24 December 2009

Apparently Eurostar needs more advance warning for winter storms

How about nine days?
Seven inches of snow is likely in the Kansas City area, perhaps resulting in carolers singing of this White Christmas being a nightmare instead of a dream come true. This means, if my past two major winter storm comparisons are indeed a reliable indication, the Channel region should expect this maelstrom on or around 3 January 2010, if not sooner as a result of the nor'easter that froze Washington D.C. earlier this week.

Since Eurostar and other European transportation agencies somehow were caught off guard by last week's wintry mess (which has doused Iowa in blizzard-like conditions the week before), I thought I'd do my part and serve as a harbinger.

Christmas Messages

Tomorrow, after families across the UK finish their turkey dinners complete with Christmas puddings and mince pies (and where it would be a very bad idea to try and bite into a Christmas cracker), many of them will sit in front of the TV or radio and receive The Queen's annual Christmas Message, set for broadcast at 1500 GMT. (Many others will be hitting refresh on YouTube for the video to appear.) This year, Her Majesty will give praise to the Armed Forces, who have taken considerably heavier losses in 2009. This year's broadcast was produced by ITN, who alternate with the BBC.

Meanwhile Channel 4, a year after choosing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for their alternate broadcast (and giving him prime time billing as opposed to running it against The Queen), has selected Katie Piper, a 26-year-old who survived an acid assault engineered by her ex-boyfriend Daniel Lynch. Piper's story, whose dreams to become a television presenter was derailed by the assault, leaving her blind in one eye and requiring at least 30 surgeries to restore her facial skin, was documented by Channel 4 last October to high acclaim. Her five-minute message, aimed to provide hope and optimism, will air at the same time.

Fortunately, for homes with digital TV, they won't have to choose between the two. As Channel 4 has a time-shifted channel, digital TV viewers can view the alternate message at 4 p.m.

21 December 2009

Another American export to arrive in Brtiain

In the past five year, the US has exported to the UK in droves restaurant brands, High School Musical, obnoxiously expensive school dances, baseball jargon, Premier League goalies, The Apprentice, yours truly, and now the crème de la crème: Prime Minister's Election Debates.

Long discussed but never agreed to until now, the three major Westminster parties have agreed to have their leaders participate in three 90-minute debates, set to take place on ITV, Sky News and BBC. Regional debates for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland will also take place. Three potential problems will crop up when these debates debut, perhaps as early as February.

First, nationalist parties (Scottish National Party and Wales' Plaid Cymru) are threatening to take all three networks to court and sue their way onto the nationwide debates. While they have the chance to make their case against the Labour, LibDem and Tory leaders from their respective devolved legislatures, they also argue that having nationwide debates doubles the publicity of the Westminster Three. This brings about another tangent to the West Lothian Question, which asks why Scottish MPs have an opportunity to weigh in on affairs in England when they and English MPs aren't able to weigh in on Scottish affairs. Why would voters in Kent or Cornwall care what Alex Salmond says about a domestic issue when the SNP or Plaid Cymru have no desire to run candidates in England? If either party want in the debates, then it would be to their advantage to campaign to put their leader in 10 Downing, rather than pursuing independence.

However, both parties can point to Canada for support, as Canadian broadcasters have had televised leaders' debates since the election of 1968. Their qualifications are that a party must have one MP in order for the party leader to appear. This ensures the place of le Bloc Québécois, the nationalist party who only runs candidates in Quebec, and thus a debate exclusively in French. Indeed the SNP & Plaid Cymru can potentially push for debates to occur in Scots Gaelic and Cymraeg, and potentially as many as 11 parties on a leaders' debate in the UK, including the Irish republican Sinn Féin party and one-member parties Independent Kidderminster Hospital & Health Concern and Respect - The Unity Coalition. Factoring in the European Parliament, UKIP and the BNP could both make claims to become part of the leadership debate, which by then might as well be turned into a game show called "Westminster Squares" or a farcical school cafeteria food fight. The fear of this, however, could bring about a worse response and put it down to two parties, shutting out the third that could easily become the figurative kingmaker in future elections.

Second, as it stands, each debate will be televised on only one network at a time. This leaves out Channel 4 and Five. Worse, should the election occur in May or June, ITV could pull a devious stunt and run "Britain's Got Talent" against the broadcast of the remaining two debates on Sky and BBC. For these debates to gain enough traction and be seen not as a ratings ploy but instead a worthy tool of informing voters, they should be operated by a multi-network commission and allowed to be broadcast on every network that wants to allot time for it.

