Do they represent you?

A poll, now located in the column to the right of this page, hopefully.

It's soon time for a general election, and whilst my colours are nailed firmly to the mast. Other people may be undecided. Let's explore that a moment.

In this country I feel people vote for the party rather than their local candidate, so my poll asks this question:-

Do either Labour, the Conservative or the Liberal Democrats represent your views? With the possible answers of 'yes', 'no' and 'don't give a crap'. I'm sorry for not allowing any degrees of 'well a little bit' or 'one more than the other two'. But I want you, my dear and valued readers, to make your own judgement about whther those three sufficiently represent your views generally.

You might want to consider the state of the UK under each of those regimes, and consider whether you feel that was what you had in mind if you voted for them.

Anyhoo, the poll closes at some point in the future, there will be more ranting.

Met office gives up on climate change

The BBC reports that the Met Office are giving up on their seasonal forecasts.

The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.

It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.

The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.

So, next time they report that global temperatures could increase by 0.5 dgrees or so in X many years keep in mind this

Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: "By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.
...

"Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather.

Death Disco - Notting Hill Arts Club

Decisions are made by those who turn up. History is written by the winners. There's no such thing as a free lunch, unless you're a goldfish.

This evening (or last night, depending on your perspective) I'm in darkest Notting Hill, at Alan McGee's Death Disco. You know how you find yersel chatting to random people at parties, then you bump into them time and time again and cos they're in a band you inevitably go to one of their shows, well here I am.

Three bands on tonight, my acquaintance's band are headlining, on stage at 22:45.

I have to get up for work six hours later.

The database state is bad enough, but here at the cool Notting Hill Arts Club, they demand photo ID at the door then scan it "So we know who's inside". My attractive young ladyfriend mutters something about being stored in a database. The guy on the door overhears and denies there's any database involved. So the point of scanning is?

I'm not taking an international flight. I'm not opening a new bank account. I'm not even taking photos of iconic landmarks in the proximity of a PCSO. I'm just trying to get in to a shitty little indie club night, so why do I need to show my papers?

I don't care that its not the doorman's fault, just management policy, or an alternative to form 696, or the Met Police policy or the local authority or health and safety for our own protection. It stinks.

Its understandable how such a system was introduced, someone clearly though we were living in East Germany. But how to turn it round? How to get rid of having to have you papers scanned for visiting an indie club?

When the management told the doorman, he should have said no fucking way. When the punters told McGee, he should have said no fucking way. When the police/authority/health and safety told the management they should have said no fucking way. When the powers that be sat in a meeting and decided it, the room should have rose up and said no fucking way. Whoever suggested it should have been sacked on the spot, escorted from the building, dowsed in petrol and set fire to, caught on camera, uploaded to YouTube and tagged accordingly.

Maybe I'm being hypocritical with my love of gig-tracking and Songkick. But I do those things by choice, not everyone does. Its linked to my Twitter and Facebook with my permission. God knows what the Notting Hill Arts Club's Clubscan is connected to, but no one asked me.

"Excuse me sir, do you mind if we scan your ID before entry?" That would have been an improvement.

Anyhoo, the entry process left a bad taste in the mouth and if this review ends up grim, that's why. Mr McGee, your precious Labour government have cultivated this, you must share responsibility.

Last time I was here was for a Scottish mob, Q Without U, they were okay, it must have been over a year ago. My ladyfriend was last here before the English smoking ban, the vibe is different. Hear that McGee, your mob have broken it. They've broken it all.

First band on are This Is Munich. One of their piano lines sounds just like Pocketbooks' Autumn Leaves, but the rest of it has Suede vocals, leaning a little towards Bowie. Geneva? I bet the keyboard player cites Coldplay as an influence, he was inspired to form the band after seeing Coldplay at Wembley Arena.

Scratchy samples of 1940s 33s. Then the guitar, bass and drums kick in again, epic soaring lead guitar. Aw man, I used to be able to remember exactly who these guys sound like, now after 543 gigs, its all a blur, a companion suggests The Kills. I think I once saw Coldplay third on the bill at King Tuts.

Tonight, This Is Munich are an odd looking bunch, nineties clothes, stupid hair. They were very competent, they certainly knew how to play their instruments.

Not sure what the deal is with Death Disco, is Alan McGee here? If he's not, it either cos he's too old or cos he's mourning the death of Michael Foot, either way, he's a cunt.

