Amit Varma calls this the WTF quote of the day:

The bold new face of modern India now stands exposed as hollow following the slapping drama starring Harbhajan Singh and S Sreesanth.

Varma found that here.  Says he:

Both cricket and India are far too complex and nuanced to be captured in such lazy clichés. No?

Well, not quite.  This is indeed a lazy Indian journo stirring it hysterically by being contrarian about the IPL.  But I think that the IPL is indeed India showing a new face to the world.  But one IPL cricketer slapping another IPL cricketer is all part of the drama, along with Gilchrist hitting a century in 42 balls.  I’m not saying I’m in favour of cricketers slapping one another, and I agree with Harbhajan being punished.  It’s just that the bigger IPL story is how great it is.

In other sports news, what does it take to eject an English club from the Champion’s League?  Answer: another English club.  (Seriously.  London Arsenal were ejected by Liverpool, Now Liverpool have been ejected by London Chelsea.  In the final, either London Chelsea will lose to Man U or Man U will lose to London Chelsea.) Patrick Crozier ((London?) Watford) and I (London Spurs) watched the first half of tonight’s London Chelsea v Liverpool game in a pub near me, after doing a podcast.  London Chelsea were leading 1-0 at half time, which for them would have been sufficient.  That’s probably all the drama there’ll be, we said, as we left.

It’s amazing what they can do with pixie dust nowadays:

How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.

Mr Speivak’s brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

For ten days Mr Spievak put a little on his finger.

“The second time I put it on I already could see growth. Each day it was up further. Finally it closed up and was a finger.

“It took about four weeks before it was sealed.”

Now he says he has “complete feeling, complete movement.”

The “pixie dust” comes from the University of Pittsburgh, though in the lab Dr Stephen Badylak prefers to call it extra cellular matrix.

It comes from the lining of a pig’s bladder, apparently.

If they can perfect the technique, it might mean one day they could repair not just a severed finger, but severely burnt skin, or even damaged organs.

It reminds me of a story I recall reading as a child, about the Apples of Youth.

I recall writing once about how our Mum used to take us on buses when we were small to expose us to lower class germs and build up our immune systems.  Various bloggers and friends quoted this because, I don’t know, they thought it was funny or something.

Well now, scientists have discovered – so it must be true – that the same principle applies with dogs:

Children run less risk of being sensitive to allergens if there is a dog in the house in the early years of their lives, scientists have found.

The conclusion, based on a six-year study of 9,000 children, adds weight to the theory that growing up with a pet trains the immune system to be less sensitive to potential triggers for allergies such as asthma, eczema and hay fever.

Imagine what it would be like to live, when young, with a lower class dog.  Not even the Black Death could touch you.

As regulars here know, bridges are a big deal here, so the biggest story in Italy just now, from the point of view of this blog, is the plan to build a huge, huge suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina.

Apparently Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s recently victorious Prime Minister or President or whatever it is, had this to say about the Messina Bridge:

He said that work on his pet grand projet, the planned suspension bridge over the Strait of Messina to Sicily, cancelled by Romano Prodi’s government, would resume without delay.

To quote Wikipedia about this bidge, under the heading Controversy and concerns (so take with pinch of salt):

There are concerns about the role of the local mafia.  It is feared that organised criminals obtain a monopoly on construction contracts by intimidating competitors and bribing local officials and then overcharging for the work, generating large profits.

Many also question the priority of the bridge, since some towns in Sicily are still without running water, and claim that the money used for the bridge would be better spent elsewhere.

There are also those who claim that the bridge would be totally unnecessary, since the local economy is already providing for the conversion of a local former NATO airport into a commercial terminal to export vegetables to northern Europe.  Alternatively, a much cheaper revamping of the current structures is claimed to be sufficient (for instance, the ferry lines on the Calabria side are now accessible by trucks only by driving through very narrow streets, which are a tight bottleneck for transport).

Finally, there are concerns about the environmental impact of the bridge, its actual feasibility, and whether it could resist earthquakes, not uncommon in the region.

Well quite so.  I’m sure that if this thing does ever gets built it will be a huge political bribe of some kind.  But most bribes don’t look nearly as good as this one will.  If they do build it.  And assuming it stays up.

Another excellent addition to the Billion Monkeys Flashing collection.  And she’s carrying a big bag.  And she’s holding another camera besides the one she’s using.  And she crouching down with the best of all those in the Billion Monkeys Crouching archive.  Tick tick tick tick.  Taken yesterday.  Click for the bigger picture.

