November 22nd
6:19 PM
6:19 PM
Checking out some start-ups at music techpitch 4.5.
November 21st
2:33 PM
2:33 PM
"
A series of Home Office proposals could ban protests during the London 2012 Olympic games. In reaction to the longevity and scale of recent Occupy London takeovers of public and private space at St Paul’s Cathedral, Finsbury Square and a former UBS bank, ministers are reported to be drafting legislation loosely based on part 3 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 – paying particular note to restricting tents and “sleeping equipment” for up to 90 days around exclusion zones. Police and “authorised officers” will be allowed to disperse protests quickly. Presumably with “reasonable force”.
…
The reasoning behind these restrictions is always to “preserve the festivity” of the Olympic experience. And security. Always security. In London’s case, security means Britain apparently waives its own rights and customs to allow America to oversee its own security operations, laying on 21,000 private security contractors and enforcing the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006.
"— Index on Censorship (via PoliceStateUK)
12:39 PM
"
Fast food giant McDonald’s will help take on 70,000 so-called Games Makers from across the UK.
London 2012 chairman Lord Coe said they would be trained to ensure the event was an “unforgettable experience”.
McDonald’s spends more than £30m a year on training its 80,000-strong workforce.
Lord Coe said: “Providing good customer service to millions of people each day is core to McDonald’s business, and the company has a proven track record in developing its own 80,000-strong workforce to thrive in a fast-paced, busy environment.
“This combination makes McDonald’s uniquely placed to equip the London 2012 Games Makers with the skills needed to deliver an unforgettable experience to millions of visitors to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
"— Via the BBC.
October 28th
1:59 PM
1:59 PM
UK facts
- Swansea is the wettest city in the UK
- In 2003 Aireborough in West Yorkshire was named the most “average” place in England and Wales.
Aireborough was selected as the most average ward from over 8,000 in England and Wales using data from the 2001 census. It was ranked as the most average, with reference to six criteria: age, home ownership, car ownership, religion, ethnicity and marital status. (Via the BBC)
- The average British person drinks three cups of tea a day, believes in God, is more than £3,000 in debt, has sex eight times a month, is caught on CCTV camera 300 times a day and drives a Ford Fiesta. Says the Daily Mail in 2007.
- Richmond is the most copied British place name in the world. (Daily Mail)
- Ripley in Derbyshire was named the most English place in Britain in 2006 and has the largest proportion of residents with an English ethnic background of any place in England. (more Daily Mail, they would focus on these things I guess)
- The average British person will drink 2.5 kg tea per year. (says wikipedia)
- The average British woman will spend over £4000 on handbags in her lifetime. (Daily Mail again)
- Most British people would like to live in York, with Bath, Brighton and Hove and Edinburgh sharing second place.
- The average Brit spends for years with a hangover.
Adults in Britain spend 24 days a year feeling hungover, a study has revealed. That’s 1,452 days of nausea and headaches during the average lifetime.
The survey, for YorkTest DrinkScan, quizzed 2,000 adults aged between 18 and 65. Not surprisingly the most common days for sore heads and suffering were Saturday and Sunday, but one in 10 admitted they were often hungover on Mondays, too. Says the Huffington Post.
- The average Brit shags 2.8m people during his or her lifetime, albeit indirectly, according to a handy “Sex Degrees of Separation” calculator from Lloyds Pharmacy.
According to the Telegraph, the calculator uses data gleaned from 6,000 British adults, with blokes on average boasting nine sexual partners, and women 6.3 lovers.
Users are invited to enter their total number of conquests, and the age range for each - no mean feat of memory if you’ve put it about a bit. The calculator then “uses its database to work out how many previous sexual partners people within that age range have had on average”. Via The Register.
- The average Brit takes 121 holidays in a lifetime and spend about £168,553 on taking breaks. (Says the Mirror).
- The average Brit spends about £40 000 on buying drinks for other people.
The average Brit spends £39,480 over a lifetime getting beers in, a survey has revealed.
Each drinker can expect to shell out around £840 a year on drinks for their friends, partners and work colleagues.
That means as a nation the UK population will spend £30 billion-a-year on round buying, according to the survey of 2,000 people (Via The Daily Mail)
- According to Tesco the average Brit eats about 7000 calories on Christmas Day.
- The Sun summed up the average Brit earlier this year.
THE average British man will spend a month of his life searching for SOCKS.
And when he’s found them he’ll be off down the pub for around 10,585 hours, new research shows.
He’ll watch 11 years of TV, learn to cook just four meals in his lifetime, sleep with eleven partners and say sorry 1.9million times.
The life of Mr Average — height 5ft 8in, weight 12st 7lb — is revealed in a survey for shopping website Kelkoo. It found men see buying things as a way of gaining status.
But Mrs Average — 5ft 4in and 10st 3lb — will do 80 per cent of the real shopping. She’ll date 24 men before finding Mr Right.
After which she can look forward to vacuuming 7,300 miles of carpet.
- The Guardian reports on what insurance policies says about British averages.
Seven out of 10 people take no exercise during the week, but do find time to go to the pub at least once.
The insurer also said that the possessions in the home of today’s Mr and Mrs Average (including furnishing, clothes and carpets) are worth on average £28,000.
- And finally, according to the BBC in 2008, Manningtree in Essex has the most pubs for its size, with five pubs and 900 people - that’s 180 people per pub.
10:50 AM
Is Britain on course to leave the European Union? http://t.co/YABoPJM1 [Guardian]
October 27th
5:19 PM
5:19 PM
Residents flee Priory Hall, symbol of Ireland’s property madness
Sharon Cunningham queued for hours in the rain with €20,000 (£17,420) in her pocket to secure her dream home at Priory Hall on the northern edge of Dublin.
Four years on, that dream has turned into a nightmare. She and about 100 other residents were evacuated this week from the flats complex that has become a symbol of the greed, reckless building and uncontrollable free market mania of Ireland’s busted construction boom.
The Priory Hall scandal involves an IRA hunger striker-turned-developer, a toothless planning regime that failed to prevent fire hazards in the 85 apartments, and dozens of young families left homeless and saddled with huge debts. (via The Guardian)
4:58 PM
"What the camp does is challlenge the church with the problem of the incarnation - that you have God who is grand and almighty, who gets born in a stable. St Paul was a tent maker. If you tried to recreate where Jesus would have been born, for me I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp."
— The Canon of St Paul’s Giles Fraser in the Guardian.
October 26th
6:09 PM
6:09 PM
Today I hung out with lots of people in suits at the Nokia World conference. This is my report for YLE. It’s pretty much exclusively in Swedish, except for a short bit at the end where I talk to Steve O’Hear. The other interviewees are Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio/Angry Birds and Christian Lindholm of Fjord.
October 25th
11:07 AM
11:07 AM
"The majority of the Conservative rebels in last night’s European Union referendum vote in the Commons – more than three fifths – were newly elected MPs, spelling troubled times ahead for David Cameron. In all, a third of the class of 2010 rebelled."
— Via Left Foot Forward.
