Stats!

If I ever get to 100 unique page views per day I will be both very happy and very flabbergasted!!!

Scottish Law.

While the rain was falling at the Oval today, Radio 4 long wave went back to their normal programming so I heard the the last program of the current season of Law in Action which was doing an article on Scottish Law. While its main thrust was about collaborating evidence and how it makes sex crimes harder to prosecute, especially after the European court ruling about legal representation while being questioned, with respect to the European Human Rights legislation, I did think two things:

• How good it was that the court process was being taught to children of ages 7 - 11.
• Why is it that only Scotland has the "Not Proven" verdict? This would work in any jurisdiction that has had it's legal system based on the English system of jurisprudence (rather that the Code Napoleon), in order to give the jury a 3rd option where they are undecided on the guilt of the defendant.

What is a Snail (Cowfat vs Wheedle KB 1932 .....)

New F1 Regulations

People say the new F1 regs have bought about more overtaking & better racing.
I don't see it that way.
Everything this year seems so artificial, and Sunday's race seems to say that the teams have got up to speed with the new regs and the passing will become harder for the rest of the season.

I think that there is only one way to improve the sport:

• Mechanical grip to aerodynamic grip should be enforced at a minimum of 40:60, preferably 50:50. This will reduce the problem of areo making it near impossible for people to pass as the dirty air means you can't go fast enough.
• Tyres should last the entire race so pit stop strategy becomes a thing of the past (you can only change tyres in a race if you get a puncture, or it starts to rain/dries up).
• Loose DRS & KERS, they only make the racing artificial.

Does Austerity work?

I'm not convinced that the austerity measures that have been imposed on Greece, Ireland & Portugal will actually improve the economies of those countries. All they seem to be doing is pushing them further into the red.

Mabe global economics doesn't work the way it should!

Requiescat In Pace Columbo

I have just heard that Peter Falk (the actor who famously played the detective Columbo) has passed away. I first came across Mr. Fallk when I was 3 or 4 in Gunsmoke/Gunlaw when his catch line was "Mr. Dillon, Mr Dillon!" as I remember it. He was a very good actor and the fact that he has alzheimer's (like my mother) in his last days makes me feel very sad. Nobody deserves that.

RIP Columbo.




Just one more thing ...

Pagevieiws from odd places

Hi, I now note that someone from India has now accessed my blog. If you were looking for a British university place or something from these sites, I do apologise. It would seem that  a link to my blog has been posted on inappropriate sites.

However, if you do like my blog, thanks!

Now if I got hits from Japan or Australia I would have gone around the world & both hemispheres!

OK Where are the Brasilians!

Take That - At The Villa

An ad that appeared when I was previewing my blog suggests that Take That (with Robbie Williams) are playing Villa Park over the summer. While they are not my cup of tea, they are all very good showmen and should be worth seeing (if you like that sort of thing).

I would personally go to Guilfest or the one in Victoria Park with the Prog Rock stage!!

Cee Lo Green at Glasto.

Did anybody see the Cee Lo Green (I'm not certain of the spelling) at Glasto this Fri? He looked like a Warhammer 40K character (Ork or Chaos Inquisitor!). I do realise that people have to wear odd costumes at festivals, but this is going over the top!

Just listen to B. B. King instead, a truely great Texas blues man!

Is default really bad?

I'm just listening to a BBC World Service programme which was mentioning the Greek (sorry it said Geek before!) financial crisis. It was promulgating the accepted position that it would be disastrous if Greece defaulted, they say it would mess up Ireland, Portugal & possibly Spain.

I'm not so sure. Several years back Argentina defaulted big time on its loans, & nothing too bad happened to it.

Maybe conventional economic theory is wrong? Maybe the 'Market' is wrong (an article in New Scientist once stated that stock market traders modeled like sheep)?

Maybe economics only works in a closed system, like thermodynamics. But possibly either the system is not closed or other factors are skewing the system.

TRUST NOBODY.

Maybe it is a Chinese 'Face Trap'?

Am I Trending?

Am I Trending?

If I am, may I humbly ask why?

There should be no reason that I am.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Wierd referring sites

I have noticed that I am getting referrals from sites that are dedicated to:

• Teeth whitening
• Increasing your length off the tee

You will note that I have never ever posted in either of these two subjects.

