komadori’s green corner

No, I’m not talking about the Adver, nor anything local for once.

It’s not every day that one comes across extreme profanity in an academic journal published by a learned society. However, the Royal Society of Chemistry have managed it. An article published in the journal Chemical Communications repeats one of the least acceptable four-letter-words of the English language, many times. Many, many times. The Society have even put a photo including said word on their website (and just in case they get a little churlish later on, I’ve stored a screenshot here). Those that have a subscription or feel that £22 is a reasonable price for a little hilarity at a stuffy academic society’s expense will see that never before have thin-walled and thick-walled copper nanotubes (and their pretty young friend, Bismuth nanotubes) been abbreviated to such effect.

What’s puzzling is how this ever made it into print. One can imagine a western colleague of the Chinese team that wrote the article ‘helping’ his colleagues with their English, wondering just how far the joke would get before someone pointed out the unfortunate acronym… and being somewhat amazed when it went as far as it did. But what about the editors at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s publishing branch in Cambridge? Either not a very worldly wise bunch, or too consumed by their high-brow interests to notice what’s now so obvious.

I see that The Register got there first ten days ago, but still worth a little extra publicity, methinks.

It’s been chucking down rain all day (to the extent that even a short walk to the local shops seems like a bad idea) and the Adver’s claiming that there’s no news. So, just to pass the time, here’s a photo of a recently retired dustbin, gathering the rain.

The failings in the publicity for Swindon Borough Council’s new fortnightly waste collections are now getting some news media coverage, from both the BBC and the Adver. The tone of both, though, is that this is just a temporary problem, that once people realise their waste will only be collected once a fortnight, the problem will go away. I don’t believe that. In streets with wheelie bins, some have a long way to go to bring their waste down to the one-wheelie-load per fortnight limit. It’s the same in blue bag streets, where many houses have put out several blue bags (I counted five outside one house in Westcott Place this morning), rather than just two as prescribed by the council.

The council say they’ll collect black bags for just one more week (this one). Unless there’s a big education effort on increasing recycling and reducing waste, it looks as though the streets of Swindon are going to be foul with uncollected waste for many weeks or months to come.

Looks like Swindon Borough Council may have forgotten to maintain the payments for their website. Since the beginning of the weekend at least, it’s been showing the holding page from Netnames, the council’s domain registrar.

Update, Tuesday 13 November: the site is back to normal now.

Today I have been the recipient of part of Ms Snelgrove’s £144,330 annual expenses spend: her parliamentary report. Being paid for with tax payer’s money, the criticism of the local blue nest is more subdued than usual, but it remains pure classic snelgrove.

Whatever I do in my work at the Houses of Parliament, I always think ‘how would this affect Swindon?’

Really? I presume she next thinks ‘What do the party whips want me to do?’ and the answer to that always takes precedence over the effect on Swindon. It’s nice to see her concern for the rural areas around Swindon too.

Constituents in rural areas often feel their concerns are not as high on the council agenda as those of more urban communities. Smaller villages need to retain their individual identities and I want to make sure that they are not ‘lumped in’ with other areas.

Well, perhaps she could make a useful contribution by opposing her own government’s imposition of 34,000 extra houses around Swindon over the next twenty years. Or would that be too much like putting the interests of Swindon before her attempts to crawl up the political ladder?

I feel I should apologise for overstating how obvious the ‘no black bag collections after 5 November’ statement was. Looking out in my street a few minutes ago, there was not a black bag in sight (our traditional collection would have been tomorrow morning), but Westcott Place and the Railway Village are very much black bag ago-go areas. I thus deduce that the little-yellow-label-on-plastic-bag’ communication method was not uniform across the town and other less fortunate souls may have had this important communication via more obscure means.

I also note that some in the Railway Village have taken the ‘there will be no collections from the alleyways’ message to heart, and have moved their wheelie bins to the fronts of their houses.

I’m not aware of there being a ‘Most incompetent communications exercise’ competition for local councils, but it seems that the current administration would be the unchallengeable winners if there were.

The rather active populous at the other end of central ward have set-up a new blog for the campaign against fortnightly rubbish collections, as opposition extends in Swindon beyond the local area. For those interested in the campaign, it has some useful information. The same people have also reported a certain level of confusion from the council workers as to who will have a wheelie bin collection and who will not. To tell people that a wheelie bin is only for storing rubbish in and that rubbish will not be collected from it (they need to take the rubbish out of the wheelie bin before putting it out for collection) is to bring the whole process down to the level of farce.

It may not have been demolished yet, but Westlecott Farm is now surrounded by development work. Further east, with only a few months to go before the first houses in East Wichel are meant to be ready, there’s no sign of even foundations being laid yet.

It is with sadness that we note today the passing of weekly rubbish collections. Born in the Victorian era as a health measure, weekly rubbish collections had an honourable, if un-noted, life maintaining the general sanitation of Swindon’s streets. Weekly rubbish collections leaves three younger siblings (weekly recycling collection, fortnightly garden waste collection and fortnightly plastic bottle collection) and two children (fortnightly wheelie bin collection and his exclusive brother weekly blue bag collection).

Weekly rubbish collections’ funeral was held early this evening at a landfill site in Wiltshire. At the request of his ‘guardian’ Mr Wren, no flowers please.

It’s amazing how much effort some people put in to their Hallowe’en decorations. It’s certainly brightened the Railway Village for the last few days.