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You know when you try and do something nice and someone just fucks it up.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a load of plants to put in a border at the front of my block in halls. It's a space that has been abused for several years now with people parking on and damaging the verge. Anyway, when I started digging I found the ground useless, so waited till today when I got some topsoil delivered.

And what did I find when I went to fetch the plants out from next to my back door - three of them had been nicked.

Bastards. If you're reading this and it was you - you can leave them outside my flat again and I'll not say anything. But I hope you're proud of your thieving - I couldn't even get the same ones again when I went back to the garden centre today to replace them. Oh and don't worry about the single gardening glove you must have also taken. I did manage to replace those.

Onanist bastard.

By the way - if anyone knows anything about fungi - are these pictures below just ordinary field mushrooms, and therefore pretty safe to eat?

...as an enduring political hot potato. From Hezza, to Mandy, to Prezza, it has been, if nothing else, the best investment in screwing politicians of the millennium so far!

Nonetheless, it was *our* investment. And should never have been passed on to rent seekers for nothing. Whoever made that decision and survived deserves hanging from its fancy roof structure.

Technorati Tags: politics, sleaze, scandals

On the occasion of his visit to Iraq on a "fact finding mission" the BBC report that "Gordon Brown has said lessons must be learned on use of intelligence in the run-up to war" and that "in future intelligence analysis must be kept independent of politics."

One nice idea might be that when the international community appoints a civil servant with no particular political axe to grind to look into the whole business, rather than agreeing with your ally in a stand up row about the guy's conclusions, you try hard to believe what your appointed on the ground investigator has been telling you.

Technorati Tags: dodgy dossier, intelligence, gordon brown, iraq

I don't believe that it is the place of the state to encourage or discourage any particular family arrangement . I declare an interest as a long time (and in all likelihood now permanently) single person, but I utterly resent the suggestion that the state should somehow reward those who are fortunate enough to have found their significant other by discriminating against singles.

I do accept, however, that the theoretical permanency of a marriage or civil partnership commitment may provide some benefits of stability in the lives of children of the union at important stages of their development. And I also recognize that virtually any interdependent personal relationship has the potential to take some of the onus off the state for support services and the like. So, how to reconcile these positions?

The answer seems obvious - Citizens' Income. Quite apart from such a system's ability to address the problems of benefits withdrawal creating excessive marginal rates of taxation for those trying to get off benefits and into work, if every individual were entitled to an unconditional and non-withdrawable basic income as of right as a citizen, those who choose, or are lucky enough, to live with another (or others), would be able to pool such incomes and no doubt make savings on the costs of procuring essential goods and services.

Food is generally cheaper when you are buying for more than one person. Family health insurance seems cheaper than the sum of the same number of individuals' insurance. In a Land Value Tax regime it is likely that multiple member households would be paying less tax per person anyway than singles simply by virtue of sharing space - making more efficient use of land by and large. Housing costs per person are likely to be lower.

So, give more of our money back to us for us to decide how to spend ourselves, and these family relationships will prove themselves by dint of domestic economic efficiencies. No need for more central tinkering.

Such is the difference, in my mind, between a moralising, authoritarian and protectionist view of human relationships and a liberal view.

From The Register: Aussie council deploys Barry Manilow sonic weapon

Aussie council deploys Barry Manilow sonic weapon
Merciless assault on tearaways
By Lester Haines
Published Monday 5th June 2006 13:03 GMT

An Australian council has decided to deploy the ultimate rowdy youth repellent - piped Barry Manilow backed by a further selection of "daggy" melodies.

The radical sonic attack plan is designed to drive the ne'er-do-wells from a car park in Rockdale, Sydney, where they have been "revving their engines and generally annoying residents", the BBC reports.

Nice one!