Its in the can..

Here's a picture of my Son and I enjoying a 7Bone burger last week in town (tremendous burgers if you ever get the chance but beware, the calorie hit is quite something!) I was pleased to see some of my local brewery (Siren) beers on sale there in cans, not only do the label designs look gorgeous it appeared that the popularity of them in the restaurant was pretty much running at full steam, as I gazed around there wasn't a table that didn't have a stack of empties. All this bodes well for my modest investment in this brewery, keep going Siren!

Friday Smirk

Some people have a very different definition of "evidence" than others, suffice to say across religious, political and cultural divides, standards will vary (a hell of a lot!)..

Brexit humour

No, I'm not going to take the piss out of Jacob-Rees Mogg for disrespecting our most cherished institution by slouching around like some indolent teenager, instead here's a cheery song about why Spanish people hate us, and to be honest, I can see their point.

Tuesday Titter

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She reduced altitude and spotted a man below. She descended a bit more and shouted: "'Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am". The man below replied "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude".

"You must be a technician." said the balloonist. "I am" replied the man "how did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you have told me is probably technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information and the fact is, I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip with your talk."

The man below responded, "You must be in management". "I am" replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?" "Well," said the man "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my f*cking fault!

Highway to hell

2016: "Sunlit uplands, I see no downsides to Brexit, only a considerable upside"
2019: "There will be adequate body bags"...

Off-ramp or death...

I propose we have a name and shame competition for the stretch of UK road that contains the highest density of over aggressive drivers; publish a "road-rage" heat-map if you like. I'd nominate the A329M between Reading and Bracknell, I have to drive it every day and it's terrifying! A maelstrom of ridiculously overpowered Jag's, Audi's and BMW's whose drivers are all desperately flexing their adrenaline fueled ego's in an attempt to intimidate other road users. This is usually achieved by repeatedly accelerating to 3 millimeters from the rear bumper of the car in front of them or swerving from lane to lane attempting to weave their way into some imaginary leading position. What on earth must some of these people (male and female) think they see when they look at themselves in their bathroom mirrors? We can only speculate. All of this stress and angst is for nowt of course, the roads in the UK are all so busy that progress is solely in the mind of the beholder, you might as well relax turn up the radio or enjoy the moment in quiet contemplation, you ain't going anywhere fast and let's face it getting to your off-ramp 30 seconds quicker isn't worth dying for..

Selling pencils from a cup

Funny article in the Guardian today about the Pastor/Father of a school in America removing all the Harry Potter books from the library because they contain dangerous and "real" spells and curses. Now this isn't some fringe loony-tunes sect it's just a Catholic school and apparently this cleric had consulted with Vatican "exorcists" previously on this matter. Of course we all know that Harry potter is a series of children's books (and films) about a boy wizard who battles with his nemesis (he who cannot be named) eventually vanquishing the "dark-lord" in a spectacular show-down in the final episode, it's harmless fantasy as opposed to the Catholic church which, although also fantasy, is in no way harmless. It's difficult to take such decisions or indeed such organisations seriously until you realise what power,  wealth and influence they possess, someone who should clearly be selling pencils from a cup is in fact having a real impact upon the cultural development and education of future generations. No wonder America is such a freakish outlier when it comes to first-world religiosity, although, I'm sure if Harry Potter had been authored by an American, brandished a M-16 and been swathed in the stars and stripes this decision would have been very different.

Veracity

Had someone knock on my door yesterday (Saturday) flogging Jesus.. We had a conversation about the veracity of the Bible, it was very polite however it never ceases to amaze me what some people can be convinced to believe, gullible doesn't even start to cover it..

Little pricks

Came across this interesting picture on the inter-webs today - it's taken with an electron-microscope and is human skin after an injection. I always thought my fear of needles was perfectly reasonable!

Friday Smirk

J&M pointing out the rather obvious contradictions in the ways that people justify sexism and misogyny and it's cultural accouterments in various places around the world. 

Thought for Thursday

Might as well get down with the new zeitgeist.. 

Thanks and goodnight..

This photo beautifully represents the new position of Britain on the world stage, the current state of our country and its politics breaks my heart. For all open-minded, optimistic, forward-looking patriots (as opposed to selfish, delusional, frightened, solipsistic gammon's) this picture feels like looking into the future, and it doesn't look pretty! Sure, no one knows exactly what will happen but most intelligent people should be able to estimate outcomes based on prior-experience and (actual) data. However, unfortunately, like the most literalist of religious believers all the Brexiters I've ever listened to seem to rest their views on delusion, wish-thinking and negative emotion or they're adherents to the Sex Pistols school of economics, i.e. "cash from chaos"!

