Published on
May 24, 2006 in
London.
I saw the aftermath of a serious accident last weekend. According to the people standing around afterwards, a bus had swerved to avoid a pedestrian in the road outside Holborn tube station. It went crashing over a traffic island, ploughing through the pedestrians standing there before coming to rest against a street light. Several people were trapped under the bus, one woman in her thirties died before she could be taken to hospital. As far as I can tell this sad story wasn’t considered important enough to be reported in any national media. It made second item on the BBC London radio news bulletin.
There are a lot of very bad bus drivers in London. I frequently see them speeding, whizzing through red traffic lights, turning without indicating and ignoring people waiting at bus stops. I’d say it’s a miracle that there aren’t more accidents but actually I suspect that there are more accidents; we just don’t hear about them. A while ago, when I had a Land Rover, I was rammed by a bus, twice, because I was driving in a bus lane. Fair enough in a way, people who drive in bus lanes are tossers, but hardly the behaviour of a responsible public servant.
I expect that the drivers are bad because the management is bad. They probably emphasise speed above safety. Even so, a bus driven by a maniac is a very serious danger to the public and so I felt quite encouraged by the news that Transport for London are working on a system that would automatically limit the speed of buses and taxis. I’m completely in favour of a scheme like this, as long as it only affects buses that I’m not travelling in.
BBC NEWS | England | London | TfL looks at car speed limiters
Another blogger who saw the wreckage
There I was, looking for information about making drawers for a cupboard and instead I found a deposition by the data engineer of the International Necronautical Society.
We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-
1. That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.
2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death’s beauty – that is, beauty.
I’m not really sure what to make of it, but it is a great read, as are all the depositions on the site.
The Necronautical Society – Papers & Depositions
Published on
May 20, 2006 in
London.
1 Westminster Bridge is a big grey forbidding building that stands in the middle of the roundabout at the southern end of Westminster bridge. There’s no obvious way to get in because the entrance used to be via an overhead walkway from the GLC headquarters at County Hall. It was designed by the GLC’s own architects and completed in 1974 but fell into disuse when Thatcher dissolved the GLC in 1987. It wasn’t a very good building. According to an article in the Independent in 1998:
Every time the sun came out, even for five seconds, the blinds would come down for 45 minutes. Because of this they wore out very quickly and took on a life of their own, going up and down at random all day, and finally got permanently stuck down over the windows. The air conditioning tubes sucked in cold air from above the Thames, so the office became Arctic in winter. And the humidity control was so sensitive that you couldn’t boil a kettle in the building for fear of disturbing the air-cooling system.
Frogmore Estates and Galliard Homes bought the building very cheaply in 1995. The developers applied repeatedly for planning permission for various schemes to develop the site but they were all refused for different reasons.
I seem to remember it being occupied by some anarchists protesting about homelessness in London in the early 90s although I can’t find any record of that. I also remember hearing rumours that it was being used by MI5 for interrogations a little while after that.
Anyway, Frogmore finally got permission to develop the site into a 15 storey, 913 bedroom hotel in 2005. And here’s the exciting bit: The existing building is going to be demolished this week, at 11:00 AM on Thursday 25 May. There’s a big LED timer on the front of the building counting down the seconds until it comes down so I’m guessing it’s going to be exciting. I’m going to try and be there if I possibly can.
A post from Giles on Other Machines about an apparent lack of German interest in the World Cup has reminded me of how frequently I favour Germany over my own corner of the UK. It is amazing how the English don’t realise that if it wasn’t for Germany we’d be the obvious candidates for their role in the world of stereotypical characters. We deride their humour as bitter or obscure while ours is more so. We joke about their desire for order while obsessively trying to clear our streets of ‘anti-social’ behaviour, our government going so far as having a policy of trying to make people more respectful. We dream of excelling in those fields where Germany excels: Engineering, architecture, design, football. We care about the same things. As Giles says in his blog, on the surface England and Germany look very similar. That’s because we are very similar in our aspirations and our values.
One of the big differences is that people in Germany have come to terms with their history much more effectively than we have. Your rarely hear people in Germany going on about how great their country was in the past because they’ve been made to face up to it. But Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time in 2002 and any discussion of the British Empire is likely to include right-wingers like Andrew Roberts who argue that we should dwell on the merits and not the failures of our empire.
This is what I prefer about Germany. They have been there, seen that, they’ve got the brown-shirt. They are in a better position to understand thuggery, nationalism and mass-hysteria because they accept that they’ve been there. The English, in the main, don’t and that’s what makes English nationalism so objectionable.
The Bavarian toy-maker who got the contract for making “Goleo”, the bare-bottomed 2006 world-cup mascot has now gone bust because nobody was buying. Whether the reason was a healthy disinterest in the World cup or an unhealthy dislike of the fact that the mascot was a lion and not an eagle it is hard to tell. I just wish that I could go the rest of the summer without seeing one more white van sporting a pair of Chinese-made flags. Maybe it’s not too late to get a summer job in the Playmobil factory.
