Still blogging from ITV Local
Alastair Stewart. That was his name. For one delirious moment I thought he would have been the ideal choice for playing Poirot, but after a few minutes watching him both on and off camera I realized he would have been a finer C. Auguste Dupin; more at home in the pages of Poe than those of Agatha Christie.
If he ever pops out for a fag whilst the news is on air, he will instantly be upgraded to my list of louche heroes.
Hackney led the news bulletin. A bendy bus had exploded in a borough depot. All employees were told to erase all footage of the incident. One didn’t. Good on him.
Being behind the news rather than on it means you get to hear exchanges between the gallery and the studio. Like this:
“Hello James, can I check the plunger’s working?”
“Nice plunger James.”
“Oh you do plunge so well.”
“All right. Plunge away James.”
Then you get all the technical jargon which, taken out of context, is nice:
“The out words for this one are ’so scary.’”
Blogging from my phone is slow work, so I’ll be back later with some photos, plus a massive plug for http://blogs.itvlocal.com/London plus Jack, Juliette and Colin from the 1000Heads social media outfit and some really delightful people from ITV.
Now it’s time for a drink.
Published on 29th August, 2008
Blogging from ITV Local
Imagine a Luddite being strapped to a chair in a room full of spinning jennies and water frames.
Done it?
Now put yourself in my shoes. At the moment I’m sitting in the gallery watching tonight’s edition of ITV local being put together. And I - the man who has not owned a TV set since 1998 - can reveal that the programme will end with a feature about a surfing dog. I don’t know the dog’s name; but to be fair I don’t remember the names of the two presenters.
They do look strangely familiar, though.
All the technical stuff, though, is impressive if incomprehensible. The four other bloggers who are with me - including one who blogs on girl geekery - seem completely unfazed.
Anyway, phones off. Back later.
Published on 29th August, 2008
Comment Snob
What a brilliant idea. Some technical cove has come up with a Firefox browser extension called “YouTube Comment Snob“. All you have to do is download it, restart your browser and - hey presto! - all the illiterate, half-witted, foul-mouthed comments on YouTube disappear.
Like so.
It’s simple, really. Comments are filtered out if they:
- have more than a specified number spelling mistakes:
- are written solely in capital letters
- have no capital letters at all
- don’t start with a capital letter
- use excessive punctuation (!!!! ???? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
- use excessive capitalization
- contain profanity.
Which rather set me thinking. Maybe, just maybe, the author might be willing to collaborate with me to create…
Comment is Free Comment Snob
The idea is simple. Any comment that falls into the following categories will automatically be removed from the page:
- Dreary, half-baked tosspottery about Israel and/ or Palestine. Especially on articles that have nothing to do with either - like heavyweight pieces on West End boutiques or guides on staging operas in your own home.
- Patronising dismissal of any logical argument (and thus defence of one’s fondly-cherished prejudices) with phrases like “the beauty of your argument is its simplicity”.
- Accusations that other commenters are Tories, simply because they don’t drool at the thought of Ken Livingstone.
Indeed, before I get carried away, why don’t we go the whole hog and invent a browser extension that deletes articles by anyone who falls into one or more of these categories?
- A banger on about the plight of the poor who earns a six-figure salary.
- A relative of someone else who works on the Guardian.
- An occasional, non-journalist contributor who has been on holiday with anyone who works for the Guardian.
- An environment bore who buys a car the moment they actually need one.
- A columnist who is secretly indignant that they’ve not been poached by The Times, where they’d get a fatter salary and a wider readership.
I could go on, but I think that’s enough to make the thing readable once again. I could just about face leafing through something like this over my morning tea and toast:
Or maybe I’ve been too hasty. A browser plugin that pastes Simon Hoggart’s latest parliamentary sketch over any Comment is Free page would do the job perfectly.
I only wish I knew how to write it myself.
Published on 26th August, 2008
The Macbook Laid Bare
The laptop, this morning.
Astonishingly, thanks to this and a huge amount of patience and suppressed panic, I got the new keyboard in and it’s working perfectly once again. No child will go near it.
Published on 13th August, 2008
How not to buy a new Mac
I remember a university friend telling me about the combined sensation of solemnity and joy he felt on those rare occasions he bought a new violin; the edginess of bidding in the auction house, followed by the celebratory drink.
Ideally, I would have a similar sensation when buying a new Mac. I’ve been using the machines for a long time, partly because I hate PCs, but largely because I instinctively went for the underdog in the computing world. I used Mac Classics to type up my degree dissertation, and since then have always used Macs at home and almost always at work (bar two short intervals). For the last two and a half years I’ve been hammering away on a very early MacBook Pro (you know - the ones that overheated, made hissing noises, had faulty batteries and power leads that caught fire). It even has scratches and dents either side of the trackpad where my cufflinks have chipped away at the paintwork.
Needless to say, I love the thing. And that’s why I was less that delighted when, after taking my 22 month old son to Southend on Friday, he rewarded me by pouring juice over the keyboard - taking out much of the left hand side.
