Life In The Jar

That NIDS Document In Full

2008-01-31T19:03:00.000Z

Annotated by those good eggs at No2ID.

It Was Always Our Plan to Make Mistakes

2008-01-25T10:35:00.001Z

A subtlety that I failed to hear about regarding the recently leaked Home Office strategy document outlining the latest push back of the shambling National Identity Register was the plan to insist that students must provide National ID Cards in order to apply for student loans and student bank accounts. As there will be no other reason to have a National ID Card (except maybe to allay fears of subliminal threats, eh, Blunkett?) this will potentially become a £93+ surcharge on attempting to pay for your education. It is also an absolutely transparent attempt to bring the scheme in through the back door. There is very little fraud to be had from setting up a student bank account, and none specific to student bank accounts. Furthermore the level of proof of identity required for getting a student loan is the same as it would be to get a National ID Card, so there is no added level of security for anyone in insisting on a National ID Card. Ah well. The chips on the ten-year NIR cards have a three-year warranty, which is the length of most degrees, so that's some small comfort.

The other measures laid out in the document are equally devoid of benefit. 2010 will see not only the introduction of further financial burdens on students, but the rolling out of cards to government workers who are in contact with the vulnerable. Leaving aside recent embarrassments such as the thousands of people not entitled to work in the UK who were cleared for security work by the Home Office, we are left with the question of who will benefit from this measure. Again the answer is no-one. The idea is that, before granny lets in the stranger claiming to be from Meals on Wheels, she will ask to see the stranger's National ID Card. Bereft of an external door fitted with a chip and PIN, fingerprint or iris scanner, all she will have to go on is the card itself. Cosmetic counterfeit cards are likely to hit the streets within months of the National ID Cards being rolled out, especially if they are to be required by resident foreign nationals (see Japan for details). In fact, whatever "anti-counterfeit" measures that are put in place are less important to duplicate if the card is to convince someone in a vulnerable position - Granny won't be able to read the tiny tiny writing, the kid down the road with Downs Syndrome won't necessarily understand about the threaded gold, or the watermark overlaying the photograph. But you can bet that they both have been told about the cards, that they both know to treat cardholders with a greater degree of trust than they would someone who had just wandered in off the street.

These measures are, of course, to get us used to the idea of the cards, of seeing them around the place. Openly, one of the reasons for rolling out the cards to foreign nationals is to see if the captured data on the foreign nationals goes walk about, which is hardly reassuring. It's a rare bit of open cyncicism, though, to pilot the scheme on people who don't have a vote. And the trouble with piloting it is that most of the issues we have with the registry are matters of scale, with many of the processing issues and issues of false positive and negative identification, are exponential.

Further worrying developments are that, subsequent to the rather wise hushing up of the iris recognition biometric (which is less likely to work correctly if you have brown eyes (you know, like the eyes that black people have) (you know, black people that are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be scuritinised by immigration officials...)) (and whereas you might say that the reason the iris recognition has been given a lower profile lately has something to do with the airport piloting of the technology, or the fact that the patent holder somehow found himself on the feasibility focus group tasked with deciding whether or not iris recognition was a feasible technology to use for the NIR scheme, I couldn't possibly comment) the fingerprint recognition has become more important. Which would be fine if that were harder to fool. As it happens, it is perfectly easy to take someone's fingerprint, say from a glass or a piece of paper, and construct a fake fingertip from jelly. As Dr Ben Goldacre pointed out in his Bad Science column, this is akin, then, to writing your PIN on every surface you ever come into contact with. Secure?

But wait! That's not all! Fingerprint data consists of quite a crude map, rather than the swirls we're all familiar with. This doesn't lose much in the way of accuracy, but allows computers to quickly match two prints of (hopefully) the same finger. It transpires that not only can you reproduce a fingertip from a fingerprint, it is now possible to take the "map" and construct a matching fingertip from that too! This, the Home Office will no doubt tell us, matters not, because it will be impossible for criminals to get the information off of the card in the first place. But the Home Office also said that about the passports; two hours and a brute force attack later, and the passport opened up its secrets.

Productivity?

2008-01-24T12:47:00.000Z

Last November, as avid readers will know, I won NaNoWriMo. It was my intention, however, to have at the manuscript throughout December and do great and wonderful things to it, before unveiling it on an unsuspecting world. Avid readers will know this has not happened. This is in part due to my taking of a break after completing the 50,000 words "to give myself distance" before I started working on the edit. Heck of a lot of distance, I had.

The project will involve me taking the manuscript and cutting it up into 102 pieces. I'd hoped, though this may prove impossible for me, that each piece would be a stand-alone section. I have several extended bits of narrative that may prove impossible to fiddle with enough to fit, though I am willing to try, and the process of actually taking these bits of story and reducing and restructuring them will hopefully be An Interesting Learning Experience.

It's also an opportunity to get in and rejig the various bits that are terribly terribly wrong with the story. I have an underpopulated Britain courtesy of an economic collapse and a state-scale embrace of mumbo-jumbo. All well and good, but I go on about how well-maintained (at least superficially) everything is, when really it ought to be a bit more rundown. I've fudged a couple of important plot elements too; they're there, but covered in a line or two as though patching over holes in the plot using brevity. Hem hem. I also have some lovely but totally bizarre behaviour going on in the ending which really ought to come somewhere before the ending. And as for the ending itself, I still haven't got anything really satisfying. We shall see.

But most of this work has been put on hold because of Half Life 2. I just need to get to the end of episode 2 and I'll be fine. I promise.

Why the internets ex; fur a curate's sea

2008-01-14T11:49:00.000Z

http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/song/589996.html

Fat-Tongued Review of the Year

2008-01-01T12:48:00.000Z

Just to prove to myself that I can still do it, here is the facts, the fictions and the funnies from the last twelvemonth.

January

I started temping at the RadioCentre.

February

Nothing happens in February.

March

I'm taken on permanently! Proper employ at last! And a media-related job, too. It only took me eleven years.

April

Kurt Vonnegut closed his peephole. He'll be up in Heaven now, looking down at us all.

May

Labour's National Identity Register Cost Estimate, delivered illegally late, rises by about £1 billion. Full steam ahead for the database state!

June

Gordon Brown, on taking power, decides to scrap the ID scheme as it is now seriously over-budget and the behind schedule.

I happened to be apartying in London on the night of the 28th near where the bombs failed to go off. Each year we have an RACC anniversary party - clients and nibbles - and after it had finished we repaired to a nearby karaoke bar and then on to home. Getting in the next day, which was no mean feat, I was asked by someone how I was after the night's wassailing. I told them I couldn't quite recall how I got home; "something about driving into a bin outside Tiger Tiger."

July

Simon goes to the beach.

August

Moulin Rouge! Off with the RC to Paris for an away day and a night out at the red windmill, which was rather like watching a sex scene with your parents. It was a fun night nevertheless, and the French take their kitsch very very seriously indeed. Highlights included Josh deciding to read some manga halfway through the performance, and a couple of the waiters. Lowlights included the talking dog and the snake nappies.

I took my first proper holiday in years, heading off to the Edinburgh festival with the good lady husband. Having seen little stand-up for the previous twelve months save for the bastard byblows available on TV panel games, it was refreshing to see acts both new and established that were still capable of funny.

September

The Bank of England decides to underwrite the Northern Rock collapse - a victory for counter-intuition! Having declared they would finance the panicking withdrawals, people stopped withdrawing money in a panic. The threat remains, however, of the level of debt that has been raised against property that has been overvalued. The property market is a bit of a misnomer these days as it seems to have little to do with the value of property and everything to do with the ease of acquiring a mortgage. There's a big old pudding filled with negative equity just waiting to be served.

October

The dawn of the time of the Lumix DMC-FZ50. A new camera at last!

November

Carol Vordeman is arrested for attending a political march in London. European leaders condemn Mr Brown's actions, citing fears for the future of British democracy.

Government's National Identity Register Scheme estimate cut by £150 million. "Savings" highlighted in altered estimations of number of passport renewals (which ought not be part of the scheme), and production and delivery of cards and passports. Outside of these cuts, the scheme has increased in cost by another £71 million.

HMRC loses a total of 8 unencrypted discs containing personal details of 25 million people.

I take on NaNoWriMo again and complete my 50,000 words a few days before the 30th. I fail, however, to redraft the piece through December. Something for the new year then?

December

NHS loses personal details of "hundreds of thousands" of individuals. HMRC loses a disc containing 6,500 people's details. DSA loses disc containing details of 3 million individuals. Gordon Brown says the data loss crises "will be forgotten" in the new year. Don't look around the eyes, look into the eyes, don't look around the eyes, look into the eyes.

11,000 illegal immigrants cleared by Home Office to work in security. An illegal immigrant was identified as working as a security guard at the Home Office. Government launch advertising campaign warning employers against employing illegal immigrants.

I get a pseudonymous thank you in the QI Annual along with a variety of other posters. I have mixed feelings about it, but keep them to myself.

2008 Predictions

In the new year PM Brown will tell us that the crises concerning the loss of personal data have indeed been forgotten. Azoozazah! Then they lose some more data.
Madonna will win that battle of the lookalike show. No, your actual Madonna.
The collapse of the property market(sic) will finally happen.

The Importance of Incredulity

2007-12-07T23:14:00.001Z

I received the following recently:

Do you remember February 1993 in England , when a young boy of 3 was taken from a Liverpool shopping centre by two 10-year-old boys? Jamie Bulger walked away from his mother for only a second, Jon Venables took his hand and led him out of the mall with his friend Robert Thompson. They took Jamie on a walk for over 2 and a half miles, along the way stopping every now and again to torture the poor little boy who was crying constantly for his mummy. Finally they stopped at a railway track where they brutally kicked him, threw stones at him, rubbed paint in his eyes, pushed batteries up his anus and cut his fingers off with scissors. Other mutilations were inflicted but not reported in the press.

N.B. :- Remember, a 3year old cannot possibly defend themselves against a 10 year old, let alone of 2 them.

What these two boys did was so horrendous that Jamie's mother was forbidden to identify his body. They then left his beaten small body on railway tracks so a train could run him over to hide the mess they had created. These two boys, even being boys, understood what they did was wrong, hence trying to make it look like an accident.

This week Lady Justice Butler-Sloss has awarded the two boys ( now men ), anonymity for the rest of their lives when they leave custody with new
identities. They will also leave custody early only serving just over half of their sentence. They are being relocated to Australia to live out the rest of their lives. They disgustingly and violently took Jamie's life away and in return they each get a new life!

Please.... . If you feel as strongly as we do, (and if you haven't already signed this petition ) that this is a grave Miscarriage of justice - Hit the forward button and add your name at the end, and send it to everyone you can !

If you are the 700th person to sign, please forward this e-mail to: cust.ser.cs@gtnet.gov.u

Now, whatever you may think about the anonymity that was granted to the two killers on their release, this kind of chain-letter is not the way in which to voice your protest.

Listen.

If each person sends this message to only two people, then by the 700th chain there will be 2^700, or 5.2601359015483735072409898828801e+210. More people than in the history of the Earth. More atoms than on Earth. And that's just the number of lists, not the number of people on the lists. And what a surprise those 5.2601359015483735072409898828801e+210 people will have when they attempt to email the address given, considering it does not exist.

The body of the text suggests that Venables and Thompson are still in prison and about to be released. Not true. They were released (having served their time) in the summer of 2001.

Please please please, when you receive stuff like this, just try and establish, either by your own judgement, or Googling a choice selection of the text, whether or not the message is genuine, and what the genuine impact of completing the request is. In this case, the impact (other than spreading spam) is slight - a few people who may have written rather tardy letters to their MPs about the 2000 judgement fail to do so, so some deaf ears are spared. Other mails are more vindictive. One such message that does the rounds involves an initiation ceremony for urban gangs that requires its new member to drive around in the dark without their lights on, and on being flashed by another motorist, to fire a round into their car. The terribly important message that the email was trying to put out was that one should advise everyone one knew to *not* warn motorists that they are driving without their headlights on. How responsible!

The Eye of the Beholder

2007-12-02T10:45:00.001Z

Big Eye Am
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

So on Facebook I have a cropped down version of this image that I use from time to time as my profile picture. The reason I took it was because of a weird perceptual shift I sometimes experience when watching the TV. People generally aren't shown facing the camera, but are in a three-quarter profile, or thereabouts. If I'm tired, or mindful of the illusion, I find that these three-quarter people tend to have their faces dominated by the nearer eye. My depth perception (which is easy to manipulate considering I'm trying to make sense of a two-dimensional image) tends to give me the impression that they have one huge eye, and one small eye. I think this in part has something to do with the Quirk character that I've been drawing since my late teens, whose face was rather similar.

It was only natural, therefore, for me to try and recreate this illusion in a photograph, so a couple of photos and an award-winning Graphics package later and the job was done.

Although I was anticipating some comment on the image, I was quite surprised at the level of disgust people seem to have felt as a result of the picture. I used it as my Facebook profile throughout November as it was the image that I was using on the NaNoWriMo site, too. Having taken it down I've had three or four messages from friends thanking me for its removal; rather like a family member who confides in you after you've finished a relationship with someone "well I never really liked them any way". I'm kind of glad, in a way, that I've been able to create something that, despite being fairly ordinary, has had such an impact, but I do find it slightly discomfitting knowing that my boundaries are different to those of my friends. It's just a big eye!

Oh, and thanks, but I didn't actually do anything to the ear. That's just my ear.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 27

2007-11-27T13:46:00.000Z

Well, tonight ought to see me complete the first and rough as hell draft of Pieces, and it's been a curious journey. I had started out with a rough idea about a love triangle, and notions about characters being complicit in their own victimhood and to their own ends, and some nebulous stuff about a dangerous mumbo-jumbo taking over the United Kingdom included only to serve as some kind of backdrop to the present day events. By the end of this draft, though, the backdrop has stepped very much into the spotlight (broken metaphor, there) and all sorts of other business is now at work in the narrative - small actions having massive repercussions, the meaninglessness of freedom of will, disconnections between intent and effect, and more and surprising occurences of the jigsaw puzzle motif. Very late in the day I decided that if a weird brain-melting cult had taken over Britain, then there ought to be a resistence group, and given that the disbanded love triangle involved the narrator, who had nothing to do with either, it was pretty obvious where the other two ended up.

I'll be sitting down to chart out what I've written, see how it can be massaged to bring out and emphasise the stronger aspects of the story, and what other parts of the story need telling. So many of the late emergent elements need to be introduced earlier. Also, I'm going to have to cut the thing into 102 pieces that will each make a sort of sense on their own (though I have the beginnings of a strategy for that), and build a hideously bloated bit of JavaScript to put the whole thing together. I was tempted earlier today to devise 100 subtly different endings for the story, but that might be a bit too much. And as if to egg me on, I was in a bookshop the other day and saw Perec's Life: A User's Manual in the bestseller's section. Ah, nice.

Oh, and if the whole mess isn't too ghastly once I'm done, I shall be approaching a certain fictional anthology with a view to getting it published. I envision a box including a jigsaw puzzle and 102 bits of paper. Now that would be something. Oh, and a disc for the disinclined.

The Today Programme

2007-11-27T10:12:00.000Z

For some reason the Today programme decided to run an item on NaNoWriMo this morning, but as a debate between a NaNoWriMoer and a publisher. The latter's main thrust seemed to be that she was down on NaNoWriMo because it threatened to make her slush pile larger, as if she wasn't already inundated, and everyone she speaks to seems to be writing a novel, yah boo. And although we have heard writer after writer say that the hardest thing about writing is sitting down and writing terrible stuff when they're really not in the mood, she cautioned against the idea of people using NaNo as a way of turning off their inner-editors. Ironically, it was she and not the NaNoWriMoer who seemed to be confusing a first draft with a finished manuscript. And this just three days (and 1800 words, chiz chiz) before the finish-line!

The NaNoWriMo done us proud, though, standing her ground, explaining it was about writing, not about getting published, and that it was a tool used by some writers to develop early drafts of works they then go on to develop into full novels.

I can't help but bring up Kerouac's On The Road here, and whereas the odds are against NaNo ever producing or discovering a Kerouac, it does demonstrate that NaNo-like writing stints are a valid and important part of, if not the development of literature itself, certainly the development of the writers themselves. The publisher suggested that if people were serious about writing then they wouldn't need NaNo to motivate them, but sadly those people are the people to be found in her slush pile. I suspect that NaNo might serve the world better in giving people who, maybe, you know, can actualy write, the excuse and the motivation to get down to it, and adopt the discipline that will actually allow them to fluorish, with or without publication.

Oh, and you can plan your story all you like, but you never know your story 'til you sit down and write it, and NaNo, again, is a great way of doing that.

But anyhew, for all I know the publisher doesn't really give two figs about NaNo, and was just playing devil's advocate at the behest of the Today Programme. This conflict was probably fiction.

Kuh!

2007-11-21T17:24:00.000Z

I create beautiful things for the world like the above fashionable accessories, and do people show an interest? Pah!

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Emergent Themes

2007-11-13T08:09:00.000Z

Non-verbal communication
The diffences between intention and effect
Betrayal
Small acts with large consequences
The acquisition of a moral highground by casting oneself as the victim
Choosing captivity
Delaying progression to maintain a less-satisfying but sustained status quo.

And God said, "Well, you can't choose your followers..."

2007-11-11T21:35:00.000Z

Apparently The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of Northern Lights is causing a bit of a brouhaha in the States. The film sees a huge multi-universe battle take place between mankind, theocracy and a heavenly army. Bastions of sensible and rational criticism the Catholic League have spoken out against the film, based as it is on the books of atheist author Philip Pullman. Here are some quotes I have mercilessly borrowed from Wikipedia.

They believe that while the religious elements of the film will be "watered down" from the source novels, it will still encourage children to read the series, which League president William A. Donohue says "denigrates Christianity" and promotes "atheism for kids", citing author Pullman as saying that he is "trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."It is the League's hope that "the film [will fail] to meet box office expectations and that [Pullman's] books attract few buyers."

And they have every right to say such things and wish such things on their fellow human beings. However, Mr Donohue seems to believe that the religion in the book, the basis of the theocracy, is Christianity. But guess who never gets a mention between the six covers of Pullman's opus? Guess who doesn't even get a cameo in Lyra's Oxford? Yup! The big JC himself! And as for promoting atheism to kids... he makes that sound like a bad thing. What the coition is wrong with atheism? Golly! Would Donohue have spoken out against a film promoting Islamic faith, or Judaism? Probably not, but as it's atheism, then it's open season, 'cos, hey, atheists aren't organised! Release the dogs! As it is Pullman has already sold shedloads of copies of HDM, and I'm sure the money he's received from the adaptations hardly have him crying all the way to the pawnbrokers.

