Another bad night's
sleep; I finally nodded off five minutes before "er indoors
TM" woke me by going for a tiddle, and
was up and watching Family Guy shortly after 6am. "Furry Face
TM" liked my toast; as he usually does. I
then had a quick surf of the Internet and as I watched an email
arrived. A new geocache had
gone live not a mile from home. However it wasn't a standard one;
this one's location could only be found by solving what looked to be
a particularly fiendish puzzle.
However bashing my head
against the wall and then trying random entries on Wikipedia soon
gave me the clue I wanted, and after surprisingly little mucking
about I had the cache in hand not forty minutes after it had been
published. First to Find. Happy dance.
I carried on to work,
listening to the radio as I went. The Government's
bedroom tax would seem to have been an abject failure. Only six
per cent of people in rented accommodation with spare rooms have
moved on. The Government had been hoping for a lot more; the idea
being that by taxing people living in houses with unused bedrooms,
single people in multi-bedroomed houses could down-size to make room
for larger families. In theory a good idea, but in practice it's not
worked.
Nearly a quarter of the
people affected by this tax are now in arrears with their rent where
they weren't before. Furthermore they interviewed the leader of
Wiltshire council who said it's their policy not to build
one-bedroomed accommodation. So those who the tax is trying to force
into one-bedroomed flats clearly have nowhere to go.
A Government spokeswoman
came on and rubbished all of what had been said; it was all patent
lies, the figuers quoted were all wrong. When pushed she reluctantly
admitted that the percentage of those in rented accommodation with
spare rooms who have moved on was not only six per cent; it was a
rather impressive eight per cent. Big deal! And she had to concede
that there are precious few single bedroomed houses or flats. Why do
politicians go on the radio when they know they are in the wrong?
Surely they'd get more respect by admitting when they'd made a
mistake?
There was also
consternation about how freely available filth
is on the Internet. The pundits interviewed a sour faced harridan
who seemed to think there was merit in hounding British smut
merchants so much that they moved overseas. She seemed to think it
was a good idea to have filth based abroad where there could be no UK
control of it, rather than keeping it local and licensed.
A leading porn-monger
then pointed out the obvious; there are plenty of cyber-tools to
prevent kiddies seeing things on the Internet if only people would
stop being so proud of being ignorant of how to use the technology.
I stopped off to get
petrol on my way to work, and once there I did my thing. It was quite
a good day. Not only did we have cream cake, but one of the lads has
been nominated for the award of National Apprentice of the year. All
rather exciting.
I had another sax
practice at lunch time. As well as gettting a surprising amount of
notes out of the thing, there was an entertaining interlude in which
the introduction ot "Paint it Black" turned into
part of "The First Noell".
After work I set of to
McDonalds where I met Stevey and the Rear Admiral. We sneered at the
antics of the Great Unwashed, then set off to astro club. Tonight's
meeting was rather disjointed as our speaker had been delayed, but
the meeting was nonetheless excellent. Interesting news, a good
little chat on what there is of note in the constellation Bootes, and
a really interesting talk on the Soviet space program...
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