And, I’ve just remembered, I want to do a collection of Billion Monkey pictures which do not violate anyone’s privacy, for exposure on such places as Flickr.  Tick tick tick tick tick.

(And here.) It’s not compulsory.  You can do a blog any way you like.  But, it’s easier:

One of the things that holds me back from waking up this blog is the feeling that any post that comes after a long silence ought to be important.

I know that feeling, and I don’t like it.  If you want something by moi that is deep, try this.  Or this.

See what I mean about easier?

Mark Steyn is always going on about how the EU is failing to reproduce.  Maybe he can make some use of this, which I found on page 3 of this (linked to this weekend by Arts & Letter Daily):

Eusocial species (termites, ants, wasps, naked mole rats, and others) live in large colonies in which many individuals forego reproduction to assist a single queen. Mr. Wilson’s classic 1975 book “Sociobiology” attributed eusociality to the close genetic relationship along the colony members. But careful observations have since shown that sterile workers cannot recognize each other, much less base their behavior on fine calculations of relatedness - a finding suggesting that the broader mechanism of group selection, rather than the more direct kin selection, was responsible. Mr. Wilson now suggests that eusocial behavior evolves in rare species that have the flexibility to be reproductive or not, and that live in circumstances inhibiting the dispersal of nests. Once forced to live together rather than founding new colonies, species preadapted to cooperation successfully adopt eusociality precisely because it is evolutionarily advantageous.

Well, Steyn wouldn’t want all of that, ending as it does with the claim that “eusociality” is “evolutionarily advantageous”, his whole point being that eusociality of the sort he observes is not evolutionarily advantageous.  But, if he dug around a bit, he would find nuggets, I think.

I particularly like bit about “circumstances inhibiting the dispersal of nests”.  That sums up the European situation from WW2 onwards very well.

Amit Varma quotes Nick Hornby saying that reading should be fun.  Should.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they’re not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

Varma adds:

So if you’re in the middle of reading a tedious book that seems more like a chore than a joy, put it aside. Read this blog instead. Let India Uncut be your guilty pleasure!

You can’t help suspecting, though, that Varma and Hornby both do still see reading as a duty, and they are merely looking for ways to fulfill this duty not so much with the maximum of fun as with the minimum of pain.  Pleasure is still a bonus, rather than the entire purpose of the thing.  When they do finish a book, they feel just that little bit smug, even if they didn’t always enjoy it.  (It was still a bit like a chore.)

So!  Read BrianMicklethwait dot com!  It is your duty!  And you will have fun, whether you like it or not.  Study all the photos carefully, and carry on doing so until you find pleasure in this.  Read all the comments, and, if you have something pertinent and intelligent to add, add.

No custard until you’ve eaten your greens.

As semi-promised in this earlier piece of cat-blogging, a couple of photos (borrowed from my Mum) of Perkins, the Micklethwait family cat in the 1950s and thenabouts:

As you can see, Perkins (apart from being a male rather than a female) bears a remarkable resemblance to the cat dreamed of in this posting.

Big brother Toby stated very firmly that Perkins was by far the best cat we ever had.  That is my recollection also.

This, from Shane Greer, is rather shrewd, I think:

It’s important to bear in mind that Clarke’s criticism, like that of the others, is a direct result of Brown’s approach to personal relationships; namely that they exist in black or white, enemy or friend.  The simple truth of life under Brown is that if you aren’t a ‘friend’ you have absolutely nothing to lose by attacking him, and indeed in the current climate have everything to gain.

This is the exact personal equivalent of the principle that the law must make a distinction between, for instance, how it punishes armed robbery and how it punishes murder.  Don’t make that distinction, and there goes any motive for armed robbers not to kill people.  From time to time, judges have to remind politicians about such things.

Most of the explanations I have read about why Labourites are now rebelling in such numbers and with such vehemence concern the political situation.  Tax changes, marginal constituencies, etc.  But this personal angle adds a definite extra something to the mix.

There’s a sort of automatic process (one of quite a few) that ruins governments.  Nowadays governments can’t just, you know, let things be, and confine themselves to governing.  Unsatisfied with the mere governing of things, governments now insist on controlling how things turn out.  They have a “vision” of what the world should be like, to which, eventually, everything must conform.

