Local rag mops bottom of barrel...

Subject:	Local rag mops bottom of barrel...
Date:	Mon, 4 Jan 2010 06:54:26 -0800 (PST)

Aw, new year's eh?

All that expenditure and stress out of the window,
over, and done with. So your mind turns to what's
on. And you check the local listings.

Anyone here presented with a device for going
back in time this year? Thought not. So, listings
which mainly cover last December aren't really
that much use.

More to the point, some amazing fantasy work
leading from the front page today. Apparently, a
club, outside which there were 6 people stabbed
on New Year's Eve had had to shut because of
the trouble. And I quote.

"That part of town has never felt safe, that's why
____________'s had to close down because there
was so much trouble" (punctuation verbatim).

Actually it isn't. Having acquired the place as a
pair of comparatively young men in, I believe, the
1960's, the borthers who owned the venue until
a few years ago, having run it for about 40 years,
sold up and retired.

A venue in the town has been formally closed,
by the licensing authority, because of trouble
started, allegedly, by its security crew.

I can believe it. There's at least one place I will
now no longer go on the reasonable grounds that
being treated like a piece of shit by a troupe of
crack-pushing martial artists is something of a
non sequitur to the significant premium on the
price of beer I'm paying to cover their wages.

After all, let's face it, they are generally on the
make off this, officially non-economic, sector,
are security staff.

But still, at least something good has come out
of all this. If a simple witness is so fantastically
garbled, and a full-time paid journalist so ignorant,
then it seems that this misinformation service we
are paying for highlights the "expediency of
principle" as opposed to the "policy of honesty"
the paper boasts.

I don't see how it can qualify as "the might of
right".

After all, just because senior members of the staff
can't use computers doesn't mean a young and
up and coming hack can't log on remotely to look
back at the last month's coverage. You know, by
using search terms and so on.

Similarly it highlights just to what extent trouble
seeds itself--and removing the troublemakers, as
had been done recently, is no real solution; the
trouble continues--possibly most likely because
people they've been unfairly treated to the benefit
of another.

Though it does leave me wondering if The Police
aren't far too quick to use holding under a section
of the Mental Health Acts as an impromptu
punishment (the ethics can go hang!) when they
so clearly overlook people mentally disturbed to
the point of fantastic nonsensical garbage.

Then again, they still have so much racism to
overcome that perhaps we ought to applaud what
progress they have made in granting equality to
those of us who can knock out a suitable report
in a reasonable amount of time rather than whinge
about how it makes our hands hurt and prevents
us from "doing the job" and spin it out far longer.

Not one of the whingeing plod I've seen, read
heard or talked to has ever mentioned a short
series of evening classes in basic typewriting.

But then, aren't the hardest accounts to write
up those where you're having to wing it, and
make things balance, and really really think
about it, rather than those where you just say it
how it is?

G DAEB
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