The increasing reliance on 'summary justice' from the UK government and police is far from a good thing. The job of the police is to detect and prevent crime, not to punish it. The result is that many people who would have had their cases dismissed by a court of law end up paying unnecessary fines. It's only in patently absurd cases such as this one that people stop and take notice.

After a recent spate of waking up, turning off my alarm and promptly going back to sleep, I was conceiving of a halfbakery idea for a bed that tilts to evict you when you need to be up. Then someone told me that Wallace and Gromit had already beaten me to it. For some reason this makes me feel better.


I've been doing work for yet another essay lately. This means one thing: hours and hours of using Wikipedia. I took a look at one of the articles that I'd been relying extensively and it turns out that one of the heavy contributors was HB's [futurebird]. There's no real point here. Just seems interesting is all.


Having essay deadlines just makes my procrastination levels go haywire. I'm likely to post another entry about it soon. Because of this, in a worrying twist, I'm actually procrastinating by reading about procrastination. This in itself is bad, but what's worse is that I now know it to be Type B procrastination.


I'm increasingly being convinced that the greatest method of imparting trivial knowledge is the pub quiz. Just yesterday, I learnt for the first time about that lipogrammatical (see, you can learn new words too) masterpiece, Gadsby (which I was pleasantly surprised to find online in its entirety, and I plan to read it when I get the chance). The lesson (if you'd call it that) is that you should attend as many pub quizzes as you possibly can (and using brackets plenty of times in a paragraph makes you look very organised).


I've seen a lot of good films lately but yesterday's one, City of God/Cicade de Deus was just fantastic. You won't see many films where the director is so dedicated as to order an actor to bully a child actor for weeks to 'increase the tension between them'.

Eddie Griffin, a clearly underrated actor from such marvellous films as Undercover Brother and Norbit, did something horrible a couple of days ago. When taking part in a charity racing event on Monday, he managed to total a Ferrari Enzo. One of the 400 Ferrari Enzos in existence. Valued at $1.5 million. Dollars. $1.5 million dollars worth of car rendered junk by the sheer uselessness of Eddie Griffin.

So does he follow the owner around begging for forgiveness? Does he drop to his knees and pledge his life in servitude? Does he even apologise? Does he fuck. To quote the idiot - "Undercover Brother's good at karate and all the rest of that, but the brother can't drive."

I think the wonderful site, the superficial.com summed it up best - "If Eddie Griffin crashed my Ferrari Enzo the next day's headlines would read "Eddie Griffin strangled to death and then stabbed and then shot a couple times by angry Enzo owner." Although that'd be kind of a long headline. They could use a small font or something."

In Eddie Griffin's defence, it is at least in part the owner's fault for giving a Ferrari Enzo to Eddie Griffin. I mean, that was just stupid. The closest thing to a Ferrari that I own is a 5 year old bicycle, and I'd still trust that to a drunk chimpanzee than I would anyone who refers to themselves as 'Undercover Brother'

Alternate title: The Inconvenient Truth.

After Al Gore began extolling the virtues of a carbon neutral lifestyle, he was naturally opening his personal life to close scrutiny, and some of the results found are rather suspect.

This article in USA Today in my opinion shoots a little wide of the mark. It criticises the former presidential candidate for advocating living without excess whilst having 3 houses dotted around the country. But it does raise some interesting points. Whilst Gore recycles and drives a hybrid car, he hasn't taken up the option provided by his utility companies for his Virginia home (with similar schemes existing in Tennessee) to pay extra in return for part of your power being generated from renewable sources like wind energy. It is also shown that, at the time of the article at least (December 2006, I have no idea how to find out if it's still true), despite being executor of his family's trust for years, he hasn't sold off his shares in Occidental Petroleum.

And this article, released yesterday by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research notes that the Gore family used 20 times the electricity of the average American home last year in their Nashville mansion alone. The power that they consumed in August would power two average households for an entire year.

This isn't a new story, but the appeal to the Georgian Supreme Court was recently rejected, and I don't think this story can be told too much, if just because it's superbly ridiculous.

This article covers it very well, but is a little bit wordy so in short:

At a New Year's high school party a 17 year old senior received a fully consensual blowjob from a 15 year old girl (there was quite literally a videotape to show consent). She never made any complaint to the police, but after a 17 year old girl got hammered and had sex with him (among others) without remembering what happened in the morning, she feared rape and the police became involved.  The boy was cleared of all rape charges but, as the 15 year old was below Georgia's age of consent, he was convicted of 'aggravated child molestation' which carried a mandatory 10 years imprisonment without parole. The forewoman of the jury later stated that part of the decision was based upon their own erroneous beliefs, such as that their decision had to be unanimous and that they had no choice but to obey the letter of the law at the expense of the spirit of the law.

Without going into the catalogue of failures that allowed this charge to reach a jury in the first place, this is a notable accusation at the concept of jury trials altogether. The idea that 12 people with no concept of the law should be (in most cases) the final arbitrator of people is laudable, especially if jail time is the expected punishment for those found guilty. If someone is to be tried under the law, it seems only logical that they are judged by someone who understands the complexities of the rules being invoked. Nobody in their right mind would let 12 random people choose their medical treatment. Why should this guy be in prison until he's 27 because a jury couldn't figure out that a law designed to protect minors from paedophiles wasn't meant to be used to police teenagers fooling around?*

</rant>

My favourite part:
"At the time that Genarlow’s trial was underway, just down the hall in the same courthouse, Douglas County Judge Robert James Baker was hearing the case of Alexander High School English teacher and cheering coach Kari McCarley. The 27-year-old was found guilty of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old male student who attended the school where she worked. She was sentenced to three years probation and 90 days in jail. "

*Yes I see the upside. Judicial independence and all that. But juries do tend to be a hindrance more than a benefit.