Personal

Life has lost all meaning! Okay, well, perhaps it's not that bad. But as just about everyone that has at some stage visited me knows, the local Chinese takeaway, Wing Lee, is the best Chinese ever. Ever.

But they have closed! Well, they are under new management, and are in the middle of re-furbishing the place, so that's the same thing, really. I mean, they will open again, but will it ever be the same? What to do? *sob*

Perfect timing! I was discussing Monkey with David and Kathryn at the exhibition on Sunday, and now he's back!

In the same day as The Times reports on a row over potential spin by the Home Office when reporting statistics (again), I notice this gem:

Although The Times survey is not representative, it is a significant attempt to gauge the views of a large number of Liberal Democrat members.

Right. Statistics is a science, you know. If it's not a representative survey, why bother mentioning it? If the survey proves nothing, why not simply write a straight forward opinion piece, about the authors' views about Mr. Huhne's chances of becoming the Liberal Democrats' front man, instead of trying to pretend there's some kind of factual basis for this opinion?

Sometimes I think that newspapers should be peer-reviewed. Maybe we can convince The Times to pay all of its staff to simply write all their articles in Wikinews, and then we can take it from there?

The headphones on my mp3 player have bought it. There's something loose around the point where the cable joins the plug. I've survived for a few days, by pulling on the cable hanging out from my bag whenever it sounds funny, but, of course, this has only made things worse, and now it's pretty much all over.

I've bought some new ones from eBay, but they haven't arrived yet. This means I am now transit music deficient. While I like TMBG, I'm not sure that I want to sing them in my head for the entire trip home. Unfortunately, someone put one of their songs in my head...

It completely slipped my mind last week, until I was talking with David on the weekend; Friday was my 2 year anniversary of coming to the UK. When did that happen?

So, I've been in a funk recently, and people have been annoying me. Especially when they email me, and I can't even come close to understanding what they want. It's hard not to send a very un-diplomatic response.

Fortunately, Rob at work sent me a handy little guide on how to ensure that your responses are always polite. Genius!

Just the other day I was commenting that the Home Secretary, Mr. Clarke, must be astoundingly stupid. Apparently, he needs a panel of experts to look at why the public don't believe the Home Office's crime statistics, despite the fact that it's blindingly obvious that the Home Office is doing everything it possibly can to "reduce" crime by playing with the numbers.

When you combine that with the fact that we learn today that the Home Office is completely incapable of keeping their accounts in order, you have to wonder how much time and money Mr. Clarke will be wasting with his panel, when the answer is staring him in the face. If only he'd open his eyes and look.