Cheerleading and other social enterprises

In the last month or so I've been doing some case study interviewing and copywriting for TogetherWorks, the social enterprise network for Greater Manchester. Damien Mahoney's set of 5 short case study films are now available on YouTube, and my favourite is without doubt the fabulous Manchester Diamonds Cheerleading Community Enterprise Company...

Now Playing...

Algerian-French musician Rachid Taha covering The Clash's Rock the Casbah. Genius...

Science Museum rubbish

Another work of bitter genius from Marc Roberts:

Police floor WW2 veteran

As well as reports of heavy-handed policing of the demo against the fascist EDL in Bolton last Saturday, this video has come out of riot police splatting an 89-year-old WW2 veteran who was there to protest against racism. Nice one, lads, 'just doing your duty':

Weird barmy people

I know that on one level I'm scared that the right wing in its many guises is so powerful. But on another, it's a source of eternal mystification and amusement that some of them are so plain barking.
Take 'Eddie,' author of an article called 'Destructive Environmentalists' on Bloggerbase, yet another we'll-make-your-rantings-world-famous writing platform. Now, I know that the Daily Mail article OA & I were interviewed for a good couple of years ago bore about as much relation to reality as Katie Price's mammaries, but at least it managed to get right which of us has been... err... snipped. But good ol' boy Eddie (who cites 'conservatives' who think the Sierra Club is 'extremist'... jeez... and then perpetrates the usual tedious-but-unfortunately-widely-believed climate denialist waffle) apparently can't scan a tabloid article and even come out with its version of events. To whit, this: "Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself..."
Wow. I sterilised myself? Without noticing? Cool. Wonder how I pulled that one off. DIY pain-free operations - I must patent this invention. Could be worth gazillions. And poor OA, not getting credit for HIS snip.
Second version of this is even more odd. Now I, despite obviously being a terrorist sympathising dangerous unwomanly unnatural extremist etc etc, can grasp why a lot of people around the world are less than chuffed with one Leila Khaled, even if I find her interesting enough to write a book about. I also know that there are a lot of misconceptions and exaggerations about her dotted about the web. But this article on the Northeast Intelligence (ahem) Network's (NIN) website is a real odd 'un. It states: "Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, who murdered 24 year-old US Navy diver Robert Stethem in an airplane hijacking in Beirut in 1970."
Now, I spotted this and started to worry that maybe there was some big chunk of LK's life story I'd missed out on completely, which would be mildly embarrassing. But no, it's Douglas J. Hagmann, Director of NIN, who needs to be hiding his blushes.
An organisation which claims to be 'INVESTIGATING THREATS TO OUR HOMELAND' would, you think, at least get its martyrs straight. Because "24 year-old US Navy diver Robert Stethem" was actually on vac from his US Navy underwater construction team in 1985 (yep, 15 years after Leila Khaled's hijackings) when he was on a plane hijacked by Hizbollah (no, not Khaled's PFLP) and killed and dumped on the tarmac at Beirut airport when the hijackers' demands for the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel was not met.
As usual, Hagmann's article also conflates Islamism and parts of the Palestinian resistance which 25 years ago American rightists would have been squealing about as part of a global Communist threat rather than a religious one. 25 years ago, of course, the US authorities were busy bankrolling Islamic militants like one Osama Bin Laden, as well as supporting Israel in its tolerance of Palestinian Islamic groups like Hamas (because in the late 80s Israel preferred the likes of Hamas to the likes of the PFLP, and the US broadly agreed).
Hagmann also goes on to make various truly bizarre claims about shadowy, dangerous links between completely above-ground organisations - for instance claiming that Al-Awda (an organisation which campaigns and educates on the right to return for Palestinian refugees) "is one part of a larger network known as the International Solidarity Movement." Errr, that would be the International Solidarity Movement that is a human rights observation and intervention organisation in the West Bank (plus some supporters overseas)? They may over the years have crossovers of personnel, be related in their aims, have similar viewpoints on many issues - but they have very different focuses and activities, and one is certainly not "part of" another. NIN claims to be "veteran, licensed professional investigators, analysts, military affairs specialists and researchers," which is really quite funny if they're happy to put this level of 'research' into the public domain. And this loon Hagmann also manages to drag in Obama, Kucinich and the revolting George Galloway as part of a giant anti-Zionist conspiracy. If only.