Also, Mr Donohue is worried that kid's are going to pursue a line of thought given them by a film that features alcoholic talking polar bears. But then maybe he's right to. I think most children are incapable of distinguishing between the kind of fantasy presented to them in fairytales and the kind of fantasy presented to them in religious texts.

Is it time for an atheism league? The trouble with rectifying such insulting behaviour as Mr Donohue's is that it's not a very atheistic thing to do. However mistaken atheists believe the likes of Christians are, we're only ever going to engage with them when they cross the line - insisting that creationism gets equal prominence in science lessons with Darwinism, for instance.

What troubles me most about Christian pressure groups getting up in arms whenever their Gods aren't depicted in a way that they would like (see Jerry Springer: the Opera and Last Temptation for reference) is that it suggests either a) they have no capability of entertaining any form of critical thoughts about their own belief system or b) they do, but feel that the man on the Clapham Omnibus doesn't, and to that end such critical thoughts are a danger to him. Arrogant but righteous.

How Far Can You Walk Into A Forest?

2007-11-11T20:13:00.001Z

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 11
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

Half way of course! I spent about four hours on public transport yesterday (thank you public transport!), which meant that when I reached Richmond I was not in the most creative of frames of mind, and only managed to get about 2,000 words down, despite the industrious ambience on offer courtesy of m'good friend Daniel.

Happily, though, I managed to rattle off a good 3,409 words today and so have made it through the 25,000 threshold. What is more, my plot seems to be holding up, so I will hopefully be feeling less antsy about it. I have about seven vignettes left at my disposal, and add more to the list as they occur. They're my back-up for when I find myself travelling through the plot too quickly.

I've a couple of nights out next week, and so have a couple of no writing days, but all is scheduled for. Nevertheless I still feel guilty about them, so will probably choose to overshoot for the rest of the week. If I stick to the plan I will finish up at 50,000 words on the 27th, so the day off on the thirtieth ought to be well within my grasp.

And pictured is the author reading some Donald Barthelme just after writing about two adults sharing a bath. How writers suffer.

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 10

2007-11-10T08:51:00.001Z

NaNoWriMo 2007 - Day 9
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

I'm off to Dan's today for as much scribbling as I can manage. The last time we did this was day 1, where I made a fantastic start, but had all my plot before me which makes it rather easier. This time may be different. As I think I've said elsewhere, I have realised my plot is far too thin for 50,000 words and so have had to embellish it, which is something I find tricky in that it has to be embellished in a way that contributes to the story as a whole. I think I've managed it, and made it much more interesting and exciting as a result. I've made the decision to have the end of the recounted story's chronology come right slap bang up to the start of George doing the jigsaw, which I hope will function well enough. I love those moments in novels where two different situations suddenly inflict themselves on one another. What this means, though, is that (come December) I will have to rework my opening. At the moment it sounds as though George has just come in from somewhere, which isn't quite right now. Easily changed, though, and what better way of convincing oneself that one is serious about revision if the first thing one is going to dicky around with is the opening!

Last night, as I left work, I felt a small amount of discomfort in one of my two feet (you know I have two feet, right?). I put less pressure on it and waited til I got home, assuming I had something in my shoe. Said somethings, and the discomfort, vanished when I removed my shoes so I assumed that whatever it was had fallen off and gone to join the kibble. But padding barefoot across the kitchen the pain returned, so out came the tweezers and a strong light and from mine own flesh I extracted a tiny tiny sliver of glass, no bigger than a piece of glitter.

Behold the serendipity, for glass is broken within the novel and here I was fishing a piece of the stuff out of my body. Coincidence certainly, but the act of removal has somewhere to go in the novel, and brings in some of the weirdness that is finally starting to creep into what I'm writing. I have a character called Elsa who to whom I wanted to give a maintenance task involving my main character, George. Initially she was to shave off the salt and pepper moustache he wears that adds a country decade to his face. This I may keep in, but I realise that the removal of a piece of glass from his foot is much stronger and, because of certain resonances already set up, will add to the suggestion that George and Elsa's friendship is healing him of something. One of my favourite things about writing, and NaNoWriMo specifically, is the way in which you are forced to play magpie with your own life. There is something almost transformative about taking the events that happen to you or to those around you and placing them in a story, to load the chaos that surrounds us with meaning and structure, even if it is an illusion, and its beneficence is merely temporary.

What? I'm Not Allowed A Night Off?

2007-11-07T21:33:00.000Z

Horrible journey home, got back much later than usual, and the blank screen was too much to bear, so instead I am going to lie around the flat in the clothes I just bought from Uniqlo and read Donald Barthelme stories. I only wish Barhelme was available in Japanese. And that I could read Japanese.

(and don't worry - I have been through my schedule and bumped up my Sunday targets, so all should still be well)

ID, Ego, and Super-ego!

2007-11-06T08:35:00.000Z

For the first time in a log time, the ID Card Scheme is back in the news. This is the scheme that Gordon Brown gave full support to, as long as it came in on time and under budget. Since then it has been rescheduled and is (massively!!!) over budget, racking up an extra .8-1.2 billion pounds within the first few months. The long grass is over there, Mr B.

It's fun watching Tony McNutty going at it. He has been drafted in to discuss the scheme that he is supposed to be in charge of, but his statements are so hesitant! "As I understand it..", "As far as I am aware..." both suggesting he is not as in the loop as he would like.

And it seems Lord West too, can only speak of his own awareness. Doesn't anyone attached to this scheme know what is going on? This is New NuLabor, after all, and uncertainty is not in the vocabulary!

That'll Be The First Wall Then.

2007-11-04T20:53:00.000Z

It's been an odd couple of days. Despite having much of the plot mapped out, I started getting to stuff that I hadn't thought about in any great level of clarity. Some of this was stuff I didn't really want to write about any way. There was a trial which I ought to have relished, but it was one of those complicated year-long trials and covered stuff I wasn't prepared to look too deeply into considering how incidental to the plot it was. It's paramount that one of the characters goes to prison, but the means by which that occurs is immaterial, and might as well be a footnote for all I care. Anyhow, I was beginning to find real difficulty in getting the words out without leaping forward to stuff I really didn't want to write about just yet.

When I started out I had hoped for four major strands to work on, so I could flit about between them to keep the wordflow going. However, only two of the strands have survived such scrutiny. I had put off the school strand because it was a bit clouded in my mind and I wanted to give it more thought before I got to it. The joy of writing about a character thinking back over his life is that he needn't do so in order. However, after a lunchtime spent brainstorming (or whatever the word we're supposed to use now is) I felt I had a strong enough storyline to get started on. That night I managed to eat up half of it in about 1,700 words, meaning one of the four strands it aint. With a fair bit of jiggery and pokery, however, I believe there is enough meat in the main two to keep me going, and some dainty vignetting around the edges that will hopefully come in handy when I start on the December work. Also happily, the next section of the school story took longer than I'd expected. I've still probably only another 2,000 words or so to get out of it, but it's a little less bleak than the first 1,700 words suggested.

What has been fun, though, is trying to establish the motivations of the characters. It seems virtually the entire cast is a shower of arseholes! But in that frail human's picking their way through moral mazes in the pursuit of a happiness that is all too fleeting kind of way. Also there's an enjoyable repeating patterns of behaviour thing happening, and that should help along the December machinations when I get to them.

And I've still not got to any of the sex yet!

NaNoWriMo - Day 3

2007-11-03T07:46:00.000Z

Well, I've not started on my day's output yet, but after a marathon day on Thursday and a coasting-along-quite-nicely-thank-you Friday I am at 8,217 words. Last year my approach was pretty much to scribble out 1,667 as best I could each day, with the occasional wobble and panicked catch up. This year, I'm basically trying to capture as much slack as I can going along, so I'll have room to maneuvre when the terrain gets trickier later on. My secondary target is to take the 30th off, but to have already finished by then.

The ultimate destination for what I'm writing is helping me a little in forming the structure of the story, and allowing me to not take too seriously the peculiar order in which I'm telling the tale. There is a distant past childhood memory section that I have no intention of starting on till I've got the dreadful part about love and betrayal out of the way. My worry is that I'm assuming the childhood section will stand up to the same level of scrutiny as the stuff I'm writing now and it may well not. Plenty of time to find more story to tell, though.

I've brought in a state-run cult for the "present day" vignettes, the challenge of which is to blur the lines between something we would recognise as a cult and something that is the feasible unintended outcome of a government drive. But that kind of problem solving is what NaNoWriMo is all about. Not it's not; it's about words.

I'm also having some fun taking the metaphorical ideas about jigsaws and coupling them up with the narrative, which helps a great deal in rationalising why the book is about a guy doing a jigsaw puzzle, beyond the structure alone. There are also some straggly bits that I want to include but I'm not quite sure yet what they're for. I worked for a day or two at a commercial espionage company as an audio typist. The job involved transcribing phone conversations between agents posing as clients and various people such as sales staff, or scientists, or whoever. I wasn't told that's what the company did, but it really could have been the only purpose of the recordings I worked on. I desperately want to give this job to George, my main character, and use it to crank up his paranoia a bit. Can't write about it too much here, though, because as we all know, you only get so many words a day to use, and I don't want to put them all in here. It's not true, but it does feel true.

I have uploaded the opening to Pieces to my NaNoWriMo profile. Please note that the first few sentences start with "And". I did this firstly to suggest that events happen prior to the start of the "action", which seems fitting for a story that is memory; secondly I did it to annoy English teachers the length and breadth of the nation (pretty big guys, some of those English teachers).

And on. And on.

NaNo Draws Smellable Near

2007-10-30T18:39:00.001Z

Well it's nearly here, and I wish it was already. I've been terribly naughty and scribbled down a few sketchy notes for Pieces, and have started to seek out the voice for the main character (it's always my voice, so I don't know why I'm bothering, really).

Last Saturday saw the London NaNoWriMo Kick-Off Meeting, which was a frightfully well-attended bacchanalia of ale, soft toys and fizzing creativity. I had forgotten how great it was to know that so many folk try for it every year. Even though, when one gets down to it, there isn't always a great deal of communication between participants, even at the write-ins, the fact that there are a bunch of crazies willing to put themselves through hell alongside you is wonderfully encouraging.

Another bit of prep what I have done is to dust off the Excel wordcount progress doohicky that I drew up last year. I've made it more flexible than 2007's strict 1,667 words a day model, and will be looking at adapting the daily targets to my social calendar as we go along. Get it here!

You can key in different wordcounts for each day, and the dates are automatically filled in following the first entry. You get a neat little spike on the graph showing you what today is. Always handy!

I shall hopefully be posting at the end of the first.

The Mouse Situation

2007-10-22T18:50:00.000+01:00

A quick update.

On Sunday, as we were sitting down and enjoying some bad telly, we heard one of the traps go. We have two plastic "humane" traps in the bed-sitting room. We had understood that by humane it meant that the traps in question killed quickly, rather than mame the wee beasties. However it became quickly apparent that the ensnared vermin was very much alive, as it's still-moving (oxymoron?) tail waved at me from the jaws of the device. As it transpires, the traps were even more humane than we had gathered, so off I trotted to the far entrance of a nearby park and released the critter, which made a dart for the long grass where it could no doubt nurse its injured pride.

I have just returned from a very very very hard day's work, dealing with ads that may or may not be for a dangerous brain-washing cult and a big old tonne of archiving to discover that two of the three inhumane traps, of the Warner Brothers BFO metal bar, mouse guts and poo everywhere variety, have been stripped of their seemingly irresistible bait of peanut butter and yummy chocolate spread, and remain very much unsprung. Pictures to follow.

Actually, following the successful relocation (one assumes) of one of the mice on Sunday, I've rather gone off the idea of killing them, and so the failure of the Little Nipper traps (yeah, nipped to fucking death!) has rather quickened my resolve to replace them with big blue perspex live capture varieties. I shall take this up with him indoors who, I suspect, will be very much of the same opinion. Just so long as I do the releasing.

WTF? No, actually WTF? Actually WTF? Actually WTF? Actually!

2007-10-22T09:47:00.000+01:00

I just sent myself an email to my work account from my hotmail account and this is what came through:

"You can't make an omelette
without breaking stride."

www.godsrudewireless.co.uk
www.hamiltonsbrain.co.uk

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do you know a place like the back of your hand? Share local knowledge with BackOfMyHand.com

Now I don't mind, given that hotmail is a free service and all, receiving adverts when I log on to use it. There's a quid pro quo going on which seems perfectly fair. However, to append spam to my outgoing emails seems a step too far. What agreement lies between the recipients of my emails and MicroSoft? Hm? I'm not wrong, am I? This is a deal breaker.

Damn You Technology!

2007-10-21T14:07:00.001+01:00

Every so often I call to mind some device or other that I would like to have. I call it to mind not from having seen it in a shop, or advertised in a magazine, but the assumption that something at such and such a price, with such and such a function ought to be feasible in this capitalism paradise in which we live.

So, having become fed up of the stupid, sound-leaking earbud headphones that came bundled with the horrifically badly designed Samsung E900, I sought out a teensy box with an audiojack on one side and a mobile phone cable on the other. Simple, thought I! Plug the box into the phone and then any old pair of headphones (such as the nice white RAB ones I got from work) and bob is very much your mother's brother. So off I trot to my grand-father's chest and bought me a box of the very very best. No of course not, because a device of such simplicity, that I would happily spend 10-15 pounds on does not exist. What does exist is the biggest pair of headphones in the world at the price of £199 that uses bluetooth. If I'm going to spend two hundred quid on a pair of headphones, I'd be pretty insistent on them being tethered to something, making their cablelessness very much a two-edged sword.

And now, with the calendar ticking away to the next NaNoWriMo I fancy that there must exist something in the £20 range that allows one to compose something akin to a txt file with a minimum of fuss - either with a stylus and touchscreen or a dinky qwerty keyboard that I could wrap my big sausagey fingers around - and then let me slot into a USB to transfer them across. This would allow me to write on the hoof without worrying about all the typing that might ensue. More to the point, when one is supposed to be writing and not editing, it is very difficult to take written work and type it up. Well, having beavered away at Kelkoo, Amazon, Play, FireBox et al, it would appear, again, that no such device exists. The Palm Zire comes close, but it is £30 which seems a lot to pay for what you're getting.

I suspect I shall have to try using dead trees and squid blood in its stead.

Precocious Advice for NaNoWriMo

2007-10-20T12:32:00.000+01:00

I thought I would go through what I felt I learnt last year, as much for my benefit as anyone else's.

1. Plan

Planning is a real necessity if you want something other than "just" 50,000 words by November 30th, but be careful. If we imagine a line, and at one end of the line is Slaughterhouse Five, and at the other end is, say "A man's concept of time is shattered and he revisits all his experiences in a jumble, from the bombing of Dresden to being abducted by aliens and kept in a zoo" at the other end, then that line becomes a kind of spectrum of planning from "idea" all the way through to "novel" (which is a kind of absolute plan, if you like) . The plan that you want at this stage is probably about a tenth of the way along from the idea. You want to keep it loose, little more than a structure with maybe some details for the opening and the finish. You will probably have some major plot points already, but for the plan you just need to know when in the 50k they happen.

2. Don't chain yourself to your plan

This seems like a contradiction to point 1 but it reallys isn't. Once you get your characters going you may find that you can't quite maneuvre them into position as easily as you'd like. It's at moments like these that you have to abandon aspects of the plan, or revise it. Sometimes you will find you have to set up the environment in which a character exists in order to get the response you need. All of this is much easier if you don't invest too heavily in the planning stage - that's why you want to keep the plan nearer the "idea" end of the spectrum. Thos plot points I mentioned earlier are best thought of not in terms of things happening, but as a set of effects that you wish to befall either your characters or your plot - keep the details loose, and think chiefly of what you need out of the plot point to get you to your big finalé.

3. Enjoy your characters

Seems obvious but you're going to be spending a good deal of time with these people, and you're counting on other people spending a good deal of time with them too, so even the bad guys have got to be the sort of bad guys it might be fun to hang out with.

4. Vignette Vignette Vignette

A down and dirty trick I pulled a couple of times in Bad Aji was to utilise cut scenes, picking up fairly minor characters and giving them a few hundred words or so on their own. This was mainly for cut-aways so I could hit the ground running on subsequent scenes, so very useful not just for the word count but for pace. I also tried to make sure that the vignettes bring something to the table - try and tell more of the central story through them.

5. Leave Work For Tomorrow

Not to be confused with procrastination, it is really really benefitial if you have something you can start tomorrow, which invariably means not finishing up a scene the night before, or it can just mean knowing what's coming next.

6. If you're bored, make a leap

I'm loathe to raise any qualitative points, because quality is something that happens in December, but some, like "enjoy the characters," have as much to do with making your writing journey pleasurable as with the quality of your first draft. From a critical point of view I would say that if you are bored writing it, people will be bored reading it, and as this is NaNoWriMo, this is where you should feel free to jazz things up a little. At a lull in Bad Aji I decided to strip a couple of the main characters, pretty much just because I could (though it helped tie the two of them together) (not literally). Sudden events, twists or turns are a great way of catching your second or third wind and can often take your plotting into whole new territories that you never knew existed. Which brings us to...

7. Develop themes along the way

Bad Aji started out with the idea that someone who believed themselves to be a temp going from job to job was actually working the same job over and over again, but had their memory tinkered with every couple of months. The title and the key aspect of the novel, the influence that dead characters have over the living, all arose along the way. If you can discover themes in your writing and emphasise them as you go along, it will give you further sources of inspiration, and better tools with which to solve problems and make decisions about your writing.

8. Grab everything you can from life even if it is nailed down

All writing is autobiographical, which is not to say that C S Lewis ever went to Narnia, but that we can only write about what we know about (which sometimes means finding out about what we want to write about). Whereas lifting characters and events wholesale from real life carries with it dangers (but smoke 'em if you got 'em), do not be afraid of taking the beefsteak of reality, mincing it up, and coming up with some tasty burgers. Although time is short try to embrace the experiences and events that have taken place in your life recently or are scheduled for November. Bad Aji's showdown at the Tate Modern was there because I'd visited the gallery and was taken with the slides that were installed at the time. Stoole's trip to Marlow was more or less my own (my school, thankfully, had existed after all).

9. The epilogue - Productive cheating

I realised with a few days to go that I was going to run out of story before I hit 50,000, which would have been a better realisation to have had on the tenth, say, than with the finishing line in sight. I had two choices, which was to fill before I got to the showdown (and ruin the chase that had been set up) or to cheat and come up with an epilogue. I chose the latter, which led to one of my favourite sections from Bad Aji, and allowed me to give my central character some kind of resolution after his tragic demise. It can be useful to pull characters temporarily out of the narrative and give them some headspace for them to make the big decisions.

