Non-ode to fallible technology

Truth is very few news stories however major lend themselves to the rolling-news style offered by a dedicated vehicle now provided by most big media organisations.

Elections are one notable exception though the Brits do manage to make a potentially fascinating evening achingly dull by gathering up all the votes in an electorate, transporting them to a central counting station and then counting them all before letting we the voters on our sofas at home know anything about how things are going - the first we know is the pompous middle aged bloke or woman who never could get on in local politics any other way but was rewarded for persistence with the job gets up on his or her hind legs, candidates ranged as a backdrop and ponderously declares the votes declared.

Also, the Brits do First Past The Post rather than Single Transferable Vote and their system might have some moral force but (a) politics is an odd and uncomfortable place for moral force or moral anything else and (b) it is a voting system that is no FUN!, even when the Raving Loonies are part of the electoral landscape.

The way things are done back home, with each station counting and transmitting the vote is inherently safe (what happens to all those votes in transit, remember what they did to all our bank details last week?), cost effective (security doesn't come cheap, when it is used at all - remember what happened last week!) and environmentally sound (how are those votes transported?).

But the most powerful arguments of all are the dull one - it adds a local interest to what is only meaningful when a local process, and the important one - it adds to the FUN!

Which polling did that absurd count come from? surely that's the sheep shearer vote counted just wait until some of the more metropolitan votes come in? that's a very high turn out for the greens suggesting we're getting returns from that pocket of middle-class neurotics who now live in a normally working class western suburb!

A glorious rolling maul of an election result, with running commentary supplied by a motley cast of political has-beens you mostly thought had died since the last election, and a token blonde to keep the blokes awake when during the turgid middle bit between the writing appearing on the wall and the concession speech.

Dutifully I fell out of bed this morning though it be only minus 2 outside and kicked the 'puter. Sadly in the half hour since then the ABCs streaming media have both collapsed under the weight of a zillion expats trying to listen in. Bugger. Things are lookin good in that Howard looks to be on his way in but bad in that Little Kev's missus is packing her bags and preparing to move into the Prime Minsterial Mansion.