Visa joys

So, eight months later, I finally have my passport back from the Syrian embassy. For the first time in umpteen phone calls someone has actually confirmed that I was denied a visa, although my remains a matter of conjecture. Up to now, I've simply been repeatedly told on the phone that 'Mr Makdisi' or 'the consul' was dealing with it, and had my various emails completely ignored. A friend-of-a-colleague who applied as a freelance photographer was told that he could have a travel visa but couldn't take any pictures while he was there. Shock, horror, the Syrian dictatorship doesn't want anyone to whom they can't clearly attach to an institution wandering about their country. And lest anyone think I'm not applying the same stands to my own horrible government, read on...
Bizarrely, I've also been given back the postal order for my fee. The young lady at the embassy desk informed me that that was because they are “nice” and return visa charges on denied applications. Although since it's over six months old it's entirely and the Post Office's discretion as to whether they refund it, so I'm not holding out much hope there.
So, the question now is whether I actually risk using this passport ever again, or simply ditch it. Can I depend on the Syrians having simply had it sitting in a file for the past eight months, or should I – given the recent activities of their equally nasty but possibly more efficient brothers in the Mossad – be a little paranoid about they might have been doing with it? Answers on a postcard from Damascus...
This has been the week for people getting shafted by various visa agencies – mainly the British. Firstly, there was the Palestinian farmers who were meant to be in the UK for Fairtrade Fortnight, of whom only one actually got a visa. One, a woman with kids from a West Bank village, got a refusal letter from the British embassy in Amman saying that the officials there were concerned that she wouldn't return home – to Iraq. Anyone would think that British bureaucracies were either a) incompetent or b) not keen to have the effects of Israel's military occupation widely known.
Then there were the various speakers who had to contribute to a SOAS conference on the Palestinian left by video instead of in person. Leila Khaled has, of course, been denied a UK visa on at least one occasion (2005) and is also now routinely denied Schengen visas, so her absence was hardly a shock, even if it was a pity. Jamal Juma of the Grassroots Palestinian Anti Apartheid Wall Campaign was prevented from travelling because the Israelis arrested him – as well as many other anti-Wall campaigners – in December, and they haven't got around to returning his documents for him to even apply to travel with.
And thirdly, my mate Adie has been comprehensively shafted by the British Embassy in Cairo, which (unlike other European embassies) insists on having a letter from a 'legitimate' humanitarian organisation before it will issue waiver letters for British citizens to enter Gaza. So it looks like Adie, who has been waiting in Cairo for two months since the Viva Palestina convoy, will not be spending the next six months in Gaza working with a kids' project and building student solidarity networks. The embassy ruled that the fairtrade organisation he had a letter from was not a 'legitimate humanitarian organisation', and appeals for support from his MP, Gerald Kaufman, have borne no fruit.

Russell Tribunal on Palestine

Live streaming of the Barcelona session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, an excellent initiative to highlight Israel's wide-ranging abuses of international law.

Email etiquette and political spikings?

