OMG, hoo is in teh Ceiling...

Proof that the internet is truly a work of awesome genius, too complicated to have evolved by chance alone. It simply must have been designed. I'm not saying it was designed by Ceiling Cat, but, you know, just look at the evidence.

LOLCat Bible

It's made me a believer.

[Hat-Tip Bartholomew's Notes On Religion]

Visiting Other Worlds

Wow.


Who'd have thought that crossing Carl Sagan with Autotune could be so compelling? A strangely moving video.

(Via Carry You Away)

A Lighthouse On St. Kilda's

Fuck me, but do I hate people. All people. Especially you. You, you new next-door neighbour, with your be-spoilered twatmobile and your repossessed Sanyo stereo. And in particular, I despise your love of crappy-poppy-dancey wank which you must listen to cranked upto 11 whilst you unpack your glitter-encrusted photo-frames and pink flip-flops. You've made me detest you so much, I will now have to spend every night in the pub rather than sit in the thin-walled hell-shack I call home and listen to you have phone-sex with your married boyfriend.*

And when I die of liver failure and bankruptcy, on your head be it.


*Names, dates and facts may be inaccurate due to beer.

You Get's What You Pays For

When you have a popular press that publishes articles with screaming headlines like this;

EACH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT TO COST US £1MILLION

or like this;

One in six rapes committed by foreign attackers, shock police figures reveal

and this;

Sharia law 'same' as Krays' rule, says Lord Tebbit

and this;

Scandal of DEAD Lithuanian rapist granted £20,000 in legal aid for breach of 'human rights'

and this one;

Just one in 10 British Muslims feel integrated into society, study claims

And that's without even repeating the bollocking bullshit, the doubtful statistics and conspiracy theories that the articles themselves contain, then is it really surprising that people end up voting for a bunch of carefully marketed racist ballsacks?

BNP secures two European seats

Listen to the BNP voter about 4 minutes in. All the bollocks you've read in your daily paper, used as justification for voting 'dick'.

If there's not an argument for better press regulation in there somewhere, then I don't know where the fuck we'll find one.

Compare And Contrast

In the UK, we send a lot of people to prison. And as a result in the UK we get stories like this

Titan prisons plans 'abandoned'...Instead, Justice Secretary Jack Straw is expected to reveal proposals for five 1,500-place jails, with two set to go ahead immediately...
Shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve said..."Jack Straw needs to urgently explain how he will address the current crisis in the prison population that has resulted in thousands of prisoners being released early".

I particularly like the use of scare quotes around the word abandoned there. Mostly because Titan prisons aren't really being 'abandoned', just scaled down slightly.

Meanwhile, over in The Netherlands;

Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals. The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.
...The overcapacity is a result of the declining crime rate, which the ministry's research department expects to continue for some time.

It's being widely reported that Labour are anticipating a proper fucking up at the polls next week and again (oh please oh please) at the general election next year. That means a lot of Labour MPs are going to be at a loose end. And you know, it really would be a shame to see the Labour party's skill at making every fucking thing illegal go to waste. And I think it's pretty clear that Holland needs a hand filling up it's prisons (I mean, where on earth are the Dutch putting their mentally ill for bum's sake?). It could be a match made in heaven.

Yeah, Nadine It's Totally The Same

Ah Nadine Dorries. She just can't stop with the stupid can she?

The atmosphere at Westminster has become so "unbearable" due to expenses revelations that a suicide is feared, one MP named in the row has warned.

...In an interview with the BBC, Ms Dorries, who was a nurse before she came into politics, said MPs were walking around "with terror in their eyes" and likened the atmosphere to that surrounding Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" of Communists during the 1950s

Nadine Dorries there, making reference to Joseph McCarthy's lesser known 'British MP's and their fraudulent expenses witch-hunt' where the following infamous question was asked;

Are you now or have you ever been a member of parliament claiming taxpayer money to pay off a non-existent mortgage or to purchase a house for a duck?

Got to love Labour MP Stephen Pounds' response though (it's a strange sensation typing the words love and Labour that close together, I can tell you),

Mr Pound dismissed the analogy as "facile" because "Senator McCarthy's victims were innocent".

Zing.

Yeah, Good Luck With That

All that carefully crafted 'the BNP aint racist' bollocks, how's that going Nick?

