Tuesday, August 05, 2008
They say that a little knowledge is dangerous
That is to say, according to this morning's DT, some Glaswegian judge has seen fit to punish an elderly wife strangler with a curfew, enforced by one of those bracelets around the ankle. I almost took fright and dived back under the bed clothes, which would almost certainly have resulted in my morning cuppa being distributed over me and said bed clothes. Reading a bit further, it seems that the chap concerned has dementia and strangled his wife when she refused to give him any money to go to the pub with, and, after the event, her relatives found it rather annoying that he was still using the same pub as they were. While, on what little we have been told, it seems entirely likely that prison will do the villain no good, it also seems entirely likely that the villain could still do some harm. What if his home help refuses to give him some money to go to the pub with? What will his fine new bracelet say about that? Would it be OK if he went to some other pub than that used by his late wife's relatives? Isn't that fact that he almost certainly smokes reason enough to bang him up for life? I think the good old DT has been rather economical with the truth again.
And then there was the peice (the page 9 lead if you please) about how the National Trusties are doing something really eco with one of their stately homes. It seems they are going to replace their oil fired boilers with wood pellet fired boilers. At Sudbury Hall this is going to save 137 tons of carbon dioxide emission out of 151. The first thing that occurred to me was that to generate any particular amount of heat, leaving aside the efficiency of combustion and whatnot, you are going to have to generate some particular amount of carbon dioxide. So where is all this saving coming from? Or do they mean that because the wood pellets have only fairly recently taken the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that doesn't really count? In which case, why are they not saving the whole 151 tons. Then there is the question of the energy cost of these fine new wood pellet burning boilers and of the collecting up of all this wood and turning it into pellets. I hope they have volunteers doing it in saw pits, thus saving both on fossil fuels and noise pollution. And then I wonder whether it really takes just a year for an oil fired boiler to pump out 151 tons of carbon dioxide. Maybe that is what you would get from around 151 tons of good quality coal. I recall as a child that our open fire in the living room got through maybe a ton a winter and that was just for decoration so maybe 151 tons in a year to actually heat a whole hall is not so far off the mark. Perhaps if the DT had devoted the whole page to this important issue, rather than giving over a large chunk of it to a musical version of 'Calendar Girls', we might have got to the bottom of it.
On a differant tack, I also learn that 2oo customers in a Streatham cinema were faced down by 20 children misbehaving at the back. Now in a more self confident - or perhaps more self reliant - era, maybe some tough guy would march down to the front and invite 49 volunteers from the 199 other customers to join him in giving the 20 children a bit of a slapping. Followed by chucking them out in the street, perhaps less shoes. Perhaps spray painted yellow (with bio-degradable, organic, smelly and edible paint) so that everyone knows what has happened. This would be far more effective than delegating the task of sorting it out to the cinema management. All they could do is call the police who, in darkest Streatham (I gather it is no longer the posh suburb of my youth), probably have far more important matters to attend to and in any event would have taken ages to turn up. But the first catch would be that there do not seem to be many articulate tough guys about. I don't qualify although I dare say I would fall in behind one. Perhaps the answer here would be for the cinema people to have such a person in the office, to be wheeled out as the occasion demanded. The second catch would be that one would probably end up in court for assaulting a minor. What a load of tosh. Badly behaved minors are like animals. They can smell fear and paralysis and behave accordingly. So long as we are not prepared to stand up for our rights and slap them down they will probably continue.
On a more solemn note, have been reading another Simenon Maigret. In this story, more or less a short story, very spare, with only enough red herrings to give the thing a bit of colour, the commissaire (who can tell me about French police organisation and ranks?) more or less allows a man to murder another man who had previously murdered his (man number 1) auntie and her young charge (for the auntie's dosh) and who has had his wife for some months, unbeknown to him, along the way. The general idea seeming to be that the first man will never get any rest until he has done the deed. We are more or less invited to condone the action of the commissaire. Which I find a bit odd. While one has no sympathy for man number 2, justice may have been done on the cheap and a good job too, but man number 1 is going to go down for a while, an outcome which could have been avoided. Maybe escape the chop, but it hardly qualifies as a crime of passion. In a legal sense that is. The passion is there but I imagine for legal purposes one has to do the thing in hot blood. Revenge served cold is not a crime of passion, despite the amount of controlled passion needed to do the deed.
