Elections

Utterly bemused by London voting for Boris. Crazyness.

In Glorious Tipton the normally Labour/BNP fight was lost to a Tory.

I can’t work out why people think David Cameron’s party will do anything better than Gordon Brown’s.

Scouts Drop Promise and Law

Edinburgh Scouts have merged with the surrounding areas to create the all new South East Scotland Scouts. Queue new website complete with Content Management System cleverness. Unfortunately my suggestion to release the site content under a creative commons licence was rejected with “that is not appropriate”. Back when I was a Cub I promised “To help other people” and we tried to follow the law of “Think of others before themselves”, it is sad to see that this has been dropped.

New 4 Star Canoe-Kayak Leadership

A good number of children will have got their one or two star awards during a summer holiday. I did many years ago. It has always been on my list of things to do before I die to learn some canoe coaching skills. Recently the 4 star award has been overhauled to include leadership for trips, not the same as coaching but just as useful, so I signed up to a course from getafix.com. Here’s my notes as a reminder to myself and incase anyone else finds them useful.

Introduction

  • Ask people for their experience
  • Do a kit check, look for airbags, buoyancy aids which won’t come off when swimming, ensure people have spare hat and top
  • Say that if anyone has medical problems they should let you know (less embarracing than asking for them to tell whole group)
  • Show boat manual handling (pick up to vertical from front then put on shoulder, all without bending back). Also you can slide plastic boats quite safely.
  • Do a warm up (can be done on the water just as well if flat)
  • Agree on signals: all go, one at a time, break out into eddy, stay still, get out
  • Show how to swim safely: on back, feet first

Drip feed the above rather than all at once.

When they first get on the water and on the first rapid, watch how everyone paddles and assess their ability.

Notes on leading down a rapid:

  • Lead down a group from the front, ensure to keep line of sight, always be looking over your shoulder to keep an eye on everyone, typically follow at two boat lengths
  • If you can’t see the full rapid go ahead to first eddy so you can, keeping line of sight with group who stay above. Call them down one at a time or all together as appropriate.
  • Watch out for trees, rocks, shallow areas and other hazards people could get pinned on, lead from the back when most likely problem is canoes getting stuck.
  • Always be mindful of position of most usefulness for when something goes wrong.
  • Eddy hop when you can’t see the full rapid, go to next eddy and call people down one at a time. If can’t fit everyone in the eddy have a chain of eddys and pass message up chain, this needs to be practiced first.
  • Go to the outside of corners so you can see around them sooner
  • Keep a headcount
  • CLAP: Communication, Line of Sight, Avoidance (better than cure), Position of more usefulness

Equipment

  • First Aid Kit: bandages, triangular bandage (large, canvas), sterilised water, tea lights, painkillers (asprin for heart attacks), inhailer, dressings, eye pads, scissors, micropore tape, electrical tape, duct tape, steri strips
  • Group shelter
  • Spare split paddles
  • Spare clothes, jacket, leggings, hats
  • Hot flasked drink
  • Knife
  • Throw bag
  • Sling with snap on carabina
  • Mobile phone
  • Spanner, bolts
  • Torch

Dry bag(s) for much of the above. First aid kit in sealed container.

Organise shuttle runs and don’t forget your car key.

No Pancakes Month

In honour of supermarkets renaming Shrove Tuesday to Pancake Day, I’m renaming Lent to No Pancake Month.

I had mine with Green and Blacks chocolate spread.

BNP out of Princes End, Tipton, Sandwell

The former BNP success story of Tipton has failed to regain their seat they lost due to the previous moronic BNP councillor not bothering to turn up to meetings. Labour won, and the BNP previously only 20 votes behind were beaten by the Conservatives. I knew the class of the area would improve after I moved in.

Shakespear

Saw some Shakespear recently. Jean-Luc Piccard (or Patrick Stewart) played Macbeth and somehow made it much more interesting than it was at school (apologies to Harry Quinn).

