Great Fire of London

So, barely 3 months after being barred from our office by the police due to a murder at a bar on our road, we were again confined to availing ourselves with the power and WiFi of the amenable people at Pret in Finsbury Square. This time, the great fire of London, in the building opposite our front door. Good thing I'd taken my laptop home the the evening before...

Eli in the Diary Room

Due to popular request, this video from 4 years ago (in the pre-blogging world) is republished here...

Shabbat Helper

This video was taken at FRS Kindergarten when Eli was Shabbat Helper, 12th Feb 2010.

Look out for the gatecrashing proto-chick, swan wannabee. Who am I kidding - you can hardly miss him!

Photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/langleben/1002ShabbatHelper#

Vote for anyone

The European parliamentary elections are taking place on 4th June 2009 (this Thursday!) and I am asking you to vote. Vote for anyone you like, just vote!



Is this canvassing for real?

Yes, it really is important that you vote, and it really doesn't matter to me who you vote for (assuming you won't vote BNP).

Why shouldn't I vote for the BNP?

If you are seriously considering voting for the BNP then get yourself one of those little crooked crosses and affix it to your head-to-toe white outfit with the pointed hat so that the rest of us can identify you for what you really are. If you are not a violent fascist and haven't yet decided whether to vote in the European elections on June 4th, please read on...

But surely the BNP is an irrelevant little party of uneducated misfits who don't stand a chance of being elected...
This is what some people thought in the 1920s, before a massive recession drove too many people to vote for a party in Germany that turned out to be one of the darkest moments in the existence of humanity. We are once again in a huge financial crisis and the BNP is trying to capitalise on the electorate's fears and get elected.

But there are many more people who are anti-fascist so how likely is it that the BNP does get elected?
There is often a low turn-out for these elections, allowing fringe groups to get elected with relatively small numbers of votes. for example, in the last European election, 800,000 people voted for the BNP, who as a result nearly won seats in a number of consistencies.

Ah-ha, isn't the low turn-out because these European elections don't really matter?
These elections do matter to extreme groups like the BNP because if they succeed in getting any of their candidates elected, they will gain perceptions of legitimacy, access to funding, and broadcasting rights like legitimate political parties for other elections, including national elections, which increases the chances they will be able to get MPs elected to Westminster.

Is the BNP really so bad that we need to go to all this effort to get out the vote?
Unfortunately, yes. Their agenda is eerily similar to that of the Nazis. They talk of training the indigenous population for a civil war to make the country white, deny that rape is a serious crime, deny the Holocaust, and describe AIDS as a friendly disease because of its impact on black and gay people...

Maybe the BNP's image is tarnished by a few bad eggs...
The head of the leader, Nick Griffin, has a conviction under race hate laws in the UK, and in previous elections their candidates have included drug dealers, rapists, and others with convictions for violent crimes. An undercover documentary by Channel 4 further revealed the extent to which these unpalatable policies are aims are endemic to this dangerous organisation.

So who should I vote for then?
Whoever you want to. If you're sitting on the fence, just pick one at random. I know this sounds strange but think about it - if you're torn between Labour and the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Greens, wouldn't you prefer any of these to represent you, rather than the BNP?

Where can I find out more information?
Unite Against Fascism http://www.uaf.org.uk/ has lots more detailed information and material, and I have borrowed heavily from their resources in writing this post.

A summary of the Channel 4 documentary can be found at http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/uk/young+nazi+and+proud/257213

Flash photography!

Life is full of funny little incidents. This weekend, in the playground with the family, a woman I'd never met comes up to me and gives mer her digital camera. "Do you know how to work these things?" she asked. "I must have changed a setting by mistake because now whenever I press the button, it takes 2 photos instead of just one." she continued. Relishing a technical challenge, I went into the menu system, had a play, and at her suggestion took a random photo to see if I had worked the magic. We went into view mode and scrolled to see if I had changed the right settings. I had not. But when the picture didn't change I pressed the "next" button again to make sure. Which took me to the beginning of the album on the memory card. Which was a photo of my distressed maiden looking not so distressed but very much de-dressed!

