PowerPoint can be a tortoise business
'Run for it, boss! It's the planners!'
The war on organised crime has shifted to a whole new front: planning.

Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth – the nearest thing we had to an organised crime czar, now "shuffled" into the deputy chief whip position – urged law enforcement officers at a Belfast conference last week to "think laterally" and collar gangsters for secondary offences such as tax evasion, immigration and breaches of planning regulations. He reminded the audience that Chicago mobster Al Capone was finally jailed in 1931 for tax evasion.

Today's crime overlords must be quaking in their dodgy conservatories.

Slides into chaos
How many PowerPoint gaffes will there be at this year's Chartered Institute of Housing conference in Harrogate?

There's bound to be a least one misspelling or cup of tea spilled into a keyboard, but surely no cock-up quite as embarrassing as the incident retold by Institute of Public Policy Research's director Matthew Taylor at the Chartered Institute of Public FInance and Accountancy conference last week.

Taylor himself no longer uses slides after a Danish intern who was preparing a presentation had a spelling problem.

According to the slides Taylor ended up with, his presentation was The Daft Report on Pubic-Private Partnerships.

Tip of the Steinberg
Talk about kicking a man when he's down.

No sooner had Norman Perry begun to get over the shock of losing top Northern investment director Max Steinberg to the east Lancashire market renewal pathfinder, he was being rapped across the knuckles by Housing Corporation board members for letting Steinberg slip through his fingers. Sometimes, you just can't win.

Blues explosion
Summertime, and the living is easy. Unless you're blues lover Alan Butler, that is.

The crooning councillor for West Twickenham and board member of Richmond Housing Partnership has released his own CD in a bid to raise £20,000 for charity. A councillor going on record? Now there's a rare treat.

Pass the 'Communities Plan ketchup'
For all those Herculean Harrogate delegates with room left after the traditional round of free food and flowing booze [surely "inspirational presentations and heated debate sessions"? – Ed] Mears Group has the answer.

The support services supplier will be handing out "partnership pear and chocolate crumble with hot chocolate sauce" and "best-value bung-it-in breakfast" in Hall C, stand 160.

I don't know what it means but, frankly, I don't care so long as I get second helpings.

Morgue the merrier

This week Harrogate will play host to the great and the good of the housing world, but on the way there last week I encountered a different species of delegate. On the train from London, yours truly found itself in a carriageload of undertakers. They had been on a course in London and, judging by the drunken shenanigans in the buffet car, they had been at the embalming fluid. After hearing several jokes involving bodies – and being twirled around by a frisky mortician – Social Animal had to conclude that a trainload of housing folk would never make such an unholy commotion.

Source

Housing Today