Then we saw The Winters Tale which isn’t performed often in Scotland according to the programme. There’s probably a good reason, only Shakespear can get away with an ending along the lines of “oh The Queen hasn’t been dead for 20 years, she’s just been sleeping”.

Finally A Midsummer Nights Dream by The Footsbarn Travelling Theatre which was the best of the three and had masks (it was part of the Stourbridge Mask Festival, amazing things happen in Englandshire). You have to be quite devoted to acting to buy a field in France and set up a travelling theatre company. Even the children weren’t too fidgety, which is impressive for a Shakespear play without an interval.

Racism at Westmorland Teebay

Having successfully got Labour elected (you won’t hear me say that much) in place of the BNP in Tipton, I was disgusted to see Westmorland’s Tebay motorway services, which I’d always thought to be quite classy, selling the BNP newsletter in their shop. Sent them a grumpy feedback form.

Digital Media

The lengthy named UKTV Gold 2 digital channel has decided that if they are going to have a stupid name they may as well have one that isn’t so long and renamed to Dave. I feel this reflects the meaningfulness of most digital TV channels.

Meanwhile digital radio is great and I look forward to Channel 4’s new multiplex (well, not the station from Closer magazine obviously, or anything with 24 hour big brother coverage). Chill radio is my favourite for ambient background music, although it does lack the handy “ban” button that last.fm sports when it gets too musack.

The BBC meanwhile is not doing its public service duty to support open platforms and access to programming by using proprietary software for its iPlayer. You can’t even control what the iPlayer is doing, and it’ll happily eat up all your bandwidth given a chance. They did put out a press release saying Linux and MacOS users will get a Flash based player, I’ve tried it and it works well if you don’t mind the window being about 600 pixels across. I think I’ll stick to UK Nova.

Tipton: Vote Against Racism

Tipton has a problem with racism. Racism is not acceptable and as a resident of Tipton you should work to get rid of it. Racist and fascist graffiti is common around Tipton, if you see it you should remove it. But here is something simpler you can do:

There is an election in Sandwell on May 3rd. Last year Labour lost three seats and the xenophobic BNP party won 3 seats. See the BBC results page for Sandwell 2006 election. Use your vote on May 3rd for a party which is not racist. You have until April 18th to register to vote, see aboutmyvote for details.

Sandwell is a key area for the BNP in this years elections. With only 1/3rd of voters taking part in the elections last year it is easy to defeat them by simply using your vote and urging your friends and neighbours to use theirs.

Don’t accept racism in Tipton. Vote on May 3rd.

Not acceptable (and not just because of the spelling) Much nicer

Joining a Political Party

I joined the SNP today. I don’t agree with all their policies, but I do agree with more of them than any other party and I’ll be voting for them in May. It doesn’t cost much either, a pound a month at a minimum. The political system is important to support and there are falling numbers of members of most parties, leaving them dependent on large donations from businessmen including the Evil Brian Souter. Somebody has to support the parties, so seems to me like every citizens duty to do so.

Empire by Niall Ferguson

I read the book Empire by Niall Ferguson, an interesting history of the British Empire, an Empire that covered a quarter of the world’s land by the end of the first world war. What’s interesting about the British Empire is that much of it was started and run by commercial entities and only later did government formally take over.

It started in the Caribbean with English sailors taking islands away from the Spanish. These were largely profitable and government soon took over the running. In the East there was dispute with the Dutch who were trading in India and the East Indies (Indonesia, Malasia etc), but that was solved when the Dutch king William taking over the English throne and splitting the east up with England getting India and the Dutch getting the East Indies. The Indian colony was run by a privately owned company, the East India Company, who slowly took over the whole sub-continent, from modern day Pakistan to Burma.

North America was fought over against the French in the Seven Years War. France losing the war allowed Britain to become the dominant world power for the next two centuries. One obvious problem being the revolution in the US which started when the British lowered taxes on imports and all the local smugglers got annoyed that they couldn’t compete any more. France helped the US in their fight for independence mostly to get back at Britiain. As with a lot of wars the politics is not as simple as is often made out and many British supported independence for the US and many US residents supported British rule. When the rebels one the war most Loyalists went to Canada, which helps explain why Canada stayed part of the Empire for so long. Losing the US wasn’t considered much of a problem since it was an inhospitable place already populated with natives and wasn’t generating any revenue (unlike the Caribean islands which were invaluable for growing sugar).

