Stuff and Nonsense

I like Jonathan Ross’ radio show. He’s funny. His Ad-libs are funny. His random walks through whatever springs to mind are entertaining. He swears occasionally you know. That in itself is not funny but in context it is because it’s normal. It’s what the rest of us do and the funniest things are always those that reflect life itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an out and out fan. I can’t bear his TV show or indeed anything he presents on TV. But when he is ad libbing, when he is reacting to others as he might do on Never Mind The Buzzcocks or Question Of Sport, he’s genuinely funny.  He’s like Wogan in this respect. Wogan always looks handcuffed and badly scripted on TV.  But on radio… on radio Ross is solid gold, just like Wogan.

Russell Brand I like too in small doses. I can’t stand most of what he does on TV but again his responses to others, his instant off-beat surreal reactions and one liners are hysterically funny.

Now on their own both Jonathan and Russell have reputations for being mouthy speak-first-think-later presenters. This is what drives people to listen to them. This is what the BBC pays (paid) them for. They are paid to be outlandish, insulting by many people’s standards maybe but they get paid for this. Now put them together on one show. What should one expect? A sobering effect on each other? Surely not. An amplifying effect of reciprocal oneupmanship?  Yes. Of course. You’d have to be an idiot to expect otherwise.

Now, they admittedly did go a little far with actually leaving a message (If you are not up to date with the furore the BBC has a good catchup) but it seems that the pre-recorded show was then passed by someone whose job it is to sanction such things.

Lesley Douglas has fallen on her sword which is just plain daft. It was some middle tier of editorial management that made the decision to broadcast (presumably – I know nothing really). They are the only ones who should be in the firing line if anyone should. Anyone resigning or being fired is a ridiculous over-reaction but when all the wrong people are in the firing line the injustice is all the worse.

The most disconcerting part of the episode is that only two complaints were received after broadcast. Not until the press jumped on the obvious bandwagon did 27,000 dimwits decide to be offended and to protest and complain. What are they all doing each day that they feel the need to complain about something they did not “witness”? For crying out loud people. If you don’t like Ross or Brand DON’T LISTEN OR WATCH THEIR SHOWS!  Their employers will soon fire them when they are not popular. They are popular. Because they’re entertaining and since the number of us who rely on the shipping forecast and farming outlook is minimal these days, the job of broadcasters is to entertain us.

By the way, if you absolutely were forced to listen to the show; if someone had cruelly stapled your ear lobes to your skull and tied you to a chair in front of the radio then I apologise because you may not have had a choice but to listen. However, if this hopefully rare situation should apply to you, take my word for it, you are complaining to the wrong people about the wrong problem.

Ross should be re-instated immediately. Brand should be begged to come back. A cynical friend is keen to wager that Brand has a juicy new job lined up somewhere and finds this rather convenient but the same friend also doesn’t eat meat so is strange in other ways that may cast doubt on this theory.

If anyone senior resigns from the BBC it should be because you have utterly failed to support your employees who did the job you asked of them, took the rope you gave them, placed it round their extrovert little necks then fell off the shaky chair of their personalties. They have been left hung out to dry by the very management that put them in the position where they could do this in the first place. That, BBC is something worth resigning for.

And here’s a tip for other broadcasters who may be tempted to offer their take on it when prompted by the press. Gambo, are you listening? (of course he isn’t, no-one reads this stuff). You see friends and colleagues cannot win. If they come out in support of the duo they will be immediately villified by the 27000, many of them in the press. If they come out against them they lose any respect the listener holds them in as they appear to be kicking good men when they are down in return for a smidgen of PR.  I’m all for free speech but it’s a no-win for other broadcasters unless their reaction is no-comment.

In the space of a few days I have had quite stunning service from several unexpected sources.

