A colleague reports in a private forum that a 14th Feb by-election is bringing out the love in Preston.
Labour’s leaflets are running with, “On 14th February, say it with roses”
Our leaflets have “Give LibDems a “X” on Valentines Day”
But Respect have gone for a rather unsavoury strapline which hardly trips off the tongue – “Make Valentines Day a Massacre for the mainstream parties”
Whilst queueing Baroness Ros Scott’s piece on last week’s Lords debate on Labour’s plans for greater community engagement, I was moved to read the debate through.
And found this rather wonderful snippet from everyone’s noble friend, Tony Greaves:
[M]y first message for the Government is to ask them, please, to start using plain English. Having read the report we are debating today, I had a vision of someone saying to their husband or wife, “I’m just off down the neighbourhood hub for a bit of community empowerment. We have been quality assured by the national empowerment partnership, and tonight we are embedding our practitioner learning and capturing and sharing it through the national neighbourhood management network”.
Language like this is everywhere and sad to say, all too often, it is there to cloud meaning not to illuminate it. There is nothing less empowering than sitting in a public meeting and having half the content obscured by obfuscation sailing over your head.
Other issues identified in the Lib Dem-led debate were the dangers of residents no longer knowing who to contact to get a decision changed, now that many former powers of government have been removed to distant quangos, and consultation fatigue, where residents have said what it is they want to happen to too many different bodies, and have been put off by the fact that it never actually happens.
Forget the woman or the black guy for US Prez, I’m voting for (newly engaged) Faustus, aka Joel Derfner.
Derfner has the sort of back-catalog that almost assures a person of great office in the States:
He is, significantly, the only presidential hopeful to have commented on my blog.
Seriously – I watched, open-mouthed, some of the coverage of the Iowa caucus, and some of the reactions of candidates afterwards. Barack don’t impress me much. I just know that Clinton will get strong anti-reactions from anyone who isn’t already a Democrat, and opens an easy line of attack campaign – who ever thought that a Clinton would be back in the Whitehouse? There are enough people in the States for whom Clinton is still a bad word, balanced budget or no. Actually, the best performer on the night struck me as Edwards, so I’m plumping arbitrarily for him. (Even though he didn’t cross my radar at all as vice-presidential candidate in ’04, and I couldn’t name him last month when someone asked who was Kerry’s running mate… And it just took me two goes to remember his first name…)
Hmm, I have tried to add a banner to this post, and something keeps eating it. Specifically, a rogue line of code
style="display: none"
is stopping it displaying. Mysterious. Clearly WordPress hates John Edwards.
If you’re following my twitter stream, you’ll have seen the message sent this afternoon:
As loose change falls through pocket holes, down my trouser leg into my boots, I remember why I stopped wearing these jeans.
It was already a bit of a job to truncate the facts enough to fit them into a text message that sounded quirky but communicated all the facts. These are old jeans. A laundry mis-management event means they’re the only trousers currently available. I’d stopped wearing them for a reason, but couldn’t really remember what it was until halfway through my day when a really odd sensation of coins trickling down my leg and ending up jangling in my shoes reminded me of the holes in my pockets.
However, the posh sounding Northumbrian thought it was a haiku, which gives the added challenge of communicating enough facts in just 17 syllables…
My first attempt…
Coins falling down trouser leg
Landing in my boot.
That’s why I stopped wearing them.
… I misremembered the syllable pattern and did 7-5-7 instead of 5-7-5.
Coins fall down my leg
From holes in my pockets. That’s
Why I benched these jeans.
Hmmm. It doesn’t have the boot-jangling sense and “benched” is uncomfortably and uncharacteristically close to sport for me. Perhaps Dogwood can manage better.
I’ve been reading lots of my local newspaper today as part of our press monitoring process, and it seems to have been a slow week for news.
As I was getting into it, I was highlighting non-stories in the political field to my colleague in the Lib Dem office this afternoon.
Some of the stories included “X Party delivers leaflets – campaigners for B MP in the Y constituency say they will deliver 40,000 leaflets in the coming months. This comes after many local people have received information from the Y party’s new PPC.”
Erm wow. Delivering leaflets is news now?
It continued with other stories in similar veins – little snippets of politico’s daily lives in the paper, and we regaled each other with articles.
Then we went home. About 10pm, I got a call from my colleague who had just picked up today’s paper, and had to share a story he found, under the headline “Chat to councillor” – Cllr C will be holding a surgery in a library at $day, $time. Cllr D will not be a holding a surgery in January.
Hold the front page.
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