It still works. I just can’t type without useful keys like the letters ‘a’ & ’s’. And, frankly, I think the whole point of a laptop is negated if you have to plug in an extra keyboard and find a way of sitting close enough to see the screen properly.
I’ve ordered a new internal keyboard to put in it, in the hope that might fix the problem. But, to make sure I could still work, I bit the bullet and went and spent a load of money I hardly had on a beautiful new iMac. That’s it at the top of the page. It has got a robust, wireless keyboard and I have put barbed wire round my working area.
And that’s why I’ve spent most of my weekend transferring crap from one machine to another, to the accompaniment of frustrated yells from a toddler who is desperate to destroy explore the new addition to his home.
I’d rather have saved the money and kept my laptop. You have to be happy to buy a Mac, not in a rage.
I also turned 34 this weekend. There’ll be kids out there, born on my 17th birthday, who are busy taking driving lessons. I’m feeling old. Old.
Published on 10th August, 2008
Sporting Unreality in “Hackney Today”
Stop me if I’ve mentioned it before, but I really do resent the fact that local residents have to fork out for for the Council’s propaganda rag, Hackney Today. Enough is enough: it’s time to scrap this disgraceful newspaper and spend the money on something worthwhile. Like poverty. Or crime. Or the educational rationing that sees so many kids rejected from all of the five Hackney secondary schools they’ve applied for.
Anyway, what’s got my goat this time is this:
And because the Council is now run more efficiently, this hasn’t added a penny to Council Tax, with local tax rates frozen in Hackney for the past three years.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 21 July 2008
Now try this:
A Gazette investigation has uncovered millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money written off by Hackney Council.
Almost £40million of debt went uncollected in the last financial year, an audit of the town hall books revealed.
Hackney Gazette, 7 August 2008
And there’s the real story: if Hackney Council wasn’t so badly run, we might have benefited from a Council Tax cut. Or the missing £40 million could have been used to improve residents’ lives for the better.
Jules, as I’ve observed, is a statistics machine. He reminds me of the people I met in the voluntary sector who believed that quoting inspirational snippets was an adequate alternative to actually doing something for the people they were employed to help.
Oh well. At least we’ve got the Olympics to give us a shot in the arm in 2012. Jules says so:
Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time, and we are making the most of this by working hard to secure the best possible benefits for residents.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 4 August 2008
Well, five of them anyway - assuming that the Council staff and councillors just sent to Beijing at the cost of £30,000 all live in the borough. Here’s a table, just in from the Telegraph (Jules’s old paper), showing how much each of the so-called five “Olympic Boroughs” have just spent sending officials over to China.
1) Hackney. 5 staff. £30,000. (£6,000 per person)
2) Greenwich. 6 staff. £14,000. (£2333.33 per person)
3) Newham. 4 staff. £9,000. (£2250 per person)
4) Tower Hamlets. None. £0. (£0 per person)
5) Waltham Forest. None. £0. (£0 per person)
Value for money, eh, Jules? Oh well, at least you’ll be on the trip yourself. Here’s the Telegraph again:
The Olympic park site also spans parts of Hackney, whose council are spending £30,000 of public money on sending the Mayor of Hackney Jules Pipe, the Cabinet Member for Regeneration and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games Cllr Guy Nicholson, the chief executive Tim Shields, the assistant chief executive Sue Primmer and the Council’s chief officer for the 2012 Games Charlie Forman.
Much as one could argue that £30,000 is great value for getting these people out of the country where they can’t do quite so much damage, this remark is rather telling.
A Hackney spokesman said: “Hackney’s key legacy opportunity from the 2012 Games is to ensure the media centres are transformed into a regional hub for media and creative industries after 2012, with the potential to create 8,000 jobs locally.”
In other words, despite saying only three days ago that “Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time”, Jules is off to China in a desperate taxpayer-funded bid to beg a few scraps for Hackney from the Olympic table. Because, quite frankly, we’re going to get feck all:
The borough’s business community fears Hackney may not receive the expected boost in tourism during the 2012 Olympic Games.And their concerns could be well founded after John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, admitted in an exclusive interview with the Gazette that most visitors would bypass the borough.
With the man below in charge, is it any wonder?
Published on 7th August, 2008
Google Maps: Walk on Water
I was thrilled to notice that Google Maps now - at long last - allows pedestrians to plan their journeys. One of the drawbacks as a non-driver was that I always found myself being told to walk along motorways, or follow unnecessary one-way systems.
So I tested it out by asking how best to walk from the Hall of Residence I lived in between 1993 and 1995 (I never forgot the postcode) to my flat. This is what it said.
Still, fair play to the new facility. It does ‘fess up so:
Sound advice.
Published on 4th August, 2008
So, you want to write a fugue?
Toccata and Fugue in D minor, J. S. Bach from musanim on Vimeo.
