pictures in the sky

I've travelled around since lockdown was derestricted. A few observations:

TRAVEL

• Boarding a train when half the people on the platform were not wearing masks. 
• Another train where everyone followed the rules.
• Seeing a number 57 bus with one passenger
• Almost forgetting to wear a mask to go into a petrol station
• Hardly ever re-fuelling the car
• Waiting for streams of WAH* golfers to cross at that usually quiet pedestrian crossing
• Passing my empty ex-commuter car-park at 15:20 when it would normally have 500+ cars
• Driving along an empty M25
• Seeing the warning signs for the Channel Ferries saying lorries can't cross because of capacity limits
• Seeing the warning signs for Operation stack (where they use the M20 as a lorry park)
• Travelling outside on the deck of a ferry (like most passengers) without wearing a mask

REFRESHMENTS

• Using the self-managed quick scan in bars to show attendance for tracks and trace.
• Getting used to quickly assessing a bar's capability to handle social distancing (1=token, 4=reliable)
• Being overwhelmed by the number of instruction messages outside a hotel's reception
• Being surprised at the variety of different schemes used by restaurants to implement their opening policies.
• Being surprised by several times qualifying for the 'eat-out' rebates of £10 per person.

SOCIAL

• Seeing no pedestrians around the shopping centre.
• Watching sports fans crowd around a football ground, not wearing masks.
• Mainly empty beaches, or at least socially distanced beaches
• Watching a socially distanced open-air theatre show
• Being turned away from National Trust for not booking
• Being able to get into Tate without prior booking (thank you!)
• Mostly conducting regular get-togethers via Zoom
• Discussing the mise-en-scène of Zoom setups
• Discussing getting one of those Dan Dare face plexi-shields
• Deciding that it ain't normal.

*WAH - Outlook abbreviation for Working At Home

Edge, Edge Blue and Edge Red

Now I am getting ahead of myself with this locked-down novel-writing lark. 

A friend commented that the Edge Book could do with a sequel, and so I've decided to produce two. Not in the sense of a conventional trilogy, but instead producing two different outcomes dependent upon an action in the first (written) novel, Edge.

I've looked at the Ed Adams novels release schedule and I'm up to 1 December 2020, so I guess I'll have some time to produce these two new novels, maybe one in January and the other in February. I'm thinking about something like 6th Jan and 28th Feb.

I've decided to try producing a concept package for each novel too:

So here's Edge Blue. And Edge Red.

I made the two earth images using photo overlays from burnt frying pans.

Now it is JASMOS - Just A Small Matter Of Storytelling.

credits remaining = 0;

Now the clown wants to go back on the Brexit deal struck last year. It's the one he struck and praised as “oven-ready” in December’s election, which saw him win a landslide victory. 

Sir Jonathan Jones, the Treasury solicitor and permanent secretary of the Government Legal Department, has reportedly quit his post in fury over the government’s plans. 

Bodger doiesn't care. It's handy that it is the permanent civil servants that are falling instead of his hapless so-called leadership.

It'll make a good book and TV-show one day.

renege renege

I know, jolly japes, let's renege on our original decision to remove the Customs border with Ireland. 

We can use the theatrics of it all to annoy that Mr Barnier too, so much that we can blame him for when we decide to smash out of the EU instead of negotiating a deal. We'll have to keep it from Parliament, use the wife of Slippy Teflon to leak it to the press "*What they don't know won't kill them." It has always been the plan, after all.

It'll be a whole lot easier to crash out and means that the appalling homework by David Davis and the other ugly ducklings will never see the light of day. 

Now we'll need a few useful charlatastic phrases for whilst we are turning the UK into a banking casino and tax haven for the privileged. Let's see now, FreePorts - that rings a bell. We can spread them around - Liverpool, Bristol, somewhere near Sunderland, and maybe a couple near Boris Island where we were going to put that original third runway. 

We can say we have levelled up, and that the red wall is now the blue wall. Something trite about fishing limits too. I'll get the new Party Bingo cards printed.

Some of my chums might have to extend their pockets to take all the money this could generate, but I think our Leader of the House of Commons probably knows a few long-winded and arcane wheezes to squirrel the money away, probably off-shore, come to think of it.

Still, I'm out of it in six months and The Dom will have to find a new covert threat.  Once I've a safe place in history, I'll hand the whole shebang to Rishi. He'll know how to print past the £2 Trillion of government debt. 

Forget doubles all round, it's not even triples, oh no, quads all around. "*Quad nesciunt eos non interficiet," as Rollo Biffkins used to say.

seaside

Okay, I'll admit it. I do, now, enjoy living close to the sea.

Sitting on a beach

Sometimes you just need to know where the empty beaches are.

hazards?

We decided to visit the seaside by train. 

We walked to the train station and noticed the big signs about wearing face masks. Of course, we did. 

Except, we were the only people on the platform to be wearing the face masks. A couple of unmasked older men were sitting on a station bench chatting. It turned out that they were not waiting for a train, but had just strolled down for the view.

Then we could see another group of maybe nine upper-teenagers. Not a mask in sight. It was mainly females, but with around three males lounging on the platform. I guess the herd immunity must have been in play although there were clearly too many of them clustered together for it to have been a single bubble.

Then, eventually, two more people arrived and immediately donned their masks. 

I'm wondering now, as I write this, whether I'm reactionary or neighbourly?

Minack Theatre - Educating Rita

 

About time to see some live theatre. This was Educating Rita at Minack Theatre, in Cornwall. It was actually our second attempt, having previously been along on a day that it was cancelled because of high winds and rain. When we were told, we had just set out from St Ives, and were slightly surprised that it had been cancelled. Sure enough, that evening, sitting in the pub garden, we got well-and-truly soaked. The rain came down like some kind of comedy show. I retreated inside at one point for a complete change of clothes. Yes, Minack had got their weather forecast right.