Undemocratic voting

I happened to catch Andrea Leadsom on the news last night calling members of parliament who are organizing themselves in order to prevent a no-deal Brexit undemocratic. I nearly spat my cup of tea out all over the carpet! What utter hogwash, how on earth did such a dim politician get into the cabinet of the United Kingdom? I guess it's the age we live in; apparently you don't need to understand the finer details, or even the less finer details of the system of government that you are supposed to represent in order to be a leading member of it. For me this is akin to a player in the premier league not understanding the offside rule! Leadsom is either terminally dim or simply acting in a cynical and sinister way by attempting to change the definition of terms like "democracy" on the fly to suit her own narrative, it's "blasphemy" in disguise, don't agree? Then you're a traitor!

We've been here before with her, back in February in an astonishing statement she claimed that democracy was not about trying again until you get the result you want in reference to the possibility of holding a second referendum. If this were true then a couple of toffs would have had one vote at the first session of the first ever Parliament back in the 13th century and we'd all still be digging up their fields for 18 hours a day and receiving a turnip for our troubles. Surely this is the whole point of democracy, it's a process of continual change that never ends, this is the whole point of it and why it's vastly superior to a system governed by dictatorial or religious dogma that can never change.

We hear today that Boris wants Parliament suspended in September. In what seems to be a clear attempt to prevent MP's having time to organize opposition to a no-deal we are pretty close to having an unelected charlatan leading a party that will cause incalculable financial and cultural damage to the country whilst benefiting a tiny minority of billionaires wagering against a rational outcome and wishing to conceal their ill-gotten gains offshore sans-tax. This my friends, is most definitely not democracy!

Tuesday Titter

Some people are just hopelessly addicted to conspiracy...

Perspectives

When it comes to defining requirements for a new piece of software I find that everyone (even people who aren't involved in the business) have unique and insightful perspectives on what is "really" required (or so they always claim) my method for capturing, prioritizing and disambiguating said offerings is to ask for requirements to be written down, in long form, with diagrams. This request is often followed by extended periods of tumbleweed, which helps get to the crux of things enormously..

An embarrassment of Sunshine..

A sunny bank holiday weekend in the UK, must be a sign of the impending apocalypse! What with the cricket yesterday there's certainly a whiff of nervous energy in the air. We went to our local town festival yesterday, our little field in Berkshire was like sitting on a beach in the Med! The Sun was so hot that we ended up seeking refuge in the shade next to a tent rather than sit in the open. It's strange that we've lived in the same town for over 25 years but have never attended this annual event (and we can easily walk to it!) Anyway a good time was had by all, we even got our teenagers up dancing which was a bit like spotting big-foot in Waitrose, and obviously a huge embarrassment for them! Not dancing of course, but dancing with their parents. Fortunately it was dark at this stage and the field was large so they could easily pretend we were nothing to do with them.. :)

Brands

Fascinating animated chart showing the fortunes of leading brands since 2000.

How low can you go?

Tried a new beer last night, it's by Northern Monk (based in Leeds) and is called "Striding Edge". It's one of the new wave of low alcohol beers that actually taste nice, this one is the best yet. A hazy, fruity India pale ale (IPA) that's totally refreshing with incredible body for a 2.8% beer. I found this one in Waitrose if you see it try it, in fact if you see any of the Northern Monk beers grab them, they're a brewery that's really on form at the moment.

Definition of insanity

What with the hairpiece in chief wanting to "buy" Greenland in order to exploit it's carbon and mineral resources and now the money grabbing leader of Brazil (Bolsonaro) laying waste to vast tracts of rain-forest so that his cronies can fill them with cows to feed already obese Americans with even more burgers, it's a shame the Amazon rain-forest isn't a Cathedral, maybe then a few more people would pay attention! We really do need to take a close look at our attitudes and the way we're treating our planet, with July being the hottest month on record, ever, this really isn't good news!

I do seriously fear for the well-being of our children. Our family will be taking even more action in the coming months/years to seriously reduce our carbon footprint, more walking, more trains, less cars, less plastic, more insulation, independent power generation and additional recycling are all on the cards, things are getting serious.

