What?

I have no idea what to do with this. Everyday, they make themselves just a little bit more electable, albeit by basically creating a new party. A Tory party that cares about things like social mobility and the environment would be like, well, a Labour party that valued big business over the well-being of the workers, if you can imagine that. Is there any similarity left between the Tories today and the 1980s government? Thatcher must be rolling in her grave. During the day, I suppose.

The issue of education brings out my most lefty views. I don't believe in school choice and market forces (and I'm an economist) for the provision of compulsory education, because I've thought a lot about these things and I understand about both equity and efficiency, and I also don't forget that there is a short-run. The argument for increasing competetion between schools is essentially a Darwinian one - badly run schools will fail, while good schools will prosper. Don't worry about the generation of children who are educated at one of the failing schools, because in the long run, only the best schools will remain and education will be fantastic, providing you can afford to travel.

Really, this all comes down to what role state-provided education is really all about. I believe it should provide the basic skills and knowledge to allow equality of opportunity so that when it becomes time for a student to make his own future decisions, he is not impeded. He is able to go to whichever university suits his or her ability, or to get a job, or whatever. None of this should depend on his or her family background, and none of this should be affected by the academic opportunities he or she was presented with as a child.

The best schools attract the best teachers. The best schools are also able to be more selective, and with no other information, are more likely to choose children from more priveledged backgrounds on the reasonable assumption that they are, genetically speaking, more able. This penalises children from poor backgrounds and the less academically gifted in two ways. They end up with worse teachers, when really they need the best teachers to get anything out of them, and they miss out on the valuable peer effects - children perform better in classes where they are surrounded by hard-working or able students.

And let us be clear on one thing - most of what is taught in schools does not make the country more or less productive. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the only subject positively linked to directly causing economic growth is primary school maths*. So any argument that says that academic selection allows the brightest children to prosper is not the same as saying academic selection helps our future economy. On the job training, vocational qualifications and univeristy education really drive our productive capabilities, or at least allow employers to screen for the most able individuals and assign them more efficiently to the top jobs.

There may be more on this later, when I've, you know, done some revision.

*Alison Wolf, "Does Education Matter?", (2000)

So, Sunday was my fourth standup outing, and I'm really starting to get the feel of my own act. It was also a completely nerveless performance, and it gave me a lot of confidence that audiences will find my material funny, which is always the big risk with my one-liner based style of word play and punnery. I'm always worried the audience will realise they are too smart to be laughing at something this daft.

I've noticed audiences react really well to setups that are really absurd (singing cat in the back of my mouth, blood ham, small man in a bicycle wheel). I found this odd - I always assumed the best reactions would be on the gags which had more effortless setups, even though I personally am a mark for the really silly stuff. It's gratifying to be rewarded (with laughs) for that.

I realised I should have written an addendum to my last post of the local elections. More seats went the Tory way in the aftermath, and the Lib Dems lost quite a few (though Eastbourne and Northampton were big wins). As the Tory vote remained at last years 40%, I tentatively stick to my original conclusion that overall, there wasn't a huge indication of Tory's stealing Lib Dem voters.

A number of things have occured recently, marking this period of time out as unusual. My thesis was finished, bounded, sealed, coated with wax and handed in. Cath has taken to calling it my "baby", often finding me lovingly holding a copy in my arms, telling it stories and tucking it in at night. Much like an actual baby, I became tired of it recently, wishing it would just go away and frequently threw it on the floor. Finally, I was able to send it out in the world, knowing I had done all I could to prepare it for the harsh realities of modern existence, disappointed in its flaws and wishing it was prettier. However, unlike an actual baby, the man who took it off me did not offer me any money.

On Monday I went to watch the Haunted - the last gig I'll see at the real Zodiac. They were great, playing the new songs (which I enjoyed more live than on CD) and some oldies. Best thrash band in the world. For an Oxford gig, the pit was OK. Metal gigs in Oxford have the following structure. Kids at the front, pressed against the barrier, noticeably not moving, nodding, possibly even blinking for the entire three hours (Frontman Peter Dolving actually asked one of them if he was even enjoying the show). Then, a large space where the pit is. Then, everyone else, keeping to the back, as if they were actually there for some other reason.

