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And my new blog is called.....

Thursday, February 03, 2011
Closed beta testing having seen my new blog name getting the thumbs up - thanks Dizzy, Blue Eyes and Catherine - I now declare my new blog open.

It can be found here - http://quizzicalgaze.blogspot.com/ .  I think that the name is fairly suggestive of content and it has three zeds in it, which is really rather fine.

Any readers linking, subscribing or reading Croydonian should change their links, as I am closing the blog.  I will not be posting here again, and I will switch off the ability to make comments.  Thank you readers from 2006 to date, especially those who checked in of late to see whether I was ever going to post again, in particular these fine folk - in alphabetical order - All Seeing Eye, Capitalists@work, JuliaM and Lakelander.

I intend to post on the same sorts of thing as before, and the dropping of the name does not indicate that there is anything amiss in Chiswick or my life more broadly - very far from it, more that the url and the croydonian name appearing on my posts and comments is both inappropriate and anachronistic.

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Coming soon - a new name, and a lot more blogging

Tuesday, February 01, 2011
I have decided to start afresh under a new, and non-geographical name.  I landgrabbed a name on blogger yesterday and currently have it in closed alpha, erm, beta testing   - as in I say 'I'm calling my new blog [x], what do you think?'  Old friends should feel free to e-mail me for the prospective name.   I would note that is is astonishing quite how many great names have been taken by folk who posted once, five years ago.   I am not altogether decided as to whether I'll use blogger or wordpress, which is another reason for not making too much noise about the name.

If feedback continues to be positive, I'll use the new name, and will continue along the same lines as before.  This blog will then be closed to comments and have a final re-direction post. 

Meanwhile, this little hissy fit from the NASUWT :

"Responding to the statement by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, that he will stop Ofsted from inspecting the contents of children’s lunchboxes, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ Union, said:

“This is a blatant attempt to distract the public.

“Whilst encouraging people to think about whether Ofsted should inspect lunchboxes, the Secretary of State is pushing through Parliament a Bill that will allow his favoured academies to charge whatever they like for milk, school meals and refreshments.

“Children’s health and nutrition is clearly a low priority when compared with enabling privatised schools to profiteer.

“This is yet another barrier for some families to admission to these elitist institutions.”


Being a picky eater, I went in for packed lunches at secondary school, and would not have allowed an inspector anywhere near what I was eating.  Probably by wolfing it at break, rather than by taking a Luther-like stand,  I hasten to add.  I rather approve of both of the Govemeister's schemes, by the way.


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A little light showing off

Thursday, July 15, 2010
I have discovered a web app which analyses one's prose style and then matches it to a noted writer.

Therefore, I am delighted to declare that when I tried out my hospital post on it, the app was perspicacious enough to recognise that I write like Charles Dickens.

Have a go here, and feel free to post any amusing results in the comments.

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Should the good burghers of Hammersmith & Fulham be worried?

Sunday, June 20, 2010
Spotted while out and about:

And a late breaking 1960 Hansard nugget:

Smell Nuisance, Tees-side

Mr. Chetwynd asked the Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs what action has been taken in the last year to find out the causes of the tom-cat smell which periodically afflicts Stockton-on-Tees and the Tees-side area; and what is being done to remedy this situation.
 
Sir K. Joseph (Yes, HIM)  This smell has not been reported since 1957, when the source was traced and interim remedies applied. These temporary measures have been replaced during the past year by permanent measures which have proved effective. There are occasional complaints about a fish-like smell from an amines plant. Remedies have been applied with success, but complete elimination of smell at all times cannot be guaranteed.

And because it would be selfish not to share this:


The Wikipedia Metal Umlaut article.  The related links are near as dammit pure gold too.

Anyway, I'm going off reservation for a bit, so blogging will be non-existent for a bit.  'See' you when I'm back, meanwhile comment moderation will be on.

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Legal trouble for a favourite blog

Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Folk concerned about the state of British defamation law and the activities of George Galloway might want to hie themselves to Harry's Place.

All the details here. 

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Even more fun with statistics - social media and politics

Thursday, March 11, 2010
Those nice people at Lewis PR have been polling the populace on Twitter, Facebook and the like, and their having sent me a press release on the findings I was sufficiently intrigued to harass them for further and better particulars and then to knock up some charts:

I'm surprised she did that well, frankly.  It should be 'Irish pop singer', by the way.

