Editor of Trans Britain. #Author of Pressing Matters. Lifetime Achievement Award PrideOfManchester 2021. Drove an 8 year old #EV called Peggy and now drives Olga who is one year old.
Posts about #climate mitigation, #trans moral panic, #books. Was #retired. Checked out but unable to leave. She/Her.
Dear oh dear, I’m not at all happy with the reboot of Rebus streaming on BBC. I’ve watched all six episodes and the character of Rebus himself is entirely changed — and not in a good way. Ian Rankin’s an exec producer so he doesn’t come away with clean hands. Vintage Rebus may not go by the book but he’s a decent cop who does real detecting. This version is hard to distinguish from the gangsters and doesn’t seem to have much actual detecting to do.
Good news: One of the hotels on my touring itinerary has EV chargers in their FREE basement car park. Always nice to plug in overnight.
Bad news: Said chargers are on yet another network that needs an app or RFID card, the app was never tested properly and the domain for Passwords to store my credentials bears no resemblance to the brand name of the network OR the web site which I had to find to get around a bug in the signup verification process.
So glad I got to debug this at leisure from the settee at home rather than under pressure with a cable in one hand after a day’s driving. And on this occasion NO, NO, NO I don’t want to pay you €6 for an RFID tag I’ll use only once. This is why I need to be sure the app is working instead.
This is what happens when free markets control the rollout of infrastructure. The chaos will end eventually when networks eat each other up and there is just one app or RFID card to rule them all. Till then
To hoteliers: It’s really great hospitality to provide low speed destination charging for guests but, for heavens sake, make sure YOU control the guest experience rather than leave patrons to fight with a network they’ll only use for one night. You provide free parking so go the extra stage and make the charging free too. That way customers can just plug in and know it just works. It’s worth it just for guest happiness and costs far less than you imagine. Or just charge a flat rate at the desk.
How the BBC covered the General Election 54 years ago in 1970. This was the first time they used an exit poll to predict the result near the start of the programme. The wrap up at the end contains some quite prescient predictions of how the Conservatives would get by with a fairly narrow majority — plus someone mentioned how Ted Heath was going to be a better figure than Harold Wilson to negotiate joining the Common Market.
Someone needs to sit the Guardian editorial team down & explain to them:
Rising house prices are not 'growth' - this is asset price inflation driven by financial instruments & constrained supply... read my lips: IT IS INFLATION!
(just because its excluded from RPI/CPI measure doesn't make it growth!)
And most inflationary areas are not 'best performing' - they are areas of housing crisis!!!!
@ChrisMayLA6 Could you tack on a module which explains to journalists that if the percentage rate of inflation goes down then prices still go up, but just not as fast? Actually you might need to tack on a preceding module that explains ratios and percentages and how meaningless it is to talk about large changes in small numbers whilst not grasping small changes in big numbers. It’s unfortunate that journalism is controlled by the kids who flunked arithmetic aged 10.
If you’d like to watch a lot of Tories losing their seats here is the BBC’s election night coverage from 1997. It’s a good way of deciding how long you’d need to stay up to see the same this year, or whether your best bet is to go to bed and just get up early instead.
As Michael Gove joins the nearly quarter of Tory MPs standing down at the election, the joke that 'would the last person leaving the Tory party please turn off the lights' seems to be ever more apposite.
For many Gove's departure will be welcome, but it also reinforces the notion that the post-election Tory party may be very different from its most recent manifestation.
The Q. will be, will they swing further to the right, shift to the 'centre', of collapse into fragments?
@ChrisMayLA6 The membership, which will be selecting the replacements with indecent haste, have already shown us which way they lean. Imagine an intake of trussalikes. The generation of members that sought and valued steadiness, a moral compass and one-nation values has already been buried, and with them any prospect of swinging back where Conservatives once stood.
Happy twentieth birthday to the Gender Recognition Act — once groundbreaking, now overdue for an update to catch-up with legislation that overtook it, but hopefully at least safe from the unhinged extreme right of the Conservative Party. Read how we forced Labour to pass it on 25th May 2004. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00PB84AUM
The New York Times sticks its thumb on the scale in the matter of Dr Cass’s review, burying a response letter from US paediatricians whilst issuing a push notification to readers for its interview with Cass.
TOMORROW: It’s twenty years since Parliament overwhelmingly passed the Gender Recognition Act. That means it’s been law for longer than many young trans people have been alive. This is the foreword to Volume 2 of my book series about achieving that landmark, Pressing Matters.
NB. The reason Commons passage was the definitive vote stage was because the Bill had started life by being debated and voted by the Lords and then moving to the Commons.
19 years ago today Stephen Whittle and I had a day out at Buckingham Palace having medals pinned on us by the now-King for services to trans people. Afterwards my daughter and I had afternoon tea with my MP, Sir Gerald Kaufman in the Commons tea room. I’ve always thought Stephen really suits formal attire. Hard to reconcile the state’s performance of respect for trans people then with what the Tories have done in the last 6-7 years.
We’ll shortly discover whether the people of Islington are inherently Corbyn voters or Labour voters. If there are any significant numbers of the former the vote will be split.
This is how a chaos agent like Marjorie Taylor Greene, overseen by a weak committee chair, throws a congressional committee into chaos. She’s not there to do work in any conventional sense.
I can’t believe Amazon are paying me £0.01 for pages of my self-published stuff that someone read with Kindle Unlimited in March. I’ve had some paltry payments in the last 11 years but 1 penny from Kindle UK is a record low 😂 My bank is going to just love processing that.
“He noted that the May 15th committee hearing featured extensive and intentional distortions of this evidence base in an attempt to mislead the American public and further advance the medically unsound and discriminatory bans on this care that are currently on the books in more than 20 states.”