So, as time goes by, they stick their sticky fingers into more and more stuff, until eventually you can feel their prodding and poking in everything you do, in everything that ever happens.

At which point they get blamed for absolutely everything that goes wrong.  Every cock-up, made by anybody, is blamed on them.  So then, after a period of furious recrimination, another government is installed and the whole nonsense begins all over again.

The current British government is now rapidly approaching the they-get-blamed-for-everything stage.  But even if it were not, this glorious logo cock-up, perpetrated by something called the Office of Government Commerce, is actually quite close to the New Labour heart of things.  New Labour is obsessed with logos, with redesigning things in a way calculated to annoy The Forces of Conservatism and to inflict a “radical shake-up” on whatever it is.  (One simple way to irritate and to generally make it clear who and what is now in charge is to make the capital letters at the beginnings of the proper nouns that describe the enterprise into small letters.) New Labour people notoriously have jobs like designing stupid logos at vast expense, instead of real jobs.  So, New Labour will get the blame for this glorious fiasco, and they probably do actually deserve a lot of it this time.  Either way, the more any of them protest that it is nothing to do with them, the more idiotic they will look.  It’s not in the Northern Rock or Ten Percent Tax Rate category.  But, like I say, this government is reaching the point where every little hurts.

Apparently a mere £14,000 was pissed away on this particular logo, which is nothing by the standards of your usual saga of government waste.  But, then again, there is this:

OGC helps the public sector get better value on goods and services across a wide range of categories.

Which is far too good an open goal to miss.  The whole idea of “Government Commerce” is ridiculous, and is itself a guarantee of vast waste.  I bet these people have presided over cock-ups massively more expensive than this one, many times.  Just not such funny ones.

All the reportage of this logo fiasco that I have seen coyly presents the logo in its horizontal form.  Now I usually like horizontal pictures, but this time, I think I prefer the vertical version, as will almost all bloggers, surely.

Deepest thanks to David Thompson for spotting this.

UPDATE: Pollard had all that two days ago, including the OGC quote.  And he goes vertical too.  Oh well.  One of his commenters supplies this.

Incoming email entitled ‘Another “I saw this and thought of you” moment’, from Six Thousand.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  It seems they’re building two more Wheels, even bigger, in Singapore and in Beijing:

Wheels are great and all that, but there’s more to Wheels than just the Wheels themselves.  It helps a lot if there are good things all around them to look at.  From that point of view, you could argue that the London Wheel might have worked better if it was a bit further down stream, because there, the London townscape gets rather more dramatic.  Okay, not Parliament, Big Ben, etc., but more it east, and you get Tower Bridge, St Paul’s, the Gherkin, and the Docklands Towers, with more to come.

What will the views be like in these new Wheels?

Will it even be possible to see the ground from the top of the Beijing Wheel, on an average day, with an average day’s pollution level?

Today I went a-walking and knackered myself, so here are a couple of quota photos, of something I like photo-ing a lot but have never yet got around to exhibiting here, namely tourist crap:

Many photos are duller than the originals.  I mean, seeing Big Ben or the Wheel or a telephone box is nice.  But what could be duller than a basic picture of Big Ben or of the Wheel or of a telephone box?  But photos of tourist crap are better than seeing the actual tourist crap face to face, provided they’re good photos.  Well, that’s what I think, and I’m too tired to argue about it, even with myself.

Until today, I didn’t have a clue where Sausalito was.  But I found out today, while doing this posting, and this Sausalito view got me viewing for the same view on Flickr, with a view to adding another view to the vertically thin view collection.  Here’s the result:

Which I got by slicing the slice that matters out of this picture.

That bridge must be the Golden Gate.  And is that lump this side of it by any chance Alcatraz?  This map says yes, I think.

Cute.  You wait weeks for a decent engadget posting, and then two come along.

Actually this posting, about “OLED” screens, also interested me, because I didn’t know what OLED meant, and I wanted to find out.  Should I hold off getting a flat screen TV?  Probably yes, for the simple reason that with tech buying the rule is always: if in doubt, wait.  It’ll get better, and cheaper, and cooler, if you do wait.  But, what does “affordable” mean, when it comes to, say, 22 inch OLED TVs?

I agree with Lynn.  This is stunning.  You can even link to particular shots.

And Sausalito.  And Chiang Mai.  Never heard of Chiang Mai until today.  And no doubt many more places in the future.

