Readers in search of interesting audio material will find two excellent interviews with Chris Davies MEP on Andy Carling’s blog, firstly on the situation in Gaza, and secondly on the forthcoming Euro elections.
Chris has been blogging about his visits to Gaza, and speaks about it in the interview. He sees Gaza City as a potential conference city – so perhaps we can schedule that into the currently empty slot for Lib Dem conference in 2011?
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If you’re planning to be in Harrogate this weekend at Spring Conference, don’t forget that LDV welcomes guest submissions on most topics. We can’t be everywhere at once so we actively encourage conference goers to submit articles. And if you’re at home watching from afar, why not pen a piece on how conference is perceived from without the bubble?
As at previous conferences, the LDV team will be filing copy, but will have to wait until we arrive in Harrogate to work out what just what facilities we have. Will it be a cupboard under the stairs? Will we be sitting on the edges of our beds in a dingy B&B somewhere hopefully pointing our laptops at the corner of the room in a desperate attempt to get next-door’s unsecured wifi to work? Or will this year be the year when Conf Office get the Leader’s suite mixed up with the LDV Cupboard and we get glorious luxury? Tune in next week…
Whatever we get, we will be doing our best to keep you posted with all the news from conference with opinion pieces, reportage, podcasts, tweets… and maybe a few more new multimedia tricks and turns.
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I came across a link today to a blog post from a speech to the Royal Soc of Arts which was a sort of overview of graphic design from the start of human history to the modern day. It’s a great post, and you should put aside 15 minutes and go and read it.
I can recognise good design, and on vanishingly rare moments in my 15+ years of playing with desktop publishing to produce posters and leaflets, I have produced good bits of design I am proud of years later.
Perhaps the poster I like most was one I did for Yeoman at university. One clip-art crow (let’s pretend it’s a raven) and a kickass old looking font, and voila!
Some other things I’ve done: the logo for NUSCR, which is half University logo and half church bell – although it was changed by someone else the year after I left and I can’t remember what was me and what wasn’t. Concept mine, definitely. Then these additional posters for university G&S shows: Pirates:1999 (my execution of image, someone else’s idea), Iolanthe, Ruddigore and Pinafore (all with my lettering and RP’s excellent drawings).
Of course, there has also been years of political leaflets, some good, some bad, many just reusing other designs. A handful of my designs have been used by others.
Then this, for our fringe event at the Harrogate Conference later in the week:
It looks reasonably good, even in black and white, but I shudder to think what the Risograph duplicator is going to do it.
Strong graphic design was a feature of the Obama campaign, not least because of Designers for Obama.
EDIT: also on the subject, last week in the B3ta newsletter was a link to this delightful blog about an artist and his daughter.
Yesterday we noted that I, along with four-fifths of the residents of the fair city of Nottingham, don’t eat enough fruit and veg. Five portions of fruit and veg is the recommended minimum amount to eat, as agreed by the our government, the NHS, and the food standards agency (who also have the “Eatwell Plate” which suggests a healthy main meal should be 1/3rd vegetables, 1/3rd carbs like potatoes, pasta, rice, and the remaining third divided between meat, dairy and a very thin slice of fatty and sugary foods and drinks).
So, yesterday, I scared myself into eating more fruit and veg for one day only. Today proved harder – there was an Unexpected Buffet at the end of an interview panel for a new Council director. It was a very tasty buffet, with no fruit and veg. So, lunchtime, wasted opportunity. Teatime was benefitting from the Co-op’s BOGOF on pepperoni pizza, so we had half each, and P had broccoli and I, erm, didn’t. An apple for supper out of desperation and – oh, yes, OJ with breakfast – and that’s it.
Will have to try harder tomorrow. But to help keep me on the straight and narrow – here’s a technological solution! FoodFeed, twitter and a hashtag! What could possibly go wrong?
Poor old Lord Adonis. Party President and Parliamentary Gem of the Week Baroness Scott got on her feet to ask a simple question about how there might be the vaguest possible chance that, you know, rail services in Britain might not be terrible for the rest of eternity:
Asked By Baroness Scott of Needham Market
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they advise Network Rail on the strategic impact of its engineering works programme.
Ros Scott is a transport specialist and no stranger to trains, but I wonder if she anticipated the ten minutes of close questioning from all sides of the house that got at just how awful rail services have been in the recent past? Why haven’t we learned from other countries’ engineering practice? Why is the Misery Line not open at weekends? Why hasn’t our noble friend published a report? Should Network Rail bosses get bonuses?
Do go and read the account on Ros’s blog.
Welcome to Lib Dem Voice’s Catchup post in the poignant week when the newest little Clegg entered this world (pics here) and one of the little Camerons left it, and politics as usual was suspended for an afternoon.
It was also the week Alix Mortimer made the longlist of the new Orwell Prize for Blogging, and Lib Dem Voice itself spent a day in cryogenic suspension as technical wizard Ryan Cullen migrated us to new, private, expensive server.
Our outage led to one angry customer: James Graham’s provocative “Is Lord Ashdown the IT Industry’s Patsy?” went live 24 hours before the closedown, which meant Lord Ashdown was unable to respond. His angry email to our Editor at Large led to his strongly worded rebuttal being inserted manually into the system during the purdah period. You can read Paddy’s response – and also James’s fisking thereof – here.
Other posts attracting a lot of comments this week included a piece revealing the shocking truth about Mark Pack’s arrival on this planet. He was in fact born, and not dropped fully-formed by aliens from the Planet Bile, as many have until now supposed.
Alix Mortimer’s defence of Chris Grayling, in a week when politicians were taking flack on housing expenses, allowed commenters to share with us the fact that Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, David Howarth, commutes in to London each day.
But the most comments this week went to Colin Lloyd’s continuation of the timeless Lib Dem debate “what is a Liberal?” His most recent piece is a paean to pleurisy pluralism, and can be found here, if you want to join in yourself in helping refine the definition.
In Op-eds this week, Hywel Morgan heard worrying echos of Hitler in Harriet Harman’s comments about enormous banking pensions, whilst Stephen Tall thought sauce for the goose… Merlene Emmerson’s musings on matters economical is worth a read, and Stephen’s piece on being either a Labour or Tory MP right now seems to have made Iain Dale choke on his toast.
Also of note this week: Green Zones in Brent; David Lammy exaggerates the BNP, and the Telegraph extrapolates from citizen journalism. Statporn puts us over 24,000 Absolute Uniques (yes, certainly sounds like the Lib Dems, but I’d have to see them to be sure) whilst February’s polls put us up 2%. Mark Pack had two good pieces on the Cabinet minutes on Iraq, here and here. He also had a very useful summary about Lord Ashcroft.
The week in numbers
Y Barcud Oren #5
Lib Dig Pig #12
Golden Dozen #105
Just two in CommentIsLinked@LDV this week
Clegg – We need to clean up our act
Cable – let’s make a virtue out of thrift
In our Members only forum
Northumberland Lib Dems on Twitter
Child tables in SQL databases
Postponed election technicality
While we were off-air over the weekend, we learned from the unlikely source of Politics and the City that we are due an Autumn conference in Liverpool.
Autumn in Liverpool was mooted when we first had Spring conference this time last year. We asked delegates at the conference there what they thought about the prospect of returning to the city for a longer conference – and you can hear what people had to say here.
This makes our expected venue timetable over the coming years:
2009
Harrogate – on Friday!
Bournemouth – 19th-23rd September
2010
Birmingham – Spring
Liverpool – Autumn
2011
??? – Spring
Birmingham – Autumn
Niles's Blog 