British National Party (BNP) chairman Nick Griffin has defended a party leaflet which says that black Britons and Asian Britons "do not exist".

The BNP's "Language and Concepts Discipline Manual" says the term used should be "racial foreigners".

In a BBC interview, Mr Griffin said to call such people British was a sort of "bloodless genocide" because it denied indigenous people their own identity.

A couple of years ago Channel 4 showed a documentary called 100% English which featured such illustrious individuals as Gary Bushell and Carole Thatcher outlining their own prohibitive conditions under which a person should be allowed to define themselves as English. Mostly the criteria seemed to revolve around not having any dusky skintones or speakers of exotic languages in your family tree. Hilarity ensued when they discovered a whole bunch of foreign in their recent ancestry and subsequently, under their own definitions, could no longer claim to be English.

When will the mass DNA screenings to seek out these perpetrators of the ridiculously monikered 'bloodless genocide' commence? Obviously it must be a matter of the utmost importance to the nation that these murderous 'racial foreigners' be identified and 'voluntarily repatriated' as soon as possible. Perhaps Mr Griffin will be prepared to have his own genetic history investigated, you know, just to make sure he's not, a-hem, one of them coloureds foreign sorts that have been slowly murdering all those 'indigenous' Germanic Anglo-Saxons, Frenchy Normans, Vikings and their mixed-up descendants through the years, what with their incessant being brown and whatnot.

100 dollars to get the ball rolling.

[Hat-Tip Rhetorically Speaking]

Ruined by The Wire

I just can't enjoy t.v. anymore. I mean, I can watch re-runs of Quantum Leap or the odd British police procedural with something approaching enjoyment, but generally I find t.v. a barren wasteland of tedious simplistic drivel.
This wasn't always the case. I used to be able to sit through nearly any old shit. Nearly. I mean, I made it through Naked Jungle and the sight of Chegwin's junk without any irreversible trauma, but I drew the line at Hollyoaks. You have to maintain some standards.
But this was all in the before time. It may say 2009 on my Fluffy Puppy Calender, but in my heart it is the year 7 ATW. 7 years After The Wire came into being.
Yeah, yeah. The Wire's meant to be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time. You've been told over and over again. That's not really what this post is about. Well, maybe a little bit. Mostly, it's about the fact that I am finding it almost impossible to enjoy any of the other critically lauded American t.v. shows that the box is heaving with these days.

I abandoned Lost after 5 episodes when it became clear that the entire premise of the show was, well, bollocks. Plus I had a sneaking suspicion, one that according to My Life Partner apears to have been borne out as the programme has progressed, that the writers were making up the plot as they went along. Heroes appears to be suffering from the same affliction. Over-written and over-staffed and apparantly hell-bent on undermining it's own story with every new plot-twist, I managed to stick with it, under some duress, until early series 3. There's only so many identikit blonde super-heroes my brain can deal with before it shuts down from the tedium. Fringe is a dull X-Files rip-off. 24 a parody of itself and the people that draw inspiration from it. Mad Men is so slow-moving I appeared to black-out for an hour whenever it was on. Also, does Mad Men have anything like a plot? I'd appreciate knowing what it is, having struggled through the entire first series and some of the 2nd before conceding that I just don't get this show's appeal.

I like Sci-Fi and that, so you might suppose that I'd be all over Battlestar Galactica like a red-clad Amazonian Cylon hotty on a sweaty little english fella. Nope. Despite assurances from a range of people that BG is an intelligent multi-layered drama dealing with religion and politics and yadda yadda yadda, I was digging my nails into my palms out of irritation by episode 2. Two-thirds of the way into series one I yanked the dvd player from the wall and chucked it into the street. Anything to ensure I never have to hear the word 'frack' or witness a red-clad Amazonian Cylon hotty licking the face of a sweaty little english fella ever again.
My main problem with BG though is, well, it's not The Wire. It's well reported that The Wire is hard work. You have to make some effort to break through the seemingly impenetrable accents and colloquiallisms to get at the sweet and juicy stories beneath. You're expected to figure stuff out for yourself. And for fucks sake, pay attention because back-story and pertinent information is not going to be repeated over and over in every other scene. In BG, you get to sit through a recap every episode, followed by 25 minutes of making sure you get that the 2 folks named Adama are related. I'm sure that if I'd watched BG in the Before Time I'd have accepted it for the awesome show that everyone else seems to think it is. But I've been ruined by The Wire, T.v. is wasted on me now.

