Political Penguin

Another divergence away from politics. That to the world of Formula 1. Yes, I can here Bob groan. But for probably the first time in a generation, our little island has produced a real talent.
Now I am completely biased in this matter given I’m a fully paid up card carrying member of Team McLaren, (one of only four organisations, the others being the Labour, Co-operative Parties and the GMB) but we have a new driver for next season by the name of Lewis Hamilton who I’ve been following for a while in the lower categories of racing. He has to a large extent won everything he’s ever competed in and even more impressively, today in testing he was a full second faster than the next driver. That is a major achievement for someone who’s only been in a Formula 1 car half a dozen times.
There’s been some people come out the woodwork to say he’s too young, that McLaren are rushing him into Formula 1. Most notable of these were David Coulthard who I’m of the opinion is a right moaning git who simply isn’t that good a driver and is realising that there is a new British driver on the scene and he’s on his way out of the sport. I also recall those detractors a few years ago when McLaren brought in Kimi Raikkonen saying he was too young, he hasn’t done too badly so far.
So for me, I’m looking forward to the 2007 season in which hopefully we’ll actually win a race. I am however, not looking forward to all the media bullshit that will be put about regarding Lewis Hamilton being the first Afro-Caribbean driver in Formula 1. He is simply there because he is arguably the best up and coming driver of his generation who was spotted by and assisted by McLaren in his career since the age of 12 and from me, I wish him all the success in the future.

I’ve been flexing the techie brain muscles today. About two days ago I got some comment spam, the usual stuff – viagra etc.
However this morning it was getting a bit more offensive so I decided to have a play around with a few things. Now just to note, many of the bits and pieces used on this site are experimental so when it first went live, instead of putting in place measures to stop spam in the first place, I decided to open the site up and see what came in.
On the whole it’s been quite encouraging that very little has got through. However, after a bit of techie investigation I tracked down the offending spam to two sources, one in Holland and the other in Poland. Suffice to say, a bit of work on the ‘.htaccess’ file (anyone who knows Apache will be very familiar with this wonderful little file) and all seems well again. Trace routes are returning to normal and bringing up proper visitors instead of spam bots and I’m all the happier.
However in my investigation I was quite interested to see a few other titbits. Apparently the search term in Google for ‘Peter Francis Walsall Council’ has netted me rather a lot of visitors and at the last check I was 6th on Google for this search term. There are also an alarming number of people interested in ‘knuckle dusters’ visiting my site, either their procurement or checking out their legal status in the UK. But the one I like the most was by someone from the House of Commons who found my site looking for a blog by the MP for Stourbidge, Lynda Waltho. I’m afraid it doesn’t reside here and if you’re interested, here’s her website. However, you won’t find a blog there, in fact you won’t find much at all there.

Having already identified myself as a bit of an environmentalist I thought I would invite you into the murky world of recycling in Walsall.
Actually, it’s not murky, just plain crap.
About three years ago, myself along with the other surrounding populace were issued with our green boxes to place recyclables such as paper, glass and tin.
We were issued with collection dates at the time, every other Tuesday on the day our normal waste is collected. I left my new green box out, didn’t get emptied. I put it down to being a new system and maybe I had misunderstood or there were delays in the implementation.
I tried again the following fortnight and again the one after that. Still no collection. So I left it outside for a month. My normal bin was emptied but not my green box. Upon which I decided not to bother, along with, it appeared the rest of my street.
About six months ago the Cabinet Member responsible; Rachel Walker was all over the press telling people that if they didn’t use their green boxes they’d be fined a cool

After my unaccustomed appraisal of Walsall Council in my last post, I had intended to weigh things up with a bit of criticism today. However, as things so often happen, issues crop up which deserve even more attention. With this goes the news that Walsall Council is due to pay out

This is a rare moment. I’m about to praise Walsall Council. I know I have a tendency towards criticising the local authority for a number of reasons but for today I’ll give it some credit.
I’ve lived in my present house for the last four years. In that time, come autumn, there are vast quantities of leaves strewn along my road (it’s lined by big lime and maple trees) and as my house it set back and creates a natural windtrap, a large number end up on my drive.
However just along from me is a grassed area with shrubs and a few trees which collects even more leaves which rot down and tend to stink a bit.
The other day there were council workers there cleaning up the lot, trimming the bushes and trees and it looks lovely now.
So there you go, a rare commodity, me praising Walsall Council. I’ve got a real critique under construction so please don’t think this will become a regular occurrence.
But for now, well done Walsall Council, you actually did a good job for once.

