A View from Scrooge's Bunker

Communal childishness

As young children we say “moo-moo” and “tummy” and are enthralled by bright colours and lights. But some people never grow up: they continue to say “tummy” well into adulthood and never lose their fascination with bright lights. They marvel at Catherine wheels like a three year old. They festoon their mid-winter houses with tacky decorations in a misguided sense of tradition, slavishly following cultural conventions in a self-conscious act of communal childishness. This is a slippery slope: one minute you are a normal intelligent adult, the next you are watching Strictly Come Dancing.

Shadwell Library is a testament to community spirit. The council would have closed it but for the concerted determination of many villagers and for the continuing effort of many more volunteers running the library and maintaining the building. It remains as vibrant book lender, cultural centre and delightful Grade II Listed Building in steadfast opposition to the philistines. It is totally inappropriate to despoil the stone building’s charm with flashing Christmas lights. Ironically those responsible have started to think down the right road and used white lights rather than hideous coloured ones. For that mercy I am very, very grateful. What a pity they didn't follow the logic through and realize how much more tasteful it would be not to put lights up at all.

Our parish church is dedicated to St Paul who famously wrote “when I became a man, I put away childish things”. Is there any chance that we could be guided by this precept, so that next year when I walk past the library on New Year’s Eve I can muse on the plain stone facade before having my soul bruised by the Christmas decorations in the pub?

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...

BBC Cowering Before Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Gary Lineker is of course right in everything he says about the government's asylum policy. There are two issues. First, should a regular presenter be restricted from political comment outside the confines of their role, in the interests of public broadcast impartiality? The answer is obvious, and you would have thought that the BBC had learnt its lesson when it ended up apologizing for censuring Naga Munchetty for heartfelt comments on Donald Trump's blatant racism, following a public and internal outcry over her treatment. Munchetty's comments were made on a live BBC broadcast. Lineker's comments were off-air on his private social media account. Nobody is in any doubt that the comments are Lineker's rather than the BBC's. Second, how circumspect should anyone be about comparing right wing nationalism with the political ideology of the Nazis? The answer is very. But Lineker has indeed been cautious in his language. I pointed out myself in the lead-up to the...

Boris Johnson is a Pathological Liar

When I was a teenager, our class were caught gambling and the head decided to cane us. He lined us up to ask each child if they were involved. Nobody lied; the idea of dishonesty was much worse than the fear of corporal punishment. Boris Johnson is the exact opposite: a pathological liar; a delinquent who derives psychological satisfaction from the slightest deceit; from getting one over on people. And he covers up any exposed mendacity with further fabrications. He was unanimously found guilty of lying to the Head of State by eleven Supreme Court judges. He was fired from his job as a journalist for a campaign of systematic lies about the EU over a prolonged period and after multiple warnings. He conspired to deceive the nation before the Brexit vote with deliberately misleading financial propaganda, when the Treasury's own forecast for leaving was for significant long-term financial disadvantage. He knowingly lied about the difficulty of getting a Brexit settlement with the EU. W...

Aniseed Balls

Search This Blog