The two support acts were Wolf (power metal cheesiness with porno bassist) and crossover-thrash kings Municipal Waste, who are so dumb and fast they can't help be entertaining: "This song is about ripping your fucking face off and throwing it on the stage. I wanna see 47 faces on the stage by the end of this song. It's called...Headbanger Face Rip". Other classics include "The Thrashing of the Christ" and "Terror Shark" ("This is a song about a shark").

Come to the Ministry of Mirth this Sunday, 8pm, at the Wheatsheaf. The show will feature some of the smartest comedy acts in town - Tom Greeves and John Lean and Andy Murray and Alex Erler and Parth Sonerji - and possibly the dumbest - Craig Holmes. Expect jokes about ham, Norway, skipping ropes and bicycles. Also, check out the new Ministry logo - it's all awesome and drawn by John, who got paid for it and as such now has a CV.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/vote2007/councils/html/31ue.stm

OK, I don't live there anymore, but this is still quite a thing of beauty. Hinckley and Bosworth has been Tory forever. The MP for Bosworth is one of the few who survived the cash-for-questions scandal and kept his seat in 1997. That's how Tory my hometown was. They'd rather elect sleaze-monkey. In 2005, the vote swung several thousand in the Lib Dem direction, so maybe in 2009 it can go further. And then I will dance around my parents house singing "Do you know the way the San Jose?".

By my count so far, two councils have changed from Liberal Democrat to Tory, and two have gone the other way. Most of the other gains for both parties have come from places where there was no overall control before. This seems like a positive result. Even better, in the past year the Tory share of the popular vote only increased by 1%, and the Lib Dem share only dropped by 1%. I would say that this suggests the Tories aren't doing so well in stealing Lib Dem voters by talking about traditional liberal issues than they would hope.

I'm also glad Labour didn't do as badly as predicted. I'm no Blair supporter, but I'm a little tired of people complaining that things are no better, or even worse, than in 1997. They are not. In so many ways they are not. It is not perfect, but it is annoying that the things this government has actually gotten right are forgotten just because everyone is getting bored.

I got an internship at OxERA, who do economics but don't do it in a classroom, and instead do it for cash wages. I didn't really understand. I asked about it in the classroom, but I was not given a good answer. Then they offered me cash wages, and I decided that I no longer needed to understand. Ever again.

Today's BBC News Have Your Say was all about the comments of Lord Chief Justice Lord Phillips, who yesterday said that some murderers are in jail for too long. The comments were roughly divided in half. The first half disagreed: life should mean life, a tautology and redundant expression if ever one existed. I checked in a dictionary, and the definition of life is exactly that.

The second half agreed that some murderers do spend too long in prison. In fact, this group believed that the exact amount of time a convicted murderer should spend it prison was the amount of time necessary for a suitable length of rope to be found, and, if necessary, a small scaffold to be erected.

In short, the Lord Chief Justice does not seem to be summarising the views of the normal people of Britain. Good. Normal people don't get to become judges (most of them, of course, don't have the Latin for the rigorous judging exams). The real complaint Lord Philips has, one shared by many of his colleagues, is over the mandatory sentences that are now imposed on over 100 crimes in the UK. Removing judicial discretion takes away the experience and knowledge of the very individuals who have the most to give. Some murderers are irrepairably damaged people: for the good of society they should be excluded from it. Some murderers made a terrible mistake, one that if appropriately punished would never be repeated. I can't believe that the appropriate punishment for that is to be locked away for ever. How can it be true that a person's entire life is dictated by the worst thing they ever did? If we can properly rehabilitate people, surely no-one is worse off at that point by allowing them to return to society?

In between that, there are people who committed mutliple offences, but could possibly be helped, and people that committed one offence, but if they weren't locked away for life they would certainly do it again. The point is this: they all have different shaped hands. And, when you have people with different shaped hands, you generally need a variety of gloves. (In this metaphor, gloves are prison sentences.)

This is what happens when the top two party's say, "Race you to the right. Last one there's hoody-hugger".

My Facebook feed tells me Adam Desmond and Mark Skimming are now friends, as of 3.09pm today. I think they met at three o'clock to sit down and finally work out those differences that have been hanging over them for years now: the awful, unspoken truths that filled a room with tension like a sponge. Five minutes were all it took to clear the air and repair the bridges everyone said were too burned down to ever exist again. Two minutes then to draw up the treaty, a minute to sign it (Mark's full name is over 3 pages long, though not always consecutively), and one moment to make a joke about the proper way to clean endangered wildlife for the assembled press.