Generally speaking, it's been quite a good few weeks. After an initial new year's panic when it looked like the recession was finally going to give me a good slapping, I've got a decent amount of work in (actually that's not completely true; I've got far too much work, as it's coming up to the financial year end and various grant-funded organisations, on the Use It Or Lose It principle, are buying in my services). I got my first Guardian by-line (albeit unpaid and online only, but hey). And Gaza: Beneath the Bombs book stuff is going pretty well, especially when we get lovely reviews like this one.
But obviously I couldn't possibly be that upbeat, so here are a few minor trivialities which have hacked me off recently.
Firstly, it's 2010. Email has been fairly common in the UK for the best part of a decade. Especially amongst campaigners. And surely there must be few Young Folk out there who've managed to evade some computer training at school. But it seems like using the BCC field on a bulk email is still beyond some people's capacity.
First, there was the eejit from the Energy Saving Trust (I promise it's the last time I'm going to whinge about the Boiler Scrappage Scheme and its incompetent administration). He managed to send an email confirming receipt of my voucher and claim - and several hundred other people's - to all of us, in the CC field. Then, in an attempt to rectify the fuckup, he sent one of those pathetic 'Recall Email' messages that civil servants use - but again to all X hundred of us. So if anyone on that list has a mate who works in boiler servicing, they have one very valuable little marketing list there... And then, in the same week, some twonk from the newly-formed Unemployed Workers Union which has been set up in Salford did exactly the same thing, with an absolutely vast (and by the look of it, at least 50% totally unrelated) press list. I emailed them back suggesting that they might annoy people if they carried on like that and got no reply... but got another press release off them slightly later doing exactly the same thing. How to alienate potential supporters and sources of coverage, in one fell swoop. Idiot.
Next thing to piss me off was City Library's Manchester Lit List blog, which supposedly covers all events book-related in Manchester. I sent the announcement for the Gaza: Beneath the Bombs launch to them well in advance, and got no reply. I chased the email, and got a reply saying it would be listed on the blog in the week preceding the event. Which it was - very briefly. I know this because I have a Google Alert on 'Gaza beneath the bombs,' and the Lit List came up on it. But by the time I clicked on the link, it had been taken down. I can only assume that this was a political spiking, since this was a bona fide Manchester book launch, in Manchester, with one Manchester author involved. Which is... interesting.

Slingshot Hip Hop

This is the trailer for Slingshot Hip Hop, one of the films shown at the UNRWA fundraiser Sharyn & I did book readings at last Saturday. I've been meaning to see the movie for ages so nice to be presented with the opportunity. A must-see...

How sinister is this?

The boiler guy downstairs has local radio on (so I'm going to be humming various power ballads for the next few days - sorry Openspace/friends). But Foreigner aside, the radio station keeps running adverts for something called Quest For Truth, a company which offers polygraph - yes, lie detector - tests. It presents these as being 'fascinating,' but then goes on to suggest that people can use them for finding out if their partner is cheating or if someone they know has nicked stuff off them. Given the very questionable reliability of polygraphs this just sounds massively dodgy all round. As dodgy as that place in Chorlton that does extra scans of your foetus for you? Dunno. But still highly dubious.

Be Very Afraid, and some updates...

Firstly, thanks to OA again for striking fear into my heart when I opened my email to this excerpt from a Financial Times book review:

The most shocking tales are about Sarah Palin, who last week took up a new role as a Fox News commentator, and whose recent book, Going Rogue, is selling in the millions. So uninformed was McCain's running mate that advisors had to give her junior school tutorials on the first and second world wars, Vietnam and the cold war. Palin insisted that Saddam Hussein launched the September 11 attacks. As the depth of her ignorance sunk in, as well as her total lack of interest in rectifying it, McCain's senior staff members were “ridden with guilt over elevating Palin to within striking distance of the White House.

And a couple of updates.

First, wahey! My boiler scrappage scheme voucher has arrived, and as I type the cats are cowering in the bedroom as the rest of the house descends in to a chaotic mess of disconnected pipes, lifted floorboards and men in boiler suits wielding bits of machinery. But that doesn't mean I'm retracting any of my comments on the equally chaotic implementation of the scheme, which I put down to the EST's political masters trying to create a bit of a warm (literally) fuzzy feeling before the electioneering really gets going.

