Boss Radio

I heard quite a bit about little government during the US election, and now during the UK's annual party shindigs I'm hearing a lot more. Everyone, we're led to believe, wants small government.

No they don't.

Certainly everyone thinks they want small government. They don't want these people interfering in their lives, and small government will obviously cost less so our taxes can come down (Yeah, right). In reality 'The government should do/have done something' is one of the most frequent phrases seen on news and documentary programmes. It seems that we all want small government until it affects us, then we think it should be slightly bigger so it could have "Done something."

I have, just lately, noticed a variation in this. None labourites are now inclined to say "George Brown should have done something". This is because polls show that Brown is less popular than his party, so they are aiming all their allegations of mismanagement at the man himself. Come the revolution all spin-doctors will be put up against the wall if I have any say in it...

Meanwhile, I kid you not, there has been a tragic, and surely preventable, loss of life in Scotland where two young girls have committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into the river below. Someone from vox-pop has just said on the radio "Someone should have done something. What are the government doing?"

I rest my case.

So Gordon Brown has just made his make or break speech and early opinions are, well... Not very invigorating to be honest.

They basically ran the gamut from "That's what he always says" to "That's what they all say." I'm guessing you can guess the political slant of the responders by which reply they go for.

The reason for this dearth of constructive critique is that the newspapers haven't come out yet. Tomorrow nearly everyone will have an opinion, and for a frighteningly high percentage of them it will be based upon what their choice of 'paper has to say. And Britain's favourite daily is The Sun.

In other words Rupert Murdoch will be dictating how people will eventually vote in the next election.

That's not my opinion, by the way, it's the opinion of The Sun itself, and of the politicians who woo the Murdoch clan at every available opportunity. Which I find a little frightening. The thing is, all newspapers are registered as such, it gives them certain privileges. To me, any 'paper which publishes opinions as news should lose that registration, opinions should be kept to the opinion columns.

Meanwhile I can but exhort the Sun's 10 million readers to think for themselves whilst they're admiring page three with one hand. Don't let Rupert Murdoch tell you what to think.

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If anyone noticed my several week's absence and wondered why, I just thought I'd mention. I downloaded Opera 10 for Mandriva Linux, and it doesn't work. It doesn't even load. Hence I am writing this on a pretty pink laptop running XP, and I don't like it.

XP that is, not the pretty pink computer, which I shall continue to worship for at least as long as it takes for this to get published...

It's amazing how one bit of bad information can stay with you all your life. One day our English teacher set us an essay on the subject 'The sense of nonsense', and he said he would give zero points to anyone who misspelled it. To emphasise his point he wrote 'SENCE' on the board. Ooh, and I so nearly got it wrong. I copied it down and used that spelling throughout my essay.

He thought I was trying to be funny.

I, on the other hand, had to check the spelling before I could write this piece thanks to his little attempt at humour.

The first time I saw the word 'halcyon' I read it - dyslexia being what it is - as 'halycon', and the first time I used it I mispronounced it, much to the amusement of the surrounding throng. So I made a mental note that what I thought it was was wrong, and now I get it right about 50% of the time.

If only I could remember which was right and which was wrong in the first place...

With thanks to either a typo or someone's rank ignorace I once read that a mile was 1,700 yards. Since the author of that little gem was a citizen of the USA I assumed that this was just one more of those little things that the USA did differently to everyone else. For several years of my life I went around telling people that a US mile wasn't as long as an imperial mile. I didn't actually go around just telling people of course, but if it came up in conversation I was ready with the trivia, so there are probably several hundred people who now think that US and UK miles are different things, and that if you're a USAian you can drive slightly faster over here...

Now I've finally got it right someone's going to write and comment that a US mile is 1,700 yards. Go on, feel free to screw me up some more.

When I was a kid I knew that bi- meant two and tri- meant three because of bicycles, biplanes, tricycles, and triplanes. It was therefore obvious to me that a billion was two million and a trillion was three million. I explained this to a whole lot of my friends and acquaintances. Finally my dad put me right. A billion was a million to the power of two, and a trillion was a million to the power of three. I thought it was silly - why would anyone need numbers that big? - but it did make a kind of logical sense.

Enter the USA again. For reasons best known to some obviously subnormal maths teacher they decided that a billion was a thousand million, therefore a trillion was a million to the power of two. Now I'm sorry but I can find no logic in that whatsoever. Try as I may I can make no sencese of that, it's positively the most stupid thing I've ever heard of in my life (Well close anyway), and when the government of Britain decided to go along with the US definition I was right there at the forefront of the don't be silly campaign (We're just so polite over here...).

Thanks to the credit crunch I now feel more than justified in that particular opinion. There are people on the TV news talking about trillions like it's small change. Now what are we going to call a really large sum of money? I think this time the USA should adopt our logical definition before they have to start inventing new words.

Which I will, of course, only have trouble with.

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Now here's an interesting little thing that I discovered whilst typing this little missive. If your right hand slips one key to the left whilst you're typing, 'mile' comes out as 'nuke'.

You learn something new every day.

I feel cheated, let down, conned, and that was before John Sergeant quit 'Strictly come dancing', so you can imagine how I'm feeling right now.

After all his great pronouncements about viewer's votes counting Sergeant goes and quits. The BBC must be hopping mad, the great man ('Great' as in 'large and rotund') was a true crowd pleaser and was also pulling in vast sums for the Children in Need charity, and they may now have to refund the money to those who voted for for him. Mind you, if I'd voted I'd have told them to keep the money, it's not the kid's fault that Sergeant wimped out.

The thing is, should the other no hopers also fall on their swords then? I can think of a couple of other clodhoppers who don't stand a bonfire in my refrigerator's chance of winning, or at least they didn't before the Sarge did a bunk. What's the point of the programme if competitors who've realised that they shouldn't win just walk off? Why bother with voting? Where's the playground Susie? What's it all about, Alphie? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? How many roads must a man walk down before he admits he is lost?

At least I can answer that last one.

42.

I've had enough of this, I'm going to bed and in the morning it will all have been a bad dream.

Night-night.

Last month I blogged about a pair of refugees from Zimbabwe, one of whom explained that they thought the country needed help from the EU because "The Organisation of African Unity... would not intervene because they never did. The most they would do would be to send in soldiers to watch as Mugabe continued to persecute the population. The United Nations would talk a lot but would never intervene because countries like South Africa and China would block it".

Today he was proved right. South Africa, China, Libya, Vietnam, and Russia voted against the US/EU proposal that actions be taken against Mugabe's unelected regime. Their reasons for doing so, or at least, their real reasons for doing so, seem inexplicable. South Africa, as a nation, almost universally agrees with former president Mandella that they should be doing something to oust Mugabe, but for reasons unknown their government is choosing to ignore them. China has a record of refusing to vote for sanctions against oppressive/represive regimes, possibly because to support them would throw unwelcome light upon their own human rights transgressions. In Libya Gaddafi is a little annoyed that the aid he was promised after he 'declared peace' has not all been forthcoming, so maybe this was a revenge vote. Vietnam I can only assume was voting in support of China, but I'm at a loss as to why. And finally there's Russia, whose new president told Britain's Prime Minister Brown that they would vote with the US/EU, then didn't. An action I find to be the most perverse of all. The only explanation I can think of is that ex-president Putin stuck his oar in simply to get up George Bush's nose.

You'll notice that at no time did I suggest that any of these nations actually believed for a second they were doing the right thing. This is because I really don't believe that any of them do. In fact I think that thousands of people are going to suffer horribly whilst their nation is pushed irrevocably, and maybe even irreparably towards chaos for reasons that, by comparison, are totally trivial.

So what else is new?