On Holiday

I'm not writing this to say that posting will be lighter while I am off at Whitby, things are a bit erratic around here anyway.

No it is just to mention that when I post it will be from my phone, so no spell check function and therefore there will be rafts of errors!

Time up for Sheffield Airport

Sheffield Airport is to close for good as that BBC news story suggests a bunch of people are trying to save it. Why bother? Here it is compared with Finningley at the same scale, one is a quite a bit bigger than the other. You will also notice that the main runways are aligned in different directions, one is better aligned for the prevailing wind conditions than the other. I'll leave you to guess which one...

Where are my pink balls?

One of today's big stories is the trial of pink cricket balls at Lords; now the actual reason for this is that the white ball used in pyjama cricket gets dirty and difficult to see, but a lot of coverage has made the comparison to the many other uses of pink in sport to highlight the evil that is Breast cancer.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not against these attempts to promote fundraising for this cause, but here is the rub, deaths from breast cancer are gradually decreasing, all this money and awareness is working. But deaths from Prostate cancer are on the up. And while Excel's trendline function isn't the most rigorous scientific analysis you will ever see, it can't be far wrong with "if the current trends continue within a decade more men will die of Prostate cancer each year than women of Breast cancer" (and of course men die of Breast cancer too). So is it time to do more than the odd sponsored mustache growing event for this increasing cause of male deaths.

Of course after that we then should raise money for Bowel Cancer which kills more people than either Breast or Prostate and after that well there is lung, which kills more than both Breast and Prostate combined, not sure what colours to use for those though really.

Year range	Female Breast Cancer Deaths	Male Prostate Cancer Deaths
1981-1985	64,413	28,937
1986-1990	68,757	37,493
1991-1995	65,850	43,465
1996-2000	58,885	42,664
2001-2005	56,254	45,262

What-a-Mess

The cuddly puppy of the cabinet Andy Burnham wants to criminalise football fans who sell their spare ticket to a mate according to Dizzy. Actually having read the DCMS's response it is much worse, they want to do this and they don't want to do this, they want to help the consumer and the promoter and ask the secondary market what they think. They want refunds to be more available where the consumer needs them but not burdensome on the promoter if they get lots. It really looks like they took the original Culture, Media and Sport Committee report as loose leaves and a stack of random notes on the subject submitted by everyone in the department and then let the office afghan puppy loose on the two piles. After ten minutes anything even slightly legible was picked up, dusted off and passed to the typing pool with instructions for it to be transcribed verbatim.
I think there is a sensible middle way to all this, require that the promoter has to either accept refunds (and outlaw utterly disproportionate "fees") or allow the tickets to be resold at only at face value.

Two tales of Graffiti

A couple of nice little stories to do with people daubing paint on things. Firstly Banksy who in general is considered to be more at the artistic end of things having fun with the post office in a piece called One Nation Under CCTV. The second is a an exceptionally funny reaction to 'tagging' in Greenwich with a very nicely weighted sticker.

Ad industry in lack of originality shocker

With their coverage of the IPL alongside several flavours of rugby I am watching a reasonable amount of setanta sports at the moment. As with most cable television channels the adverts are in predictable blocks, lots of Guinness and Magners during live rugby for example. As it gets late of an evening, it moves towards SMS based flirting and recently lots of instances of this advert for Berocca. Which if you have had any exposure to popular YouTube videos you will recognise as a rip off of Here It Goes Again by OK Go. Of course borrowing from other peoples creative works by advertising executives is nothing new, it is some years now since an advertising agency watched the Hudsucker Proxy and decided to drop a car off a building in the snow and have it stop just above the road. It is also unlikely to ever stop the thinking it saves them leaves them more time to snort coke of the pert buttocks of recently legal boys.

The shafting of Bryan Ashton.

The first two years of Clive Woodward two second place finishes in the 5 Nations and losing in the quarter finals of the World Cup is backed and goes on to form one of the great England rugby sides.
Brian Aston a second and a third in the 6 nations and a *runner up* finish in the World Cup and is dumped.
When it was first mooted that MJ would join the setup as Team Manager it was spun that it was to free up Brian to be a focused head coach. But now he is in charge of the whole shebang, but only after a further three tests, two against the All Blacks, and while there are specialist area coaches under him with Brian goes the only Backs coach. While I think Brian is to dignified to do anything Darrell Hair like and sue, it seems a shame that they will get away with treating him like this.
All in all about as well managed as the Tony -> Gordon hand over and it will probably turn out about as successful.

What price security?

Richard has highlighted a story about the Northern Ireland Civil Service spending a lot of money on computers. He makes some very good point about security not being a hardware issue it is about training people to have the security mindset.

I read through the article and wondered whether:

1. This is a non story, the NI executive would have been buying these machines anyway and they thought they could try and look good on security for once; or
2. They genuinely  need to upgrade these machines to cope with upgrades to do with security and Bill McCluggage  saw this as yet another opportunity to promote NI's so called e-government.

