Okay so, yes, in America at the moment. Boston, actually.

Getting into America required filling in a special form on the interwebs, then after I’d arrived in Boston I was photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and yelled at. I was searched in Dublin but, good news, dodged the bullet of going through the electronic strip search in Manchester.

Last night I caught a special screening of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Edgar Wright, the director, was there… along with some of the cast which was nice. Suspect the film has a younger demographic in mind than Edgar’s previous films “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” and the use of the vocabulary of Nintendo games to tell a story in film form will leave many baffled… but for those that ‘get it’ this film seems to hit the spot.

America is fascinating so far, although I appreciate I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. First things first though… there’s no kettle in this hotel room. I mean, seriously? A coffee filter machine but no kettle? Even the dirtiest, nastiest, most cheapo hotel in Britain will provide you with a kettle – it may kill you, of course, but you’ll get a kettle. Here? No kettle.

It’s the little things that really freak you out.

Pandas.

They eat bamboo. They struggle to breed. The two things aren’t entirely unrelated – bamboo, it turns out, isn’t really what Pandas should be eating. They can only digest something like 10% of the bamboo which means they need to eat non-stop, all day, every day, just to basically feel completely knackered and hungry.

Why do they do it? Well bamboo is basically like a drug, and all baby Pandas are born with… I guess fetal bamboo syndrome or something.

Poor Pandas. Yet, crucially, there’s nothing anyone can do. You can’t reason with a Panda. You can’t explain that bamboo might give Mr and Mrs Panda a proper bangin’ buzz but isn’t really very healthy because Pandas have no ability to comprehend any human form of communication.

No, they’re just going to keep wanting nothing but bamboo. Forever and ever. Even if it kills them… which it seems like it will.

However, it does offer a handy new version of the cliche, “Yeah? Then I’m a monkey’s uncle” which, amusingly, is “Yeah? Then I’m a Randy Panda.”

Use at your own risk.

Is this thing on?

Guess who said this:

“This is not about trying to save money. This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Say hello to the ill-considered world of one Mr David Cameron, who’s got what he believes is a great idea but absolutely no idea how to sell it. The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible, horrible name for a project that seeks to make some of the buttons and levers of the State accessible to the outer party members or something. That’s got to be a good thing, right? So why is he having such difficulty winning support for the idea?

Consider: At any point normal members of the public already have the ability to get together to build or start a school already. They just raise the money and do it, and voila. There’s currently nothing stopping them. The ‘catch’ is that if people want to send their little darlings to this new school they’d have to pay themselves. The world of free money is the exclusive preserve of the State schools.

So what is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ trying to achieve?

Imagine, instead, starting your own school AND getting the Government to give it the Free Money that’ll let you send your darling children to it.

No risk. No responsibility. Monkey see, monkey take.

Makes you wonder if this really will save any money. If anything it sort of sounds a bit… expensive, doesn’t it?

“This is not about trying to save money”

Ah. Right. Of course.

I’m just confused because people are attacking it (yes, really, attacking it) because it might deliver the same services for less money, which of course would be an abomination and an unspeakable horror. Those ghastly Tories! IT MIGHT COST LESS! AGHH! We’re dooooooomed!

But, no, calm your boots everyone. It’ll cost us more, don’t you worry. But, if it’s not to save money, what’s the point again?

“This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Oh. That… that sucks. Really?  That’s it?

The thing about giving individuals and groups access to public money to do stuff like this is that they’re not accountable. No-one’s really going to be accountable. It gives people access to public money without having to go through the democratic process and that democratic process is supposed to protect tax payers from the monkeys that would ‘fill the world with bananas’.

The democratic process will be sidestepped but the bureaucratic process, the bit where someone, somewhere, says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ is going to be enlarged and made more complicated. Someone, somewhere, will have to take responsibility for that decision to release the funding. Who’s that going to be? What’s their salary going to be? How many of them will there be? What sort of supporting infrastructure – call centres, form processing etc – is going to be required?

This is still taxpayer’s money we’re talking about here. You can’t simply invite this ‘bigger, better’ society to spend whatever it wants from the taxpayer’s purse and then have the politicians send the ‘bigger, better’ bill… or… is that what’s going on? Is this some sort of political game to (ironically for a Coalition obsessed with localism) render local councillors even more pointless than they already are?

I don’t know about you but I’m even more confused than I was.

Going through Mandelson’s memoirs the BBC highlights that he claims Labour achieved 80% of its aims. I could agree with that, but only because it gives me an excuse to play funny buggers with the 80/20 ‘rule’ – that 20% of the effort will get 80% of the work done, and the last 20% of work will require 80% of the effort.

In other words, if Labour’s achieved 80% of its goals in 13 years, then to get that last stubborn 20% would take another 52 years – assuming the Pareto Principle holds true.

65 years of Labour. Yikes.

Of course, this assumes that all problems are a simple question of time and money and that there are never any new problems created by devoting said time and money, and that there’s never any unintended consequences arising from solving said problems.

Nope, I think even with another 100 years Labour wouldn’t get that last 20%. There’s no ‘with just a bit more time it would have all been perfect’ here. They had a super majority, unbelievable public support until the Iraq War, a boom and seemingly infinite money coming from tax revenues. If something went wrong, who can they really blame?