Tomorrow: I Love Traffic Wardens.
My iTunes library tends to acquire new music in large indigestible chunks. I often have no idea what I’m listening to. Yesterday I was ruminating on whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to write a little program that would speak the track name and artist before or after each track so that I’d have a clue about what music I like.
Lights on, nobody home.
Published on
May 14, 2006 in
Media.
I listened to the interview with the unreal Guy Kewney again and I realised that there’s something quite scary about it. At the start of the first answer the confused guest is clearly out of his depth. By the end of the third answer the presenter has managed to adapt her tone and questions to make it sound a little bit like he knows what he’s talking about.
Expert interviewees have a strange status in broadcast media. Presenters rarely challenge what they are saying, partly because the presenter doesn’t know anything about the subject but also because the network’s credibility depends on the experts credibility. If you demonstrate on air that your pundit is wrong then the audience will wonder why on earth you chose that particular person in the first place. The unfortunate consequence is that ‘experts’ frequently get away with the most absurd views and the audience has only a shadowy doubt in their mind about what they just heard.
Guy Kewney had a lot to say about the Apple vs Apple case. He said on his blog that Apple Corps (The Beatles) would probably win. He said that Apple Computer would probably have to remove the Apple logo from iTunes and iPods. After the judgement he said that he thought that the judge got it wrong. But he’s not a lawyer, he’s a technology writer who predicted the wrong outcome, why should we care what he thinks? Maybe what the cab driver said in his interview, that people are keen on downloading music and they like choice, was actually no less substantial and incisive than what Mr Kewney would have said. And at least he didn’t try to sound authoritative about things he didn’t really know about.
Mr Kewney also makes a great deal of fuss about the fact that he is white, very white he says, while the cab driver who took his place on the air was black. In fact, in his blog it sounds like he thinks that they should have noticed the mistake not because of what the accidental guest said but because of what he looked like. I think he’s completely wrong about that as well.
Published on
May 13, 2006 in
Media.
According to the Guardian, News 24 put a cab driver on air by mistake on 8 May. A producer had gone down to reception to collect Guy Kewney, computer pundit, who was going to talk about the Apple vs Apple verdict. A cab driver who was waiting to collect Mr Kewney heard the name and stood up. The producer rushed him upstairs into makeup and before he knew it he was on the air. You can hear the results here.
You can also watch selected highlights of the interview at the end of this week’s Newswatch.
Guy Kewney, in his blog, says that it was a Studio Manager who picked him up from reception. That’s very unlikely, Studio Managers don’t make mistakes like that. He also says elsewhere in his blog that he’s doing an interview about the cock-up on another TV programme but they don’t want him to tell anyone about it because they’re worried that a load of ringers will turn up in reception at the same time as him. “I am Guy Kewney! No, I am Guy Kewney!”
One other interesting thing about this is that before it happened Guy said that he thought Apple corp would probably win the case. That’s what lawyer Robert Lands thought as well when he appeared on World Service radio at half past ten that morning. Unfortunately he was just saying so when the news that Apple Computer had won the case appeared on a screen in front of the presenter Dan Damon. Cue an embarrassing contradiction. So all in all a bad day for pundits at the BBC.
I am quite keen on Europe, I wouldn’t mind if the UK joined the Euro tomorrow. I also love cake. In fact, one reason I love Europe so much is that I love European cafe culture so I was bound to feel enthusiastic about the way the Austrians decided to mark Europe day today. What a contrast, though, with Britain’s presidency of the EU. Have a look at the website for the UK presidency. What a bunch of dreary tossers; the whole thing looks like it was designed by the Tories in 1989. Now have a look at the logo for the UK 1998 presidency. It’s depressing because it reminds me how New Labour started off so up-beat and positive. Oh guys, come on, I’m not angry, just disappointed. You could have been so much better.
According to the World Service “The new British foreign secretary (Margaret Beckett) says there will NOT be military action — but that doesn’t mean Tehran is off the hook.” BBC News online says “she refused to repeat her predecessor Jack Straw’s insistence that military action against Iran was inconceivable.” I suppose I should be glad she’s talking about sanctions and not war but I can’t help wondering whether she’s forgotten what a disaster the sanctions against Iraq proved to be.
I had three votes in the local election. I voted twice for Labour and once for the Greens. Why oh why did I vote Labour? Because my MP, Keith Hill, recently replied to a letter I sent him about Identity Cards and his letter was good and rather persuasive. The other reason is the card which the good people in the Streatham Labour Party sent me on May Day. It was deep crimson with a fist raised in solidarity on the front. Inside it had the lyrics of Billy Bragg’s version of the Internationale and a brief history of International Workers’ Day. That’s all it took. What can I say? I’m a cheap date. Anyway, as a result of my vote Lambeth was the only Labour gain of the local elections and I’m feeling pretty smug about that.
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