RandomJottings.co.uk

As the “big chill” looks to be drawing to a close ITV’s Tonight programme aired an investigation into how we can stop the winter weather reaking havok.

According to the programme, the answer is £1.2 billion pounds initial investment and an additional £400 million per year to maintain it (in contrast, the recent cold snap has been estimated to have cost the economy £800 million per day).

Being away this year, I missed the most disruptive weather, but this has got to have been the first time in years that such a major disruption has occurred, so maybe what we really need is better planning rather than a huge investment for an event that hardly ever happened (and should become less frequent as the globe naturally warms).

Our biggest priority must be keeping the public transport links open, even if you can’t get your car out of the garage, if all it takes is a short walk to get to an operating  bus or train, you can get to work. Local authorities (or possibly central government) needs to look at our infastructure and give precise priorities. We don’t need to grit every road, but every area should have a priority route, and these are usually serviced by buses, that should be kept open no matter what the weather throws at us.

Supposedly every council in the country had 6 days supply of grit, but certainly in Rochdale’s case, this six days seemed to have been worked out as a light dusting of salt on a couple of main routes that they were legally obliged to treat, no thought seems to have gone into provisioning to keep the rest of the town running, or dealing with particularly hazardous roads (which to be fair, being situated on the edge of the Pennines we have quite a few of).

In truth, six days (if calculated correctly) should be more than enough to deal with winter most of the time, but we then need a centrally controlled emergency supply that can be brought out those times that we have more serious conditions, and this could be built up with the surplus from milder winters.

Perhaps the most affordable of the programme’s proposed improvements is the airports, (£75 million + £15 million/year) with over 235 million passengers using British airports each year, a levy of a few pence per flight to avoid airport closures due to weather has got to be worthwhile.

Finally, we have a huge manpower resource sat around even in the best of weather. It doesn’t need much (if any) training to use a shovel to shift snow, it’s time that we replaced the “dole” system with a “national service” that can be utilised in general to improve our environment, but can be rolled out in times of need to deal with conditions like this.

An advert for anti-bullying site cybermentors.org.uk has been banned from the TV because some scenes are considered too offensive!

It’s only a short advert, the content isn’t really graphic (it shows, from behind, a girl sewing her mouth shut) certainly far less than the films and video games that our children have suposedly become desensitised to.

More importantly, the aim should be to shock, those responsible have to be made to realise the harm that they cause to their victims and the victims need to be aware that there is help available. It harks right back to the original charter for TV, that it should educate.

The advert is dedicated to Megan Gillan, a pretty 15 year old (by all accounts a bright pupil) who despite being bullied was further victimised by the school, who segregated her rather than dealing with the bullies that pushed her to desperately take her own life.

Compared to the despair Megan (and other victims like her) go through the video (you can see it below) is nothing.

Beatbullying:

If you want to speak out, text SPEAKOUT to 84459 and donate just £3 to Beatbullying.

The cost of your text to 84459 will be charged at £3.00 plus your standard network text charge. Service is available for UK mobiles only.

An illegal-immigrant, Javid Iqbal,  residing in Bolton has finally been found guilty of rape, a reason for Police to celebrate you would think.

However, despite having a description and DNA evidence, this crook managed to elude them.

Three months later the victim even managed to supply them with the registration of his vehicle (after spotting her attacker in another part of town).

Of course, the vehicle might not have been registered, so maybe the Police were still struggling to find the perpetrator.

Three years later, they just happen to stop Javid’s vehicle, in the course of an investigation into illegal street trading and link it (and him) to the earlier rape.

According to the Police, “It must have been galling for the victim to see him a second time going about his business, but thankfully she was able to make a note of his registration which was key to us identifying Iqbal.”

All well and good, but the vehicle in question wasn’t exactly common place…

Had the vehicle been a red Ford Escort, maybe they could be excused the long delay in tracking it down, but it was infact an ice-cream van!!! Surely it doesn’t take much to letpatrol cars know to check registration plates on this sort of highly visible vehicle, what were the Police waiting for, the victim to supply them with the name, address and phone number of her attacker?

I can only hope that there aren’t more victims of this scumbag who could have been saved if the Police weren’t so incompetent.

