komadori’s green corner

I read that the Japanese are considering alternatives to tuna for sushi, owing to a shortage brought on by the worldwide popularity of the dish (and their own consumption).

At the Fukuzushi restaurant in Tokyo, Shigekazu Ozoe, said he might use red-coloured substitutes such as horse and deer if tuna supplies ran out, as he did in 1973 when a mercury poisoning scare meant customers refused to eat the fish.
“We tasted it, and horse sushi was pretty good. It was soft, easy to bite off, had no smell,” he told the New York Times.

I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you’re a vampire — the taste of blood is quite strong. I once had the privilege of trying both horse sashimi and beef sashimi in a small village in central Japan. In comparison with the beef sashimi, the horse sashimi was pleasant with a mild flavour; an acquirable taste. Beef sashimi was like chewing on an open wound.

I’m very much in favour of the ‘Inspired’ proposals for the Science Museum at Wroughton Airfield, but as usual the artist’s impression is glossy nonsense: never before have a set of old concrete hangers looked so shiny. In the words of the architect responsible for this nonsense

It looks quite pretty. Swindon could do with more landmark buildings so these plans could be the answer.

Pretty? It’s just infilling between the existing hangars. It will be no more a ‘landmark’ than those existing hangars (which admittedly are visible on the hilltop from the southern edge of Swindon) and according to the artist’s impression will be almost completely hidden by trees. There’s certainly no wow factor here.

So I exaggerate a little: Swindon is neither sunny (as I write, ’tis raining outside) nor by the sea; but my exaggeration is only slightly more than that of Anna Mansell of The Adver.

SWINDON may be a somewhat land-locked town, but residents will soon be able to bask on a beautiful beach…. A sweeping bend will be created on the river at Rivermead, and the beach will be installed giving visitors a place to sit and enjoy the scene and animal life sights.

I don’t think ‘basking’ is quite what the Swindon Water for Wildlife River Ray restoration project has in mind, as becomes clear later in the article.

This big sweeping bend will provide a shallow, graded gravel beach which will provide a community focus in the area where people can come and enjoy the river, sit and contemplate, or dip their dogs.

No hint of basking there. More a case of taking cover as a flotilla of soggy dogs shake themselves dry.

The deputy leader of Swindon’s red nest seems unsure as to what caused one councillor’s encounter with the law to make it to the front page of the local rag, and another councillor’s encounter with the law just got a small mention on the inside pages.

Two Councillors in the paper too for alleged misdemeanours. Interesting one is a front page article and the other one a few lines on an inside page. Not sure if that’s due to the worlds obsession with sex, or political bias?

Unless she has never read a UK newspaper, I’d have thought that was simple to answer. The outspoken Councillor Glaholm arrested for kerb-crawling, or Councillor Heenan charged with failing to produce a driving licence, driving without insurance and failing to display a valid vehicle excise licence (and one of those charges already dropped, apparently). For an editor of a local daily paper with nothing much to report and looking for a salacious headline, the choice is obvious.

This morning I went to the Swindon Gateway Partnership’s display of their new plans for the area to the east of Coate Water. They are a great improvement on the previous plans. That does not make them good. To quote the developers’ consultants.

Sarah Smith, associate director of DPDS, said: “Essentially what’s changed is we have taken on board the local planning inspector’s comments about the views into and out of Coate Water Country Park. Therefore we have looked at moving the university site further south to remove some of the higher buildings out of these views. We have increased the buffer zone to the special site of scientific interest by about 40 per cent.

That’s all very well and is an improvement on their earlier plans. However, in place of the university at the northern end of the site there will now be a residential area… right up close to the northern arm of Coate Water. That’s the part of Coate Water that has the most visitors. There’s no buffer zone there. And at upto 5 storeys tall (according to Ms Smith this morning), even with a wider buffer zone, the university buildings are not going to be hidden out-of-sight. The possibility of imposing lower limits on those university buildings nearest Coate Water was considered but discounted by the developers (or in Ms Smith’s words “It’s in the plans’ environmental statement.”).