While the US was unprofitable, Australia had even more harsh terrain and was up to 8 months sailing away, so it was populated with convicts who worked as slaves for a period for the relatively few free landowners. Far more slaves however were taken to the Caribbean and the US from Western Africa, about three million in total. But somewhere in the 18th century the political mood about slavery changes and the slave trade is banned. Not only is it banned between British colonies, but the British Navy is also sent to stop the trade of Africans to Brazil and later of Easten Africans to Arabia and Persia.

David Livingstone was a church missionary who went to Africa to convert them all to Christianity. He only ever converted one person, who reverted after a month because he preferred polygamy, so Livingstone turned into an explorer and was the first white person to cross central Africa. He convinced the government to fund the founding of a colony in Eastern Africa which failed horribly when the ship couldn’t sail up the Zambizi because of some waterfalls Livingstone had failed to chart correctly. As usual though private enterprise succeeded where government had failed, and the main difference was a horrific new machine gun called the Maxim Gun, a small number of which could kill a whole tribe of Zulu warriors before a battle had begun. South Africa was colonised to mine for gold and diamonds and the monopolistic De Beers company funded much of the murderous expansion north into Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Eventually the British had colonised a solid path of continent from South Africa to Egypt.

Egypt had been squabbled over with France for ages but was sorted out with the Entente Cordiale. With Egypt, British interests moved into the Middle East, much of which was occupied by the Turkish Ottoman Emptire. During the first world war the Germans trained and encouraged the Turks to fight the British. Much of the British army in the area was made up of forces from the Colonies: India, East Africa, Egypt and ANZACS (Australia and New Zealand), many of whom were promptly killed. When Germany and Turkey were defeated British took over their empires, gaining British a number of colonies in the Middle East: Palestine, Jordan, Transjordan (Syria) and Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Western Africa.

Between the world wars the world was understandably poor, and people questioned the need for an Empire that seemed to benefit a few wealthy businessmen but not the country as a whole. After the second world war the national debt was worse and the costs of socialist government such as the NHS high, and most of the empire was wound up in a couple of decades. For all the brutality in taking over lands and turning them into countries, once the British were in power they were a largely benign government. The dismantling of the empire was in many countries a disaster that created wars and dictators. In many places the empire did a good job of spreading representative government, and it was certainly better than any of the alternatives during the middle of the twentieth century (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Imperialist Japan). It also spread the English language and free trade, all largely beneficial.

This book missed out a number of colonies which would have been interesting to learn about, from Hong Kong to Cyprus and especially Mesopotamia, but is otherwise an excellent introduction to an important part of world history we often forget about.

One Palestine, Completed

I finished reading One Palestine Complete, the history of Palestine during the British Mandate. Predictably enough the violence between the Jews and the Arabs gets worse, with Arabs doing their small scale terrorist thing and Jews setting up people’s malitias armed and trained with a blind eye turned by the British. Although the Zionists had licence to immigrate as many Jews as they wanted they took relitavely low numbers to keep the economy running smoothly. When fascism took hold in Europe they knew they could not take all the Jews being persecuted and prioritised only fit, male, educated people. They were happy at the number of suitable candidates fascism supplied them, Ben-Gurion (later first Prime Minister of Israel) said “We want Hitler to be destroyed but as long as he exists we are interested in exploiting that for the good of Palestine”. People with mental disabilities were not allowed to immigrate, and a fund was set up to return those who had become mentally ill. Eventually the British realised they weren’t going to solve the problems of Palestine and it was costing a lot of money, so they packed up and left. The UN vote for partition caused a worldwide diplomatic campaign with bribery on a huge scale, the Jewish Agency set aside a million dollars for it. On Nover 29 1947 they voted to split Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Arabs were against the plan, being in the majority they would be happy with one democratic state. The Zionists accepted but everyone knew it was an unworkable plan with a long contorted border that would still leave a majority of Arabs in the proposed boundary. Towards the end of the mandate the Zionist malitias (Haganah, Palmach, Etzel and Lechi) invaded several Arab cities and areas including Tiberias, Safed, Haifa and Jaffa. The Arabs were unorganised and leaderless and deserted the invaded cities. The British handed over control to the Jewish Agency and the UN, completing the task set out in the Balfour declaration and UN mandate to advance the Jewish state, while ignoring the needs of those already living there.