Curiouser and curiouser:

Words fail me.

And there's more:

Even I draw the line at having MPs as Facebook friends.

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Everybody loves a widget. Don't they?

Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Well, I'm adding one to the blog.  Those nice people at ComRes have teamed up with Betfair (my bookmaker of choice, and no - they aren't paying me.  However, if anyone wants to sign up with them, e-mail me first and we both get a kickback) to create a range of election-related widgets which looks exactly like those that have now appeared in my sidebar.

Enjoy.

(or they would do if I could get them to work.  I am e-mailing those concerned)

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Housekeeping

Wednesday, February 10, 2010
And this is my snazzy new blog name.  URL etc remains the same, obviously.

I mooted a name change a while back, and opted against it at the time, but following consultation with someone Really Rather Important have chosen to run with a name change.

As and when I have rather more time, I'll sharpen things up a tad and sort out the font size.

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A bit of good news involving a brother blogger

Wednesday, July 15, 2009
My good (if at present, virtual) friend Geoff from Gib, a regular visitor to these parts, and the head honcho at the never less than excellent and utterly sound An All Seeing Eye is on the mend after being hospitalised with very serious injuries some weeks back.

I am delighted that one of the definitive good guys is heading back to health and vigour, and the e-mail he sent me earlier confirmed that his sense of humour and so forth is in the most robust working order.

My best wishes, and those of my regulars, go out to him for a speedy ongoing recovery.

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Blogging anonymity - The French look to be getting it right

Saturday, June 27, 2009
(Updated - including a factual correction)

From Libé:

"Yesterday, [at] the Conference on Rights and freedoms in the Digital Society, organized by Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet the Secretary of State in charge of the digital economy, Senator Yves Détraigne presented his idea of right to the “heteronymity”. Detraigne is the co-author of the report 'Privacy in the Digital Age: For a reinforcement of trust between citizens and the Information Society'...One of the concepts it supports is the recognition of a right to anonymity to those is dubs Homo Digitalis. It is a question of being able to separate a real identity from a digital identity".

That is the gist of it. I'm not very keen on the idea of registering an identity with the state, which serves to undermine much of the point of having separate identities for blogging, Second Life and all the rest of it. While the unmaskings of Night Jack and Girl with a One Track Mind (a correction from an earlier reference to BdJ - I got my horizontal bloggers mixed up) are the greatest causes célèbres of recent times, I do not have to struggle too hard to think of other bloggers - including mates - who wished to keep their given names private and were outed for reasons that can only be seen as motivated by no reason beyond spite - Devil's Kitchen, Old Holborn and PragueTory (sort of). Another blogger who went public has had the delight of another blogger contact his workplace attempting to get him sacked for 'blogging during working hours'. The effort failed. I am NOT making that up. And no, no names at this stage. I know full well who my mate Behind Blue Eyes is, and he has perfectly sensible reasons for wishing to be anonymous. Elsewhere, I use a completely different identity when posting on music fora and so forth as my political views have no bearings on my thoughts on Blind Lemon Jefferson, and indeed vice versa. Elsewhere, I have occasionally (if not in living memory) used a third identity as a blog commentator mainly when I have wanted to make off-colour jokes and / or have wanted to make comments where I have not wanted my main identity to prejudice, for better or worse, the points I was making. Re the former, that was in part informed by concern that as my mother reads this (sometimes), and as perhaps my children will too one of these days I have kept the swearing and coarseness to a minimum and hoped to avoid 'awkwardness'. I might add that I decided to keep this place PG before I started showing off to to the family. A friend outed me to my ex-wife, without malicious intent, but that caused a momentary panic in which I worried that I might have said something hateful about her. Doubtless she has better things to do with her time than immerse herself in the archives and I am 99.9% certain I have not let my mouth, or rather fingers run away with me. Anyway, I have never referred to her by name.

I kept my given name under the rug until the chance to appear on the much missed 18 Doughty Street came my way, and for anyone who does not know, and actually gives a good goddamn, I am called William Luckman and live guess where. Not that it would have taken much googling for any interested party to discover that. Take it from there would-be stalkers.... As I am self-employed, I do not have to be particularly furtive, but others feel that they do and if folk wish to maintain a chinese wall between given name and nom de blog for whatever reason, that is their affair and their affair alone

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Some rather good photoshopping

Friday, June 26, 2009
Found this here:
The photoshopper is Brian Lane Winfield Moore, and if I have read the Creative Commons licence properly by linking, attributing etc I am within the licence's terms. More in the same vein here, although I think the one I've used is the pick of the bunch.

