Good Advice

(Click for a bigger version if you can't read the text properly)


I'm guessing it's probably from Private Eye.

NETCU Guide to Policing Protest

I heard a rumour while I was at camp that a copy of the NETCU Guide to Policing Protest had been dropped by a police officer during one of their violent incursions onto the site. The NETCU guide is a handbook for police on laws relevant to protests with guidelines on how to interpret them, and police forces "are advised not to release this guide following freedom of information requests".

I've just found the entire thing in PDF format here, so I thought I'd link to it as a public service since it's not available through normal democratic channels.

I can't work out how to save it on my own machine because I only have Adobe Reader and none of the menus say "Save" on them anywhere - can anyone help?

Additional from Indymedia:

If you have any concerns about NETCU then get in touch with them

04.08.2008 22:56

They only have a postal address as a contact so here's a little extra:

NETCU
PO Box 525
Huntingdon
PE29 9AL

Tel: 01480 425091
Fax: 01480 425007

Email: mailbox@netcu.pnn.police.uk ***NEW***
Or try: netcu@cambs.pnn.police.uk



You can ask for Steven Pearl, head of NETCU, for all of your complaints.

Concerned Activist
Homepage: http://netcuwatch.org.uk

Lego Protest

From Indymedia - E.ON’s replica of the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station has been occupied by one inch tall climate change campaigners. The drama unfolded at the Legoland park in Windsor – sponsored by E.ON – where the Lego Kingsnorth is given pride of place next to Big Ben and Canary Wharf.

More here

Climate Camp Ready for Action

My plan so far for the day of action involves using some kind of floating thing to sail up the river, getting into the power station and find the manager's office. I'm told that on his desk is a big red button marked "STOP", and there is a prize of a bottle of rum for the first person to press it and switch the power off.

I went canoeing a few times when I was at school and it's only a few miles, and I've got an eye patch and everything so I'm sure it'll be fine. Until then I'm trying to put residents of Sipson (which is where the climate camp was last year) in touch with residents of Hoo, which is where I had a lovely pint of Kentish ale last night and chatted with some local people here.

Local feeling has been very much swung in our favour after some really nasty police behaviour, and rumours are rife of the ridiculous items confiscated from campers and locals alike, most of which are true.

I need to cycle to power the battery of this laptop for half the time I spend using it, and since I'm a slow typist and a poor cyclist I'll just point you at indymedia and our own onsite TV station VisionOn for further news, probably at least until Sunday and assuming I'm not either drowned or nicked by then.

Please send messages of support to the camp if you can, it's good to hear from the world outside the police lines occasionally!

Climate Camp at Kingsnorth

Well, Glastonbury was amazing - having so little rain meant being able to sit on the grass, walk around a lot more easily and generally relax more effectively, without having to wrestle with waterproof trousers and stinking wet socks every few hours.

I came home to find the allotment knee-deep in weeds, and I've spent several weeks frantically picking all my fruit before shoving all my kit back in the rucksack to go to Climate Camp.

The camp this year is at Kingsnorth in Kent, where E.ON and the government apparently think it would be a good idea to build a new coal-fired power station on the site of an old one.

It would not.

As the camp paper puts it, "Building a coal-fired power station in the middle of a climate crisis ... makes about as much sense as a petrol-filled fire extinguisher" The existing power station is reaching the end of its 30 year lifespan, and building a new one would be a commitment to burning coal there for another 30 years. Coal is the most polluting form of fossil fuel (despite the impression that E.ON's greenwash tries to create), and six more coal-fired power stations are planned across the country if Kingsnorth goes ahead.

It's big and it's urgent, and it's now half a mile away from me as I sit in my tent flicking spiders out and eating carrots. I somehow managed to lose both my waterproof coat and my wellies at Glastonbury, but I'm surviving intermittent rain so far with boots and a drab stinky coat that I found in a bin recently.

Yesterday was mostly taken up with resisting some nasty police behaviour, but today I've been going to talks and workshops and generally getting on with what I came here for. The day of mass action is on Saturday, the police haven't beaten anyone for a good few hours now, and I'm trying to figure out the logistics of having a wash with a cup and a bucket inside my tent.

I'll keep you posted.

Seven Songs

Merrick tagged me with this:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I should warn you that my taste in music is just as chaotic as everything else in my life, which at least should keep everybody awake. Sorry that I’ve been extremely lazy and linked almost everything to YouTube – please try not to get too distracted there by searching for talking cats.

Other disclaimers: I’ve gone for what I’m honestly listening to right now rather than turning it into “My Top Seven Tracks Ever,” and if you asked me again next week I’d probably pick seven completely different and equally random tracks. Also I’m totally useless at describing music, so you’ll have to use the links to find out what it all sounds like. Come back and tell me if you like them though.

1. “Two of Us” by Aimee Mann – cute, summery, close harmonies – yum.

2. “Oops Oh My” by Tweet and Missy Elliot – loud and dark and sexy. Strangely I find it sexier without the skinny nearly-naked women in the weird ice palace thing, but they’re here if you want them.

3. “Revolve” by Hush the Many – I first heard this a couple of days ago when Merrick did this meme, and now I can’t turn it off – thanks Merrick! I love animation, especially when it’s kind of dark and creepy.

4. “Bobby Brown” by Frank Zappa. Also pretty dark and creepy, although in a different way…

5. “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum – because I’m off to Glastonbury festival tomorrow, and because my mum warped my musical taste early on. She wants this at her funeral, which might be rather odd at an otherwise very pointedly Jesus-free event. Mum’s having Elvis instead of Jesus.