Friday Smirk

J&M pointing out that never in any field of human endeavor has a single religious claim ever successfully debunked a (properly peer reviewed) scientific one, it's always the other way around. You never hear the sentence "all these years those scientists were wrong, it's like the Bible said all along, whales are indeed fish...". The apologists out there of course bleat that religion doesn't make the same kinds of claims that science does and "interpretation" is required, unfortunately for them you don't need to look far to find claims in scripture that are clearly either right or they are wrong, either bats are birds or they are not (Leviticus 11:13-19), either Jesus knew about seeds or he didn't (Matthew 13:32:1) nothing allegorical about it..

Insignificant

It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that we're insignificant on the scale of the universe. As if to rub it in we're told that there's a billion billion stars in our own galaxy and a billion billion galaxies in our universe, each one harboring trillions of planets. Then again from a different perspective, here's a chart showing where all the various elements come from. When you consider that every atom, of the otherwise quite rare element Phosphorus that sit inside every DNA molecule of every cell in your body is essential in defining every aspect of your existence and ONLY came from the heart of an exploding star, it's quite a neat thought.

Cascadian Ale

New beer tried at the weekend. It's something labelled as "Cascadian Dark Ale" and I believe the recipe idea hails from the Pacific Northwest of the USA where Simcoe hops have long been used to impart piney, resinous flavours into pale-ales. The difference here is that the beer has been made dark using roasted malts rather than the pale malts used in paler ales, these dark malts also impart chocolate, plum and coffee flavours which actually marry with the Simcoe very well. This beer was made by Verdant down in Falmouth, Cornwall in collaboration with Buxton Brewery in Derbyshire and is one of the cans that I bought back from my holiday. I'm wishing I had more boot space now.. should have packed one of the kids off back home on the train...

Machine Learning

Best (simple) explanation I've found so far for Machine Learning systems (or what most mainstream media outlets label as "AI" or artificial intelligence) The important point about this is that in order to build a good system you need to have a bunch of questions (or data) to which you have a bunch of correct answers with which to train or "build" a set of rules with. This is the thing that most management types have no clue about, they usually think that you can simply pick a problem and set the computer off solving it, at which point I usually point out that if that were true the national lottery would be a bit boring. As usual in this life there's no such thing as a free lunch..

Metaphorical brick walls...

J&M on the money as usual. How some people can call this a "Christian country" these days is a complete fallacy, some people sure like to beat their heads against the metaphorical brick wall of faith based reasoning.

The dark side

I've noticed that the number of virus bearing spam emails has been increasing alarmingly lately, it really is a minefield for the unwary in cyber-space these days. In my company we regularly test the resilience of our own people by sending out mails that attempt to entice them into clicking on spurious links that then simulate some kind of phishing attack, interestingly, no matter how much training we do, when we send mails to 50 people we're guaranteed to get at least three that fall for it! Maybe I should think about a change of career over to the dark side?

Monday Mirth

Funniest thing I read all day...

Fear, ignorance and obstinacy

Everyone should read what Roald Dahl wrote in 1986 (click this link to see a longer version) on the death of his daughter Olivia from measles in 1962 (the year of my birth). It's a salutary reminder that children need to be vaccinated against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. People who don't do it without good reason are irresponsible and are allowing their own fear, ignorance or sheer obstinacy to put the lives of their children and their fellow travelers on life's journey at risk of reaching an early and unnecessary terminus.

Cream-teas

Back to work today after a week off in Cornwall, hitting the mid-morning energy low as my body is expecting some sea-air and a cream-tea but isn't getting either. 

Beery fun in Kernow

Spent a stellar week with the family in Falmouth, Cornwall got back Friday afternoon. We stayed in a town-centre AirBnB which was a bit quirky but in a brilliant location being only a 5 minute stroll from the high-street. On a random note, whilst strolling along said high-street I noticed the above plaque on one of the buildings, it commemorates the landing of Charles Darwin in the town at the end of his pivotal voyage on the Beagle in 1836, an interesting detail. One of the other attractions of Falmouth as a place to stay (for me) is the craft beer scene. 

Ever since star brewers Verdant set up their brewery in the town several craft beer bars and restaurants featuring their products have sprung up attracting fans from far and wide, Verdant themselves even have a tap-room slash tapas bar in the town centre which is excellent. Falmouth was also a good place to be based for day trips out to various Cornish attractions, like St. Ives, Padstow, Port Isaac and beauty spots along the coast such as Harlyn Bay (see below) where the kids did some surfing while the adults popped over to nearby Padstow for some lunch! We certainly made the most of what was a fairly rainy week. 

Another beer related discovery was the Padstow Brewing Company who have a tasting room in Padstow town centre, not a bad selection of ales, I sampled a few of their core beers and grabbed a couple of more exotic cans to bring home to share with friends.