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Who was that masked man?

Monday, April 20, 2009
Saw this characature in The Irish Times, and wondered if any readers recognised the Wexford-based blogger it depicts:


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The loneliness of the long distance parliamentary blogger

Monday, April 13, 2009
Swedish ones, anyway. C/O those nice people at The Local:

"Swedish members of parliament are diligent bloggers. But there is very little interest in what most have to say, according to a new survey by Dagens Nyheter. More than one third of the parliamentary blogs have received no comments on published posts at all, according to the survey. With the European elections approaching in June and the general election round the corner in 2010, almost 25 percent of Swedish members of parliament, 83 of 349, kept a blog in March 2009. 51 of the bloggers had less than ten comments the entire month and 31 of them had none at all".

OK, so maybe there are lots of readers but they are just a bit shy. Given how busy some of parliamentary bloggers are with the green ink brigade, perhaps the Riksdag's finest are fortunate.

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The long arm of the law stretches out to attempt to collar the Adam Smith Institute

Friday, April 03, 2009
I am a big fan of the Adam Smith Institute - they are as sound as it pretty well possible to be and they are generous hosts to we blogging types, witness another thoroughly entertaining bash on Wednesday. Anyway, I have been sent a photo of 'London's Finest' attempting to collar Dr Butler:




Here's the tale:


"There I was, this morning, doing an interview in the office for a Canadian TV station (they took shots of The Rotten State of Britain to use, and asked for a copy too). We'd finished the inside shots, so we went outside to do some set-ups of me walking down the street. After about 2 minutes up screeched a red police car, and two armoured officers got out to ask our business. Pretty obvious, I'd have thought, since the cameraman had a huge camera on a tripod and the interviewer was carrying one of these big microphones like a shaggy dog. But they had to provide identification and fill in forms – name, address, date of birth, height...

Sure, we're in Westminster, but I wouldn't have thought that Church House, where we are, is a particularly sensitive building.

The cameraman suggested that it was obvious what we were doing, and why did he need to fill in his details. The police officer explained that since we were on at least four different security cameras, they just had to go through the procedure".

I have not had the opportunity to buy Dr Butler's book as yet, but hear universally glowing reports. There is no direct link at the Adam Smith Institute for the book, but a link to Amazon shows up.

All pluggage aside, that the Plod have nothing better to do than harass academics going about their work is an alarming state of affairs.

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Belgians behaving badly

Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Imagine you are the Belgian Minister of Defence. Imagine further that while in a bar in NYC you are recognised and reckoned to be blotto, sing bawdy songs and try to serve yourself from the bar.

I would think that Belgian Defence Ministers can generally count on the belief that what happens outside Belgium stays outside Belgium. Furthermore, I imagine most BDF's would be thrilled to be recognised by anyone other than close family members, but not in this case, as Pieter De Crem, for it is he, was spotted behaving thus in a Belgian bar in NYC and was then denounced by a staff member on her blog. Here is the link for my many millions of readers with fluent Flemish.

And for this, she has now been sacked, following a word from one of De Crem's homunculi to the bar's owner.

Mijnheer De Crem has gone on to say that he is not at war with blogs, but thinks that they can be 'misused'.

Indeed.

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The advantage of limited blog traffic

Friday, October 03, 2008
At least for Koreans:

"The Korea Communications Commission said it will expand the verification system whereby users who post comments on websites are required to use their resident registration numbers....The policy is currently applied to 37 media outlets, portals and UCC sites that experience traffic of 300,000 or more visitors a day. Under the new plan, those getting 100,000 a day will be subject to the policy".

More here, but the link will only work today.

Can't say I have the energy to dig around in other people's statpr0n, but I doubt any interactive sites away from the portals and big media would be affected in these parts.

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Freedom and the internet - panel discussion

Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Fringe event of the day - probably - yesterday, a panel discussion featuring Guido, Nadine Dorries, Dizzy Thinks and Devil's Kitchen. An individual known not to be a fan of three of those people nor of the chairman of the discussion disappointed many by not turning up to heckle....

As with any of these write ups I do, unless I use quotes I am giving the overall gist of what was said rather than there being any pretence that is verbatim.

