Mad Goldfish’s blog

I've been following World Without Oil for a while now without actually contributing. It's a game of imagination where the idea is to imagine what life will be like when the oil runs out. Thanks to Ineos and the Grangemouth strike, it might not be that hard to imagine. If the strike goes ahead, which looks inevitable, supplies across Scotland and the North of England will be disrupted, and there are talks about restricting fuel access to key workers and emergency services (unless your car can run on chip fat of course).

It's not as though Scotland's short of oil anyway. There's still plenty pumping from the North Sea, and plenty of companies supplying oil in various forms, from the extraction companies to the forecourts, but there seems to be a bottleneck, caused by a monopoly in the processing part of the chain, which means we all suffer the effects of a whim of the directors to close a pension scheme that looks after workers better but costs a bit more money. I know a lot of the stories are just scaremongering to try and paint the strikers in a bad light, but to me it highlights the fact that there shouldn't be a monopoly on something so important to the economy, and either the refinery needs competition or nationalisation, or the government needs to work harder to wean us off oil. Diesel trains are not an option in this scenario.

At the moment, I'm OK, I have the option of public transport to get to work, but in a few months, the company is moving office to a bit of a public transport desert (which, funnily enough, is next to the airport, which doesn't really like cars and yet they're only now working on a rail link, and they've only recently decided more bus routes are needed).

So, what will this country do when we run out of oil? Even without the question of lost oil revenue, the picture's not looking great. Looks like we'll have Flintstones' buses on the streets.

BlogIt allows me to update all my blogs from my Facebook page. Interesting idea.

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Originally uploaded by Mad Goldfish

If only IKEA quality went as far as a spell checker...

At the moment, it's very hard to get information out of the UK government on what happening to our laws, particularly if you want to generate things like RSS and email alerts, mash-ups with other data sources and many other things. Since the government works for us, shouldn't we be able to say what we want to do with the information they generate?

Free Our Bills - TheyWorkForYou UK

If you could get everyone in the world to change their behavior in one way, what would you have them do differently?
Submitted by Ross.

Say hello to a new stranger every day.

The Divine Comedy's (still unofficially released) song, set to photographic evidence from the archives.

Books:  Show us a great children's book.

The Neverending Story

Michael Ende

The Neverending Story - W♥M

http://weheartmus...

To state that "The Neverending Story" is a cult classic is no overstatement. The movie defined for many people what it meant to be a child of the 80s. It was escapism at its finest, with adventure, hope, magic, mystery, and even seemed to be a precourser to what we now commonly refer to as "inter...