All in all a fun and relaxing seven days, not looking forward to work next week though.

Friday Smirk

Excellent J&M up today. The Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be the leading philosophy for politicians, religious apologists of all stripes and newspaper reporters these days, in fact, historians may look back at this time and call it the "Dunning-Kruger age"..

Fear and Wonder

Popped over to Bracknell on Saturday and came face to face with this fella, a moving roaring T-Rex! It was highly amusing to watch the battle between fear and wonder on the little kids faces when it started to move, brilliant!

Small Pale

Tried a new beer at the weekend (see above) it's by Manchester maestros Cloudwater and is called "Small Pale" and its a revelation. 

Traditional wisdom is that to get bigger flavour and mouthfeel in a beer you need to create more alcohol in it by using bigger charges of fermentables (like barley) and possibly even ramping up the sugar by adding maltose or candy sugar so that the yeast has more food to convert into alcohol; we all know that the weaker the beer the more "watery" it tends to taste. Of course in days gone by low strength beer has been a perfectly respectable drink, back when workers liked to down a few pints at lunchtime and return for the afternoon shift in reasonable shape they tended toward the traditional session bitters at around 3-4% ABV but since the influx of continental lagers and more recently flavorsome American IPA styles, the ABV of beer has been steadily creeping upward. It's not unusual for a modern craft beer bar to not have anything on tap under 5% and sometimes even higher, the emphasis these days is most definitely on variety and the taste experience (half pint by half pint) and not getting blotto by drinking 8 pints of 6% lager on a Friday night.

Enter Cloudwater, who have a stellar reputation for BIG flavour double IPA style beers usually coming in at around 6-8%. This time they've created a low alcohol version of this big taste profile at a miserly 2.9% ABV. I wasn't expecting much from this beer but boy was I wrong! Blindfold I would have sworn blind that this was a 5-6% American IPA style beer, and a good one at that! Plenty of body and wonderful fruity/citrus flavours in a modern hazy, perfectly carbonated package, a brilliant beer and the best bit is you can session it with ease and not feel like you've slept in a tumble dryer the next morning, good effort Cloudwater!

Generations

As many of us have realised over the years, and is also backed up by scientific studies, people with conservative oriented personalities prefer the status-quo whereas people with a more liberal disposition tend to embrace the new a little more readily. Studies have shown that liberals tend to make better entrepreneurs but aren't so good at running a steady-state business, for conservative types it tends to be the other way around, conservatives are generally better at being managers. The bottom line though is that to have a successful society you need both personality traits, you need people that defend the status-quo and who manage things in an orderly fashion, however, you also need people who are outward looking, seeking new ideas and trying new things, without this, a culture eventually withers and dies. Unfortunately the more mature we get as individuals and the more mature our culture becomes the conservative traits seem to dominate, it's particularly visible in the UK and the USA at the moment, we seem to be much more inward looking than ever before in my life-time. I do wonder if this has something to do with people living longer or if it's just one of those natural cycles that invisibly doom all empires, political systems, cultures and religions eventually to the scrap heap. Anyway regardless of the psychology, it's a worrying trend for us liberals, lets hope the next generation are able to address the imbalance somehow.

Monday Mirth

Saw this on the inter-webs the other day, made me smile, particularly the last two entries :)

Birthdays

One of the many little perks that we offer in my company is allow people to take their birthday day off, i.e. as paid holiday. It's a little gesture which seems to go down well with everyone and quite often people pop back into the office at lunchtime with cake and sweets to share with their colleagues anyway. Most of the time if you treat people like grown-ups they tend to behave like grown-ups, particularly when it involves a win-win, i.e. they get a day off, we all get cake!

Seeking funding

I've got an idea for a new start-up, how about a WEB based scheduling platform so that American gun lovers can organize their mass shootings sensibly spread over the year (in order to maximize media exposure). We don't want another repeat of this last 24 hours do we, just a waste of TV coverage, we can't have our world-wide audience becoming de-sensitized to massacres of innocent Women and Children whilst they attend school or do their grocery shopping can we...

19th Hole

J&M commenting on recent moves at a UK church to drum up more business. The entertainments committee at Rochester Cathedral decided to install a 9-hole crazy golf course to attract more visitors. It's not clear if people will turn up for a religious experience or because they saw it on the telly, what we can be pretty sure about is that most 8 year olds won't experience a miraculous conversion moment as they tee off into the mouth of a cardboard crocodile. I can't help be cynical about this, stripping away the medieval architecture, pretty windows and "fun" based marketing, it's just another religious organisation trying to lure children into it's clutches with gimmicks! In other words a blatant attempt to target vulnerable (intellectually) segments of the community with a particular set of ideas and dogma in an attempt to extract resources from them, it should at least be taxed as such!

