Thanks to Jean Giraud aka Moebius

Actually I'd really this one back, cos if we don't sort it out real soon, we're gonna need another one pretty damn quick

keep to the Fen Causeway

Bah, I'll decide on another planet at 6.30 tonight once the FSU-UF game is over.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

for the last two days I've been working at a beer festival and I think I've just about had it. My feet and knees are still killing me now from last night.

Yet I know they're really short of staff for tonight. and it's raining and I've a long walk to the station.

I don't wanna go, but I feel I'd be letting them down if I didn't.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

CEPR: That Shortage of Skilled Manufacturing Workers is Really a Shortage of Employers Willing to Pay the Market Wage (24 November 2012)

News stories have been filled with reports of managers of manufacturing companies insisting that they have jobs open that they can't fill because there are no qualified workers. Adam Davidson at the NYT looked at this more closely and found that the real problem is that the managers don't seem to be interested in paying for the high level of skills that they claim they need.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Politics USA: Studies Reveal that Conservatism is Promoted When People Rely on `Low-Effort' Thinking (November 21st, 2012)

Good news for conservatives as a compilation of four recent social psychology studies demonstrate that rather than necessarily being pathological, political conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking.

In the four studies conducted by Scott Eidelman, Christian S. Crandall, Jeffrey A. Goodman, and John C. Blanchar published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, they concluded, "(P)olitical conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking. When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology... low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement."

Ever wonder why conservatives can't seem to understand that people are not always to blame for the circumstances they find themselves in? While personal responsibility sounds like it makes perfect sense initially, when you walk people through the various life circumstances that can render people temporarily dependent upon government help, it becomes clear that things are not so simple. These studies demonstrate the impact of correctional/effortful explanations on political ideology, "This analysis also suggests that some forms of political ideology may result from intentional and effortful correction. For example, Wänke and Wyer (1996) found that liberals scored higher than conservatives on the Attributional Complexity Scale (Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, & Reeder, 1986), an indicator that the former generate more complex and detailed (if not more effortful) explanations for the behavior of others."

Or: knee-jerk thinking makes you a jerk.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Everything was going swimmingly tonight with the Singing D performing at Savoy theatre with 23 piece UMO jazz orchestra. She was doing her own song Hyperventilating with a big band arrangement and it was great. I had decided to shoot from the wings and also had an HD spy cam on a short mic stand on stage.

Crowd goes wild. I'm feeling rather happy as I get back to the dressing rooms after they did 3 encores - until the stage crew informs that they were unable to record sound due to last minute technical problems. So - great picture, no sound. Very useful.

Then to dinner at the new Katsomo snobbateria next to the theatre with members of a genetically entangled mixture of Finnish industrial families representing possibly billions of wealth. Some of them are quite eccentric and rather nice. I normally sit with the black sheep branch of the Ex. The daughters of course remain fully fledged members of the black sheep branch. I no longer carry Teamster papers, but I obviously did a fair job of British charm when I was unionized, because I was kissed a great deal by people of the matriarchical persuasion, cascading in jewellery and good causes.

I was told, when I joined the family 25 years ago, not entirely in jest, that mongrel genes were needed to freshen up the dynastic bloodline. But I've told you this before.

What I really wanted to discuss is the interior of said restaurant. It was absolutely ghastly. Hanna, the theatrical wonderlady and wife of one of my ex-bros-in-law, and I identified 32 different styles of decoration that went far beyond the mix and match cultural hypocrisy of Santa Fe, or even Tracey Emin's version of Buckingham Palace as planned, elevated and sectioned by Gilbert and George.

I mean - go to the link, click on photo gallery and feel gravity molesting your jaw. And they've chickened out of showing the vast fake gold-framed  canvases of Rubenesque ladies showing their bums - I should rococo. Nor do they illustrate the fact that this chubby pink arse motif has been transferred - at some considerable cost, I imagine - to the carpet of the loge section.

I probably forgot to mention that The Circus also owns the theatre and the snobbateria. They don't do cheap. This dog's breakfast design is a monstrosity and the work of a charlatan, or possibly a committee of charlatans. The space is great, the service is courteous and pro but relaxed, the food was passable - especially when you're not paying for it - but....this is the worst interior I've ever been in in pursuit of pleasure.

Good, that's got that out of my system. Now I can sleep justly.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Guardian - Growing food in the desert: is this the solution to the world's food crisis?

The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that a group of young brains from Europe, Asia and north America, led by a 33-year-old German former Goldman Sachs banker but inspired by a London theatre lighting engineer of 62, have bought a sizeable lump of this unpromising outback territory and built on it an experimental greenhouse which holds the seemingly realistic promise of solving the world's food problems.

Indeed, the work that Sundrop Farms, as they call themselves, are doing in South Australia, and just starting up in Qatar, is beyond the experimental stage. They appear to have pulled off the ultimate something-from-nothing agricultural feat - using the sun to desalinate seawater for irrigation and to heat and cool greenhouses as required, and thence cheaply grow high-quality, pesticide-free vegetables year-round in commercial quantities.

keep to the Fen Causeway

One of the many charms of Mexico is the music. Took a quick mental trip there this Sunday to pick up some memories, and brought this back to share:

about this...

I realize the applepieness is crucial to reaching a certain very wide audience by appealing to their patriotism and owning of rightness, but at the same time these are the very values that caused the problem in the first place.

I find it increasingly hard to be convinced by anything coming out of the States, from any persuasive lobby. In our local supermarkets there are short shelf sections that contain imported US products. Almost all of them offer processed fantasy foods of dubious nutritional value. It's life in a pack, just add life.

This does not mean that all US food is like that - it means that for Finnish shoppers, the perception of US food is like that.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I think these are meant to stop flooding, but I don't see how they are supposed to work

Venice seems to have found a way to keep this nonsense under control

Some lawbreakers

One side-effect of the ban on pigeons has been that either the seagulls have come back, or become more noticeable, and seagulls are pretty good at making clear to the pigeons that the food is for them. The problem is that pigeons generally waddle on to the next feeding place, while seagulls fly. And they come in fast, only just missing the tourists (or so it seems to me)

Oops. Confetti at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Was Made of Still-Readable Confidential Police Docs

This year's Thanksgiving parade was kind of a heartbreaker after a a Yonkers man died while clowning. But things may be getting a little bit worse.

The magical specks of color that float down the city streets are normally just a mishmash of multicolored confetti, but this year, shredded confidential documents from the Nassau Police Department were also in the air.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

So my nearsightedness and astigmatism are getting better, my presbyopia is non-existent, but I have no discernible physical problems that may be causing this.

My physicians are stumped.

Twitter / IanDonovanVP: .@RepPaulRyan changed his name ...

.@RepPaulRyan changed his name back AND HE UNFOLLOWED @MITTROMNEY

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.