Dadblog

The funniest news of the week so far: Woody Allen’s Match Point has been given a nomination for best screenplay at the Oscars. Other screenplays nominated: Dallas (The Pilot), Eldorado (Final Season) and Thomson’s Local Directory. For our review of Mr Allen’s world-class film, please click here.

A film critic writes: “Some time ago we were informed that the Motion Picture Academy had lost its sense of humour. We are relieved to find that the said sense of humour has now been located. We regret that the same can’t be said of Woody Allen.”

Great title, no? Puts images in your mind of placing unsullied innocents in trees with tags tied to their toes for others to find. In fact, it celebrates the fact that yesterday we successfully found our first geocache. In a rush of gadgetry excitement I bought a GPS device last week (a Magellan, since you ask), and yesterday we went out and found this cache. There were four adults and seven children, and it was hard to tell who was the most excited.

The weird thing was that I had put the coordinates into the Magellan using Long and Lat, but it sent us to where the geocache definitely wasn’t. After 15 minutes of searching, I tried reentering the numbers as Ordnance Survey coordinates, and the device then directed us 100 metres away from where we were searching and took us directly to the cache - an old ammo box containing, of all things, a Bruce Forsyth VHS video. Now that’s postmodern.

So it’s OS, not LatLong, for me from now on. One other bit of advice - when taking small children geocaching, do not overpromise on the “treasure hunt” aspect of it. They’re likely to be quite upset when the said treasure turns out to be a Bruce Forsyth video.

PS: One other piece of GPS-related news. Last week my wife bought a TomTom, as she frequently needs to drive to outlying London schools and quite often gets lost. It is brilliant. And perfect for handing to taxi drivers when they’re driving you home, allowing you to sleep in the back seat while they argue with the TomTom about which bridge is best for South London, instead of arguing with you.

OK, time for a Friday afternoon rant, kicked off by Nik’s post saying he doesn’t believe people who say they’re pissed off with LibDems because they lied. Nik’s contention is that, really, people are pissed off with the transgressions themselves (alcoholism, male prostitution, occasional gay sex). They just say they’re pissed off about the lying to hide their true colours.

Well, I can’t speak for others (although I often do). But for me, the emergence of the LibDem leadership as a bunch of confused, self-serving and fundamentally dishonest chancers has been too long coming (disclaimer - and it’s a whopper - I am a member of the Labour party).

Anyone who’s been involved in any kind of political campaigning knows that the modern LibDem party works at two levels. On the national level, it makes great play about being independently-minded, with a set of core principles that are not buffeted by the winds of political expediency. The problem I have with that is I can’t actually think of one of those principles, other than the one for electoral reform, which is essentially self-serving.

Contrast that national high-mindedness with what happens on the ground, were LibDems will occupy any position, line up with any party of any colour, in order to get power. In Lambeth, my borough, they’re in coalition with the Conservatives. As it happens, they’re doing an OK job, in a meritocratic sort of way, and they’ve certainly put the local Labour party to shame. But that’s not the point. The point is that their core principles were completely up for sale when it came down to it.

So, yes, Charles Kennedy, lovely bloke, Simon Hughes, great constituency MP, Mark Oaten, well, what about Mark Oaten? The media stereotype for all of them is fine up to a point. But peel away the facade of the cheery LibDem idealist and you get a truer picture - genuine naked self-interest. They are, quite literally, as bad as the rest of them, and it’s about time they were shown to be so.

Rant over.

The Rocking Vicar has a blog. But they don’t seem to have an RSS feed. Shame.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Galloway may face serious fraud office investigation

George Galloway faces the prospect of a criminal investigation into his activities by the serious fraud office, which has collected evidence relating to the oil-for-food corruption scandal in Iraq.

A four-strong SFO team returned from Washington with what a source close to US investigators calls “thousands of documents” about the scandal. The team is expected to produce, within the next four weeks, a report for the SFO director, Robert Wardle, as to whether a full criminal investigation should be mounted into UK individuals and companies involved, including Mr Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.

Article continues
The SFO is following up two official reports published before Christmas in Washington, which detailed banking evidence that Mr Galloway’s wife and his political campaign organisation both received large sums from Saddam Hussein, laundered through under-the-counter oil allocations.

Two profoundly depressing commentaries on the state of this country’s attitude to damaged young people. First, from the Damilola Taylor trial which opened today:

The 17-year-old defendant was 12 at the time and lived in a local authority care home called the Hollies Children’s Home in Bermondsey, south London.

Mr Temple said there was little discipline at the home. He said: “It was far from secure. For much of the time, he could come and go as he pleased. His family home was but a short distance away.”

His brother was 13 then and a day pupil at an assessment centre in another part of south-east London. He had failed to attend on the day Damilola was killed, said Mr Temple.

