The blog of a student, Still Learning Economics and Politics, music, Formula 1, life, etcetera...

That is the music video director, not the economist.

According to The Guide, the video to the latest single from The Streets, Blinded By The Lights (which I think is great) has been banned, seemingly in case it encourages people to take drugs.

I thought it was quite an anti-drugs video myself. Mike Skinner regrets taking that second one, until he's fucked and he doesn't care - at which point he gets beaten up. I mean, it sure convinced me to take drugs!

This one is the best yet, and many thanks to Daniel Brett for pointing it out!

The OkCupid! Politics Test tells me:

You are a

Social Liberal
(78% permissive)


and an...

Economic Liberal
(30% permissive) [I don't think it means liberal in the libertarian sense, then]


You are best described as a:

Strong Democrat


You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

The chart here is a bit more complicated than any I've seen before, and it looks quite sound to me actually. And I can't tell whose face my little you are here symbol is covering. I think it's Bono.

There are some pretty extreme views at the bottom of this page here. I'm not sure if they're being 100% serious (but they probably are).

"Those who are judged ignorant and inconsiderate of others by their community may be moved to a ghetto where those who go through life in inconsiderate ways may live together."
—AHB from Belmont, MA

Natasha Bedingfield good; Green Day bad.

These Words is actually a very distinctive song, and I can't think of much else that sounds like it.

American Idiot is just yet another samey, lame pseudo-punk yawn-o-rama.

Mark Oaten isn't always my favourite Lib Dem, but his piece on 'tough liberalism' (as a soundbite, it sounds only marginally less stupid than 'compassionate conservatism') has some good points.

This week at our party conference I want to take that on. I believe it's possible to have a liberal policy on law and order and still be tough on crime. I've called it tough liberalism. It challenges the way the other parties do things. Their so-called tough measures are often soft options. Sending somebody to jail, issuing a fine, or declaring a no-go area gives short-term comfort, but doesn't force the offender to change .

We have to try harder. Anti-social behaviour orders have a role to play, but the government wrongly believes they are a panacea. An Asbo excludes troublemakers instead of finding a solution that turns the troublemaker into a useful member of society.

Via www.perfect.co.uk.

Underblog highlights the total weirdness of the crane fly. Weirdness. God was clearly having a bad day, of course.

I'm just wondering how such an inadequate insect evolved the way it did. I mean, those ridiculously long yet ridiculously thin legs must be there for some reason. (As an example of their fragility, the picture of the crane fly used on the Wikipedia article is missing a leg.) If they all died by landing on light bulbs, how come there are always more, just ready to land on more light bulbs?

There must be a reason.

Via Bloggerheads, a great post on the issue of terrorism.

In Britain we know terrorism, as they do in Spain. For Americans, with their limited experience of living with the constant threat of attack, to lecture Brits or Spaniards (as happened after the Madrid bombs) on the correct response is somewhat rich.

Olympicsballs.

Got this one via Normblog. I've done it before, but it was a couple of years ago, and I think the results are now quite different.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Low
Avoidant:	High
Dependent:	Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

So it's official. Jaguar have gone. What would be interesting is if, as F1 Racing reported, it is merely a name-change to Ford or if it is actually gone gone.

If it's gone gone, there are some massive implications. Not only does it shake up the 'silly season' (leaving David Coulthard in a very bad position, unless he can scrounge a seat off BAR (note Coulthard's tendancy this season to toddle along to the ITV F1 studio to do a spot of analysis)), but, if my knowledge of the Concorde Agreement is correct, two top teams will have to run three cars next season. Ow.

Via Complete Tosh, Steve Bell is on good form today!

Unfortunately, all my screws are rusting and hanging out.

Good for him.

As GrandPrix.com notes, it is quite a feat to sign a contract with two different teams on the same day!

This morning I guess I was in favour of the hunting ban, but I didn't really care. Like most people, I think this is just a diversion from the more important issues. Like most people, I am also bored sick of endless debates about it, and I switched off the Victoria Derbyshire programme when I discovered that today's phone-in was on hunting.

Of course, today's events have been anything but boring. I was quite surprised when I saw Julie Etchingham doing an outside broadcast from the demonstration on Sky News in the morning. I was also quite surprised when I switched the news channels this afternoon to see that the BBC, ITV and Sky were all providing continuous coverage of the demonstration. Then I discovered that the protest had turned a bit violent.

