Hackery for Londoners

In the unlikely event that you have any friends or relations thinking of voting for Boris Johnson to be Grand High Poo-Bah of London later this week (*) then show them this lively interview. Especially if they are gay.

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1286

It just shows how wonderfully out of touch he is.

(*) or thinking of not voting for Ken Livingstone as first choice, which, if as it is a 2-round contest rather than a full alternative vote system, might be almost the same as voting Tory.

The real point of this post being (as Abigail is fed up to the back teeth with me saying) that if you *really* don’t want Boris, and if there is a chance that he might sneak in with a small absolute majority in the first round then it is NOT safe to vote for whoever you really want in the first round (Greens, Respect etc) and Livingstone second – that only works if there IS a second round.

This posting based on the arguable assumptions that:

(1) it matters who gets in, in that government, including local government, makes a real difference to real people’s lives (even if only a small one)

(2) yes Virginia, Amelioration is not Revolution. But it still makes things better, or at any rate less bad

(3) Corrupt careerist Labour politicians are bad – but corrupt careerist Tories are worse.

(4) No-one other than Labour or Tory is in with a chance (and yes, I know that would not be the case if we all voted for another candidate, but we aren’t going to this week, are we?)

Feel free to debate them at length – while voting Labour

Oh, and the BNP still look as if they might get an Assembly seat on the proportional vote – that is least likely the higher the turnout is. So get in there and vote with abandon for all those greens and left lists and so on for the assembly seats – the more left-wingers there are there the less of a free hand the new Mayor gets whoever he is.

Vote early, vote often!

The Way we Speak Now, Part N.

Overheard on a train.

Middle-aged woman with a terribly loud irritating voice talking some of the most egregiously self-serving businessdroid jargon I have ever heard into her mobile.

“That was the night they let everyone go. They kept two or three resources but they rolled everyone else off the project.”

“I should tell you that from 29th April there will be no batch management from our project-team. All batch management resources will be rolled off”

“There is a bandwidth effect in the problem management space”

“Do you know X? He is the solutions architect on the project. He solutioned the deal with Y”

Utterly vomitable.

A lot better banter, if only slightly better morals from a man in a suit talking about money:

“Frankly its going nowhere. [We're] only waiting for them to CMOT on it and then we’ll throw some magic dust on it”.

“We need to get him onto a managed account but he’ll want to tell us all about his future career”

“Send them a note saying that we released [the contract] before we got the true guidance on it and there’s an error in it and send it back and we’ll grandfather it and grub the terms out and give it back to them when we’ve cleaned it.

Yes, he really did use CMOT (I assume) as a verb – pronounced see-mot. That’s a first I think!