10. Don't be led by round numbers

Or any kind of structure or order that doesn't spring organically from what you are writing. I've seen people ask things like "how many chapters should I write" but if you're going to write 50,000 words, then the number of chapters oughtn't be a factor. You've got your story, let that be your guide.

11. Narrative can be vertical as well as horizontal

If you're running out of story, don't just think in terms of lengthening the plot; try bunging in a subplot or two. It sounds really obvious but if you send some characters off to do some business, either aiding the central narrative or as an aside, then you get more words out of it with little replotting. And with business happening away from the main action, you'll have more cutting points to choose from which ought to help you get round the stuff you don't want or need to write about.

Signs & Portents

2007-10-18T22:29:00.000+01:00

I'm not overly superstitious. I believe coincidences are just coincidences; but I also believe that much of our intelligence is based around trying to discover or otherwise work out correlations between the various chaotic events that surround us. To that end, I can explain away coincidence quite merrily with probability, yet still enjoy the visceral thrill of noticing them when they crop up.

So I was thrilled when I got my fairly unexpected stickies through from NaNoWriMo in exchange for services rendered. This year's novel will focus on a central character doing a jigsaw puzzle (for 50,000 words! Crazy!) and lo did the thank you postcard feature a design involving a jigsaw puzzle piece! This in the same week that an old story of mine caught up with me. The good lady husband and I have a mouse-shaped visitor and have laid down traps, which is at slight odds with my hilarious "don't kill anything, but continue to condone the killing of animals by buying rather large quantities of dead flesh once a week, which is fine really because at the end of the day the planet wouldn't be able to support a vegetarian humanity so really what should concern us is the manner in which the animals are bred, raised and, ultimately dispatched, so take that evangelical vegetarian; your moral highground is a luxury my sausage guzzling pays for" position.

Um...

That's all I have, really.

Adjusting My Jacket Tails

2007-10-12T20:58:00.000+01:00

I'm still not thinking of elephants.

I've waved NaNoWriMo about a bit amongst friends and forum buddies, and managed to convince a few to have a stab at it, which will help me immensely with my own work.

Also, the plot of the novel is beginning to emerge out of the mists of my unthink. I'm torn between writing in the first or third person. The story involves someone sitting in small apartment doing a jigsaw puzzle, while ruminating about his distant past, a less distant Terrible Thing, recent developments, his world view, and his immediate situation. Because of the focus on a single character, I feel a first person narrator would be more appropriate, but I don't want the character to be an open book. Also I need to write 50,000 words in a month, and I feel a third person narrator would allow for the inclusion of things that I wouldn't be able to bother with in the first person. But then there's a lot of reminiscence that I don't want to broach by a spray of harp strings and the picture going all misty. I did have the idea of fudging it and have the third person narrator be revealed as the central character talking about himself in the first person which would be a great deal of fun, but might be too distracting considering what the December dissection will be about and what little I have of a plot doesn't quite go with it somehow. If I were to use the device, it would have to be in a story where the revelation actually meant something. I think the first person narrator is getting the upperhand...

As to the plot, it seems to be evolving into a confrontation of guilt, with lots of ambiguity thrown in, and malevolent darkness burning the edges of the paper. One of the other things I want to do, which I did to some extent last year, is weave in the current events of November (in various scales) into the story. The realtime of the novel takes place at the end of November, with immediate reminiscences taking place throughout the month, and leading up to the end. There's a fair amount of unreality that's likely to occur, though, so the November events might fall by the wayside. What has also been interesting is the way in which this new rendering of Pieces is comparing to what I had of the original. I'm totally starting from scratch in terms of set-up and story-line, but there are distinct thematic links which I'm sure can only be a good thing.

Oh, and I have my ending, but I'm not sure what it means or how I'll get there. Should be fun finding out though.

Also, I have just this second decided to write a couple of 1,667 word stories, just to remind myself of what I'm letting myself in for. Nothing too strenuous, though - just a couple of stretches at the starting line.

The Railton Turnaround

2007-10-09T16:28:00.000+01:00

Prompted by a post over at Fallen Angel and while I have some free time during my slow recovery from a zombified state, I would like to let you in on an anthropological wonder that I have discovered and have dubbed the Railton Turnaround after the road on which I observe it.

The Railton Turnaround is one of the many many pedestrial faux pas that one encounters on a regular basis, and can be added to such delights as the escalator bearing loss (whereby the ped alights from the moving staircase but fails to move away from the immediate area) the short-sighted eleventh hour navigator (who stops right in front of the underground station lists for about a minute before then moving toward the platform they need) and the Indiana Jones (those who board an underground train by getting the absolute minimum distance inside the carriage, thus blocking the entrance for the two-hundred or so commuters directly behind them). The Railton turnaround is peculiar inasmuch as it is perhaps the most irritating pattern of behaviour to take place that is not directly attached to public transport. I can think only of the Psychic Meander (whereby a slow walker will meander into the path of an overtaking walkeri) as matching it for annoyance.

1) The first phase of the Railton turnaround involves adopting a stationery position. This can either be a brief cessation in walking or alternatively begin from a position that the ped has occupied for some time.

2) The ped then stares into the middle distance in one direction only. They may feel this phase benefits from raising themselves to their full height, possibly even tilting their head back to maximise the eye-level. This added fluorish is entirely optional, however the scoping out of a single direction is paramount.

3) By the third phase the ped is now fully comitted to making the turnaround, and must make the complex move that is at the heart of the action. The ped must, while still staring into the middle distance, take one step backwards, transfer their weight onto this leading foot, then in one move turn in the opposite direction to that in which they have been staring and, to complete the gesture, push off from the leading foot as if to adopt a brisk walking pace.

If the Railton Turnaround has been successfully employed then there will have been no warning to oncoming pedestrians that the move was about to take place and the "turner" will have collided, hopefully with some force, with someone in the process of walking past them. Seasoned turners will be well used to picking out the most viable spots along a pavement in which to make the maneuvre. This correspondent recommends areas heavily populated with unlicensed street furniture, or starting points parallel with streetlamps or bollards. Psychic meanderers are particularly adept at the maneuver and a team local to South London is already campaigning for it to be considered a host discipline in the 2012 Olympics.

i I should point out that the only time James Randi has had to give away his million dollars to someone capable of proving paranormal abilities it was to just such a meanderer, a rather flamboyant homosexual by the name of Red "Hots" Fletcher. "An extraordinary claim," Randi commented at the time, "calls for an extraordinary poof."

Not Thinking Of Elephants

2007-10-08T12:53:00.000+01:00

NaNoWriMo is approaching and perhaps against my better judgement I am deciding to give it another go. I hadn't intended to, but having begun the Night Store project I feel that setting out 50,000 words at the hurry up might enable me to get some meat for the novel proper. Night Store will be constrained as anything, but the NaNoWriMo will be brash and jazzy. The trouble is, I'm intent on keepting true to the NaNoWriMo ideal of not thinking about what I shall write before the first of November. Last year I was blessed in only finding out about it at the start of the month anyway; this year I am caught. It is testament to my laziness that I can do quite a substantial amount of work on ideas in my head without committing anything to paper - running through scenes, plotting and whatnot. The facility is troubling in that I find I can't not think about what I intend to do. I shall try and be strong.

As a further encouragement for the NaNoWriMo it will be my intention to use it to complete Pieces, or at the very least to replace Pieces with another semi-random ordered story. Too much of Hamilton's Brain is given over to the abandoned and half finished, so it will be nice to get to the end of November with the bulk of a text that I can then polish up into something shiny for the homepage.

I have bullied Daniel into joining me for the adventure, and intend taking the first (and probably the thirtieth) off for a big old typing jamboree. 2006 saw me attempting the actually quite excruciating 1,667 words a day approach. This year I shall go for the initial blitz, regroup, recalculate and attack method, which could be a lot more fun.

More later.

Four and a half to go...

2007-10-01T08:01:00.001+01:00

Four and a half to go...
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott

Makin' skulls....

Fringe Guide

2007-06-09T22:14:00.000+01:00

Ian and I are beginning to sort out which shows we're going to see, which involves trawling through the rather large guide to see what's on when we're there, and which of these interest us enough to give up the time and the money. No Spy Monkey in evidence, sadly. Their Cooped in 2001 was one of the highlights. If you've ever taken on the festival before you'll know it's a mammoth task to decide what to see from the hundreds of possibilities. In order to make it easier for myself, I employed the following filter:

no animal whimsy
nothing that describes itself as surreal (what's that? A play about a squirrel obstetrician? And it's surreal you say?)
nothing that describes itself as Pythonesque (it's not for you to say!)
nothing that describes itself as dark (Oooo! Daaaaaark! Look! A dead baby! One of its eyes is gone! Ew!)
nothing that offers free food (why? Will critics say, "well the dialogue was ropey, but the cakes were moist"?)

One of the other issues with the festival is the fact that you will have your choice of two or three productions of the same play. This is usually okay, because the plays in question will be given a unique twist - Hamlet's a car, Romeo and Julian, etc. etc. So our hearts go out to the two productions of The Odd Couple playing this year, both employing the unique (eek!) twist of being female versions.

There haven't been any really easy sells this year, but that will hopefully mean we will have a more experimental take on what we do go along to. I've a hankering for gore and nudity for no readily apparent reason. Oh, and sadly we won't be there for Mark Watson's twenty-four hour show, which is rumoured to be his last. Poo and, very much, bum. Ought to be checking out his shorter set though, along with the usual - Lee, Herring, Kitson, Long, Dembina, etc etc. Spreadsheet depending, of course.

Edingburrow Here We Come

2007-06-07T20:53:00.000+01:00

Well, we've just booked our tickets to Edinburgh for the 2007 Fringe Festival, which means I now actually feel like we're going! We should get the programme through tomorrow, so can start on our itinerary. Ian and I are favouring the use of multi-attribute utility theory. Jobs that require spreadsheets are the best!

Dang!

2007-05-31T07:45:00.000+01:00

Well, I didn't manage to keep up with the photos. I found myself scrabbling around for ideas for self-portraits, and just didn't have enough of them to stay interested. I may sit down and plan something more elaborate and guiding and make the attempt in 2008. Or I may not.

Also, in a rash attempt at kickstarting my writing for the nth time, I attempted to write another 50,000 words in May. This too fell by the wayside, as I couldn't really fathom out a plot that connected the odd scraps of character and event that I initially came up with. That said, such scribbling holds interest. The stuff that I did write has the feel of an artist's sketchbook, and there is meat in there worth salvaging.

And lo my blog too goes unloved and uncared for. I must try harder!

Last night I met up with James from off of my old writing circle in Canterbury Waterstone's. He's doing rather well for himself, and is as encouraging as ever, which is probably why I am typing right now. We talked muchly about works in progress and the like (though mine are in the 'but can I be arsed' category and his are 'I got a call from the producer' flavoured, hem-hem) and from the back of that I've decided to do what I was supposed to do to Bad Aji, my NaNoWriMo, which is to work it up into something better, stronger, and all together more bionic.

As Daniel said to me only the other day, I clearly need a project.

Oh, and this thread what I started on the QI forum is joyfully distracting.

366 Days - 002

2007-03-19T19:56:00.001Z

366 Days - 002
Originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Oh, and here's picture number two. Thrilling!

Remember Me?

2007-03-19T19:13:00.000Z

It's been a while, hasn't it. But much news!

I've recently found permanent employ, bringing a return to Edinburgh that little bit closer. I've also decided, perhaps foolishly, to take a self-portrait every day for my 23rd year.

Oh, and I've decided to start memorising things, and to return to a pursuit from my childhood, namely prestidigitation. It's what having nieces does to one. I'm working through Royal Road To Card Magic, Expert Card Technique, and a variety of other sources such as the wonderful work of Peter Duffie.

As for memorisation, I decided last night to memorise the top 73 of the 100 Greatest Stand-Ups show on Channel 4. The joy here is that you can do it while you watch the show, and once it's in, it's in. Of course, such knowledge is fantastically pointless, but the exercise is good. Imagine that! A use for list shows!

End the Madness of Free Banking

2006-11-15T09:46:00.000Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6148776.stm

First Direct, the branchless bank, is going to start charging a monthly fee of £10 to some of its customers.

The fee will apply to those paying less than £1,500 into their account each month or those who have an average monthly balance below £1,500.

The bank say that this is so that only customers with dormant accounts will be targetted. Meaning that they are charging £10 a month only to those low maintenace customers who presumably don't use up as much in the way of resources, which then serves to subsidise those that do.

This is being touted by consumer groups as a first step towards an end to free banking, a football that the banking community kick around with relish from time to time. But banks are supposed to make money by using the money that we bank with them, giving us a small amount of interest and keeping the rest. The other source, natch, is debt, hence first direct waiving the £10/month fee for customers who take out loans, or (I suspect) have overdrafts. The banks are in profit, so why the need for a pay banking service? First Direct tell us that it is so they can focus their attentions on their more important customers. Yeah.

Recently the banks raised the idea of introducing charges for the use of ATMs. This, they said, was necessary to cover the costs of ATMs. But ATMs are there to replace bank tellers. Clues in the name, children. The introduction of ATMs saved money, and because of the flawed way in which they work, they also encourage debt, as anyone who has gone over their overdraft limit following an incorrect balance statement will testify. If they do start charging, people will start queueing up for the humans, and then in ten years time the banks will probably start considering charges for peak times (like, y'know, lunchtime) for the extra staff they will have to take on to make up for the drop in ATM use. Lookin' busy, makin' money...

An end to free banking would be unethical for a further reason, and that is that there is now no real alternative to having a bank account. The powers that be have slowly made it more and more difficult to live without one, citing their usual list of bogeymen (benefit fraudsters, tax evaders, etc.) as a reason. So soon, every life will come with a £93 surcharge + extras (for the NIR) and a further £10/month fee from the age of 16 for the rest of your life.

Grr, and, needless to say, arg.

NaNoWriMo - Day 14

2006-11-14T15:44:00.000Z

Well, so far, so good, or should I perhaps say so far, so many words. Over 20,000 of them now! It's been quite an education developing the plot as I've progressed, and although it perhaps doesn't stand as good writing, I've found the challenge of creating filler (for the pacing, you understand, not for the word count!) an enlightening experience. Being forced to do something with the extraneous characters has meant giving them more of a share of the plot, and a hand in the overall dynamic of the story that otherwise wouldn't be there.

I've yet to do any revisions, but for when I do, I have made the quite arbitrary rule of forbidding myself cutting anything unless I am replacing it with something else.

I'm having a (thoroughly English, not at all graphic) sex scene at the midway point by way of celebration, and am off to a gathering of fellow NaNoWriMoists in Leicester Square on Saturday.

Sausage tribar - a first attempt.

2006-11-05T00:42:00.000Z

Sausage tribar - a first attempt.,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

As part of my ongoing contribution to the 1,720 uses for sausages thread on the QI forum, I decided to try and create an impossible tribar out of sausages. This is attempt number one. I'm going to have another stab at it on Monday, this time using one and a half sossies.

Count Me In

2006-11-02T08:04:00.000Z

So I was on the Idler forum yesterday and someone mentioned the National Novel Writing Month in America, and an annual event where people sign up to a writing marathon to produce 50,000 words of novel between the 1st November and the 30th.

I'm far too busy, of course, but this works out at 1,500 words a day, which takes me about an hour or so to do. So what the hell. I've often said that one of the biggest barriers to my writing is that I hate sitting at the keyboard turning out crap. This is one of the (many) reasons why I don't write very much, and the main reason why I tend not to do perhaps as much editing as I ought to. The challenge of churning out 50k over thirty days will, I hope, lead to a slightly less precious attitude to my output, and it'll also bring those high numbers within an achievable reach. So, yes, basically, I'm doing it.

I've set down certain strategies, basing the central character to some extent on myself (he's a temp in London) , and using the various pursuits I followed on my week between assignments to populate the plot. Added to that will be a Dickian strangeness that is the main guts of the novel, but I've not quite worked out what that's all about yet, which is part of the fun.

I'm 1550 words into it so far, and hope to build up a decent amount of slack in the next couple of days so that I can spend some time editing what I've done and working out a bit more of the plot. The story is going to be some sort of conspiracy type affair, but with the emphasis on big Government as a self-serving meta-consciousness. I've also arbitrarily made the decision for each day's writing to mirror palindromically, so in the first 1550 words, for instance, there features the word balloon, and so a balloon will appear in the closing 1550 words.

It will also be people with characters that are named after my various online chums. If that's you, ask me for inclusion.

So much for Reid then...

2006-09-18T08:07:00.000+01:00

John Reid, who began his job as home secretary stating the department was unfit for purpose, and began working on its administration rather than looking at the various scary new powers and duties previously pushed for, now wants to close "legal loopholes" in order to prevent safe verdicts being quashed on technicalities. A good idea in principle, but the BBC helpfully listed a few such loopholes thusly:

"Common examples of so-called loopholes include the police failing to properly read suspects their rights, or searching homes with out-of-date warrants."

So the "loopholes" are actually not loopholes at all, but the police (and therefore the home office) not doing their jobs properly. I once met a defense lawyer who revelled in getting people off the hook due to technicalities. I asked him if that wasn't morally dubious, but his reply was that the police have rules and procedures and they have them for a reason. He viewed his actions as a means of punishing the police for not obeying those rules and procedures, and of course if the police are punished for such misdemeanours, then they will get the message that they must try harder. It's the importance of clear feedback, folks!

What is more worrying about Reid's sudden change in tactic is that he is beginning to adopt too familiar NuLabor rhetoric - the same meaingless claim that he wants to "rebalance criminal justice in favour of victims". This was last trotted out when Safety Elephant wanted to remove the rights of wrongfully imprisoned folk from receiving compensation if they have their convictions overturned with their first appeal. Clarke came very close to suggesting that somehow the wrongly convicted were a) not victims and b) were criminal regardless of their acquittal. All this to cut a piss-poor £5 million a year, which one commentator noted wouldn't cover the subsidies for the House of Commons bars.

Again the issue seems to be a binary one - either we have to have our rights read to us or we don't; either police have to obtain a search warrant or they don't. You can't legislate to cover over the police's incompetence without removing from the police the obligation to observe the rights of the citizens it is supposed to be protecting and serving. To suggest that you can is to suggest that the law should operate on a fuzzy case-by-case nature, and that ultimately we cannot know beforehand our rights, or in what way the law actually applies to us. Say bye-bye to that feedback, folks!

