Recently in Other stuff Category

When I first saw this story, I thought they meant goats kept by prisoners as a possible food source, but no, they really were there awaiting trial:

The beasts were due to appear in court, charged with being sold illegally by the roadside.

The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining.

Mr Nyamugabo was conducting a routine visit to the prison when, he said, he was astonished to discover not only humans, but a herd of goats crammed into a prison cell in the capital.

The goats' owners were also charged, so the world hasn't gone completely mad.

There was no word on what their punishment would have been, had they been found guilty.

I think the death penalty is in order here. Let them be lunch! (Or dinner, since it's Ramadan.)

Comment is free: Hygiene obsession

Katherine Ashenburg (author of a forthcoming book, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing) on American toilets (sorry, bathrooms) and the various methods deployed to prevent people getting their hands soiled with germs - among them a device which sprays disinfectant on the doorknob and devices which spare the users the necessity of touching things like the taps and even the paper dispensers. As one who makes fairly frequent use of these things in London, I have to say that some of them are useful and some are plain stupid.

I was not going to comment on the latest twist in the divorce saga of Paul McCartney and Heather Mills until I saw the front page story on today's Daily Mirror, in which Mills is reported to have produced a tape in which McCartney confessed to hitting his late wife Linda (of meat-free sausages fame) once or twice. Clearly, Mills did this because she thought that the worst thing she could have done to Paul, short of exposing him as a paedophile or a rapist or something like that, was to tell the world that he was a wife-beater (although she did this off-camera, but it still made it to the front of the Daily Mirror).

Why is this, though? If the worst that Mills knew about McCartney was that he had been, in his youth, a thug who made the lives of other boys a misery for fun, I'm sure the world would dismiss her as a vengeful cow and not bat an eyelid regarding Paul. In fact, even adult violence against teenage boys is often excused, and the perpetrators do not face any come-uppance even when it causes the youths' deaths. None of the thug teachers or "care" workers who threw boys round rooms at my school, much less their teenage lackeys, did a day of jail time. Why, then, are we expected to think Paul McCartney the scum of the earth for one or two alleged incidents of violence against a grown woman?

There is another aspect to the relationship of Paul and "Saint Linda" McCartney, which is the fact that Paul and Linda remained married until the day Linda died, and by all accounts their marriage was mostly a happy one. Mills apparently thinks we will judge Paul McCartney with the usual response of "how dare he hit a woman", when surely the alleged victim's own opinion counts for more than whatever we think.

These tots in PVC don't scare me (The Observer)

Christina Odone (regular in the Observer and noted contributor to the Catholic press also) noted in last Sunday's Observer the popularity of indecent clothing for young girls both among both the Polish community in the UK and in Poland itself. She notes that this fashion is accompanied by a socially conservative society and an "ultra-conservative and Catholic government [which] never stops trumpeting traditional social mores and the importance of the family".

Duncan Mac-Vicar P.: LISTEN I HAVE MY RIGHTS!!!!

This is a blog entry I pulled off one of the tech sites I read, which tells the story of what happened when a man in West Virginia found a wallet that someone had left behind, and having found the owner on an IRC channel, attempted to demand a share of his possessions, and when challenged insisted, "LISTEN I HAVE MY RIGHTS". Pretty hilarious. (For anyone wondering, KDE, Kopete and Gaim are all Unix software, the latter two being instant messenger clients.)

The Guardian reports today on the declining popularity of jeans, which it attributes to their ubiquity and their escalating prices:

The sight of Victoria, Coleen, Carly, Elen and the rest desperately trying to out-Wag [as in Wags, meaning and wives and girlfriends of celebs] each other in their R'n'Rs was enough to put anybody with even a smidgen of personal style off their lunch. And when everybody is wearing them, the premium denim brands can hardly justify such an "exclusive" price tag any more. It's telling that the most recent brand to cause anything like a blip on the fashion radar has been Cheap Monday, hailing from Sweden and coming in at just £40. It has become a statement in itself to spend less than £80 on your jeans. However, this fashionable "it" brand is also very difficult to wear - with their drainpipe cut, only (male) fashion students look good in Mondays.

