More often than not I find myself having a real brow-slapping moment when I realise that I really should have got it if I had remembered that ‘ground’ usually indicates an anagram, or that “scorer” often indicates a composer’s name, or remembered to check for hidden words or something like that. I could really do with a checklist of things to look out for and thought perhaps I could do one myself, in daily doses. One post per topic. Before giving up I could run through the checklist.

Sometimes the answer depends on some arcane knowledge, like the names of 17th-Century Persian civil servants or something like that and I wouldn’t stand a chance, but a lot of the time just not forgetting a few common devices would do the trick for me.

I have always believed that the best way to learn something is to have the lesson at the point it is needed. Sit through a presentation of 58 keyboard shortcuts in Windows applications and you would forget most of them. Sod’s law means that you would only remember the stupid ones that nobody in their right minds would want. However, if somebody notices you doing control-alt-delete and choosing to lock the screen every time you leave your desk and points out that Windows+L would do it more efficiently, that will stick on your mind.

So on that basis I thought I would choose one of the answers I didn’t get, and write a little bit about it and try to do it in such a way it would remind me to keep that possibility in mind in the future.

Having made this decision I then went on an unprecedented run of 9 days of completing the thing, by which time the appeal of the idea wore off a little bit. The regret has been more than compensated by the feeling of utter smugness at not only completing it but understanding the answers 99% of the time.

Any smugness is usually dispelled by looking that that blog. Having all my smoking breaks, lunch and time when I get home working on the crossword I read the discussions where someone will say “It was a tough one today – took me nearly 15 minutes to complete it”. It makes me feel like one of those marathon runners who finally cross the line after 12 hours.

Let’s see how I feel tomorrow. The aforementioned law of Sod and the forces of hubris combined with the fact that the Friday crossword is often a real bastard mean that I will probably end up failing miserably tomorrow and then I’ll have my chance to embark on this project of inflicting boredom on the world.

What a week for Crawley. First the FA Cup draw against Man Utd. and now a mention by Hopi Sen.  I may be overdoing the hyperbole a bit there, but I’m really pleased to see a new and younger voice coming onto the scene.

Note that I didn’t refer to the new blog as one from “Councillor Peter Lamb”.  He is a councillor, and a good one, but he seems to be writing in a more personal capacity which I think is a good thing for several reasons.  The main one is that he is not defining himself by what he does.   One reason I have been reluctant to return to that sort of thing is the great temptation to see ‘councillor’ as something you are rather than something you do, often alongside a day job that occupies far more of your time.

Hopi Sen may find he regrets ever endorsing Pete, who has the potential to be an even bigger political anorak and policy wonk than him.   Having got himself to the (admittedly self-proclaimed) position of being the Central Committee of the People’s Best Left Wing Blog through nobbling opponents left, centre-left and far-left, like a socialist Dick Dastardly, Hopi may find some stiff new competition in the Total Politics best political blog awards in 2012, if not in 2011.

Having said that…  no pressure Pete!

But only after the list is extended to eleven items and a new number one is inserted to cover “should of” vs “should have”.

In other words: nothing to see here. Move along!

Catch it while it still looks good – i.e. before he gets carried away with plug-ins and widgets like what I did.

It has evolved into a sphere of memes and ideas constantly shaped by the millions of Web users who write, read, and comment on blogs, many of whom followed links there, which were themselves spread virally.  In a sense, the blogosphere operates in a similar manner too open-source code, where a loose confederation of programmers timkers with software, adding to it and sharing contributions with anyone who is interested.

Blimey.  I must be using the wrong internet or something. Doesn’t sound much like skuds.co.uk!  Hang on though, it continues…

Of course, there are often stark intellectual inefficiencies, as well as a lot of hot-gas rhetoric, vitriol, inane discussions, score settling, and outright buffoonery.  Actually the blogosphere can be downright Hobbesian, with posts that are nasty, brutish and (often mercifully) short.

Ah.  That’s more like it.

Interesting book BTW.  Review to follow when I finish it.

It concerns one of our local councillors and his belief that he is being targetted by the Chinese government. The story starts by saying:

Eager blogger Duncan Crow was shocked when an article posted on his website appeared to infect his whole system.  And he even hinted that it could have been the work of the Chinese government.

Sounds like somebody has been a big fish in a small pond for a bit too long and has started to forget how small that pond is in the grand scheme of things.

On reading this I reached into Skuds’ toolbox and pulled out Occam’s Razor which suggested that the chances of the Chinese government finding one critical article about their relationship with Tibet out of the thousands that must exist, and then acting against it instead of the many that will be more influential, are a lot slimmer than the chances of one person, who would never claim to be any sort of expert, making a bit of a cock-up and screwing up his own site.

