The Croydonian

Labels: France, idiots

Labels: arms and the man, Random anecdotes

Perhaps he could have mentioned that post '47 shuls in East Jerusalem were either destroyed or converted into animal pens and the like.

Odd question o' the day:

Insert any of the old warhorse jokes about the dismal science here.

And this has precisely how much to do with the lovely constituency of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk?

And the lardy member for West Brom is still at it:

Why not roll back to Netscape Navigator, eh?

Someone is angling for a Five Year Plan:

I would think that a COI campaign across media could be entertaining: 'Steel ingots, every home should have one'.

When compelled to count my blessings, not having to do PE is one of them:

Andrew Stunell: To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families what percentage of schools in each local authority area provide pupils with the opportunity for at least two hours of sport per week.

And the place to be a juvenile salad dodger is Medway, with 20% of them able to avoid cross country running and the like. There is the least chance of escape from sadistic PE teachers (are there any other varieties?) in Southend - 97%. Poor wretches. Mind you, armed with particularly powerful megaphones, Southend's schoolchildren could taunt Medway types across the intervening Thames, knowing that if the Medway kids ran after them they would be wheezing within minutes.

Labels: Parliament

And this is how he did it:

"[He] pushed his car on a muddy path...waited for daybreak outdoors, exposing himself to cold dew, lest that the family of a house...crossed a river by a wooden boat...ate a boiled maize ear...grasped unreservedly greasy hands of workers at a factory...transplanted rice seedlings...walk[ed] along a ridge between rice fields"

And thus, "The President was the only great father of the people and peerless great man in history, who devoted his whole life to the people, finding himself among people to bestow warmest affection on them".

I have done many of those things, or functional equivalents, but I doubt that I will be getting encomia worthy of Butler's Lives of the Saints some 15 years after my inevitable demise.

Meanwhile, something for everyone's bookmarks / diaries:

Labels: DPRK-watch

“The Audit Commission is simply joining the long list of those who use the recession as an excuse to promulgate an anti-public services agenda, to privatise public services and to attack public service workers’ jobs, pay and pensions on the grounds that there should be ‘equity of misery’.

So that's alright then.

Labels: Class war, Unions

Mr. Paice: To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport what estimate he has made of the amount of waste arising from his Department in (a) 2006-07 and (b) 2007-08 (i) in total and (ii) per full-time equivalent member of staff.

Mr. Sutcliffe: The Department has made the following estimate of the amount of waste arising:

Total 2006-07: 2,070 tonnes, 2007-08: 187.32 tonnes

Per full-time equivalent member of staff: 2006-07: 2.49 tonnes/FTE, 2007-08: 0.27 tonnes/FTE.

That's an awful lot of 'eye-catching initiatives', press releases and so forth.

Looks like the Taliban do a bit of Hansard trawling themselves:

Dr. Fox: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many times each type of aircraft has (a) come under fire and (b) been damaged by enemy fire in Afghanistan in each of the last five years.

Mr. Bob Ainsworth: I am withholding the information as its disclosure would, or would be likely to prejudice the capability, effectiveness or security of the armed forces.

Head scratcher o' the day:

Andrew Rosindell: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs if he will undertake research into the effect of dog microchipping schemes on (a) levels of crime and (b) perceptions of crime.

Jim Fitzpatrick: There are no plans to assess the effect of dog microchipping schemes on levels of (a) crime and (b) perception of crime.

Erm, how would the questions be phrased? 'Do you feel safer at night knowing that cyborg dogs roam the land?'.

And what about this?:

Tim Loughton: To ask the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families how many and what proportion of pupils eligible to receive free school meals have been entered for GCSE Latin in each year since 1997.

Ms Diana R. Johnson: The information requested can be provided only at disproportionate cost.

Repeat after me, "Correlation does not imply causation".

Labels: arms and the man, furry creatures and similar, Parliament

Labels: food and drink, Israel

The crater, previously named Posidonius J, is located in the Moon’s Lake of Dreams and is close to a 1,200-acre parcel, which was purchased by the pop star".

Pretty good as PR stunts go, but what of the Lunar Republic Society? It hangs out here, and in physical terms, on Fifth Avenue NYC. It sells bits of lunar real estate, from $18.95-$37.50 an acre.

The FAQs are priceless:

The Lunar Registry operates under the statutes of the Lunar Settlement Initiative, an international program through which a limited quantity of land claims are offered to private entities in order to finance the exploration, settlement and development of the Moon and its resources. The Lunar Registry is the authorized sales agent of the Lunar Republic Society, one of the leading advocates of privatized property ownership on the Moon. The Lunar Republic Society is a registered international business company (IBC) which is legally authorized to operate in more than 200 nations around the world, including the United States, Canada, China, Russia, Japan and every nation in Europe. For more information on the Lunar Settlement Initiative.

Labels: privatisation

Labels: Challenges to the readership, nonsense on stilts

Labels: EU fun and games, furry creatures and similar, Greenery

Labels: Blears, The arts

Maybe he is pining for 'this is the age of the train', or 'we're getting there'.

Something for Lord Adonis to do during the working day:

Tempting to wander the mean streets filming cars on double yellows and uploading the results to Youtube with suitably lurid descriptions.

The most unanswerable question of the week, probably:

Bob Spink: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what estimate he has made of the cost to his Department of the statutory obligations upon it provided for in legislation on matters for which it is responsible which were introduced as a consequence of obligations arising from EU legislation in the most recent 12 months for which figures are available. [283472]

Mr. Straw: Information as to statutory obligations arising from EU legislation and their associated costs is not held centrally by the Department and could not be collected without disproportionate cost.