Paymentshield. Some years ago my wife and I took out an insurance policy with PaymentShield that would pay the mortgage in the event of either of us being made redundant. The policy has crept up over the last six years from £26 per month to £30.  My cousin who arranged the policy all those years ago recently asked me had I reviewed it because he thought it was changed to cover only my wife’s salary when I started my business and since then, my wife has given up work to be mum so how could I possibly claim?  Well he was right.  We’d paid the last few years of premiums blindly on direct debit and never once questioned it. Now, hands up, this is my fault. The insurer has no responsibility to repay any of those premiums. I cancelled the policy recently but did write and say to them that if there was any opportunity of a refund of premiums I would appreciate it. It was no stronger a request than that. After all, I didn’t have a leg to stand on. But today, a letter arrives. They have refunded £600. A total of 20 months premiums. I was aghast. Grateful too but mostly bowled over by the completely reasonable attitude. In the current cash-strapped financial markets this is all the more remarkable. So, PaymentShield, thank you.  This is my first example of stunning customer service. Well done PaymentShield!

And so to another Insurer (I know!, who’d have thought it?). I had finally reached the end of my tether with the AA. We’ve been members of the AA for 10+ years and nothing will shift me from their breakdown service but until recently I thought I was doing OK on the car insurance front. It was a regular hassle though that only the policy holder was allowed to administer stuff. With the most recent renewal quote and my recent purchase of a new (old) car bringing the family total to three vehicles I decided to shop around. I’m 40 now, My wife is 34, we’ve got 10 years+ no claims, low mileage, modest vehicles. How then was I paying for the three cars a total of £1500 per year with the AA?  The AA don’t do a multi car policy (two of us can’t drive all three at the same time so you would think there was less than 3 x risk) so I called Admiral. Within 20 minutes I had a quote that has saved me… £1000 in the next 12 months. What’s more, I can administer all three policies. The paperwork arrived the next day. The AA cancelled my policies and refunded a few hundred pounds in total (promptly, to their credit). Today I phoned Admiral because I hadn’t received the confirmation of no claims that they needed from the AA. “No problem Mr Gray, I’ll call the AA and call you back”. AND SHE DID! Ten minutes later, I hear “OK, Mr Gray, no problem the AA have confirmed the no-claims, your policies are fine, have a nice day”.  Of course with insurers, the only real measure of quality is when you have to claim but given my claims history (and the fact that I read the small print) I have to say that the annual renewal, the cost and the service (when it comes to adding drivers, switching cars etc.) I get throughout the year is the only usual measure to hand. My experience thus far with Admiral has been the smoothest, most cost-effective and pleasant experience I have ever had with any insurer. Well done Admiral!

Finally, I had cause to declare my new old car off-road. The log book had been delayed or lost in the post. I called DVLA. A new log book arrived two days later. I logged on last night, entered the log book reference and the registration on the government direct website, clicked a button to declare SORN and that was it. Done! No cost, no fuss, halfway through the night when it was convenient for me. A small victory perhaps but it’s the little things in life that can so easily make it harder than it ought to be.

Great service from two insurers and the government in the space of a few hours. This is a good day indeed.

Write thoughts down when they come to me.

I spent several hours out of the office today, most of them driving. While listening to the radio, several subjects cropped up that I felt compelled to comment on here. In fact, in my head I considered my position in depth, argued with myself a little to make sure I wasn’t being unreasonable (never let it be said there isn’t something positive to be found in multiple personality disorders) and then wrote a long and detailed post about each subject.

I had at least four posts lined up. Four things that piqued my interest enough that I devoted some brain time to them but now; now, as I wait for a very large data set to restore during a server migration and so have a few idle moments, I can remember… absolutely NOTHING about the thoughts previously described.

And so I find myself instead writing about forgetting what I wanted to write. Wow, that’s really interesting.

I just heard a radio interview with the playwright Alan Bennett who has donated his life’s records, scribblings, notes and drafts to Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. In my position as a cultural inadequate I can’t say I’m familiar with his work though I dare say I am but simply don’t know it. I’ve probably watched TV adaptations of his work and just never really noticed. Anyway, the point (while I remember it) is that in describing the grant he received as a result of his gaining a scholarship to Oxford he used the word “munificent“.  (In the context that the grant was “sufficient but not munificent”). I like this word a lot. You might say that my liking of the word is itself munificent. It seems like a very fine word and I’d never heard it before today. I intend to use it in the very next conversation that I can’t avoid having.

