one thing that's been in the UK news lately is the possibility of a strike by British Airways workers (now averted).
i just wanted to say N Cohen's Cruel Britannia anthology has a few good passages about when Bob Ayling was there if i remember.
timely reading.

Cohen's also good on another of Tony Blair's mates, Silvio B, and Labour's gambling addiction (more timely stuff).

btw, it says Jimmy now here below. it's cuz i switched blogger to the same thing as my food/drink blog (where i'm Jimmy); i'm planning to get back into the swing of things, soon, and have already started adding some links to some fave food blogs (though w/ my html skills, they are a bit messy), inc THE SARAWAK LAKSA [ two kids eat their way around Sarawak, bowl after bowl after bowl ], SO BAD ITS GOOD [ photos of L.A. carniceria store murals ], and the original and best, Great Taco Hunt, also based in the City of Angels.
i feel, incidentally, i too must register my disgust that the Wikipedia entry on tacos has recently delinked that site.
tosh!
-
foodblog.

is it just me or is Nancy Pelosi seriously hot?

( sample pick up line: let's ditch these isolationist losers Nanc, and grab a bellini )

i've not heard Organized Konfusion for bloody ages.

Chief Executives, now they've got the skills. Justin King, currently chief executive of UK supermarket Sainsbury, now he has to be on the top of his game discussing quinoa, Omega-3, Jamie Oliver's kid-sized takes on a nice quesadilla, things like that.

but hold on!

King used to be don dada at the RAC, the UK road users' association (owned by Aviva, who have their fingers in plenty of pies, such as insurer Norwich Union), didn't he?

so where once he was banging on about black ice, taxing the motorist off the road and the pernicious toll at Tamworth, now it's 5 -a-day, PJ smoothies and finest ready meals.



now these people are the top people and so they're not so much on the details i imagine as the overall picture, which is why they get bounced around, in demand. (blue skies thinking? the first time i've ever used this phrase, and i believe a phrase everyone wants binning, one might add.)



but come on King!

sort it out!

wheatgerm or Citroen, what's it to be?



it's this shilly-shallying that gets me.

(on second thought, i think i may be getting King confused with someone else.
but any"road".)

maudlin tone, gently self-mocking, the dry humour, everything came together at the weekend just gone when a very close chum of mine sent me a txt re. the football that literally made me belly-laugh out loud (a rarity for me and texts).

he's an Evertonian, and they went on to win, but it must have been nils when he sent me these words:

Wigan v Everton. Two shit teams playing football.

you'd think Charles Clarke would have learnt to have put a sock in it by now, wouldn't you.

i've been running this place down for the last couple of years or so but i think i'll get back into it, from now on.
maybe. (i'll have to sort out the archive and other links later on.)

meanwhile, Paul Dacre: fuck me, the bloke's a bit of a thicko isn't he?

if i told you, you wouldn't believe me anyway.

Dangerous Ambivalence: UK Policy on Torture since 9/11

“Britain cannot have it both ways. The government claims to oppose torture. Yet at the same it is actively trying to undermine the global ban against it.”
Benjamin Ward

The situation is totally out of control and I don't see any parachutes.

Romano Prodi talks Alitalia

bacofoil on yr fod/really cheap Aussie lager

i saw Peaches yesterday.

never has the football spectator heckle 50p HEAD been more appropriate.

one thing that's really getting me right now (as in, you know, in love) is toward the end of 'Reishi' by everyone's fave Anglian technoheads, well, as Tura.


"in other news" [old news, ok], at the close, just so (just Jack), of About Schmidt, well, i wept buckets.

oh, and that, and Annie Mac told The Times that Harvey got her in to Gorecki bigtime, true fact. (as in, you know, in love.)

..


that's our man

.

RIP PETER NORMAN

He whispered to himself, 'After all, I'm not a criminal.'

The Ministry of Fear.

one sleight they don't exactly tuck away in the Vodafone store is that "data management centres" [i think that was it, they mean the call centre anyway] are based in the UK.

shoring up the anti-Indian populism is performed in tandem with the competing claim - glossy large posters adorning walls - that Vodafone customers are living happy and excited lives in diverse, sexy multinational locations, from Leeds and Lisbon to Paris and (presumably) Poole.