Try Sticking The Handbrake On

Really Mr McKeevor? This is what you're going with?

“A lot of that is based on people taking ill-informed positions. Demonstrations like that are extremely difficult to police and a lot of the criticism has been very unfair. There is a broad-ranging bandwagon rolling and it is of concern. There seems to be a disconnection between commentators in the media and the public, and what it is that police officers do.”

You don't think that recent murmurs of concern coming from the public and parts of the government over the style used to police the recent G20 protests may actually have some basis in fact at all? I don't know, maybe you've been too busy thinking up your little defensive speech there to take a squint at some of the videos, pictures and accounts that have been pouring into places like the IPCC. Maybe you should have a quick peek. You see, otherwise, it sounds a bit like you think whacking people in the face with riot shields, or dishing out back-handers to feisty bystanders or shoving sauntering men to the pavement is all a reasonable part of policing legal and overwhelmingly peaceful protest.

The fact that the metropolitan police described themseves as 'up for it' before G20, that officers were largely dressed like a cross between the racing car baddies from an A-Ha video and Deathstar storm-troopers, that officers concealed identifying numbers and covered their faces, that they were rather too free and easy with the old nightstick, surely that is actually relevant to some of what took place during the protests? It can't really be that difficult to imagine that footage of police misusing the Public Order Act to order the press to clear an area for no reason other than 'we say so' might leave people feeling a touch uneasy about the direction policing might be heading in? And looking beyond G20, I don't think that questioning the pre-emptive arrest of protestors constitutes unfair criticism.

I do actually have some sympathy for the police. I'm sure it is difficult to police a large, increasingly (if understandably) hostile crowd of people. And some of the videos and photographs alleging police brutality are pretty ridiculous, perhaps even lacking any merit at all. But let's face it, there wouldn't be a fucking 'anti-police bandwagon' for members of the public to jump on in the first place if the police hadn't provided the materials themselves and then got busy with cobbling the vehicle together.

(Hat-Tip Chicken Yoghurt)

Totally Unrelated Events

Sometimes you read a newspaper and you find stories like these;

The Telegraph, 2001

'Man of principles' dies of heart attack after robbery
....we are treating this as a murder inquiry.

Daily Mail, 2007

Pensioner dies of heart attack from shock of doorstep robbery
...The Metropolitan police have launched a murder investigation into her death

The Times, 2007

Children stoned man to death as he played with son, court is told
...A gang of children aged as young as 10 stoned a father who died of a heart attack as he played cricket with his son
...They are jointly responsible for this attack and jointly responsible for his death

I reckon PC Shovemaniac might want to get himself a lawyer.

Nothing To Fear

A month or so ago I planned on travelling into London to catch the end of the Taking Liberties exhibition at the British Library. I'd suddenly got it into my head that I just had to have a look at the Magna Carta before it got chucked into a furnace or wherever it is the government plans on taking it to be destroyed. I'd even talked my mum into coming with me and before I knew it a day out had been planned.
The day I intended to go was the day after the Convention On Modern Liberty and it was partly that event that had inspired me to attend the exhibition in the first place. It was also indirectly responsible for me abandoning all my plans and going to a craft fair instead.
A couple of nights before we were due to go, and after having read some of the articles and blog posts folks had written in the lead up to the convention, I suddenly became frightened about going to London. It wasn't a sudden horror of being blown up by terrorists on the underground that got my stomach churning. It wasn't the prospect of aggressive beggars that sent my heart into palpitations. Nope. I was terrified of being stopped and searched by the police.
Initially this fear seemed absolutely irrational. After all, I've nothing to hide, right? I don't have a beard. I prefer a small shoulder bag to a gigantic rucksack. I carry a mobile only under duress. Why on earth would the police be remotely interested in me?
But the thing that kept gnawing at me was that I do not own anything even vaguely resembling i.d. If I was stopped and searched at the train station, as I believe the scuffers now like to do I couldn't produce i.d. even if I wanted to. And I gradually convinced myself that the simple fact I wouldn't be carrying any identifying information would be enough to get me carted off to Paddington Green.
Of course, I was being ridiculous. Right? There's no law that actually compels me to carry i.d. whilst travelling (YET)But there's also no law against photographing drain covers and that still gets a fella arrested. There's also no law against lighting a fag near a police van but that apparently get's you smacked with a big stick, knocked to the ground and denied appropriate medical assistance.
The point is that the prospect of an unlikely, but still entirely possible encounter with the police, no matter how minor, left me feeling so fearful that I abandoned my plans. The possibility of not being able to defend perfectly run-of-the-mill aspects of my life in the event of police questioning worried me so much that I chose to avoid London altogether.
And if I could be put off simply travelling into London to go to a museum based on a few Henry Porter articles and youtube videos of people being threatened with arrest for asking questions, then imagine how much easier it will be to frighten people out of attending protests or other high profile events if you face the prospect of kettling, being arrested on spurious terrorism charges and "polite, proportionate and pragmatic" policing in the form of a baton in the back of the legs and a hard shove to the floor.

