Showing posts with label venice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label venice. Show all posts

Sunday 15 November 2009

The Sunday Section

Pie in the sky; Gondola gone? Chilean cut off; Repair rip off; and Cornish Gwenn



BF 5 during the dark thingy. Well, it didn’t happen did it, at least down ere in ‘Ampshire, it rained for a bit and then there was a bit of wind, then the sun came out, and then it rained and so on, the weather was very polite and kept the rain the sun and the wind apart.

The villagers have returned to their hovels and I am counting the rent collected before they were allowed to leave, every cloud as the saying goes.








I see that the barmy Gov has managed to show us how well their immigration policy is working by paying an immigrant childminder who killed a toddler in her care £4,500 to return to Malaysia after she was released from prison.

If they gave me £4,500 I would be quite happy to f**k off to a nice warm country and get out of this piss poorly run, damaged, fiscally bereft, overcrowded land.



And:









After the Tories sold off the railways, labour is taking them back; at least they are taking back one that is failing.

National Express will hand back East Coast Mainline services between London and Edinburgh and the rest of the East Coast franchise just before midnight.

Falling revenue and rising costs left it unable to meet a commitment to pay £1.4bn for the franchise until 2015.

A government company, Directly Operated Railways, will run the franchise for at least 18 months. Ministers say staff and services will be unaffected.

Here’s a hint Gord, take back the ones that are making a profit, and buy back the ones that aren’t for the same amount of money that was paid for them-F**K ALL.



First up:







A giant "digital cloud" that would "float" above London's skyline has been outlined by an international team of architects, artists and engineers.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data.

The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

The unconventional structure was originally envisaged as a centre piece of the city's Olympic village.

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.

"It's really about people coming together to raise the Cloud," Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News.

"We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached."

The size of the structure will evolve depending on the number of contributions, he said.

The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set up by London Mayor Boris Johnson.

The mayor has committed to build a tourist attraction in the Olympic Park "with a legacy for the east end [of London]".

Other finalists are thought to include the former Turner prize winner Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, the designer of the Angel of the North.

The mayor is still in the "process of deciding" which design will be commissioned, according to a spokesperson.

Here’s something to think about big B, why not build something useful like a community centre?










A procession of gondolas accompanied a pink coffin along Venice's Grand Canal on Saturday in a mock funeral to protest against the steep decline in the city's population.

Pall bearers in black capes accompanied the flower-draped coffin symbolising the death of the "Queen of Adriatic" at the hands of rampant tourism, rising waters and housing costs, a low birth rate and a lack of services.

It was brought ashore at the city hall where a message of condolence and a poem in the Venetian dialect were read out.

As tourists and onlookers took photos and popped wine corks, a flag bearing the image of a phoenix emerged from the coffin to symbolise the rebirth of the threatened city.

The protest, organised by local website Venessia.com, was inspired by a report last month that the city's population had fallen below 60,000, the minimum for an Italian city.

Venice's population has halved since 1966 as residents have left to seek work elsewhere and housing costs have soared as homes have been converted into hotels or guest houses.

Taking advantage of the crowd gathered for the protest, researchers from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States took saliva samples to identify authentic Venetians genetically, Ansa news agency reported.

Why not turn it into an aquatic theme park.











Voters tired of slick, endless election campaign broadcasts may finally have a sanctuary in Chile.

As the South American nation prepares for December 13 elections, some candidates have been allotted as little as two seconds of air-time to put their case to voters.

Tomas Diaz, an independent presidential candidate used his time to say very little.

"I'm Tomas and the most important thing to know about my campaign is..." he said on his television spot before being cut off.

Rodrigo Garcia Pinochet, the grandson of former dictator Augusto Pinochet who is running for congress, tried a different tack, simply posting a photo of himself, his grandfather and his mother onscreen in silence.

Independent candidates have as little as two seconds worth of broadcasts thanks to rules that distribute time according to how a party fared in the previous election.

