Sunday 6 October 2013

Oh My Cod!

Oh My Cod!

From the new signage it looks as though Eddie Gilberts fishmonger and gourmet fish restaurant in King Street Ramsgate that closed after the tragic early death of its owner Johnny Dunhill is to reopen as a chippy.

Having just had a peruse of the news and the blogs it seems Tony Bignews is saying UKIP leader Nigel Farage is going to stand as candidate to be the MP of Thanet South – the constituency that covers Sandwich, Ramsgate Broadstairs and a fair old chunk of Cliftonville – Nigel Farage on the other hand, talking on the Andrew Marr show this morning seemed to be saying he was most likely to stand in Folkestone.

I would guess our Laura is breathing a sigh of relief as I guess this would have split the Conservative vote more than the Labour vote.

Personally I would be surprised if UKIP did anything like as well in the parliamentary and district elections as they did at County.

Voter wise though my take is that most of the swingers in the constituency may well be in Ramsgate and from what people are saying I would think Will Scobie is in with a very good chance either way.

For me, the big issue this week has been the one over the videoing of council meetings and I was interested to note that Ian Driver has done a video blog, here it is:



Ian is certainly a very good speaker, I don’t think I could blog this way, when I see one our councillors with an exceptional skill, the thing that strikes most is how little the council as a whole seems to make of these skills.

We have Simon Moores who has considerable experience with ITC, and yet the council seem unable to get a convincing and watchable video of council meetings on youtube in a timely fashion.

It looks like the councils IT team could learn a lot from Ian Driver when it comes to producing a video.

I don’t think I would be much good at video blogging, but may give it a go at some time.

I had hoped to get to the new exhibition at The Turner Contemporary today but it looks like family commitments are not going to make this possible.

To be honest I had difficulty with the last exhibition, I went several times and it looked OK but just didn’t seem to make my artistic wotsisname revolve, so I am feeling a bit deprived and really want to se the Turners and Constables asap.

This isn’t something I can explain, as it doesn’t seem to be about whether I think the exhibition is any good, just that some exhibitions seem to inspire me to paint and draw and some don’t.

After all our Trace, with her blue woman having difficulty inserting blue tampon, a very tentative series of sketches, which didn’t seem to do much for me when I was looking at them, did something. What? Hard to say really, perhaps to do with the any lose toys in my attic, but. Yes. I did feel the urge to go out and sketch after each visit. 

My day off today and I will endeavour to add to this post. 

26 comments:

  1. That's the first time I've seen a video of him where he isn't shouting! Very good, though the kid in the background is distracting.

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    1. Absolutely Peter, I guess like me you know how hard it is to produce a convincing video. Not so sure about the “kid in the background” being a bad idea. Lots of us have to do stuff our children about. I know I would have sent mine off if I tried to do a video post and I am pretty sure it would have still been a lot worse than Ian’s offering.

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    2. I guess you're right Michael. I've tried doing something similar myself and the results were unwatchable!

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    3. In the film world if they get 3 mins screen time out of day's work then they consider they have done well.

      The secret about making a video is preparation. In close up the slightest stutter or flick of the eyes is magnified, distracts the audience and can make you look shifty. The knack to film work is economy of movement, as opposed to stage work which is often the opposite.You are taught that acting in films is 30% talent and 70% technique. It is no different for a video blog. It is easy for your background characters to steal the scene and more, much more.

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  2. For Cod's sake, I've haddock enough of this. There's a time and a plaice for bad fish puns and bassically this isn't it. Sorry to carp on but salmon had to say it and not just skate around the issue

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    1. Anon 12:48 pm,

      I like it. But anymore of this and you've had your chips.

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  3. Michael, if you seriously want me to believe you are a floating voter, you will stop plugging Will Scobie's credentials and chances this far in advance of 2015 without taking a more balanced approach and looking at the current MP's record.

    As for Driver, well it is a decent video, but, whereas I never had much time for his politics and beliefs, which are totally alien to mine, his 'kicked some ass' comment when referring to the butcher Giap totally finished him in my book. I write for a couple of service association newsletters and shall ensure that gets included in my next articles.

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    1. All Michael said here was he thought that Will Scobie stood a chance of being elected regardless of whether Nigel Farage stood or not. Hardly plugging his credentials.
      I am sure some other UKIP candidate will stand though, even one of the KCC UKIP councillors.

      It seems to me that the best way to promote a candidate is to rubbish them. After the Daily Mail has tried to rubbish the the Miliband family, Ed's (and labours) fortunes has risen in the polls this week, undoing any gain that the tory conference may have given them.

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    2. UKIP's best chance is to bring in a candidate with no TDC or KCC history. Then attack Tory and Labour on their local history. That way UKIP would both be telling people what they already know plus what they want to hear. Groundwater contamination, convictions and arrests of tories, earner burner security, kitten cruelty, funding of unlawful military cadets, questions of qualies courtesy of Cyril (used to gain work ahead of genuinely qualified unemployed men), civil high court evidence questions, fraud squad inquiries, reports to police pro standards by retired murder case Det Ch Supt, South Africa Commission of Inquiry into mercenaries and their Ramsgate base, unfair dismissal tribunals at TDC and what was said in evidence about Thanet based IRA supportive right wing group, two Labour cllrs and one Chief Exec of TDC reporting to police matters subject of Terrorism Act 2000.

      TEF, Pleasurama, what happened to grant aid ?

      Secrecy over Thor and Sericol ground water contaminations. Both sites had incidents of rising ground water during remediation too. A water mains burst and a fire.

      Building Westwood Cross over an unmapped anthrax burial site. (It is OK to have it under a car park).

