So George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic played the Forum on about the sweatiest night of the year and I went. This isn’t my video – who wants to stand still and point a camera? – but it gives a strong flavour. They give value; having hit the stage about 2145 they were still playing at 1am.…
Read More non-Thursday music postI started planning this post asking why Palestinian rockets seemed to be steadily increasing in range, but not improving in accuracy. Although nobody publishes circular-error probable figures for these things, various indicators suggested that they were still essentially random weapons. For example, there were no or few reports of them hitting valuable infrastructure or politically…
Read More Wild speculation on a highly controversial subjectIt seems to be TYR Service! day, so I followed up on a discussion elsewhere about social trust in the UK by analysing Ipsos MORI’s polling series on trust by profession. Having fiddled with various ways of filtering the data in an attempt to get a readable line chart, I decided to look at net…
Read More Who do we trust? Len McCluskey, Jerry Heywood, and SCIENCE!It looks like the experiment is over. The job of Head of the Home Civil Service is being re-integrated with Cabinet Secretary and No.10 Downing Street PS. There’s also going to be a “CEO” who will perhaps be recruited from the private sector, although no names that aren’t civil servants have been put forward. But…
Read More Viva Blob!The main response to the nomination of Lord Hill for European commissioner was widely described as incomprehension. This was literally true; nobody understood who he was. But they didn’t fail to understand because Hill is so obscure, but rather because they were ignorant. Martin Schulz, for example, made a fool of himself as follows: “I…
Read More HillI remember reader Ajay wondering how those godawful “Aberdeen Steak House” things around the West End have a business. I can’t find the discussion now, but I recall I told him that their ideal customer was someone for whom paying over the odds for a really bad dinner was an important part of their night…
Read More Spam, and the art of negative marketingSo yer big french pushbike sportsday. Having run away from the London ‘Lympics, you may be surprised to learn I was back in Yorkshire for it. The explanation is simple – it went through the village I grew up in twice, a unique distinction. As our old neighbour’s slogan goes, so good it’s coming twice.…
Read More Big Sportsday 2.0: YorkshirePeople are saying that a section about critical “noises off” was removed from Bob Kerslake’s blog. When I visited one was still present. It may of course have been edited. Here is a grab: Announcement from Sir Bob _ Bob Kerslake – Head of the Civil Service
Read More Bobslake from EricklesA bit more about RBS and HBOS. One thing that sticks out for me is that sense of two institutions with a bitter local rivalry, both with serious resources and ambitions, but perhaps not quite up to the standards they set for themselves, with an identity built on chippy bitterness. We’ve seen that somewhere before…
Read More Local rivalrySo I advised you not to read Iain Martin’s Making it Happen, but advised you to read Simon Carswell’s Anglo Republic. Reviews of books on bank failures seem to have become an occasional series, and at least it’s somewhat less depressing than Jimmy Savile, so here we go. Yes, yes, you should absolutely read Ian…
Read More Now here’s the bank disaster book you should read.