Miliband is Very Much Old Labour
Congratulations to Ed Miliband and his partner, Justine, on the birth of their son.
But the announcement of the birth with his weight in pound is very much in the past and well into Old Labour territory.
When our second son was born in the same hospital, forty years ago, his weight was given in kilograms.
So get into the present day, Mr. Miliband!
Aung San Suu Kyi
So there are to be elections in Burma, but they are pointless without the participation of the bravest woman in the world; Aung San Suu Kyi.
Spider-Man has Trouble with Health and Safety
Apparently the Broadway musucal about Spider-Man is in trouble with Health and Safety according to the Daily Mail.
He’s obviously not a real superhero! Now Dan Dare wouldn’t have had that sort of problem!
A Unique Place in the History of European Fascism
That was the said in Private Eye as they detailed how the senior figures in the odious British National Party might be bankrupted by Unilever for breaching Unilever’s copyright on a Marmite advert.
They finish the article by saying that they could be the first neo-Nazi party destroyed by the makers of a yeast extract sandwich spread.
C used to love her Marmite, but I don’t!
Hasty Legislation Often Doesn’t Work
This article entitled London landlords cash in as MPs play by the rules, also in the Independent, shows how when you do things quickly, you often don’t get the result you wanted. Before the expenses claim, this article says that the average monthly mortgage claim was £694.63. Now the average rental claim is £1,173.81.
It sounds like in order to get the morality right, we have created a system that doesn’t give the best value in all cases.
C would have thought this par for the course, as the number of times she came home complaining how the new laws about families, children, divorce and dogs were often worse than those that had been in force before.
Buggy Burglars
This article in the Independent may explain a strange sight I saw. Or not!
I was walking by the Angel in Islington and saw a council truck, which had upwards of about fifty buggies in the back.
Were they abandoned, stolen or just lost?
How to be Safe from Falling Concrete Mixers
After vreading this story, you obviously need to be in a train!
It’s not really too practical a solution as you don’t often have a train handy, when you see a concrete mixer falling out of the sky!
Luckily no-one was seriously hurt!
Zopa Approaches 500,000 Members
Zopa has announced that they are approaching half a million members.
That to me is an astonishing figure, considering they’ve only been going for a few years.
Obviously, some are borrowers and some are lenders.
Is This Platform the Future for Offshore Oil and Gas?
As Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha have shown, trying to get offshore oil and gas wells working properly can be a hazardous business.
I was converted to the idea and the economics of reuseable platforms many years ago, when I did the calculations for Balaena Structures in Cambridge.
A few days ago I was watching BBC Breakfast, when they had an item about F3-FA, which is a reuseable gas platform. It may have cost £200million, but it is intended to drain up to four or five smaller gas fields during ts working life.
The article says this about the costs of the design.
“Most platforms are permanently installed on the seabed, they are used for a number of years, after which they are decommissioned and brought back onshore,” he says.
“This platform is self-installing, which means it comes out on a barge, you put the legs down to the sea bed, you exploit the oil and gas out of the field and when the field is finished you do it in reverse and take it to the next field.
Just seven or eight people are needed to run the 9,000-tonnes facility“And you do that three or four times, thus reducing the cost.”
Note that statement about the platform needing a small crew. It must surely have safety and accommodation implications as well as cost.
Incidentally, it is very different to the Balaena I worked on. One day, I’ll put the details of that on this blog.
The Anonymous Widower 