And stories like this are like buses! Not that I was waiting for a virtual flasher, but you know what I mean. Anyway, not 4 days later and at work this time, I was talkin to a colleague. "Let's talk about how... OMG there's a naked person behind you..." she said. I turned around and admired the view through our window and into the window of the building on the far side of City Road. "Actually, maybe she's got a thong on" my colleague eventually continued, in an attempt to cover up, either metaphorically or telepathically, for the apostate opposite.

Virgin on the ridiculous

We have a Virgin contract which includes home broadband. When we informed them we were moving home, they decided to disconnect our email. For no apparent reason whatsoever. Other than to annoy us. Because as every marketeer knows, the way to stay solvent in a recession is to utterly wind up your loyal customers so that they will bugger off to a competitor at the earliest opportunity and tell all their friends about how utterly crap they are. My colleagues in marketing will know that this is how you achieve you "Net Detractor Score" which many companies actually use as the basis for bonuses for customer service employees. But I digress.

Being only a semi-Luddite (I can blog and do PCs but please don't ask me to transfer a call or use a fax machine) it never even occurred to me that in the 5 days between being disconnected from our old and connected at our new property, we would be unable to access our webmail account. It was so obvious that it never even crossed my mind to ask whether they would go out of their way to turn off a service which costs them nothing to run, but which is greatly valued by customers. Had I thought about it, I might have reasoned that continuing to provide webmail services while people are in the transition of moving homes would be a perfect opportunity to foster loyalty among customers who might appreciate being able to access their emails from every internet-connected computer in the entire world, from their work PC to internet cafes, especially when the one PC in the entire world that they cannot use while in the midst of moving home is their own!

Unfortunately it also never occurred to the Virgin "Helping you to move home" team (an oxymoron of morons) to tell us that cut me off from webmail was exactly what they planned to do, so we had no time to make alternative arrangements and forward all emails we needed to refer to, to another email account.

I tried explaining this ridiculousness to one oxyomoronic moron, who insisted that because my home wasn't yet online, I of course could not access my webmail account from another computer in another location, because it was an IT issue. When I asked to speak to someone who actually knew about computers, she put me on hold while she went off for several minutes to talk to someone in IT, and came back even more entrenched in her ignorance. When I spoke to the IT person myself, and he confirmed to me that there was no logical reason why we couldn't use any online PC, I told him to take the entire oxymorons anonymous team to a training day at an internet cafe. He commiserated, but actually understanding the basics of how computers work meant he wasn't allowed to change anything on my account such as switch webmail back on.

So we were resigned to losing all our emails and swiftly set up a gmail account (to which email to the @thelanglebens domain now goes). All emails sent to our Virgin (@ntlworld) account bounced back for a week. Including the email from Virgin Customer Services asking us for feedback on their service while we moved house. Which we therefore didn't receive. We only found out about this survey when, following the broadband re-connection, we were granted access once again to our webmail (which I'm checking from my in-laws' PC as we're still not back in the house), only to find a reminder email "you might remember that we wrote to you recently..." to complete their survey. The final twist: by the time I actually received the survey and tried to respond to give them some honest feedback, the survey was no longer live.

Should I email them a link to this post?

http://survey.ccsurvey.com/virg0701a/survey6.pl?kvgta634343739manem

A Jewish home

We are committed to building a Jewish home. However we have been accused of taking things a bit too literally during the current building project on our house.

Back in October, when the festival of Succot commands the use of temporary dwellings, we moved out of our house and into temporary accommodation while building work was taking place on our house.

The building work continued along with a Jewish twist. For instance, when we did our weekly progress check in the week of Purim, we found the toilets installed in amusing locations - one in the middle of the bedroom, another in the airing cupboard.

The building work was scheduled to last about 6 months - taking us to some time in April. As we entered this month, we checked the completion date with the builders. The date when all the work would be completed - rewiring, re-plumbing, new windows, new bathrooms, new kitchen, etc. and we could move back in, was confirmed as 9th April. Indeed, as of first day Pesach, we were to move in to a totally refurbished and hometz-free home.

However, predictably, that was not to be, and a delay in the arrival of the windows means that this date will pass, over-running on the works by about a week (sorry, couldn't resist the word order in that sentence).

All this religiosity, and our builders are not even Jewish! Indeed, they have included their own religious icons during the project, as this photo, taken in Easter week, demonstrates...


Chag sameach!