Boris says 'BOGOF Cops'!

Gotta hand it to Boris, who else could launch a buy one get one free scheme for policemen?

For every new police officer a borough pays for, the Mayor will ‘match fund’ the post and recruit another officer. This means boroughs will effectively be given two police officers for the price of one – a huge boost to the numbers of uniformed officers patrolling local streets.

Boris, we who are about to die salute you!

Hares and Easter

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

Researching seasonal poetry (as you do) brought me again, unexpectedly, to "Memory" by W.B. Yeats. The poem is as beautiful as I remembered. But I found it quoted anew, coupled with this image by young Dutch photographer Rebecca Rijsdijk.

Together the one amplifies the other into something so exquisite that it took my breath away and the involuntary response to such beauty, love and loss was to weep.

More images.

Terri Windling's article The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares underpins the power of Yeats' analogy and Rijsdijk's image. Windling reminds us that the hare is "a goddess symbol, a trickster symbol, a symbol of the Holy Trinity, a symbol of death, redemption and rebirth".

Very fitting in the run up to Easter.

Alternative Vote Advertising

These two ads are really in today’s Times. Honestly! This is not some Year 10 pupil’s ‘comedy’ advertising for a Citizenship project.

It really is true that Ogilvy & Mather has served up Reductio ad Hitlerum! Big FAIL as the Nation invokes Godwin’s law for an ad that is devoid of any cogent (let alone original) thought.

And JWT too! They have got entirely the wrong analogy. Hello? It’s supposed to be Cameron and Cleggover who are the sharp-suited clones, not Dave and Gromit! And ironically pretty much the only good thing you could have said about the Krays was that they were snappy dressers in their day. Is this an implied compliment? Another Big FAIL!

Are our advertisers really so inept these days? What has become of the good political advertising of days gone by?

And what's with the use of LibDem yellow (by the subs at The Times) on the rationales for both offerings? FAIL.

Downing Street launches the logo for National Citizen Service

Oh dear, some bright spark appears to have rather conflated Constructivism as a learning theory with Constructivism, the art movement.

Is it really possible that a Tory led government is seeking to flavour a flagship policy with the art of the Revolution as conceived by The Commissariat of Enlightenment, the Bolshevik government's cultural and educational ministry?

However Constructivism did have a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic. And as the Weimar Republic is chiefly associated in our minds with hyperinflation, the choice might prove eerily prescient.

Egypt

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