Some of the people there looked like quite nasty pieces of work. I am certain not all of them are, of course; it seems to me that a bunch of thugs turned up specifically looking for a fight (proving, by the way, that real anti-social behaviour isn't the preserve of 'neds' and 'chavs').

Once again, the events of today have turned me quite against the pro-hunt mob. Like Fathers 4 Justice, the people who play silly stunts like breaking into the House of Commons and running onto the floor of the chamber are doing their cause no favours whatsoever. The only thing they achieve is martyrdom within their own little clique, but they are known by the vast majority of the country as those idiots who delayed the real democratic process from going ahead.

And the notion that these people are oppressed, with their banners proclaiming that they are the victims of prejudice, is clearly nonsense.

I heard one person on one of the news channels saying, "For a democratic institution to use the Parliament Act is just outrageous."
Remind me again which institution it was which has voted in favour of anti-hunting legislation more than once - the democratically elected one, or the unelected and unrepresentative one?

One of the protesters in the House of Commons said today, "This isn't democracy. You are overturning democracy."
But who are the ones who halted the democratic process this afternoon?

I've said this before. I would not like to have anything to do with somebody whose idea of fun was setting a pack of dogs on a fox. The woman boasting on the radio this afternoon about her having killed two foxes in the morning was quite sickening. But I don't think that the Government should be involved in this issue. On the one hand, you could make the analogy with cock fighting. But is fox hunting as bad as cock fighting? I really don't know, but I can't be bothered to work it out, which probably tells me that it's not something that the government should be getting involved with.


Of course, the other big issue of the day is yet another security scare. The frequency with which this is happening is quite alarming, and Parliament has had to have been suspended twice in the past few months. This is where I draw the line. There needs to be a serious, radical overhaul of Parliament.

Useless procedures should not be kept just because of tradition. They may be quaint to some. But I've heard it raised more than once today that the men who had to restrain the protesters were quite elderly retirees. It is clearly unacceptable that the only people there to restrain the protesters were retirees.

This event has been a setback to the traditionalists. As long as these archaic procedures are around, Parliament will be less efficient than it could be, and as we've seen today the security implications can be quite serious. This should be seen as an opportunity to modernise Parliament for the better.

One upside of the early mornings is that I get to catch a bit of Today, which I do quite like.

Today they had an interesting story about Australian television. With their American soaps, they've decided just to skip four and a half years, and have bridged the gap with one hour-long programme (RM file).

The woman from the television company seems to think it won't be a problem. I think, if I was a fan of those programmes, I'd be pretty damn pissed off.

As I said, I got quite a lot done. The 7:15 start was actually alright - I must have slept like a log.

I now have a better idea about the structure of my course.

Economics lectures are at 9am on Mondays and Thursdays; Politics is Thursdays at 3pm. So I've ended up with both extremes on a Thursday.. fun.

However, I now have to choose an outside course. Having a look through the 'Alternative Prospectus', nothing really grabbed my attention apart from Meteorology. I don't really imagine myself being a weatherman. So I'll probably end up doing something like Economic History..

I'm taking tomorrow off, for a bit of a rest and a think about outside courses.

Today at the uni was much more productive. I got pretty much everything I wanted to do done, and then some.

The best part was all the freebies though. Even though you have to give them your address, a list of previous convictions and a DNA sample, I snapped up my bag of The Times goodies. In there was a copy of today's Times, a Sunday Times 'The Month' calendar and CD-ROM and this month's, uh, The Month. Yeah. And a magnetic Times bottle opener! Although the bottle opener is gold and black which I'm not too keen on - it looks so old fashioned.

Which the paper certainly does not. The new 'compact' Times is great! I took a nice rest in the sun in Princes Street Gardens and had a read, and I was quite impressed. People say it's tabloidy, but I don't think it's too bad. And I actually read some articles! I reckon it's marginally better than The Guardian, which definitely is tabloidy, no matter how much it tries to deny it. I don't really read it any more; only on the internet. I wouldn't normally buy The Times, though, but I've got two weeks' worth of 30p-off vouchers so I'll probably buy it for a couple of weeks!

News International were certainly out in force today - there weas also a load of promotional stuff and vouchers for The Sun and The News Of The World. That went in the bin; 10p off is not a good enough incentive for it.

I also got a free copy of today's Scotsman. Although it's also now a sleek compact, I still don't understand the appeal. I leafed through it today and I didn't really find anything much interesting. It might just have been that I had been sitting on that bench in the sun for too long, though, so I'll give it another look later.