It would seem that either:

• I have been in some way been hacked & people are being sent here for no good reason.
• The world has gone mad

If any Malaysians find themselves here in error, please get on to Google and complain!

Posting Fequency

Hi! Please be aware that this blog will be posted to at irregular intervals. There should be one at least once a week, but it may be a little bit less frequent.

With luck it should be 2 or 3 times week, but unless I have something to say I won't post, so it may be less frequent.

Villa - again (Sorry)

Hi, Ashley Young has gone to Man U & we have not got anyone in. McLiesh needs to get his ass in gear or we'll go the same way as Brum!


FIFA, they are so, so trustworth aren't they!

Villa - Dublin Cup

I expect that we will be last in the tournament in July.
Also our new manager is highly likely to take a massive amount of stick, especially against Celtic.
Why are we going?

(This was posted via e-mail as a test)

Black Hole Swallows Star?

A gamma ray burst observed in the constellation of Draco by the Swift satelite on the 28th March this year is believed to have been caused by a Sol sized star being torn to pieces by super-massive black-hole!

Fuller details can be found here, here, here, & here. It is also discussed on this radio programme.

Villa Manager Search

Why are we trying to recruit a manager that took his team down this year?

McLiesh is a decent manager, but he got Brum City relegated (Hooray!!!) and failed too win anything after they stumbled into winning the League Cup!

It seems odd that Randy chose him after looking at Roberto Martinez (who can work on a shoestring) as it does not show any consistancy. More fans will hate this than the putative signing of Mclaren as Manager!

Do we have any vision for next season?

(OMG, I'm looking for a vision statement! Dilbert would kill me!)

Special post for thoes of you who aren't British

Thank you very much! I never expected to get anyone looking at this outside GB!

Bafflement?

OK, why does everybody find me wishing Prince Philip a Happy 90th Birthday so fascinating? I've checked the stats and I'm totally baffled!

Sorry!!

I do apologise that I haven't been here for a bit, I had a pain in all my diodes down my left hand side!

Happy Birthday, Phil the Greek

He's 90 today y'know!

Dr. David Kelly, no new inquest

The Attorney General has decided not to issue a fiat to the Supreme Court to hold a new inquest into the death of Dr. David Kelly.

For those of you who don't remember who Dr. Kelly was, he was the government scientist who committed suicide after being outed as the man who suggested that the Government's Iraq Dossier had been "Sexed Up" and disciplined for it. The Hutton inquiry into his death subsumed his inquest.

A number of people had queries about the investigation into his death (why no fingerprint check on the knife or medication packaging, was the body moved, the amount of blood, etc) and had been pressing for a new inquest. Today the Attorney General ruled this out, but it is possible that this may be challenged in the courts.

It is unlikely the speculation around Dr. Kelly's untimely demise will go away as it just looks so much like a botched government XPD to be true, even though, on the balance of probabilities, it is likely he committed suicide.

Aston Villa - Managerial Speculation

More worrying news from Villa vis-a-vis the possible new manager:

• Raffa - Wants to spend too much money on players (£30m minimum).
• McLaren - Fans don't like him as he made such a SNAFU of the England job (even though his club pedigree is not too bad).
• The current Wigan manager - (Sorry I can't remember his name) Works well on a shoestring budget and engenders loyalty in the team.

Maybe Randy Lerner is channeling the spirit of Doug Ellis!

Sure looks like it.

Bilderberg Group - Masters of the Universe?

Some people think that they are the Illuminati. Others believe them to be some form of secret world government. Whatever you think they are, they are meeting right now in St.Moritz, Switzerland.

The Bilderberg Group, a shadowy group of Western liberal global capitalist movers and shakers, thinkers, economists and politicians (both current and former) are holding their 2011 conference from the 9th to the 12th of June in the Grand Hotel Kempinski in St. Moritz. This highly secretive group of the great and the good are the focus of a huge number of conspiracy theories, mostly saying in so many words that they run the planet.

The most charitable description of them is that they promote a Western liberal capitalist view in a very subtle fashion and in such a way that in politics it becomes almost impossible to disagree with them. They don't do this openly, but it has an effect on your beliefs similar to if you go to 4 or 5 dinner parties and they all tell you the same thing in different ways, so that by the time you've finished you can't believe that there can be any differing views because that's what everybody thinks.