The Guardian: Patrick Barkham on the rise of the man bag

This is what they were talking about on the Vanessa Feltz show yesterday: the phenomenon of some men carrying what amount to handbags (that's purses to you Americans), something the tennis player Andy Roddick deemed effeminate on his blog. The print version of this article actually has some pictures of them, and they mostly don't really look like handbags at all. They are kind of large satchels.

Actually, I would never have considered carrying one of these, because I have a rucksack, but something which this article doesn't mention is that rucksacks are increasingly deemed a security risk. This has happened to me in two places since last summer - one of them a theatre on the South Bank, the other being the British Museum reading room, which suggested that I leave my bag in the cloakroom instead, and pay for the "privilege" of course. (I didn't - I went and did my business in a Westminster public library, which did admit me with my rucksack.) And investing in one might require me to keep down the amount of unncessary stuff I put in there (at least one newspaper, at least one book, at least one magazine, some food and various other bits and bobs).

Has anyone else been receiving the same flurry of 419-type email scam invitations I have been receiving the past couple of weeks? Every day I receive a few of these emails inviting me to some dodgy business deal in a third-world country. The latest is from "CHIMANAKIRE MAXWELL", claiming to be "the eldest son of Mr. Gift Chimanakire who was murdered in land dispute that was instituted by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe", claiming to be writing from South Africa. (As Mike at 419 Eater discovered, people who make such claims are generally lying - they are writing from their home country in west Africa.) I thought these types of scams had died down as the scammers realised that people were getting wise to them as they had received a fair amount of publicity. (However, Charles Arthur wrote in this week's Technology Guardian that the content of spam was changing from the usual dodgy meds and indecent stuff to phishing and stock scams, but even so, I thought that 419 scams were, like, just so yesterday.)

OK, well, this is the second time I think that I've been tagged for the "seven things" meme - first it was by Safiyyah and this time it's by Izzy Mo [1], [2]. Since I've got an enforced break from work while my boss wonders if there's anything more for me to do, I thought I might start on it.

You read Blogthings' "You Know You're From London when ..." and realise it wasn't written by a Londoner. Actually, I suspect UZ's You Know You're From New York when ... was not written by a New Yorker either. Let's face it, neither of them mention Londoners and New Yorkers.

OK, let's take this point by point, insha Allah.

You say "the city" and expect everyone to know which one

Capital C! In London "the City" means the City of London; London means the whole of the London area. But "going to London" means going to the central area (which is mostly west of the City), while London Bridge goes into the City from Southwark.

London is full of places which mean different things for different purposes. Lambeth and Southwark are both areas on the immediate south bank of the Thames, but the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark stretch all the way to Crystal Palace, about 8 miles from the centre of town. Camden borough is centred on Camden Town, but also includes a large chunk of central London.

You have never been to The Tower or Madame Tussauds but love Brighton.

Well, Brighton is where a lot of Londoners go to get away from the heat and bustle and lie by the seaside or enjoy the views (they are stunning). But I imagine many, if not most, Londoners do visit the Tower and Madame Tussauds. (Especially since Tussauds now owns loads of other attractions.)

You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Shepherds Bush to Elephant & Castle at 3:30 on the Friday before a long weekend, but can't find Dorset on a map.

A little bit of an exaggeration ... but in London there's lots of ways of getting from different places to different places. Although there is only one way to go west from the Elephant at 3:30pm on a Friday (if you want to avoid the £5 congestion charge), which is to go down the Ring Road, Kennington Lane.

Hookers and the homeless are invisible.

There are actually far fewer homeless now than there were in Thatcher's day when London was notorious for its "cardboard city". You'll mostly find them sitting quietly by the side of the road or pavement muttering "spare any change, mate?". As for hookers, they are certainly visible if you use a West End phone box, but they are less visible if you walk through their reputed den north of Picadilly. The sex shops, however, are anything but invisible.

You step over people who collapse on the tube.

Not true.

You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multi-lingual.

Yeah ... a lot of people are like this. I've even seen books on how to swear and to cuss someone's mamá in Spanish. I think they are available outside London too.

You've considered stabbing someone.

No comment ...

Your door has more than three locks.

As in most major cities ...

