If you’re still dadrocking and attending gigs by popular beat combos with the younger generation, you’ve no doubt been caught short once or twice, moshing down in the front row with a bellyful of lager and a bladder full of…well, you know what bladders are normally full of. While the esteemed musicians on the stage bang out their driving rhythms, you fight your way back through the young people (aren’t they rude these days?) and make your way to a toilet facility whose sheer unpleasantness almost bends your mind.
We were discussing this in the pub last night (well, some of were, others were in the toilet), and someone brought this up: STADIUM | PAL. Put simply, it’s a bag to wee in that you wear round your leg. It’s one of those ideas which is conceptually brilliant, but practically probably less so. I mean, can you imagine moshing with a bag of piss strapped to your leg? Actually, don’t answer that.
They also make a female version. But in my experience women only seem to pee once a week, so it doesn’t sound like a goer…
Tomorrow, the worst part of Labour’s manifesto, the ID Card bill, will come to the Commons for the first time. I could go into why everyone who values their civil liberties should oppose this bill, but thankfully some boffins at the LSE have done it for me:
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | ID cards ‘neither safe nor appropriate’: [The LSE report] highlights 10 areas of concern: cost, renewing the biometric testing, replacing ID cards, enrolling difficulties, difficulties with card reader machines, non-cooperation from the public, civil liberty, privacy and legal implications, problems for disabled users, security concerns and the creation of a new offence of identity theft.
In a particularly ominous warning, the report’s authors note that the “successful identity theft of a person’s biometric data would mean that their fingerprints or iris scans are permanently in the hands of criminals, with little hope of revoking them.”
Other damning criticisms are the cost - around £250 - to small businesses of card-readers, the lack of a single “clear and focused” purpose for the ID cards, potential legal breaches of the European convention on human rights, the likelihood of a public disobedience campaign and the chances of “function creep”, whereby the card becomes a de facto “internal passport” without which “a person cannot function”.
And at the report’s launch, Professor Ian Angell of the LSE’s IT department branded the system a “one-stop shop for fraudsters”.
He added: “It is a dog’s dinner. I do not believe it is going to work - that is why I’m not concerned about the privacy issue.”
It won’t work. It’ll be expensive. It’ll lead to unpredicted consequences most of which will be bad. It won’t work. It’ll take years. It’ll turn identity theft into a major industry. And did I mention that it won’t work?
Yesterday, I was sad. Having decided not to do Glastonbury this year, mainly because I couldn’t face another four days in a tent, I watched nostalgically as people climbed into cars in their floppy hats and t-shirts for a ride down to the south-west. I questioned my decision, frankly. This will be the last Glasto before my 40th birthday, and maybe, just maybe, I should have gone after all.
But now it’s under inches of water and acts are being cancelled and I’m feeling smug. I’ll snuggle up on the sofa tonight with a beer and watch the BBC. It ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, but it ain’t muddy, either.
OK, that’s it. I’ve just deleted 300 bits of trackback spam, and have now definitively decided that trackback is now, officially, dead. So I’ve taken it off the site. No-one cares and no-one’s listening, but I thought I should just add my voice to the growing chorus of disapproval for the whole trackback thing. So long and good night. And yes I need to post more.
You know when you have an idea and are then just too bloody lazy to do anything about it, and then someone else does it and you hate them for it? Oh, is that just me then?
Evening Standard Headline Crisis - a photoset on Flickr