Don't Look Up

Oh, Metropolitan scuffers, why do you want us to hate and fear each other so?


So looking at CCTV cameras, perhaps simply in forlorn wonder at the sheer number of the fucking things these days, could now be enough to get you brought to the attention of the bizzies, intimately acquainted with the inside of a Paddington Green cell and charged with committing the allegedly bonafide terrorist act of looking at something that is, in turn, looking at you.
This poster in particular pissed the living daylights out of me. It depicts a busy street with smiling white people in the foreground. A family is prominently positioned in the centre of the image. Nice use of children to prop up your argument there knacker. And looming over this cheery scene is a big black cctv camera. You see it there, near where all the brown people are loitering?
You must realise of course that this sort of seemingly entirely normal activity is indeed how the 9/11 conspirators and the London bombers got started don't you? Yep, those murderous fuckfaces started off as trainspotters and then worked their way methodically through the ranks of 'CCTV Camera Studier' and 'Tourist attraction Photographer' (now an obsolete course I believe, having been replaced with 'Google Street Map Proficiency'), right up to 'Using Facebook to Inform Your Friends in Impenetrable Teenage Vernacular of Your Intention to Kill the Infidel'. It's a story we're all too familiar with.

And what about the words? Something like...

A bomb won't go off here and kill all the widdle kiddiwinks because some twat saw our scaremongering poster campaign and is now sufficiently terrified of all other human beings that he felt compelled to waste Knackers time reporting that bearded man over there who removed his eyes from the pavement for a few moments to contemplate the sky and the metaphorical freedom it offers in the general vicinity of a cctv camera because the fact is that there is a fucking camera every 2 paces along every single street you happen to walk down and, therefore, it is almost impossible not to look at the bastard things. No. The bomb went off somewhere else instead.

Or something along those lines. I may be exaggerating. Being over the age of 27, my mind is pretty unreliable.

I think the police want to be careful here you know. It would seem that they're giving away all their best terrorist tracking secrets to the public with this poster campaign. I've totally got the hang of it.
"I don't like the looks of that fellow over there. He has long hair/black skin/a hilarious beard/a boyfriend/youthful ideals/an air of wistful melancholy/brown skin/a hood and he is doing something that has really no connection to terrorism at all. Best get the armed police onto him right away."
I mean, terrorist spotting is apparently so simple that even a lowly shop assistant can now spot a nasty bad man at 30 paces. More importantly, eventually we'll all be so good at averting terrapocalypse ourselves we won't need the scuffers at all anymore.

Update Hacktacular

An update from the Tory Troll via Justin. Turns out the print version of that delightful Express story was even worse than the online version. Check out the section on the 'good' Dunblane survivors at the bottom of the article.

The Daily Express. A class act.

On a related note, perhaps we can expect to see similar stories having a swipe at those involved in/affected by other tragic events once they reach the age of majority? Can we look forward to the schoolfriends of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells being villified for twittering about their weekend activities next year perhaps? Or maybe the siblings of Madeline McCann being hounded for getting on with their lives and having the occasional alcoholic beverage sometime around 2022? Do the 'bloidz keep a little list of young people involved in terrible events so they can dredge up shit about them as soon as they turn 18? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

UPDATE
Jonathan at No Sleep Til Brooklands makes the same point, but so, so much better than I did.

