Archive for October, 2008


A busy Halloween

October 31st, 2008 by Roger Darlington

It was a busy Halloween evening. Between 5.30-7.30 pm, the doorbell rang no less than nine times as we were visited by a total of 31 local children. Fortunately Vee had bought lots of miniature chocolate bars and filled up a plastic bucket with them, so everyone went away with two items each. Here are […]

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Waiting for Halloween

October 31st, 2008 by Roger Darlington

When I was a kid (which admittedly was some five decades ago), here in Britain (at the time I lived in Manchester), this time of year meant Bonfire Night: collecting material for a bonfire, building a guy, collecting money for fireworks and then – on the night itself – the bonfire, the fireworks, toffee apples […]

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Matrix working in Whitehall

October 31st, 2008 by Roger Darlington

Matrix management is very fashionable in the business world – although far from easy to achieve effectively. But the concept seems to be growing in popularity in the political world. Take, for instance, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (snappy title that) which I deal with most because of my involvement in consumer […]

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The American presidential election (87)

October 31st, 2008 by Roger Darlington

Barack Obama (playing himself) pals around with Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) to discuss “The West Wing” and how to spread the wealth For me, the best entertainment television ever produced was “The West Wing”. I watched every episode of every one of the seven series as they were first broadcast; then I rewatched […]

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Back to 6,000 visits a day

October 30th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

The traffic figures for my web site (which embraces my two blogs NightHawk & CommsWatch) follows a couple of cyclical patterns. On a weekly basis, traffic usually peaks on a Tuesday (when people have got on top of the new week’s e-mails?), slowly falls down to Saturday, and starts rising again on the Sunday (when […]

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The American presidential election (86)

October 30th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

You can watch the groundbreaking 30-minute commercial from Barack Obama in four parts here:

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World heading for “ecological credit crunch”

October 29th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

“The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr […]

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Would you vote for an atheist?

October 29th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

I would – but apparently one in five voters in Britain and one in two voters in the United States would not. “In the US survey, the most electoral objectionable group was atheists, with 53% of Americans saying they would not vote for an otherwise well-qualified Presidential candidate who was an atheist. One would expect […]

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Snow in London

October 28th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

Here in London, it snows rarely. Indeed we can go a whole winter without snow. But tonight it’s snowing here. I can’t remember when it last snowed in London in October. Footnote (29/10/08): I’ve lived in London since 1971 and never seen snow here in October. Today’s media advised us that this has been the […]

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Credit crisis hits London hard

October 28th, 2008 by Roger Darlington

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