Your favourite movie has Hugh Grant in it.

Well, Hugh Grant's movies are so English, aren't they? A lot of middle-class English people like those modern period pieces with Kenneth Branagh and Hugh Grant.

You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

Yeah, it's best to avoid eye contact with some people.

You call an 8' x 10' plot of patchy grass a garden.

Yep. Like New Yorkers call that a yard, when as we all know, a yard is three feet.

You know where Karl Marx is buried.

Highgate Cemetery. But the place where he wrote Das Kapital is more famous - the British Museum Reading Room.

You consider Essex the "countryside"

It is!

You think Hyde Park is "nature."

It's the nearest to it for quite a few miles, unless you count London Zoo if it's still open.

You're paying £1,200 a month for a studio the size of a walk-in wardrobe and you think it's a "bargain."

Urgh yeah, London house prices ... but if you can afford that much per month for a small flat, you are probably not a Londoner. Most likely a foreign investor ...

Shopping in suburban supermarkets and shopping malls gives you a severe attack of agoraphobia.

Most Londoners shop in suburban supermarkets and malls - those in the suburbs have the same chain stores as in the town.

You've been to Tooting twice and got hopelessly lost both times.

You cannot get lost in Tooting. Just about everything lies on two main streets!

You pay more each month to park your car than most people in the UK pay in rent.

Another slight exaggeration, I think. Car parking charges are extortionate, but many parts of London still have free parking ... just not the bits which are convenient for getting to central London.

You haven't seen more than twelve stars in the night sky since you went camping as a kid.

Hmmm ... funny, wonder where I read this before ...

You own hiking boots and a 4WD vehicle, neither of which have ever touched dirt.

Well, the 4WD bit is true of a lot of people (known as Chelsea Tractors). My hiking boots have been used for their intended purpose.

You haven't heard the sound of true absolute silence since 1977, and when you did, it terrified you.

I think this is true of darkness rather than silence. Unless you are in a windowless basement, you will not be entirely deprived of light in London (if you can see, that is). I noticed this when I stayed in places like the Lake District and the west of Ireland. There, when you turn out the lights, it really is dark.

(A few omitted)

The UK west of Heathrow is still theoretical to you.

Have you seen the UK immediately west of Heathrow? Slough is basically a London suburb, and Reading is pretty close to that as well.

You don't hear sirens anymore.

Everyone hears sirens, and people really do move over for the police, fire and ambulance people. (Not like in Egypt.)

You live in a building with a larger population than most towns.

I guess that most households in Greater London have a house with a garden. I've never lived in a block of flats, and most of those, by the way, are not high-rise.

Your cleaner is Russian, your grocer is Korean, your deli man is Israeli, your landlord is Italian, your laundry guy is Chinese, your favourite bartender is Irish, your favourite diner owner is Greek, the watch-seller on your corner is Senegalese, your last cabbie was Pakistani, your newsagent is Indian and your favourite falafel guy is Egyptian.

This was copied word-for-word from the NY article. You're more likely to be a Londoner if your cleaner is Ghanaian, your grocer and deli man is one of four large supermarket companies, your "landlord" is a bank, your laundry person is yourself or your mum, your favourite bartender could be from anywhere (I don't go to them so I wouldn't know) and the same goes for the diner owner, there are no watch-sellers on your corner except for the occasional guy who claims to be selling you £900 watches for £50, your last cabbie was anyone with a four-door car who was desperate for the money, your newsagent is Indian (one thing right!) and you have never heard of felafel.

You wouldn't want to live anywhere else until you get married.

Uh ... well, or at least until you wanted to get a house and find you've been priced out of the market.

You say 'mate' constantly

No.

Anyone not from London is a 'wanker'

No.

Anyone from outside London and north of the Watford Gap is a 'Northern Wanker'

Uh, for some people I suppose.

You have no idea where the North is.

Of course we know where the North is. It's where Man United are. (There are a lot of Man U fans in London. I don't know how many Arsenal and Charlton Athletic fans there are in Manchester.)

You see All Saints in the Met Bar (again) and find it hard to get excited about it.