This is the latest in a long line of modest proposals (The NIR, the children's index, vehicle tracking, carbon rationing...) that thinly veil NL's determination to create a controlling all powerful Big Government. And where does it get us? Billions of pounds in overspend on schemes that, though easy to fit into a sentence, cost a fortune to even come close to implimentation and usually come unstuck as soon as NL encounter something they hadn't thought of. Which brings us back to Charles Clarke's rebalancing of criminal justice away from victims of injustice. Now people who are acquitted after their first appeal receive no compensation, irrespective of the length of time they have spent in chokey, and have no alternative but to sue the Government, thus costing the Home Office much more than £5 million a year.

Spread The Word

2006-09-17T19:50:00.000+01:00

Who do you think you are? A benefit for NO2ID. Featuring,

Dara O'Briain (Host of Mock the Week and Have I got News For You)
Paul Sinha (Perrier nominee 2006)
Josie Long (Perrier best newcomer 2006)
Kevin Eldon
Lucy Porter
Wil Hodgson (Perrier best newcomer 2004)
Gary Le Strange (Perrier best newcomner 2003)
Andrew O'Neill
Ben Norris

with MC Daniel Kitson

Book tickets here: www.hackneyempire.co.uk

Nuff said.

Huh?

2006-09-17T08:08:00.000+01:00

Ex-Fish Coach Is Terror Suspect,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

On our weekly shop on Saturday we came across the following splash. Frequently the Southwark News splashes fail to make any kind of sense to me. Did the coach used to be a fish? Does he coach things that used to be fish? I suspect he is the ex-coach of fish, but that doesn't get me much further. Is this something to do with sport? Usually if I can't understand it it's sport. I wouldn't know the off-side rule from a rule forbidding a player to score a goal when there are no players of the opposing team between him and the goal save the keeper.

I also like the way Southwark News always seems to try and punch above its weight, with the splashes getting closer and closer to those of the Evening Standard. I'll try and get more of these in future.

I knew one day my prints would come

2006-09-08T17:30:00.001+01:00

I got my 20 complimentary prints through from Truprint. So strange to see pictures that have only ever existed on monitors transferred to little squares of card.

I knew one day my prints will come

2006-09-08T17:30:00.000+01:00

I got my 20 complimentary prints through from Truprint. So strange to see pictures that have only ever existed on monitors transferred to little squares of card.

Martin Scott-Tumbling

2006-09-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

What once was a Resonance Open Spot is now being brought to animated glory by Joseph Champniss. A clutch of good people can be found here:

The Lonely Traveller

Plus Ce Change

2006-09-07T10:24:00.000+01:00

So recently I renewed my passport, thus avoiding being incorporated into NuLabor's stasi database 'til long after it has collapsed under its own weight and crushing uselessness.

But UKIPS like to save money on their forms. It's probably small potatoes but if they put the price of passports on all their documentation then every time they increase the price of renewal (which will effectively be £93 or more by the time the windscreen scrapers start being issued) they have to ensure that all outstanding forms have been removed from circulation, and that they have been reprinted with the new prices on. To save all that hassle they place the cost of renewal on a single sheet of paper. I lost mine, but if memory served it was about an inch across and written in pencil on that old fashioned kind of toilet paper you used to get in pads.

As my mother will tell you, I had spent an age getting round to my passport renewal so when I finally got my fearful symmetry committed to photographic paper in the biometrics stylee, I was rather keen to just get on with it and get the thing in the post. But how much was it? Being unable to find the tiny bit of paper (come to think of it, I cut myself shaving not long before, and may have used it to quell the bloodflow) I had to take a best guess, and used a figure that I had hastily scrawled on the "where the money goes" handout. And not long after I bundled the whole thing in the post, I received a letter telling me they had received the application. Then a letter telling me that I had sent them too much money, and that I would receive a cheque for the outstanding amount in a few weeks' time. Then I got my old passport back with the corner cut off. Then I got my new passport. Then I got the cheque, for the princely sum of £1.30. I've not paid it in yet...

Also, I noted that on my new passport (biometric chip included) you cannot see the colour of my eyes. What is more, for all the lipservice paid to biometrics, one's eye colour isn't recorded on the passport.

You can't always choose your supporters...

2006-09-05T14:22:00.000+01:00

The BBC News website is currently running a have your say on whether or not Tony Blair (the Prime Minster) should go. One of the comments runs thus:

I'd rather he didn't quit, he is the best Prime Minister we have had this century and his successor will have some big shoes to fill so can only be a
disappointment.

Which century?

What People Want - c/o Google Analytics

2006-08-20T00:23:00.000+01:00

The following are search terms that have led people to Hamilton's Brain lately:

signs,+shyamalan,+"owen+meany",+interview
correct+way+to+iron+a+shirt
kirsty wark
late review germaine greer tom paulin famous spat
knots for gents ties
hamlet perec lipogram
perec neologisms
hair traps for bath
parrot kisi words hoax
did bob holness play on baker street ?
how far from the ground will a tree grow that has had initials carved into it
hgttg sunglasses
n kisi
definition meercats
meercats sex
picture of meercats
double winsor knot
making traps in room
tie winsor knot
compulsory id for "it professionals" united kingdom

Adez Memoire

2006-08-11T19:38:00.000+01:00

Discontinued Adez,
originally uploaded by SquidyUK.

According to Squidy, of internet fame, the nutritious, delicious blend of soya milk and exotic fruit juices that goes by the unfortunate name of Adez has been discontinued. Is it due to the public's reluctance to consider juice plus milk being a good combination, or is it because it sounds a bit like AIDS?

Perhaps we will never know.

Don't forget the fire blanket on Jiff lemon day

2006-08-06T00:42:00.000+01:00

Do you ever get that thing where, just as you've done something you really shouldn't do, a little mental flash will take place telling you you've just done something you really shouldn't have, and always once it's too late. Like tell a friend yes it is okay to put bubble bath in a Jacuzzi. Or...

By some error at the butchers we ended up with a stray chicken breast, which has been merrily solidified in the ice compartment of our Frigidair until today when I had to fend for myself, what with Ian off at a family tandoori. I decided to "be creative" with the lone chicken tit, and so thoroughly thawed it, and fried it in some heavily peppered oil. And as it sizzled away I thought to myself, "what's nicer than peppered chicken? Why, lemon pepper chicken of course!" So off I went back to the Frigidair where I retrieved a bottle of Jif Lemon Juice. And as I stood over the sizzling, pepper strewn corn oil I thought not a jot about the consequences of introducing an acid fruit juice to the mix. Only after the third stroke of the bottle did, all of a sudden, a mental image of Neil Morrisey pop into my head...

"Here's a tip for the lads. If you add lemon juice to hot oil, it makes it go on fire. It's a great way to impress the chicks. Wanna buy a shed?"

And lo did my eyes widen. And lo did the pan go on fire. As I quietly shat myself, and Englishly worried at how embarrassed I would be around the landlady should the house burn down, I withdrew the flaming pan from the heat and shook it a bit, like they do on the telly. And miraculously the fire subsided, no doubt as a result of the lemon juice burning itself out, rather than my Antony Worrall Thompson shamblings. Smoked out the kitchen, but so lightly that it failed to set off the smoke alarm.

A lesson learned. And it tasted good, too. But not of lemons.

Daniel Kitson's C90 at Riverside Studios

2006-07-30T10:21:00.000+01:00

Daniel Kitson - C90,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Daniel Kitson has been warming up his new story show at Riverside Studios. An idea tangential to one of his Stories For The Wobbly Hearted, and possibly influenced by Poliakoff's Shooting The Past, features a man working in an archive devoted to compilation tapes, who on his last day receives a tape of his own that moves him so much he attempts to discover who sent it.

Kitson has been keen to make his work more theatrical, and this seems most explicitly realised in the set on which he tells this extended story. The office is realised with a large shelving unit and one of those sliding ladders you get in libraries, or more correctly films about libraries. Added to that is the main character's desk, and a few boxes of discarded tapes. When the action went beyond the office, Kitson moved upstage.

The story itself makes a claim for the importance of normal people, punishing characters that might be familiar to us from Kitson's stand-up as his pet hates, and offering hope and joy to the characters that he evidently genuinely cares about. And there are jokes too. Some have criticised the premise of the show - why is there an archive of compilation tapes? What is it for? - but that doesn't matter - its existence is a foundation to the story, and not only gives an excuse for the slow revelation of the second character, Milly, but also realises the dark background of the tale, that of a cruel and humiliating world that will readily chew people up and spit them out. The beauty of the characters Kitson has created is that they are willing to make sure that doesn't happen.

Simon Munnery & Simon Amstell at the BAC

2006-07-30T10:20:00.000+01:00

Simon Munnery at the BAC,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Ian, Alex and I repaired to the Battersea Arts Centre to take in a couple of the Edinburgh warm-ups that are currently being performed. Munnery, of Alan Parker and League Against Tedium fame, played out various new pieces he has been working on including an examination of a 60s childrens book on soldiery that forgets to mention death. Munnery ultimately ran over, so we all reconvened in the bar where he read from his book How To Live which the grafitti artist Banksy had published.

Next up was Simon Amstell, who rather than flinging himself headlong into another show once he had finished his Popworld tenure, instead seems to have booked himself into a colossal number of gigs, almost as though he's more interested in mastering the craft than he is at using his celebrity status to take a short-cut to the glittering prizes.

Slightly odd moment when he pinched someone's fan because it was bothering him, but then it's a tough call. Does he allow himself to be bothered and give a below par performance?
About half of the set was stuff that I'd seen previously, but was well polished and worked into the new stuff. He picked out a particular girl in the audience, the drunk blonde that seems to be ubiquitous in comedy gigs these days, and kept returning to her, either by his own choice or to counter her interjections. Yet his set still ran short, so how far shorter it would run when he is spared the drunk blonde is hard to say; I suppose it depends on how far he manages to orchestrate that happening each night.

But length aside it was an enjoyable set. Amstell's in an odd position in that he's not that famous, but he has moved in circles with people more famous than he is (he was invited to Elton John's wedding having never met the man), and a fair amount of his material seemed to be informed by that peculiar viewpoint. His star is on the ascendance though; he will be taking over the hosting of Never Mind The Buzzcocks next series, which may even be reason enough to start watching it again.

Thus I Win

2006-07-25T12:46:00.000+01:00

Just when I thought we'd never hear of them again, the Red Mercury 3 were acquitted today!

These were the three guys who Screws Of The World had set up via their fake Sheikh in a deal for the non-existent material Red Mercury. By the sound of it, Mahmood even arranged for a fake buyer to get involved with the three of them, so that they'd be more likely to bite. So we have a fake seller selling a non-existent material to three suckers so they could sell it on to a fake buyer. I'm frankly amazed it ever went to court.

And whatever the three men were willing to pay for red mercury (£500,000), and whoever they had agreed to sell it onto, they could have reaped rewards financial, celebrated and scientific by handing the mythical substance over to the authorities.

Much police time and court time that could have been spent, I don't know, investigating and trying real terrorists, with real bombs, rather than stooges only suckered in to sell newspapers to the easily alarmed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5176522.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5176382.stm

Screen Burn

2006-07-25T05:53:00.000+01:00

Monitor Burn Out,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

So the old monitor finally died yesterday. It had been playing up for a while, so I was kind of expecting it. Just to be sure it was the monitor and not the 'puter, I took the casing off and found this wonderful scorched patch on one of the PCBs. I managed to get another one at lunchtime, and shed my own weight in water dragging it home.

A can of Fosters and a nice sit down later and the new monitor was in place. It's a much nicer screen which takes up less space without losing any screen inches. The old monitor was never all that great, with the top of the screen darkening out to nothing and the whole thing needing a bit of a gamma boost in order to see anything. I ought to be able to work out what I'm doing with my photos now, rather than get them as good as I can, then seeing them on another monitor and wincing.

That Mitchell & Webb Look

2006-07-16T01:05:00.000+01:00

Lyndsay On Set,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Friday saw us off to watch bits for The Mitchell & Webb Look being filmed. We've been keen on M&W for some time, both on radio, in Peep Show, and the Mitchell & Webb Situation, a much earlier TV sketch show they did which no-one else appears to like. Bruiser sucked a BDC though.

The boys did the snooker commentators, which was pleasing for me as I'd been worried how these sketches would translate to the visual. Would we see snooker footage with the commentary over the top, or would be see the commentators themselves and lose the anonymity of the characters. The latter option was plumped for, with a certain amount of additional business thrown in, some practical burgers (masterful mayonnaise work from Mitchell) and a home-brew kit.

Filmed inserts included the pelican crossing sketch, a favourite from the second warm-up we went to, and the "aristocratic people who are still unaccountably..." in this case working in a clothing store. Mitchell does the insensed posh bloke slightly too well. He might be Hitler.

There were new bits, too, including a wonderfully sinister series of sketches about the earliest TV broadcasts, the concept being that they literally had no idea how to do television to begin with. The massive ear-pieces, cultish applause cues and the naming of television as "the endlessness" gave the sketches a nightmarish David Foster Wallace quality.

And the lovely Lyndsay, to whom I am a sort of surrogate dirty cousin, has been working on the series, gadding about in abandoned wings of hospitals and the like. She's in vision on a couple of the "behind the scenes" skits too, which is nice.

Oh and it was David Mitchell's birthday. And Australian woman Julia Morris was the warm-up. When she announced early on that she'd been in the UK for six years, an audience member piped up with a disgruntled "we know" which was funnier than the rest of her material. Ah well, at least she didn't break the cardinal rule of being funnier than the main talent.

AdeZ, pronounced...

2006-07-12T14:14:00.000+01:00

Whilst tubing into work this morning I saw an advert for a fruit juice and soya based health drink called AdeZ. That's AdeZ. Now, I don't know about you, but when I see a word like that, I assume the Z is taking the place of a pluralising S, and when I see the word Ade I pronounce it... well... Ade. Thus the drink in question, on first sight, seems to be called Adez pronounced aids. I sat staring at the ad and finally decided that the drink is probably called Ay Duh Zed, or worse still Ay Duh Zee, but if you're skirting that close to the edge of a different pronunciation of negative connotation you really don't want to come up with a name for your drink that requires a fact sheet on how to say it properly.

As my mother would no doubt say "someone got paid for coming up with that."

ID Cards On The Ropes

2006-07-10T10:43:00.000+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5164270.stm

I rub my hands with glee.

"...nothing to do with Iraq."

2006-07-06T16:31:00.000+01:00

A line the Government is going to find harder to maintain, I think.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5154714.stm

Writing: A Great Way Of Finding Other Things To Do

2006-07-03T08:09:00.000+01:00

I met up with David Miller yesterday in the swelter of the city to discuss our colabo. What began as a screenplay has become a stage play, which has actually led to massive leaps in our telling the story. I still, mercenery that I am, want to develop it as a screenplay too, but so much has come out of having to get the story out of three actors that we're well on our way to drafting a first script. Constraints free us.

What is more, I'm beginning to feel comfortable with writing the story. The play is historical, but the documentary evidence on which it sits is scant. This, too, should free us, but instead it stops the ink in the pen. Everything I dared write could easily turn out to be embarrassingly wrong, so I try in vain to come up with more information, and the project's fruition disappears over the horizon. Somehow, though, the stage production has made it easier to get across the notion that this is just a version of history, that it might not be accurate.

The real joy came, though, in writing out a dialogue that is supposed to be the centrepoint of the play, an uneasy agreement between the two lead characters. This bit had always remained a little baffling to me. But somehow in actually writing out a conversation between them, a solution has presented itself.

I also managed to get the ending I wanted sorted out. It will doubtless be revised a hundred times but what I wanted said is sayable, and I'm always much happier once an ending is in place.

We've drawn up a series of scenes that we want to include, so we shall start scripting those in turn, and see what bridging is needed, and how much of what we think we need we really do need. I really feel we've made a breakthrough, which is hugely encouraging!

For Weeks The Fields Were In A State Of Shock

2006-06-27T12:23:00.000+01:00

I managed to do a fair amount of noodlin' and adoodlin' last night on the Everbury cycle. No details so far, but I'm beginning to get a better idea of how the thing will come into being. I had a few moments of "flow" which is always welcome. Nothing builds the confidence like spurting out a load of words that you're automatically happy with- especially when you make the leap from notes to prose. It's a weakness of mine, however, that I really take it badly when what I write is crap. I'm dependent on my "channeling" mode...

Everbury's going to be a series of stand alone stories that are bridged by the continuing narrative of a film director who is attempting to script out a film about the Everbury event. He talks to various people about the event, so we get vox pops and interviews. We also get sketches and ideas from him as he works towards developing sequences for the film. He may crop up from time to time in other people's stories too. I've not decided yet. Part of me would like to have the stand alone stories taking place after increasing passages of time (2 years, 4 years, 8, 16...), but that might be a different set of stories.

I'm cheating a little in basing Everbury on Canterbury, which allows me to lift wholesale aspects of the city's history, local culture, and economy. It's interesting though because as I research into all that I'm getting a view of Canterbury that I didn't have before. Everbury will have to take a conscious departure from Canterbury, though, in part to keep the reality cohesive and also for a couple of gags I might want to pull when the director starts finding out about me.

I finished reading Black Swan Green last night (which disturbingly contained one of my jokes - "Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet" "Yeah? Well I've not met the Yorkshire Ripper..." I shall take it as a good omen and move on) and noted that David Mitchell is a graduate of Kent University. Hee hee.

I really wanted the Everbury event to take place on 16th January 2018, which would give me 1618, and the beginnings of something about phi, but 2018 is too far out. Knowing my rate of progress though, I might not have it done by then! I'm also keen to involve a certain degree of political satire (well, satire's too strong a word - comment, perhaps). The event - and really the point of at least one of the key strands of the stories - has both a personal and a political impact. I don't want to get too bogged down in the latter because it's the people stories that I'm more interested in, but a certain amount will be required, certainly in the director's pieces, where he begins to investigate the event.

There was a line I liked, too - not got it worded just how I want it yet. Something like "For weeks the fields were in a state of shock". Hey! That's iambic pentameter! Also I've scheduled in a torrential downpour for the 17th of January - the creator clearing his tracks... Lots of nice little ideas have occured to me along the way, too, including a kind of deep sadness that picks out individuals at random. It starts with the military and police personnel on the scene, but somehow is transmitted through the documentation and the press. Even dry administrative paperwork somehow carries the sadness with it. The director will get a bout or three.

Anyhoo, there goes lunchbreak...

Monday

2006-06-26T11:12:00.000+01:00

Fawlty Towers Freeby,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Well it's grey skies today. I suspect between David Miller, John Duffy, Alison & Mike I have had rather too much fun. I feel thoroughly worn out and miserable today. Just the right frame of mind to work on a manual for the super-duper workbook I created when I started my current temping assignment.

