[conspire] How does changing CABAL to 1-9 pm sound?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> Some folks are still more likely to trek out to Ealing than try to
> work out how to get to, say, Camberwell ("Is that in Brighton? Do they
> grow carrots there?"), but Ken Livingstone did manage to help cover
> the area with buses.

One suspects denizens of Westminster take one look at the monstrosity
that is Elephant and Castle, turn around, and decide to proceed no
further south.  Camberwell thus becomes a blip on the further horizon,
and Croydon and Bromley purely the province of myth.

> Never mind that as of Tuesday we've now got a racist tory for a mayor
> who managed to bring enough wingnut votes in that the BNP ("Didn't our
> granddads fight those guys in The War?") got a seat on the London
> Assembly... *shudder*  It's like the Bush election all over again.
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/01/boris.livingstone

I rather lost track of London politics above the level of boroughs
around 1986 for the simple reason that Thatcher had just crushed the
politically inconvenient forum for such politics, the Greater London
Council, getting it utterly destroyed by Parliament, root and branch.
So, I was a bit perplexed to pass through the UK in 2005 and hear that
Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London.  Hullo?  Wasn't that the 1980s?  

Of course, everything old was new again, with the Greater London
Authority being created in 2000, and the voters, with a fine sense of
history, putting Ken Livingstone right back in power as Mayor again.  I
heard that his victory speach started out "As I was saying before I was
so rudely interrupted 14 years ago...."

But yes, Mr Boris Johnson does seem quite the small-minded thug.  And
he's now _mayor_?  Good god.

[_Good Omens_:]

> Haha, I read enough of that to get that bit.  That book was interesting
> in how clear it was who wrote which bits.  The big clue is that
> Pratchett really doesn't do dialogue very well: he prefers to lay out a
> few pages of spiraling exposition and scene-setting and then have a
> character drop one dull-witted anticlimax or punchline.

It's peppered with good bits, including the protagonist's malfunctioning
Japanese subcompact, a Wasabi, which he forlornly tries to keep running
despite the fact that he's apparently the only owner of that make in all
of England.

> I have never actually seen the M25, because I only ever leave London by
> rail.

The first few times I used Heathrow, my bus crossed it on the M4, but
that's it for me.  (This preceded the Tube extension's completion.)