Will Expelling Two Syrian Diplomats Make Any Difference?
Of Course it won’t! Assad’s vile regime will expel or worse two of our diplomats. And two from all the other countries that have sent a couple of Syrian diplomats home.
I can’t see a solution to this, whilst the Russians and China back the Syrians. After all, kicking Assad out of power, would set a terrible precedent for their own human rights abuses.
Robert Comes Home
I like to see old engines and other pieces of industrial history displayed at places like stations.
Robert has now been put back at Stratford station and as you casn see from the picture, it has a proper information board.
Some might have commissioned an expensive sculpture, but surely old engines like this are cheaper and just as interesting.
A Pair of Wongas
Wonga is now targetting the business market.
A Pair of Wongas
Did they give the drivers a bonus to be in convoy?
An All-Over Train on the Overground
I took these pictures at Canonbury station on the North London line.
I’m not sure, whether I like the concept, but I suppose it brings in money.
Paying by Phone
They are discussing this on BBC Breakfast this morning.
It won’t work for me, as I use a 12 year old Nokia 6310i. In fact, I’m now going the other way, taking just one credit card, my camera and my Freedom Pass with me, when I go travelling or shopping in London. I sometimes leave the phone at home anyway, as when I’m in the Underground, there is no signal.
Pasty Tax
As a coeliac, I can’t eat pasties and most takeaway food, so the pasty-tax was for me creating a level playing field in taxation.
It just shows how the country wants to eat themselves to hell and then travel there in a dump truck.
Lizzie Says Relax
Someone has painted this on the wall above Old Street Tube station.
Lizzie Says Relax
I tried to photograph it yesterday, but failed. But I did succeed today.
Lessons in Love
Ater The Times, on Saturday answered what to do, when your husband doesn’t like bondage, tonight the Evening Standard has an article about how to write erotic fiction, entitled Lessons in Love.
The odd thing about the article is the picture. In the actual paper, it’s taken from her left with the typewriter to the left, but on the web, it’s the other way round.
It probably doesn’t matter, but it does to me, as I was brought up in a print works.
It’s seriousness pales into comparision to the boob Horse and Hound once made, when they published in reverse a picture of the Queen at Trooping the Colour. It was only obvious, as in those days, she was riding the horse side-saddle.
FiReControl Was Abysmal Failure
FiReControl was one of the Blair government’s flagship projects, which had the aim of sorting out the 999 services for the fire brigades across England. According to this report from the the National Audit Office, it wasn’t a success. Here’s the first paragaph.
The project to replace the 46 Fire and Rescue Services’ local control rooms across England with nine purpose-built regional control centres linked by a new IT system has been a comprehensive failure. The DCLG acted to cut its losses by terminating the contract in December 2010 but at least £469 million will have been wasted.
Lord Prescott defended the system in the media last week and felt that others were to blame.
Now a letter from Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union is published in The Times with the title of this post as a title, which drops Prescott in the doo-dah. If the FBU won’t support you, something must be wrong.
I hope he’s got his wet suit on!
Prescott is one of those politicians, who in my view, are not fit to run a whelk stall.
He should do everybody a favour and retire from public life. Preferably to a cottage by Spurn Head.
Vandalism In The Service of Ignorance
The title of this post comes from a phrase, describing the protestors, in the third leader of The Times, which defends the work at Rothamsted to create a strain of wheat , which has a natural repellant effect to pests, by crossing it with mint using gentic engineering,
Genetic engineering is a touchy subject to many, but properly used it should benefit mankind. The aim of the Rothampsted experiment is to produce a strain of wheat that uses less pesticides.
On the other hand, I would be against genetic engineering, that produced wheat with the so-called terminator gene, that meant farmers couldn’t use some of this year’s crop for next year.
There are now drugs coming on the market, that have been created by genetic engineering using plants or hens’ eggs as a starting point. Would these protestors stop this process as well? If I suffered from a disease, where the drug could be produced by genetic engineering, I would not be happy.
As I said, provided that the purpose of creating the organism by genetic engineering has a moral purpose, I can see no reason to ban it.
I’m also a coeliac, which is a minor genetic disease. I suspect a few decades down the line, they’ll be able to correct the faulty genes in babies by some clever genetic modification.
The Anonymous Widower 