Published on 4th August, 2008
Excellent radio
available here.
I must buy a new wire or something to hook the laptop up to my amplifier.
Published on 3rd August, 2008
Race is to the miffed
For all the praise or flak it gets for being a multicultural London borough, some folk seem unable to talk about Hackney’s racial make-up without reaching for a dog whistle and giving it a good, hard blow.
You’ll see what I mean if you take a look at this post of Luke Akehurst’s, which I picked up on over at Dave Hill’s Clapton Pond Blog. In it, Luke is taking a pop at this Spectator article by Anthony Browne, formerly of the Policy Exchange and now Boris Johnson’s Policy Director.
I recommend you read Browne’s article. I fully agree that he talks a lot of bollocks, including nonsense like:
Many on the Left hope so because they believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation — interracial love rather than war.
It’s a cheap shot, and it certainly doesn’t - in my opinion - reflect the views of most people on the Left. You could certainly argue that Browne is puffing on the dog whistle himself, but for a different audience. But, insofar as I can see, the rest of his argument boils down to:
1) The modern trend towards diversity is a Western phenomenon.
2) People tend to gravitate towards others who have the same language, culture and values.
3) As poorer economies prosper, fewer people leave for richer countries in search of prosperity; and, indeed, many people start to return to their homelands.
4) The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.
I agree with the first three points (Poland and migrant Poles would be a good, up-to-date example of them), even if I have major reservations about the fourth. I also think Browne has a rather distorted idea about what Hackney is actually like, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.
Up to this point, I suspect Cllr Akehurst and I are mostly in agreement. As he says:
One of the things that is right about my borough though, and really works, is that it functions pretty well as a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community. People live along side [sic] each other in relative peace and harmony and on the whole they appreciate and enjoy this diversity.
He’s right. We do live alongside each other in relative peace and harmony (though it’s far from perfect), and - on the whole - people are pretty tolerant of each other. However, I don’t think Hackney really works well as “a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community” - what it does do, though, is show that a fairly large number of communities can co-exist in the same administrative area, live mostly separate lives, and rub along well where they have to or want to. But to imply, as Luke does, that Hackney is a single, multicultural community does not reflect the reality.
I’d be happy to disagree, and leave it at that. But Luke made my jaw drop by failing to actually address Browne’s argument, instead listing these quotes from the latter’s article:
“Many on the Left … believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation” (I’ve never heard anyone on the left say this!
“The champions of diversity ultimately believe that our future is not as a species with many races, but with one race — a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a quarter African and a quarter European.”
“The eternal human urge for self-segregation — surrounding yourself with people like you — is likely to triumph over the more ephemeral economic and political incentives to leave what you know.”
“It is not Hackney that is the future of the world, but Japan.”
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
“The white flight — or white self-segregation — which is such a feature of US cities is now endemic in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of white Briton’s (sic) fleeing the effects of the government’s open border policy on London each year.”
“The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.”
All of which, selected with the true skill of the dog-whistler, are designed to spark fear and worry amongst minority groups - and others - who might not have read some of the following from the same article:
“…I have been convinced that mixed-race people, by a blessing of nature, combine the best of all their parts.”
“And as our minorities keep telling us, it is not easy being a minority, since in democracies it is the majority that sets the rules.”
“Self-segregation is apparent all around us, but there is a reluctance to accept it because it mocks multiculturalism”.
In a tour de force of doublethink, though, Luke does accept the self-segregation that’s all around us. Why else would he go on to say this?
Do Hackney’s Tory Councillors, eight out of nine of whom are from minority faith and ethnic communities, know about the views of their London Mayor’s Policy Director about the model of community harmony represented by our borough?
What? Does Cllr Akehurst really believe that all those Orthodox Jewish councillors (for that, at root is what he’s talking about) are going to get upset that someone has said this in print?
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
It’s all these things that have made the Chareidi so strong a community in Hackney. You could say the same, to a greater or lesser degree, of other faith and ethnic groups in Hackney: the Turks and Kurds who live in the north of Dalston and south of Stoke Newington; the Vietnamese in Shoreditch; the Africans and Caribbeans in Dalston. You could even make the same point about the enclaves of the (mostly white) middle-class people who are centred on Stoke Newington Church Street or in the leafy, spacious streets and squares of De Beauvoir.
And this brings me back to the point on which I disagree with both Anthony Browne and Luke Akehurst. Browne concluded his article by saying:
The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. Not all the world will look like Hackney, just those countries that opened their borders when push-migration was at its peak.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, ‘the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities.’
What Browne doesn’t realise he is saying is that, if there’s a worldwide trend towards less diversity within nations, the global picture will look more like Hackney: a place in which people band together mostly with those who have the same “language, culture and values“, but still have to find ways of getting along together with others as groups and as individuals.
That’s Hackney’s strength. And I like it: except when people on both left and right exploit the weaker relationships between those communities for political gain.
Published on 3rd August, 2008