All Saints? You mean the pop group? I didn't even know they were British. (I know Eternal come from Croydon and used to go to Ashburton High. Whether you could still find them in the pubs of Addiscombe I very much doubt.)

The countryside makes you nervous

Far from it - most Londoners like going out into the country - they think of it as where the air is clean (except for the "fertiliser") and where you can get away from the hustle and bustle of city life. (Actually, many townies underestimate some of the dangers of the countryside. People know that bulls charge, but are less aware that cows will attack people as well, particularly if they have calves, and more so if you have a dog. A woman walking a dog was killed in this way a few weeks ago.)

Somebody speaks to you on the tube and you freak out thinking they are a stalker.

People do, sometimes, talk to each other on the tube.

You talk in postcodes. "God, it was really warm round SW1 the other day"

No. W1 (West One) possibly, and a few other places. But not SW1.

You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from London.

More likely, "we show someone from London and have a good laugh at this guy who obviously has never been to London".

OK, the interview meme has finally caught up with me ... Ahmed Weir has picked me at random to answer five questions of his choosing. So here's my answers:

Should the UK go more into the EU and adopt the Euro or should we withdraw?

I've got mixed feelings about the EU, because on one hand countries need to be part of international bodies to survive, unless they are an empire. When Britain had an empire, of course it didn't need the EU; others (like Germany and, earlier, Poland) carved empires out of their neighbours' countries rather than far off countries. I'm not entirely happy about some of the stupid legislation that comes out of Brussels (such as the impending new copyright laws, which are said to be even more stringent than America's DMCA), and we don't get the full benefits anyway (like being able to travel to the continent without a passport). I fear that it's a choice between the EU and NAFTA, and I prefer the EU.

I don't mind anymore one way or the other about the Euro. On one hand, it'll lead to price gouging when it first appears and also binds us much closer to countries like Portugal and Italy which have long been notorious for their worthless currencies. On the other, if they cough, we'll get a cold anyway.

Why Indigo Jo?

It's a long story, and it relates to an interest I had in the mid-1990s, about which I used to run a website. I pulled it down in 1997, but when I left Uni in 1998, I took the Hotmail address indigojo [at] hotmail dot com, because I couldn't think of a better nickname.

Should Turkey join the EU?

I used to think that Turkey's joining the EU would lead to some of its anti-Muslim laws being struck down on human rights grounds, but in light of what has happened in France, I'm not so sure. I suspect it will lead to Turkey's reactionary military losing its influence, which can only be a good thing. I raised this issue on the Fistful of Euros blog a few weeks ago; people seem so concerned about an Islamic party winning an election and forget the fact that this is a country with a history of military coups.

Who should Muslims in the UK vote for at the upcoming General Election?

Generally, I'd say the Lib Dems; but Muslims should vote tactically for candidates known to be sympathetic to civil liberties and to wider Muslim issues. I'd say don't vote Tory, because they'll drag this country in the direction of Australia, and don't vote for a Tony Crony, for obvious reasons.

Should corporeal punishment be brought back into schools, and would it solve the discipline problem?

I'm not sure it would solve the discipline problem anymore; as discussed elsewhere, I think the breakdown of the family and poor diet has as much to do with poor discipline as the lack of corporal punishment. Some kids would refuse to be caned anyway, or respond with violence. I'm not against it in principle, but I don't like the idea of it being used against petty rule-breakers and people who answer back a teacher, and not against kids who attack other kids for no good reason.

Last night I got an email from a supporter of the Terri Schiavo campaign, asking me to join a "Blogburst" in their support. I clicked on the link in the email, and I discovered a blog with a hard-line American neo-con religious right stance. The blog roll includes LGF, Jihad / Dhimmi Watch, Backcountry Conservative and Internet Haganah, and the content has a lot of stuff about Schiavo, but also a lot of anti-Muslim content. I'm not sure why the person who sent this email included me, because I'm not willing to give support to anti-Muslim bigots, much as I wholly support the Schiavo campaign itself (perhaps they saw this earlier entry). As far as I've heard, the case is cut and dried - the poor lady is the victim of a campaign by her husband to use the law to bump her off, so that he can marry his girlfriend, and he has claimed (but not provided a signed statement from her to this effect) that she had said she wanted to be "let go" in the event of something like this happened. If this really is just his word, then it shouldn't be taken as evidence, because it's unsupported and coming from someone with something to gain.