The second one is a corker. Remember Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling declaring that Moss Side was like the Wire? A couple of journalists - a freelancer from Manchester and a crime reporter from the Baltimore Sun - decided to swap cities and see if he was right. So Baltimore blokey, from a city with several hundred murders a year, gets to spend a night with GMP in sunny Moss Side. Simon Binns reported the result in Crains:

Justin Fenton, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter, spent a week on a job swap with Northern Independent hack Mark Hughes in order to see if Moss Side really was like hit TV show The Wire, a recent claim made by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling. Fenton was positively disappointed at the lack of excitement, however, after 14 hours with Greater Manchester Police. “The lack of action on my ridealongs has been quite ridiculous, especially since the press and the officers I rode around with in Manchester insist that these are tough streets,” he said. “Here's what I witnessed first-hand: a car full of teens who had just finished smoking marijuana; a kid whose furious bike riding raised suspicions but turned out to be nothing.” Furious bike riding is a suspicious activity now? Good news for Manchester's public image, though, and proof that cycling really has taken off since the Velodrome and Sir Chris Hoy's Olympic success.

Gaza book - fundraiser for ISM and FreeGaza

For anyone considering buying Gaza: Beneath the Bombs by credit card, if you use the Pluto Press sales website and enter the code FREEGAZA or ISM GAZA during the payment process the relevant organisation gets a cut...

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: pt II

So, the Monday After the Saturday Before (see this rant), I get a phone call in response to the message I left for the Energy Savings Trust. I will not, for reasons which will become obvious, be divulging anything at all that might identify the person who rang me. That's the problem with slagging off organisations like this - some of the people working for them are actually genuinely dedicated and lovely. It's their bosses that are the problem.
So, Nice Person from the EST (NPEST from now on) gives me a call and establishes that what I would like is to apply for the effing Boiler Scrappage Scheme. They then helpfully offer to take down all my details for the application form, while admitting that they haven't actually seen the form before and certainly haven't filled it in. There's a first time for everything. But NPEST does warn me that this might result in my application going in several times, as they've already been told that "although the form looks like it doesn't work it actually has."
Maybe.
So, NPEST goes through the form, filling in the details as I read them off. They get a bit stuck trying to fill in the address section, since, as they comment, the fields are a bit confused and all over the place and it's not totally clear which bit of one's address is meant to go where.
NPEST also divulges (which I'm guessing they shouldn't have) that there was supposed to be a dedicated team staffing the phone lines to deal with the boiler scrappage scheme. I don't know if these are secondees from somewhere else in government, or what. But, says NPEST, for some reason they're not actually being trained until this week, ie won't actually be staffing anything for a few more days at least, and the EST's normal staff were significantly dischuffed to find this out when they came into work this morning, expecting to be able to farm this particular weight off onto someone else.
So, according to the computer screen in front of NPEST, my application has actually gone through this time. I haven't had any kind of confirmation email to that effect (and this must be six hours ago now), which is a bit worrying, but given the standard of form building which seems to be standard at the EST they probably just haven't remembered that people might actually want some kind of receipt.
The saga continues... (or, hopefully, it doesn't, but I get a nice voucher in the post).

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: a tale of bureaucratic hell