I also read The Lord of the Flies, which was good but probably better read as a 10-13 year old. And I got Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, for Christmas, a lightweight and fun introduction to memory techniques, hypnotism, mind reading (obviously not literally, but reading the clues in peoples speech and body movements) and NLP (a very good pyramid scheme).

One Palestine, Complete

I’m reading a book called “One Palestine, Complete” about the British invation and rule of Palestine during the first world war up to the second. Palestine was the last country to be invaded for the British Empire with the dual purpose of attacking the German allied Turkish Ottoman empire who ruled it at the time and promising it to the Zionists. Please the Zionists, the British government thought, and Jews would help keep the US fighting the war and stop the Russians from making peace with Germany. The invasion went smoothly with a train line built from Egypt to bring supplies and the Turks politely leaving Jerusalem without destroying its valuable history.

The Paris Peace Conference was a year long meeting to create the new face of the world after the first world war, new nations were created and old ones re-created. A mandate was a new spin on colonialism for the 20th century and Palestine ended up as a British Mandate, ruled by a civil administration and self-financing. The British run government created a stable judiciary, built roads and ensured the post was reliable. They tended to see the Arabs as primitive natives to whom they could bring some civilisation, but were also happy for them to keep their local customs.

Of course the trouble with promising the land to one people is that there was a large population already there. The Colonial Office had a general policy of allowing Jewish immigration in the hope that after a couple of generations the Jewish population would outnumber the Arab and the stated aim of a Jewish homeland would be possible. When a Jewish Englishman is appointed the high commissioner the Arabs get understandably upset and riots break out in the streets.

I’m only about half way through this fascinating book. I wonder what happens in the end.

The need for a Scottish Podcast

A while ago I gained an ipod shuffle in a fraudulent illegal lottery I helped to set up. My guilt at helping with this immoral website (you know the type “get an ipod for 20 pounds, once 20 other people have got one besides you” and then profiteering from it was second only to the fact I had no need for the thing. I quite like being able to concentrate and appreciate the world when I’m out and about. However long commutes to England and elsewhere and I’ve got more into the habit of using it, especially with the BBC doing some interesting podcasts like Newsnight, From our Own Correspondant and The Now Show.

Even Channel 4 has some interesting stuff on their channel4radio.com site, an attempt to get into new media which allows downloads in MP3 (their music shows are only streamed in MP3 using cookies and I guess user agent to stop you downloading the stuff, annoying if understandable and better than WMV which they only use for the occational audio books that they try to sell). 4radio also serves to convince the world they are worthy of gaining the second UK wide DAB licence, which should be fun.

But nobody is doing a decent Scottish news podcast, so I have no way to catch up with news stories relevant to me and instead have to listen to more englandandwales stories which the London broadcasters think are relevant to everyone. The only relevent thing I’ve found is the First Ministers Questions podcast, but the Scottish parliament is increasingly ya-boo politics like the UK parliament. Hopefully BBC Scotland will get into podcasting soon since nobody else thinks it worth making news in Scotland with an international agenda and the only such problem which exists is Good Morning Scotland at 6am.

Tipton

Kirssy has moved from one of the poshest places in England – Twekesbury home of marinas, St George’s day parades and teenage repellant machines – to one of the most schemie – Tipton.

If you phone up national rail enquiries and ask for a train from Hell they automatically know that you mean Birminham New Street. Well Tipton is the place that people from Birmingham look down on. (Allegedly Tipton is a separate town from Birmingham, although as far as I can tell the whole area between Birmingham and Wolverhampton is one large breeze block).

