— SimonWaldman.net

As I’m sure you’ve heard, they’re going to stop painting the Forth Bridge. According to the Independent:

After 10 years, £130m and some extraordinary feats of scaffolding, the 1.6-mile rail bridge, which connects Edinburgh to Fife, will not require repainting for some 25 years

All because of a new kind of paint.

If we’re not careful, they’ll soon be building oil tankers that can turn around on the head of a pin [instead of 2km as they take at the moment].

Anyway – both cliches that spring to mind as the task of sorting out Yahoo goes into its next phase..

Via: Why painting the Forth Bridge isn’t like painting the Forth Bridge any more – Home News, UK – The Independent.

One of the by-products of the phone hacking saga has been getting to see certain celebrities in a different light. Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan have both come out with a great deal more integrity than the media that prey on them.

Anyway – a great interview with Coogan in the Guardian today , including.

“It serves certain people’s commercial interests to characterise what’s happening as an attack on the freedom of the press and it’s not,” he says.

“It’s about responsible journalism. The tabloids operate in an amoral parallel universe where the bottom line is selling newspapers.

“It’s like blaming a scorpion for not being moral. They just sting people. That’s what they do. Sometimes they might sting someone who deserves it. But it’s not through any moral imperative.

“And this idea that for every 20 stories they do about a pile of shit, they do one story that has some sort of nobility to it – I don’t buy it.”

and

The Daily Mail is worse than the redtops because it has this semblance of respectability. To me the Daily Mail is like a used car salesman in a cheap suit because it masquerades as having this respectability about it and yet it peddles the same kind of hate-mongering [as] the redtops.

and

However rich or successful I am, I have fucking human rights. That’s the first thing. I have certain rights and I need to be treated with respect. I don’t deserve to be published for being successful.

via Steve Coogan: What I really think of Coulson, Dacre and the Daily Mail | Media | The Guardian.

I’m looking forward to Polly Toynbee’s Radio 4 series, The Class Ceiling about the decline of social mobility in the UK. Expect it will spark the usual awkward cycle of outrage,  relief, and then guilt that is the stuff of middle-class, quite well-off, liberal parenthood . It is the standard reaction when faced with something that you know isn’t right, but may well be of benefit to your own children.

Regardless of that – I found this fact in her column in the Guardian about the series quite startling.

Only 24% call themselves working class now. Where once the label was a badge of pride (67% claimed it in 1988) now those self-defining as working class say despondently that it only means “poor” and “low-paid” these days.

That amounts to a drop of nearly 44 per centage points – or 65% less people – calling themselves working class. In 20 years time will the very concept of the ‘working class’ be resigned to the history books, the stuff of Orwell, coal mines and cotton mills – and we’ll just talk about middle class and the ‘underclass’?

via Money busts the convenient myth that social class is dead | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | The Guardian.

One of those facts to bring out that no-one will actually believe..

The last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

via Think Again: War – By Joshua S. Goldstein | Foreign Policy.

Just remembered this sketch from Not The Nine O’clock news…seems from the comments that quite a few others have too