It is not just the music but the sheer spectacle of that remarkable stage, and the audacity of the NFL to have it all in the half-time interval, not to mention the technical achievement of getting that stage set up, performed on and struck again in about twenty minutes.  I think it took a lot longer to get the band set up for Live 8 and that was a comparitively bare stage.

The word ‘awesome’ is over-used and has lost much of its original meaning now but I think it is appropriate for that display.  I am not ashamed to admit that I had a pretty big lump in my throat watching it, and I am glad I recorded the Superbowl so I could watch it on the big TV and not have to rely on the relatively tiny YouTube clips below.

Right now though I have the opposite problem: there is just too much on television at the moment to keep up with, and the V+ box is backing up a bit.  There is Heroes, Being Human, Jim Al Khalili’s chemistry series, Latin Music USA and now Lost has started again – plus there are a few old faithfuls like QI and Mock The Week for comfort viewing.  Fortunately the chemistry series is over now and Latin Music USA is only for four weeks or I would be struggling.

I know there are other things on that I would probably like, but do me a favour and don’t tell me.  The last thing I need now is to get hooked on anther American multi-parter.

Annie enjoyed the party, but I’m not so sure she will enjoy the headache tomorrow morning quite as much,

I wasn’t too keen on the piano-based version of Are ‘Friends’ Electric? but very much enjoyed the version of Venus in Furs.  Just a shame it stopped before the end of the song.  Good while it lasted though.

So far the only vaguely intertesting ‘revelation’ is that David Cameron hosted an event for freemasons.Never mind.  The Guardian is still pushing it as another opportunity for crowdsourcing, hoping something will come out of it.  I think they are still put out that the Telegraph got all the attention for the expenses business and are making sure that they jump on everything that comes along now.  They do publish a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet of all the bookings so you can look up your own MP for amusement, but I suspect that, even if they do find anything wrong or illegal it would not have the impact of expenses as the wrongness would be a technicality that needs to be explained first.

With expenses the media were pushing at an open door as many people get outraged by the totally legitimate and necessary office expenses, expecting MPs to fund an office and several staff out of their own pockets, so provoking comment with tales of duck islands and moat cleaning was never going to be difficult.

Anyway, I did have a look at the Google doc to see what Francis Maude has been up to.  He hired Commons facilities about thirty times in the period covered by the report, and most of the bookings look entirely innocent, like hosting functions for Novartis (a local employer) or the all-party parliamentary governance group (whatever that is).

Other bookings are more suspect, but I think I saw somewhere that the rules changed in 2007 so that before then a booking that was intended to raise funds for political parties was not explicitly against the rules.  Even so, looking through them is a bit of an eye-opener, revealing the existance of all sorts of organisations that are working to fund and support the Tories but are largely going un-noticed.

A few examples:

May 7th 2004, The Winston Churchill Fifty Dining Club

This was a dinner for 35 people.  The Winston Churchill 50 Dining Club is an organisation that raises money for the Tories to fight the three Brighton and Hove seats.  That is according to Daniel Hannan, a past chair of the club.  In a Telegraph blog a few months ago he said:

From Prague to Brighton for a dinner of the Sir Winston Churchill 50 Dining Club, which raises oodles of money from all over Sussex for the three Brighton and Hove seats.

So Maude was hosting an event for a group whose purpose is to raise ‘oodles of cash’ for the Tories.  Perhaps that was all allowed then, or not explicitly not allowed, or whatever.  Interesting though.  I wonder how much they raised that day?

23rd November 2006, Horsham Parliamentary Dining Club

This was a dinner for 34 people.  The organisation is a familiar name from the Register of Members’ Interests, where Maude says:

In 2008 the Horsham and Crawley Conservative Association received donations from the Horsham Parliamentary Dining Club of which I am chairman.

Of course, the money they raised and donated may not have come from that dinner, but I can’t see that they have any other purpose.

14th March 2007, Conservatives Abroad Reception

This was a reception for 145 people in the Terrace Pavilion.  No suggestion that the event was a fund-raiser, I just find the whole idea of the organisation to be a bit suspect.  Looking through a few of their websites I came across this report of one of their conferences, containing this line:

The presentations were completed by an excellent powerpoint presentation by Alistair Kinloch from Sydney, proposing a method of vote harvesting and inspiring further debate.

“Vote harvesting”?  Not sure exactly what that entails, but it sounds a bit sinister to me, as does the organisation itself.  Under our current electoral system the entire outcome of a general election can be decided by a few thousand votes if they are in the right place, so having a pool of a few hundred thousand overseas voters all committed to one side could easily sway the outcome.  It does highlight the fundamental iniquity of first-past-the-post.

6th November 2009, Premier Members

It is not clear exactly what this is, but if you look at Sussex Enterprise’s website and explore a bit you will find that they have something called Premier Membership and can even find a brochure which boasts “Access, Influence, Opportunity” and says “at our most recent lunch we were joined by Francis Maude MP”, so it looks like the November booking relates to them.  Strange wording though, he did not join them at their lunch but hosted it.

They are not exactly saying that you can buy access to MPs but the suggestion is there.  Just to be clear: there is no suggestion by me at all that the MP receives anything in return for allowing this access.

It all looks like a bit of a con really.  Wouldn’t you expect any MP to be willing to see any employer in their constituency anyway?  Why bother paying?