Tipton has more burnt out houses per street than anywhere else in the UK (I made that up, but it’s true). It was described during the last by-election as one of the only places in Britain with no middle class. It also has three BNP councillors on the local council, which might explain the curious sense of humour of the council’s licensing board. They refused to allow any more pubs to open until one was named after the head of the board, that pub has now been renamed Pie-Factory.

However unlike Tewekesbury the vet’s practice is run by nice people, so in general it’s a step up. Plus they have the best all you can eat curry buffet’s there is.

Twekesbury and the Mosquito Teenage Repellent

Tewkesbury in Englandshire is just the sort of place English towns ought to be like. A large abbey, genuine tudor houses that look like they’re about to fall down any minute, no discernable sight of industry save for an early 19th century flower mill still in heavy use, a marina filled with very expensive looking boats and even the rough parts of town look like suburban bliss. They also have more St George’s crosses flying than I’ve ever seen before.

Like all small towns it has groups of teenagers, but these are not the schemies I lived with in Bridge of Allan, here they sit around making polite conversation about Proust. However the owner of the video shop thinks that teenagers have no business being out and about socialising and should be at home playing computer games or something so has installed a Mosquito teenage repellent device which emits a loud high pitched sound on the edge of human hearing, teenagers can hear the unpleasant noise it makes but most adults can not. Except me. I find it very depressing that people think it’s acceptable to create a public nuisance and harrass innocent people just because they are teenagers. Which is what I told her, she didn’t have much of an argument in reply and it was turned off this time but if she turns it back on I’ll report her to the polis.

Science, Magic and Mass

I went to some more lectures in the Science Festival. The first was about the psychology of magic and showed some of the tricks used by magicians to deceive us. Most interesting was a video where we were told to count the number of times the basket ball was passed between players. On second viewing though the surprising thing was a man in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the players without anyone noticing. Then we went to a talk about the supercomputers run at Edinburgh university. These machines not only cost a lot but also use fantastic amounts of electricity to run and almost as much to keep cool, a lot of supercomputers now are using more slower lower powered chips since that keeps the electricity usage more reasonable. Finally I went to a talk on tall buildings and how they are made, mildly interesting but didn’t help me understand much about how they stay upright. Between talks Beth invited me to go to Catholic Mass, this was about the most scary event of my life. Four men stand at the front saying meaningless stuff while everyone else chants back at them, they all just know what to chant back. This is a fantastic waste of time and money, I would have hoped that these four people who get paid full time saleries to say a quarter of a mass each a day could be better put to use on pretty much anything else.

Adam Hart Davis at the Edinburgh Science Festival

Sadly some people I know read OK magazine and watch soap operas and enjoy similar such low entertainment. These people sometimes laugh at my naivety of not knowing random famous people like Joan Collins. I’ve been asked who my preferred type of celebrity is but generally I’d say I don’t have one until I noticed that Adam Hart Davis was speaking at the Science Festival. He’s cool because he rides a pink bicycles and does interesting TV programmes like Local Heroes. His talk was slightly disapointing in that it wasn’t about anything much, he gave something of his background and TV career then showed some interesting science themed photography he has done answered some questions then went to sign copies of the book he was pimping. Also he had no bicycles. But he’s still cool.

Diss to a Haggis

The sad thing about Burns night is how few people are willing to even read out a poem. It’s only once a year for goodness sakes! But at my Burns’ Supper last night Alex got into the mood by writing his own response to Address to a Haggis.

M.C. Haggis

Yo haggis, what.
We ain't down wit yo
Fat ma'am
Jinxin' wit yo butler

Represent!
Dat meat free brethren,
He be solid
Jolly good.

I say!
Haggis, what?
Gonna take you out
For trout
Ain't no doubt, yo
We is gonna make you pay

I say!
Nigella ain't gonna do you
Cuz you is lilly-livered
Your homosexual tendencies
We ain't missin'
Stiff upper lip,
An' you take this dissin!