Banditry: The idle musings of John B

From these fine people, here is a word map of this site. It’s kind-of cool – excerpt here:

“People”, “knife”, “crime”, “statistics”, “public” and “law” seem to be pretty high up.

Since the main point of this blog is to use stats and logic to highlight when general commentary on a major issue is wrong, I guess the main lesson is that commentators at present are more outrageously wrong about knife crime than finance or transport.

Which, given the appallingly low quality of finance and transport coverage, is a bit disturbing.

(via)

Are you aware of all Internet traditions? If not, why not try this handy slideshow?

(also, this)

It’s like a 1950s children’s guide to the police, but ever so slightly different. Excellent comedy.

This is an absolutely superb generator of ignorant nonsense. It’s nominally a tribute to the BBC’s Have Your Say, but is quite an effective simulation of most right-wing blog comments.

Sample:

Twas ever thus. here come the pc brigade and the nanny state! Gordon Brown is going to put us all in Death Camps. It is vital that we string them all up. Why did nobody listen to Enoch Powell all those years ago?!!

Gordon Clown Out Now England

Yes, I know that I’m 29 years old, middle class and white. But fuck it, this is awesome:

(yup, it is indeed from this. How did you guess? And yes, I am indeed quite grumpy that I’ve got to go out every night this week. Can’t people leave me alone for, ooh, a month or so…?)

You’ll be delighted to hear that The Sharpener is back online and that I have a new post there on why it’s right to treat politics as a trivial and irrelevant sideshow.

Also, now that the Sharpener is back up, I’m going to try and get back into the habit of putting my political stuff up there, and random finance / transport / IT geekery / lifestyle stuff on here. Whether that will improve either place is a question for thee and not for me…

Today’s “this is what the Internet was invented for” site is the automatic random proverb generator.

Favourites it’s given me include:

Blood is thicker than the eye of the beholder.
He who lives by the sword shall die by a vacuum.
A little learning is money.

Quality stuff. From B3ta, obviously. As is this link: a gangsta rap album called Mail on Sunday. There’s got to be some scope for Middle England confusion there…

The world’s first ever Rickmob happened yesterday at Liverpool Street station. Awesome stuff.

Added bonus: if you watch the video, you may notice a special guest appearance from your effervescent host…