Third, critics of the debates argue that placing the party leader on a nationwide televised debate puts more emphasis on the leader and party brand, detracting from the individual running in each constituency for his or her party. This criticism, however, can be levelled against any function involving the role of a party leader—Prime Minister's Questions, Question Time, election party broadcasts, the party manifesto—and is mostly a reaction to the evolution of the role of Prime Minister the past 200 years, and by extension party leaders. The debates, however, would harden the role of the Prime Minister as an executive, whereas the position remains in the legislative branch with powers delegated by the monarchical executive. By debates being televised to millions, several of whom won't bother to read the manifestos or even push the Red Button to review the party broadcasts, individual candidates could find themselves in a more narrow definition of their party, and deviating from that image could cost both them and their party.

While this is a major step forward in bringing election processes to the masses of today, the potential changes it may make to how elections play out could be few and minimal or quite drastic.

Now THIS should have been #1 in the UK this week!

Forget X Factor and Rage Against The Machine. The BBC has posted a message from a group of sewer workers from Thames Water.

Most enlightening and hilarious. I wonder if people will follow their lyrical subterranean advice.

17 December 2009

So 103 years of tradition is bunk?

With the eleven universities in the Big Ten Conference likely to agree to a plan to add one or three more members in the near future, speculation in the media is turning widely to the prospect of Mizzou defecting from the Big 12. If such discussions transpire to where Mizzou does make the move to a Big Ten+2, they will leave behind a conference whose predecessor the Big Eight (formerly Big Seven, Big Six, and Missouri Valley) they helped form in 1907, along with Kansas, Nebraska, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Now while the Big Ten has a plenty of tradition as America's oldest collegiate athletic conference and serious academic acumen, Mizzou would be getting all this for the sake of milking more out of the St. Louis market:
  • No guaranteed Border Showdown with KU. The MU-KU rivalry has its roots in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War and was one of the many spawns of a great American university tradition, Homecoming. In its place would be Mizzou's only current rivalry with a Big Ten school, Illinois, whose roots is exclusively in the fact that the biggest city on the Missouri-Illinois border is St. Louis. In football, this game is already set to expire after next season. Aside from this, Mizzou has no significant rivalry with any other Big Ten school, except Northwestern in the contest for best journalism school.
  • Longer travel times. Instead of being the easternmost member of the Big 12 Conference, Mizzou would become the southernmost and westernmost of a larger Big Ten. Also, its longest trip won't be a 695-mile sojourn to Boulder to take on a so-so Buffalo squad, but an 800-mile odyssey to challenge Joe Paterno's vaunted Penn State Nittany Lions.
  • One heck of a tougher schedule just to get into a BCS bowl. Instead of playing perennial powerhouses Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas, Mizzou instead goes up against Iowa, Penn State, Ohio State and Wisconsin. While a Big Ten+2 western conference might result in Mizzou often rising to the top for a new championship game, winning that championship game would have Mizzou going to Pasadena with a likelihood of getting speared by USC in the Rose Bowl.
But of course, this isn't happening tomorrow, and that's only from the football perspective. When factoring in all sports, the Big Ten offer more (12 men's, 13 women's) than the Big 12 (10 men's, 11 women's). In men's basketball, Mizzou would have to put up quite a fight against Tom Izzo's Spartans of Michigan State and typically tough teams at Wisconsin and Ohio State, of which only Wisconsin would be in a western division.

Unfortunate for Missouri tourism revenue, especially Kansas City, leaving the Big 12 for a Big Ten+2 would cause the state to lose its pivot point in attracting conference tournaments (because why would KU host such tournaments in Missouri?) and instead become a fringe area. Chicago's central location would be reinforced, with St. Louis likely to be seen as a bone thrown to the west when Minneapolis/St. Paul and Milwaukee won't do. It would be imperative for Mizzou officials, and by extension state lawmakers, to consider this when making statements regarding the prospect of Mizzou jumping conferences.

But this is all speculation. For starters, the Big Ten have to agree whether or not to seek a 12th school, or go further and expand to 14 or even 16. And then there are other schools they are destined to consider, likely Big East schools like Syracuse, Rutgers and Pittsburgh. And they just could find a way for Notre Dame to shrug off its staunch independent mentality and embrace a place in a historic conference (then again, I've been dreaming of a Notre Dame-Mizzou game for years now.)

Raging against the same machine…

Author's note: this was reported today by the Daily Star, the lowbrow sister of the Daily Express. All the guy probably did was what I did once I read the story: find the names on the same list on Wikipedia.

When it comes to the UK music charts, the most coveted prize of the year is to have the most popular song at Christmas. As described by the BBC in 2001, winning the honour conveys the ultimate sign of name recognition in the UK, guaranteeing a spot on talk shows and Top of the Pops programmes. Schemes to obtain the top spot, attempted as early as 1973, were lampooned in the comedy film Love Actually with a parody of The Troggs' "Love is All Around".

