Crime Reduction Website Proves Its Worth

Here's how Government IT systems work. A lovely story, and all too typical. Can anyone name a single Government-commissioned IT project that came in on time and on budget, did the job it was designed to do, and proved secure in operation? The one good thing about the promised/threatened computerisation of NHS records - here's the latest setback - is that it will almost certainly never happen. As well as IT firms pulling out, growing numbers of individuals, GPs' surgeries and clinics are refusing to co-operate in this madness. Yet the Government's already thrown billions of pounds of our money into the crazy project, and will throw much more after it. (Here's how to opt out, if you're interested.)

Women Vote For Man Shock

Sorry about the hiatus. On Friday, NigeCorp technology collapsed under me like a spavined nag (or the horse you put your money on in the Derby) and on Saturday I was not fully in touch with reality, partly as an after-effect of the previous night's leaving party for a lucky colleague who has escaped the sticky corporate web and is heading for a new life in the south of France, where nobody works and everything works (jaloux - moi?).
However, I was dimly aware that Hillary's minders have finally wrestled her to the ground, sedated her and, with a mere three days of intensive deprogramming, convinced her that she is not the President of the United States of America. She rose on her hinder legs and, in terms as ringing as a muffled bell in a thick fog, 'endorsed' Obama, 'praised' him - see Bryan's post 'Hillary As Mark Anthony' (to which, as to everything else, I am currently unable to link) - and 'urged' her supporters to 'back' him (the verbal form of stab in the back?). Well, we'll see what happens next...
Meanwhile, it seems that the Dems' historic first of running a white woman against a black man has unleashed an equally historic level of bitterness and enmity, reigniting precisely the kind of attitudes the Dems most deplore - racism, sexism, class enmity - and throwing them into uncomfortable prominence. This morning, I caught one of Hill's defeated army - a prominent feminist, I gathered - opining that the problem was that the women didn't all vote together. Which is to say that the women should have all voted for Hillary, simply because she is (despite a testosterone level that would be the envy of Sly Stallone) a woman. By the same token, presumably, all the blacks should have voted for Obama - as should, by the crazed logic of identity politics, all the men. And Hill would have lost by a much bigger margin. This kind of talk only makes sense in the context of a wholly outdated - indeed, exploded - version of feminism. No wonder Mrs C's lot have seemed to be living in the past, whereas Barack at least gives an impression of living in the present. Well - if the Dems are going to beat McCain, they're surely going to have to stop thinking like this, and the legions of aggrieved, embittered Clintonistas are going to have to line up behind Obama, whether they like it or not.

Diego and Henry

On a happier note, today is the birthday of a man with a good claim to be
the greatest painter who ever lived - Diego Velazquez - a birthday marked
by a Las Meninas masthead on the Google title page. This purports to be a
virtual reality tour of the painting - needless to say, it's too much for
NigeCorp technology to handle.
Today is also the birthday - the 112th - of dear old Henry Allingham, who attributes his longevity to 'cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women – and a sense of humour'. Here's to him.

Legacy, Schmegacy

They're talking about the Olympic legacy again.
Free swimming is the latest treat we're promised (paid for out of our own
money, of course, like all such 'free' treats), and a nation transformed from
couch potatoes into hyperactive exercise junkies, swarming in our thousands
to all those swanky venues left over from the triumph that was London 2012.
It's hard not to reach for the word ironic at times like this. If ever
there was a festival of couch potato cultivation, it's the Olympics. It only
exists, in its grotequely bloated modern form, because of the huge
worldwide TV audience - and many of the sports represented only exist, to
the outside world, as a once-every-four-years TV spectacle. What sort of
crowd does the average weightlifting event attract? Where, indeed, would
one find such a thing? Yet, come the Olympics, weightlifting's up there
with the rest, suddenly being gawped at by millions of couch potatoes.
Because the Olympics is fundamentally a TV event, it makes very little sense to build special venues for most of the events. That only leaves a legacy of expensive white elephants - the one sure Olympic legacy we can realistically look forward to. The sponsors and the TV companies should knock up temporary structures - sets, as it were - and take them down when it's all over. As it is, the likeliest 'legacy' of the London Olympics will be not only rotting, redundant venues (this is already the case post-Athens) but also decades of debt - remember Montreal...
There was more legacy talk as the farcical 'UN food summit' closed. Malnutrition would be halved worldwide by 2015, we were solemnly assured, in what was described as an 'important pledge'. Why is this stuff reported as news? It is pure, self-serving fantasy - as it all talk of the benign legacy of the London Olympics.

A Train Is Not a Bathroom

So there I was sitting on the train this morning, minding my own business (which, today, was reading Shirley Hazzard's The Evening of the Holiday - recommended, of course). Opposite me sat a middle-aged lady of respectable appearance and agreeable demeanour, who was apparently applying the finishing touches to her make-up. Why so many women choose to do this on a swaying, juddering train, rattling over bumpy suburban rails, is one of life's minor mysteries, but there we go... Anyway, a little later I became aware that this woman had moved on, as it were, and was now - silence, please - applying a roll-on deodorant to both her underarms.
This was not the first time I've seen this happen on trains, but it still astonishes me. I know people increasingly behave as if they're living in a magic bubble that somehow prevents them being seen or heard - but surely there are elements of the toilette that should stay at home. A train is not a bathroom. I've also seen nail clipping - feet as well as hands - and various attentions to facial blemishes etc. . There must be a line somewhere, but I fear it's already been crossed. Heaven knows what's coming next.
Anyone had similar experiences - or (gulp) worse?

Hillary Agonistes

So, as all the world - apart from Hillary Rodham Clinton - now knows, it's going to be Obama. Poor Hill has yet to speak, suffering as she is from a bad case of cognitive dissonance. You see, the thing is, she was the winner, there was no other scenario - simple really - what part of that did Barack not understand? But now she's faced with an Obama victory. Does not compute, does not compute...
As far as I'm concerned, the gilding is flaking off Barack at an alarming rate now, and I suspect I'll end up, with the great Frank Wilson, among the totally disenchanted. I'm also pretty sure he'll lose against McCain. As for Hillary, she will utter, it seems, on Saturday. Whatever she says, one thing is for sure - if she's offering to be deputy, Obama would be mad to take her on. Buy Hill and you get one free Bill thrown in - imagine what that toxic twosome could do, so near to the centre of power. Let them occupy themselves in planning Hill's 2012 campaign - the one in which she wins the nomination and the Dems lose the election yet again.

Gulls - What Would Hudson Say?

Two score years ago this day, our fathers launched a war that could never be won - the war against seagulls, initiated by the bold burghers of Dover. Forty years on, it is painfully clear their efforts were all in vain. The gulls have bidden farewell to the clifftops and the foam-flecked seas, and spend their entire lives shouting at each other in squalid rooftop shanties and hanging around municipal rubbish tips, when not harassing the human and avian population. And of course they're 'protected' (all but the urban herring gull). What, I wonder, would that great bird man W.H. Hudson make of it? He was strangely fond of the London gulls (there's a picture of him consorting with them in Birds Of London) - but surely he wouldn't care to live with the mobs of shrieking shitehawks that now menace every town in the land. Perhaps they could be enticed away with promises of a better life elsewhere? They are, after all, very (hem hem) gullible.