Christmas Day

After all these years of dreaming of a White Christmas, we've finally got one, and it's horrible. Temperatures are stuck below zero and transport is paralysed throughout Europe. I am spending Christmas alone (as I usually do) but this year I shall be making no attempt to find a pub with the usual pitifully limited opening hours. I am determined to stay indoors, and to venture no further afield than the garbage chute. So, a Merry Christmas to all my readers(if any)!

In the Bleak Midwinter

The world outside my window is a composition in whites and greys as the snow drives in, silent and unstoppable. So, it's time for a warming chuckle from YouTube:

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

This being the festive season I thought I'd post this little gem of a Christmas film from 1955. It was created by the multi-talented Wendy Toye, and the art direction is by Ronald Searle.

Bienvenue sur le Jeux Olympiques 2012!

English might be the most widely  spoken language on Earth, but it isn't good enough for the International Olympic Committee. It has ruled that French must take precedence over English at all ceremonies and medal awards; that all billboards must be displayed in French as well as English; and that the Union Jack must be flown fifth in precedence behind the Olympic flag, the London 2012 symbol, the United nations flag and the flag of Greece. Moreover, free hotel rooms must be provided for 40,000 Olympic officials, sports administrators and 'official guests'.
The last two Olympics left their host countries out of pocket after the show; hard to see the present beano causing a departure from the trend.
  Oh, and most of the media have picked up on the announcement that EU rules on the classification of explosives have been nodded into British law by our dozy politicians, with the result that Christmas Crackers ( a British invention, by the way) can no longer be sold to children under 16.  Merry Christmas!

Frost and fog

The temperature is below zero, and likely to remain so for at least a week. I awoke yesterday to a remarkably dense freezing fog. Every twig and blade of grass was furred with white rime, and when the sun finally managed to leak through, it could be seen that the air was teeming with billions of tiny ice crystals. Meanwhile the Met office is still saying that 2010 could be the warmest year since records began. This is, of course meaningless; they are working in tiny fractions of a single degree centigrade, well within their own error margins - and they don't have the figures for November and December yet.
I presume that the statement was made as a propaganda device for the current Warmist's Sabbath in Cancun.

Man in the Know.

They actually lost 3-0.
Thanks for the tip, Daily Mirror!

World Cup Woe?

So Britain's bid to host the World Cup has failed. Thank God, I say. Another massive expenditure of taxpayers' money has been averted. By 2018 we shall just about be climbing out of the financial hole into which the London Olympics will have dropped us. A pity no-one intervened to save us from that monumental waste of dosh.

Cancun Can Can

As bureaucrats, shysters and unclassifiable wonks converge on Cancun, Mexico, to flog the dead horse known as Anthropogenic Global Warming, this video gives us a foretaste of the horrors we shall all face in a warmer world.

What's This? A new contender for Christmas No.1?

The debate over which single will make it into the top spot for Christmas has has been giving uninspired  hacks something to write about for years. This year, we may have an unexpected contender thanks to a television commercial by Littlewoods. It uses 'What's This?' from Tim Burton's 'Nightmare Before Christmas' by Danny Elfman as background music. Already I've come across a number of online queries as to what it is. Personally, I think it's great.

Acronym Glut

I have long been concerned by what I call Acronym Glut, which occurs when a large number of meanings accumulate around the same set of initials. The commonest example is PC - standing for Political Correctness, Personal Computer or Police Constable, depending on context. Every acronym coined represents a little bit of meaning lost from the language. The fact is that, outside of chemical nomenclature, most acronyms could be replaced by the words which they represent, without too great an outlay of energy or time on the part of the writer. The greatest problem with acronyms is not that they may be ambiguous, but that they have no meaning at all to the outsider. Thus (and particularly in government or other large organizations) they create a ring fence around the doings of an inner elite.
Just to illustrate, here (mainly from Wikipedia) are the possible meanings accruing to the acronym CIF which recently stopped me in my tracks.

• Canada India Foundation - Canadian lobbying organization
• Cost, Insurance and Freight - a sales contract term indicating that price includes cost, insurance and freight
• California Interscholastic Federation - the governing body for high school sports in California
• Caltech Intermediate Form - geometry language for VLSI design, in which the primitives are coloured rectangles (similar to GDSII)
• Chicago Improv Festival - a non-profit comedy festival held annually in Chicago
• Climate Investment Funds
• Coming into force
• Comment is Free (CiF), online comment section of The Guardian newspaper
• Comme il Faut (CiF), brand of tango shoes, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Community Infrastructure Fund (CIF), a method of UK government funding for transport infrastructure
• Crystallographic Information File, a standard text file format for representing crystallographic information promulgated by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) - and the closely related Crystallographic Information Framework
• Customer Information File, any electronic file containing Customer Information, to include data bases and file exchanges
• "Código de Identificación Fiscal", an acronym for Taxpayer Identification Code in Spain, the identification document of legal persons in Spain
• Common Intermediate Format (CIF also FCIF) - Common Intermediate Format or Full Common Intermediate Format, is a format used to standardize the horizontal and vertical resolutions in pixels of YCbCr sequences in video signals, commonly used in video teleconferencing systems.
• Cumulative incidence function - in epidemiology statistics, an expression of the probability of disease up to a given time
• Come In Face (Pornographic).

Ridiculous.