Facebook is efficient.

Children, gather around. Say you have, I don't know, half an hour of which you have nothing do. Then why not listen to the Sunday Sideshow, a radio program, if that is really the word, of topical material, irreverent discussion and jokes about disabled people. Well, famous people. That's kind of the same.

I went to watch the BJ Show last Wednesday. Brad should be commended for his efforts, because it was basically a one man project, particularly the writing and video production, and not a small part of the acting. The first half was sketch, though with a series of stories or themes running through. Some of it wasn't all that funny, some of it was killer. I was impressed at exactly how offensive the Cancer vs. Genital Warts leadership battle scene was (there was some laughter, but the audience did not seem hugely enthused by a dying cancer kid being credited with popularising the bald head look). The acting wasn't always great, and it occassionaly tried to be cleverer than it actually was, but overall it was an impressive effort.

The second half was Theatresports improv, and I thought it was really tight. Some scenes could have been longer: there was quite a bit of cutting out at a big joke rather than trying for a nicer conclusion, but I probably laughed more during that part than the scripted bits.

Overall, I thought it was a good night's entertainment, if not the pinnacle of comedy in this town. I don't think it deserved all the comments made in Ben Laffery's review, but then as he clearly knows nothing about improv (and our cast member-laden audience) and thinks Facebooking relationship status counts as intelligently researched journalism then I don't think they really would have mattered much.

Yesterday I went to listen to Sir Nicholas Stern at the Examination Schools. Of the many topics he could have been asked to discuss, climate change was the one he finally settled on. He made a very succinct presentation of his findings in the Report, and with the benefit of four months outside scrutiny, also made a considered defence against the criticisms he has faced since last November. (Herein we get all technical) He talked about the probability distributions the team used is assessing how certain levels of carbon in the atmosphere translate to temperature changes.

At 450 ppm CO2e, just above te current level, there is a 50% chance of temperatures increasing by more than 1.5°C, while at 550 ppm CO2e, there is a 50% chance of temperatures increasing by more than 3°C. Both predictions had a 95% confidence band of about 5°C. The distributions they used are by no means the most conservative, but are similarly not the most outlandish. Also, his assumptions close, and possibly slightly more conservative than the most recent IPCC report predictions. (That wasn't too bad, was it?)

Basically, I was impressed and left feeling the doubters are the ones that need to prove themselves now.

Plus, he discussed the reasons people may not want to act: 1. don't believe the science; 2. believe we will be able to adapt when it happens; 3. don't care about the future. These, he said, were 1. absurd 2. reckless and 3. unethical. Plus, he did manage to get one little dig in: he said there are many top scientists who aren't convinced climate change is a man-made phenomena. Nigel Lawson, for example.

Watched a Chris Rock DVD today (Bigger and Blacker). I really love Chris Rock shows. For a start the audiences he has (predominantly black) make each show seem like an event: jumping up and shouting approval and applauding and literally rolling in the aisles. Its more like a healing than a standup gig. Add to that the fact that Chris Rock is a very talented comedian, and one of the best social critics that isn't dead. He courts controversy (almost daring the audience to disagree with him), but not in the way that's only purpose is to see how far you can go. He, moreso than any other "Blacks guys are like this, but white guys are doing this" comics of the 1990s, is the heir to Richard Pryor. There's a point of view and an honesty and an inelligence that stands out a lot more than the actual material and style.

I still need to track down Bring the Pain. "Black people and niggas" is still one of my top five standup routines. Check it.

Went to see some modern art at a suitably titled gallery last Friday. The main exhibit is by a abstract artist called Callum Innes. I liked looking at his paintings, which he achieves by repeated painting and paint removal. The Exposed series especially are very striking when together, as one kind of evoles into the next.

I'd probably go and have another wander around in the next week or so, and then the artist himself is coming to discuss his work on March 8th. I'd like to know more about his paintings than just what they look like, but without reading some critic who uses the phrases like "representing isolation of the self".

Amongst the many things I like to do during my day, trawling through the BBC News page for something to be annoyed at ranks pretty high. I especially like the Have Your Say page as a good starting point for any prospective bout of humanity-doubt.

