Why the legislative session in Utah is so short

Only a few weeks to go before the legislative session ends.  What the??  It only started a few weeks ago.  What do these people do for the rest of the year - are we paying them for this.  These are all questions I was asking  my television last night in a rather loud voice (I wasn't shouting but well ok I was shouting)  And to cap it all the important stuff, the state budget, immigration (Utah needs a guest worker's program imho) hasn't been finalised yet.  Here are some of the frou frou bills that have passed into law.  We have a state gun (HB # who the hell cares it was one of Carl Wimmer's the man who wants the U to allow open carry on campus)  Landowners in rural Utah can now kill feral cats (that one died in committee - thank goodness), new rules on blood collection and procurement (for the vampires amongst you), new boating regulations, wolves have been delisted as an endangered species etc etc.  Sure every representative thinks their bill is important but in the grand scheme of things is it.  Is it really?

And then there is HB477 - this means we the public can't request our (or any) representative's electronic communications.  So transparency in Utah government just took a turn for the opaque.  The cheek of those so-called representatives one of them appeared on TV last night - fat - well-dressed - smug - republican - to express surprise that his constituents should be able to know every aspect of his life on the hill (not his private life)  Um Duh!!   He said that those who believe this bill  is a bad thing are the people who believe in the black helicopters.  If you hide your communications then hello bribes, back handers, back scratching - all the things that give politicians a bad name. 

http://le.utah.gov/asp/passedbills/passedbills.asp

Thankfully after a massive public outcry HB477 has been repealed.

Why do sick people think we all want what they've got

When it comes to illness I'm downright selfish, this cold/flu/thing that's going around the Salt Lake valley right now is mine, I hold the exclusive rights and no one else shall have it.  I stay in bed and take my medicine and come out the other end refreshed, recharged and back to my old self.  Other members of the public are more generous, they haul themselves around, sneezing, wheezing, coughing, and infecting the rest of us.  I'm pretty lucky, I don't tend to catch much and I have a battery of defences including vitamin D, and home made ginger tea.but what I don't have is the authority to send a complete stranger home.

Picture the scene a quiet Sunday morning, in a coffee house.  Half the booths are full and then this guy comes in and from the moment he sits down he starts to sneeze and not dust up my nose sneezes either.  These are full-on my lungs are going to come out of my nose shortly sneezes.  I've seen Mythbusters - I know how far and how fast a sneeze and its associated lurgy can travel.  Apparently so did the rest of the room,  the people sitting next to him moved as far up the room as possible.  It's one thing when you don't know you're carrying anything - like the woman who arrived in New Mexico last week and was promptly diagnosed with measels.  But when you can hardly stand the only place you should be heading is to the doctors - wearing a face mask.

Have I indentified a new species?

This post is slightly tongue in cheek and while my exposure to this species is rare once back in Control Section in the 90's

It's been rumoured for some time that there lurks among us a new breed of human.  Predominently male - they have a wide range of habitat but their behaviours are similar and easy to recognize once you've established their genus.

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you - the teflon.

The teflon is always very well dressed and if you are up wind of him you can scent the powerful aroma of deadwood.

Teflons are powered by copious amounts of alcohol and junk food.

The teflon feigns intelligence,

The teflon hunts those alongside and below him, he will sacrifice them to the people above him,

The teflon gives destructive criticisim never praise.

Teflons have a hero complex they break things so they can rush in and save the day.  Teflons also have the reverse midas touch so someone else will have to clean up the mess they have created.

You can injure a teflon but it only takes three months for them to heal.

The teflon has a chocolate coloured nose.

And as his name suggests he can deflect blame from himself onto hard working co-workers.

Teflons destroy morale.

If you discover a teflon, do not approach them, teflons hate to be ignored.  Ignore a teflon today you'll be glad you did.

No Valentine left behind

Valentines Day, after Christmas the most shameless example of consumerism.  Did you know that Saint Valentine was an early Christian martyr (and there was more than one Saint Valentine)  so hearts and flowers and martyrs (people executed for their faith) do have something in common, red .

I see nothing wrong in a day that celebrates love but when did it lose it's exclusivity?

Valentine's Day is for lovers, you get that card from a secret admirer and spend the rest of the day trying to work out if it came from Dan in accounting or the really cute guy who delivers your mail or a n other.  You give your husband/wife a card because you are still in love with them and there might be roses or dinner for two in the mix. 

So I'm looking for a card for hubby and guess what? there are Valentines that sing at you, Valentines from your kids, or the dog or the cat, every kind of sweet that can be moulded into the shape of a  heart. Packs of 20 valentines!  Please, anyone with that many boy/girlfriends would be labelled promiscuous and it kind of takes the edge off that 'special someone'.  Then we come to the gifts, you can buy anything from a bunch of roses, to a diamond necklace, to a car, to - my personal favourite - a sofa.  That's like giving a woman power tools, you'll be the one who gets drilled and not in a good way.

So by all means celebrate Valentine's day but do it thoughtfully and responsibly, you're showing the one you love how much they mean to you.  You don't have to go into debt to do it.

Why is my country up for sale?

When oil and gas where discovered in the 1960’s in the North Sea while politicians paid lip service to the idea of using UK reserves to bolster our energy policy that rapidly went out of the window.  Unlike the Norwegians whose government kept a tight rein on their reserves and has profited massively as a result the UK has gone from being a net exporter of crude oil to a net importer.  Our oil and gas leases are being sold off by the BP’s and Shell’s to smaller companies hardly any of them British.

One of the downsides of becoming Europeans is that other countries can come in and buy up the infrastructure of their neighbours, effectively owning them.