Next up are/is Sangeeta, some keyboard girl with drum-guitar-bass backing. Jazzy rock Kate Bush or Lapsus Linguae for another gender I reckon. Feist and PJ Harvey reckons my attractive young ladyfriend, she's on the money with the latter.

Love the plinky plonk piano at the end of every song. Extra points cos she sure can holler and cos the guitar sound is huge.

The audience are a bit disinterested, chatting throughout over their glasses of house red and tins of Red Stripe.

The headliners, Wonderful World of Cactapuss, take to the stage, spending 24 minutes setting up a vast array of keyboards, effects boxes and colour-changing chicken lights. Truly they are gods.

"Good evenin' earthlin's"

Are they London's answer to Air or Daft Punk. Great big crunchy rhythms, stuff you can not only get your teeth into, but could probably build a shithouse out of, if necessary.

Earlier the two of them were discussing their flashing LED specs, genuine artifacts from the eighties, do they even make them any more. Mark, the one on the left, had dropped his pair on the floor so they were now held together with masking tape.

Finally, for the first time this evening the crowd start moving, the place is packed and the kids are making weird shapes. Tall chap in the middle casting some shoulder moves, heavily make-uped girls on the right doing the cheekbone thrust, and front left a couple who've been snogging throughout, really face-chewing stuff.

In fourteen years time, this'll be the soundtrack to the Hull Olympics.

Dancing in the street

As I walk to work through the cold rainy streets of Wembley, quietly observing the world, I see plent of government adverts for dance classes.

Free dance classes.

Well, not really free. Just paid for with your money against your will. In the depths of the recession the government have decided to spend our money providing dance classes, whether we turn up or not.

Its like those old joke phone numbers in the back of eighties kids comics where you phone a premium rate number to hear some jokes read out, but here you have no choice. The money's spent.

It went to dance classes in 2008 on my own accord. Lindy-hop dancing, it was fun. I had to pay for it myself from my own pocket. Six quid a session for eight weeks. If I don't go to the government's dance classes can I have a refund.

Its the way dance classes are an interchangable commodity in the government's eyes. Just dance, it doesn't matter which dancing school or organisation is conducting the classes. There's no sign of it on the adverts, just the government.

Its vulgar.

'Power up your robot'? Robot dancing was cool for a week in 1983 before every seven year old in school started doing it.

I guess it was cool again last year when that Britain's got Talent mob won their thing, but that was only funny when Perri did a backflip and fell on his head. Besides, is the winner of a talent show any guide for government entertainment policy. In which case I would rather do 'chick chick, chick chick chicken, lay a little egg for me'.

Could they no have just made advertising tax deductible for established dance schools, rather than this shit?

Blog Stat Pron - February

Good evening and welcome to my irregular start of the month look at the previous month's blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for February, this blog got:-

1,336 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,229 Pageviews

Compared to January's

1,309 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,405 Pageviews

Well, Absolutes are up a wee bit, total Pageviews down a wee bit, kind of satisfying considering the month has a few days fewer than other months. Its all thanks to one post which cornered the market on google traffic, but more about that later.

Statcounter reckons I had 2,151 Unique Visitors, and an average of 98 pageloads per day, up 3 from last month. Still not quite breaching the 100 ppd barrier, but getting better man. Maybe next month.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

26 subscribers - GoogleReader (same as last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
8 followers - Blogger (same as last month)

Boring.

These are my top referrers for February (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 76 visitors (213 friends)
2. Twitter - 36 visitors (169 followers)
3. Stumbling and Mumbling - 22 visitors
4. Mark Wadsworth - 17 visitors
5. UK Bubble - 11 visitors
6. Baby Honey - 8 visitors
7. Liberal-Vision - 8 visitors
8. ClimateQuotes - 3 visitors
9. Last.Fm - 3 visitors
10. Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during February.

1. The Holly Greig Story - 573 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 142 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 57 views
4. North Vs Pachauri - 48 views
5. Back to Academies International - 43 views
6. Give me my internet 7 - 37 views
7. Benefits Anxiety - 29 views
8. Names of the dead in Gaza - 24 views
9. London Indiepop EyeSpy - 24 views
10. Bookcase dreams - 23 views

The top five most popular posts that I wrote in February were:-

1. The Holly Greig Story - 573 views
2. Give me my internet 7 - 37 views
3. Benefits Anxiety - 29 views
4. I Give Up - 10 views
5. London Bloggers Meetup - 8 views

That's it belatedly for February's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.