So there it is. Nothing likely to catch the headlines in Maude’s local paper unfortunately, no matter how dodgy some of the bokoings may appear to some of us.

Anyway, one of the bands on there was called Pleasure Seekers, featuring a 14-year old (in 1964) female bass player called Suzi Quatro.   Like most males of my sort of age I remember Suzi Quatro as the tiny, leather-clad singer, dwarfed by her bass guitar on Top of the Pops, playing Chinn & Chapman songs.  Being of the right age and in the target audience for glam rock at the time I quite liked such songs as 48 Crash and Devil Gate Drive, although I imagine it was probably not seen as ‘proper’ music by the critics at the time, and certainly not when punk came along.

I had no idea she had a past as part of an ultra-credible, grass-roots scene that came to influence the whole punk scene.  How ironic that her popularity waned as the very scene she helped to inspire grew and led youngsters to look down on the sort of manufactured pop that she was then seen to be performing.

I still think Devil Gate Drive is great by the way, but now I am really taken with What a Way to Die by Pleasure Seekers.  Have a listen on Spotify and see for yourself.  A shame they only have two tracks available in the library, but better than nothing.

And on top of that she had a regular part in Happy Days and had an Audi named after her

With all that, there are still protests and campaigns to have more hospitals and more services.  Meanwhile in America, using the example of Texas from the BBC story, about a third of the population have no medical cover and a fifth of children have no medical cover.  If they get sick or injured there is no guarantee of treatment and yet they seem to have even bigger protests because Obama wants them to have the sort of access to medical facilities that we have.   A rational person would expect them to be dying of envy for us, but instead they are fighting to remain deprived.

So here in the UK we find it hard to understand why Americans protest about the prospect of having what we protest about not having enough of – with the exception of the Dan Hannan tendency who would prefer us to move to the US model – but the BBC story, drawing from some recent books and theories tries to explain why that could be.

It seems to boil down to a basic human trait of paying more attention to narrative than to facts.

How I understand it is that, collectively, we act like contrary teenagers.  If our parents tell us we should do something because it is better for us we are against it because it our parents telling us.   We have our own minds, how dare they have the arrogance to decide what would be better for us just because they know more?  I think we have all been there, and probably found ourselves ten years later wishing we had listened, and ten years after that getting the same reactions from our own teenagers.

The worrying aspect of the story is that you can see it happening here to an extent.  The recent fuss about ‘dodgy statistics’ on crime is a great example. On one side of the fence we have statistics gathered to show the drops in different types of crime.  On the other hand we have the Tories with a catchphrase of ‘broken Britain’, backed up by anecdotal evidence and a distortion of the statistics.  Guess what?  Lots of people hear the ‘broken Britain’ catchphrase but don’t want to hear all the real statistics, whether that is because of a natural mistrust of official statistics, or anything official, or our famously reduced collective attention span or some other reason entirely doesn’t really matter: the bottom line is that the broken record wins over any reasoned argument.

Ironically, it is hardly necessary for the Tories to keep misrepresenting the crime figures, except as a hook to get the broken Britain message back on the front page of the Daily Mail – nobody is paying any more attention to their mendacious interpretation of the statistics than to the proper interpretation.

The reason why this is depressing is that, even knowing why Tories get their arguments across better (style having greater impact than substance, complicit media, etc.) does not help.  There are certain character traits ingrained in the left that will not be overcome:

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.”

So true.  But I can’t see us abandoning our facts for rhetoric. It just feels wrong, despite the Labour Party’s reputation as being masters of spin (if only that was true).  I’m sure we will continue to counter emotive, baseless, but effective soundbites with reasoned argument that just turns the voters off, because at the end of the day we on the left are no more able to control our instincts than the poor Americans without healthcare who are voting to stay that way.

He [Thomas Frank] believes that the voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

That is the challenge right there.  How do we find a way to compete on emotional engagement without abandoning our quaint, self-destructive preference for reasonable argument?

Sorry about that rare diversion into dull theory. I’m sure I’ll be back to trivia again soon enough.

I did a Google search on “should of” just now.  It returned 2.5million results.  The first was from a site complaining about the usage.  So was the second.  In fact the first five results were from grammar blogs, moaning about the usage, and then it went downhill.  I suspect that at least 2,499,900 of the results are from sites where the writers are totally unaware of the error.

1. see. Not too difficult was it?

A couple of things to note:

• He got compensation of £335 (plus medical expenses).  Doesn’t sound a lot for what must have been a pretty traumatic experience.
• The brand he was smoking was called Clas Mild.  I hope Clas don’t do a full-strength – imagine what damage they would do!

Great quote from the manufacturers:

We do not put any strange materials in the cigarettes, so we think that this is a weird case. This is the first time for us.

Yesterday I was a little less impressed as we passed through, as we do every day on the way home from work.

This is, as the council keep reminding us a multi-million pound scheme, so who decided it would be a good idea to put a bus stop in a single-lane road, only a few metres after a roundabout?  A bus only has to stop for a few minutes and the traffic backs up to block the roundabout.  There is a wide expanse of pavement where the bus stop is – more than enough room to make it a proper lay-by bus stop.  The stop in the other direction has room for cars to park, but not the westbound side.

Very poor planning in my opinion.