ChristopherWhite.info/blog

Just has a conversation with a tech support adviser from 3 that went like this:

Advisor Sharon D has entered the session.
Chris White: Technical Support - I’m using 3 mobile broadband — or trying to — and can’t load any web pages or get my email.
Advisor Sharon D: Sorry, but we can’t support queries about mobile unlocking yet. Please call customer services on 333 (free) from a 3 mobile or 08707 330 333 from any other phone and they’ll be able to help you with this. You can also find help and FAQs in the Help & support section of our website. http://www.three.co.uk/personal/help_support_/got_a_question.omp

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Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Cressida Dick at the inquest into the De Menezes shooting:

She said the electrician had been “unfortunate” to [...] look “very like Hussain Osman”

Wtf?

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Passed on this “classic books” thing from Gary.

Bolded are ones I’ve read; bold and square-bracketed are the ones I’ve read and loved; italicised those I intend to read. (I’ve exorcised the duplicated because they annoyed me.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Various Artists (most of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most of it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 DELETED DUPLICATE
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 This one was blank so I’ll fill it in with [2001: A Space Odyssey (and sequels) - Arthur C Clarke]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 DUPLICATE DELETED
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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I know graphology is an utter nonsense, but have a look at this:

This week, work sent me along to cover “Parliamentary Links Day” — it’s an event every year where the sciences’ learned societies (such as the organisers, the Royal Society of Chemistry) and professional institutions get together with a handful of MPs, mostly from the Innovation, Skills, Science and Technology Committee, or whatever absurdly long name it goes by.

Naturally, both party leaders are too busy to come. Both of them, and the Speaker of the House, sent letters of apology. These were their signatures:

It’s not clear in the scan, but Cameron’s was in blue — it’s clearly seen an actual pen at some point. I’m not sure whether Brown’s is a felt-tip held in a sword-grip or something emanating from MS Paint, but it’s clear to me that he just couldn’t be fucked. Thank you Gordon, your respect for the sciences is awesome.

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“The US has removed its nuclear weapons from Britain, ending a contentious presence spanning more than half a century, a report will say today. According to the study by the Federation of American Scientists, the last 110 American nuclear weapons on UK soil were withdrawn from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on the orders of President George Bush.”

He’s probably scared we’ll leave one on a train.

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Likes to starve Africans, apparently.

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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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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 12th) 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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Joy. Now not only can the police arrest you for pretty much anything they like (and often call it “terrorism”), they can now beat the crap out of you while doing so:

POLICE officers who seriously injured an innocent man when they forced their way into his home to arrest him have been cleared of using excessive force.

Stephen Whenary needed 13 weeks off work to recover from the beating he received when officers from Cleveland Police used batons and CS gas on him while he was cowering in his bathroom.

Following an 18-month investigation, carried out by the same force, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has ruled the officers have no case to answer and will not face criminal or misconduct charges.

(My emphasis.)

Behaviour like that is only going to turn law-abiding people against the police force — as does their general contemptuous attitude to the public.

Not that long ago a copper in Cardiff stopped me from walking into the back of the students’ union. When I asked why, I got shouted at: “Because I said so.” Not really the explanation I was after. Is it really that much harder to say something along the lines of, “It’s a crime scene and we’re sealng it off”?

When my cousin visited a few weeks ago I hardly spoke to her, mostly because she’s a PCSO. And this is from someone used to tape The Bill and watch a term’s worth in two days.

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