Qn to ND - is yours a real blog given that you don't accept comments? Why don't you take comments?

ND - As a full-time MP, I wanted to find a way to speak to my constituents, and -so to speak - take them to Westminster. That was the entire reason, and I think of my blog as more of an online diary

ND then went on to outline the less than friendly comments she was receiving at one point, threats to her and family culminating in receiving an 'I am watching you' text on her phone will alone in a post midnight station car park. She suggested that she might allow comments after the abortion furore has died down.

DK noted that it is very much a case of 'her blog, her choice', but felt that as a minimum some form of contact should be possible. ND commented that there is an e-mail address on the site. DK reads all his comments and allows all of them through, including spam as they can be funny, plus one of his readers might want to buy a printer.

GF was asked whether he modded comments, and said that he is 'very liberal with the deletion button', removing the gratuitously gynaecological, racist rants and BNP comments. To much amusement he said that Polly Toynbee and Suzanne Moore are under the impression he writes his own comments.


Qn - will Derek Draper's attempt to rebut blog claims etc work?

DT - 'Draper's thing is b*llocks'. The panel in general was sceptical about the prospects for the rebuttal unit. DT argued that it was fine to delete troll comments, and noted that there had been a major upsurge in anonymous comments of late
DK - Overtly party political blogs tend to the dull, and the more popular blogs lean one way but are not too nakedly partisan. Generally.

Asked opinions on the Conservative party at one point de-linking from blogs, ND defended it on the grounds of party nervousness. DK noted that if the serious parties were to engage more it would show a more human side, and noted that the David Davis affair illustrated the same point. Guido noted there were no votes in it,while ND suggested that bloggers over-estimate their importance, given the small readership for virtually all of thenm.


More later, if anyone is interested.

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Chuffed

Sunday, August 03, 2008
As everyone knows, popularity contests and the like are utterly worthless until one wins one. The well-informed, discerning and cultured subscribers to the Witangemot Club site have voted in its blog awards thus:

Best Foreign Affairs (including Iraq and Afghan wars)
  • Croydonian
  • Harry's Place
  • Devil's Kitchen
I am rather pleased.



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How to lose friends and alienate people through blogging

Thursday, July 31, 2008
Catalan Green Socialist MP, Lluís Suñé Morales, has shown with this well thought out post on his blog that the squabbling, foot swallowing and so forth some manage in these parts is rank amateurism:

Extremadura is the poorest region of Spain, whereas his home turf of Catalonia is at the top of the economic tree. Draw whichever UK etc parallels you like. The post, which - fancy - he has now deleted suggests that people should adopt an Extremaduran child at a cost of €1000 per month. He claimed it was a joke, and merely a wry comment on regional subsidies. The Extremadurans are not best pleased. My very limited Spanish allows me to work out that in this item the Extremaduran authorities are going to sic their lawyers on him. Some English language detail is available at El Pais.

The coalitions and parties in Spain can be a tad confusing, but Morales flies the colours of Initiative for Catalonia Greens / United and Alternative Left, neither of which are parties I could imagine myself voting for.

The former has an 'ideology [that] looks to renew the left and is firmly against communism as practised in the former Soviet Union and against capitalism, as practised by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but also against social democracy, which is only a lesser evil, but does not respond to the environmental and social challenges ahead. From the ecosocialist point of view, both communism and capitalism are two faces of the productivism "mode of production" (a marxist term), which should be phased out if our planet is to survive. According to this book, this ideology is also deeply feminist and pro "freedom of the European peoples".

The UAL has Communists in it, so further exegesis would be pointless.

Nice man, very green and very socialist.....

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New times....

Thursday, May 01, 2008
My man in Haringey & Enfield (hello Justin) tells me that we have been running a *serious* telling operation on Broadwater Farm.

Anyway, an entertaining evening engaging in a little light knocking up in Greenwich & Lewisham with Dizzy, followed by some drinking and breeze-shooting with the G&L crew including the man who, with any luck, will be the next AM. Stranger things have been known.

Early days yet, and I am deeply peeved about the London count being held over till the morrow - and no exit poll - but this does have the makings of the first British election I have really enjoyed since '92. Back then I was also in Croydon, and represented by the splendid, if outgoing, Bernard Wetherill. With my Essex connections, I knew that Basildon was the tipping point. Yes,really.

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