I suppose Straw could have replied 'how long is a piece of string', so I suppose he should be commended for his restraint.

In an unintentionally (?) telling juxtaposition, this question

'James Brokenshire: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office how many (a) men and (b) women aged (a) under 20, (b) between 21 and 30, (c) between 31 and 40, (d) between 41 and 50, (e) between 51 and 60 and (f) 61 years and above died from an underlying cause which was alcohol-related in each of the last 10 years

(A total of 5,870 last year)

was followed by this:

Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office how many cannabis-related deaths there were in (a) Crosby constituency and (b) Merseyside in the last 12 months

and the response

There were no deaths where the underlying cause was drug poisoning and cannabis was mentioned alone or with other substances on the death certificate in (a) Crosby constituency,in 2007 (the latest year available).

There were no deaths where the underlying cause was drug poisoning and cannabis alone was mentioned on the death certificate.. in Merseyside metropolitan county, in 2007

Labels: drugs, furry creatures and similar, the demon drink

"The tree was given to the city in 1942 as a birthday gift from Hitler to the then-head of the town council, said 80-year-old Kazimierz Polak, who was an eyewitness to the planting. Local politicians have called for the tree to be removed.

“The tree remembers the biggest criminal in the history of mankind,” Jaslo mayor Maria Kurovska told a Polish newspaper. She has ordered the oak to be chopped down and publicly burned".

Labels: Poland

"The phenomenon is initially American, but already a local chapter has been formed in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium. The philosophy is simple: rather than boycotting shop owners for not doing enough for the environment, carrotmobbers use their consumer power to reward those that do..."Instead of telling the shop owner: we're not going to buy from you anymore until you invest in making your shop more sustainable, we will go to his store on a particular day with a bunch of people to shop. In exchange we ask that part of the money we've spent is invested in green management."

Carrotmob was founded in the US by Brent Schulkin. In a short film on the website, Schulkin recalls his first Carrotmob action in March 2008. "I went to 23 liquor stores in my neighbourhood (...) I asked them what percentage of the money that we spend are you willing to set aside for energy efficiency improvements in your store. (...) When the dust settled the highest bid was 22 percent." Schulkin says the action was a success: the store's turnover that day went from 1,800 to more than 9,000 dollars, enough for the owner to spend some money on making the lighting and the cooling installations in the store more environment-friendly".

Labels: Greenery, I shop therefore I am

To ask the Minister of State, Department for Transport what percentage of (a) white and (b) non-white staff of his Department of each (i) grade and (ii) pay band have received the highest performance marking in each reporting year since the inception of Department for Transport (central).

Labels: Croydon, fun with statistics, racial minefields, the Left

Labels: facetiousness, Serbia

Mr. Stewart Jackson: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government...in what format the intranet staff handbook is held.

Mr. Malik: The terms and conditions of employment that form our staff handbook are stored on the Department's intranet site as individual web pages.

Collapse of stout party...

Mr. Grieve: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what average period of imprisonment had been served by prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment who were released in (a) 2007 and (b) 2008.

Mr. Straw: The numbers of life sentenced prisoners released in 2007 along with average period spent in custody for those on first release is shown in the following table.

Mr. Frank Field: To ask the Prime Minister whether members of the public are able to email the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister: Yes.

This has been an issue in the past, and despite what the PM says, I cannot lay hands on his e-mail address as such. There is no gbrown@gov.uk, although there is a rather rubbishy contact form, as critiqued by Dizzy a while back.

Labels: crime and punishment, Parliament

"The beers including black beer and rice beer made by the Taedonggang Beer Factory are these days popular with the Pyongyang citizens. Beer houses are crowed with working people who look pleased with their successes in the current 150-day campaign. It was Juche 91 (2002) that the just built Taedonggang Beer Factory began supplying beer to the citizens. The cold and soft Taedonggang beer rich in gas content immediately came into great favor among the customers by catering to their tastes".

"The refrigerator vans carrying beer have a traffic privilege on the streets of Pyongyang like cars carrying soybean milk to children".

"I want to make a well-known Dutch compliment to Kim Jong Il.

'Kim Jong Il moet eens flink in zijn reet geneukt worden door een roedel schurftige bruine bosberen met syfilis"

It means "May the warm rays of the sun forever shine on the honourable face of Kim Jong Il'

We reserve this compliment only to those whom we deem most worthy.
Please feel free to mention my compliment in party publications and do not forget to include the full text of the compliment as well".

Labels: DPRK-watch, the demon drink

Labels: France, surveys

Labels: France, surveys, this sporting life

Mr. Baron: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office how many deaths there have been from each type of cancer as recorded by the ICD-10 classification in each year since 1997.

Angela E. Smith: The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the authority to reply.

Chris Ruane: To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office whether her Department provides facilities for meditation for its staff.

Angela E. Smith: The Cabinet Office provides facilities which can be used for prayer, meditation and reflection.

A peer through the key hole might see Tessa Jowell, Shaun Woodward, Angela Smith and 'Baroness' Vadera taking up the lotus position. The question was subbed as 'stress', which does seem a pretty narrow reason for offering up prayer to one's God or Gods.

A fall in the cost of living the government will not be bragging about:

Chris Grayling: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what estimate he has made of the average street price of (a) cannabis, (b) ecstasy, (c) gamma hydroxybutyrate and (d) ketamine in each of the last 10 years.

Alan Johnson: Street prices for drugs vary considerably and are dependent on a number of factors. Prices are given where available in the following table.

And the figures for cannabis (per 1/8th), skunk (ditto) and ecstacy (per tablet). Other figures are incomplete.

And that's all I can find today.

Labels: drugs, Health and inefficiency, Parliament

Labels: brief observations