The overall impression from the display was of some fairly uncaring developers (they can afford to be — Swindon Borough Council is on their side). Ms Smith’s colleague was like a record stuck in a groove, repeating “it complies with national standards” in response to every concern raised (noise from adjoining main roads; provision of utilities; density of housing; impact on road congestion…). I’m sure that is true, but on its own it does not win many friends.

I’m not sure how one can miss a huge conifer, but apparently one can.

For operational reasons, it has become necessary to remove one of the conifer trees at the main gate area…. The main gate area will be closed and coned off to all vehicles entering and exiting the site, whilst this work is undertaken.

The tree is being felled because there is a laser link being installed…. Without the link no data or telephony will be available to [quango 1]. The equipment and line of sight is formally agreed between BT and [quango 2].

Unfortunately the installers have now informed us the tree will interfere with the signal and there is no time to change direction on this. I am happy to arrange replanting of 2 new trees elsewhere to rebalance the situation.

Clearly nobody bothered looking along the ‘line of sight’. If they had they’d have noticed their sight obstructed by the tree. As its a conifer, they don’t even have the excuse of the tree being bare if the planning was done in winter. Project planning at its best.

Clearly, Tewkesbury is a very important place for it’s MP. I’m not sure that many in the rest of the country would share Mr Robertson’s view of its importance though.

“There’s a train only every one hour and 52 minutes,” Mr Robertson told the House of Commons. “On a lot of the trains you have to change if you want to come to London. The cost of an open return is £139. This really is a very, very poor service between a very important area of the country and London.”

Hmm… Tewkesbury, such an important town that its station in called Tewkesbury Grand Central Ashchurch.

An independent group has published a report on the problems with the electronic voting system trialled in Swindon in the local council elections in May. Many of the problems identified in the report were already widely known immediately after the election and many of it’s more serious allegations (e.g. that people could have voted twice) were readily refuted by the deputy returning officer. Others were not. Of particular concern are the lack of security

POs [Presiding Officers] were tasked with collecting laptops and other equipment relating to the setup and operation of polling stations. POs are expected to lead the opening and running of their polling station with security a primary concern. It is therefore surprising, given the security concerns that should accompany the use of computers in elections, that POs were allowed to take the laptops for voting home with them one day or more before the election. This provided considerable time for potentially malicious or fraudulent modifications to the laptops, by POs and others to whom they could have given access.

and lack of scrutiny.

In South Bucks and Swindon votes were downloaded and counted on computers controlled by supplier’s staff without any candidate, agent or observer able to examine the process…. In Swindon, CDs were delivered which were said to have the e-votes on them, but nobody had observed the votes being downloaded to the disks or seen what had happened to them until they were inserted into ‘clean’ machines at the count which, attendees were told, decrypted and counted the votes.

Also surprising, from the deputy returning officer’s response to the report, is just how many were expected to vote electronically.

We reduced the number of manual counting staff by about 50 people as we expected 40 per cent of the electorate to vote electronically, but only 24 per cent did.

Given that turn-out is highest amongst the elderly, lowest amongst those in their teens and twenties, to have expected almost half of active voters to change the habit of a lifetime and embrace the new technology was very optimistic.

In public life, the point often made is that it is not enough to abide by the appropriate standards, but one also has to be seen to abide by those standards; it is not enough not to commit any misdemeanours, one must also avoid the perception that one might have committed a misdemeanour. Regardless of what may be the outcome of Councillor Glaholm’s recent arrest, that perception of the highest standards being maintained has gone. (Some might say it went when he was arrested whilst mayor in 1994.) To have such a person chairing Swindon Borough Council’s Scrutiny Committee, especially when the council has only recently changed its constitution to allow him to do so, looks distinctly tawdry.

I see that Toby Sturgis, cabinet member for planning and waste on Wiltshire County Council has a rather poor understanding (i.e. virtually none) of the science on which some of the decisions within his remit are should be made. On the council’s trial of food digesting bins, he is reported to have said

It’s not sustainable to keep on burying this rubbish in the ground. It is expensive and it produces green house gases

Err… so what do these food digesting bins produce? To quote from the Wiltshire Waste Partnership’s website, describing one of the two designs of food digesting bin being offered.

The patented design ensures the total breakdown of all food waste into its natural components of water and carbon dioxide, thus producing minimal residue.

Ah, good old CO2, one of the main green house gases.