“Just how many Hayseed Dixie albums can one man own?”

Well the boys are back (after a quiet year) to put this to the test with their eighth studio album (due out in February)

I haven’t heard the full album yet, but luckily Barley has been posting teasers on YouTube for a couple of months now.

While I like Hayseed Dixie’s tongue in cheek original songs (There’s seven on this release), the good news is that the cover versions are back in the mix with rockgrass assaults on bands like Queen, The Prodigy, Black Sabbath and Mozart, all chosen to highlight the album’s theme of killing and death, although the other three elements to any song worth singing also get a good airing.

“There’s still plenty of drinking, cheating and hell in there too, as them 4 elements all go together like stink on poop,” remarks front-maniac Barley Scotch.

If that isn’t enough to get you to put your hand in your pocket though, the package also comes with a DVD with six music videos from the album and five tutorials. Want to know what to do if your banjo playing brother accidentally cuts off one of his arms, or how to play Duelling Banjos with an African darbucka, the answers are right here.

Still not enough?? Well now it’s time to try your hand at being a record producer…

The DVD contains (in full CD quality) all the multi-track audio files for the album so that you can mix the songs yourself, there’s even a track – Love Cabin – that is only available if you mix it yourself, a first for any band.

So what are you waiting for (well apart from February), get out there and fund the band’s ambitious project to drink like students.

After yesterday’s rant about gritting…

Up until recently, our road used to get gritted in cold weather, then a couple of years ago it stopped. I don’t like it, but since it isn’t a main road I can understand that the council’s priorities are elsewhere.

So, with councils across the UK being ordered to cut their gritting by 25%, and our council in particular complaining that the stocks are critically low and that the government has hijacked the extra grit they’d ordered, what happens?

I get home last night to find our road has unexpectedly been gritted!!!

While personally I’m happy, I’m also dumbfounded as to why Rochdale Council suddenly think they have grit to spare. I can only assume that some bean-counter has found some down the back of the sofa and they want to get rid of it before anyone else notices.

With grit for the roads rapidly running out (if you believe the news and distrust Gordon Brown) it’s funny to note the excuses put out by local authorities accused of not gritting the roads properly.

1> Grit needs a flow of traffic over it shortly after being laid down for it to work.

Funnily enough, when I got back from Austrailia, the first thing I did was grit the area outside my garage (it’s not funny when the car starts to slide just as you enter an enclosed space), following day, that gritted area was snow free despite only having one car drive over it.

2> Grit suplies are low because the weather was unexpected and you can’t store it for a long time.

The grit I used was some I liberated from a grit bin last year when it snowed (and stored in my garage ready for the next time it was needed), not sure how long it had been in the bin, but it has certainly not degraded over the 12 months that it has been in my possession.

The true cause of the situation we are in however is the budgets and the hype about global warming.

In the first case, councils are being hit with ever tighter budgets for the essentials because their money is hoovered up protecting the pensions of council workers and funding strange minority projects like “Gay Lithuanian Pensioners against Apple Blossom*” when all they really should be doing is the essentials like emptying the bins and keeping the roads clear.

Secondly, with their unerring political belief in global warming how could it ever snow again, surely a cold-snap is impossible, so why bother to prepare for it – Boris Johnson’s London Transport Strategy (all 354 pages of it) bleats on about responding to climate change but not once covers what will be done in the case of freezing conditions.

* Please note that I have nothing against Gays, Lithuanians or indeed Pensioners, Apple Blossom however, is only fine whilst it’s on the tree, I hate it when it falls off and starts littering the streets 😀

Having previously been put off 3D by 80’s TV and magazines like Look In, (not to mention the £11 per ticket price tag) I was dubious about going to see this film expecting the good old red and green cardboard glasses. Instead the new version looks like NHS sunglasses with slightly darkened lenses (no sign of the colours of the past) and a proper plastic frame.

So preparing to be unimpressed I donned the glasses at the required time and the Disney Logo on the trailer that had just started, jumped out of the screen and hovered a foot from my nose!!! Not a bad start. We then got treated to the usual cliches of things jumping out of the screen towards you etc. which is all well and good, but tends to distract from a storyline.

