Rob's Blog

I am visiting NYC with my mother (it is her 60th birthday present). She is very excited about it. In the taxi from the airport, we stopped at the entrance to the Queens-Midtown tunnel to pay a toll. At that moment, my mother spotted some tall buildings in the distance and took a photo, and the flash went off.

The toll booth guy told the taxi driver to roll down the rear window. Toll booth guy says, “did someone take a picture?” My mother is holding her camera. “I see the camera”, says toll booth guy. To the taxi driver he says, “what are you supposed to tell your passengers?” Taxi driver has no idea. “You are supposed to tell them no photos of bridges or tunnels. This has been in effect since 9/11. It is an act of terrorism. You could be fined $5000 or go to jail.” He asks to see our ID. I hand him my driving license. My mother hands him her passport. He demands my passport and I hand it over. He looks at the documents, then rings his bell, and a supervisor comes over.

“Go and pull over there and talk to the lady.” To the lady, toll booth guy says, “make sure my face isn’t on that camera.”

We pull over. The lady asks to see the last photo on the camera, which is of the tall buildings in the distance but the entrance to the tunnel is also visible. She makes us delete the picture, and generally lectures us and the taxi driver, before handing back our papers.

The taxi driver is now convinced he is in big trouble and will be reported, which makes for an unpleasant ride to the hotel.

Later, I try to find reference to the law against photographing bridges and tunnels (or toll booth guys’ faces). I can’t find it. What’s going on?

I can find an NYPD document reminding officers that photography is not a crime, and some discussion of Port Authority rules. But if there is a law about this it is far from common knowledge — there is no way a tourist would know about it. So what happened?

Eddie Jordan and Jake Humphrey interviewed Australian former Formula One champion Alan Jones on the BBC’s programme covering the Korean Grand Prix this morning.

Alan Jones is about as no nonsense and plain speaking as they come. He’s acting as the FIA’s fourth steward for the race this weekend. Asked whether he would swing things in favour of Mark Webber, he responded jovially, “knowing my luck there’ll be some controversy and I’ll be buggered if I do and buggered if I don’t”, for which Jake Humphrey later had to apologise to sensitive 5am BBC viewers for his “colourful Australian language”.

Anyway, Eddie Jordan asked, “When you and I were racing everything was about Europe, and now it’s all about the Middle East and Far East. Are you surprised?”

Replied Jones, “Not really, I’m not. That’s the way everything’s going at the moment. With the emerging economies of China and India, Formula One has to follow that. I think they’re doing the right thing. Europe’s getting more stringent with the rules in terms of what you can do and say and put on the car and off the car. There’s a lot more leniency in this part of the world, so to me it just makes a bit of sense.”

Indeed.

This morning I caught an interview on BBC Breakfast between a BBC journalist and a trawlerman. The item was about the high number of trawlermen who die at sea each year.

Looking down at the boat our Journalist says, “There are a lot of ropes and machinery down there, it must be easy to slip up.”

Replies the trawlerman, and I’m paraphrasing from memory: “Slipping up on deck is the least of our worries. Most men can keep their feet at sea. What’s worse is if the net snags on rocks. If the cable doesn’t break it can have the whole boat over.”

“What can be done to improve safety?”

“Very little. The job is dangerous by nature. However, as just one example, they brought out this ridiculous regulation that set stricter quotas on boats over ten meters in length than on smaller boats. So now there are a lot more small boats than there used to be, and these are more dangerous.”

Australian comic Steve Hughes gets good about two minutes into this video when he starts talking about health and safety and political correctness.

New EU rules limiting international roaming charges come into effect today. I have written about this in strong terms before. There was some idiot interviewed on the radio this morning complaining that he’d run up a huge bill by mistake while on holiday. He has no problem with asking his friends the government to threaten people with violence to save him from his own mistakes.