. "I have difficulty to isolate sounds," he said. "It may explain the fact that the music of the language is difficult for me to catch."

Question - should that be "to isolate", "in isolating" or should another construction have been utilized? No matter.

Speaking of Brummies, we were discussing them today and the question arose of their accent. "Oh, they're much improved now," my friend corrected me.

"Well that's nice to hear," I replied. "I always considered that my strangulated accent was not the worst accent in the British Isles but now I see that it is."

'Yes, it's much improved now, Birmingham," he continued. "They've done the city centre up quite nicely, in fact."

You'd have to agree with that. Look at how spic and span those canal boats in the picture [above] look. I've just had the most brilliant idea how to overcome my current job flow crisis - set up a Birmingham Narrowboat Holiday Company, funded by Northern Rock.

[raschida dati] did nick do the deed

Lowering the tone on a drizzly Monday morning, Paris has this today:

The rumour that the unmarried minister — noted for her closeness to President Nicolas Sarkozy — was pregnant began, as rumours tend to do in France, quietly, over lunch tables and in the gilded salons of the establishment. Naturally, not a word of conjecture was allowed to soil the pages of the daily prints, for to do so would be to deprive the French public of its cherished right to be told as little as possible about the private lives of its politicians.

Which of these most closely approximated your reaction?

1. Who cares when there are poverty and all sorts of other bad things about;

2. Thataboy, Nick, you son-of-a-gun;

3. The man needs castrating to stop him rutting;

4. Poor Carla, poor, poor dear;

5. Could have been anyone - not just Sarko;

6. Sigh

7. Other?

[resource deployment] outer space or poverty

Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva

Interesting, if not predictable, that Sir David King should say that the most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth's greatest challenges, such as climate change ... and that less time and money is spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.

The thrust was that the best minds should concentrate on solving climate change and presumably starvation in Africa and so on. He mentioned seemingly spurious but highly expensive research on such things as the Large Hadron Collider, with a spin-off, for example, being Tim Berners Lee's world wide web.

Surely that was worth the money?

Where do we start? It's the old "should we go to the moon when people are starving" argument all over again. We're all caught in an impasse. Governments and corporations can allocate billions on ostensibly innocent programmes like nuclear fission and the results are history. Certain groups get their hands on the best science and the result is destructive.

So it's all very well Sir David King saying that but the whole thing is geared in such a way that the money can buy the best researchers and the goal is not necessarily always philanthropic.

The argument then goes - well, the warmongers are at the controls, therefore we need to up our own research in mass destruction and conventional weaponry to offer an effective deterrent to them. Billions are poured in which might have been used to house the homeless and retrain them in new skills or to provide for single mums.

This blog doesn't necessarily accept that line holus bolus and the welfare fraud is staggering and yet I'm not far off that position myself of being homeless, jobless and on the street.

Turning the attention to allocation of funds by local councils, do they spend two million on a sculpture in the town square, in the interests of civic pride and everything looking lovely or do they allocate it to revamping housing and providing local services such as bin collection?

Is there some sort of compromise position perhaps?