I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic to know the full details of this case, but I did see an article by Suzanne Goldenberg in the (liberal) Guardian newspaper, Playing God, accusing Terri Schiavo's parents of collaborating with the Religious Right and "turn[ing] this very private tragedy into a national pro-life pageant". Goldenberg makes much of the Right's involvement in the campaign, its advantage to them, and the emotional content of the campaign. But this really isn't an argument, any more than showing that Hitler supported something (such as banning fox hunting) is enough to discredit it. The religious right are known to over-emotionalise issues like abortion, and draw public anger onto poor women rather than, say, companies whose bad safety records kill workers, or politicians who start wars with dubious intentions.

The thing I find disturbing about attempts to switch off Terri Schiavo's life support is that she is clearly conscious. The claim is that she is in a "persistent vegetative state", which clearly connotes lack of consciousness (as in the case of Tony Bland, a young man who ended up in such a state after the Hillsborough football [soccer] stadium disaster). Goldenberg notes that "her eyes are open, her limbs are contracted, she smiles and grunts occasionally, but without any sense of purpose, according to the majority medical opinion presented to the courts", but some of the people I've been working with the past few days do not apparently have much more ability than that. If Janice, probably the least able of the "clients" I deal with, was unable to push herself around, but lay in bed instead, would anyone consider not feeding her? What a horrifying thought.

Yesterday the BBC aired an interview with the Reverend Joanna Jepson, a curate with the Church of England who has been leading a legal effort to prevent babies being aborted because of a cleft palate. In the case she challenged, the baby was aborted after the normal legal limit, which is allowed in special circumstances; Jepson, who had a jaw deformity herself which was fixed by surgery when she became adult, didn't see a cleft palate as being special enough. In this interview, I was disappointed with Jepson's replies to the interviewer's questions. She is clearly of the position that she couldn't condemn a woman for having an abortion in some circumstances, but failed to distinguish this from the issue of aborting babies because they are in some way abnormal. I can't find the interview on the BBC's website now (you can hear another interview with her here though), but she wouldn't go much further than to say that the law puts a limit on how late an abortion can be carried out, and that the exception made for the abortion in the case she challenged was illegal. I think we need people to be stronger than this in campaigning against the killing of babies simply because they are abnormal or disabled. It's just not right, and should not be a matter or right or left, but right or wrong.

Anyway, I'll include a link (insha Allah) to the main Terri's Fight page. I'm not going to join this blog-roll of theirs.

Mas'ud Khan has alerted people to an African advance-free conman trying to use Islam to lure people into joining his fraudulent scheme. The scheme is known as 419 after the section of the Nigerian penal code which deals with it; I posted an article to my web page about this as I'd received a similar invitation from a "dictator's widow" in the Ivory Coast.

Note that this scam invitation, like that shown in the article I earlier wrote, contains phrases no Muslim would use. For example, we do not talk of a near-fatal crash as meeting Almighty Allah; not do we talk of da'wah as being "enhancement" of the word of Allah; tawheed (one word, not two!) is not the "Islamic bath". By the way, a stroke does not leave you paralysed from the waist down - it leaves you paralysed down one side.

London Metropolitan Police's page on 419

419 Eater - a page dedicated to baiting and exposing advance fee scammers. From:    Mas'ud Ahmed Khan Date:  Thu Jan 20, 2005  5:48 pm Subject:  SCAM beware

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as-salamu 'alaykum,

If anyone received the following please do not get taken in by, this is yet another case of a Nigerian style 419 Advance Fee Banking Fraud. This person is very despicable in that he is trying to play to the sensibilities of Muslim to then defraud them of money, please inform others of this as many people have been taken in by such scams before and have lost vast sums of money. wa 'as-salam

Mas'ud

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Assalamu Alaikum Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 13:25:16 +0100 From: bilaalazizudeen11@h...

Assalamu Alaikum,

In the name of Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful, the Master of the day of Judgement , I greet you in the name of Allah. I am formally Miguel Marcos Llera from Cuba. I was born into a strong and devoted catholic family. All through my life I have been doing business and I was into gold mining and selling.

