Disclosure: Whose Business Is It Anyway?

O.K.  Your turn to be judge, jury and -- if you so wish -- executioner in some made-up-cases.

A, a "devout and committed" vegan who boasts that they would never have sex with anyone who was not also a vegan, meets B in a vegan restaurant.  A chemistry soon develops between the couple and, after several meetings either on neutral territory or A's home, they have intimate relations.  Some time later, A discovers that B is not a vegan.

Has B committed a sexual offence by failing to disclose their omnivorous diet, which -- had A known of it in advance -- would have been grounds for withdrawal of consent?

Side question, no extra marks, just something to ponder:  Would it make any difference who did what to whom?  (B was acting at all times in good faith that A was consenting and a willing participant.)

C, a supporter of Celtic Football Club, meets D; who, unbeknownst to C, is a supporter of Glasgow Rangers F.C.  Stepping into the light following a knee-tremble in the bushes outside, C spots a "Rangers FC" tattoo on D's body; which was previously covered by D's coat, and was not noticeable in the gloom before the sexual encounter proper.

Has D committed a sexual offence by failing to disclose their sporting allegiance, which -- had C known in advance -- would have been grounds for withdrawal of consent?

And another one:

E, who has a severe phobia of insects, encounters F.  A relationship eventually develops, and leads to sex.  E discovers that F is a lecturer in entomology at a local college, and subsequently claims to feel as though beetles are crawling all over their skin whenever they think of F.

Did F commit any sexual offence by not mentioning, before the event, the potentially-phobia-triggering fact that they worked with insects?

Well, analogously to this court ruling, they would have.  Well, at least they would have if the plaintiff was transphobic and the defendant was transsexual.  Because the rules are just different for us  :(

O.K., so you probably shouldn't jump into bed without first establishing that there are no potential deal-breakers lurking under the surface.  But in those sorts of cases, surely it's up to the fussy person to ask the other person if they might have some non-obvious grounds for denial of consent?  "Wait -- are you a vegan, too?  Because I could never f**k someone who gorged themself on the rotting flesh of animal corpses." is surely a lot more reasonable than "I didn't know it was rape until I saw B in McDonalds".

And if a partner was man or woman enough for you at the time, and you only later feel a sense of revulsion after discovering that they were transsexual, well, you should have asked first.  Because you are the one with the problem  (refusal to sleep with a subset of people sharing some certain non-obvious or low-obviety characteristic, and feeling icky afterwards if you discovered that you had inadvertently done so).  And if you are embarrassed at the thought of having to ask a potential partner "Have you always been like that down there?", maybe you're actually transphobic and embarrassed by that.

This is a song about a famous train wreck .....

.....  Co-incidentally, it was about a famous train wreck before I changed the words.

Oh, they gave her her orders at Guardian Headquarters
Saying "Burch, we're way behind
"We've been losing readers since 1997
"You must whip 'em to a frenzy this time!"

Julie Burchill turned across to her spoilt, paying intern
And said, "Shovel on a little more hate
"And then when we get out there and the presses are a-rollin'
"We can watch those tr*nnies disintegrate!"

She was writing out bull$#!t, making ninety words a minute
When they heard a piercing scream
'Cause the ink in her fountain pen had overheated
And she vanished in a cloud of blue steam!

When the money from the advertising slowed to a trickle
They said, "Sorry -- that article stank!"
If you print harsh words about a minority
You can eat crow all the way to the bank!

Now all I need is a time machine, and then I can go back to when it was actually topical  :)

I'm on a train!

I'm posting this from a train, using tethering to my Android phone.  Ubuntu just recognised it.

I'm on a train returning from sorting out a crisis for my Partner In Crime.

Thatcher is dead .....

.....  So what?

Has Britain's manufacturing industry been rebuilt?
Have the privatised utilities been renationalised?
Have the shipyards reopened?
Have the coal mines reopened, and the rifts within the mining communities been healed?
Do schoolkids get free milk again now?

A frail old lady has passed away.  Well, wake me up when something interesting happens.  (And I don't mean rioting, looting, damaging property and arson.  I fully expect all that.)

The Sun almost get it right!

After a whole bunch of transphobic screeds in the media, this article is actually pretty benign by the standards of The Sun:  (Yes, The Sun. You have been warned.)

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/lifestyle/4867253/pre-op-transgender-woman-takes-revenge-on-childhood-bully.html

They at least refer to Nicole as a woman throughout the article.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Nicole is conventionally beautiful and very "passable".

This being The Sun, of course, they manage to turn her into an object, using gratuitous underwear shots to "prove" how feminine she is.  But at least they are objectifying her fully as a woman, rather than presenting her as some kind of freak.  And some would say points should be docked for the gratuitous inclusion of boypix and boyname; but some people are more comfortable than others with mention of their previous lives, and for all I know, maybe Nicole is cool with this.

So, yes, the article is misogynistic -- but it's not particularly transphobic, compared to how it could have been written.  She is only being beaten with one stick, instead of two.  I would love to think this is a sign, however dim, that we should hope for better.

It's the Big Day!

My solar installation team have arrived and now they are getting stuff ready.

(I should have posted this just after 09:00 yesterday, but events sort of conspired against me.)

Anyway, all was up and running by 16:00; and the last couple of hours of daylight produced 0.45 kWh of electricity.

I have also learned that the human eye is utterly lousy for measuring light intensity. But I guess that's why cameras have exposure meters .....

Solar Payback Calculator

The "important solar calculation" below has been turned into a handy online calculator.  You can access it here.

Once you have had your site survey, you will receive a quotation for the installation and an estimated annual generation figure.  The brochures for your panels will include figures for degradation in performance due to ageing.  With these figures, you can determine the system output over its lifetime; and thence the equivalent cost per kWh treating the purchase of the generating system as a single bulk purchase of electricity.