To those teenagers, I say this; put the Buckfast down and think about taking up crusading investigative journalism as a path to redemption. There are plenty more tragedies out there with potential! Okay, Ann Coulter is already bravely taking down the 9/11 widows, but I bet there are probably some babies damaged by the fallout from Chernobyl who don't comport themselves with sufficient decorum in 2009. What are the people who got rescued from the sinking ship during the Zeebrugge disaster up to these days? I bet some of them are a bit sweary. Be creative! With a few seconds on Wikipedia I just found out that three people survived getting wounded in the 2002 Washington sniper attacks; why not find out who they are and then start talking to their neighbours or digging around in their bins?

Awesome.

Extravaganza of Hackery!

What in bollocking balls is this all about?
There are some young people involved in doing young people stuff whilst using teenage colloquialisms on one of those evil social networking sites that hacks pretend not to understand and this is bad. So on the surface this article is simply yet another trawl through the internet for a story to whip some fauxrage up about Things Middle England Are Against and pretty much business as usual for the 'bloidz.

Ah, but this is much worse than that. These particular youths are survivors of the appalling Dunblane Massacre which took place some 13 years ago. What do you mean, what's that got to do with anything? Obviously these particular young people are somehow even worse than ordinary teenagers (who are all, according to the 'bloidz, drunken, knife-wielding fuck-rabbits) because they...er..I actually have no idea.

But I get the distinctly yucky feeling that there is something else, something exceedingly nasty being implied here. Something along the lines of 'look at these kids, using the precious gift of life for swearing, drinking and casual sex. Maybe it would have been better if.....'
I mean, just look at this shit;

For instance, ****** – who was hit by a single bullet and watched in horror as his classmates died – makes rude gestures in pictures he posted on his Bebo site, and boasts of drunken nights out.

The webpage of ******, who suffered serious injuries in the shooting, states he is the “f***y who canny stop drivin in the silver hing”, is littered with foul language and features images of him with his new tattoo on his back.

How dare these young men be alive to do the kind of things all young people do! Their classmates died and yet there they are on Bebo, engaged in evil networking, posing in pictures and showing off their tattoos! Tattoos! And according to this particular hack, this means that by simply growing up and living their lives these kids are 'shaming' the memory of those children who were killed. I mean it's obvious really. Don't they get it?

No. And neither does anyone else. What a repugnant rag the Express is.

[Hat Tip Enemies Of Reason]

UPDATE
Looks like the Express got the hint about this tripe and have taken the story down. But cached version is here (via Justin) if you still fancy making yourself sick with rage.

Much Later Update - Decided to 'redact' the names of the kids the Shitspress decided worthy of bile.

The Listener

According to The Observer, Jack Straw has had some sort of flash of insight and now reckons he suddenly "understand people's anxiety" over the data-sharing proposals that were to be included in the forthcoming Coroners and Justice Bill under Clause 152. He goes onto claim with no sense of irony whatsoever that "I have never had a piece of legislation that was not improved by public debate during its passage through parliament."

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Oh wait, he's being serious. Let me laugh harder. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Mercy.

Anyway, he's going to do us all a personal favour and take out all that stuff allowing whoever to compile whatever and use it for everything, not because he's really understood 'people's anxieties' that the law would allow for gross invasion of privacy (privacy clearly being something only a terrorist would want), that it would give rise to fears that the laws would allow for spying and are yet another blow to personal freedom and civil liberties. No. Come on. There were totally going to be safeguards. And it's not as if laws passed for one thing have been used inappropriately in the past or anything. Why would you even think that? Come off it. It's just that the public haven't properly understood the proposals. Hence the need, according to the article, for

a fresh public consultation on how to implement more limited proposals...which would allow government bodies to share information where there is clear benefit...

In other words, give us a minute to talk you all round and it'll be fine.

Clause 152

After coming across this request at Boing Boing and reading a little more about the proposed law and it's potential impact here I felt motivated to contact my own MP to register my concerns.

