Interesting Start

On the way to work this morning, I was confronted by road closures and the after-effects of this crash.

Fairly serious – and the damage all looked pretty grim – so I hope all are OK in it.

[Update : As it turns out, they weren’t. One fatal (a motorcyclist)]


Unbalanced

In today’s news, there’s (yet another) ceasefire in Gaza.

I’m neither pro-Palestine or pro-Israeli – personally, I think the entire thing is insane.

But what really gets me is the inequality of the body count.  From the article…

Gaza officials say the four-week conflict has killed 1,800 Palestinians. Some 67 Israelis have also died.

That’s just over 26 Gazans killed for every Israeli killed. And that’s disgraceful.

I seem to recall that at the start of this, the Gazans had killed one – yes, one – Israeli, for something like 200 Gazans. And I just can’t see that having one dead person is an excuse to go and re-invade a country and effectively declare war.


Interesting Parking

In today’s news, “Driver crashes through railings into Elephant and Castle Subway” (the underpass, not the fast-food sandwich place)

BMW in a subway

And wouldn’t you know it? It’s a BMW driver.  Colour me totally unsurprised.


Nearly Done

2014 has been another of those grim “Summer of Sport”s that piss me off.  But it’s nearly over, which is A Good Thing.

This year’s sport includes…

  • Winter Olympics
  • World Cup (Football)
  • Commonwealth Games
  • Wimbledon (as usual)
  • UK Grand Prix (as usual)
  • Tour de France (as usual) with UK start
  • Various cricket things
  • Various rugby things
  • Various cycling things
  • Other stuff I can’t recall right now.

The real genius is that a lot of it was all on the same weekend – Grand Prix, World Cup, Wimbledon and Tour de France start. Genius right there.

Still, we’re now at the point – now the World Cup’s finally bloody over – where it’s (I think) just the Commonwealth Games to go from the list of ‘main’ events.

And then of course we’ll just be back to the normal football instead. *sigh*

 


Covering All Options

Is *anyone* really surprised at the news over the weekend that it’s “fairly likely” that allegations of paedophilia by famous people in the 70s and 80s were hidden and denied by politicians? I know I’m not surprised at all.

What did amuse me (or made me despair, I’m not quite certain which) was the quote explaining how documents had gone astray…

The Home Office’s 2013 review found 527 potentially relevant files which it had kept, but a further 114 were missing, destroyed or “not found”.

Well, “Missing, destroyed or ‘not found’” pretty much covers every eventuality, doesn’t it?


Miss Transit

Back in September, I wrote a small bit of cynicism about Luton’s Guided Busway, and why I was rather unconvinced about the reasoning behind the current glut of Busways, Tramways.

This week the first operating quarter’s passenger figures were released – and they’re only 41% of what they were projected to be.

Luton Borough Council revealed there were 346,854 passenger journeys between October and December 2013.

The 2008 busway business case projected usage of 9,000 daily trips, indicating 828,000 journeys for its first quarter.

But of course there’s someone else to blame – and it’s not the council, nor is it the bus companies involved in the project.

“If you want to blame anybody, blame the bankers,” [Colin Chick, the director of regeneration] said.

“When the country starts to recover and sites are developed and we create new jobs in that area and the airport expansion goes through, within a few months those figures will go back to what was anticipated.”

I remain unconvinced – but apparently the figures for the second quarter will be published soon, so it should be fun to see what they reveal…


Skewing Perceptions

This story from Business Insider contains one of the worst (or cleverest, depending on your perspective) graphs in history.

The story is about gun deaths in Florida, and contains the graph below, created by Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement.

florida_gun_deaths

Looks like deaths went down after the “Stand Your Ground” law came in, doesn’t it?

But no, look at that Y axis on the chart (or the bold ‘totals’). The scale is upside down – so gun deaths actually increased after that law came in.

I can hear Blue Witch gnashing her teeth about that graph already…