Talking of long versus short, how about this:

Elderly and disabled people in England are increasingly being denied social services, a report says.

In 2005, I gave up smoking, oh how I miss it. In 2008, I’ve yet to have a single alcoholic drink. It’s proved easier than I expected, I’m not missing it, actually enjoying it and part of me wonders if I’ll drink again.

And then I read the above and I think, what’s the bloody point? I’ll have a thousand Camel Lights and a Jeroboam of Absolut, please landlord.

Those of us found wanting by the Blairite meritocracy don’t want to be any more of a burden to our children than anyone else. Conversely, maybe paradoxically, I think my kids should work for themselves and not expect to inherit anything. Which is just as well, really.

My legacy to my kids will - hopefully - be shit-hot bullshit detectors and coping strategies for life in a world where simple compassion seems to be going the way of the dodo. They will, it seems, inherit one thing however. Me, aged 75, to look after. Soiling myself and drooling and frightening their kids all because I was selfish and gave up fags and drink in my mid thirties.

As you may have gathered, I don’t understand the stock market, because it’s so boring my brain refuses to get to grips with it. Say the word “economics” and I reach for my pillow. But even I know enough to realise it’s largely an imaginary construct: abstract numbers given shape by wishful thinking. If the traders suddenly stop believing it’s healthy, millions of people lose their jobs. Maybe one day they’ll stop believing in it altogether; they’ll collectively blink and rub their eyes, and the entire global economy will vanish, like a monster under the bed that turns out never to have existed in the first place, or an optical illusion you’ve suddenly seen through. And on News at Ten that night they’ll say, “Business news now … and, er, there is no business news. It’s gone.” At which point we’d better come up with some kind of replacement barter system, pronto. Let’s hope it’s not based on sexual favours, or a simple trip to the supermarket’s going to be downright harrowing.

Read the rest

Just been over to Worthing to see the guts of the Ice Prince.

Even standing on the beach it’s difficult to take in the incredible amount of wood that’s been washed up and which stretches off to the vanishing point. I doubt the photos do it justice (click on them to see larger versions). Despite being thoroughly waterlogged, the wood still gives off the scent of pine resin.

It’s like a huge art installation. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone bought a load of the wood to try and recreate the spectacle on a smaller scale in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

They’re fencing off the beach at Worthing to prevent public access while the clean up goes on. So if, for some reason, you want soaked, smashed up and dangerously splintery planks of cheap pine, head for Shoreham where there’s much less wood but also less surveillance.

No, it really isn’t:

Prince William is to train as a pilot during a four-month attachment with the Royal Air Force.

How come this military dilettante gets to fly helicopters and I don’t? It’s not like he’s going to make a long term career out of it or be allowed to be a decoy for Exocets like his uncle. After several flight hours in this baby, I reckon I could.

This is like those unpaid journalism internships at places like the New Statesman that you can’t afford to take unless you’ve got a rich daddy to foot the expenses, isn’t it? The great and the good just keep on getting greater and gooder, the bastards.

I’d quite like four months learning to fly combat aircraft and then I can realise my long-held ambition of carpet-bombing Hove job centre, the scene of so many miserable months for me back in the century.

(Actually, it’s now an architect’s offices so I can’t. What I’m actually going to do, when I’m rich and famous, is buy the building and have it pushed brick by brick up the fundament of then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett.)

In keeping with all the other bloggers who are fresh out of ideas and looking to boost their visitor stats at a slow time of year, here’s my roundup of the momentous events that made 2007 one of the most fantastic years in human history.

January: Saddam Hussein’s death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. At a joint press conference George Bush and Tony Blair hail the move. ‘It’s a very real sign that, under the guidance of the coalition of the willing, Iraq has put the medieval horrors of its past behind it,’ says the Prime Minister.

February: Responding to reports that Tony Blair’s political adviser had been arrested in a dawn raid by police investigating cash for honours, a government spokesman says: ‘All people are equal in the eyes of the law. It is only right that, along with asylum seekers, the great and the good should know the fear of the hammering on the door at dawn’.

March: The media completely ignores David Cameron’s new haircut and instead turns its laser-like scrutiny to his policies, leadership abilities and party’s funding arrangements.

April: Prime Minister Tony Blair tells reporters he would be ‘delighted’ if his child wanted to serve in Iraq. His eldest son Euan immediately secures a job as a waiter in Baghdad’s newly opened Spearmint Rhino.

May: Former Tory leader Michael Howard brands former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell as a man who ‘did more to lower the tone of our political life, our public life’. ‘It’s a fair cop,’ admits a penitent Campbell who then joins a trappist order and is never heard from again.

June: Tony Blair hands the reigns of power to Gordon Brown and gives himself up to the police. The tender scene of the pair sharing a tearful, lingering embrace on the steps of 10 Downing Street is etched into the hearts of a grateful nation.

July: New Home Secretary Jacqui Smith admits to trying cannabis at university. ‘Yeah, it was quite nice,’ she says. ‘As long as you don’t overdo it where’s the harm?’

August: Britain enjoys the most spectacular summer since 1914.

September: Taking advantage of their new freedoms, two million Iraqis go on holiday.

October: The Iraqi employees of the British army threatened with reprisals by death squads are welcomed with open arms by a grateful Britain. David Miliband and Jacqui Smith serve cakes and tea on the plane over.

November: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s state visit to the UK is cancelled and he is refused entry into the country for the foreseeable future. ‘Get your act together, sunshine,’ is the totality of the government’s statement announcing the move.

December: Richard Littlejohn converts to Islam.

Well, then. Nearly over for another year. Hope you had/are having a good one. They say Christmas is a time for giving and my liver is giving me gip. In return, I shall shortly be giving it a holiday.