When my dad saw them, he just said, "That's not The Times! ...and that's not The Scotsman."

Myself, I can't wait for The Graun to go compact (or at least this new 'midi' size, which sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me) so that I can read it without getting a sore back.

Now what about The Telegraph?


(By the way, prize for coolest and cleverest freebie definitely goes to O2 for their bubbles.)

I remember, when I was young, I was quite against widescreen television. Like most people, this was because I was misguided and thought that it meant seeing less of the action, when of course you see more of the action, it's just that it's smaller. In other words, buy yourself a bigger telly. (We still haven't got a widescreen telly. It makes football scores very difficult to read, but there you go.)

The television companies tried their very best to persuade people that widescreen was the way to go - in the future, all television programmes will be in widescreen! (Except for ITV News. Typical.)

So what Labour need to do, obviously, is to oil their spin machine and tell us that, in the future, all ministers will be like Ian McCartney.

So I went over to the University today. I wasn't going to go, but Ailsa (who is the other person who I know is commuting to Edinburgh) persuaded me. As it turned out, I might as well have stayed at home, as it wasn't exactly a riproaring success today.

I couldn't get to sleep until about 3 o'clock last night, and I had to get up at 9, so I was tired enough as it is (I bumbled my way through buying a ticket at the station cos I was only half-awake).

The plan was to meet up with Ailsa at E-bow, because she had her introductory meeting in the morning. But her meeting over-ran big time, and by the time we'd met up it was too late to go to the finding-your-feet talk thingy.

Then we couldn't register! The woman at the door said we had to come back at - get this - 9:15. Yippee. I might skip it and register later on in the week though; who knows (my introductory meeting is at 10:15 tomorrow anyway, so I have to get up quite early whatever, so I might as well try and register tomorrow aswell).

After lunch, we went on to the Freshers' Welcoming Ceremony. It was shite; it was like a more pompous version of the assemblies we got at school. There was a 'tea party' afterwards, but I couldn't be bothered with that, and just came home.

At the station, I had to work out how the hell you're supposed to get to platform 18. Turns out it's just like the Glasgow Underground (coming into E-bow, it gobbles your ticket up and it's gone forever! I bet people who collect their tickets are pissed off with these new gate thingies).

Due to all the walking that was involved, my legs are pretty dead. In time, I'll work out the quickest way from the station. And how to order a normal coffee that's just normal and black and normal. And where the best place for lunch is. (Lunch today was made by my mother - she just can't let go! But it put paid to my suspicions that my tummy troubles were caused by bread.)

So it was a wee bit of a dead loss today. But I'm on a bit of a learning curve at the moment, so it's good to get climbing up it earlier than expected.

I thought during the race that Jarno Trulli should just leave Renault. Right now. It's clear Trulli hates the team and the team hates Trulli back. His already lacklustre race performances have become even worse, and it sounds like he's becoming just a tad paranoid.

Okay, so he might have won Renault's only race this season. And he might be an alright qualifier, but his race performances have never been up to scratch. His sole race win was at Monaco. A chimp could win at Monaco so long as he qualified on pole. I mean, there's no space for him to leave the door wide open like he did at the French Grand Prix. Trulli is the sort of driver who only ever loses points, not win them.

GrandPrix.com agrees that Trulli should go. Renault are not going to score any more points with their second car this season so long as the space is being wasted by Trulli. But who to replace him with? The obvious choice would be Fisichella, but he's probably not available. If I were the team, I'd go for Montagny, as he knows the team and the car already. Hiring Villeneuve, whose record is also a little suspect, would be a huge gamble which probably wouldn't pay off.

Most people I know have now gone off to Univeristy. Probably the majority of people I know are off to Dundee. Everytime I mention that somebody has gone to Dundee (as I was wanting to aswell) she says, "Why is every-one going to Dundee? It hasn't got any reputation." Well stick this up your reputation bumhole, mother.

Dundee University has been named the Scottish University of the Year with former students enjoying better pay and job prospects than those from any other academic institution in Scotland.

She was desperate for me to go to Edinburgh because she was adament that it had a better reputation. The only reputation it's got is for attracting pretentious snobs.

Anyway, the whole family was out last night and everything, and I was on my own. It felt kinda lonely. It didn't help that the hall light had gone. Without the lights on, everything always seems so much more depressing, doesn't it?