I read engadget so you don’t have to, and today, all that ploughing through meaningless boxes for doing nothing and stupid satnav things that ought to be proper computers as well but aren’t has yielded gold, even though in this case the gold is light blue in colour.  The blue elephant is not lady-pissing in the urinal.  It’s cleaning it.  The engadget headline is a classic.  There is video.

I was rather sniffy about these pictures, as contributions to the vertically thin picture genre, but this is splendid:

More car art of the same era here.  This is particularly fabulous.

Yes, home to Mum’s today, and this time it was slightly different, because my Mum has reached the age when she just might be gone at any moment.  She may, and I hope will, live for at least another decade or more, but ... she may, now, not.  Some time soon or soonish, she, and her house (the house), and her garden (the garden) may all be gone, smashed up and replaced by about five new suburban houses.  And I found myself looking at the house and the garden with new eyes, those of a stranger.  I saw all kinds of things I had not really noticed since I lived there in my childhood.

I noticed the chimneys.  If you had asked me to describe those chimneys any time before today, I wouldn’t have been able to even say how many of them there were.  Yet there they are, and have been ever since my family moved in, in 1945, two years before I did.  And where on earth did that nest (a bees’ nest apparently) come from?  When did that happen?  And who knew that Mum has plants that produce pink flowers that look like they are made of sugar (at any rate when I photo them)?

The car is the UKIP battle wagon of brother Toby.  He drove me back down the hill to Egham station via the territory which he is trying to persuade to elect him as a councillor, and which he has flooded with UKIP posters.  If posters determined elections, he would win by a landslide.

The final picture merely shows how very rural Clapham Junction has become lately.  Looks more like somewhere deep in the countryside, doesn’t it?  Of the sort that Doctor Beeching closed down.

Here is a very good piece about Brian Ashton, and about sporting leadership in general.  It reminds me of some of the stuff in that book by Ed Smith, where he writes about the great Zinedine Zidane, and the fact that failure by the Great Me is just ... impossible.  The Universe obviously misbehaved.  (And had to be head-butted.  That head-butt came just after a great shot header by Zidane was brilliantly and inexplicably saved by French Italian goalie Buffon.)

Anyway, back to Barnes on relatively ego-free Ashton, and on his fatally normal tendency to answer questions truthfully and normally, because he thinks normally:

How tough had the preparation been prior to the World Cup? Bloody tough, he said, and admitted to human vulnerability. How shaken was he by the 36-0 defeat in the pool stages? Bloody shaken. He was asked questions and he told the truth as most of us, in his situations, would have seen it.

Here is where it unravelled, indicating that maybe he was not cut out to be the Head Man for England. When Woodward made an awful mess of the 2005 Lions tour, he returned from Auckland airport convinced that the series could have been won had a few small details dropped his way. It was deluded, but to be the very best in this job such delusions are part of the package. Listen to those outstanding football managers, Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, in reaction to defeat. The excuses are never just excuses, they are the toiling workings of minds that cannot believe they could fail.

While I’m on the subject of international rugby bosses, I finally worked out, a few weeks back, who Wales coach Warren Gatland (on the left below) reminded me of.  See if you agree:

On the right is this bloke.

Nothing here today, because today I was building more shelves, and because Samizdata needed replenishing and I’m the only Samizdatista who has no life and hence is free at the weekend.  So, I did a(nother) piece about the Indian Premier League, which strikes me as being at least as important a thing as the ghastliness of Brown or Mugabe.  (About the only dignified thing the first of those has done lately is complain about the second.)

So anyway, here’s a flat picture, suggested for inclusion here (or at least a mention here) in an email from David Thompson:

Actually, I consider panoramas to be a cheat for getting pictorial flatness.  All panoramas are flat.  It’s in their nature.  If you shove six snaps in a horizontal line, the result is bound to be horizontal.  What I prefer are things that are horizontal by their nature, such as horizons.  Or bridges or pencils or blog top pictures.

Here.

The Spectator’s Coffee House Blog (otherwise very good) is doing something rather undignified, in order to shake off regular bouts of PID.  It’s not nearly as bad as PID itself, but it is not good.

The Coffee House rule was that all quotes were in italics.  But now, if a particular paragraph of a quote gets cut automatically off in the middle, that paragraph is entirely de-italicised, even if a previous paragraph of the same quote is italicised immediately above.  Most illogical.  God knows how much fiddling about this involves.