Since 2005, the Christmas Number One spot has been dominated by winners of The X Factor, Britain's counterpart to American Idol. As the final episode airs two weeks before Christmas, demand for the new release of the show's winner ultimately spikes. And while Leona Lewis has made waves on US charts, I'd be surprised if anyone back home has heard of Shayne Ward, Leon Jackson or Alexandra Burke. And now there's another representative of the music "establishment": Joe McElderry, an 18-year-old from the Tyneside town of South Shields and winner of this year's hotly contested X Factor. His single "The Climb" (which is a cover of Miley Cyrus) was produced by SyCo, Simon Cowell's recording label, which is part of the Sony Music conglomerate.

However, those tired of the bubble-gum, sugar-coated covers that are churned out by Simon Cowell are rallying on Facebook to get a different song at the top. Enter Rage Against The Machine and their 1992 debut single, "Killing In The Name", complete with 17 mentions of one obscene word. The band, along with several UK radio personalities and the first winner of X Factor, are expressing support for the endeavour, which has been made easier this year by purchased downloads now counting in the charts. Earlier today, a partially edited version of song aired at the end of an interview with the band on BBC Five Live (and by partially, I mean a refrain featuring said obscene word aired four times before being yanked from the air.) Also today, the online music magazine Gigwise claims RATM is surpassing McElderry by 65,000 downloads.

"Killing In The Name" was released by Epic, also a subsidiary of Sony Music.

Even if Cowell is going to blow a gasket being unseated by anarchists, someone in a hi-rise on New York's Columbus Circle is still revelling in turning anarchists into a different breed of sheep. All the while, the real X Factor (where Christians are concerned) isn't factoring on the charts. The last Christmas song to reach #1 during Christmas was a 2004 remake of the 1985 Band Aid hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

If I had to choose one song to download this week, it's going to be this one. It just happens to be another Sony artist.

15 December 2009

Ninety-eight turns out to be too great

Last week I became aware of a wonderfully devised infographic by The New York Times showing the increasing number of food stamps recipients across the US. The Times found that over the past two years, program participation has ballooned to now encompass almost one in eight Americans, and twice as many children.

Missouri was highlighted in the related article as having signed up 98 percent of eligible Missourians, and having five counties (Pemiscot, Dunklin, Ripley, Mississippi and New Madrid) among the 25 counties in the U.S. with highest participation. An additional 16 counties in Missouri, ranging from St. Louis City to McDonald County, have half their children receiving food stamps.

Now, it turns out the high participation numbers reported to the US Department of Agriculture wasn't entirely because of a successful push to get qualified families on the dole, but instead a computer glitch that has kept figures inflated since September 2002. The most common miscalculation came when a qualified resident would leave a household but not be deducted from the count.

A recalculation is underway, which could bring Missouri's count down by as much as one-fourth. The big hit, however, could come from Missouri repaying $4.4 million in bonus benefits granted to the state for its high participation rates.

09 December 2009

Onward Christian Hoteliers

Report from the BBC just over an hour ago

A Christian couple from Liverpool have been cleared of charges that they insulted a Muslim guest at their bed & breakfast because she was wearing a hijab.

The hoteliers, Benjamin and Sharon Vogelenzang, faced a judge in a Liverpool Magistrates Court this week following accusations made by Ericka Tazi, who spent much of March 2009 at the B&B to attend classes at a nearby hospital. Tazi, a 60-year-old who converted to Islam 18 months ago, accused the Christian-devout Vogelenzangs of calling her a terrorist and insulting her choice of religion by comparing the Prophet Muhammad to several infamous dictators. The couple, while admitting that they did weren't fond of Tazi's apparel selection, seeing it as a form of bondage, they say the discussion wasn't as heated as Tazi claims.

Judge Richard Clancy, who was hearing the case, ruled following two days of testimony that the evidence was inconsistent to the charges presented and threw the case out. While the Vogelenzangs were quick to offer praise to God and their supporters for holding prayer vigils, business to their B&B has dropped by 80 percent.

Indeed a case of "she said, she said" heightened by the differing, entrenched views of two Abrahamic religions. Hopefully, both parties in the case will during this festive season find cause to, while extolling their beliefs, gain a degree of tolerance for others. If anyone is destined or inclined to convert, he or she will do so best when he or she is the one seeking out for spiritual guidance.

08 December 2009

Marceline trumped by wicked roundabout

Walt Disney World recently completed a contest to find its first twin community. Evidently they didn't want to look toward Linn County and Disney's boyhood town of Marceline, but rather in the UK. Now twinned with the Magic Kingdom and potential site of Disney's utopian EPCOT: the magic roundabout and still-depressed town centre of Swindon in eastern Wiltshire.