Once the actual film starts, however, you notice that the 3D effects aren’t pushed, the story takes first place and the technology just adds that extra depth and clarity to the scenes, possibly the epitomy of this style is after the destruction of the Hometree, where the ash is falling all around you as well as the hero on screen.

Anyway, to the film…

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled ex-marine is persuaded to take on his twin brother’s position on a moon called Pandora, rich in a coveted mineral and inhabited by a tall blue-skinned Na’vi, a “primitive” race. Jake’s job to control an Avatar, a genetically engineered simulation of one of the Na’vi in order to infiltrate the tribe and convince them to move from the mineral rich lands.

I assume that the writers analogy was that of the treatment of the Native Americans, but fresh from my escapades in Oz, I couldn’t fail to miss the similarities of the Na’vi’s belief system with that of the Aboriginies (somewhat helped by the fact that my guide, Evan Yanna Muru, had seen the film the day before my walkabout), being at one with the world around them enhanced in the Na’vi’s case by their ability to physically bond with the plants and animals.

Generally accepted that all they have to do is look like the Na’vi and educate them, it isn’t until Jake is separated from the others and meets up with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) that he discovers the rich tapestry of beliefs from his reluctant tutor. In learning these beliefs Jake comes to appreciate and bond with this primitive way of life.

Inevitably of course, the “advanced” human race decides that enough-is-enough and moves in to capture the mineral wealth by force, destroying the Hometree (which just happens to be on top of the biggest lode of Unobtanium) and dispersing the natives.

What follows is the usual hero changes sides and leads the tribe against the agressors (along with boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back by flying a huge reptile), which on the face of it is a pretty cliched storyline, but it is the well thought out background to the film (along with the careful use of 3D) that sets it apart from others. If you want an action movie, then it’s not bad, but if you miss out on the spirituality of the storyline then you’re only seeing half the film.

When, due to the cold snap, disabled pensioner Joan Armstrong (81) found herself housebound, she called on Salford social services for help. She wasn’t looking for much, just someone to do a little shopping for her while she was unable to do it herself.

The answer she got is that she would have to wait two weeks for an assessment before they could do anything for her!!!

The fact that she didn’t know her neighbours well enough to ask any of them for help (and none of her neighbours thought to check up on her) is one problem, what we can do to get the community spirit back into our national psyche god only knows.

What is really alarming though is that the jobsworth at the other end of the phone, despite working in a caring profession, lacked the basic humanity to make the effort to get something done!

I’m sure that the people who actually do the caring (not holed up in a centrally heated office) wouldn’t have minded checking up on this vulnerable pensioner and could have easily done a quick assessment to show that she really did need a spot of help in these unusual conditions.

This “person” needs to be sacked, but more than that needs to be named, shamed and vilified, abandoning Joan in this way was attempted manslaughter.

Many pensioners faced with this callousnes would just have given up and likely become another victim of the cold, luckily in this case the Manchester Evening News became involved.

Sunrise at Heathrow

Arrived back in England early yesterday morning expecting the whole world to have frozen solid. Had a bit of a problem starting the car after a month stood idle (the car that is) and a couple of weeks of cold weather but apart from that and a minor delay at Heathrow no issues getting around.

I was also expecting to be freezing my wotnots off, but only got round to putting a fleece on when I went to shovel the snow drift from the doors of my garage.

Flying up from Heathrow was to see the countryside at it’s best, the snow having cleaned the landscape to it’s bare essentials, the Pennines especially had almost Lake District grandeur instead of the usual view of bumpy muddy-green moorland we’re used to.

Sat at Sydney Airport’s business club lounge, drink in one hand, wireless internet in the other, an hour and a half to go before we’re in the air.

God knows what we’re going to be greated with when we get back, last news I had was that Manchester Airport had reopened, but big problems on the road with Rochdale Council due to run out of grit before we get back (not that they do any but the main roads anymore so my estate will be treacherous.)

Also got to hope that the car will start after a month sat in the dismal British weather. (Granted we had thunderstorms last night, when we got here there were warnings of fire risks, now parts of NSW are flooded)