In other PID news, Samizdata itself was even affected (briefly) by PID, about a fortnight ago.  What happened was that Dale Amon put up a posting which caused an outbreak.  But since I had already done a posting immediately below his (about the LPUK), I did some vanity editing of Dale’s post.  What he had done took a little spotting.  At the end, he had switched off the italics like the good blogging boy that he is.  However, he had two italicised paragraphs, rather than just one, and he had switched on the italics at the beginning of each one, but had mis-written the switching off of the italics at the end of the first paragraph.  Instead of < slash e m >, he had put < slash a > by mistake.  So italics got switched on twice, but only switched off once.  When he edited his post, he could not see this, but the result was that italics were still switched on at the end of his post.  Result: PID.

I see that the ilaticising of Dale’s final two paragraphs, originally done to flag up that they had been added to the posting later (which is what the whole posting is about), has now been entirely deactivated.

Here‘s an interesting story:

Global news and photograph agencies will carry out their threat to boycott coverage of the Indian Premier League because of the restrictions on the distribution of photographs. Agencies are prohibited from providing photographs of the Twenty20 tournament to cricket-specific websites.

The News Media Coalition (NMC), the umbrella body that comprises global news and photograph agencies Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Getty Images, called the restrictions “discriminatory”.

“It is discriminatory for the accreditation terms to prohibit international news agencies from being able to serve a specific group of users, such as cricket websites,” the NMC said in a statement. “The interests of the IPL are protected by the fact that its accreditation terms limit news content generated by the news agencies to be used for editorial purposes only. The NMC calls upon the IPL to remove remaining obstacles in the way of full editorial coverage of the tournament.”

The Editors Guild of India also called for the withdrawal of “unacceptable conditions” while the Press Trust of India, India’s leading news agency, had said it would cover the event “under protest”.

What this shows is the overwhelming importance to cricket of the biggest fact in cricket now, which is the number of Indians who are fans of it.  Foreign fans of cricket in India just don’t matter, or not enough register seriously in anyone’s calculations.  The combined might of all those foreign press agencies counts as nothing besides those Indian fans.  Meanwhile the Editors Guild of India has “called for” this, that and the other, and the Press Trust of India, which would look idiotic, to all those Indian fans, if it ignored this new Indian cricket league, only agrees to cover it “under protest”, in other words: it agrees.  The bottom line is, if only Indians pay any attention to this new league, that will be more than sufficient.  This won’t stop it being mega-profitable, and in search of their shares of all those mega-profits, all the world’s best cricketers will still want to play in it.  Even if at the moment the only white people involved seem for the time being to be made of plastic:

Calling Michael J, my expert commenter on cricket, football, science, technology, travel, history, geography, television, etc. etc. etc..  Have I got that right?  Or will this news agency boycott actually count for something?  And will there eventually be pictures I can copy and paste to here of Pietersen, Flintoff, Mascarenas, Luke Wright, and other expert Anglo-sloggers giving their all to Bangalore Royal Challengers (or Birmingham City?), when they should (according to MCC old farts and the like) be playing boring old test and county cricket in front of very few people indeed in England?

Time for the Billion Monkeys of India to snap a million IPL snaps, methinks.  18X zoom lenses have arrived just at the right moment.  (But, will Billion Monkey cameras be banned from the grounds?  And if so, will that make a blind bit of difference?)

More informative IPL reportage here.

Patri’s Peripatetic Perigrinations is a blog which I blogrolled pretty much entirely for nepotistical reasons.  His dad is this guy, and his grandad is this guy, so he must be some kind of a guy, was my reasoning.

Anyway, sure enough, I dropped by today, and encountered this excellent man-demeaning-women quote, from Bill Cosby:

“Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think - in a deeper voice.”

These things get very dreary when you hear them the seventh time, and if that’s what you’re doing with this one then apologies.  But this is the first time I encountered this particular anti-female insult.

It reminds me of another good gag, in the movie John and Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow.  She is telling her friend about her latest lover.  The lover is stroking her stomach and saying: “I love you I love you.” She says: “Lower please.” So the lover says: “I love you I love you” in a deeper voice.  It’s funnier when Mia Farrow tells it, because she doesn’t have to say “in a deeper voice”.  She just says the second “I love you I love you” in a deeper voice.  Never mind.