300 couture ?

Saw this, immediately thought of some recent splatter-movies I've seen, 300 for example..

Friday Smirk

Might smirk if we weren't such a bunch of masochists..

Radio ga ga

Reading today that Zoe Ball has lost nearly 800,000 listeners from the Radio 2 breakfast show since taking over from Chris Evans in January. I can't say I'm surprised, our family always puts the radio on in the mornings whilst eating breakfast and getting ready for the day etc. We switched to Virgin (where Evans moved to) after about a week of listening to the new format, we tried to like it but unfortunately it just wasn't for us. I do wonder if the BBC has fallen foul of an over-reached desire to level the numbers in terms of male and female presenters? Perhaps, the liberal loveys that run the show at our state broadcaster have lost sight of the fact that whatever gender the presenter of that particular peak-time show is, they still have to have a certain star quality, and Zoe just doesn't have it IMO, she's a competent presenter but the whole "stream of consciousness" thing doesn't cut it for many people, including our family, we find it's like overhearing a couple of women having a chat on the bus, fairly mundane and seldom interesting from a third-party perspective. What Evans did much better was to rely on his "crew" of co-presenters and many more guests to break things up and keep a certain momentum and energy going. The radio 2 breakfast show is still very popular though, I'm sure they'll persevere with it and good luck to them, radio is still by far the best way to start the day.

Track-kill

Believe it or not this butterfly was hit by a train! On my lunchtime walk today I had to pass under a railway bridge, I did so just as the fast train from Gatwick was passing over. This little critter fluttered down as I was walking past. Such vivid colours, such distinct shapes, an amazing evolutionary adaptation to scare and avoid predators , just beautiful.

Progress update

- Since the referendum results, investment in the UK car manufacturing sector has fallen from £4.5 billion to less than £0.25 billion (we export 60% of cars we make to the EU)

- Sterling is now trading at 1.21 against the Dollar, down from 1.48 in 2016, against the Euro it's performed similarly badly, down from 1.40 in 2016  to 1.09 yesterday.

- We've spent roughly a billion pounds of taxpayer money on Brexit preparations so far, the cost is predicted to exceed £2 billion.

- Aviva is moving £7.8 billion in assets from the UK to Ireland (Feb 2019)

- BOA Merrill Lynch is moving it's HQ from London to Paris and is transferring 125 jobs to Dublin

- Barclays has moved £166 billion of client assets to Dublin from London

- British steel risks going into administration with 4,000 jobs on the line (with 20,000 jobs in the supply chain)

- Dyson is moving it's HQ from the UK to Singapore

- Ford is cutting jobs in the UK, threatening the viability of three major plants in the UK

- Goldman Sachs is moving staff to the continent ahead of Brexit

- Honda is closing manufacturing in Swindon, culling 3,500 jobs

- Jaguar Land-Rover is cutting 4,500 jobs, the firm currently employs 44,000 people in the UK

- JP Morgan Chase is removing 4,000 positions from London and moving to Frankfurt

- Lloyds is opening a new EU base, transferring business to a Brussels subsidiary by 2020

- Nissan is abandoning manufacture of it's new X-Trail SUV in Sunderland, relocating to Japan instead

- Panasonic is moving it's European HQ to Amsterdam

- Philips is losing 430 jobs in the UK, all roles being transferred to Holland.

- Rolls-Royce is cutting 4,600 jobs in Derby by 2020, moving aero engine production to Germany

- Sony is moving it's European HQ from London to Amsterdam

- UBS is choosing Frankfurt as the base for EU operations over London

- Unilever has abandoned dual HQ plans and is making Rotterdam it's EU HQ.


Now you could argue that these things may have happened anyway and that Brexit is just a coincidence, but, that's a bit like trying to argue that our planet isn't getting warmer when the hottest 10 years on record (since the 1800's) have all happened since 2002, i.e. not likely. Brexit is likened to the UK's "Vietnam", the only difference is that the people of the UK are fighting and paying on BOTH sides!

Success

Having been on the receiving end of some management training recently this little cartoon rang bells. During the course we were supposed to define what our "10 year goals" were, laughably some people actually took this seriously! Honestly, if a single group of people could agree on a single set of goals over such a long period of time in such an uncertain economic climate with no idea what's going to happen next we would all live in a very different world than the one we do, we should leave that kind of wish-thinking to religion.