"I'm not a racist/homophobe/cello player but its about time the silent majority stood up to these brown folk/perverts/bassoon players and said enough is enough and it's time that we returned to the good old fashioned values of segregation/public floggings/string quartets." And why is it the "silent majority" are always about so quiet as to resemble, in fact, a regular-volumed minority? How do they manage that? Do they have to meet up to practice it?

Sometimes, however, you manage to find so many reasons to want a species-change within the main pages. I am aware the Stern report is in all likelihood the very worst case scenario. I sleep easier at night someone is making the worse case scenario public knowledge. That way, we can decide whether the very worst thing possible is something we all want to risk.

That said, how is it possible that anyone can still express doubts about who it was what did all that planet burnin'? And how is the argument that the costs right now may be too high to pay a good one? Are we to expect a discount later on, maybe when we've found an a second planet in the country that needs a bit of work? That would be like a Chancellor who just threw money to people in the streets because the costs of cutting back now outweight the three year recession that will follow? Oh wait, he did that too.

My favourite part of all of this is the reminder to the world that Tories are no longer relevant. The only way to make yourself a relevant conservative is to be a Conservative For Change. It's over. It's time to go home.

I heartily recommend graduate study. This term has been great - hardly any lectures, plenty of free time to research and read and write my thesis. I can hop between seminars that up to three minutes before I had no interest in and five minutes after I stop thinking about, just for the sheer economics of it.

But mainly, I had this dream last night. In my dream, I believed I was in a recurring, well, not exactly dream because I didn't acknowledge that I was asleep, but a recurring story, I suppose. As a result, I knew it was going to veer into nightmare territory, and I knew what the nightmarish incident was going to be - I was going to go from looking at someone to taking a third person look at myself, at which point, I was going to be a hideous green troll/goblin creature-thing. I'm pretty sure the person mentioned above were real - I reckon one of them was Bradley Whitford (West Wing) and Charlie (Imps), though I can't remember which of the two the person was at the time of the troll/goblin. The whole thing panned out exactly like a knew it would (I think there was even a part of it when I was asked by another person if I knew what happened next).

So you can imagine my surprise when I awoke from a nightmare that, quite frankly, I gave myself advance notice of, feeling like I had awoken from a nightmare.

[In this section I talk about how long it has been since I last posted a blog entry.]

Wow, hasn't it been a long time since I last posted a blog entry. I have been existing more or less constantly in this time, but it has gone undocumented. To recap: summer, caravaning, Rome, left home, new flat.

[In this section, I discuss what I'm up to right now.]

I'm co-running the Ministry of Mirth this term. There are shows 22 October, 5 November, 12 November and 26 November, so come down to the Wheatsheaf on those Sundays at 8pm. Tickets are £3, unless you want to buy a block and sell them on, in which case you can buy 10 for £15, which are valid for any of the shows.

This Sunday at 4pm, I am on the first broadcast of OXIDE's new panel game, The Sunday Sideshow. It's a regular panel show, with current affairs rounds, improv games and some very well scripted in-jokes. Please listen. If anyone knows how to rip directly from a stream, I would love it if you did this for me: you can listen here.

And there is still the Imps. In my spare time, I like to write a thesis.

[In this section I wax lyrical about my two current favourite albums]

I recently bought two albums that while in sound are completely different, have many similarities, mainly in the region of being excellent. The first is Cult of Luna's "Somewhere Along The Highway". CoL probably closest resemble a doom band, with the slow, chugging melodies and riffs. Doom, for me, is heavy music. I never think fast is heavy. Slow is heavy. Black Sabbath sound heavier to me than Dismember. And quiet moments can be heaviest of all, like the calm before a storm. The album is completely about creating an atmosphere in which the rest of the music can exist. It comes across much more like a single piece than a 10 track album, and that this quite an achievement.

The other album is Agrophobic Nosebleed's "Altered States of America". Clocking in at under 22 minutes long, this one hundred track alnum (that is 100 track) pushes right at the frontier of grindcore and extreme music. Most tracks last under 10 seconds, there's a 1000bpm drum machine thumping out blast beats behind the insane guitar shredding. The entire thing leaves you stunned - there is no respite from the dense wall of noise and chaos that begins and ends over and over within a single breath. I figure most people would say this wasn't music - I'd probably agree. It really is something else.

[In this section is stop writing]