"This thing goes right to the top"

[webofevil]

Just found some notes I took earlier this year (as you may be able to tell from recent entries, I’m having a bit of a spring-clean).

In a Commons Standing Committee on 3 February, Christopher Chope (Con) battled valiantly to get a new clause inserted into the Road Safety Bill that would allow bicycles to carry only flashing headlights. At the time, if one or both of your lights weren’t, um, non-pulsating, you were breaking the law. This was quite a sensible amendment, but Chope managed instantly to make it look much less sensible:

Christopher Chope: There is a good deal of suspicion that the Department has suppressed information in this context [i.e. flashing lights on bicycles]. About five years ago, using taxpayers' money, the Department commissioned a report on this very subject from the institute of contemporary ergonomics at Loughborough university… That report has never been published or revealed to people like us, which makes us suspicious. Today is an opportunity for the Minister to say that he will publish the report.

What, truly, are the odds that the wonks at the Department of Transport turned to each other in horror and cried “This report is dynamite! We've got to bury it now!”? There aren’t exactly the beginnings of a Michael Crichton conspiracy thriller in there. It’s a sight more likely, as strictlytrue said at the time, that their reaction was more along the lines of: “Let’s never speak of this again…”.

Also, Chope used the phrase “the effluxion of time” in cold blood. He’ll be writing rock operas about hobbits next.

Comments

[ruudboy.livejournal.com]

Well, you say that, but no sooner do you raise the issue than They've got to your journal. It's a warning.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Er, yes, that's it. It wasn't my own incompetence that led to this post initially being a sprawling tangled mess of garbled HTML, it was Sinister Outside Forces Intent On My Destruction.

I wonder how often that excuse genuinely gets deployed. I'll be scrutinising alleged "denial of service" attacks more closely from now on.