If you’re one of those people who get the Lib Dems to put 5′ correx boards outside your house at election time, you may be interested in a new product from Weathervane.uk.com

Lib Dem logo weather vane

(Thanks to Woking councillor Philip Goldenberg, whose wife spotted this first.)

Top marks to Mr M. Dome, the cuddly elephant from the Isle of Dogs, for his wonderful post bringing together a whole host of daft Government spouting over the last few days, in The Only Opus Dei in the Village.

As always, Millennium has some wonderful turns of phrase

What [Mrs Ruth Kelly] wants is for people to be able to discriminate against gay daddies for no reason other than a four-thousand year old copy of “Rough Guide to the Sinai” says so.

And

Typically, Mr Balloon is waiting to discover which way the wind is blowing before COURAGEOUSLY leading in whatever direction public opinion is already blowing. This would have been a good time to DEMONSTRATE how he really meant all those things he said about INCLUSIVELY and CHANGE. Oh dear, another opportunity BLOWN.

(Mr Balloon currently leads the Conservatory Party)

And some brilliant comedy allusions

The Catholic Church, which – it says here – regards homosexuality as a SIN, has suggested adoption agencies would close down rather than obey.

If only it was so easy to convince other BIGOTS!

Elephant: dear Ku Klux Klan, you must obey equality legislation about black people;

Grand Wizard: oh, well in that case we’re all just a-hangin’ up our cotton-pickin’ WHITE SHEETS and darn well GOIN’ ON HOME!

Another fantastic point the cuddly elephant makes that had totally passed me by and hasn’t cropped up on anything else I read is there’s a little hypocrisy between one Government minister saying someone’s religion is getting the way of her job (if she wears a veil to work) and another Government minister saying her religion stops her implementing Government policy of greater equality for gay people.

Not everyone gets Millennium Dome, and I have to confess I don’t read every word he or Alex Wilcock writes (there are so darn many of them!) but they’re the sort of Liberal Democrat I wanna be if I grow up.

If you’re laying out calendars as part of your campaign this year, you might find this site useful.  Lib Dems like calendars with candidates name on and the key message because hopefully people will find the calendar useful, stick it on their wall, and then spend the rest of the year looking at the names of your candidates and your key message.
The site lets you define the calendar you want and produces it in plain text, you can more or less copy it into your artwork.  Or ask me for mine in a day or two…

The other interesting thing the site does is works out all sorts of interesting dates and times based on any input you give it.  When will you have your 1,000,000,000 second?

I’ll have both my 15 millionth minute and my 250 thousandth hour sometime on February 9th next year.

Not me!

The City Council takes advantage of free advertising by appending short sentences to the bottom of every email.  Not just the usual legal waffle, but also very on-message little snippets.  Last month it was ‘Congratulations to our children and teachers – exam results have improved’ or something like it.

This month they’re promoting the “Notice Nottingham” newsletter, and with it, the new “Notice Nottingham podcast”

You can now listen to Notice Nottingham as a Podcast by pasting the following link into your Podcast software:
http://feeds.readspeaker.com/app/podcaster/nottscity/feed/112.xml

It’s a really good idea, I think, but there are some wrinkles to iron out.

It’s a text-to-voice program, rather than a real reader, so some things sound a bit artificial.  There’s no mention of it on the city council website that I can find, so you only get to hear of it if you email the council about something.  And strangest of all, each separate item is a different MP3 file, so for any given edition of Notice Nottingham, you get lots of little 30 sec MP3s instead of just one 4min podcast.

I’ve just heard through the podcast that the Conservatives are planning their spring conference in Nottingham.  Eep!  Apparently, 500 delagates (seems very low?) will bring a £250,000 injection to the local economy.
Today for some reason I was on Lincolnshire County Council’s website, and that was really good.  Random facts (20% of England’s food comes from Lincs) a gallery of photos taken by members of the public.  Just didn’t list the councillors by political party, which is the thing I go on council websites for most often.

9th October is “the Day Humanity starts Eating the Planet”

New research reveals rising consumption of natural resources is pushing the world into ever earlier ecological debt, or ‘overshoot’

New calculations released today show that from now until the end of the year we will be living beyond our global environmental means. Research by the US-based Global Footprint Network in partnership with nef and Best Foot Forward reveals that as of today, humanity has used up what nature can renew this year and is now eating into its ‘ecological capital’.

Each year, the day that the global economy starts to operate with an ecological deficit is designated as ‘ecological debt day’ (known internationally as ‘overshoot day’). This marks the date that the planet’s environmental resource flow goes into the red and we begin operating on a non-existent environmental overdraft.