I actually think it is a bit of both and the canny Bill has used security as a great excuse to buy a whole load of new kit rather than argue his way through upgrades piecemeal (I don't know what percentage of NICS 14,000 people are, but I suspect it is quite a large one). While I was looking at this I though I would see how much they were paying; after 2.9 *Million* pounds of discount they are still paying £475 per laptop and £435 per desktop machine, someone saw them coming.

Obvious but not iconic

To: The Editor, Observer Review.
Sir,

Thank you for publishing "One city's towering folly" on Sunday. It is indeed successfully highlighting a distinct imprudence, not that a pair of generic cooling towers that could frankly be anywhere in the UK are going to be demolished, but that Tom James and Go are so pot committed to their wonderful art project falling with the towers.

Tom hits the nail on the head, Sheffield is famous more for things like cutlery and Cocker than for many of the great culture we have going on here, but that isn't going to get better by putting art in a silly building in a part of the city that no-one goes to unless they are shopping at Meadowhall. Given that Sheffield is most famous outside the city for steel and plate, for knifes and forks, for brewing and drinking (we often come up as the "Beer Capital" of Britain in the annual choice and diversity surveys) why not pick a building related to one of these industries currently lying fallow, save it from being made into studio flats and put the art project there? The William Stones brewery lies unused, downsized steel works are ten a penny and there is an added bonus with a number of old cutlery factories that they are next to the Cultural Industries Quarter.

One thing I would say to Tom is that his idea has to be compelling on its own merits, the National Centre for Popular Music showed that an uninteresting attraction won't get more visitors just because you have put it in an architecturally striking building.

Yours,
Tony Kennick

Illegal to say illegal

I really wish it was illegal to say something was illegal when it wasn't. Some pubs do it when they don't want to serve certain drinks that look wrong to the untutored eye like a Black and Tan or snakebite. Instead of being honest with the customer and saying "the landlord won't let us" or "it is against the pub company policy" they lie about the law thinking people are less likely to argue.
It happened to a woman in front of me in the supermarket the other day, I don't know if it was bad staff training that meant the checkout staff didn't realise the difference between the law on the sale of Paracetamol and painkillers in general, or perhaps he just thought ibuprofen contained paracetamol, or it is a badly implemented a company policy but still.
I suppose it would just be another law that people objected to you pointing out to them (oh the irony) given they generally go into utterly nasty defensive mode when you call them on their mistake/lie and given how shitty people are when you point out they are breaking the rules themselves; this mostly happens with traffic regulations and the smoking ban, not had to say "excuse me, do you know holding up a building society with a shotgun is against the law" in a while.

Has Iain Dale lost it?

After a poorly weighted April Fool's joke and the very strange promotion of a particularly cheesy video about having a thing for Boris the doyen of conservative bloggers has decided to run a sex survey. Nick Clegg's remarks in GQ has caused a frisson of comment and this isn't the first quiz I have seen as a result but certainly the least expected. Anyway whatever the reason for the shift towards tabloid blog posts (perhaps it was the disappointment of not being selected to step into Ann Widdecombe's shoes at Maidstone & the Weald) it isn't either a particularly long or taxing survey if you want to take it:

If you normally support the Conservatives VOTE HERE
If you normally support Labour VOTE HERE
If you normally support the LibDems VOTE HERE
If you normally support UKIP VOTE HERE
If you normally support the Greens VOTE HERE
If you normally support the BNP VOTE HERE
If you normally support the SNP or Plaid Cymru VOTE HERE
If you are a floating voter VOTE HERE

Sexual acts mean we can't drive as fast.

Apparently motor sport is up in arms because one of its administrators was caught with his trousers down. I am really unable to see what on earth this has to do with the price of stolen technical data fish, I maybe naive here but I suspect that the Nazi overtones were nothing to do with a fetish for small mustaches or cars for the people but part of a power game. The various power game subcultures often associate with the Nazis as they were pretty bloody powerful (and the uniforms are hot) walk round any alternative night ands you will probably run out of fingers counting people walking round both wearing items with a distinct Totenkopf theme and carrying whips.

If the man had actually been oppressing people due to their lack of racial purity of invading Poland I could see the fuss but not for this, I mean I absolutely can't get aroused unless the other person kneels on all fours and shouts "Genghis, I demand that you subjugate me with your barbarian hordes and make my felted mound part of your Mongol Empire while you tickle me about the Ulan Bator" while a lackey bakes bread in the corner, making the alarm calls of Corvus corax, should I keep away from public life?

Alex Salmond caught in the net.

The Sunday Times reports that the SNP wants Scotland to have it's own brand on the Internet and break away from the use of .uk domain names. Notwithstanding how hard it is to get a top level domain these days unless the statisticians at the United Nations deem you worthy of a country code even if they succeed most businesses will either just register their chosen name in that zone as well as .co.uk or .com (or use it as a last resort when all the .uk and generic TLD variants have gone).

Of course given Alex has such confidence in the Scottish Internet infrastructure his web server is in a data centre in Edinburgh or maybe Glasgow. No up until recently it was in Docklands and is now in Berkshire.

Even more amusing is the childish mud slinging going on over the matter on the Nominet "steering" list, apparently an Irishman referring to the Barnet formula is racism, but a Scotsman suggesting most of England is too lazy to get off social security isn't.