Come to think of it, was the appeal of the young Dustin Hoffman that he was, basically, a woman, but with a really quite deep voice?  I think there may be something in that.

Day one of the County Championship was yesterday, and I only just noticed.  And what did it bring?  This (I don’t trust cricket reports on the internet to stay put so I do photos off of Ceefax):

One wicket to the recuperated Flintoff.  One century to the inexorable Ramprakash.  It’s as if Ramps is a CD that was merely paused at the end of last season and has been spinning at the same spot all winter, ready to resume as if nothing had happened.

Michael J sends this picture:

And says of it, and of a second snap of people just drinking beer, this:

Two shots of Alan Little in a gigantic beer tent in Munich on Sunday.  The two of us concluded that the first is not a Billion Monkey photograph as he was using a Real Photographer’s camera. I am not sure if the fact that I was also using a Real Photographer’s camera disqualifies things further.

That’s Alan Little as in this.

Do we need a separate category for SLR users?  How many are there of them.  Two hundred million gorillas?  Four hundred million?  Trouble is that the categories merge into each other.  A few years ago they said you couldn’t have proper SLR cameras which showed you the picture beforehand on a little screen.  Can’t be done.  No more possible than ships made of metal floating or heavier than air airplanes taking to the air.  Which rather neglected the fact that so many people, people like me for instance, very much wanted this.  So, now, these combined SLR/Billion Monkey cameras now exist.  The best one is truly brilliant, with the screen not only showing pictures beforehand but also twiddling, just like on my Canon S5 IS.  It costs two arms and three legs now, but that will soon change, once the loony millionaires buy it anyway (thereby proving that non-millionaires would like it also), and the competitors move in.  My next camera will probably be like this.

Another recent Munich pic from MJ here.  The picture is called “nazi1.jpg” so I’m guessing the building has an unsavory history.

One of the joys of blogging is that you can get your own back on tradesmen who muck you about.

Last Thursday I went to Travis Perkins in Pimlico Square to order some timber.  So far I have always just carried my timber home, which has worked very well, albeit very strenuously.  But I am getting too old for such labour and this time I asked if they did deliveries, which they did.  They said it would be delivered on Monday.  On Monday I got a call saying that the timber I ordered wasn’t yet available, but would Tuesday be okay?  I said make it Wednesday afternoon.  They said fine.  That was this afternoon.  This morning a driver showed up, buzzed the door and I went down in my pyjamas, blogger style, to sort out the timber arriving.  But, it turned out he didn’t have the timber on his lorry.  I was on the list, but my timber hadn’t been loaded up.  Christ almighty.  I’ll get back and sort it out, he said.  Six hours later, with the afternoon fast disappearing, wanting to get out to do stuff, and I ring them to find out what’s happening.  “It didn’t get put on the lorry today.  We’ll get it to you tomorrow morning.” This after about two minutes of moron propaganda on the telephone about the wonderfulness of Travis Perkins from a moron propaganda telephone machine, while the first person to answer the phone found someone who knew what was going on.  I said: Why didn’t you ring me when you knew that I wasn’t getting it today either?  (They’d rung on Monday with the first lot of bad news.) And: If it doesn’t get here tomorrow morning, I’ll call round in person and collect my money back.  The voice at the other end was managerially implacable.  He sounded like he’d been been on a course to learn how to deal with annoying customers who are angry when they don’t get what they’d paid for.  Stonewall, “assertively”, i.e. repetitiously, without emotion.

Time was when this kind of shite just had to be endured in, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, silence.  But now, I can blog it.  Or go looking for other things about Travis Perkins, or the timber supply business, and comment the story there.  Now, anyone else with a Travis Perkins bad service story can go a-Googling, and maybe encounter my story.  If this is a one-off, then nothing follows, but if there is a pattern of Travis Perkinsian incompetence out there, these things are much easier to put together than they used to be.

This little annoyance is nowhere near bad enough to get onto television.  To qualify to be on Watchdog or whatever it’s called, the one with Nicky Campbell, they’d have to fail to deliver my timber for about two months and charge me far too much for it, twice.  And then disappear without ever delivering it.  But, it is annoying.

It’s very important that I am allowed to put the exact name, the way I might not be allowed to in a big media begging letter.  It’s not the law as such that makes the difference.  You know the kind of thing: “I have recently been screwed around by ...” [name w