Tuesday, April 19, 2011
What passes for news from the Telegraph (tnaka DT)
The biggest headline in yesterday's DT was about Whitehall blunders, which on closer reading appear to amount to careless censoring of documents published on the internet under the freedom of information act. The headline has no doubt prompted massive intervention by the security industry in the censoring industry. Massive pay day for all those security consultants who can now spend happy weeks explaining to the humble censors how they might better do their work. Was it in the public interest for the DT to explain how easy it is to leave text under stones in word processing documents, stones which are not that hard to lift up and text which you had intended to be private? Was the whole thing a put up job by the United UK Federation of Security Consulting Contractors? Is the expense involved in responding to this headline justified by the improvement in state security? Have resources been diverted from the fight against terrorism? Or from our crime ridden streets?
The second lead on the front page was about the iniquity of Labour Councils holding cash reserves at the time of cuts to the bone. Or perhaps 'cuts to the chase', a phrase which I have completely failed to elucidate the origins of. Any more than those of 'stone the crows'. No more than a passing mention of the idea that financial managers need to have cash reserves or the fact that there may be severe penalties for any kind of overrun. The Treasury behaving in this matter rather like your listening bank which bangs you for £100 for technical infringements of your agreement with them (a practise now sanctified at great expense by the High Court).
This while the standard of debate on AV has improved slightly. To the point where one commentator was arguing that AV might result in less proportional representation rather than more. The idea being that in a year where one of the two big parties does badly, AV will make it do even more badly. Which if true, is to my mind a serious point against. And leads me to wonder about why we got rid of the multi-member constituencies which we used to have 100 years ago. Could they be the basis of a better answer? Let us hope that the media will answer all these questions and more over the coming weeks.
Further into the DT we read of some ground breaking research from Cambridge which suggests that the Last Supper might have taken place on the first day of Passover (15th Nisan) rather than one some day tied to some lunar calendar which was in wide use at that time and place and which we have now mapped onto our lunar calendar for Easter. The article, if not the research, then goes on to suggest that this would make Easter a fixed date rather than a moving date, which I have not yet worked through, my understanding being that Passover moves in relation to our solar calendar too. All of which begs the question that if you want to celebrate the anniversary of something, which calendar do you use? One might argue that the Last Supper being in the first instance a celebration held by devout Jews, ought to be tied to the Jewish religious calendar, rather than some other, possibly newer calendar which does not carry any relevant cultural baggage.
While all this is working through the system, we are taking bets on whether the arrangements for computing the date of Easter will be changed - a matter with which, the Queen as head of our church, will have to be fully involved, assuming she can spare the time from the upcoming wedding.
And lastly we came across the scandal involving the historic Beacon Park in Lichfield, historic in the sense that it was once a medieval swan reserve, one of the first in the country. It appears that the council have spent more than £4m on a new toddlers playground which majors on sand and rocks. I suspect the scandal is more or less a split between the better offs and the worse offs. Those from Islington (as it were) are all for sand, rocks and creative play while those from the Longmead want a bit of flashy playground equipment. I thnk the DT might have made a bit more of this item than it did, relegated as it was to a 2 inches by 1 inch filler, rather than a substantive article with pictures of park and its disgusted users.
# posted by Jim @ 1:52 AM 