I met our creator and the merciful one Almighty Allah when I was having a business deal with one of my partners from U.A.E and from the day I was given the Islamic bath (Taw heed) my name changed to Bilaal Azizudeen .On 10th january 2004 myself and my family and my business partner took a flight from kish to sharjah and we flew kish airline. We had a plane crash and all members of my family including my very good friend lost their lives. I give thanks to Allah that I am one of the lucky ones that survived the crash.

The airline was under the management of one Mr Shabab Attarzadeh who was later sacked after this incidence. I had to Move to AKAR SENEGAL and I am now left with my relatives to take care of me. Owing to the fact that my relatives knows I have reverted to Islam, they have left me to suffer in pain. what disturbs me most is stroke that I have. I have developed paralyses from my waist region downward I am taking this bold step to let you know that I want to leave in your care the sum of $12.8million United States Dollars I deposited in a security company here in DAKAR SENEGAL for the enhancement and propagation of the word of Almighty Allah.

Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a mosque, or an Islamic organisation or better still a Moslem that will utilize this funds the way I am going to instruct here in. My main aim of doing this is for the propagation and upholding of the message of Prophet Muhammad(peace be upon Him).I want this funds to be used for Zakah and for helping the poor after the Ramadan fasting and performing pilgrimage. Also In the western world, you find out that the message of Allah has not yet really gotten there.

The message of Islam must not only be preached and upheld, but also our youths have to be called back to the right path and thereby reawaken their consciousness. Allah didn?t send Muhammad (peace be upon him) to one particular tribe, but to mankind at large.Surah #2.254 "Allah commands His slaves to spend out of what He has provided them in His way, in charity that they may accumulate their reward with their lord and proprietor. It is for this reason they should hasten up to do in this world before the Day of Resurrection in which neither bargaining nor friendship nor intercession shall avail.

No one can bail himself out or can he ransom himself even if he spent, for that purpose, and earth load of gold. Nor can kinship avail him.(#23.101)For now I don?t want any calls from you because of the presence of my relatives that are always around me and I don?t want them to know my plans. Do get back to me to my private mail Azizudeen2@n... Hoping to hear from you soonest and do notify your interest to help me to propagate Islam.

All praise is due to Allah Who brought everything into existence and may the peace and blessing of Allah be upon our noble Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) and His virtous adorers till the day of Judgement.

May Allah bless you as you respond to my plea.

Ma Salam,

Bilaal Azizudeen.

Some time in 2003 I took part in a rally in north-west London against an appearance by Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, where an organised "riot" in 2002 resulted in a huge number of Muslims being murdered and raped and numerous mosques and Muslim businesses being destroyed. Modi's government is widely suspected of being heavily involved in these events.

The BJP was kicked out of national office last year, for reasons not all connected with their support for "fascism", i.e. Hindu bigotry, but it seems Modi persists in Gujarat. Today I saw the latest edition of what used to be the Footprint guide to Rajasthan and Gujarat. Only now, Gujarat has been left out. There is no "preface to the second edition" to explain why Gujarat has been unceremoniously expunged from the book, but we can all guess that they no longer consider the state to be a viable tourist destination given that the state is still governed by the local equivalent of the KKK-Democrats of 1950s Mississippi and that (among other things) British Muslim tourists of local origin have been dragged out of their car and murdered; the case is still not solved.

I was beginning to miss the experience of being out on the road. Typically my truck and van driving career has consisted of a mix of middle-distance (ie. around the south-east of England) and urban driving. I much prefer the out of town driving, because it's vastly less stressful and requires fewer stops, and there's the obvious fact of the scenery. When Ramadan started I was hoping to get quite a few such jobs because almost everywhere on the south coast is outside the 48-mile limit from here (except Brighton), but I got only one, and on that occasion I chose to fast anyway. This is the first week I got several long runs in a row.

