Into the freezer.

Not for the first time Mummylonglegs has apparently stopped blogging and pulled the shutters down. Why? I'd look into it a bit more to find out exactly why but I don't have time and to be honest it's happened enough before that I can't muster a stronger reaction than a shrug. Since her shelf in the cold storage room has barely warmed up from last time she withdrew from the blogosphere and then started up again, back she goes.

Will she make another return? On past form it's quite possible. Will I put her back on the blogroll if she does? That I'm not so sure about. I've enjoyed her blog even though I haven't agreed with her all the time (I rarely agree 100% with anyone else's blog, and given enough time I'll probably disagree with something I've written) but keeping track of whether she's blogging or not and whether to keep her on the blogroll is in danger of becoming a chore. Sorry MLL, but leaving it off permanently is simply the low maintenance option. As Rick Blaine said in Casablanca, we'll always have RSS.

Massive forehead, big nose.

Do you remember late 1997 and early 98 when it was really becoming clear that New Labour were likely to be at least as bad as the late and unlamented Major government and possibly more so? And now in 2011 are you getting a sense of déjà vu? Well you bloody shouldn't be because the disappointing lack of action on the part of The Cobbleition when it comes to disposing of much of the illiberal legislation of their predecessors has been pointed out by enough people already, as has the fact that they are getting awfully like the bastards the country finally got shot of less than a year ago. This time it's bank bonuses again, and the utter inability of the government to grasp that it's got absolutely fuck all to do with them.

Downing Street has accepted that it cannot halt large bonuses for bankers...

Now before we all start cheering that they realise that pay and bonuses are between an employee, their employer and the company's shareholders bear in mind firstly that it's seems like very reluctant acceptance on the government's part, and secondly that they have a Plan B.

...and is instead negotiating to make employers disclose how many are given more than £1 million.

Which, given the way all governments fuck the currency and inflate away its worth, isn't always going to mean CEOs, even though I'd believe them if they said that's all they were interested in. Y'see, like the parasites who were in government before them they've clocked that jealousy can work for them. Point out to the average man in the street that some chinless wonders in pinstripes each get paid more money per year apparently just for not fucking up too much than he or anyone he knows will make in their lives, and hopefully he will be so consumed with angry jealousy that he won't notice the way the government had quietly put its hand into his own pocket and is now busy lightening his wallet.

I'm still a bit busy to rip into this at any length so I'll condense it down to one word.

Cunts.

Seriously, whut the fark?

Whut the fark?

This lobby is no smoking.

If you like a smoke you use the entrance on the left. If you work for someone that makes nicotine patches, chewing gum, Zyban or all the other shit that you're told to spend your baccy money on (whether you want to stop smoking or not), then you use the entrance on the right.

Easy.

Light blogging.

For at least a few days. The best laid blogging plans of mice and men, eh.

Offered without comment.

Non Sequitur

Hitting targets, but missing the point.

Sigh.

Thousands of commuters were denied payouts by Southeastern after the firm passed punctuality targets by a wafer-thin margin.
Greg Barker, a climate change minister and Tory MP for Bexhill and Battle, has demanded an independent inspection of the figures, saying they “didn’t smell right”.
This is because the statistics did not take into account the services which were cancelled when the company operated a succession of emergency timetables during the recent bad weather.

And what should we have expected? Time and again we've seen that setting a target in Britain means that efforts go into meeting the target by hook or by crook, and hard to quantify stuff like value for money or decent service often falls by the wayside. Imagine you were going to train basketball players and you drew a line at a certain height on a wall and tell them they must be able to jump and reach that line or else, and so reaching the line becomes so important that what was important before becomes secondary, or even eventually unimportant. Where you'll end up is obvious. Shooting baskets? Meh. As long as we reach that line...

The line that usually jumps straight into my head when I read stories about targets being met while services are widely regarded as being completely shithouse is a quote attributed to the late Robert McNamara, former US Defense Secretary. Supposedly it was his response when military chiefs were bringing him reports of the numbers of buildings destroyed in Viet-Cong territory during the Vietnam War.

Measure what is important. Don't make important what you can measure.

The message is plain: what is easy to measure isn't necessarily of much importance. I have no idea if McNamara might have felt the same way about targets but to me the whole concept often seems to be about making important what can be easily targeted, rather than targeting something of any real worth.


P.S. While unsuccessfully looking for a source for that McNamara quote I came across another line attributed alternatively to him or Ronald Reagan. This time I found a transcript of a speech McNamara made in 1966 which shows that if he didn't say it first it's at least likely that he said it before Reagan, who wasn't yet even Governor of California at the time. The quote doesn't have much to do with the subject of this post but it fits in with one of the themes of the blog as a whole.

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

New Year and a blogroll change already.

Sadly Corrugated Soundbite has posted for the last time, at least on his current blog and under his current pseudonym. The good news is he expects to return before long with a new blog, and I for one very much hope he does.

Enjoy your break, CS, but don't stay away too long, eh.

So, who wants a holiday in America this year?

Via reason.com.

Curiosity maimed the moose.

What it did to Mr Puddlecote I'm not sure, but having been hung, drawn and simultaneously buried in multiple graves I'm sure it isn't anything he can't handle. Still, since he and the Moose have tagged me to describe the blogging environment of Chez Exile I think they're in no danger here. In no particular order, and skipping over the obvious like computer, mouse, printer, we have:

Two tape measures
Some cat hair
A piece of plastic that fell off my chair earlier today
A coaster
A bunch of USB flash drives
A stack of blank DVDs
Some permanent marker pens
Some more cat hair
A four month old copy of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria magazine that I deliberately kept for some reason that I'll probably never remember now
An Allen key, fuck knows why
A landline phone and a charger for my mobile
A Maglite torch
A letter from some thieving bastards calling themselves something like Her Majesty's Revenue And Cuntscum offering me the chance to permanently lose more money in their version of Bernie Madoff's investment scheme
An English dictionary (English English, the Strine version is on a shelf)
A broken iPod that awaits love and coaxing back into life, or a short meeting with a ball peen hammer
Yet more cat hair
A menu for a new pizza restaurant
A watch
A coffee mug that missed the washing up round up from 12 hours ago and has therefore not been washed up since last year
A bottle of alcohol free fizzy piss (empty)
A shelf of hardback books, mostly non-fiction
A can of compressed air to help blow away all the cat hair until one of the fuckers comes and sheds all over the desk again

There's some stuff I've glossed over but that gives an overall impression. Needless to say everything is upside down.

I'll tag Uncle Bill and Captain Ranty.

And since it's now 2011 here...

... a happy New Year to all.