December 2003 Archives

...when you see the headline Amazon search for UK campaigner and you think it's got something to do with online book shops.

When you're looking for a political consultation web site it's important to get the URL just right. Two of the following sites take you to that nice Mr Blair's Labour Party site where they closely control what you can read. The other two don't.

bigconversation.org
bigconversation.org.uk
thebigconversation.org
thebigconversation.org.uk

Ever wondered how your MP has voted in Parliament? Well now you can find out. publicwhip.org.uk have extracted the records from the online version of Hansard back to the start of the 1997 session and put them all into a database which you can query.

For example, I now know that my MP has voted against the Labour Party a total of 10 times (out of 1664 divisions).

Do you ever get into a discussion where something seems perfectly obvious to you, but other people in the group can't see it? I saw a good example of this recently.

I was in a pub with a group of friends when one of them showed us a "card trick". This trick involved taking an unshuffled pack of cards, cutting it seven times and dealing seven poker hands. Six of the hands are full houses, the dealer decides to change all five cards in his hand and the next five cards deal him a running flush.

I thought the trick looked pretty obvious and I asked my friend to repeat it so I could check my understanding. He started again by cutting the pack seven times. I pointed out that it really didn't matter how many times you cut the pack and he disagreed saying that it was important to cut it seven times if you were going to deal seven hands.

This lead to a discussion where it became obvious that half of the people around the table didn't understand that cutting the pack didn't change the order of the pack at all. We'd given the cards back to the landlord by then so we couldn't demonstrate, but the rest of us tried hard to persuade them that we were right. Drinks were lined up on the table and "cut" and all sorts of analogies were tried. Finally I think we has some limited success with an analogy of beads on a necklace.

But I was very surprised that something which is so self-evident to me was such a mystery to so many of my friends.

It seems that Michael Howard has apologised for his part in the Poll Tax.

It's a start I suppose, but personally I won't be happy until Thatcher has been made to travel every road in the UK on her hands and knees apologising to everyone she meets.

When did the meaning of the word "acronym" get changed? As I understand it, an acronym is an abbreviation which can be pronounced as a word. Like "scuba", "nato" or "radar". But many people seem to use "acronym" when they actually mean "abbreviation". There's already a perfectly usable word for abbreviations. It's "abbreviation". Why not use it?

Early December and I'm already deep in "bah humbug" mode. I really hate Christmas. I can't understand how some many people who don't follow a religion can get so excited about one of that religion's festivals. And I also don't understand why people who do follow that religion get so excited as it's obvious that most of the legends surrounding the date were stolen from far older religions.

One of the things I hate most about it is Christmas songs. It's a real trial for me to go shopping in December when every shop you go into will be playing "Merry Christmas Everyone" or "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".

There are, however, two songs that make me put aside my cynicism briefly and almost embrace the Christmas mood. They are Steeleye Span's "Gaudete" and (embarassingly) Greg Lake's "I Believe In Father Christmas".

Actually, there's also a third - Lindisfarne's "Winter Song", but you'll never hear that being played in a shop on Oxford St.

Marcus McLaurin was waiting in line to go to recess on November 11 at Ernest Gallet Elementary School when a classmate asked him about his mother and father. He responded that he didn’t have a mother and father; instead he has two mothers. When the other child asked why, Marcus told him that it was because his mother is gay. The other child then asked what that meant, and Marcus explained, “Gay is when a girl likes another girl.”

Upon hearing this, Marcus’s teacher scolded him in front of his classmates, telling him that “gay” is a bad word and he should never say it at school, then sent him to the principal’s office instead of letting him go to recess. The following week the school required Marcus to attend a special behavioral clinic at 6:45 in the morning, where he was forced to repeatedly write “I will never use the word ‘gay’ in school again.”

Louisiana School Punishes 7-Year-Old Boy for Talking About His Lesbian Moms

Some ten to fifteen years ago the Conservative party was in power in the UK and to them the free market was king. It would solve all consumer problems, give us better services across the board and make everything cheaper. One of their biggest projects was to turn our nationally owned railway service into a number of privately owned companies. On just about every line there would be two or three companies who could run services and this would encourage competition on service levels and prices and the consumer would be the winner.

It didn't, of course, work out like this. Many unprofitable lines are suffering from much reduced services and on many lines there is a bewildering choice of fares available. Surveys have demonstrated that these options confuse even the ticket sellers and there is plenty of evidence of people being sold the wrong tickets (or not being sold the cheapest ticket for their journey.

Take, for example, my experience on Saturday. We were meeting a friend at Liverpool St and travelling to Colchester. There are two companies that run services on that line. We weren't sure when the friend we were meeting would turn up, but we knew we wanted to get the first train that left after she arrived. But the ticket seller asked us which company's trains we wanted to travel on and we didn't know that and I tried to explain that to her. "So what do you want?" she asked. "I want British Rail back please" I replied. This didn't go down well and in order to enable us to travel on any train, she sold us the most expensive tickets.

But it seems that this situation may improve soon. The Strategic Rail Authority are the government body responsible for running the trains and they have decided that having multiple companines on the same track is not a good idea. So they are doing away with the competition. For example the three companies that run trains out of Liverpool Street will become one next year. This, apparently, will also happen in other areas.

So we'll go to a situation where (and I'm making these numbers up, but they are in the right ballpark) instead of having 20 train companies in the country, we'll have six or seven. And there will be no competition on any of the lines.

I just wonder where they came up with the new, lower, number of companies. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go back to one company?