Many of my characters are defined almost entirely by the environment in which they find themselves. They are the shapeless entities that the world reaches around to make something of; the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle in Perec's Life: A User's Manual. That's often how I feel about myself - unable to really determine who I am or what I want out of life. Hence my being thirty-one and only the vaguest idea of what I should be doing. I hope against hope that somehow I will gain the freedom to sit at home for three weeks and belt out a novel that will gain me fame and notoriety. Instead I find myself trying to manage my urge to write, the domestic chores, and having to work for a living.

When the black dog is with me I'll reach for a pen. It's only then that I feel what I write escapes being laughably bad.

I've started making a map of Everbury to be used in a cycle of stories I want to write. It's a step into the void, really. I'm not sure there are any stories there to be told. We shall see. I find I want to make the place as real as I can, and know all that endeavour to make it real will merely sit in the background whilst I draw up characters that fall apart. I want the stories to end with a feeling of hope, but I don't know how I can do that convincingly. The best I can come up with are those few moments one gets when suddenly the world seems beautiful and to exist is all the power in the world anyone might need. I hope that will be enough.

Living The Dream

2006-06-15T21:12:00.000+01:00

Daniel Kitson,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

This is just an excuse to get some bloody blogging done, as the last two brief posts, spread far and wide across the sea of time like delapidated groins poking up from the waves, hesitantly hinting at the structure of my life that lies beneath, hardly seem to do the trick.

We went to see Daniel Kitson do his Weltenschauung and Tales For The Wobbly Hearted shows at the Regents Park open air theatre. Butterflies fluttered by, fireworks heckled, there was pink light in the trees, and I think I saw a dragonfly.

This was the first time we'd seen Kitson outside of the Brixton Comedy Club, a much more intimate venue with a vocal, but generally warm, polite and regular crowd. The main difference was that what we had seen of Weltenschauung was sketchy, with Kitson finding his way through his own material. At Regent's Park, which Kitson claimed was the biggest gig of his career (no mean feat considering he won the Perrier four years ago), the show was fully formed and polished. It was missing a little of the excitement, but was also the first time I'd seen this material and felt I could get some sense of the cohesive whole.

Prominent audience members included Paul Whitehouse and Simon Day, who seemed to enjoy Kitson's attack on Lads mags. I had to steel myself from watching their reactions though.

The second part was something I literally had no prior experience of, save for some of Gavin Osbourne's songs. Kitson performed a series of short stories, unashamedly sentimental, life affirming and all those uncool things we're supposed to be above. Lovely way in which Kitson and Osbourne worked seamlessly together; not a sense of chemistry, really, just a sort of rightness about the two of them performing.

The stories themselves tended to be surreal without being impossible, and were chiefly about characters trying to connect to the right people, to make friendships that can remain true despite their imperfections, or the pressures of the world around us. They had the kind of hope I find impossible to bring out in my own writing. I guess the nearest I'll get is the girl smiling at the end of Magnolia.

Anyhoo, see Kitson! He remains the finest stand-up comedian of his generation.

Even my desk calendar hates me...

2006-06-14T19:57:00.000+01:00

The quote on my Who Moved My Cheese desk calendar yesterday was as follows:

"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been"
-Diane Arbus

Which I would be happy to take on board were it not for the fact that Diane Arbus killed herself. It'll be Tony Hancock and old Hitlers next...

The Short-Lived Fur Age...

2006-05-02T16:24:00.000+01:00

Cash card taps virtual game funds

For example a gamer may choose to be a hunter who traps virtual animals for their furs. These can then be sold to a virtual seamstress who makes and sells swords.

Si vs Dan 280406 B - W Res

2006-04-28T12:34:00.000+01:00

Si vs Dan 280406 B - W Res,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

I played Dan on Thursday. I'd been reading quite a bit following my defeat last time. I found that playing speed games against Many Faces (which I always lose) was giving me a better grounding for my reading, and seemed to help with my intuition.

I also reread certain chapters of Toshiro Kageyama's Lesson's In The Fundamentals Of Go and felt I got much more out of it than before, I guess because I have more games behind me. The killer chapter, and I think the one that helped me out in this game in particular, was Kage's discussion of correct endgame strategy. When Dan began invading my framework, instead of simply defending I used it as an opportunity to stage a bigger invasion of his territory. This allowed me to encircle the group of white stones centre left as depicted.

Daniel resigned, which was a first for either of us, and I ran a couple of play throughs beyond it which largely favoured black, so perhaps it was the right decision. He had lost the top right corner in quite a silly mistake, tenukiing when he should have connected, and had he not made the mistake the game would probably have evened out. But if you see a pig, steal it...

There's also a lot of adji on the board, which MFOG tended to exploit rather effectively.

He's keen to play again, perhaps with less wine being drunk on both sides.

What A Difference A Day Makes...

2006-04-26T07:22:00.000+01:00

Clarke to explain prison releases

This coming after he spent the last few days attacking the press for their unbiased view of the curtailment of civil liberties at the hands of his party; an attack that has made him look more ridiculous in himself than any amount of negative press coverage. I'm sure they'll be gentle with him. I laughed out loud yesterday hearing that following this act of incompetence he wasn't going to resign, saying it was his job to stay on and sort out the problem. Bit of a contradiction that.

And I can't help but note that this news went public, along with the inability to sort out the tax credit system, yesterday, the morning after three bombs going off in Egypt. Bad news day?

And it seems part of the problem with the tax credit system is that it relies on people keeping the system informed when their circumstances change - i.e. when they end up paying less for their child-minder, or getting paid more for their own jobs. Heaven help us when we have to keep the Home Office up to date with our NIR details...

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London Marathon 2006

2006-04-24T12:12:00.000+01:00

DSCF1211,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

I agreed, rather on the spur of the moment, to cheer on the Macmillan runners at the London Marathon this year. I’ve been determined, Danny Wallace style, to say yes to more things this year, and cheerage was one of them (although I’d forgotten that I’d already said yes to “do you want to be taken round the National Gallery by Paul Foot for a fiver while he lies about painting”). Based on geography alone, I chose the point on the Victoria Embankment, underneath Cleopatra’s Needle, which I later found out was the twenty-five mile point, the last cheer point before the finish line. Roping in Lyndsay to accompany me, I agreed to meet her at Waterloo, allowing me the morning to descend on Greenwich to watch the start.

Whilst waiting for the off, and photographing runners, I fancied I spied an old school friend, Tom Sumpster in amongst the other runners. Tom, through no fault of his own, remains one of those people I’m probably not going to forget. When playing basketball at school, I reached out to gain control of a stray ball, only to have Tom’s mouth inadvertently collide with my arm. I sustained a small puncture wound to the forearm, and he lost a crown. I’m scarred to this day, and never played the violin again. Or previously. I made a mental note, given my long history of recognising people that aren’t who I think they are, to Google him when I was next able and see if it was indeed him.

The start of the race loomed ever closer, and a volley of thrown ponchos, jumpers and drinks bottles came over the metal fencing. The runners occasionally were called on to wave at the BBC camera crane, parked in the field beyond the starting line. Then, almost without ceremony the running was underway. I made my way slowly back out of the park, hoping to meet up with the race later on at London Bridge. The tannoy announcer began his shout-outs to various runners and charities, occasionally saying things like “Let’s Have A Big Cheer For Altzheimers!”

My way back to the station was troubled slightly, as I managed somehow to get misguided back towards the opening stretch of the race. I got to see the pro runners go past, though, and took in the way in which Greenwich was transformed, with people allowing their front gardens to be invaded by the crowded spectators. Finally reaching Greenwich station, I decided to head straight for Waterloo, meeting Lyndsay there before crossing the river and making our way to the cheering point. Donning the charity greens we slowly warmed to our purpose, which was made a little more difficult by the prevalence of other greens. From afar the NSPCC singlets and the Macmillan ones were virtually indistringuishable. Still, it was better to cheer for the odd NSPCC runner as well as our own from time to time.

The trick, if trick there was, was to spot the name of the runner as soon as possible, and begin shouting once you believed the runner was in ear-shot. It’s quite an odd thing to do, though. That far on in the race you suspect many of the runners have entered a little mental sanctuary. Most people training won’t have run the full length of the marathon ever before, and will be in uncharted territory. More often than note, those still running would not notice the cheering point until they were all but past it. That said, the majority was pleased to see us. Some seemed a little baffled, which made me wonder how they had responded to the previous cheering points.
The most rewarding moments tended to be those who, on being cheered, would pick up the pace a little, finding in them a bit or reserved determination to keep going. There was also a strange circle of encouragement. As the runners responded to the cheerers, the cheerers responded in kind. If the runners weren’t... well... running, one or other of us would probably have burst.
And then there was the rain. A light drizzle that had begun a little while before the start of the race got gradually heavier and heavier, so that by the time the last of the runners were coming through, everything not safely ponchoed was soaked. Some flood damage occurred to a few volumes from the Go library that I had brought with me, but nothing that besmirched the type.

We counted through the final runners, a couple of Little Britain style “ladies” and a handful of more conventionally dressed runners not long after the roads were reopened, before making our ways home again. The following morning, aware that some of the people at work had been running, I managed not to bemoan my sore throat, or my aching calves. I dread to think of the level of discomfort the people actually running must have suffered.

Oh, and it probably was Tom Sumpster. There was a Tom Sumpster running but I can’t say for certain it was the same one.

The Macmillan team raised over a million pounds.

That's The Keeper!

2006-04-21T17:54:00.000+01:00

You know, there are a lot of people who have quite a, if I can put it this way, high-octane view of the behaviour of the UK Government. They see behind the slow but sure erosion of civil liberties by way of ID Cards, removal of trial by jury, removal of Parliamentary debate, the sale of peerages, the desire to tag all motor vehicles, the desire to identify troublemakers at the age of three, a single sinister agenda, rather than, say, the ridiculous fluorishes of a Government misled by a premier desperate to leave his mark in the history books at the cost of everything, including his own reputation.

The way I look at it, the system of Government that we have ultimately decides for itself the path it takes. It has little to do with who we vote for, and little to do with the intentions of those who are elected. It really comes down to the way in which the organisation itself feeds and thinks. Now I'm beginning to sound like one of the tin-foil hat brigade, and for that I am sorry - it's just the epiphenomenalist in me. Better not to think of this kind of consciousness, if consciousness it be, as some bureaucratic metabrain. Think of it instead as the old historical debate of individual versus movement - i.e. the holocaust being cause by Hitler vs the Holocaust being caused by the Nazis, or more correctly the exact timing of a particularly nasty belief in a sinister Jewish plot matched against economic desperation and a harsh shaming on the diplomatic stage. True, history does on occasion "rattle over the points" but the train generally moves in one particular direction, whether it derails or not. But I digress.

Take a look at the picture above, and, just for fun, find out what it is. I shan't say here, because that may ruin the surprise. Let's just say I'd have given my eye-teeth to be at the meeting.

Defeated!

2006-04-18T06:57:00.000+01:00

Well it had to happen sooner or later. Daniel beat me yesterday. I decided to play out of form - opening with diagonal non-4,4 stones, and between the difficulties that ensued, and my inability, as ever, to turn quite a sizeable amount of influence into territory, I lost the game by over 130 points. But that's cool.

I logged onto Kiseido this morning only to find that following my routine losses to doobious et al my rank has actually gone up to 22kyu. I don't think so!

Easter Cancelled

2006-04-13T12:39:00.000+01:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4905304.stm

What The People Of Britain Are Up Against

2006-04-11T21:32:00.000+01:00

A link to this article was posted to the No2ID forum.

Charles Clarke, there. Interesting story, apparently his parents had a good reason for calling him Charles. It's because they couldn't spell c___.

Goban and Breakfast Bowls

2006-04-11T13:41:00.000+01:00

I've decided, as I generally start waking up at 6:30 in the morning at this time of year, to open my day with a Go game. The flat is quiet, and I am awake enough to concentrate. However, since the weekend I have been roundly defeated by over a hundred stones a game. I suspect I am going to have to get used to losing.

However, something weird is happening at Kiseido. Because ranks are effectively worked out on a day by day basis by looking at the whole of the playing community, it is possible for your rank to rise without actually playing. Having put the game down between January and April, my rank (still with the ever present question mark of uncertainty) has risen from 29 kyu to 23 kyu. I had decided to play only free games this week as a sort of warm up period, but have decided instead to play rank, just to try and get mine into some kind of order.

And having spent part of my lunchtime looking at the people I have been playing, I can feel a little less doleful about my resounding defeats. They all seem to be players of greater acumen than I, which stands to reason given that they beat me, but knowing what the margin is makes me feel more philosophical in my failures. I think, too, that this has already been in part to blame for my winless rise in the ranks.

What is more, I feel I have taken lessons from my recent games. I'm going to start making better use of the Kiseido server, to. They offer training games and the like, so I may try and get some proper learnin' in.

And I continue to ensnare people into the ways of the game. I've had a couple of 9x9 games with a colleague, and have promised to teach a dear friend of mine. At the moment it may be the only way I can be sure of beating anyone!

Anyhoo, back to work...

Go on now Go

2006-04-03T08:57:00.000+01:00

Had a lovely game with Dan on Sunday. Very well balanced, with us both playing badly in complementary ways. Dan played too close to the edges and corners, I succeeded in boxing him in but left myself too wide open for invasion. In the end the game hinged on a delicious endgame play where I managed to pull off a snapback against him, letting me win by about three points. The snapback was avoidable but Dan didn't see it, and the stress I experienced while waiting for him to not notice it was extreme. Oh to record these games!

A real appetite for passport renewal

2006-04-01T08:37:00.000+01:00

I finally managed to find my old passport on Thursday night, and then promptly spoiled the form I had to apply for a renewal. Ironically I did this by signing the form and having my signature go ovwer the border, which seemed deeply metaphoric somehow.

I tried to get a current passport form from the post office yesterday but they'd run out. I hope this is because people everywhere are slipping their current passports into their washing machines and stumping up fifty-odd quid to save themselves from the NIR for as long as possible. And should the passport service suddenly run out of forms, well, that would be newsworthy, wouldn't it?

Talk is beginning to warm up on the No2ID forum about a march, hopefully one running as a coalition of protest against the various dodgy measures Tony Baloney is bullying through. There's also the typical and rather depressing talk that marching doesn't change anything, but neither, seemingly, does voting or writing to your MP, so on with the boots.

And Swindon No2ID have recruited a Charles Clarke lookylikey to help them in their leafleting which has cheered me up, no end.

Losing Sleep...

2006-03-30T01:25:00.000+01:00

To the HO

Dear sir/madam,

As you will know, the ID Card Bill was passed by the House of Lords on the 29th March of this year. The legislation, changing as it does the relationship between citizen and state, was deservedly controversial and needless to say, many of the issues with regards the workings of the scheme have yet to be satisfactorily resolved. With this in mind I have compiled a list of questions that, were I to be provided with reasoned answers, would put me at my ease. I thank you in advance for your patient handling of my enquiries.
The Bill passed on the proviso that until 2010, citizens renewing their passport will be entered onto the National Identity Register but will have the option of getting a card. The card is currently priced at £30. Am I to understand that those choosing not to receive a card will not have to pay any registration fee when being entered onto the database? If this is indeed the case, how does this effect the financing of the scheme as a whole?
The passport has recently suffered a price increase to cover the cost of incorporating an RFID chip so that it may contain a digitised passport photo bringing it in line with standards being brought in by the ICAO. Am I right in saying that no money from passport sales will go towards the National Identity Register? There have been accusations that the passport is subsidising the NIR allowing the ID Cards to remain at an artificially low price. Is this the case? Given that the ID card will be useable as a travel document within Europe, what level of impact is this likely to have on the sale of passports?
Mr Burnham has stated categorically that the idea that the RFID chips being used in the ID cards can not be read at a distance. Currently IBM’s advertising campaign suggests that RFID chips can be used to track to the mile goods in transit. Is the junior minister correct, or the computer manufacturer?
I understand from written answers given by Mr Burnham that business plans have been drawn up to cover the implementation of the NIR scheme in various arms of the government, and that these costs have not been included in the £6 billion budget laid out for the NIR itself. Do the various arms of government already have access to these business plans?
Nortrhop Grumman, the company currently responsible for maintaining the fingerprint database used by the police has stated that the ID cards will probably need replacing every three to five years. The Passport Office also believes that passport issue should move to a five-year cycle in part to prevent problems with the chips wearing out. Will citizens be charged a further £30 when renewing their cards? Will the cards be issued by post, or will they be issued face-to-face? Will the NIR scheme make use of card renewals in order to renew biometrics which, according to most experts, change over time?
It has been suggested that the NIR scheme will allow for tighter control of illegal workers. I have yet to see it explained how the scheme will be an improvement on the current system. It appears that employers who wish to employ people illegally simply fail to go through proper legal procedures. What will prevent them doing this with the NIR in place? Furthermore, am I to understand that when starting work a full biometric check will be carried out? If so, how will this work in practicality?
Mr Blair has intimated that the NIR will allow people to check their NHS records online, something that he says is impossible currently due to the need to prove an individual’s identity. How will the NIR allow people to check their NHS records online?
Much has been said about commercial confirmatory access to the NIR. Presumably this will be by way of biometric checks carried out on the premises of private businesses. Are we to assume that the government, and whoever wins the lucrative NIR contracts, will provide and maintain the biometric readers necessary? How will the Government safeguard against disreputable companies employing adapted biometric readers in order to collect data so that they may “spoof” it at a later date?
When has it been forecast that the scheme will start to make a return on the investment?
In July 2002 the figure of £1.3 billion was attached to identity fraud in this country. In February of this year the figure stood at £1.7 billion. Given that, as has been ably demonstrated by the media, much of this cannot be recovered through the NIR scheme, what is the moral grounding of using it a justification of the ID Card Bill? Has a more relevant figure been drawn up, and if so, what is it?
It has been suggested by IT experts such as Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft UK and the former senior MI6 officer Lady Park that the NIR will become a honeypot for identity fraudsters. What is the government’s position on this belief? What safeguards are to be put in place to prevent this from happening, given previous government IT projects susceptibility to crime. Charles Clarke believes that the consolidation of the entire countries personal information in one place will be in some way making things harder for identity fraudsters. How so?
We have been told that “lessons have been learned” with regards IT procurement. What lessons have been learned?
Given that cosmetic forgeries of ID cards came out in Japan four months after the genuine cards were released, what kind of anti-forgery measures will the UK ID cards incorporate to prevent the same thing happening over here?
Given the contentious nature of the scheme, what sort of get-out clauses will be in place with the contractor, should critics of the scheme prove to be right?
Does the home office believe, as Mr Burnham said on the Today programme on the 28th of March that we will be required to prove our identity “day in, day out”, or on the other hand, does it side with the view of Mr Burnham, who suggested in a letter to the Observer on the 26th of March that we will be required to prove it only “when it is important to verify identity. That is not an everyday occurrence for the majority”?