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    3. Anon, 9:26, this is not the first time since Scobie was announced as the Labour candidate that he has pushed his claims. As for 2015, well they say a week is a long time in politics and yet here we are trying to assess chances for a positive age of 20 months into the future. Anybody's guess is valid at the moment, but it is only a guess not a prediction.

      On rubbishing, yes, short term, publicity, even bad, can enhance a candidates prospects, but once a seed is sown it tends to grow and the longer term effect can be far more damaging. Again, it remains to be seen.

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    4. Smart idea,. 8:26, but surely that was tried in 2011 by Tim Garbutt and he got nowhere. Very rarely do local issues impact on general election votes.

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    5. Correction to above, for 2011 read 2010. Tim campaigned then on issues like contamination and pollution, particularly at Manston, night flights, corruption, 0% salaries, arrests of councillors and council officers, but when challenged by James Maskell about the charges for the proposed arrests he clammed up. Throw in terrorists and White Mercenaries and you are into the losing of deposits stakes.

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  4. I guess I'm a floating voter too, despite usually voting Tory.

    Most of my beliefs are probably a little left wing, but then there are things like gay marriage and cannabis use where I'm much more in line with Roger Gale. So sometimes I struggle to find a party to represent my views.

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  5. Having managed the blog over a busy weekend via my mobile, zapping the odd bit of spam, 0%, gentlemen enlargement, firing ranges and oddly enough compression stockings, whatever they are. And no please please don’t tell me. I get the feeling that some of the commentators may have supped well after tentatively trying to produce some sort of video.

    It seems that somewhere in the post I have written a party political broadcast on behalf of Will Scobie, but I can’t seem to find this.

    The enormous JCB seems to have been going ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa for 8.26 while he dug up the car park at Westwood Cross removing the deadly threat of anthrax. I do hope he didn’t forget to buy the compression stockings and overshoes.

    It does make one wonder what the resultant video was like if that was the masterplan.

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    1. Michael, you might not be taking firing ranges and high court perjury seriously, thus zapping such input, but I see over on Ian Driver's site he is into an exchange with Rick offering to publish his report on such matters. Takes one to know one I guess.

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    2. William, joking apart here and it doesn’t go unnoticed here that you can actually take a joke at your own expense, much of the problem here lies with misunderstanding pollution and ecological issues.

      The bottom line here being that as a species we have overly polluted our environment, so if you take a small part of the world, like Thanet combining a little knowledge of science, you can get into a very tangled webb.

      Take this further and try and use the information to support some wild ideas and you can waste your life obsessing over these issues.

      Take the anthrax as one example, now anthrax bacteria exists in all of the world and can survive for centuries, it was a great killer up until the 1880s when Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine.

      However going down the road of considering that any old hospital or graveyard site is dangerous if it is converted to a car park is just plain potty. Sitting here in my bookshop the nearest old graveyard that would definitely have contained people who died from the disease is the car park at Aldi and I guess if you live in a town it is highly likely that some of the car parks nearby are on old graveyards.

      Manston air pollution is another similar issue, here we are talking about pollution caused by internal combustion engines, which in some parts of the world leads to terrible smog that can indeed kill people.

      Obviously in terms of aircraft engine pollution you would need to consider this very seriously around busy airports with a lot of plane movements and I guess the very fact that the people around Gatwick and Heathrow are not dying like flies makes common sense suggest that around Manston with less than 1% of the plane movement of these busy airports, we don’t have much of an issue.

      We do however have some air pollution issues around busy road junctions and in the UK this is something we are getting better at monitoring although we haven’t got very far with resolving it.

      Now obviously if on still days Thanet was covered by a heavy smog this would be a potential election issue, just as obviously, on a still day the air will be cleaner a long way from civilisation, say on a remote island.

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  6. Browsing around the blogs today, this fish & chip shop one caught my eye. Can't have enough good chippies in my book so let's wish them well.

    On the Turner exhibition, and I'm into Turner and Constable, bad feedback elsewhere suggests the stench from Margate harbour is sending visitors fleeing with hankies clasped to their snouts. We hear much of snouts in troughs over on Driver's blog, but I doubt too many will be sniffing up the delights of rotting sea weed.

    See William picked up on the new love match between Driver and Card. I suppose the former was attracted by juicy stories of perjury committing Tories, but wait until he gets to the Uzi wielding Arabs in Birchington. Love to see him turn that one into a new band wagon.

    Back to work I guess, before my idleness costs me money. Keep blogging, Michael.

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    1. On saturday Pegwell Bay smelt far worse than Margate (I know as I walked past them both!).

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    2. Allan, I do try to keep at it and to keep some sense of balance, my guess is that Ian’s sense of humour will come to his rescue.

      Peter sewage pipe blockage, the local press are on to it and Southern Water say it will take another week to mend.

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  7. http://inforrm.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/case-law-thompson-v-james-blogger-loses-libel-claim-against-council-gervase-de-wilde/ something of interest re filming and blogging

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    1. Clive Hart claims that TDC meetings are broadcast in full (yet Simon Moores admits that they're edited):

      http://thanet.gov.uk/the-thanet-magazine/press-releases/2013/october/filming-at-council-meetings/

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    2. I look forward to laughing at you and the other poor saps of FORs when the implications of the case law become apparent :)

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    3. Mind you you have to wonder what james's comment has to do with a fish n chip shop ;)

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  8. I see on twitter that John Worrow has come out... against the public filming council meetings!

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    1. Hardly surprising in view of his outbursts and antics. Mind you I did wonder what the comment at 7:44 had to do with a fish and chip shop, but, on recalling the last photo I saw of JW's face, it was vaguely reminiscent of a sweaty cod.

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  9. http://thanet.gov.uk/the-thanet-magazine/council-meeting-webcast/

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.