Swindon's entry, submitted by a 20-year-old bank employee, beat out 24 other entries to win the honour from the Florida resort. She, along with her nephew and niece, will travel to Florida to unveil the plaque declaring the twinned status between the 28,000-acre complex and Swindon. So what drew the Mouse to Wiltshire?

In addition to the complex-yet-safer Magic Roundabout (drivers-eye view from the Swindon Advertiser) it appears as though the Seven Dwarfs would like to work for the many industries situated in Swindon, including the hub of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Main Line from London to Bristol and car factories for Renault and Honda. Meanwhile, anyone from the Mickey Mouse Club who wants to become a Hare Krishna would feel right at home in the UK's largest concentration of practitioners. And being on the M4 between London and Wales, Lightning McQueen can use the fabled roundabouts to mount a challenge to Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton when the British Grand Prix returns to Silverstone, roughly a 90-minute drive northeast to the edge of Northamptonshire.

Here's to hoping that MoDOT, just days after their divergent diamond won praise from Popular Science magazine in their Best of What's New year-in-review, doesn't find reason to put in a magic roundabout of their own in Linn County, or suggest Florida do the same outside Downtown Disney. I sense such a roundabout would confuse the heck out of drivers guiding buses to the next Bell Game.

04 December 2009

The Windmills of Scotland

The Scottish National Party might want to consider adopting a new patron saint: Don Quixote.

Of course, the Catholic Church (and any mainstream religious operation, for that matter) wouldn't allow the canonisation of a fictional character. But on the day dedicated to the patron saint of Scotland, this past Monday, the SNP made known yet again their desire to tilt the windmills of the 300-year-old Acts of Union. This time, the SNP-led minority Scottish Government released their long-awaited white paper which spells out their plans to pursue a referendum next year asking voters on whether they want to commit Scotland to independence from the United Kingdom.

This report, which would have reached 200 pages with just a few more pictures of SNP leaders in front of saltires, details their findings from two years of meetings and forums. It also comes just days after the SNP were soundly defeated in the Glasgow North East by-election by a rebounding Labour. But the report could be summed up in one vague, idealistic paragraph:

"We want independence for Scotland. We want to run our own things. We already run some things, but we want to run everything. But we don't mind keeping your NHS doctors, your passports, your Queen (she descended from our Stuarts, after all) and even your Pounds. After all, we're part of one big European family that'll listen to us, embrace us as a new member, and bail us out if this doesn't work, right? Right?"

Throughout the paper, the Scottish government's position makes clear their desire to achieve independence, explaining where they are currently inhibited under the current devolution scheme and where independence from the UK would increase Scotland's international representation and potentially its economic growth. Their conclusions and goals for independence, however, showed their only assurances as Scotland taking full responsibility for their affairs, while not sufficiently indicating how becoming a more vocal voice in bodies such as the European Union or United Nations would benefit Scotland. Even when it comes to the referendum they want to have next year, they even suggest that such a question posited to the voter have more than one option, as opposed to the typical yes-no ballot question that would be seen as binding.

It would be delusional for Alex Salmond's cavalry of Rocinates to assume that they can somehow supplant the remnants of the UK on the UN Security Council, let alone push for a reform of the 15-member body. Or for an independent Scotland to be the one voice that suddenly convinces stubborn Czechs, Aussies and Arkansans to combat climate change. Or for an independent Scotland to be taken seriously as a partner in the fight against global terrorism, when the lone man convicted of bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 spent just two weeks in prison for each victim of the bombing.

It's not helping our Gaelic Quixotes either that two of the windmills they must charge at are the two banks chartered in Edinburgh – the Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of Scotland. Both banks are now owned by holding companies (RBS Group and Lloyds, respectively) which are owned partly by British taxpayers (again respectively, 58% and 43%). Would an independent Scotland be capable of propping up these two banks? All the while, will the muscle an independent Scotland suddenly gain in Brussels ensure that the big banks "come back into the real world"?

If failing to keep Labour from regaining Glasgow North East doesn't indicate to the SNP that they're losing touch with the future citizens of their independent Scotland, then the fate of their candidates in the next general election will determine that. At their most recent annual conference, the SNP boldly declared that they would become the kingmakers come June, claiming 20 seats at Westminster and determining who in a hung parliament would become Prime Minister. Elections to the Scottish Parliament follow in 2011.

These lofty goals are about to smack head-first into the two-metre long blades turning the mill on the barley for future bottles of whisky. Lofty ambitions with vague means to achieve the end is bound to cause heart-wrenching setbacks.