I received a phone call from OfCom yesterday, advising me which frequency Morley FM could have next month. (94.9FM, subject to approval). Shortly afterwards, I received an email from OfCom, telling me that no frequencies were available, terribly sorry and all that.

Aaaargh! Left hand, meet right hand; right hand, meet left hand…

Turns out we can have the frequency after all, after I facilitated some joined-up Government. If I’d received the info in the reverse order I would have been a particularly unhappy bunny…

Officialdom- as Bart Simpson would say, it both sucks and blows at the same time!

ID cards are going to solve everything?

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

From Bruce Schnier’s blogpiece with the title above.

I found out more about the Eurovision amazing camera cuts- the clue was in the credits. The system is called Spidercam from Creative Complex Systems, an Austrian Company. The Camera is suspended on four cables, each of which goes back to a tower and can be rapidly winched in or out. This enables the camera to be placed practically anywhere within the bounds of the towers and presumably if the camera is radio controlled for pan, tilt, zoom and focus, remarkable things happen.

I do wonder, though, how disorienting it must have been for the turns, who could have come to grief if they had wandered off their marks during the performance.

The other thing we watched (on time shift) was the Princes Trust gig, a sort of mini- Live 8 & Red Nose day rolled into one. Ben Elton hosted the last hour and is as sharp and searing as ever, it took me straight back to the mid 80s, Saturday live and “a little bit of politics”. None of your middle of the road Ant & Dec pap, this was in your face and cutting edge.

A lot of the 80’s acts were Cak but it held together well and Friday Night Live was even bigger, if short lived. Ben was great live, a real motormouth and whilst you didn’t always agree with him, he certainly pointed out the absurd and the funny side.

I still say “hello everybodypeeps” to some people who remember Harry enfield’s Stavros.

A very wet weekend in Morley so far. It didn’t matter on the way to the swimming pool, but it made the Morley FM Town Hall leafleting a washout before it had even started.

We popped over the Pennines this afternoon, surprisingly it was raining less in Manchester, not the normal state of affairs.

This evening, after Dr Who and Dr Who confidential, we ended up watching the Eurovision song contest. I fully expected to have lost interest and wandered off to surf, but the show kept my attention. Not that the songs were that good, but Terry Wogan sends it up something rotten and the staging of such a mammoth event is nothing short of “amazing”, a little in-joke that it was the most overused word of the evening.

I was particularly impressed with the camerawork, massive swoops and scurrys round the performers from what could only have been motorised in the air systems at times, never visible in the long shots. A bit frenetic, but fascinating.

The lighting and LED sets were spectacular but not gripping. To me, wow factors need great music (or theatre) and being there in the flesh.

We switched off just before the judging which is traditionally tedious but insightful into european politics.

An MP called Eric Forth died on Wednesday. I don’t think I was aware of anything about him before today but I read a very earthy eulogy of him in the mail this morning, by Quentin Letts. You have to fork out to read it, however, I include the link just in case you are a Mail online subscriber.

He was a distinct individualist, put principle before party, spoke his mind, knew the answer to problems was not more regulation, abhorred Political Correctness and the other trendy pseudo-religions like envirophobia and a United EUrope. He also wore rather odd clothing and I suspect he didn’t give a tinker’s cuss what others thought of him.

He sounds like the sort of oddball that I would have enjoyed rubbing shoulders with.

There is much more toned down stuff on the BBC but there are rather a lot of narrow minded leftish comments, as the BBC telds to encourage here. It gave me a chuckle reading them though!