The impending doom of 6Music

When I first heard about the impending closure of 6 Music I was somewhat saddened, they're one of the few stations to play tracks from my beloved Plimptons, and half the indiepop band whom I religiously follow. But on the other hand I rarely listen to 6 Music.

After reading reactions and comment online I realised that I was part of the music industry, I only wanted to keep 6 Music as a means to promote my own interests, rather than cos I liked listening to it. I was The Man, the enemy, in the wrong.

So today I read on Sharpey's Opinion piece

that the station itself is not as important as the content it carries – if Radios 1 and 2 were more like 6Music, we wouldn’t actually need 6Music any more.

And aye, that resonates, I only used to listen to Radio 1 for John Peel, Radcliffe and Riley, DJ's who are long gone from Radio 1 in it's pursuit of the younger listener who I imagine enjoy being shouted at.

Whenever I listen to the radio these day's its in my car, and its Radio 4, everything else sounds like just indeterminate noise.

This youthiness of Radio 1 isn't the state of British culture right now, its just the whims of the Director General, it could go any way if he wanted it to.

Council Tax cuts

Here's an interesting thing, the Local Government Association's annual survey of council tax things reports that the average rise is 1.6%

Householders are set to see an average rise of 1.6% – the lowest increase since council tax began in 1993. With the Retail Price Index (RPI) currently running at 3.7%, the increase would represent a real-terms cut of 2.1%. For councils outside London, the average increase is 1.9%.

They fail to mention those councils who've been able to cut the tax this year. The Taxpayers Alliance neatly suggests a few:-

But there is no mention at all of Hammersmith & Fulham's amazing four years in a row of 3% tax cuts. Nor do Windsor & Maidenhead get congratulations for introducing the largest council tax cut ever - 4%. Not even Three Rivers' 0.5% cut is acknowledged.

Then again, its a bit of a coincidence that these three mentioned are all down south, (two Conservative councils and one LibDem). I wonder what the national picture of council tax rises is like in terms of party control of the council and how up north or daan south the councils are

Benefits anxiety

I walk to work, its about 2.4 miles, I do it not to save petrol but to save money and ensure I get to work on time. As a result of this walking, I get to see lots of adverts.

You know, of course that the government is the UK's biggest advertiser.

I am fraught with anxiety. I see lots of adverts against benefit fraud. They catch benefit thieves, 56,439 of them last year.

I'm not sure if I'm a benefit thief or not. Maybe I am and I just don't know it, maybe I made a mistake on a form, and as a result I'm getting benefits that I shouldn't be. If its just an innocent mistake, they won't prosecute and fine me, will they?

Like, last year I claimed Housing Benefit for a few months, and Job Seekers allowance, but they kept cancelling it for a variety of reasons, so I got further and further into debt. The Housing Benefit was a particular pain, cos I lived in the middle of West Hampstead, its pretty expensive round there and I could barely afford it even when I had a job, so there was something that made me feel uneasy about getting the state to pay for me to stay there. If I was the state I wouldn't have paid any benefits, I would have insisted I moved out to somewhere cheaper, like Hull.

But no, the State, they paid vast sums of money for me to stay. Maybe that was the mistake that will get me done. Anyhoo, I moved away to somewhere cheaper, Wembley and stopped relying on Housing Benefit.

I heard about some bloke who works 50 hours a week, but still claimed Housing Benefit cos he couldn't afford the place he stayed in, he had a big family and needed a big house. He was advised to work less so he'd be able to claim more benefits, it was the only way he could stay were he was. Is that cheating? Not working as much as you possibly can? Or is it just the way the system's geared.

I was on Job Seekers Allowance, but that kept on changing, and getting cut and I'd have to reapply for it and then discover that it was the Job Centre who made a mistake and not me. But maybe it was all a mistake and I wasn't due to claim anything. It could go either way.

Besides, if its not the claimant who makes the mistake, does the person in the benefits agency get fined and imprisoned? No? Is there any penalty for them cocking up? Any incentive for them to not mess up?

There was a Dick Puddlecote piece the other day about how his business has to keep doing stuff to keep up with changing regulations, just to stay in business. Maybe the benefits malarkey is like that, one week I'm all law abiding and lawfully claiming and then some legislation changes or some statutory instrument and a week later I'm a benefit thief without me actually doing anything.