+

in an episode of The Simpsons last night Homer read his paper at the breakfast table and chuckled away at the bridge column, commenting you never know what South's going to do next.

He told officials this would happen and it did

blighted

Niall Ferguson:
you can tell it clearly troubles him that there will soon be a minaret on the Oxford skyline. it gets a mention in his new book and i've read him note this some time ago somewhere else. it genuinely does seem to sit a little uneasily for him cos otherwise we wouldn't be having this new observation couched in much the same terms, and with the clear impression behind his writing that this is a bit of a scab for him. well, that's the inference i'm getting for at least the second time, following a decent passage of time.

in this new book, it looks like he's trying to pass it off as part of some neat aside, a pun if you will, about Edward Gibbon but - lor knows - that just sounds bollocks.

so have some fruit tea and leave it out mate.

(to be fair to Niall, he does describe himself as an optimist and Americans who don't want anything to do with the outside world get short shrift from him.)

MAKE IT IN THE STUDIO and NOT IN THE GARAGE

RIP DESMOND DEKKER
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i didn't know until i read the obits but apparently Rugova's grandpa spent 20 years of his life building a kulla - a 'tower' - using marble blocks. some great photos here you see.
Rugova cited his grandfather as a patient influence.

well i'd have certainly taken some gemstones off the man!
and that scarf, always the scarf.
(Carl Barat in Burberry please.)

+

now then, Mark Mardell can be quite nimble.
days after i slag off Auntie, you have to hand it to him on the brandy tip.
9am, "clear grape brandy", "It's really very good: fiery and strong but very smooth and fruity as well".

_

I am Ramush Haradinaj and I am looking for Isuf Hoxha and Hajrullah Gashi

even by its own miserably low standards the lead editorial in Friday’s Daily Express was – to paraphrase General Melchett – perhaps a “crowning turd in the water pipe”.

unusually, some of their own correspondents wrote sympathetically in the face of human misery: the day’s front page was about people risking the much longer crossing from the Canary Islands to the European mainland, rather than trying the Straits because of changes in the Spanish enclaves etc.
it’s frankly quite rare for people emigrating from Mauritania or wherever, scrabbling toward Fortress Europe, to get humane coverage in the Express, so this was at least something to be grateful for.

but the editorial appeared to be unaware of any of this, and seemed quite different in tone and approach (though still with that reassuring lack of complexity and grey areas you get with the Express).

citing the usual laundry list of grievances and noting that the BBC now agreed with them (off the back of a Newsnight programme, apparently; i saw but seconds of the show in question, which had Jeremy Paxman spouting some noxious cobblers, so i switched over), you could tell the reader was in for a treat at the end.
(incidentally, have you noticed just how degraded some of the BBC’s domestic news programming has been getting of late. the Six O’Clock News has been getting increasingly parochial, more than ever it seems, over the last several months to few years or so.)

the final paragraph was magnificent, absurdly disingenuous, latching onto the ultimate ludicrous strawman as the writer reached their triumphant conclusion, that Maybe those worried by plans to allow crime-ridden Bulgaria and Romania to join the European Union next year and Turkey to follow can now voice such sentiments without being smeared as racist by Left-wingers, proven as wrong on migration in the 21st century as they were on the Cold War in the 20th.

the Express is a ‘you couldn’t make it up’-type tabloid, fond of the common sense approach, despairing at this mad politically correct world we now live in (one of their star columnists was today seeing a Third World despotism take over Britain).

well, no, you couldn’t, could you?

She was not a health tourist - she simply had the misfortune to fall ill here.

I accept that we have to have rules to stop people from taking advantage of the NHS but they should not discriminate against people with genuine need because of this obsession about immigration.

I think it is appalling that a civilised country like Britain treats someone like that.

Her death was unnecessary.

Richard Stein, who represented Ese Elizabeth Alabi.

labelled 'health tourist' by some, she died on Monday, aged 29.
she leaves behind three young children and the man who loved her.