6. This choice shall be known only as “Malcolm Middleton – Choir Eddie Cointreaus 2008 Redo” – not because I’m deliberately trying to be obscure, but because someone posted me that link, it’s something their friend did, and I’m not even certain that I’m strictly supposed to tell anyone else about it. But I love it. So sue me.

7. ELO “Hold on Tight” Apparently when I was very little I thought the lyric was “Hold on tight ‘til you’re three,” and imagined that something amazing would happen to me on my third birthday. If it did I can’t remember, but I did hold on.

So, I’ve managed to do seven things I’m currently listening to without mentioning this by Howard Jones (discovered by accident when I got a Robert Knight song in my head) or the theme tune to the chipmunks. Phew!

Might do some more of this when I get back from Glastonbury, if there’s any call for it. I promise to tag seven other people when I get back too, but it’s very late now and I need to pack my tent, which I put up in my living room three days ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

Let Me In

Everyone liked "Wake Up Cat" so much that I thought I'd better post the new one "Let Me In", also starring Simon's Cat



"Wake Up Cat" can now be found here

Change of Address

I mentioned recently that I've been having big problems with bluebottle.com, who have provided my e-mail account for a couple of years now and who are crap. I just about managed to dump them before they dumped me this week, but not without spending several sunny days indoors staring at a stupid computer screen. Sorry if I’ve been ignoring you.

When I first set up my account I couldn't get it to talk to Outlook properly/at all so I ended up just leaving everything on the server, and it was oh-so-convenient to be able to access it all from any computer anywhere. This did eventually mean having two years worth of correspondence saved somewhere out in cyberspace and not backed up anywhere, but hey, that’s not a problem when it’s all working fine, and what could possibly go wrong…?

A few days ago, just as I was beginning to get warnings about having reached my capacity and needing to delete some old messages, Bluebottle sent an email to all their users to let us know that they're no longer going to be providing free accounts, we have ten days to download any of our correspondence that we'd like to keep, and then please would we bugger off if we're not going to give them any money.

“Panic” would be too strong a word considering the way I’d probably feel about, say, finding that I’d fallen into a polar bear’s private swimming pool, or being trapped in a lift for 41 hours, but I was pretty quick to send a pathetic message to Techie Friend begging him to come over and make it work please. Techie Friend being good at this kind of thing, it now does work in that all 3000+ messages that were on the server are now on my machine and won’t be deleted by Bluebottle. Unfortunately, the downloading process and the fact that I haven’t bothered to organise anything into folders for two years means that I now just have a very very long list of messages in no particular order. In fact it looks quite a lot like my paper filing system.

I've spent nearly four hours today putting thousands of messages into 38 sub-folders in Thunderbird. This is in addition to time spent persuading five Yahoo groups to use my new address, trying to somehow capture all the e-mail addresses I've ever used which Bluebottle holds onto forever in a massive, badly-punctuated list rather than permit me to keep a proper address book, changing 38 subscriptions to various accounts and websites many of which I'd forgotten I had, and writing to everyone I’ve ever met to let actual real people know my new address.

So, apologies to anyone reading this who has written to me recently and who I haven’t yet replied to.

If you still only have either of my old addresses then my new one is the same username @riseup.net – I will get anything sent to the riseup address, but the process of moving has left me with three different inboxes and a large folder called “dump” which is going to take me a while to sort through. I will reply to you all, but for the moment you are probably marked blue for “To Do” in a funky new Thunderbird folder somewhere.

I honestly don't remember it being this hard to change my physical address, although it has been a while since I've moved house and I'm probably forgetting.

On the plus side, I've got my new address talking to Thunderbird to avoid ever having all this hassle again. I can now do italics and different colours and all kinds of exciting things, and other people's text gets wrapped rather than keeping going for six feet or so off my screen to the right. Unwrapped text quite unfairly makes people seem very longwinded. I haven't even started on creating my own mailing lists yet, but look out world…

Wall-Painted Animation

Wow, look at this...

Time warp

At this time of year I feel as though anything I turn my back on for five minutes goes through some kind of time distortion effect where weeks of neglect happen to it in my short absence.

I spent two whole weekends recently doing nothing but weeding the allotment, and it now has dandelions in it that I couldn't possibly have missed only a couple of weeks ago - great big mature bloody trees have sprung up, with masses of seed heads crumbling gently into cracks in the soil all over the entire plot.

Slugs of course are well known for having the ability to warp time - this is why, for instance, courgette plants sometimes seem to disappear completely without leaving any remains at all. They apparently find it necessary to shred corn, so I'm growing a second batch of corn plants for them to eat when they've reduced the first ones to ribbons. At least the fox deli bar should prove cheaper this year, since a new plot-holder on my site works part time in a pub and can get us all beer dregs to use in the slug traps.

I have loads more seeds to sow, a strawberry patch full of buttercup, kit to repair before the festival season, a zillion things I'm supposed to have read by now and a flat that I can't even find the dirty laundry in any more. Socks, in particular, have been doing the time-distortion thing a lot recently. I've always found them to be prone to it.

I haven't posted here in over a month, and I have a huge backlog of things I wanted to ramble on about, some of which I'll try to get around to posting soon. In the meantime, you may like to amuse yourself with pie charts and Venn diagrams...






Back soon, perhaps with some more short and sweet ones until I've got RL a bit more under control.