Well what do you know, I just had a conversation with myself (very very difficult to avoid sometimes) and I used the word. So there you go. Next I shall try it out on someone not inside my head.

This car achieves many world firsts.

Screen capture taken from the page linked to above.

The instant (and therefore, infinite) acceleration means it must have zero mass. Since even the lightest engine blocks have mass this MUST be the first example of a production car powered by a flux capacitor, achieving the FC’s predicted ability to offset its own mass precisely by using an anti-matter exhaust system. Even Clarkson would be excited by this.

In light of this drive train, the fuel consumption figure is disappointing. My calculations (approximate) lead me to believe that this mpg figure was arrived at when carrying four adults amounting to a payload of just over 1 ton. Assuming that the adults are human, and hence the MBF (Muscle Bone Fat) density relatively constant, they would each need a volume to achieve this mass of just over 2.7 cubic metres. Clearly (I’m coming to the point) it is ridiculous to suggest that four adults, each larger than the car itself could fit inside it. The logical and only conclusion therefore is that this “car” is actually a tardis.

Since we’ve established that the “car” is actually a tardis (and clearly fully functional, as it is cloaked as a small car rather than a police call box), the “mpg” probably means MINUTES per gallon. This is a common cosmological measure that links time travelled to gallons of baked bean juice consumed by your typical time lord.

This is good news for the frugal motorist. Tardi come with the universe’s best warranty package since if they break down after the 4 millennia or 22 million light year warranty period you simply travel back in time and get the problem fixed under warranty before it occurs. How can it travel back in time you say if it is broken? Well, that’s the beauty of time-travel paradoxes. It never breaks down BECAUSE you went back once and fixed everything. This notion makes a tardis purchase extremely easy on the wallet though carries clear mental health risks if you think about it too much.

I’m going to order one. Oops, it seems I already have. Clearly it’s working well. Oh no, wait. It’s stopped. It’s not broken, it’s just on strike.
Damn. It’s French.

Aaaaarghhh!  No matter where I work there is always some FW coffee drinker who is utterly incapable of keeping the coffee (for the more metropolitan among you, know this: most of the country’s coffee drinkers have granulated instant, particularly when the company is paying) granules out of the sugar.

Now us tea drinkers are resigned to visually filtering each spoonful of sugar on its way from jar to cup because the coffee comedian couldn’t figure out that it is possible to put sugar into the cup BEFORE the coffee and that they could do this with a dry spoon. No, the brain-dead in these parts like to use a damp spoon, plunge it into the coffee granules, empty the non-sticking bits into the cup then use the coffee coated spoon to retrieve sugar, depositing in the process granules in the sugar pot.

Perhaps I will split open a tea bag or twenty and mingle it in with the coffee granules. Let’s see how they like picking floaty bits from their cup of coffee.

Swines. Inconsiderate, lazy, stupid swines.

The local news outside broadcast director must have been beside himself with joy. “Great! We’re doing an article about the town councils putting millions of pounds into Icelandic banks. We’ll put handfuls of ten pound notes on statues and on grass and next to unfeasibly made-up ladies of a certain age wandering round Cheltenham. That will help our audience of village idiots get the point.”

Bloody fantastic. Illustrate the council “spreading OUR money around to minimise risk and maximise interest” by literally sprinkling money around and filming said money. I for one am grateful. There is absolutely no way in which I could possibly have grasped what on earth it was all about without this  hammed-up, ham fisted, banal visual feast.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better the final words of the reporter “…thrown away” or “…in the bin” – , I’m too stupid to recall exactly what was said – were played over, wait for it; A man throwing money into a bin!

And they say TV isn’t dumbing down.

I’ve been duped. Perhaps you have too. I always took it for granted that my money was safe with a high street bank. I suppose most people were of this opinion. During the recent economic strife though, for the first time in my life, I’ve heard about a limit on how much of my money I can count on getting back if the bank fails.

