By Tim Hardy

Photo: @DSG_DSG

CARP, the Carpenters campaign against demolition of the estate, was holding a film show outside the Carpenters Arms. I had wandered off and found a blocked off road with a sign which said 'Welcome to the Olympic Park'. It was so ridiculous that I decided to take a photo. Just as I was doing this a police car pulled up and a policeman leaned out and asked:

Did any of the planning documents mention a missile base?

concludes @blackheathbugle, perhaps in faux naïveté?

Now it's the turn of Loughborough University and Leicestershire Constabulary to get up the nose of the British Olympic Association! It's already being charged £750,000 to use the facilities at Loughborough for Team GB but it is now facing a further charge of £1million for security.

By Mike Wells, posted 16th February 2012, edited 17th Feb 2012

For security reasons there will be no commercial flights within 18 miles of the Olympic stadium for the duration of the Games. This will mean that VIPs and heads of state will not be able to use their preferred mode of transport - the helicopter - they will have to slum it with the rest of us on the roads.

by Jeff Davis, a librarian living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

In the lead-up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, the RCMP stepped up its surveillance of the radical left in Vancouver. After all, they knew a bunch of activists and anti-capitalists were organizing to oppose the Games, and when you’re throwing a multi-billion-dollar party, it looks bad when people start drawing attention to inconvenient truths like the criminalization of poverty, the erosion of civil liberties, corporate profiteering, and massive public debt.

So, ever so slowly, slowly, slowly it's beginning to hit the public consciousness that certain of our civil liberties will be p*ssed upon from the great on high during the Olympics. And whether it's Collapsonomics-wrought inflation, or perhaps that the Summer Games attracts a higher premium than the Winter Games in any event, but those penalties have gone up markedly!

Dave Hill has a neat little story about journey times during the Olympics. He typed in a search for a journey from Hackney Central to Stratford and then on to the Aquatic Centre, which would usually take about twenty minutes. On July 30th 2012 starting around 10am it is expected to take an hour and twenty-nine minutes, most of it going through security checks.