In care and abandoned. Assessed and ignored. Roaming the streets of south London, ignored by adults and left to their own devices. And then they ran into Damilola…

And prior to that, an even more depressing example: that of Chelsea O’Mahoney, one of the “happy-slappers” who kicked a man to death on the south bank and who were sentenced yesterday:

O’Mahoney was born in south London to parents addicted to heroin. At a young age she would sit and watch her mother inject heroin in the flat where they lived, the court heard. From the age of three, O’Mahoney was left to wander the streets of London unsupervised until she was taken in by her aunt, who attempted to offer her a better life. But the experiment of living with her aunt did not work out and O’Mahoney was taken into the care of the local authority.

It was the picture of O’Mahoney that killed me - an attractive, normal-looking girl, she looked like a lot of my son’s female friends. And then I read this:

When police raided O’Mahoney’s home in South Norwood, south-east London, they found a diary which mentioned “all nighters” - the phrase the gang used for robbery sprees - and “ramping”, slang for robbery. In an entry for Sunday October 3 2004, a few weeks before the attack on Mr Morley, she wrote: “Them lot bang up some old homeless man which I fink is bad even doe I woz laughen after doe.”

She kept a diary, for Christ’s sake. More than a decade of abuse at the hands of her family and the state, and she was still enough of a teenage girl to keep a diary.

Of course, the tabloids will have her on display as a monster, a savage devourer of souls. But in my head is the image of a pretty teenager writing a diary. What a shitty world this can be.

One of my weekly pleasures is Simon Jordan’s ballsy, conceited, self-serving, fascinating and brilliant column in the Observer. The chairman of Crystal Palace usually comes over as some Boysey-meets-Cloughie lower-league Godfather, but he’s always fascinating and whoever edits him for the Observer does a great job (unless I’m doing him a disservice and he writes it himself, in which case Richard Littlejohn should be looking over his shoulder nervously).

In his latest screed, Jordan says his piece on the currently red-hot bung issue, arguing that agents are an easy target - a bigger problem is the enemy within. In other words, managers:

None of this is meant to underestimate the harm malign agents can do, or to undermine Newell’s basic complaint about the sheer volume of them constantly trying to find a way through. To know what they’re capable of when a club opens up, you really had to be a Palace fan back in the late 90s when Mark Goldberg’s la-la land ownership took the club into administration. Agents were crawling all over him like engorged maggots.

In 12 months, Goldberg lost £1m on agent fees. He paid Boca Juniors £187,000 for defender Walter del Rio, plus fees to multiple agents totalling £450,000. It then emerged that the player had been available on a free, and that documents showing his registration with Boca had been forged by a third party in Argentina. The money was never traced, and the player moved on after one league start.

He paid Israeli club Maccabi Nevealon £800,000 for unknown defender David Amsalem, via a third party. Only £11,600 ever arrived at Maccabi Nevealon, and the player was released after six starts. He signed Chinese players Fan Zhiyi and Sun Jihai - now at Manchester City - for £1m, and only £600,000 arrived in China. He signed two bewildered wonderkids at the same time as Del Rio - Pablo Rodrigues and Cristian Ledesma from Argentinos Juniors - who went home before kicking a ball. The money paid for them wasn’t traced.

The High Court ruled that all those deals were a result of corrupt agents and, to paraphrase a bit, a stunningly naive owner. But the manager at the time - the man who recommended all 13 incoming transfers to Goldberg - was absolved. As the report put it: ‘The High Court ruled that Terry Venables was entirely innocent of any wrong-doing.’

Read the whole thing - it’s fascinating, and the first genuinely new and informative thing I’ve read on the whole sorry issue.

Nik went geocaching this weekend. I had never heard of such a thing. It sounds excellent (although it also sounds like one of those things you describe at a dinner party and everyone looks at you blankly as if you’ve just grown an extra nose. I do remember this is how people looked when I first described the Internet to them, though, so who knows?). So, if I wanted to do this, what’s the best GPS device to use? And can you use a standard TomTom?

Seeing a whale (admittedly, let’s be honest, a pretty small whale) swim up the Thames in central London was an amazing thing, but not as amazing as the BBC headlines “whale spotted in central London” and “whale lost in central London.” It does rather put images into your head of cetaceans being spotted through the windows of the Criterion restaurant before going into a drunken rampage and losing themselves in the wilds of south London, doesn’t it?

Lovely post from Joho the Blog about the new heroic competency of teams, referring to big US dramas like CSI and West Wing where teams of super-clever individuals meld seamlessly to solve seemingly intractable problems:

Is this a response to the world’s new (or newly-exposed) complexity? When the enemy is an identifiable superpower, bravery and strength saves us. When the threat is that our environment is fragmenting and the pieces are raining down on us, the ability to put the pieces together saves us.

Yes, but where does the A-Team fit into this? If the 80s was about individualism, how the hell do you explain the existence of that bunch of misfits?