The job is for a company which hires out tools, including heavy tools like generators ("jennies") and cement mixers. I first got called up last week, only to be sent away on arrival for the lack of safety boots. I've been working with many different types of gear over my three years as a driver, including timber and heavy ceramic tiles, and nobody has ever objected to my wearing normal shoes. The only pair of such boots I've got I bought a few years ago for a building site job. I have an automatic negative reaction to this sort of thing, though, because the last time I had people telling me what I could or couldn't do "for my own good" or "safety" was at school. I'm also far more worried about my back than my feet.

Anyway, I took the job when it was offered to me again, and took the boots along in a plastic bag. I've been there two days and haven't worn the boots, and nobody's noticed. Then again, I saw why, because I had to transport two heavy "Pango" drills which are mounted on a special trolley. They had not been mounted properly when they had been loaded, and when they got to their destination and the trolleys were lifted, the drills fell to the floor with a bang.

The job is a stock transfer job, which requires driving out from the firm's depot in south London (Mitcham), via Woodham (west Surrey), Farnborough (in Hampshire), Camberley (back in Surrey), Basingstoke and Winchester (both Hampshire), then back via Guildford and Woking (both Surrey). This morning I though it would be a relatively light job, but this impression changed when I got to Camberley and saw that I had to transport a massive generator and an even bigger cement mixer. We first loaded the wrong mixer - the one I really had to carry was the heavy one, with cement in it. As it turned out, it didn't slow the van down too much, but I'm still sort of surprised they had me take this on a Ford Transit, rather than a proper lorry.

After Camberley I stopped at the Fleet service area on the M3 motorway for an expensive and rather small latte. (This is the first time I've heard of regular and small coffees, rather than regular and large.) Basingstoke to Winchester is the really interesting bit, because the company gave me a circuitous route to Winchester via the M3, up the A34 and then back into Winchester along a minor road. There is, in fact, a better way: straight down the old A33 via Micheldever which was once part of the main London-Southampton highway. I think there was once a wish to make the highways of England into solid blue lines on the map, to which end they found roads like the A33, parts of it dual carriageway, and built motorways alongside them. Thus, you get eight to ten lanes of road, four of them used by motorway traffic, two of them the shoulder of the M3, and the other two or four virtually empty along the more-or-less disused A33. They could just have built an extra two lanes along the narrower bits of the A33, but that wouldn't make the solid blue line. The advantage, of course, is that it leaves a virtually empty, straight road.

(They've duplicated this stupidity in Cambridgeshire, building an eight-lane (plus shoulders) motorway alongside the old A1. They grassed over two of the old four lanes, but ten lanes of traffic instead of the previous four between a small city (Peterborough) and a small town (Huntingdon) just doesn't make sense. And they bypassed the truck stop and, no doubt, other roadside businesses also - a common by-product of blue-lining schemes.)

The way back from Winchester, the furthest point out, was pretty uncomplicated - straight along the A31 and the A3, with a detour to Woking. I've had a pretty easy couple of days apart from the really heavy gear. Alhamdu lillah, no traffic jams; I hate traffic jams (and other forms of enforced idleness) far more than I hate hard work.

A number of major British universities are closing important departments including chemistry, physics, architecture and music, the BBC reports. This is leading to a number of their luminaries returning honorary degrees in disgust:

Two things seem to be concentrating the minds of vice-chancellors: the prospect of variable tuition fees for undergraduates and the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which determines the distribution of government funding for university research.

You might think these two would be unconnected but, increasingly it seems, universities are using research funds to subsidise teaching costs.

... The architecture, chemistry and physics departments at Cambridge, Exeter and Newcastle all fell from the top RAE rating of 5 or 5* to a 4 in the last rating round in 2001.

In the past this might not have mattered so much, as a 4 rating was still both prestigious and lucrative.

But government policy changed in 2003 when ministers made it clear they wanted to see greater focus on specialist excellence.

To drive this, the university funding body has now shifted its resources heavily in favour of 5 and 5*-rated departments at the expense of 4-rated departments.

It is a trend that is likely to continue.

I actually witnessed this when I was at university in Aberystwyth in the mid-1990s - a number of the better-known teachers at our college, particularly in the science departments, were laid off (or encouraged to leave, either way they left) because the university wanted to push up its Research "Assessment" Exercise (RAE) rating, which is based solely on the quantity of research material the department produced. The problem is that the best researchers are not always the best teachers, but teaching does not push up the RAE rating (which is simply on a 1 to 5 scale).