The fact that this year, ecological debt day falls on 9 October, only three quarters of the way through the year, means that we are living well beyond our environmental means. This leads, in effect, to a net depletion of the resources. From October 9 until the end of the year, humanity will be in ecological overshoot, building up ever greater ecological debt by consuming resources beyond the level that the planet’s ecosystems can replace.

This has been called, ‘the biggest issue you’ve never heard of,’ yet its causes and effects are simple and logical. If we eat more than we grow in any given year, we have to dip into reserves. If we cut trees faster than they grow back, then our forests become smaller than the year before. If we catch more fish than spawn each year, then there will be fewer fish in the sea.

The day that we begin living beyond our environmental means is creeping ever earlier in the year as human consumption grows:

• humanity first went into global ecological debt in 1987, with the first ecological debt day on 19 December that year;
• by 1995 it had jumped a month forward to 21 November;
• now, new estimates based on the latest available data indicate that in 2006, we run out of ecological resources today, Monday 9 October.

(via)

I well remember being at conference in Blackpool where the media were trying to show the Lib Dems as battling with the leader over the post office motion of the time.  It was plain that gentlemen of the press had arrived not just with preconceived ideas of what was going to happen but pretty much pre-written stories.  Conference started to become about what they wanted it to be, with them promoting their version of events, and ignoring much of the rest of what was happening.

They tried in Brighton this time to do the same.  They so wanted the tax debate to end badly for the leader with the loony left activists defeating the party’s policy  pros.  Instead, they watched a mature and measured debate and in the end the grassroot Lib Dems voted with the leadership, and the fourth estate had quickly to rewrite all their copy.  Caught on the hoof, they ended up repeated what was being told to them about how this showed the party as mature and measured, etc.

A week later in Manchester the gents of the press also turned up with idées fixes. They wanted the story to be spats about the leadership, and they wanted to watch the Labour party tear itself apart. So much so, it appears that the only thing they could find to support their hypotheses were aside remarks allegedly made sotto voce by the wife of the Prime Minister.

So it’s rather pleasing that after being thwarted twice the media moguls arrive in Bournemouth and get to hear the Tories doing exactly what they expected them to, with spats about policy or lack of, tax cuts or no, and on top of that some really bad headlines for the party: a crass remark about autism that appears to have caused offence, terrible queues, porn links for Francis Maude, outright lies about previous manifestos.

Oh, this week will be jolly.

An interesting day spent with Chris Huhne MP and Lib Dem councillors in Chesterfield going around the Borough and looking at sustainable technology included in recent buildings.

The Lib Dems in Chesterfield have persuaded Barratts to include solar panels on a housing estate, the first time Barratts have done this. So we all got to put on high-vis vests and hard hats and go up on the scaffolding to the 5th storey roofs to look at the evacuated solar tubes. Very exciting.

We also looked at ground-source heat pumps being use to heat new buiness incubator units in Staveley – 48 100m vertical shafts have been buried under the ground outside a new complex of office / workshop space and the steady 12 deg C under the earth can be used to heat the building in winter and cool it in summer. The former flooded mineworking the shafts have been buried in just help in terms of heat transfer to the pipes, and for every 1kWh spent in pumping coolant, 4kWh in energy can be put into the building in heating or cooling. It’s essentially free energy from the earth. The only catch is that there simply aren’t enough companies in the UK who can instal this technology, and who have the kit to drill 100m holes into the ground.

We also looked at the photovoltaic cells in various places around Chesterfield, most notably on the roof of the Queen’s Park Leisure Centre, a truly huge installation of PVs both on the roof, and on transfers stuck onto a glazed section. It’s one of the largest installations of PVs in the country and provides the entire leisure centre with up to two thirds of its energy in the best weather conditions, but around 80 MWh over a year, a huge amount for PVs.

Before we finished the day, we also saw a large installation of PVs on the brand new Coach Station, the working GSHP in the Tourist Info Centre, and of course took time to photograph our visitor standing outside the Crooked Spire.

I’ve been reading about the technologies put into these buildings in Chesterfield for ages, but it was good to go and see them in action, particularly the pump room for the GSHP.

…from his Lordship, always an entertaining read, with full details of the new budget airline Air Lembit, and a rather exciting Time Team discovery.

Lord Bonker’s Archives are also available.

Would anyone like to lend me a hand on the Wikipedia entries for Lord Bonkers and Jonathan Calder?

EDIT: Oh dear – it seems Lord Bonkers didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion, and Jonathon may not be long for this world either.