But perhaps I have got it all wrong, my French being a bit ropey. Maybe the story is just a portrayal of a tired policeman, near retirement, who makes an error of judgement, an error which will weigh on him for ever more.
And then there was the peice (the page 9 lead if you please) about how the National Trusties are doing something really eco with one of their stately homes. It seems they are going to replace their oil fired boilers with wood pellet fired boilers. At Sudbury Hall this is going to save 137 tons of carbon dioxide emission out of 151. The first thing that occurred to me was that to generate any particular amount of heat, leaving aside the efficiency of combustion and whatnot, you are going to have to generate some particular amount of carbon dioxide. So where is all this saving coming from? Or do they mean that because the wood pellets have only fairly recently taken the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that doesn't really count? In which case, why are they not saving the whole 151 tons. Then there is the question of the energy cost of these fine new wood pellet burning boilers and of the collecting up of all this wood and turning it into pellets. I hope they have volunteers doing it in saw pits, thus saving both on fossil fuels and noise pollution. And then I wonder whether it really takes just a year for an oil fired boiler to pump out 151 tons of carbon dioxide. Maybe that is what you would get from around 151 tons of good quality coal. I recall as a child that our open fire in the living room got through maybe a ton a winter and that was just for decoration so maybe 151 tons in a year to actually heat a whole hall is not so far off the mark. Perhaps if the DT had devoted the whole page to this important issue, rather than giving over a large chunk of it to a musical version of 'Calendar Girls', we might have got to the bottom of it.
On a differant tack, I also learn that 2oo customers in a Streatham cinema were faced down by 20 children misbehaving at the back. Now in a more self confident - or perhaps more self reliant - era, maybe some tough guy would march down to the front and invite 49 volunteers from the 199 other customers to join him in giving the 20 children a bit of a slapping. Followed by chucking them out in the street, perhaps less shoes. Perhaps spray painted yellow (with bio-degradable, organic, smelly and edible paint) so that everyone knows what has happened. This would be far more effective than delegating the task of sorting it out to the cinema management. All they could do is call the police who, in darkest Streatham (I gather it is no longer the posh suburb of my youth), probably have far more important matters to attend to and in any event would have taken ages to turn up. But the first catch would be that there do not seem to be many articulate tough guys about. I don't qualify although I dare say I would fall in behind one. Perhaps the answer here would be for the cinema people to have such a person in the office, to be wheeled out as the occasion demanded. The second catch would be that one would probably end up in court for assaulting a minor. What a load of tosh. Badly behaved minors are like animals. They can smell fear and paralysis and behave accordingly. So long as we are not prepared to stand up for our rights and slap them down they will probably continue.
On a more solemn note, have been reading another Simenon Maigret. In this story, more or less a short story, very spare, with only enough red herrings to give the thing a bit of colour, the commissaire (who can tell me about French police organisation and ranks?) more or less allows a man to murder another man who had previously murdered his (man number 1) auntie and her young charge (for the auntie's dosh) and who has had his wife for some months, unbeknown to him, along the way. The general idea seeming to be that the first man will never get any rest until he has done the deed. We are more or less invited to condone the action of the commissaire. Which I find a bit odd. While one has no sympathy for man number 2, justice may have been done on the cheap and a good job too, but man number 1 is going to go down for a while, an outcome which could have been avoided. Maybe escape the chop, but it hardly qualifies as a crime of passion. In a legal sense that is. The passion is there but I imagine for legal purposes one has to do the thing in hot blood. Revenge served cold is not a crime of passion, despite the amount of controlled passion needed to do the deed.
But perhaps I have got it all wrong, my French being a bit ropey. Maybe the story is just a portrayal of a tired policeman, near retirement, who makes an error of judgement, an error which will weigh on him for ever more.
# posted by Jim @ 8:59 AM 