The truer (quality) picture is shown in another study mentioned in this report, the Citations report (based on who references your work) - and the top British university in this league is only 18th place.

There is a rather amusing observation in a report on This is London (the London Evening Standard's website) in a brief article about an ongoing case at the Old Bailey:

A Lord Chancellor's official accused of raping a senior civil servant was the sort of man who "talked to your tits," his alleged victim told the Old Bailey this afternoon. The 38-year-old woman said bachelor Michael Burrell was the sort of man who existed in every office. She said Burrell used to hang around her office and he became the butt of office gossip. "When you think they are talking to you, they are talking to your tits, and he was that kind of man," she said.

Rape, of course, never is funny. But the bit about men talking to the "front" of women in the office is, as is the bit about such men existing in every office.

The fact is that there are women in pretty much every large office who are not as squeamish about exposing their fronts as this newspaper was about talking about them (they used asterisks in place of the middle two letters; I removed them for the benefit of my visually-impaired readership). Why is it that some women have no idea about respecting the boundaries of male fellow members of staff - in fact, they believe we have no boundaries, or perhaps, that nobody has any boundaries.

The truth is, it's difficult to focus on someone's face if their cleavage is wide open just below it. Izzy Mo has already touched on this topic (read the whole post, it's a scream):

Now as a Muslim ... well, even before I converted, I always thought that seeing a woman’s cleavage was just a little too much info. It’s so obvious, overt and blunt. There’s no feminine touch there, though I know many men don’t complain about it. But, now I am seeing the “munchkins” at work in the museum, on the street, on the magazines (the so-called non porn ones) and everywhere else. Ladies…cleavage is like your grandmother’s pearls…they should only be worn on special occasions.

Oh, and another thing, why do you insist on calling me "darling" (pronounced daaaahling), or "sweets", "precious", "gorgeous", when I hardly know you and I'm actually probably older than you? I've spoken to men about this and a lot of them know what I'm talking about, and hate it. One time, when I was at sixth-form college, I heard a male fellow student commenting on the lady in the canteen who used to stroke his hand as she was giving him his change. We know an unwanted advance just as well as you lot do, and we like them just as much, that is to say, we hate them.

So, ladies, if you don't like me talking to your front, do what I do with mine. Cover it up!

I thought this too amusing to not blog ...

Yesterday morning I heard the bizarre story that a load of the last Russian Tsar's wine collection was going on sale in London - supposedly some of the finest vintage wine in the world, under the hammer at Sotheby's. I never cared much for the stuff anyway, even before I became Muslim, but it's always puzzled me why anyone would drink wine that was years, never mind decades, old.

And it appears that interest in this lot (or these lots) was underwhelming - although the highest paid for a single bottle was nearly £3,000! The sale made a total of £149,391 - just over a quarter of the half-million expected.

Are the buyers going to stash it away so it gets even more "vintage", or do they plan to drink the stuff? (I wonder why the Bolsheviks didn't knock it back while it was still fresh.)

Just watching a programme called Someone to Watch Over Me, which is about social workers in Bristol, which features a 14-year-old girl called Nadia, who was out of control at home, put in care and then drifted off into drugs and inappropriate relationships, and was eventually put into a secure unit. The girl was devastated to be kept in the unit (for three months in the end, the latter two much nearer home than the first month), but the programme does not discuss the matter of how she got into that situation in the first place. Where's her father, for one thing, and why are they not arranging for her and her mother to move somewhere away from the problems of drugs and prostitution and so on? Obviously it seems that in this case the mother couldn't cope with her, but do they make any provision for keeping together families?

Because even though it may cost money, the costs in the long term of splitting up families may well be greater. I remember the story of a family in Northern Ireland where the mother was killed by the IRA, and the children ended up being split up into various foster homes, where many were themselves abused. They had grandparents, but their home was not big enough, and I remember thinking - why weren't they sorted with a decent-size home?

Seen in Charing Cross Road, London today: a demonstration by "Reclaim the Streets", involving a procession of women chanting:

We have the right To walk the streets at night Without the fear of rape