Dear Mr Boswell,
I'm not somebody who usually bothers to contact my MP over anything as I understand that my voice is simply one of many you have to listen to. I would, however, like to register my very strong objection to the provisions of Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill which I believe is currently being debated in the House Of Commons, and ask that you vote against the bill itself if this clause in particular is not removed.
I understand that under the proposed Information Sharing Order (ISO), any personal data about an individual obtained for one purpose could be passed on and used for another entirely different purpose without seeking the consent of the individual concerned. The idea that control over and access to my personal data including, as I understand it, sensitive information such as my medical records will be taken entirely out of my hands and handed over to the state to give away to whoever wants it is frankly terrifying to me. It must be up to me to decide what organisations or businesses can have access to my personal information, and for what purpose they can use it, and not the government. Clause 152 (along with the wider bill) is not only yet another threat to individual privacy and liberty but it also undermines existing data protection law. There is also the fact that for all it's claimed safeguards, the governement has proved time and again that it cannot be trusted to protect our personal data as made clear with the numerous high profile losses of confidential files.
Most troubling of all is the fact that this proposed law, the impact of which would be enormous, has been slipped in at the end of a controversial bill full of legislation that will draw most attention from the media and the wider public, as well as most, if not all, parliamentary time given to debating it. It is vital that clause 152 is debated openly and thoroughly as the government has absolutely no mandate for the proposals made.
Should this law come into being I would like it on record that I refuse to give my consent to having my details shared in this way.

I got a reply from my MP today which was short, but positive and indicated sympathy for my views. It would also appear that, perhaps fortunately, Tim Boswell (Con) is serving on a commitee that will be considering the Bill in detail. According to They Work For You Boswell has voted against ID card legislation and the like in the past which makes me a little bit hopeful that this part of the Coroners and Justice Bill at least will be abandoned or scaled back. But, judging by Boswell's tendency to vote strongly in-line with his party's position, this small amount of hope is dependant upon the Tory party as a whole being opposed to this law as well.

A Fair Trial And Hang 'Em

So, the other day I heard Harriet Harman say the following;

"Sir Fred should not be counting on being £650,000 a year better off as a result of this because it's not going to happen. The prime minister has said it's not acceptable and, therefore, it will not be accepted. And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it's not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that's where the government steps in."

Which caused me to leap to my feet in a mixture of astonishment and vein-throbbing rage. It also led to me knocking a rather delicious piece of Jamaican ginger cake upon which I'd been nibbling onto the floor. Even accounting for the 5-second rule, the stickiness of the cake meant it quickly picked up a coating of carpet and suspicious-looking hairs rendering it inedible.
Now, I'm not sure that Harman has actually broken any actual laws in making me drop my cake, but in the court of public opinion round my house, she's a cake-destroying bastard who ought to pay for her actions. And as public opinion seems to be on it's way to becoming, ironically enough, legally binding, I shall look forward with interest to her show trial.

First Post

What are you supposed to say in a first blog post?

I'm terrible at decision-making. I find everything in life a baffling ordeal. I have a helluva time expressing myself properly. I am extremely dull. I will probably post infrequently at best and be torn to pieces by the wise blogger owls (or Wiblowls if you will) of the internet should they swoop by looking for ... internet .. mice?

I have learned it's best that I don't go about making bold pronouncements on what I'm going to be doing in the future as I am incurably lazy, fickle and easily distrac ooh look a bee. So this may be the only post I ever write. Or I'll spend a fortnight obsessively blogging my every thought before realising even I don't give a shit about what I'm thinking and ooh look a bee. I can, though, confidently predict that there will be Lolcats. Mostly, however, I am imagining that this blog will simply act as some sort of half-arsed echoing chamber for other more awesomer bloggers. But not twitterers. Do you hear me twitterers? CAN you hear me above all that tweeting? Your brevity sickens me.

"But Sonofajoiner!" cry the adoring hoardes, "why start a blog now? Haven't you heard of twitter?"

I have opinions. Angry ones. Poorly reasoned, knee-jerk, astoundingly ignorant opinions that definitely take up more than 140 characters. Mostly about TV. But also other things. And my Life Partner is sick of listening to me yelling them at Jon Snow and the one who sounds like Moss off the IT Crowd and all the other (mostly channel 4) news-harbingers who I'm assured apparently cannot hear me. I could go into the streets clutching a bottle of White Lightening to shout impotently about my fundamental objections to everything at passing traffic, but I imagine the government is probably working on a law to prohibit that very thing even as we .. er .. speak sort of. So here I am. Still clutching the White Lightening, only inside, and yelling impotently at you, you lucky, lucky people.