Yours sincerely,

Simon Scott.

Well I'd have sacked him by now

2006-03-28T18:00:00.000+01:00

This lovely bit of about-face was pointed out today on the No2ID forum:

"I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out," said Mr Burnham. On the Today programme today.

"The scheme will not track your life's activities. ID cards will be used when it is important to verify identity. That is not an everyday occurrence for the majority, [...]" Mr Burnham in a letter to the Observer last Sunday.

Of course we're all used to this sort of flip-floppery from Mr Burnhim, but, really, does the Government actually want him on their side?

Corridor People

2006-03-25T23:50:00.000Z

Corridor People,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Ian and I went up to our storage unit today with our former landlord Ivor Dembina. We're hoping to downside and down-expense our storage, and it's beginning to look achievable.

While sorting through stuff we found a box of Ivor's. Ian mentioned it to Ivor, along with the fact that the bottom of the box was falling out. Ivor said "Oh! That's my old love letters! No wonder the box is falling apart."

I liberated an SLR that my father gave me an age ago. The battery compartment is a little busted, but nothing a bit of tin foil hasn't fixed. I'm going to get some film and do some old fashioned pics.

I also found a load of undeveloped film which I shall put in for processing. I wonder what they are...

Would You Buy A Card From This Man?

2006-03-15T18:00:00.000Z

I suppose it would depend on whether or not I were feeling lucky.

I'm lookin' over a three-leaf clover dat I overlook'd bethree.

2006-03-14T17:51:00.000Z

As m'chums will know, I always find my birthday coincides with St Patrick's Day which makes drunken revelry a little arduous. It's certainly difficult trying to maintain that it's your special day when you're sharing a bar with a thousand people from Chicago and Australia who are inexplicably also Irish. I usually end up umming and ahhing over what to do, and then getting a bottle or two in with the boyf. However, when mid-ahh I was informed by a close personal friend that it's also sausage night at the Battersea Arts Centre. For a modest fee I get two of the things I love the most, comedy and a sausage. Hussah! What is more, the money spent goes to a worthwhile cause; the Battersea Arts Centre!

Acts confirmed thus far:

TV's TV Burp's Harry Hill,
TV's Mitchel & Web Experience's Mitchell & Webb,
TV's Feastival of Fun's Stewart Lee,
TV's Rise's Richard Herring,
Um... Paul Foot,
The lovely Simon Amstell (he's a very beautiful young man),
Lemn Sissay (yeah)
nudity's Arthur Smith,

and Natalie Haynes.

I wonder what they're going to get me!

Only one way to find out...

2006-03-13T20:09:00.000Z

The man doesn't know when to stop. This is the latest tissue of lies coming from Mr Burnhim.

10th March 2006
IDENTITY CARDS BILL

Dear Colleague

I thought it might be helpful for you to have an update on the Identity Cards Bill before it returns on Monday.

Agreement has been reached on the issues of cost and the route to compulsion (ie primary legislation). The only remaining area of disagreement with the Lords is over the consequences of 'designating' a document. Clauses 5 and 8 mean that where certain official documents are designated (with the approval of Parliament) a person applying for one of those documents must simultaneously apply to be registered on the National Identity Register and be issued with an ID card.

The Government has always made clear its intention to designate the passport. This proposal was at the heart of the original Bill introduced before the last election. Biometric information (fingerprints and possibly iris) will be introduced into the British passport from around 2008-09. People will have to enrol such information when applying for a passport and this will require the UK Passport Service to enrol and store more information on an expanded database.

Our proposal is to use this development to create a clean database - the National Identity Register - as the source for the issuing of the biometric passport and identity card. It will mean that we can extend to our everyday life the benefits of much higher standard identification in international travel documents.

Last week, the House of Lords voted to weaken the consequences of designation, by rendering registration on the National Identity Register (and an application for an ID Card) optional extras when applying for a designated document. We will be resisting this amendment because it goes to the heart of our plans for delivering a successful scheme that we have always said should become compulsory in time. Our detailed reasons are set out here:

* We have a clear manifesto commitment to introduce the National Identity Register (NIR) and the identity cards scheme "as people renew their passports".

* The manifesto reference that this process would initially take place on a voluntary basis refers to the fact that no order setting a date for compulsory enrolment would be laid in this Parliament.

* It is a fact that people have an element of choice (albeit small) about whether to have a passport. However, all passports holders are able to choose when they renew their passport and can do so at any time.

* Irrespective of the Identity Cards Bill, people will have to register fingerprint biometric information when applying for a passport from 2008/09 to keep us in line with standards being adopted in the rest of the EU . Last week, the United Kingdom Passport Service began issuing first generation biometric passports to the public, containing an electronic chip with a digital facial image of the holder.

* Introducing the scheme alongside the passport allows for a managed introduction that will enhance the likelihood of successful delivery and keep overall costs down.
* Many members of the Lords have made clear that their principal concern is the creation of the biometric database. One of the perverse effects of their amendment would be to create two biometric databases instead of one - the NIR for those choosing to join and an expanded passport service database for those who don't - adding cost and complexity.

* It would mean that strong safeguards that the NIR brings would not extend to the other database. These include: the creation of the statutory National Identity Scheme Commissioner with powers to scrutinse the use of the NIR; the introduction of extra criminal sanctions for misuse of the NIR over and above what normally applies for misuse of databases ; and the provision of much greater information to individual citizen about use of their personal data (such as the audit log).

There has now been a long public debate about identity cards, but the fact is that this is a manifesto commitment that still commands majority support in the country.

It is also worth remembering that at the last CCLA the Commons disagreed with the Lords' amendments on designation with a healthy majority of 31.

I hope this is helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact me on 0207 035 8796 if you need any further information.

Best wishes

ANDY BURNHAM MP

Happily there are still politicians who take this whole politics business quite seriously:

Andy Burnham MP
Under Secretary of State
Home Office
50 Queen Anne's Gate
London
SW1H 9AT

By email and post

Our ref: MIN/D0343/ID
Date: 12 March 2006

Dear Andy,

ID card and register scheme

Thank you for your letter dated 14 February, responding to some of my remarks on the World at One on Friday 10 February.

You say that it is ‘simply not credible’ to imply that the Government is proceeding by ‘sleight of hand’ because Home Office documents have made it clear that it will be compulsory for people to go on the NIR when they apply for a passport. However, as you know, our 2005 Manifesto stated the opposite. It stated that the scheme would be “rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports”. In the letter you sent to colleagues on Friday, referring to the Manifesto commitment, I note that you omit the first part of this phrase:

“We have a clear manifesto commitment to introduce the National Identity Register (NIR) and the identity cards scheme "as people renew their passports".

You then try and get around the fact this was supposed to be voluntary as people renew their passports by stating:

“The manifesto reference that this process would initially take place on a voluntary basis refers to the fact that no order setting a date for compulsory enrolment would be laid in this Parliament.”

How were voters supposed to know that? It is ridiculous to infer that this is what people would have understood without it being explained alongside.

Furthermore, in view of the fact that the Government has made much of the fact that further primary legislation would be required before the scheme becomes compulsory, it is perfectly reasonable to point out in interviews that, despite this, there will be compulsion for the majority of people through ‘designated documents’ which will not come through the ‘front door’ of further primary legislation.

Ministers have also frequently and repeatedly given the misleading impression that the scheme is proceeding on the basis of international requirements or is at least keeping up with international schemes, when in reality it goes far beyond these. During the last debate on 13 February, when I asked Charles Clarke which other countries propose to have 13 sets of biometric data on a centrally held database, he replied:

Mr. Clarke: A number of countries, including the United States of America, is the answer to my hon. Friend's question.

Following this, I asked the House of Commons Library if they could verify the Home Secretary’s answer. When the Library asked the Home Office 'what sources or authority the Home Secretary had relied on, when he said that a number of countries including the USA proposed to have 13 sets of biometric data on a central database' the Home Office replied “We have no specific information as to when other countries will move to using 13 biometrics.” Unless you or Charles have evidence to the contrary (that your officials are unaware of), I suggest it would be appropriate for the Home Secretary to apologise for misleading the House (I am copying him into this letter).

You state that limiting the document designation powers in the Bill will lead to higher costs, thus acknowledging that those in need of passports are expected to subsidise the ID card scheme. You make no reference to the fact that, if you had a less intrusive scheme then your costs could be as low as in other countries with biometric ID cards. As you state in your letter, all countries that issue passports and ID cards have databases to administer their scheme, but can you give details of any other scheme that proposes to have a live central database with an audit trail on the scale proposed under the NIR?

You suggest that raising the concern that the Government’s scheme may make the identity fraud situation worse is an ‘uninformed assertion’ as ‘with many criticisms of the scheme’ (without specifying to which criticisms you are referring). You state this despite the comments of the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft UK that the Register would become a 'honeypot' for criminals. Is he ‘uninformed’? Furthermore, the European Commission’s Data Protection Working Party, in their publication Working Document on Biometrics looked at whether biometric information should be kept on smart cards and retained by the individual or whether it was acceptable to store the information on a centralised database. The House of Commons Library note on Biometrics states that the Working Party’s clear preference is for the former as it believes centralised storage presents an increased risk of data misuse. Is the Working Party ‘uninformed’?

Turning to your response to my comment that the Home Office are ‘making the scheme up as they go along’, I stand by this view, which is based on the answers I have received to Parliamentary questions, for example:

• In June 2005 the Government didn’t know how many enrolment centres there would be for the ID cards programme and have still not provided this information to MPs. Whilst it has been announced there will be some 70 centres for interviews for passports, the Home Office stated in a PQ tha, whilst these 70 centres form part of the ID card programme, ‘these offices do not necessarily form part of the enrolment centre provision’ and ‘at this stage it is not known how many of these facilities there will be’. Are we to seriously believe the Government’s estimated costs are realistic when such a major part of the project has not been worked out?

• In December 2003 the Minister stated that ‘The costs estimates which my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary set out in Command paper 6020 were based on the assumption that this automatic replacement card would be provided free of charge’. In June 2005, when asked if this assumption remained the Government’s policy, you answered ‘No such assumption was made in CM 6020.’ We have still not been told what the policy is on replacement cards and who will bear the cost. On the issue of how much it will cost an individual to replace a stolen, lost or damaged card, in a recent PQ, answered 13.02.06, we are told that no final decisions have been taken.

• No detailed planning or cost estimates have been undertaken in respect of assessments of applications for exemptions for when the ID Card scheme becomes compulsory.

• When asked if the Home Office would be revisiting its cost assumptions in line with the recommendations of the KPMG review, on 25 October 2005, Tony McNulty answered that his officials were reviewing the recommendations of the KPMG review and ‘would be acting on them in future iterations of the costings’. Yet the Government have not revised their £584m figure or referred to these KPMG recommendations in their briefings on costs.

• The Home Office admit in their own Regulatory Impact Assessment analysis of 25 May 2005 that some benefits are ‘not yet quantified completely’. In answer to a PQ asking if the cost benefit analysis of the scheme includes estimates for these unquantified benefits, we are told it did but that further analysis was underway to ‘refine these estimates’. When asked what the results were of his Department’s further analysis, you answered that benefits were continuing to be identified and quantified and the analysis was ongoing. The Government do not say whether any of this analysis will have any impact on the Government’s cost estimates.

Regarding your claim to be consulting with industry, I have to say that talking to people from the industry with an interest in procurement within the scheme is not the same as listening to the concerns of independent industry experts. You cite Intellect as a source of expert guidance. Is my understanding correct that Intellect’s membership includes several companies who are likely to bid for contracts with the Home Office? I would be more willing to accept that the Government have really researched this project thoroughly with industry experts if you had provided satisfactory replies to the many letters my constituent, Andrew Hawker (who has had many years working in the industry and who now comments on this matter independently) has taken the trouble to write.

Despite your failure to address Mr Hawker’s questions on how the benefits of the ID card scheme have been calculated, Mr Hawker has taken the trouble to respond to your last letter of 20 February, your reference: M3198/6. A copy of Mr Hawker’s letter is enclosed. I should therefore be grateful for your response to the specific points Mr Hawker has raised in the enclosed letter (and previously) about the Home Office’s estimated benefits of the ID cards scheme.

In your letter, you state that cost reviews have been done by the Treasury, Office of Government and Commerce and KPMG but won’t publish these on the basis that a detailed breakdown of costs might have procurement implications and lead to higher costs. As you will note from Mr Hawker’s letter, biometric equipment is freely advertised and priced on the internet and companies regularly announce the value of other biometric contracts. Presumably there will also be competition between bidders anxious to win what must be extremely lucrative contracts (unless you are implying such companies are capable of price rigging). Both these factors render the excuse for not providing some cost breakdown of the ID cards project most questionable. Furthermore, the Government has never addressed the point that MPs like myself have only requested a broad breakdown of the estimated costs for the major components of the scheme. We haven’t even been told the likely cost of the National Identity Register!
Finally, I would like to raise the case of individuals who could be put in danger if their biometric details are accessible on the NIR, for example security personnel or victims of crimes such as domestic violence. The intended compulsory registration of UK citizens in the NIR may endanger individuals who are threatened by terrorists or organised criminals. For instance, witnesses threatened with revenge, would typically be relocated and given new identities. Were enrolment on the National Identity Register to be established on a compulsory basis, what guarantee could then be given to such a person that their whereabouts could be kept secret? I am sure you would agree that it would become impossible to carry out anything like a normal life without a functioning ID card. Thus a witness would have to be registered in the database under their new identity. But because they are identified by biometric information in the database, and that biometric information would not have changed with their identity, it would be possible to find them using biometric information recorded before they disappeared. (Or are you accepting that multiple identities will be possible with the same biometrics?)
As an example, a photograph of the person taken before they disappeared could be used to match the facial biometric information in the database enabling all the person's details to be looked up including their new home address. No doubt you will be aware that it is possible to identify a person using an ‘iris code' obtained from a photograph taken many years before as demonstrated publicly in the case of Sharbat-Gula, an Afghan woman who appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1985, and who was positively identified in 2002 from that photograph using an iris biometric. I accept that, on as large a database as the NIR, facial and iris recognition alone would not necessarity provide unique identification but presumably you are arguing that possession of all 13 biometrics would. Numerous Police officers and others would be allowed to perform this type of search without the subject's consent and, while the Bill would make unauthorised disclosure of information from the Register a serious criminal offence, this could not prevent an organised criminal from coercing an authorised person into performing lookups on their behalf.
Dose the Home Office have a solution to this problem?
I should be grateful for your response to the points raised in this letter. I apologise for its length but I hope you will appreciate the serious nature of the concerns raised.

Yours sincerely,

LYNNE JONES MP

cc Charles Clarke, Home Secretary

Oh that my own MP could slip her ministerial straitjacket long enough to stand up against the torrent of bullshit the Home Office insists on fertilising their mad Bill with.

Opaque Government

2006-03-08T18:33:00.000Z

Dear Mr Scott,

Thank you for your e-mail of 15 February 2006 in which you ask for all correspondence, internal and external, pertaining to the commissioning, calculation, drafting and intended use of the Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee’s figures on identity fraud that were published on 2 February 2006.

Your request has been handled in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

I can confirm that the Home Office does hold information on this subject. We believe that some of the information that you have asked for is already reasonably accessible to you. This was published in documents on 2 February 2006. A table showing data and calculations of the cost of identity fraud can be accessed from the home page of the Home Office Identity Theft Website – www.identitytheft.org.uk. Information about the commissioning and use of the updated estimate of identity fraud is contained in a Written Ministerial Statement from Andy Burnham. This is available at: [link]

Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act exempts the Home Office from complying with the duty to supply you with this information on the grounds that it is already reasonably accessible to you. Should you have difficulties in accessing this information by the means listed above please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Other information was provided to ministers in relation to the updated estimate of the cost of identity fraud. After careful consideration it has been determined that this information is exempt from disclosure by virtue of Section 35(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act. This provides that information which relates to the formulation or development of government policy can be withheld where the public interest falls in favour of non-disclosure. We consider that the information contained in the briefing falls within this exemption.

In applying this exemption the Home Office has had to balance the public interest in withholding the information against the public interest in disclosing the information.

In doing so, we have had regard to the public interest in members of the public having access to information that enables them to understand how Ministers work and take decisions. We have also had regard to the fact that knowledge about the way government works, and the information on which it has based its decisions, may increase the public contribution to the policy making process, thereby rendering it more effective and broadly-based.

However, we have also had regard to a number of factors weighing against release. Disclosure of this information, which is in relation to an area of policy in the process of being formulated, could damage the ability of Ministers and their officials to seek and provide free and frank advice. If officials believe that their advice in relation to ongoing policy formulation will be disclosed, there is a significant danger of a reduction in candour on their part. Similarly, Ministers may be less willing to seek advice on certain matters if they believe that such advice might be disclosed. A reduction in the willingness of officials and Ministers to seek candid advice may lead to policies being formulated on the basis of poorer, more narrowly based advice, which would clearly not be in the public interest.

We have carefully considered where the public interest test lies in this case and concluded that the balance is in favour of non-disclosure.

We have also had to consider the confidential nature of the correspondence on this subject. After careful consideration it has been determined that the “in confidence” exemption, under Section 41 of the Freedom of Information Act, applies. This states that information is exempt information if:

(a) it was obtained by the public authority from any other person (including another public authority); and

(b) the disclosure of the information to the public (otherwise than under this Act) by the public authority holding it would constitute a breach of confidence actionable by that or any other person.

In applying this exemption we have had to consider that organisations supplied information to us in confidence. The information provided relates to financial losses and was supplied on the basis that only agreed information would be published. This agreed information is included in the table described above – see paragraph 3. To release any other information would leave the Government open to legal proceedings, harm our relationship with those supplying the information to us and potentially reduce the level of cooperation that we would otherwise have expected with future and on-going projects.

Section 41 is an absolute exemption, and as such we are not required to assess the balance of the public interest in relation to this exemption.

If you are dissatisfied with this response you may request an independent internal review of our decision by submitting your complaint to:

Information Policy Team
Information and Record Management Service
Home Office
4th Floor, Seacole Building
2 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DF

Should you request a review, the department’s handling of your information request will be reassessed by staff who were not involved in providing you with this response.

Should you remain dissatisfied after this internal review, you will have a right of complaint to the Information Commissioner as established by section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act.

Yours sincerely

Kevin Burt
Identity Fraud Reduction Team

I can understand how some correspondence would be exempt, but not all. And given that I was requetsing information about how they'd drafted the figures on ID fraud (or at least their umbrella-like interpretation of it) the initial correspondance I received was from the "ID Card Team".

