ChristopherWhite.info

A “monkey’s heid” he may have, but he’s right about one thing:

Former Manchester City, Sunderland and Leeds boss Peter Reid has called for Fabio Capello to make Steven Gerrard the permanent England captain.

Reid, who will take charge of the England Legends against Scotland Legends live on ITV4 at Southampton tomorrow (Thursday 15 May), says the Liverpool skipper has the same qualities as England’s iconic Captain Marvel, Bryan Robson. Robson will be captaining the Legends team.

Speaking ahead of the game, Reid said: “There’s different types of captains but I think the inspirational ones in the middle of the park, like Robson, like Gerrard, galvanize the team when they need galvanizing.

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Likes to starve Africans, apparently.

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Workers accused of theft or damage could soon find themselves blacklisted on a register to be shared among employers. It will be good for profits but campaigners say innocent people could find it impossible to get another job.

To critics it sounds like a scenario from some Orwellian nightmare.

An online database of workers accused of theft and dishonesty, regardless of whether they have been convicted of any crime, which bosses can access when vetting potential employees.

But this is no dystopian fantasy. Later this month, the National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR) is expected to go live.

Outrageous, to be sure. But it’s manifestly vulnerable to a defamation suit.

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“South American, African and other non-European footballers who cannot speak English will be barred from joining Premier League clubs from the autumn under the new points-based immigration system detailed by ministers yesterday.

“The introduction of an English language test, covering everyday phrases and simple conversation, forms part of a package of tougher rules for skilled migrants from outside Europe applying to work in Britain and for temporary workers and students.

“The immigration minister, Liam Byrne, said that there would have been 20,000 fewer migrants coming to Britain last year had the new rules been in force.

Aside from the obvious irony — that native players can hardly speak English — this is pretty silly on at least two counts:

1. It implies that, for example, a bunch of South Americans running round a pitch speaking Spanish is somehow “worse” than a bunch of Spaniards running round a pitch speaking Spanish. (Only there’s obviously nothing Liam Byrne could do about the latter even if he wanted to.)
2. If these guys’ employers don’t believe it’s necessary for them to speak English — and not just within football — then it’s got precisely cock-all to do with anyone else.

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I refused the opportunity to cast a vote in last week’s London mayoral/assembly elections. Normally I’d consider this a dereliction of duty, but did so for two (related) reasons.

Firstly, I don’t consider the “expression of popular will” aspect of democracy¹ to be as important as the chance to easily change government — as Tim says, “the occasional opportunity to throw the bastards out”. (Hence most elections being fought on competence rather than policy.)

Having lived in London for less than three weeks before the election, it wasn’t remotely my place to do so.

Secondly, I would’ve lost my vote in my native constituency², and feel obliged to vote against both my [former] MP (Helen Goodman, idiot toady to the Labour party leadership) and MEP (Fiona Hall, just a plain idiot).
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1 Because what we’ve been lumbered with is too top-down for this to actually happen anyway.
2 The system having been mended since the 2005 General Election, when I voted in Cardiff Central and Bishop Auckland.

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There has been outrage in Italy after the outgoing government published every Italian’s declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet.
The tax authority’s website was inundated by people curious to know how much their neighbours, celebrities or sports stars were making.
The Italian treasury suspended the website after a formal complaint from the country’s privacy watchdog.
The information was put on the site with no warning for nearly 24 hours.
Sour grapes?
The release of the information was one of the last acts of the outgoing centre-left government and has shocked many tax-shy Italians, says the BBC’s Mark Duff in Milan.
But it was also hugely popular, and within hours the site was overwhelmed and impossible to access.
The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency.
Critics condemned it as an outrageous breach of privacy.

And those critics are right.

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The online version of a piece by Martin Rees for the Guardian’s science course series:

“We are each made up of between 1028 and 1029 atoms. […] More than 1078 atoms lie within range of our telescope.”

So there’s only about 1.05 people in the visible universe, and bugger all else.

(In a recent post, which I’ve since misplaced, I criticised Madeleine Bunting for writing C02 rather than CO2, and took some flak myself for not being entirely accurate either, and not writing CO₂. In that case the lack of a subscript doesn’t obscure understading — not much anyway; it’s reasonably obvious we’re talking about a molecule made of one carbon atom and two oxygen. But in Rees’s article, having lost the superscript on 10²⁸ and so on makes it a complete nonsense.)

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This planned teachers’ strike on thursday.

What should happen is this: If the police see any teachers out and about that day, they should drag them back into school.

That’s what happens when the kids bunk off.

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I moved into my new flat a week ago on saturday (the 14th) and bought a telly licence on the monday, the morning after finally actually managing to get a signal (though I still can’t pick up either ITV or Channel 4).

Then, a week after moving in and five days after buying said telly licence, I get a letter from TV Licensing.

Not the relatively polite reminder letter either, but the one in which they threaten to send round enforcement officers to interview me under caution.

I’m not absolutely sure which boils my piss more, being told off for something I haven’t done, or this absurd contention:

“Officers from our enforcement division catch 60,631 people every year.”

What happens if they get to that figure in October? Do they just have the rest of the year off?

Frankly I don’t think that’s a very good use of my licence fee money.

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Oona King on BBC2’s The Grumpy Guide to… Money the other night:

“I earn quite a decent salary and still quite often find I can’t get money out of a cashpoint.”

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