Indoctrination

There's a story breaking today about a couple in Oxfordshire who have removed their children from assemblies at a local primary school because they object to them being told by teachers that Christian mythology (i.e. Noah's flood, Crucifixion/Resurrection, Good Samaritan etc.) are literally true. The couple claim that the school made their children take part in Christian prayer and watch re-enactments of Bible stories. It seems as though the NSS have taken up support for their case in offering a legal challenge to the school board for not providing their children access to inclusive assemblies representing a plurality of people having many faith based traditions and none.

I suspect this is quite a common issue among primary schools run by Church organisations, my own children had Christianity forced down their throats on many occasions, both by evangelical teachers acting on their own and also by the institutions themselves in the form of compulsory worship etc. My Wife and I were fairly relaxed about it since we have raised them to think critically for themselves and fortunately (so far) that seems to have acted as a kind of inoculation against this kind of thing. Like most parents we have no issue at all with religious studies, in fact my Son ended up doing an A-Level in Religious Studies, Philosophy and Ethics and found it to be his favourite subject (the Philosophy bits at least) The real problem here are teachers teaching young children in a state funded organisations that idea that their supernatural "beliefs" are true. No one has a problem with people believing whatever they like or even sending their kids to private religious schools, but, in a modern pluralistic society they shouldn't get the right to indoctrinate everyone else's kids with those beliefs on the taxpayers dollar.

Threatening advertising

Interesting catch-phrase from Delta airlines, very easy to mis-read and feel rejected or even somehow threatened. Can't imagine what kind of marketing pitch for an airline came up with the idea that being "out" in the world would be a good thing to think about while travelling at 30,000 feet in a metal tube..

Pervasive

Spent a lovely weekend down in the New Forest attending a good friend's birthday bash, stayed in Brockenhurst and was quite excited on Saturday to have a couple of hours of down-time and the possibility of visiting one of my favourite breweries of the moment nearby in Hardley. The brewery in question is called Vibrant Forest and seems to be on top form currently, unfortunately though my Wife wasn't as keen to visit as I was, to be honest I can't blame her, we did only have a couple of hours and the prospect of 25 minutes in a hot car verses sitting in a pub garden in Brockenhurst wasn't a balanced equation in anyone's books. Luckily we took a stroll through the village instead and came across a little wine bar called "The Sett" low and behold they stocked a nice little range of Vibrant Forest beers and a few other local offerings to boot (see board above), we sat in the sun and scoffed a wonderful platter of cheese and bread with our beverages, the missus had a couple of glasses of white and I necked a couple of local brews, very nice they were too. I think we've reached a point in the UK now where it's almost possible to get locally sourced craft beer pretty much anywhere, much like cask beer in the 70s and 80s, the craft movement is becoming totally pervasive, onward and upward!

Gender

Gender and gender expression are topics that seems to generate quite a lot of "heat" in this era of political correctness and virtue signalling. As far as the science is concerned there are two things, biological sex, which can only be male or female and then there is gender expression which is much more fluid and can involve many combinations and permutations. I think it is important that we don't confuse these two things, particularly in legal settings. On a passport, for example, I think it is important to record biological sex or gender, but not gender expression, which I believe is none of the business of the person reading the passport and should not be a factor in any action (i.e. allowing entry to a country) resulting from reading such a document. In some situations it seems as though people are confusing what they are with what they would like to be, both are real and deserving of Human dignity, it's just that they're not the same thing.

Friday Smirk

I love the smell of a good pun in the morning...

Who needs experts..

I've lost count of the number of times I've watched the inevitable car-crash of a bunch of people trying to implement a data-processing system using spreadsheets or isolated reporting tools. It ALWAYS ends up wasting time, money and emotional energy, ultimately being discarded and started again (usually with exactly the same flaws) The strange thing is that many people seem unable to learn this simple lesson, which is just the classic "stitch in time" one, not complicated but indicative of the fact that most people don't understand either data or software and yet when combined with ego and arrogance (who needs experts!), some software tools are simple enough to use (superficially) to sucker them into thinking that they do. I've given up trying to talk people down on this, these days I simply refuse to get involved at all, more useful things to do with my life.

Mid-Week Mirth

J&M pointing out the bleeding obvious for us again. If you suppress a key part of a Human Being's biological and hormonal make-up, i.e. the desire to have sex as  a result of hormonal activity in their bodies and brains then it tends to make them a little cranky, sometimes even deviant.