The unfortunate masses of politicos aiming to make an electoral breakthrough cannot even hope to throw money at the problem, as Chilean laws forbid TV channels from accepting cash for broadcasts.

But they may take some solace in a campaign by Rosa Gonzalez, who was elected after a 1997 broadcast in which she did not manage to finish her name.

And Samuel Velasco memorably shouted "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" in his flicker of a campaign spot. He, too, was elected.

Yet according to one expert, the videos - of whatever length - may be incidental in Chilean politics.

"It is by tradition the centre piece of a political campaign, but that does not mean it would change the vote of the population," said political marketing expert Felipe Vergara.

Great idea, if it happened here Gord would say-“Errr”, Dave would say “I” and the other one would manage “But”.










Watch the video.


Mechanics were supposed to be fixing a leaky radiator, but when the owner of a £30,000 Vauxhall Monaro car collected it from the local garage, he discovered it had been taken on a joyride at speeds of 125mph.

The owner of the car, who doesn’t want to be named, had installed a Roadhawk black-box recorder three months earlier.

When he left his car for repair at the garage in Redditch, there was a quarter of a tank of petrol left. When he collected it, he noticed the tank was empty.

"I looked at the video from the Roadhawk and was completely stunned. They had taken it out for a spin on the A435 at 120mph.

"When I confronted the garage they denied it. Then I told them I had the video and they admitted everything and apologised."

Video captured during the incident, which has been posted on YouTube, shows the driver overtaking cars and lorries on the A435 Alcester Road between Redditch to Portway.

The vehicle speeds past a garage at 100mph, before hitting a narrow slip-road at 90mph and continuing through country lanes.

The owner said: "The outside of that lane is marked off and lorries sometimes park up there. If you go wide on that corner at that speed you could easily slam into the back of one."

Fans of the film Ferris Bueller's Day off will enjoy the video.

In a scene from the film, Ferris persuades Cameron to let them borrow his father's 1961 Ferrari 250 GT. After leaving it at a garage they return to discover 100 miles have been added to the clock.

The 5.7 litre Vauxhall Monaro has a top-speed of 170mph and won Top Gear's best Muscle Car award.

West Mercia police confirmed they are investigating the incident. The owner of the garage said he had seen the video but refused to comment.

Yeah, I bet he did, so who services your car?




And finally:








Street signs in Cornwall will be translated into the region's traditional language, despite the fact that only 300 people speak it.

Council premises will also get the new signs and councillors will be asked to consider using Cornish in all future publications, promotional literature and their website.

The move is aimed at promoting the language and Cornwall’s distinctive culture, but opponents criticised the move as “unnecessary” and potentially divisive.

Cornwall Council said the changeover would not cost anything because the signs would only be replaced when they were broken or needed repairing, and they would be the same size. Manufacturers had agreed to add the translations free, a spokesman added.

Graeme Hicks, the county’s cabinet member for highways transport and planning, said: “The sign manufacturers will put the Cornish underneath the English at absolutely no cost, so it is a win-win situation.

”We have got an obligation as a local authority to promote the language, and this is an ideal way of doing it.”

Dick Cole, the leader of the Mebyon Kernow party, which advocates greater Cornish home rule, said the new signs would benefit the Cornish economy.

He said: "Cornwall's uniqueness is its Celtic heritage and we have to promote that as a brand to attract more overseas visitors. These sorts of things are vitally important when trying to make an area stand out from the rest."

Four examples are:
1/ Tregganna Fields, Camborne, Parkow Tregennow
2/ Pendarves View, Camborne, Gwel Penderves
3/ Crellow Hill, Stithians, Bre Gerellow
4/ Boundervean Lane, Camborne, Bownder Vyghan

Gwenn, by the way is “Anus” in Cornish, and if you want to expand your vocabulary Here is a Cornish dictionary.


I am going to go into the garden and cut some roses that have bloomed, in November!


Angus

AnglishLit

Angus Dei-NHS-THE OTHER SIDE

Angus Dei politico