Goodbye To All That

2006-03-05T08:26:00.000Z

Goodbye To All That,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

If the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill enters the statute, will the last person leaving the House of Commons please switch off the lights.

Hamilton's Brain Update Teaser - 1st March, 2006

2006-02-26T14:08:00.000Z

I've finally sat down and drawn up a links page, linked by way of the paperweight. Also my mother surprised me recently by posting me a load of cartoons that I used to do for the Christchurch student magazine. I've scanned all fourteen of them and added them to the probe.

I also surprised myself by writing over a thousand words of a brand new short story. I'm hoping to get a rough draft completed and online in time for the update. I can just about squeeze it under the "Death In The Family" umbrella.

Back in real life, I've finished my work placement with Cancer Research. Hopefully I'll be working elsewhere from Thursday, and spending the intermediate days in self indulgence, working on my screenplay and getting the new story finished.

Books read in 2006 - You Will Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, Rodinsky's Room by Rachel Lichtenstein & Iain Sinclair, Black Hole by Charles Burns. Next up, the Sailor & Lula novels by Barry Gifford.

Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill

2006-02-18T15:32:00.000Z

Learn its name and fear it.

The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is currently going through the House of Commons, removes the need for reforms to be placed before the house. It will allow ministers to take an exisiting law and repeal, reform or replace it. The only "safeguard" is that the benefits must outway the drawbacks, but this decision will be left to the ministers want to put through the reform in the first place.

The reason being given for the Bill is that the world is running too quickly for our current democratic process - there is a real need to cut through red-tape, but putting a Bill through Parliament to excsise redundant laws takes too long. This is, surprise surprise, a lie. Departments are too slow in identifying such laws, and too slow in drafting replacements. What is more, the Government is generally not very good at drafting its Bills - as a certain Iraq protestor can testify.

The measure is unconstitutional and should be stopped. The Government pays lip-service to a need to tackle voter apathy, but voters are currently more impotent than they have been for thirty years - why vote when it makes no difference? When ministers start calling the shots irrespective of the will of the House then democracy ends.

It will further undermine the democratic process for the introduction of new Bills. Say, just to pluck an example out of the air, Charles Clarke concedes that the ID scheme will only move from its present form of creeping compulsion to one more compulsion on the introduction of a separate Bill. He will remove the particular piece of enabling legislation in the Bill. With the Bill in place, and the Home Office unsurprisingly fails to meet its 80% take-up by 2012 goal, there is nothing to stop Mr Clarke, or whoever is filling his chair by that point, saying "well there's clearly a case for enforced registration because we're currently spending stupid amounts of money and not getting any of those many benefits back" and just revising the Bill accordingly. Thus, with the L&RRB on the cards, there can be no further concessions...

Next Stop - Council Elections

2006-02-14T11:10:00.000Z

If you, like me, were a little disappointed in the behaviour of our elected representatives last night, and writing to your MP is like shouting at a brick wall, your next avenue of protest will probably be the local elections taking place in May.

Dear Councillors Dixon, McHugh & O'Connell,

Last night the MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, the Rt Hon. Tessa Jowell MP failed to vote in favour of amendments to the ID Card Bill regarding the removal of compulsion from the scheme. This measure would have at least brought the Bill into line with the Labour Party Manifesto pledge of the introduction of a voluntary scheme.

I have followed the issue of the ID Card Bill closely over the past few months and it has been made clear that the decision to instigate the scheme is entirely irrational. Tony Blair, himself a staunch opponent of ID Cards prior to his election as Prime Minister, stated in a press conference on 28th June 2005 that the ID Scheme would allow people to check their NHS records online, something that at present cannot happen because of fears over proof of identity. This clearly cannot be the case without every home computer being fitted with iris and fingerprint scanners. Gordon Brown on Sunday 12th February embarrassed himself in an interview with Andrew Marr by suggesting that ID Cards could in some way have had a bearing on the recent alleged Ricin plot (one which would never have worked and relied on multiple foreign identity documents beyond the scope of the ID Bill) and the 7th July bombings, which were perpetrated by British citizens working with scant resources. Every time a senior Labour politician opens his mouth to discuss the ID Card scheme we are treated to either lies or incompetence.

On 7th February Andrew Burnham sent out a letter to Labour MPs briefing them on the Bill. One of the statements made implied that Mr Burnham could not see why the London School Of Economics report suggested that a five year renewal of documentation and biometrics might be more feasible if the scheme is to work. In saying this he clearly is attempting to wilfully mislead members of the house. Northrop Grumman, the company that runs the national fingerprint information system stated in a Memorandum submitted to the Select Committee on Home Affairs in January 2004, that ID Cards will require replacing on average once every three years. The UKPS Corporate and Business Plans 2004 –2009 mentions the desire to have the new biometric passports renewed every five years, one of the reasons being to avoid a problem with damaged chips. Mr Burnham also calls into question the level set for lost or stolen ID cards, a figure the Home Office have based entirely on the current loss of documentation associated with passports. KPMG, in a report we know Mr Burnham has read, also advise him that the Home Office have underestimated this figure. Yet in his letter, Mr Burnham suggested the LSE have pulled the five-year renewal out of thin air. How are we to trust these people when they can't be called on to be truthful with their own colleagues?

I have had a frustrating series of attempted correspondence with Tessa Jowell in which she shows no interest in discussing her own beliefs about the ID Card Bill, or dealing with any of the arguments I have put forward in criticism of the scheme. Instead my letters have been forwarded to the Home Office, who reply with the very kind of ill-grounded dogma I have been complaining about.

In following the ID Card Bill I have become increasingly aware of the levels to which members of the Labour party will stoop in order to foist its expensive, intrusive measures onto an unwilling public. For all of Mr Blair's talk of listening, and Mrs Jowell's talk of wishing to win back the faith of the electorate, the Labour party has, if anything, become worse - relinquishing its whip only when it can't make its mind up. In reading about the scheme I am confronted with the same dilemma over and over again - is the speaker in question incompetent or corrupt? Whatever the answer, they should not be in power.

I believe the ID Card Bill to be one of the most important issues of the day, and as a result of Labour's handling of it, I feel it is my duty to not vote for you in the forthcoming council elections.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Scott.

Mo' Bullshit

2006-02-13T19:16:00.000Z

This is the letter that Andy Burnham sent out to Labour MPs on 7th February, prior to the ID Card Bill vote that is taking place right now. In it he wilfully misleads members of the house in order that they vote in favour of the bill and reject the modest amendments made by the House Of Lords.

I thought you might find it useful to have a detailed note about the costs of the Identity Cards scheme.

Important context

Two changes to the British passport to improve its security as an identity document are now imminent. First, by the end of this year, all new and reissued passports will include an electronic chip, leading to a full biometric passport by 2009. Second, from October, all first-time applicants will have to apply in person. These changes are planned irrespective of the Identity Cards Bill. They have all-party support.
The question which the Bill puts before the House is whether to build on this step forward in identity protection and create a National Identity Register that can be used: (a) to issue the new passport and identity cards; and (b) to improve the standard and security of the millions of ID checks carried out every day in Britain by a range of public and private sector organisations.

In considering this question, colleagues will want to weigh the benefits of this development against the additional costs of the NIR and identity card over and above the changes to the passport. The purpose of this note is to inform that consideration. It uses figures from the business case and Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) published alongside the Bill. These figures have been independently verified as sound by KPMG.

Consumer costs

The RIA puts the unit cost of enrolling an individual onto the National Identity Register and issuing a full biometric passport and ID card at £93. The passport will account for about 70% of this cost.

The price of a passport will rise over coming years irrespective of the decision on identity cards. It recently rose to £51 and will rise again in 06/07 when application by interview begins. While we have yet to confirm next year's price, the unit cost of producing the passport in 06/07 has been put at £57.93. It will rise further when the full biometric passport is introduced and fingerprints are added to the electronic chip.

Within this context, the Home Secretary has announced that it is affordable to make available a stand-alone ID card at a fee of around £30. The card will be able to be used as a travel document within the European Union.

Running costs

A new agency, based on the UK Passport Service, will manage the N!R and be responsible for issuing the new passports and ID cards. In the RIA, the annual running costs of this expanded operation are estimated at £584 million a year.
There are two important things about this figure: first, the bulk of it relates to issuing passports (around 70%); second, it is not additional to the current annual running costs of UKPS.

Reflecting the changes to the passport, UKPS running costs will increase significantly this year and next. From its baseline expenditure of £219 million in 2004/5, UKPS will spend £293 million in 05/06 and expects to spend £397 million in 06/07.

It is simply wrong to suggest, as opponents of the scheme do, that the £584 million can be spent on other priorities such as policing. As today with the funding of the passport service, the costs of running the combined passport and identity card service will be predominantly raised through fees.

Set-up costs

To date, the Home Office has spent £30 million on the Identity Cards Programme. This expenditure has been made from Home Office funds voted by Parliament.
Once the legislation is in place, there will be annual costs to the Home Office above the current level of expenditure over the years leading up to the issue of the first identity card and the scheme reaching full issuing capacity. The Home Office will bear the cost of running a major procurement exercise and of building the IT infrastructure, including the purchase and commissioning of biometric recording equipment.

In line with best practice in major procurement, our estimated set-up costs have not been published. By doing so, we would provide information to potential bidders and restrict our potential to gain value for money. People are asking us to keep costs down on the one hand, but then on the other making requests that would limit our ability to do so.

However, these annual set-up costs will be much less than the annual running costs of the scheme as a whole and will be met entirely from within existing departmental budgets. Indeed, it is quite possible that suppliers may propose bearing some of the initial set-up costs and recharging them on an annual basis over the lifetime of the contract.

Integration costs

We expect that the NIR will be a valuable resource for other government departments and public bodies and enable them to make considerable savings by ending the current duplication of identity checking processes across the public sector. However, it is for each department to consider the business case for integrating their systems and processes with the NIR. Any costs they incur will be offset by benefits such as increased efficiency, reduced fraud or better service to the public so in the economic analysis there will be a net benefit to that organisation not a net cost.

LSE report

It is our view that the LSE 'Identity Project' report on the Home Office identity card scheme set out deliberately to inflate its costs. The cost estimate of £19 billion was based on a series of assumptions that do not correspond with the scheme we are proposing.

For example, the LSE report fails to explain why reputable research indicating 10-year reliability for biometrics should be discounted in favour of an assumption of a 5-year lifespan. If people have to be re-interviewed every five years, it adds enormous cost.

The LSE also allocated an inflated £1 billion marketing budget and assumed a much higher loss/theft rate than is the case for existing documents. In that way, the research generated headlines of the kind that read '£300 for an ID card' which some may say was the object of the exercise.

Conclusion

There has been much inaccurate comment on the costs of the scheme. Some of it has been intended to undermine public confidence in the principle of an identity card scheme.

As I hope this note shows, the investment needed to bring the National Identity Register and identity cards into being - on top of the considerable funds already being made available to improve the security of the passport - is both realistic and affordable for the Home Office, the Government and the individual citizen.
But, more than that, we believe it will bring the country significant benefits for years to come. The benefits case for the scheme is based on detailed work with other departments. It shows that the benefits of the scheme will far outweigh its costs when fully operational.

At present, the only document in Britain which provides a high degree of identity assurance is the passport. But, false passport applications are still made and, at 45-48 million records, the system does not cover the whole of our population. Indeed, it is people on the lowest incomes who are most likely not to have a passport and therefore more likely to miss out on the protection and convenience it provides.
It is the very lack of a comprehensive identity management system that makes it possible for identity fraudsters to exploit gaps in the system. Latest estimates show that identity fraud is growing and costs the country £1.7 billion every year. An identity card backed by a biometric National Identity Register will put the individual in control of the use of their personal data and cut the potential for identity fraud.

I also enclose a table detailing the Lords' amendments that I hope you will find useful.

Yours sincerely

ANDY BURNHAM

Here we go then...

Important context

Again the myth is perpetuated that the NIR is a modest extension to changes being forced on the passport office by the world at large, but passport requirements are for an encrypted digital photo to be stored on a chip on the card. The recording of finger prints and iris scans onto an open-ended database recording every interaction with the state an individual has is not a modest extension. The less ambitious NHS database has already cost £6 billion. Bye bye context.

Consumer Costs and Running Costs

£584 million a year on UK Passport Service - 70% on passports themselves.

Which leaves £173.1 million a year on the ID cards - i.e. £1.73 billion, which is undoubtedly where the £30 a card comes from. The fact is the reason the cost breaks down in the favour of the passport is because the passport is carrying loads of stuff we don't need, unless of course it is utilised in the ever so cheap NIR. Not very subtle misdirection, and even worse considering the fact that the set-up costs have yet to be included.

Set-Up Costs

Mr Burnham is basically saying, "if we tell people how much it will cost, it will empower companies bidding for the contract." But he's saying this to Members of Parliament! The infrastructure does not exist that will allow MPs to know how much the set-up is likely to cost! The "commercial sensitivity" argument is a nonsense inasmuch as it suggests MPs cannot be trusted with this information. AB states it will be less than the annual running costs of the scheme. So that's alright then. The other aspect of the argument is, that we seem intent on giving the contract to the lowest bidder; we'll ultimately get what we pay for.

AB also confusingly suggests it won't be expensive because contractors may choose to put up some of the money to begin with and claim it back later... How does that make it any cheaper? How does it not make it more expensive in the long run?

Integration Costs

"It is for each department to consider the business case for integrating their systems and processes with the BIR." yet AB is certain that "there will be a net benefit to that organisation, not a net cost." So have these business cases been drawn up already? Apparently so, but you can guarantee they've not been distributed. In fact there have been written questions to suggest this actually hasn't happened, and the business cases don't exist. Burnham himself has stated that the infrastructure of the scheme has yet to be agreed on, so how can there be business plans worth considering.

LSE report

AB feigns ingnorance as to why the LSE report hazarded a five-year lifespan for both cards and biometrics might be prudent. Aside from the fact that the five-year renewal only figured in their more pessimistic costings of the scheme, it's a subject well worth making the most of, not least of all because Mr Burnham himself suggests that the impact on costs that a shorter renewal period than ten years would have would be astronomical.

Hansard 6th February 2006:
Mr. Drew: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department which international biometric databases are being used as exemplars for the development of the UK National Identity Card Register. [42804]

Andy Burnham: Since the final details of the design and implementation of the National Identity Register cannot be completed in advance of procurement stages for the Scheme, it is not possible to provide a direct comparison with another biometric database at present and as such there are no 'exemplars' for the Register. However, as well as looking at the outcomes of biometric research and testing and the advice of biometric experts, the development the National Identity Register will be informed by experience gained from the operation of other biometric databases including: IAFS—IND's biometric database, IDENT1—UK fingerprints database, Philippines Social Security Card System, Hong Kong Identity Card System, US Visit biometric border control system, US Department of Homeland Security border crossing database, US Department of State Mexican visa database, United Arab Emirates Iris Expellee Tracking and Border Control database.

LSE Report:
The RIA estimates an indicative unit cost for an ID card and passport at £93. This assumes a ten-year life for a card and a recorded biometric. However, all technical and scientific literature indicates that biometric certainty diminishes over time,
and it is therefore likely that a biometric – particularly fingerprints and facial features – will have to be re-scanned at least every five years. This cost must be taken into account. If the enrolled biometrics do not significantly match the re-enrolled biometrics, it may be necessary to conduct another full identity check. Northrop Grumman, the operator of the national fingerprint information system (Nafis) argued that cards would need to be replaced on average every three years.663 The question of how a card subject is accurately verified to receive a new card is unclear, but we feel that the process will necessarily be costly and time-consuming.
...
663 ‘Memorandum submitted by Northrop Grumman’, submitted to the Select Committee on Home Affairs, January
2004, available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm200304/cmselect/cmhaff/130/130we40.htm.

So we have Burnham suggesting that the five year period is unfounded, yet also telling us that Northrop Grumman, the company that is perhaps in the best position of all to comment in that they actively use and deal with biometrics and biometric databases, is one of the companies being "listened to" in creating the NIR; a company that suggests the ID cards will have on average a three-year life span!

LSE Report wrote:
Furthermore, the UKPS is considering a reduction in the period of validity of a passport, from ten years to five years,556 which implies that for many individuals, passport fees will be payable every five years. The UKPS acknowledges that this will represent a major financial burden on customers, and that it could be operationally challenging, but
it would remedy potential problems caused by chip damage and allow for the updating of biometric information.557

556 UKPS Corporate and Business Plans 2004 –2009, page 18
557 UKPS Corporate and Business Plans 2004 –2009, page 23

So there we have it! Mr Burnham believes the five-year lifespan isn't based on anything concrete, yet not only is the card itself in doubt but the longevity of the biometrics themselves, and these are worries raised not by "partisan critics" but by the very people running current Governmental systems. By his own admission the five-year card renewal will lead to a dramatic increase in the cost of the scheme.

The report also makes the point that as we get older, our biometrics change yet more rapidly, but we already know that the HO have a no concessions policy on public NIR costs...

The report "assumed a much higher loss/theft rate than is the case for existing documents." It seems clear that ID card loss or theft would be much higher than for existing documents if the cards are to be in use for the "millions of ID checks carried out every day". Furthermore with the card in place, the number of checks carried out, and with it the opportunities for loss and theft, will definitely increase. This is something that KMPG, whose findings of the "robustness" of the Home Office's methodology (note "methodology", and not "findings"), even commented on, stating in the same report that the ten-year life span was not a belief to confidently cling to. KPMG also said the estimates for the levels of lost, stolen, damaged or faulty cards, based on passport figures, "appear low".

Conclusion

"Indeed it is people on the lowest incomes who are most likely not to have a passport and therefore more likely to miss out on the protection and convenience it provides"

People on the lowest incomes are less likely to have good credit ratings and therefore are not a target of identity theft.

"Latest estimates show that identity fraud is growing and costs the country £1.7 billion every year."

No it doesn't. The HO applies a much broader definition of identity fraud than not only the rest of the world, but the HO's earlier report. As has been widely publicised, little of the £1.7 billion would be recoverable from the ID card scheme. What is more, the criminal world is not static - the introduction of the ID card scheme will, in all likelihood change the way in which criminals get money, it won't stop them all together, something that "best value" calculations need to take into account.

Labour's understanding of food miles has little to do with apples in Tescos having come from half-way round the world, and more with Joe Public having the audacity to drive to out of town supermarkets to buy them. That is all there has to be said about Labour's perspective, and it carries through to the ID Card Bill. Ultimately, the financial victims of identity fraud are the credit card companies and compulsory public expenditure should not be used to further line their already pretty well lined pockets. As I've said elsewhere, if the Government brought in a law stipulating that credit card applications had to involve a face-to-face interview, and/or that the company retained a photo of the applicant, then a substantial amount identity theft would be ruled out immediately, the cost being met by the credit card companies who stand to take the biggest hit from ID theft in the first place. But Labour isn't interested in creating responsible lenders, so it'll be Joe Public that has to carry the can again.