It's dawned on me this weekend that I won't be seeing my friends nearly as often any more, and that there hadn't been any kind of big send-off. Well, there was actually. But I've been so tired this past week and I've had my suspected food poisoning / illness (and I was still feeling ill last night. It's just coming and going - but especially coming late at night, which makes sleeping fun, oh yess). So for the various little get-togethers and nights out, I just couldn't go. I tried on Thursday, but I couldn't last, and left very early. I hadn't considered at that point that it would be the last time I'd see Alan, and I even left before David came. Hmm.

I can't be too downhearted though. MVC are being quite generous with their sales at the moment. (The clever Economics student-to-be that I am, I was stumped as to why. Then my brother just swanned along and said it's cos the interest rates have gone up. Clever swine; he's the one who ought to be doing economics.)

Anyway, my bro wanted Shaun Of The Dead on DVD, and by chance MVC were offering it for just £9.99 if you spend £20 or more. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to take advantage of another of MVC's generous price-cuts, by buying Formula 1 '04 for thirty squiddos. I'll probably write a great big review of it soon enough, but I can tell you for the moment that it's been occupying my time very nicely.

So, in summary then: sad ill happy sad.

This morning I listened to Mal Young on BBC Radio Five Live criticising ITV for poaching BBC faces. He said, "You'll notice that they've stopped doing that because it doesn't work," or something like that. He also said, "The BBC can't do that because it can't justify spending public money like that."

Well this is just not true (and I'm not just thinking about the fact that ITV do still poach BBC faces - Michael Parkinson, for instance). On the same day, once again, the BBC's attempt to 'poach' a Channel 4 star (Graham Norton this time) looks like it's going to fail, and Lorraine Heggessey is already playing him down. This happens every time.

The BBC spent £1million to lure Johnny Vaughan from Channel 4, and then didn't know what to do with him. An unfunny sitcom and about half-a-dozen chatshows have passed, and he still hasn't had a hit on the BBC (the only vaguely good thing he's done on the BBC is Fighting Talk, which he doesn't even present any more).

Then when they bought Richard Blackwood (who was frankly unfunny enough on Channel 4), he too had a failure of a sitcom (and it was a double-blow - it was on BBC Choice aswell), and the last time I saw him on a programme it was about a year ago on the Learning Zone.

Now that they've spent megabucks on Norton, his chatshow (which is exactly the same as his already overstretched 'So' / 'V' / 'NY' Graham Norton chatshows) is tucked away on some graveyard slot on BBC Three, and his debut on BBC One gets postponed again and again.

Today I got yet another package of advertising guff sent to me from UCAS. Today's was from Orange. I'm not too good with this mobile phone jargon, but I think they're offering "1000 free texts... for just £25 a month". I've never topped my phone up since I got it in March, which means that I don't even spend £10 in six months, never mind £25 in one month.

Anyway. I don't object to the junk mail; it keeps the costs of using UCAS down, right? But in each envelope of guff they've sent me, they've enclosed a letter which contains the following cheeky sentence:

Whilst I hope that the leaflet enclosed will be useful, UCAS does not endorse promotional literature from any organisation.

Cheeky bastards!

I don't think the darker shade of grey worked in the end. Even I couldn't read those orange links any more. So I've caved in and gone for a more conventional white background. Enjoy.

Still not quite got everything sorted out yet. Annoying. That's what you get for tinkering with things which were perfectly fine in the first place.

Today, I've written an article for UK Future, a blog designed to encourage debate amongst youger voters. James Malcolm is coming from a centre-right position, but seems to want to encourage debate from a range of perspectives. He asked me to write after I commented on his post on the issue of the Scottish Parliament and the West Lothian Question.

I wrote about something I've been pondering over the past few days - what should the Conservative Party do to win back the respect of the voters?

Michael Howard has created two new jobs. Shadow deregulation secretary, yes. I can see why a Conservative government would go for that (although I don't think it's a good thing - more on that in a minute).

But shadow family secretary? This sounds like it could be (almost literally) nanny-statism to me. What exactly is Theresa May going to do in this role? Tell people off for not having enough children?

The creation of these posts undoubtedly send out a message as to what direction the Conservatives are coming from. But this is just the same opportunism that has typified Howard's Tories, and the voters will see it as exactly that. It certainly doesn't impress me.

I'm winding up towards having more political posts. I haven't been blogging as much about politics recently, but having taken a bit of time off I feel filled with stuff to write about. Watch this space for more.