Giant Panda Has Tiny Wriggly Baby

Amazing cute/weird offspring…

August Bank Holiday

Traditionally the last stretch of summer. The final hazy days of fun before the days grow shorter, the garden begins to fade away and the kids go back to school.

So it’s nice to see Debenhams have their full Christmas display out.

Only 17 1/2 weeks to go!

“Team GB”

I know sporty types aren’t known for their grasp of language, but it’s not difficult.
In English, the adjective comes before the noun. Let’s practise:

The Yellow Car
The Big Dog
The Happy Eater
The GB Team

Got it?

Parking Tickets

I’m by no means the sort of person who moans about parking/speeding fines. You know when you’re on a double-yellow or doing 90mph down the motorway that you might get one.

My problem is with consistency.

We get free parking all around the flat, and Penny usually doesn’t have much trouble in finding a space. But on Sunday night, she did. So she parked Splat on the corner with his back wheel on a double-yellow.

Just to be clear: this is not the sort of double-yellow that’s there to stop you blocking a road completely, or is for ambulances or fire engines. It’s just the one that stops you parking too close to the corner of the road. So basically, Penny was about 2 feet too close to the corner. She’s done it many times, and she’ll do it many more times when there’s no-where else.

She got a ticket, placed on her windscreen at 10.21pm on Sunday night. Fair enough, she was parked illegally and it’s only £35.

But on Monday night at 6pm, there were many cars on double-yellow lines in the same area. Most of them more then a couple of feet over. It’s like that every night.

Olympic Ambivalence

Before the Olympics began, I was pretty set in my mind. Here was a country where communist dictatorship forms an unholy alliance with rampant capitalism. I’m no fan of “freedom of speech”, as an aim above “food, clothing, shelter”, but for a government to keep it’s people without many of the basic freedoms and rights of being alive in the 21st century is pretty unforgivable.

Although deeply flawed, the gamers are the only half-chance of each country of the world being together in peace for the noble aim of friendly yet fierce competition.

China won the games on a raft of promises it never meant to keep. The opportunity for the games to be used as a carrot (“make these changes and the games will come”) was lost, and China made it the most politically charged for decades. Not to mention the abuse they heaped on the ordinary people of Beijing to clear them out of the way lest they look untidy.

So, I was all set to ignore them and hold my own little boycott.

Then, the opening ceremony came and was (apparently) spectacular. The people of China were hailed as welcoming, wanting to talk to and to help all their foreign friends coming to the city. I began to wonder: perhaps the games were for them, and not the authorities. Maybe the people deserve them, even if their government doesn’t. After all, more than most they don’t choose their government.

But then again, what could the games be more than an endorsement of it’s host government? So I don’t know.

The corrupt, corporation-bound ICC are bad enough, and giving it to China is like the final bullet in the head of the pretence that the games have ideals. Maybe it’s time the whole concept was re-thought and then it could become the non-political, peaceful competition that humanity deserves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/09/olympics20081

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/09/olympics2008.china

More Trains…

I spent around 3 hours a day on trains, plus the occasional weekend journey. So humour me while I write another post about them.

I had a lovely weekend visiting my neice and nephew. Reluctantly, it was time to go home so I got dropped off at the station only to find it was a replacement bus to Milton Keynes at 17.18

The timetable I’d printed only a week before had the departure as a train direct to London at 16.56, so I had an extra 20 minutes wait, plus a slower journey and extra, inconvenient change. I might not have bothered going to Northampton at all if I’d known. The online timetable is supposed to have all this info up-to-date.

Which got me thinking… why do we still have to pay for tickets, if we then turn up and it’s a bus? If I wanted to catch the bus from A to B, I’d use National Express or buy a cheap bus fare. We pay a premium for fast, flexible, comfortable and direct train services.

If the train companies were forced to make the replacement buses entirely free of charge, and were forced to refund that portion of the fare for every ticket holder (at the time of travel or later on application), then maybe we’d see less of them.

Not only would it discourage “late-running” engineering, but it would also stop companies from putting on buses which they allegedly wish to run-down, claim there’s no call for and then scrap.