In my bimbling innocence, I have been sucked into a bizarre parallel world of quangoese cockups that could drive a woman to... oooh believe that the state is incompetent and corrupt...
Gordon B announced with much fanfare a couple of weeks ago a boiler scrappage scheme, like the car scheme, which would replace G rated boilers with A rated ones, allegedly reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount as taking 45,000 cars off the road, and - the buzzword of the moment, create British jobs! Woohoo! What can go wrong, one asks.
The answer, of course, is that one can give the job of administering this scheme to the Energy Savings Trust, a clunking bureaucracy which isn't apparently up to anything more complex than sending out a few leaflets about changing your lightbulbs. It certainly managed to screw up the solar incentive scheme a few years back. Trying to make contact with this organisation is like dealing with some little organisation with three staff and a doggie on a string - you'd never guess its budget runs into tens of millions and it gets to second dozens of staff from government departments.
The sorry saga so far is that on the 6th January, my very on-the-ball boiler installer rang my at about nine o'clock at night to tell me to apply for the scheme. I went to the EST site next morning and, as per the instructions, emailed boilerscrappage@est.org.uk with a 'registration of interest' which included the make of boiler being replaced, the new one etc. I heard nothing back. So on about the 12th or 13th I rang up to chase this. The very nice, if somewhat woolly and confused-sounding woman on the phone told me they'd been 'snowed under' with interest (although I managed to get through straight away on the phone - obviously a good thing but not necessarily a sign of stretched capacity). She informed me that 'Steve' (not the name she said) would get back to my email - which rather (and worryingly) implied that a single bloke was actually dealing with this landslide of email interest.
Needless to say, by Saturday 16th I've heard nothing back. I tried ringing the national number, only to find that it's only staffed Monday-Friday 9-5. So how are people in work supposed to access a) the boiler scheme and b) the wealth of energy efficiency information the EST claims to be able to bestow? Not through the online forms on the site, that's for certain. I clicked through the same series of links I'd followed on the 7th, only to find that the instructions page has changed, and there is now a link to an application form for the scrappage scheme. Wahey! I thought. Yes, there is a question as to why everyone who sent in an expression of interest couldn't have been auto-emailed to tell them that this form was now up, but never mind. Now I can just apply...
Can I buggery. I fill in the form, not one but three times. Each time it all seems to go fine, I fill in the requisite fields - some of them dropdown menus, some typed fields. I tick the necessary disclaimer boxes. I press 'submit.' And then every single field on the form sprouts a kind of burgundy-purple message saying 'Please provide some information for the above field it is a required field,' or similar. It's not my browser - I fill in online forms all the bloody time.
So, I think, I'll at least let them know their form isn't working, and maybe I'll get something back telling me when it is. Or some such vain hope. So I go to the EST's standard contact form and write a little message to this effect. I also have to fill in a bunch of fields with my name, address, phone number etc, including one of those ones where you fill in your postcode and it finds your address for you. This works successfully. But when I press 'submit' - it all goes tits up again. Despite the form identifying my postcode enough to find my address, it's refusing to admit it is actually a postcode for the purposes of submitting the form. Great.
My last salvo is to try and email my message to the generic email addresses, which appear on various EST leaflets, ads etc, mail@ and info@. Neither of these are working either. There are completely unfunded organisations campaigning for the preservation of species no-one's ever heard of with more efficient communications than this over-funded shower. Withholding tax because irresponsible governments will just spend it on nasty nuclear weapons is a fab idea. But withholding it because their quangos are completely unable to perform basic tasks feels like an even better notion at this time...

Writing: Gaza, Freelance Hackery

Sharyn and I did our first book event this evening, to a small but warm and interesting audience at Manchester Muslim Writers – hopefully a good intro for Sharyn for the substantial tour she has booked all around the UK.
One of the audience was a guy who, on his Manchester Evening Snooze blog, has done a neat analysis of the Sky TV 'documentary' about Ross Kemp's trip to Gaza. Congratulations to Azaad on sitting through the whole thing. I should make it clear I haven't seen the programme. But I'm putting inverted commas around the word documentary because it has Ross Kemp in it. Maybe I'm a crashing snob. Probably. But I've never quite gotten the point of him.
Anyway, our advance order of the books turned up last week, and what a strange experience that was. A real book, rather a nicely designed one and on nice looking-paper. With our names on the front. Bizarre. Both of us had similarly bemused, slightly stunned reactions, and then have had to keep going back and remind ourselves that the product of that frenzied chunk of work last summer really happened. I had another Oh! moment today when I had to find something from the book and realised I could look in the index. It has an Index. Somehow that made it more real too. As did having people buy it and ask to have it signed for their friends and mums. Very odd.
Reading the accounts of the same days a year ago, from the depths of the hellish bombardment and invasion, is also very odd. But not in a good way.

