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MrCynical

Listed below are comments made by MrCynical between Thursday, 26th March 2009 and Saturday, 5th September 2009.

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Cricket misses the point again 8:49pm on 05 Sep 2009 In every other sport, unless there is an unavoidable (!) risk of injury to players the game generally goes ahead if at all possible. We can all remember football games (especially those either live on TV or included in 'daft moments' DVDs) played in blizzards sufficiently severe as to require an orange ball. Rugby matches, international ones even, played on pitches which would be indistinguishable from a ploughed field. Old Trafford had one runup suitable for spin bowlers, and one runup which was in 100% playing condition. Why this crisis was sufficiently serious as to justify cancellation of a game people had already paid for (and remember their refunds won't include the 'admin fee' scam, or their travel + parking, or their food, or the time they took off work) is utterly beyond me.
Chelsea will suffer if transfer ban stands 6:55pm on 03 Sep 2009 Although the two previous teams to suffer this punishment managed to get the ban reduced, I'm not sure that Chelsea should be confident of achieving the same. They do, after all, have 'previous' in this area unlike Sion and Roma. See for example Ashley Cole and the John Obi Mikel fiasco.
Where next on Megrahi? 10:00pm on 24 Aug 2009 I fully support the decision to release Megrahi, but why on earth does Kenny MacAskill (or Magasgill as the London BBC keep calling him) have to answer every single question in that same grating tone?
Victory or heist at the Oval? 10:34pm on 23 Aug 2009 The problem with blaming the pitch for Australia's pathetic first-innings batting is that England got pretty close to 400 runs on that pitch in their second innings - when the conventional wisdom goes a pitch will have deteriorated. The use of foreign-born players is hardly unique to the England cricket team - qualification through grandparents is common throughout team sport (see for example Aiden McGeady playing for the Ireland football team, the handful of Kiwis playing in the Scottish rugby team around the turn of the century).

Failing to pick a spin bowler - and then having to place Australia's Ashes hopes on the bowling of Marcus North - should surely rival Mauro 'Scrum Half' Bergamasco as a candidate for strangest selection decision of the year.
Can O2 cope with smartphone traffic? 11:10am on 08 Jul 2009 'I do feel some sympathy for phone networks, besieged on the one hand by geeks like me demanding better service - and on the other by campaigners fearful that phone masts could in some way pose a danger to health, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they do not.'

There you go, fixed that for you. :)
Brown's right royal dilemma 12:04pm on 06 May 2009 Perhaps if Royal Mail was allowed to raise its prices significantly, then the remaining refuseniks would (belatedly) move over to email. All that is needed for this to happen is for the law to recognise digital signatures (and I mean proper ones with SSL or OpenPGP signing certificates, not ticking an 'I agree' box) as being just as valid as an ink signature on a posted or faxed document. Then we will only need delivery companies (even monopoly ones) for transporting goods, such as online shopping purchases.
Age of austerity 2:58pm on 24 Apr 2009 Nick, that think tank article you linked to has a 'black hole' of its own. It states that £30 billion of cuts are needed, yet the suggestions they make barely amount to half that.

#229:
"Not clear wat this means. Anyway let me respond. PPP allows spending to be off balance sheet which gets round some World Bank/IMF rules."

Actually, the rules have recently changed and most PPP projects now have to be counted as public borrowing. Since they aren't great deals to begin with (making the taxpayer [eventually] pay twice the value of the work in order to inflate the PPP provider's profit margins), losing the benefit of this classic Brown 'accounting fudge' (see for example claiming to have "cut inflation" by changing the way it is calculated) makes PPP pointless.
Welcome to some new initials - DRM, HDCP, DTCP and AACS! 9:41pm on 23 Apr 2009 So presumably the BBC will be launching a scheme to issue those with non-'protected' home networks with a licence fee refund? After all, you are refusing to let people with this perfectly capable equipment watch the content they have paid for because of your choice of restrictive technology.
Worthy or wasteful? 01:18am on 21 Apr 2009 Solution: cancel the Trident missile and submarine replacements (£70bn) and ID cards (£20bn). Voila, £90bn of public money saved without harming public services one bit.
Who's running the EU? 00:47am on 26 Mar 2009 #15 - FreeBorn John
'No nation in Europe (or anywhere in the world) agrees that they should be governed in the interest of more populous nations elsewhere, which is what international elections would mean.'

That's funny, because it doesn't seem to fit with the UK's own experience. At the moment a majority of voters in Scotland and Wales (best leave Northern Ireland to one side!) are in favour of continuing to be governed by a Parliament which is overwhelmingly controlled by another more populous nation (England) and can therefore be assumed to act largely in that nation's interests.

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