Faustus for President

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:

Gay Haiku Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever

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.
JohnEdwards.com

Haiku for Rob F

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.

News for nothing

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.

Solar panel performance 07

Rather impressed to hear the solar panel working today, New Year’s Eve, on a grey, overcast day with no hint of sun.  It ran for less than an hour so if I hadn’t heard it, it wouldn’t have been recorded in the stats.

Since it started working in September, its mini-computer calculates that it has generated 385kW of heat for the hot water tank.

Using Nottingham Energy Partnership‘s energy ready reckoner, that’s about  £10.72 worth of gas.  We will have to see how well it performs when confronted with an actual summer.

Factoid

Today’s factoid – “factoid” is a real word, accepted by Facebook scrabble, that has just earned me 96 points.

Woo me!

Happy new year to all of you!

Sitting in Judgement

This week, I’m a guest judge on Post of the Week, a worthy project that appears to be uncertain about its future.

The shortlist is a rum bunch – famous bloggers, funny bloggers, drunk bloggers, downright weird bloggers and one or two where I have no idea whatsoever is going on. Several posts take me well outside my comfort zone.

The real stellar find, in my humble view, is local blog May Contain Notts which is a devastating combination of acerbic humour and the local Notts accent. I have seen his blog before, but forgot to take a note of it, so it’s nice to be given a pointer back to him.