Spain's Ferrovial has bought airports operator BAA, and German rail group Deutsche Bahn bought the train and bus company Arriva. The npower company has been snapped up by another German group, RWE, and ports company P&O was bought by Dubai's DP World.
France's EDF energy group has been involved in electricity generation in Britain for many years, along with the sale of gas and electricity to households and businesses.
The OFT states: 'From our own data, we found that approximately 38% of infrastructure is held by foreign investors.
Boots the Chemist now owned by Alliance (GmBH articled in Switzerland), their website says they are “international”
Rolls Royce, they kept the name but the marque like the iconic Mini is owned by BMW.
The Spanish, US, Australians are swooping on our banks, the ones we the taxpayer don’t own that is.
Kraft have bought Cadbury and are asset stripping it to death and killing the taste of the chocolate I grew up with by moving the production to Poland.  The icing on the cake, this week Deutsche Post are the main contender to buy our privatized Royal Mail so no more queens head on the UK’s stamps.
For a start a country’s infrastructure shouldn’t be for sale.  In an ideal world everyone gets a fair share, but what happens when the gas supplies run low and the French company decides their citizens get what’s left.  Or the Germans cut our power because they can.  England, which am I ashamed to say has been brought to a grinding halt by snow that the average Utahn would consider ‘light’ is never going to be part of Great Britain if it doesn’t start rediscovering some backbone and telling foreign investors where they can stick their money.  I’m not suggesting they nationalize everything it’s been tried and it was a complete disaster.  I think we can save ourselves if we put our minds to it and our cupboard of British owned companies is pretty nearly bare.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/United_Kingdom/NaturalGas.html

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=519416&in_page_id=2#ixzz18bgMDlJt

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340093/The-Queens-head-set-saved-stamps-revealed-foreign-firm-remove-image.html

The True Meaning of Diplomacy

Diplomat – look it up.  In the dictionary the meaning is pretty clear.  A Diplomat is an ambassador, an envoy for his or her country in a foreign land.  As a Diplomat one is required to be diplomatic ie tactful, respectful of the customs of the land you are being a Diplomat in while representing the best about your country and dealing with any situations that arise with Diplomacy – I think  you can see where this is going.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few days you can’t fail to have read about the new WikiLeaks info dump either from the site itself or in the various press reports.  Depending on your point of view it either matters or doesn’t matter who said what to whom, who called who a light weight, who ordered US diplomats to spy on their UN counterparts, who the US government considered unstable ( newsflash – he was)

The fact is that those comments are a matter of record and as such should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act but as they are covered by a cloak of diplomatic secrecy some parties would have you believe that the world will end if they see the light of day.

So here’s what I want to know.  Why did the diplomats and government officials in question write or say those things? There are other ways of expressing your opinion of the French PM or Chancellor Merkel or Blair or the current situations in certain countries that don’t cause sharp intakes of breath or strained relations with the countries involved.  More diplomatic ways, shall we say.

Of course one answer is that they never expected their comments to see the light of day.  Another is that they hold the rest of the world in such contempt that they don’t care.  If lessons are learned from this then WikiLeaks will still publish the same kind of information but it won’t be controversial or interesting.

Did this article raise your hackles do you want to discuss it further?  You know where you can reach me. 

The Remake - why???

When I lived in England we were just entering the satellite channel boom and you could count the terrestrial channels on the fingers of one hand.  Our TV diet consisted of a couple of reality shows – the very first Big Brother was appointment TV – it’s been flogged to death since and was recently taken out and shot after 10 years.  Sitcoms, some serious science programming by men in radiation shield glasses and comb-overs on BBC 2, period dramas and sprinkled into the mix those glossy shows from the US. 

We didn’t mess with perfection, the channels bought shows from abroad and we watched them. The few times we did try and remake shows they were misfires. The woeful Days Like These, the UK version of That Seventies Show sank without a trace, despite being copied word for word – the humour didn’t travel well.  Among others that didn’t work Green Wing the UK version of Scrubs.  We bought plenty of concepts, This is Your Life, Family Fortunes, The Apprentice, Blockbusters (my favourite quiz show) and most recently Deal or No Deal.  Concepts are fair game, you can’t import the host and the slick production values, so you have enough latitude to tailor the program to the audience who are going to watch it.  I prefer the family atmosphere of the UK DOND to the slick sanitized, bimboed up US version.

But going the other way it seems the US TV industry continues to not get British TV shows.  While there are occasional bright spots, the US version of the The Office is actually funny (I hated the UK version).  I think the point I’m trying to make is that we Brits like to watch foreign TV shows because it shows us a world we’d have to hop on a plane to see - from our living rooms.  Brit shows are usually gritty, their humour is blacker their characters darker.  To remake shows like Life on Mars or Being Human or Red Dwarf, Viva Blackpool (Viva Loughlin – one episode CBS), Coupling, Men Behaving Badly and whatever the next remake is that’s coming down the pipe is an insult to the showrunners, actors and most of all to the viewers who ‘won’t get it.’

The reason for this post is that SyFy are remaking Being Human, it’s a huge hit in the UK and did well when it was shown over here on BBC America.  The teaser trailer they had for it went something like this, ‘a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf share a flat in Bristol’ of course Bristol will be swopped for New York or LA and the actors will all be so pretty (in the UK version the werewolf wore glasses, the ghost was obsessive about making tea and the vamp was on the wagon but they blended the horror with the sad/funny bits) and of course just to spice things up a bit the vampire will have a human girlfriend.

US TV has some great shows, but it would be ground-breaking if they could show imported programming in its original form.