What You Can Get Away With

I know airlines are ruthless and INS officers at American airports can be very harsh, but I hadn’t expected this:

There is overbooking and lots of passengers are simply being bumped off.

Just reading this story and then Alex’s comments on it prompted a thought. As 2010 now seems the most likely date for the next General Election, what if the referendum on Scottish independence happens on the same day? I haven’t got time to write up all my thoughts on it right now, but it would make for a very interesting campaign, both north and south of the border.

I think it’s time I started blogging more regularly again - and now the elections are over, I’ve actually got some time to do it.

I’ve had a stressful month, but in the end it was all well worth it. I spent most of yesterday on my bike dodging rain (and even hail at a couple of times) as I was number-running for my ward, so I’m not quite sure how I found the energy to stay up for the count, but I suspect adrenaline played a large part, replaced after a while by a bit of euphoria.

Yesterday we did a very good job in bucking the national trend and gained four seats off the Tories to put Colchester Council back into no overall control. The first key result was in my ward (Castle) where we saw off the Greens yet again, with my colleague Henry Spyvee increasing our vote as he got re-elected with a bigger majority than me. After that, we were in the Chinese whispers part of the election count with everyone trading box counts and tallies back and forth as we tried to work out how we were doing.

For a while, it seemed like we were going to have a so near and yet so far night as we missed out in Prettygate by 30 votes (after a 9.6% swing to us from the Tories) and in Berechurch by 55 votes (with a 10% swing from Labour) but then came the biggest win of the night as Martin Goss stormed home in Mile End by over 700 votes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate who’s worked as hard as Martin has over the past year and it was a thoroughly well-deserved victory over a member of the Council’s cabinet.

After that, the coin-flips started landing in our favour - Jon Manning followed up on Mark Cory’s win last year to turn Wivenhoe Cross all gold, Laura Sykes won Stanway and then finally, after several recounts, Nigel Offen unseated another member of the cabinet to take Shrub End and leave us all with great big grins on our faces. On top of that, our sitting Councillors all did well and Mark Warner did a great job in Labour’s St Andrew’s heartland with a swing of almost 11%.

As for me, I’m now having my recovery day - my legs are reminding me of how much work they did yesterday - and looking forward to our first new group meeting tomorrow for the 23 of us.

Full results here, if you’re interested.

Sad news comes that Arthur C. Clarke has died. I can remember watching his Mysterious World series as a child, and then his books being one of the reasons that got me into SF - particularly Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End.

When the first European ATV was launched to the International Space Station last week, I noticed that it had been named after Jules Verne and wondered if the ones that follow it would be named after authors too. While there are a number of objects and other things named after him in the stars already - both in reality and fiction - I think it’d be fitting for the second ATV to be named after him

OK, in posting this I want you to remember that I thought the V For Vendetta movie looked good in advance shots, then the actual film turned out to be something that made me want to drag out the brain bleach afterwards to forget about.

So, here are some pictures of the Comedian, Rorschach, Nite Owl, Ozymandias and Silk Spectre from the Watchmen movie.

The Guardian has an interesting article about the links - both real and imagined - between Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, and the fictional Matt Santos Presidential campaign in The West Wing.

Of course, as anyone who’s seen series 7 of The West Wing will remember, if the links continue Obama may find it hard to persuade anyone to be his running mate, and if you happen to live near an American nuclear power plant, it might be a good idea to think about moving something soon.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

So, for reasons I can’t adequately explain I watched Primeval yesterday evening and had a revelation. OK, first I had the thought ‘dear Lord, this is truly awful’ but my revelation went some way to explaining that: I realised that the show it wants to be isn’t Doctor Who, but 90s BBC action show Bugs. It’s one of those shows - like Hotel Babylon, say - that’s set in Generic International City London, where it’s easy to strip off the soundtrack and redub it in German, Spanish, Russian, Uzbek or whatever, and no one’s going to need to know anything about the setting other than it’s Capital City. And of course, if you know your dialogue’s only there to serve as a placeholder until it gets overdubbed by someone else, why bother going for nuance or subtlety that’ll be completely missed by the translator? Just make sure people talk in fluent exposition, and it’ll be easier to sell as they can probably get the Babelfish software to do 90% of the work for them.

In related news, I’m thinking that what the world needs is an objective ranking of TV show quality, and I’d like to present the Stupid Stick as a way towards developing that objectivity. Basically, the Stupid Stick ranking is a count of the number of times when something happens on screen that can only be explained by the character, writer or both having been hit hard on the head with said stick. For instance, on last night’s Primeval, someone (the blonde girl who was in S Club 7) is part of a team looking for strange creatures and has seen several herself in the past including, it seems, owning one as a pet. She’s on a boat with a couple of other people who are looking for a strange creature in a canal basin. She sees something in the water that rises up towards the boat and then moves away, which scares her. Does she (a) say ‘hey guys, I think I saw something’ to the other people on the boat with her, or does she (b) say nothing - even when her teammates on the boat question her exclamation of shock - and then stand up very close to the edge of the boat thus making it easier for said creature to grab her.

Yes, it’s (b) and we score 1 to the Stupid Stick count. Sadly, my Stupid Stick measuring device just gave up and exploded during a later scene with a conveniently waterproof machine gun.