Catching up on links.

Wandering through a few of my bookmarked sites following links. Sue provides a link to yet another personality test based on What book are you. She's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" apparently I'm "The Mists of Avalon" -

"You're obsessed with Camelot in all its forms, from Arthurian legend to the Kennedy administration. Your favorite movie from childhood was 'The Sword in the Stone'. But more than tales of wizardry and Cuban missiles, you've focused on women. You know that they truly hold all the power. You always wished you could meet Jackie Kennedy"

Hmm yeah sort of I suppose, especially the bit about women; bit US-centric though.


Naked Female Ape posts some more pictures include one I really like here


Tav at the WFA points out some interesting passages in the agenda regarding the forthcoming financial strategy meeting for the district. The meeting is being held tomorrow in Kidderminster at 6pm; given the time I leave work and the amount of traffic that'll be around I might be able to get there by 6:30pm though I doubt they'll be providing food and would frown if I turned up with a bag of chips.

The agenda is here and even provides a map to the meeting point now although I know the area and I still had difficulty reading it; most maps nowadays have the major roads coloured for a reason.

He also provides a link to The West Midlands Conservatives blog. The one post that caught my eye was the "Local Conservatives Spend Saturday Morning Tending Flower Beds and Collecting Litter". Now I've no problem with the message of not dropping litter and about caring for your environment, but um we pay for people to litter pick. So either they're not doing the job (and I know they are) or we're not hiring enough people to do it. I'm just saying that when you have/need both a professional and voluntary service to adequately perform a task then the fundamentals of what you're doing need to be examined.

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying we shouldn't pick up a bit of litter (if it's safe to do so) and put it in a bin just because someone else is being paid to do it, it's just that if you get to the point where you're organising litter picking trips then something needs to be looked at. If I were being cynical (who moi?) I'd think of it simply as a publicity stunt of the 'Hey look at me I'm doing community work' type. Depends really on if it was a one-off or if they're repeating the exercise next week etc.

Oh and as Tav points out it's not really a blog more an up-to-date newsletter as commenting has been turned off. Oh and just to prove the point they have a delightful article asking if you've seen Deirdre Alden's new blog without providing a link to it, but I suppose you could email her asking for it.


The President of the USA gave his State of the Union address (sadly yet to be spoofed by Whitehouse.org) and called for a 20% reduction in petrol use by 2017. Is this to do with emission reduction, about reserving supplies of a irreplaceable source that is simply being burnt, curbing the insatiable need of Americans for cheap fuel? Nope

"when we do that we will have cut our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East."

it's about not being dependant on anybody else. To be honest it's difficult to criticise negatively, he was elected (at least once) to deal with the problems of the citizens of his own country; that's his job. Sometimes I wish our own government took a similar line rather then enforcing whatever spews forth from the EU. Sure it's in our own best interests to get along with our immediate neighbours and the rest of the world and occasionally that might mean sacrificing short-term gains for long-term achievements, but at the heart of it our country must always be put first.

I was going to pop over to Comedy Central and catch the latest Daily Show and Colbert Report, but sadly Flash appears to be throwing a tantrum every so often and locking everything up, <sigh>never had a problem when it was Macromedia.