David Brent is alive and well and living in Wales.
From BBC News
‘North Wales deputy chief constable Clive Wolfendale has been criticised for performing a rap to his force’s black police association.’
The full rap is hilarious and actually quite well executed, but you can imagine some PR person begging him not to do it.
People feel uncomfortable with St George’s day and the English flag because it’s been hijacked by a football hooligan Din-ger-lan, Din-ger-lan, Din-ger-lan mentality. I say let’s celebrate Englishness in the gentle archetypes of gentlemen, bounders and cads like those played by Terry Thomas,
Leslie Phillips,
David Niven,
and Dirk Bogarde.
A report from the BBC about fake universities on the web pointed me towards those venerable institutions (in descending order of believability) Shepperton University, The University of Dorchester (now offline) and GM (Greater Manchester) U.
Sad to see Professor John McKenzie stepping down as chairman of Leeds United Football Club. The thought of a professor in charge of a football club (what could be further from the dusty world of academia?) always made me smile and his title added something of a bygone, more gentle era to a game desperately in need of respectability at the moment.
… now that the students have gone home.
A piece on The Today Programme this morning about the upcoming European Summit in Brussels revealed the unit that delegates use to measure the likely length of the conference – shirts! Three shirts; three days.
It makes perfect sense, of course, but it tickled me and, it would appear, the journalists at Radio 4 as shirt numbers came up on PM later in the day. I’ll have to remember this one next time I’m off to a conference.
The take over’s off. Aston’s council met yesterday and have rejected UCE’s advances. In my opinion this is a missed opportunity.
Donald rumsfeld has won the Plain English Campaign’s 2003 Foot in Mouth Award for this little gem:
‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
Strangely enough it looks as though John Prescott has yet to feature in their rogue’s gallery. There’s always next year, I suppose.
It seems everybody wants a piece of this little green space in town …
‘Row over Birmingham universities’ merger proposals‘ from EducationGuardian.co.uk.