I am a pretty keen environmentalist whatever one of those is; I am truly unsure as it is one of those all encompassing definitions to describe a broad range of people who can differ quite significantly. But if one of the qualifying factors of being an environmentalist is that one should care deeply about the future of our planet and actively do something, nomatter how small to positiviely make a difference, then I do fall into that category.
However, and being a rather cynical person on the whole, I like to check things out for myself, especially when it comes to claims by different organisations and their use of statistics. The one message that is peddled out continually by whichever rent-a-mouth can be found is that if we all turned our TV’s off instead of leaving them on standby then we’d save enough electricity to close down a nuclear power station. This is a rather grand statement, a bit simplistic and headline grabbing so I thought I’d check it out.
There is however a flaw in this statement, it being, as in many other cases in life, not all things are equal, especially not nuclear power stations. Britains oldest working nuclear power station is Dungeness which has a power output rating of 225MegaWattHours. (For those who don’t know, all measures of energy are in hours, so KiloWattHours, MegaWattHours etc). Compare this to Britain’s newest nuclear plant, Sizewell B which has an output of 1188MegaWattHours. That is five times the capacity of Dungeness so which nuclear power station could we shut down if we turned off our TV’s instead of leaving them on standby?
Again, there’s a lot of variables to consider and to be frank, enough to make such a claim completely pointless but for arguments sake and in the Spirit of Jon Snow, for just a bit of fun we will persist. There are a lot of household items that can be left on standby, however the largest culprits are the TV, Satellite/Cable box and DVD/VCR players. Of all these devices there are vast differences in terms of energy used depending on the make and model of the device. I decided to tot up the standby power usages of our electronic devices. So, TV’s, three of those, an old Decca Colour that’s older than me and pre-remote control so that’s out, a portable Phillips with a standy power rating of >3watts and another more modern Phillips TV with a standby power rating of >1watt. So that’s >4watts for all the TV’s. Then there’s the satellite and cable box, both with >1watt standby power ratings. The DVD player is a cheapo

For all you Internet Explorer users out there, yes I have been thinking of you and finally got round to playing around with the CSS script of the site. So now, the calendar section on the right-hand side should be perfectly aligned.
This as far as I am concerned completely signs off the Beta testing of this site. I’ve tested pretty much everything to destruction now and it all works.
If however, anyone spots anything that doesn’t work or looks out of place or funny, just let me know.

Can someone please tell me just how do you stop babies eating the coffee table? (and anything else they can get their teeth into for that matter)

I read yesterday on the BBC that France is going to find it hard meet new targets for carbon emissions.
Now if a country that produces just shy of 80% of it’s electricity by nuclear power can’t do this, then what hope have the rest of us?

Following on from the decision of Heinz to close down the profitable factory in Birmingham that produces HP sauce I decided to do what little I can as a consumer and completely boycott Heinz products. So far the stock is down to half a bottle of HP, half a bottle of red sauce and a couple of tins of soup.
But of course one consumers actions aren’t exactly going to make a difference to such a large corporation so here goes. I’m urging everyone to show their loyalty to British workers who have produced an iconic and bloody lovely tasting product in Birmingham that takes its name from our own Parliament to stop buying Heinz products.
For those of an interwebnet persuasion I’ve even come up with a little banner that you can plonk on your site. Feel free to copy it or contact me for the original for which you are free to alter in whatever way you like.
Oh, and why hasn’t someone come up with window and car stickers in the same theme? Unfortunately the Penguin budget doesn’t run to this but I’d proudly stick one in my window if there’s anyone out there who wants to produce them.