Right now I get a single person's discount on my council tax, 25% off, which is nice of them. But I'm concerned that when I phoned up, I just told the nice person at Brent Council that I lived alone and they believed me, and didn't require any proof or anything. What if I was lying? What if its some kind of trick, some kind of test?

I swear I'm the only person who lives at my flat, no one else has slept there or stayed the night since I moved in. The bed remains unchristened.

Then again there was that thing with Islington Council taking itself to court about parking fines, maybe the council folk have gone rogue against themselves. Its not my fault, I'm just caught up in some council schizo split personality battle.

Maybe its the Working Tax Credits? First time I applied I figured out how much I was due to earn in 2009/2010 and the nice Working Tax Credit people gave me a regular amount of money every week. But then a month or so later, I recalculated how much I thought I'd earn in the same financial year and came up with a different figure, so now I get paid a different amount in Working Tax Credits, but I don't know which number was right, or what I did differently the first time.

What if it was right before and wrong now? What if I'm a benefit thief?

I don't think I am, I don't think they'll ever catch me, but that's what the people in the adverts thought. Or they would do if they were actually benefit thieves, and not just models paid to appear in adverts holding signs.

In fact if they're not really benefit thieves, and just pretending to be, how do we know that the 56,439 figure isn't also just pretending to be the number of people caught? How can we believe any of it?

Kids ages and fathers

In both of these stories I'm somewhat concerned by the ages of the youngest children and the relationships with the father.

Miss Essma Marjam: youngest child - 5 months

'I'm separated from my husband. He's a solicitor in Derby, but I don't know if he's working at the moment. He doesn't pay anything towards the kids. Things are quite difficult between us.

Miss Nimco Hassan Ibrahim: youngest child - 4 years

After eight months working as a bus driver, Mr Yusuf began living on benefits. When they were stopped in March 2004, he left the country.

Also I think I'm quite jealous of her TV, Playstation 3 and high speed internet connection.

Both these ladies appear to be taking the piss.

Greetings from 2006

I've fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum and I'm writing this from 2006, or it sure feels like it.

Disaster struck at work the other day, and for once it wasn't work related. I dropped my Blackberry, the trackerball fell out, and the wee chromed ring bit rolled off under a cage. I managed to recover all the bits, but I was quite distraught.

Somehow it still worked, I called up the nice people at Orange and they said they'd send me a new one if I paid £60. I said I'd think about it.

Luckily the internet told me that the trackerball is just held in by magnets. So I popped it back in, making sure everything was the right way round and it worked, almost as good as new.

Until the next day when none of the keys worked. People would phone, I couldn't answer. Emails would come through, I couldn't read. Blogging needed to be done and couldn't be.

The internet had the answer this time too, moisture had gotten into the phone, and sticking it in front of a hairdrier would fix it, sometimes.

So I gave it a try, the keys came back to life, I called my attractive young ladyfriend to assure her I was still alive. Then the keys died again, and no amount of hair-drying would fix it.

My sim card is now in my old 2006 Nokia, the battery life is about six hours, and it doesn't do email or internetting.

All the stored phone numbers from the last three years have been lost, so I just have the number of people who I was still in touch with in 2006. Hello ladies.

The great and tedious saga of me trying to get an internet connection of my own, as documented previously here, as drawn to an uncomfortable close as I've abandoned the plan of getting my Ubuntu netbook online and had to settle for my old cranky desktop computer which takes half an hour to boot up.

When it finds an internet connection, all by itself it loads up MSN messenger/Live messenger. Does anyone still use that? I fear not.

On the way walking to work, through Wembley, there's a wee independent computer game shop, in the window on Monday I noticed amongst the preowned PS3s and XBox 360s, they had a preowned original Xbox, only £15. Now way back in another life I used to test AV and hifi systems and we got an Xbox at work, I used to spend weeks and weeks playing Project Gotham Racing, nipping round Edinburgh and Stockholm, and now this was my chance to get back.

Alas, when I went in the shop, it had been sold. Still it would have been just like 2006.

On Sunday I wandered out to the Hangover Lounge at The Lexington, where in with the chilled out music, it was also Scrabble Club, hosted by Ken Chu. I hadn't seen him in months. I couldn't help but think, there's few people more 2006 than Ken Chu, bless 'im.

This is what the past feels like.

Hopefully a courier should be bringing round my replacement Blackberry this evening, and the nightmare can start to end.