This morning I got a visit by police. I was still in my pjamas and confused the policeman with the postman bringing me new exciting documentary films, as both wear dark blue uniforms. How very embarrasing. Anyways, apparantly they are looking for someone who would have to appear in court in relation with something more or less G8-y or something like that and who gave my address as a bail address.
My reaction was very “Haeh?”, till I actually found out what the person there wanted, but I am actually still not clear what exactly was going on. Luckily enough I had a visitor then who helped me out a bit, because all these “No comment” and legal guide thingy’s actually don’t really tell you what to do in such situation where you might get somebody else in trouble or yourself in trouble by being just stupid. And in Britain the policing is different from mainland Europe and America in that the police is usually so polite and especially if you say the correct answer at once out of a choice of several possible they don’t hassle you ever again with that problem. Now if you say “no comment” they are bound to make a small problem into a superb big one.
In Britain it is like, if you are stopped and questioned you might be able by just smilingly and politely suggesting:
“Would you mind me prefering to rather not giving you my name and adress”
And then that is acceptable in most cases and they bugger off or let you bugger off. Now, you would not always think of such answer especially if you come from the continent and the US where you are more likely to be prosecuted for making fun of the police in case of such an answer.
Anyways, I am pissed off with some online casino poker adverts spamming the scotland indymedia site. Every day there are about 50 of them or so. It was suggested that the forms actually are automatically filled in with this spam to increase google ranking, but it is still annoying. Damn I wish there would be a way to block this.
Another nuisance is that our media gallery seems to be abused for maybe even commercial music file-sharing of Sudanese and Arabic music nobody of the editorial team can understand. To add on, it is in weird crappy file-formats always crashing my browser. There are about 10 uploads or more a day of these. It was suggested that the people posting it actually make money out of it by selling the URLs to others who want the music.
Otherwise it would be actually quite pleasant to have some multi-cultural super-international input into Indymedia Scotland, but now it was decided to be rigourous with them to discourage them from abusing the Indymedia site, but that takes quite a bit of time.