Convenience Of The Daleks

2006-02-06T19:59:00.000Z

Convenience Of The Daleks,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

One of the spoils from the trip to Brighton was this here photoshopportunity. What larks! I'll have to keep my eye out for further dalekable items.

And lo

2006-02-03T19:15:00.000Z

It seems the report the HO have brought out, which Andy Burnham is keen to point out was only supposed to illustrate the fact that ID Theft is a growing crime, simply hasn't washed. Loads of newspapers have demonstrated how much the figures have been manipulated and misrepresented. What is more, some of the criticism has come from the finance industries themselves, who have a somewhat narrower definition of identity theft. Apparently the HO's figures even include money spent on police dealing with people who pretend to be gasmen and the like to gain entry to people's houses. Burnham has been backing out of the idea that the report was supposed to support the ID Card Bill, despite the fact that he has used the report to support the ID Card Bill and it's been released just in time for the vote. Had it been more negative, it would have been released on the morning of the vote, of course, and probably would've been a good deal longer. Nice to see how readily people are smelling a rat over it.

That said, with the recent embarrassment over the religious hatred bill, the whips will be working at the hurry-up, so anything could happen. A weird sort of balance occurs, though - if the ID card bill goes bye-bye then it will be an even bigger embarrassment for Tony, and that might be worth rebelling for, no matter what threats the whips will trot out.

Of course I'm stuck with Jowell. Can't be helped.

2006-02-02T09:15:00.000Z

More Home Office Misdirection

The HO is set to release a report today that shows identity fraud has increased over the last two years. The increase is from the previous report which, as has been demonstrated by smarter people than me, does not single out theft that could be avoided by the ID Card scheme. I believe the amount from the previous report that fell into this category was between 50 and 80 million. I'm hoping that the HO has shot itself in the foot by releasing this follow up report, as I suspect counter-measures taken both on an individual and corporate level will show an actual decline in the kind of fraud preventable by the scheme (and only if the scheme is compulsory and taken up by all financial businesses).

I ought to add at the same time that the criminal world is not pickled in aspic, and that, should one opportunity disappear, they will merely seek opportunity elsewhere, something which has to be taken into consideration when working out if the scheme is good value. What is more, none of this negates the "honeypot" issue, and that it is likely the register will be a contributory factor to identity theft.

And the HO has recently embarrassed itself further by failing its bookkeeping audit. Not inspiring of confidence.

Good advice

2006-01-31T19:43:00.000Z

Banksy Rats,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

c/o Banksy.

Do No Pass Go

2006-01-29T15:30:00.000Z

I popped over to Daniel & Sarah's last weekend to play a game of Go, but never got round to it. It's been an absolute age since I played any games, so this weekend have logged onto the Kiseido Go Server, create a new profile (my old one has lapsed) and played a few games.

And by God I suck! Also, to make matters worse, I found out that the scoring on KGS has never been very clever, and that when the server is working out the score, the players are supposed to click on or off the live groups. Thus the first two games on my profile are somewhat inaccurately scored, the second one by over 100 points. I still lost both, but by a slightly less shameful margin. The third game I don't even want to talk about. I suspect a good bit of playing and reading are going to be in order if I'm to regain the level of personal comfort I once had in my game. I suspect my intuition is gone, and I just need some practice games and to sit on my hands a bit. I always play too fast on the computer, y'see.

Nearing Completion

2006-01-24T21:56:00.000Z

Lipogram Prufrock,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

Well, the lipogram Prufrock is pretty much as I want to leave it. Here's a relatively pointless pic of a paper copy I'd been editing. I'm going to upload the polished version to Hamilton's Brain for February, along with some other lipogrammatic doodles. I've not done much of an update at HB for a while, so will be racking my brains for goodies over the next few days...

...might send the Prufrock to Radio 3's The Verb. You never know.

About That ID Card Bill II

2006-01-23T21:44:00.000Z

More defeats in the Lords. This time the Lords voted in favour of amendments that would ensure the scheme remains truly voluntary and that the scheme won't become compulsary without a second vote in the house. Interestingly, I have a letter (editors, please note!) from Charles Clarke suggesting this last point anyway. Surely he knows the content of his own Bill? That old New Labour decision of incompentence or corruption rearing its ugly again.

The only thing that they seem to be selling the Bill on at the moment is that 21st Century bogie man, Identity Theft. However, when they say ID Theft, they're usually talking about credit card fraud - remember that? Most credit card fraud is in the form of cardholder not present transactions: i.e. internet and phone shopping. Thus the ID card scheme won't make any kind of impression on it, as most home computers don't have ID card readers; that's why we won't be able to check our medical records using the cards either, Tony. Where it might make an impression is in preventing people adopting other people's identities when applying for credit cards. Given that although hassle and irritation will befall the person whose "identity" has been "stolen" (such alarmist terms - it's not Blade Runner!), generally speaking it costs the credit card companies, rather than the individual. So why is it the individual who has to pay? Why don't the credit card companies come up with schemes for their credit cards that will make this more difficult? And isn't credit card fraud on the decrease in this brave new Chip & PIN world?

The fact is, identity theft is avoidable. All it takes is a bit of common sense when disposing of utility bills, bank statements, and the like. Not costly, not intrusive, and, hey! it even becomes the individual's responsibility!

As for credit card companies, why not make it legal that you can only give someone a credit card in a face-to-face transaction? Why not take a photo of the person being given the credit card, so that should they be faking it, then it will be a lot easier to prove after the fact? I know this still leaves you with the costs, but getting rid of anonymous credit card application and photographing the applicants will put off a hell of a lot of would be fraudsters. The thing is, credit card companies don't want to do that because it will put some people off. Given the number of times the companies are getting their knuckles rapped over aggressive advertising and irresponsible lending, don't you think maybe it would be a way of showing you're willing to behave?

A.J. Prufrock's chanson d'amour

2006-01-19T19:45:00.000Z

I'm writing a lipogrammatic translation of a famous work of Tom's. My first draft is shown below. My first parsing of it took it to lipogram status, and I shall visit it again for a final polish.

A.J. Prufrock's chanson d'amour

Why not go now, you and I
Whilst this gloaming's languid against its sky
as if it lay unconscious on a slab
Why not go through familiar but not crowding roads
Through murmuring lodgings
of tiring nights in short-stay tawdry inns
sawdust food-halls with scallop casings
Paths that follow, akin to boring discussions
Of implicit aim
To point you to an inundating inquiry
Oh do not ask “what is it?”
Why not go now and both visit

In my room ladyfolk pass on by
Talking of Buonorotti

A mustard fog that rubs its back upon a window’s glass
A mustard smog that rubs its lips upon a window’s glass
Tonguing into all of this gloaming’s nooks,
Floats aloft from ponds that stand in drains
Allows to fall upon its back dark ash that falls from roof stacks
Slips by a row of housing, without warning jumps,
And noticing this soft autumnal month
Curls all about my lodging for a kip

And opportunity will follow
For mustard smog that slips along my road
Rubbing its back upon all window glass;
Opportunity, opportunity
To form a look to confront looks in turn
Opportunity to kill and bring about
And opportunity for all works and days of hands
That lift and drop an inquiry in your bowl;
Instants for both you and I,
Instants too for a myriad don’t-knows,
A myriad drafts of a myriad sights,
Prior to taking of toast and chai.

In my room ladyfolk pass on by
Talking of Buonorotti

And opportunity too
To ask “Do I risk it for a small affair?”
Now to turn back, and go downstairs
With a bald spot tonsuring my hair
(all will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to my chin,
My cravat rich and civil, but stuck fast by a worn old pin--
(All will say: “But how his limbs now grow so thin!”)

Do I risk it
Disturbing this continuum?

In an instant, opportunity
For picking paths and making drafts which an instant can undo.

For I know all instants now, known instants all—
Known gloamings, mornings, nights and noons
Brought my mortal story out with sugar spoons
I know all babbling dying with a dying fall
Drowning in music from a distant room
My assumption is too soon?

And all looks I know by now, known looks all
Looks that fix you with sly formulaic words
And whilst I’m but a formula, sprawling on a pin
Whilst on a pin and wriggling on a wall,
How should I now start
To spit out all cigar butts of my days and ways?
My assumption is too soon?

And all arms I know by now, known arms all—
Arms with shining bands and palid and fair
(but whilst in lamplight, a down of august hair!)
Is it odour from a gown
Causing my thoughts to roam?
Arms lying along a worktop or that wrap about a shawl.
My assumption is too soon?
And how should I now start?
……

Shall I say, I brought my body down narrow roads,
Watching smog rising out of roof stacks
Of solitary chaps, tilting out of windows…
If only I had had a form, a pair of worn down claws
Scuttling across our sub-aquatic floors.
……

And so past noon, and gloaming, kips so placidly!
A smoothing of long digits,
Akip… worn out … or dawdling stays,
upon our floor, along from both of us
Should I, whilst full of chai, hot and cold pudding.
Find it in my soul to bring this instant’s flooding?
Though in my past I cry and fast, cry and pray,
Though I saw my skull (grown slightly bald) brought in within a bowl,
This is of small import—I am no guiding soul;
I saw my hour of distinction pass,
And I saw that undying footman hold my coat, and laugh,
And, in short, I was afraid.

And would my account find nothing owing
With cups, and citrus jams, and chai
Amongst this china clay, a bit of talk of you and I
Would it finally show profit
If grinning I bit this thing to stop it
So pushing this continuum into a ball
To roll it towards an inundating inquiry,
To say “I am Lazarus, back from passing,
Back to inform you all, I’ll inform you all”—
If a lady puts a pillow by that lady’s skull
Should say: “That is not what I said at all;
That is not it, at all.”

And would my account find nothing owing
Would it finally show profit
Past many sundowns, many dooryards, and rain-slick roads,
Past many books, past china cups, past many skirts that trail along a floor—
Past an unfinishing list of things?--
I hold an inability to say what I’d imply!
But as if a magic box had on a backdrop shown my axons laid out tidily:
Would it finally show profit,
If a lady, placing pillows or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward a window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I said at all.”
……

No! I am no Danish dauphin, nor was that my path;
Am an assisting lord, such that will do,
To push a plot or start an act or two,
Inform my royal lord; no doubt a tool,
My Duty won, and glad to carry out,
Politic, cautious, and assiduous
Full of high standing, but short on clout;
Occasionally ridiculous—
Occasionally his Fool.

I grow old… I grow old….
I‘ll don a pair of slacks, its bottoms fold
Shall I part my hair at back? Do I risk having a plum?
I shall don my slacks with turn-ups, and walk upon a strand.
I know singing by aquatic nymphs, but only from dry land.

I do not think that song is for my favour sung.

I saw nymphs riding out on tidal flows
Combing strands of hair on surf blown back
As winds blow its foam both ivory and black
Our past was too long paid in coastal rooms
By nymphs with plants for clothing, blush and brown
Till human talking stirs us, so to drown.

I should point out that my saying "ladyfolk" is a rarity.

About That ID Card Bill

2006-01-17T19:38:00.000Z

Quietly pleased, but the show's not over yet...

Glad to see that some people in politics are willing to actually point out the lies and inconsistencies in the Government's line on ID Cards.

The Lords have not only requested a full and open release of the Home Office's figures, but wish to make the scheme truly voluntary. They also want to block any future use of the NID key in other databases, which would prevent the creation of the meta-database.

Clarke recently suggested that public support for the scheme was higher now than it's ever been. Happily that doesn't seem to be the case.

I suspect a letter to Mrs Jowell might be in order...

Hello By The Way

2006-01-15T11:54:00.000Z

Well, I've not posted properly for a while - between Christmas and an unshakeable cold I've not really had much time, energy or impetus to make more than a passing comment on recent news and events. However, my mucus has changed consistency, I've completed the story missions of GTA: San Andreas, and we've reorganised the books, so here I am. Consider this an update and that.

I've been spending a little too long on the QI forums of late. Its eclecticism appeals to me, and there's a genuinely interesting range of voices, experiences and learnings. I post there as Mr Grue (and in school time, too! A bad habit I'm determined to get out of). Say hello some time.

Christmas was made more interesting than usual in that Ian and I were prominantly visible in the audience of the Goodies night studio bits. We'd been similarly framed in a Dad's Army documentary a while ago, too, but this time round the show we were ever so slightly in was on the viewing list of most of our friends. We were inundated with texts and emails along the lines of "look! You're on the telly!". Ian got a message from one of the talking heads in the show complaining that we were in it more than he was. Bo.

We did our almost annual book sort, which is getting increasingly difficult. We'd get another set of shelves, but there isn't the space. There was collapsage, too, which was a tad annoying. All done now, though. Anally placed some pics on Flickr with loads of annotation. Check 'em out.

Speaking of anal - I also was considering the importance of art that has something to say and the need to apply this to my own writing. I began to "restate my assumptions" which was quite an interesting exercise. I've been a bit low of late, partly due to the cold, and partly just my turning 30 blues, which will hopefully end by the time I'm 31. Partly stemming from the list, and the blues, I've decided to draw up a life plan, pillow book type thing - starting with the list of assumptions, but going on to include things such as free pleasures, goals for 2006, goals for 2016. I'll probably post a good deal of it online when it's done. I guess what I'm trying to do is channel my energies more effectively. I've taken on a couple of creative projects lately that I really believe in, and find myself genuinely interested in the research that goes along with them, but I need to make sure I follow them through, and the listmaking exercise will be a help.

What about Pieces? Yeah, yeah, I know! It'll get done eventually. I'm having a huge problem trying to find something in the character's childhood to write about. There's a friendship with his art teacher which I want to focus on but I'm having trouble bringing it about without making it seem contrived.

What about GRW? Yeah, yeah, I know! Definitely want to do something with it, but I'm not sure at present what. I'm planning an expidition into the interior to find the source of the Circle Line, probably the weekend before my birthday. This was originally intended for a piece in the Grue, but it's very much mirth and merriment, and so goes against the original agenda. I suspect I may have to lighten up a little on the requirements for entry. Was even toying with running fiction, but would need to really really control that, and might not be bastard enough to do so.

I notice you've not done much with Hamilton's Brain lately. Yeah, yeah, I know! I'll at least get some more straplines out, and a progress update on Pieces. I did a noun+7 version of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock on the old Grue site. Rolf has lamented that I've not transferred the Victor Mature letters over to the Brain Probe, so I might make something of that. I had worked out a quite elaborate plot about it, which should be easy enough to work through in the correspondence stylee. Will that do?

Anyhoo, I'm for coffee. TTFN.

Lies, all lies!

2006-01-15T11:46:00.000Z

Cameron Crowe,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

On the town with Ian and Rolf and who should we bump into but North American film director Cameron Crowe! He was wearing a Robert Crumb t-shirt, so maybe those rumours are true?

BBC NEWS | Wales | Opik fury as Kennedy stands down

2006-01-07T18:43:00.000Z

Opik fury as Kennedy stands down

Glad to see someone willing to point out how much damage this mess has done to the Liberal Democrats. I had some issues with Kennedy, feeling that he hadn't really done enough in the last election (despite the historic result). That said, his being forced from his position in such a weak-spirited conniving manner has shown the party up as a weak-willed, easily manipulated bunch of fools. I sincerely hope that this chaos will be short lived and that Simon Hughes, or whoever, will get the party back on its feet as quickly as possible. Let's just hope they'll regain credibility.

Missing Believed Wiped

2005-12-12T21:34:00.000Z

The NFT play host to an annual show of recently recovered archive television. Many programmes get misfiled, destroyed or misplaced and turn up decades later in old men's sheds, or taped over the cricket. The Missing Believed Wiped screening allows the dust to be blown from the tapes, the programmes get shown, and then filed away again. Top show this year, but probably the most curious line up, and a somewhat atypical turnout for all of that.

Choice pickings were Shaggy Dog, by Dennis Potter which was made for ITV as part of the Company Of Five series of one off plays. It was much stronger than expected, and actually managed to fit the strand (what I've seen of it) rather well, with Potter flexing his political muscles but keeping it within a soft, fleshy, human frame.

We were also treated to the first reel of the first ever episode of The Avengers, along with the usual array of slightly flawed, format still maturing, action drama. One was a delightful courtroom drama where the case hinged on a new type of electromagnetic car door lock, presumably sold by the Maguffin car door lock company.

There's often something quite extraordinary that is shown, too, such as one year where they showed one of the earliest and abandoned experiments in television recording - we watched bleary, almost incomprehensible images of a dancing chorusline that were practically supernatural.

But the ghosts this year were of a different order all together, the filmed interview inserts for a documentary called Tyranny. The film concerned itself with Adolf Hitler, and the interviewees included Adolf's chauffeur and sister.

Code Repair

2005-12-12T21:06:00.000Z

In an idle moment I attempted to use my N7 Assistant (see GRW Language Lab for details) and found to my happy surprise that Firefox afford more flexible dialogue boxes than Internet Explorer. I'd long thought about reworking the Assistant so that the questions it asks you pop up in their own windows, but I could never get the thing to work. Now I'm tempted to leave it as it is.

Or I would have been. Much to my dismay the bugger wouldn't actually spit the text out at the other end. However, a brief and only slightly irritating bit of coding later, and the thing is back on its feet. The problem seemed to have something to do with the different way IEx and Firefox handle variable scopes. Anyhoo it works, and to celebrate I've parsed a poem and popped it up. Poetry's more fun to N7 than prose somehow.

Radical Underground

2005-12-04T21:04:00.000Z

Radical Underground,
originally uploaded by Simon Scott.

A suitably surreal photo on the way to see the League of Gentlemen Pantomime. Courtesy of the curious policy the Hammersmith Appollo have of putting the curtain time rather than the door time on the ticket we missed the very start of the show, but enjoyed the rest of it. The show seemed to build on the structure of the last tour. In that one the first half involved the boys doing their bits in dinner jackets, the way they used to pre-telly, and the second half was more costumes and catchphrases. This was, as a friend pointed out to me, just panto, and so it makes a certain kind of sense for them to literally do a panto this time round. The djs have gone, however, replaced by an abortive attempt to do a nativity play by those irascible Legz Akimbo. Interesting to see the one-shot characters from series three getting such strong responses from the crowd, too. I've been pleasantly surprised by both the film and the show... I think I' allowed to like them again now!

Clouds and that

2005-12-02T23:57:00.000Z

Xenmate on flickr commented on a pic of some clouds I'd taken a while back. Apparently they're due to something called the Kelvin Helmholtz instability, which I won't pretend to understand, but can nevertheless appreciate!