It is even less likely when you consider that, despite the story talking about “his system” and the Chinese “hacking into his computer”, Duncan’s blog is hosted by Blogspot and so is entirely based on Google’s servers.  To hack it you would need to hack Google and not a PC in Crawley.  Having said that, I suppose you could avoid hacking Google by getting into the PC to look for a stored password.

More hilarity ensues when Crow is quoted as saying ” this was too sophisticated to be the work of local political extremists who would be my usual suspects.”

But the punchline is at the end:

Fellow blogger Richard Symonds, who stood in the county council elections this year for Gossops Green and Ifield East, called Cllr Crow ‘paranoid’.

I think that when Richard Symonds starts calling you paranoid you should start worrying.

There are other possibilities.  I know a bit about Blogger, having been working on a Blogger-based site for a few months on behalf of Horsham Labour and I have seen posts on there that have screwed up the whole site until I fixed them.

The most common cause is pasting something from Word or some other source.  It may look like you are just pasting text but in fact you can pick up all sorts of junk from Word, including all sorts of spurious <div> and <span> tags.  In fact a well-placed, accidental </div> could make it look like the rest of the site has gone.

One way to fix this is to go into HTML mode and remove all the junk.  The sledgehammer approach is to delete the whole post.  To avoid this sort of thing,  if you paste anything do it in HTML mode.

I’m not saying that is what happened, but I’m guessing it was something like that.  If I’m going to rubbish one hypothesis it is only fiar to offer an alternative one that is more plausible.  The irony is that in all probability it was a local political extremist that caused all the problems after all – he just didn’t realise it.

The Observer, wisely, made no comment of their own about whether they believed any of this, but just stuck to reporting what was claimed.  The Crawley News, even more wisely, chose to refrain from printing anything at all.

In reality such comments are few and far between, with most of the site contents being devoted to rather more substantial matters like conflicts of interests and suggestions of poor financial management, which if they are true would be rather more of a reason to resign than being called a few names.

Now I think it is taken as read that I am not a fan of our local Tories and, with one or two exceptions, have a very low opinion of them, but I can’t see them standing down in a huff because somebody said bad things about them.  Unfortunately. They have more backbone than that – or stubborness or bloody-mindedness or arrogance or sheer front, depending on your point of view.  I don’t think they would even consider resigning if somebody published 100% true details of proveable malpractise, so why are the Somerton councillors so comparitively easy to topple?

There must be more to it than is in the news so far.  Might be worth adding Muck & Brass to the old RSS reader to find out.

I look forward to adding his feed to Google Reader if and when it happens.

Me & Tony Benn, Worthing, June 30th 2009

Today I went down to Worthing for ‘an evening with Tony Benn’.   This was a fundraiser for his grandaughter, Emily, who is the parliamentary candidate down there, and a very pleasant evening it was too.Tony Benn has always been a bit of a hero and inspiration to me.  The only time I ever saw him before was when he was speaking at a rally in Trafalgar Square in the 80s.   I can’t remember if it was a CND rally, or an anti-apaartheid rally, or something else, but I do remember that it was his birthday and the whole crowd (estimated to be in excess of 7 by the police at the time) sang happy birthday.

Back then Benn was held in great esteem by the sort of person who went on these marches but was public enemy number one in the tabloid papers.  In the years since then he seems to have acheived national treasure status.  Not sure when that happened, but surely he deserves it.  He spoke to us for a short time, leaving most of the evening free for questions from the floor.

It was a welcome change to have somebody from the Labour party speaking and to be able to sit there agreeing with everything they said!   There were some very thought-provoking comments on all sorts of topics, particularly on war and how much we should interfere with other nations’ affairs.

Emily Benn was also there.  I thought she was very impressive and so absolutely bloody young.  I am still finding it hard to adjust to parliamentary candidates who are literally young enough to be my children, but I can see why she was selected because she spoke well and sounded like a real politician. (But I won’t hold that against her)

I know that when she was selected there were suggestions that it was just because of the family name and Tony’s influence in the party.  Personally I think that if Tony Benn’s influence had anything to do with it then it was only the influence he will have had over Emily and her development rather than anything else and when she gets into parliament, as I am sure she will, it will be under her own steam.

East Worthing & Shoreham Labour Party put on a really good evening.  Tea, coffee and soft drinks laid on, and a plate of strawberries, raspberries, grapes and cherries on every table. Lots of party members and supporters from all over the county were there and made to feel extremely welcome.