They may think that they are all doing the right thing, but the secrecy they surround themselves with makes people concerned. Maybe this is just to make sure they aren't the focus of anti-capitalist protesters or global terrorists.
I think it just makes them look furtive and as if they have something to hide. They should be much more transparent (especialy as many of the members of this group call for transparency in the political and business worlds all arround the globe) about what they do and what they stand for.

Here are a few links to stuff about Bilderberg, showing the range of things that is thought about them:

• www.bilderberg.org
• The Insider
• Bilderberg 2011
• The Student Room
• BBC News - Magazine
• The Independant (2010)
• Wikipedia

New Supernova in M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy)

A new supernova was discovered in the Whirlpool Galaxy (in Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs) on the 31st May. It is thought to be a Type II-L supernova judging by the amount of hydrogen in its spectrum.

The above image shows the location of the supernova. Full details here.

Mobile Blogging Enabled

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Have a nice day!

Aston Villa - What the "expletive deleted" is going on??

OK, you're going to have to be a Aston Villa fan to find this post interesting.

What is going on over at Villa? OK, I can understand why Houlier was let go, health issues, not that I liked it. When he got the boot from Liverpool for basically the same reason I didn't like that. I can understand Carrew being let go, he was out on loan and that usually signifies that the player is on the way out.

But that leaves us with no manager, hemorrhaging players (Friedle, Reo-Coker gone, Ashley Young worried about getting a decent level of play) and fans felling a little confused. We haven't signed anyone (well we may be in talks with some Yank midfielder) and everything seems to be way up in the air!

I think the board/management need to make a statement quickly to calm down the fans before we think the club is 'going to hell in a handbasket'.

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Sepp Blatter - don'tcha just love him?!

E.Coli in Germany - A Conspiracy Theory

Here's a worst case scenario for you.
Germany is suffering a large E.Coli outbreak. The type of bacterium is new and very toxic. There is difficulty in tracing the source of the outbreak.
Could this be a germ-warfare attack by some make of terrorist outfit who have genetically engineered a new strain of E.Coli for this attack?

Silly Season = Time for a Moral Panic!

It's summer! The "Silly Season" for news and current affairs. So guess what, we get a moral panic about the sexualisation of sub 12 y.o. children (though it seems to mostly to apply to young girls)!
The strange thing is:

• I'm 53.
• When I was 5 - 10 years old I wore shorts (as did all my male classmates) and the girls tended to be in very short mini-skirts/dresses.
• No moral panic about sexualisation of children as we were assumed to be too innocent for this to happen.
• 'Cider With Rosie' stuff went on, boys from about 8 onwards tried to get a glimpse up the girls skirts, etc.

We have a moral panic now as:

• Pedophiles sell papers. (Stories about them increase circulation, not 'all news vendors are pedophiles').
• Moral panics help newspapers, self-appointed experts, self-appointed moral leaders (lots from mums net, nothing from the C of E), get themselves publicity.
• With this publicity comes power and money.

And they get to fill up the pages of the papers, or fill time on the phone-in!

Plausible Conspiracy Theory No. 1

Here's a plausible conspiracy theory for you (I doubt very much that it is true, but what if it is ...) ...

Just suppose the the Champions League was all fixed!

• Lets say that the majority of people who watch the matches do so via satellite television (either at home or in the pub). 
• The satellite broadcasters provide UEFA with a fair amount of the money to fund the competition.
• The broadcasters wish to maximise their viewing figures to gain the maximum advertising revenue.
• They therefore conspire together make sure all the clubs with either a reletively small fan base or with a large fan base in a relatively poor country go out in the group stages, regardless of how well they play or how good their players are.
• In order to ensure that all the broadcasters maximise their viewing figures for the final, the quarter-finals onwards are manipulated so that not too many teams from a single country get through, and that each broadcaster gets to choose the winner in rotation too keep their viewers comming back.If they hadn't Barca would have won for the last 2 or 3 years (& Man or Chealsea for the 3 years before that).

As I said, this is almost certainly not true, but if you tell your mates in the pub after a few pints ....

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I forgot I was doing this ....

I forgot I was doing this. Shows what happens when you accept a dare when you are 'tired & emotional' as they say in Private Eye ....