We managed to get some more tickets for another day, and decided to make a round trip of it. The show was early evening and didn't finish too late. Thoroughly enjoyable, with Stephen Thompkinson and Jessica Johnson as Frank and Rita, performing on the cliff edges as if it was the spires of Oxford. Around two thirds of the way through, the weather changed. Frank and Rita continued unabashed. The audience shuffled slightly and battened down for the rest of the performance. To the credit of the cast and the rest of the production crew, the show really did go on, and you'd be hard pressed to tell that they were combatting the elements. Only in the last encore did the main characters turn around and we all saw they were - well - soaked through.

you're unbelievable

There is a bit more effort required from the UK to watch the US political conventions, compared with being in America when they air. They are on those difficult-to-find channels at the back of Virgin's menus and the broadcasts are generally at uncivil hours.

Nonetheless, there's a kind of evil fascination to watch the worst of them at work. The  Republican National Convention’s defence of  “Western civilization,” shout-outs to the COVID's discredited treatment hydroxychloroquine, curious words about Democrats keeping Black people on “mental plantations,” and denunciations of the “China virus.”  

Awful twisted stuff designed to snare the less-educated.

There was gratitude that President Trump gave up his “life of luxury” to rule the country. 
That St. Louis couple who recently waved firearms at Black Lives Matter demonstrators from their front lawn, and a different elderly stunt-couple who spoke of wanting “this nation to continue to be the beacon of hope for the world,” while they looked lovingly at a section of border wall being installed. 

Dangerous rabble-rousing stuff.

There was talk of Donald Trump not being racist, juxtaposed without irony against racist warnings to white voters that Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs.” 

Inflammatory stuff showing Donald just doesn't care about anything except himself.

My favourite for blatant bombast was Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality who dialled it up to the max and strutted onto the flag-bedecked stage.  

Guilfoyle brought the convention’s fascist timbre to the next level.

“They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” Guilfoyle said, describing the Democrats. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom, they want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” 

Old school fear, uncertainty and doubt. Curious that Kimberly Guilfoyle-Newsom was once married to a Democrat.  

Her message riffed on a hidden (dog-whistled?) "Democrats Make America Weak Again" theme and wasn't officially in line with the positive and uplifting tone that the Convention announced. 

Trump Senior hugged her afterwards.

Blame the servants

Statistics lesson: Neither of the men in ties has a clue although they both know 'ego sum stultus'

Bozza has fired top DfE civil servant Jonathan Slater over the exam results fiasco. Gavin Williamson earlier denied making the resigning Ofqual boss Sally Collier a scapegoat for the exam results.

It goes to show how little attention the top people gave to the statistics before they went public and Bozza himself demonstrates the lack of understanding of a statistical haircut. But then, why should he, when the number of independent schools reaching a 9 grading was five times higher than all schools.

I also notice the modest curve on the all schools graph, compared with the laughably immodest curve on that from the 529 ISC. Pay Per Performance (PPP/P3) anyone?

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has retained his position, ironically, despite his sacking for allegedly leaking information from Defence about Huawei the last time he held senior office. 

Play On, Christina Nott

 

I've already got 2 or 3 books in the release pipeline, so I reckon this one will hit the streets in early December.

This is a further follow-on to the Archangel series, comprising:

• Archangel - where Christina Nott's backstory is established (Icelandic, but trained mainly in Russia)
• Raven - Corporate corruption.
• Raven's Card - Political corruption.

Then, finally we get Christina back on the road with a band. The only thing is, she's still beholden to the FSB and gets mixed up in some tricky business in Saint Petersburg. 

We get to see her perform with a band acting as a support act to another band who are danger of splitting up. 

Music, Money, Manipulation and I daresay some Mayhem too.

Maybe I'll serialise a couple of sections from the novel, whilst I decide whether to ARC (Advanced Readers' Copy) it.

Play On, Christina Nott.

The bamboo forests of Norton Security

Sometimes it is like walking through a bamboo forest. 

This was supposed to be an easy one, but I knew in advance it would be difficult. 

I was removing Norton Security from an Apple Mac. I decided the system is designed to make it almost impossible. 

it is socially engineered to make the merest enquiry about the use of the removal tool fail. 

A few examples. 

1) Ask the help system. It froze only allowing entry whilst simultaneously holding down a mouse button. 

2) Checking with Google. Symantec has packed the top of a Google search with pages they control, all of which offer misleading advice. 

3) Attempting to use the so-called remove button built into the utility. Except the helper agent that runs the button was not working so the button didn't show. 

{Most people will have given up by around here}

4) Attempting to download the uninstall helper. Except every copy of it was the one for Windows. 

5) Being pointed to a (you must be joking) separate page to download someone else's utility (Nope).

6) Being patronisingly asked after I'd looked at each of their help pages, whether it was useful (No)

7) Being pop-up asked if I needed help (Chat) but then ignored.

In the end, I used the Activity Monitor to force crash the Norton helper agents that were still running. This simulated a Norton failure. 

Then I pretended I wanted to re-install the product. Norton gave me a link to a failed installation page for Mac and from there I was able to navigate to find this helpful page:

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/uk/home/current/solutions/kb20080427024142EN 

 It includes a link to the utility file: 

 https://buy-download.norton.com/downloads/mac/tools/RemoveNortonMacFiles.zip 

which in turn requires one to boot up and run a Mac Terminal Session (ie in Unix) to work through the script. 

 Halfway through, the script failed too and simply hung. 

I rebooted and then re-ran it and sure enough, it carried on to delete about 100 Norton files scattered all over the Mac. I know these files are used to provide nag scripts to re-install the product, so it was necessary to get rid of them all. 

 However, it worked.