This was a revelation. Banks are monitored, regulated, audited; everything we see in the media (until recently) is geared towards giving us all the impression that our money is safer in the bank than under the mattress. But it’s not true is it? Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t have any money. No, not at all. Like most of you I’m a net borrower from the bank. The balance on my mortgage far outweighs any other assets I may have other than the house itself. You can bet your life I’d be a outraged all the more if I had retired and had my £40k pension lump sum only to find that the last £5k of it could evaporate in the event that my bank hit the dirt.

I’ve seen the warnings about shares “Values of investments my go down as well as up”. Of course. Who’d be daft enough to believe otherwise?  On life insurance policies we are warned “You may not get back all you pay in”.

But when did you EVER see a warning on the bank poster “Caution: You may not get back all you pay in.”

Some banks even charge for these accounts. Of course, one may earn a few percent interest on the cash in the bank but if you wanted to put £50k in the bank would you put it all with the same banking group if you were forewarned “Remember, the x% interest means you have to risk 50% of your capital. You’ll definitely earn x% this year but if we overstretch ourselves you may only get £35k back.”

It’s fundamentally dishonest. I don’t want something for nothing. I appreciate that to earn that small amount of interest then I have to let the bank USE my money temporarily but where was the warning that they may LOSE it? That’s the point. I, naively no doubt, always thought that the bank is using my money to make so much more that they can afford to give me a very very tiny return. It seems plausible.

Of course we hear that no private individual has ever lost money from a UK bank. We hear that no UK bank will actually be allowed to fail, simply because no government wants to be the one in power when the first hit is taken by the public (aside from the taxpayer bailing out the banks of course which DOES seem to be acceptable.) I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know who to believe any more. I suppose I should be glad that I’m a net borrower, but just as the well heeled depositor will lose a packet if the bank dies, that same bank may call in my mortgage and put me and the family on the streets! Despite this unpleasant possibility,  I  should stop moaning. I’m benefiting right now from borrowing from the bank which ultimately must mean borrowing from the depositors who have surplus cash. I wonder if those depositors know though that their cash isn’t safe when the bank fails?

Blogging that is. Surely vanity. The desire of otherwise modestly, if at all, talented people to see their name “in lights”. For sure there is a lot of good out there. Good, talented people donating software, knowledge, hints, tips, advice and ultimately, their time: that most precious of commodities. But most blogs seem to be like this blog. Like my blog; A dumping ground for random thoughts and questions of no relevance to world affairs and quite likely of no interest to any other inhabitant of said world. Yet still we do it. Rewarded in the short term anyway only by the marginal ego boost received by seeing ‘published’ what would be published no other way.

My writing here will have no more beneficial effect on the world at large than your reading of it. No poor will be lifted from poverty, no oppressed peoples freed. By the same token, and perhaps most importantly of all no one will be harmed by it either so what the hell. Read if you like. I’ll write if I like.

The most pressing question in my mind as I write this is the proper construct of a paragraph. Part of me just wants to have a bit of white space after a few lines because it’s prettier that way (my use of this particular adjective should in no way be taken to imply any real appreciation of aesthetic whatsoever. Let’s just say I find it nicer to read.) Somewhere in the depths of my brain I seem to recall something about the changing of a subject or the grouping of related ideas. Grammar didn’t feature largely in my education as far as I can recall.

Isn’t every thought in this post related? Isn’t the whole post a train of thought? I know, I know, I should  Google it. Google knows everything. It certainly seems to. Musing on the notion of a paragraph though is somehow more appealing than looking for it in the almost certain knowledge that were I to Google “How to use Paragraphs” I would have my answer.

This leads me to another thought. I think Google, without which of course the web may still be virtually unnavigable may have stolen most of the mystery from the web. There was some fun to be had in the quest for knowledge, the cross referencing between different “catalogues” as yahoo et al started out as. Locating knowledge has almost now become too easy. The seeking is now short lived, with Google and others providing almost instant guidance to what one seeks. The challenge has become finding enough time and focus enough to take in the information or to identify its provenance. Perhaps one day there will be a market for a search engine that doesn’t. A search engine that attempts to obfuscate results just enough to make the research challenging. Perhaps not.