On a completely different note, I came across a link to this more parochially depressing article today, analysing the state of the freelance writing market. Last week one of my regular (and better-paid) sources of work informed me that they have had to impose tight constraints on their freelance budgets, so no more work for me for the moment. It's not a surprise – it's a publication which is substantially dependent on public-sector advertising for its revenue. But it's happened sooner than I expected.
So the LA Times overview of some of the developments in freelance writing markets is interesting, looking at the risible sums paid by many of the contractors on freelance job sites like oDesk or peopleperhour, or by pay-per-hit 'news' sites like Allvoices. Many of the advertisers on the contract sites make it abundantly clear that they're not interested in the quality of the writing they commission – they simply want search engine-friendly-text that will lure people to their websites, selling whatever kind of tat they're in the market for. And the huge amount of free stuff on the web means there is no incentive for them to pay anything approaching a proper rate. But, as the LA Times writer points out, it also behooves writers who actually want to make a living out of their writing to see themselves to some extent as business people, offering a service, rather than as creatives who are owed a living for churning out our chosen art form. Hmm.

Copenhagen

Thanks to my little-ray-of-sunshine husband for the cheerful, if accurate, image.

Brave John MacLean has come hame tae the Clyde!

Ten days ago I was privileged to be invited to the Christmas party for people who've contributed to the work of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. The afternoon included a range of fascinating readings and songs from some of Greater Manchester's left-wing greats, including the mighty Ewan MacColl, and songs performed by Aidan Jolly (who did a great rendition of a part of Leon Rosselson's very funny Ballad of Spycatcher), Bernie Murphy and a fantastic pair whose names I caught only as Ben(?) and Emily.
One of the songs covered by the latter was the haunting, deeply moving John MacLean March, a song to the Clydeside trade unionist who was the origin of the phrase 'a bayonet is a weapon with a working man at boths ends.' The song itself, written by Alistair Hulett, relates to his imprisonment for three years for sedition in urging the working men of Glasgow to see that fighting in the First World War was not in their interests as a class and that the empty nationalism of the war was a matter for the ruling classes and not those who would simply become their cannon fodder. The song, performed by Dick Gaughan, is here:

Climate change is not funny...

... obviously. It's deeply, deeply scary and unamusing.
But sometimes a certain grim humour can be found in it. Firstly I have to spread the word on one of the genius Marc Roberts' latest cartoons, the script of which was written by my lovely husband from a Copenhagen fantasy I'd had of the members of some of the most evil delegations - USA, Saudi Arabia etc - being eaten alive, very slowly and painfully from the feet up, by the polar bears who are being so painfully wiped out by the impacts of climate change. The cartoon is here.
The second dark little chuckle I've had this morning is at the eejits in, presumably, a) the PR agency hired by cheap flight website Nowfly, and b) Nowfly's own PR department which presumably passed its latest press release. It's headed "A Restive Festive," which is presumably meant to mean 'restful' and somebody thinks they've been terribly clever using the rhyming word instead. Unfortunately 'restive' actually means:

1. impatient of control, restraint, or delay, as persons; restless; uneasy.
2. refractory; stubborn.
3. refusing to go forward; balky: a restive horse.

and, as Dictionary.com continues, derives not from the same verbs as words like rest and restful, but from the Middle English restif meaning "stationary, balking" or the Old French for 'inert.' Which I guess is how many people do end up spending Christmas, but not in the way the advertising wonks intended...

Adsales job! (all in a good cause...)

From MULE...

is looking for someone to bring in advertising revenue through both the website and the newspaper.
The work will involve contacting local businesses and ethical organisations, building a database of contacts and being a point of contact when adverts are submitted.
You will be supported by MULE volunteers and can choose to work from home, or in our city centre office. No experience is necessary but could be an advantage.
To discuss rates of pay, or to arrange an informal interview, please contact Jenny on jen.nelson [at] themule.info, or 07934 699 223.

More Onion genius

Some people will hate this. But I think it's hysterical. And it's my blog.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_study_reveals_most_children