Anyway, Mammon was very good to me this year. A shiny new camera and not one but two tiny remote control helicopters.

One of the highlights must surely be the present from my mother-in-law. One of these babies - a Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.

I’m 37 next birthday but my partner’s mum always pitches her presents at my level of arrested development with frightening accuracy. The remote controlled thises and thats. The Star Wars DVD box set. The enormous model of the Starship Enterprise that also doubled as an FM radio.

While tottering around the house in my helmet issuing quasi-fascistic grunts, I noticed this message stamped on the inside:

‘WARNING! This is a toy. Does not provide protection.’

Which makes you wonder about the kind of person who might consider using the Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet as a hard hat and therefore require said warning.

‘You be careful when you’re up on the roof adjusting the television aerial.’

‘It’ll be ok, I’ve got my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.’

…or…

‘Fancy a spot of pot-holing at the weekend?’

‘Too right, I’ll dig out my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet and I’ll be as safe as houses.’

Surely, the warning message should be left off the helmet, you know, for the good of our species. We could have a whipround and buy one for, well, you know.

I’ve gone off the idea of being cremated when I die. I really want a Viking funeral but I’m pretty sure there’ll be a local by-law outlawing them.

I like George Monbiot’s idea and fancy being buried in the roots of a tree. It’s a kind of reincarnation - my molecules become the fruit and the leaves which are then eaten by caterpillars that then become butterflies. Or die of alcohol and cholesterol poisoning.

But then I read something like this…

The average cost of dying in the UK is nearly £6,000, research has shown.

…and think, sod it, just put me out for the bin men. Two and a half big ones just to drop my carcass in a hole in the ground? You can spend 98 quid on a death notice in the local paper and £149 on a funeral notice but the number people attending your send-off will be largely dictated by the weather.

Six grand? I’d rather my missus spent it on attracting a decent and reliable stud muffin who was nice to the kids. Nah, not really. I demand she commissions a forty foot statue of me that glows in the dark.

Right here.

(Ps. Up in Blackpool. Pleasure Beach. Illuminations. Fat, obstructive holidaymakers. Joy unconfined. Back Monday.)

Invaluable.

(Via this appeasing pro-fascist.)

I was called a ‘Labour apologist’, ‘ring licker’ and ‘fucker’ by the same person they other day.

Labour apologist?

It’s been one of those days, hasn’t it? I’m off to drink to destruction but before then I’m going to kick back a little…

I feel better already.

So anyway. Heresy was on Radio 4 tonight. One of the guests was the mighty Dr Phil Hammond.

He says the second or third biggest killer in the UK today is the NHS itself. As in people who go in and should come out - but don’t - count at around 70,000 a year.

Did you know that they want to take £1,000 off Patricia Hewitt’s salary? Apparently, it’s the ‘traditional’ way of showing no confidence in a minister.

Now, I have a lot of respect for tradition but I can’t help thinking that this convention is in need of some updating. How about rolling the minister in dog mess and then pushing her in a patch of nettles? What about forcing her to teach, in that patronising manner of hers, anger management to a hypoglycemic John Prescott? A dose of necrotizing fasciitis?

How about we just fire the useless cow? See how long she lasts trying to get on with backbenchers with that voice of hers. She’d probably rather have the flesh-eating virus.

The ace Matthew Norman on the crime of the century:

Myself — not that I’d given a minute’s thought to the matter before now, of course — I’d take my five-million-pound cut, wait for a moonless night and head for the Normandy coast in a fishing boat. Airports, car ferries and especially Channel Tunnel trains are out of the question with All Ports Bulletins in effect throughout the land; but given a following wind and a bit of luck, a tiny fishing vessel should make the beach at Trouville or Honfleur undetected by French coast guards.

Once arrived, the next step would be to launder the money, very slowly, in the casinos to be found in every French coastal town. It’s an old and well-known scam, but with caution it should be OK.

Whether the Tonbridge Mob will follow this blueprint is anyone’s guess, but it will be the hope of us all that whatever laundering method they employ will fail, and that they are swiftly apprehended.

Then, as is traditional with major fiscal offences, they can spend twice as long in jug as they would have done for committing a couple of murders.

For the merest flavour of the “oh shit, what are we going to do now?” moment these villains must be experiencing at this minute in time, I heartily recommend the final episode of season two of the mighty, mighty, The Shield.

To fund their retirements, the frighteningly appealing bent cop/sadist/monster Vic Mackey and his knuckle-headed colleagues on LA’s Farmington Precinct anti-gang Strike Team have robbed an Eastern European mob’s “money train” of crime-supplied cash. Back at their hideout, they stand around the table admiring the Kilimanjaro of cash. One by one, their laughter dies as they realise the sheer enormity of their crime…

From the comments:

[D]efined by the cousins over the water as the
Napolean-Clarke Law - “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”

Its origin lies in the elegant splicing of Napoleon’s…

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

…and Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law…

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Expect to see it used here to the point of dispiriting cliche.

The Federation of American Scientists have launched a couple of blogs: Secrecy News, which is a mirror of Steven Aftergood’s estimable Secrecy News email newsletter, and the Strategic Security Project Blog, which is going to cover all kinds of goodies such as nuclear weapons, arms control and biosecurity.

I found the PhysOrg mailing list via Warren Ellis‘ site. It details what’s hot in science, physics and space and is great for the occasional “they can do what now?” moment.

PS. This is the greatest achievement of human endeavour. It’s the end of history. Pack up and go home everybody.

Try it, it’s life affirming. When the cataclysm finally strikes and those of us who survive are eking out our miserable, brutal existence in the Arctic Circle, it will come as huge consolation when you remember you once got the best Doctor Who to ring your Mum and Dad to tell them you loved them.