Cucking Fookies

Been on the Internet for years, me. I can't claim to have been "one of the first" to hit the wires, but I wasn't far behind. About twenty years ago I think it was when I first read a newsgroup. Roughly 18 months later when I became a permanent rider of the electric surf.

So I know about cookies. I know what they are, and what they aren't, and what they can and can't do. And I appreciate the fact that they get on with what it is they do quietly, in the background, with a minimum of fuss. Hardly any fuss, in fact, beyond having to clear them out occasionally when things get in a bit of a tangle. Or should I say I appreciated that fact. Because recently, it stopped being true.

Recently, legislators got involved and decided that our human rights were being infringed or something by these quiet, unassuming little blobs of text. Our personal data was being kept!! OH NOES!! Without our knowledge!! Well, without our knowledge if we were the kind of surfer who didn't bother to learn how things work. So, 98% of surfers then.

So now every time I visit a new site I get some sort of annoying little pop-up.

	Our site uses cookies! Please do not continue unless you agree to our use of cookies! By continuing you are confirming that you understand you will probably not die as a direct or indirect result of our use of COOKIES!	x

Jeez. What I really need now is a browser with a "silently accept all cookie prompts" option!

But it's worse than that. The commercial use of cookies is becoming even more annoying than the warnings. I sell stuff on eBay, so I regularly search for that stuff to see if it's saleable, and for how much. And then, every bloody site I visit for the next month is plastered with adverts for whatever I'm trying to sell. Even something as innocuous as the Hunger Site (which even after 12 years I still click on every day) - and, you know, fair enough, they want to raise as much money as they can for their good causes - but crikey I went there the other day and TWO of its panels AND the top banner were all offering me the same aerial signal booster that I've got listed on eBay right now. Gimme a break!

(I've sold it, by the way)

Merge In Turn

Coming to the final week or so of the improvements at J3 of the M60, which ordinarily I would use twice a day ferrying my good lady to and from her office. For the duration of the work I've been avoiding it in the evenings in favour of the A34 since the tailback has often filled the anticlockwise slip road right back to the motorway (about a mile), but I couldn't avoid it on Monday.

I noticed the contractors had put up "Please Merge In Turn" signs to encourage gentlemanly practice among drivers approaching from both clockwise and anticlockwise slip roads (which at the moment both feed into a single lane) and on the southerly approach from the A34 (ditto). Once complete, both of these flows of traffic will have three lanes available so you can see how much better it will be. Eventually.

But the appearance of these signs set me thinking (again) about something that has always perplexed (annoyed) me about British drivers. Whenever a road reduces in lanes, from 3 to 2, or 2 to 1, they seem hell bent on dividing into two warring camps. One lot will move into the open lane often several miles back, despite any long queue, and sit there in their righteousness inching forwards every few seconds. The other lot, perceiving that the soon-to-be closed lane has been totally vacated by the first lot, will stay in that lane until the last minute, and then attempt to cut in. At which point the righteousness of the first lot boils over into righteous indignation as they hog the bumper of the car in front to freeze out any car wanting to "push in."

This behaviour is a constant source of amusement to me, on those days where I'm in an expansive, forgiving mood. And annoyance when I'm not feeling so full of the milk of human kindness. My question - one of my questions - to the drivers in the first group is: at what point do you decide that you should abandon the unoccupied road in front of you in favour of a lengthy, barely moving queue? Which distance would you consider socially acceptable? 200 metres? 500? A mile? Two miles? And what good do you think it does to sit queuing in one lane when there's a totally empty lane going to waste immediately to your left, or right?

What is so magical about the appearance of a "Please Merge In Turn" sign that lights up the lightbulb in your head and makes you realise that it makes more sense for everyone to use as many lanes as possible, for as long as possible, and then merge in turn at the point where one lane disappears. Not to mention being a fairer and less stressful alternative.

Is it embarrassment that makes you try to stop drivers merging late from the other lane? A realisation that you too could have "pushed" to the front and not wasted all that time queuing? Or a determination to force the other person, even if only for one more car length, to "waste" a fraction of the time that you've wasted in your queue? Can't you see that merging in turn means no-one gets an unfair advantage, or disadvantage, over anyone else?

As someone aptly commented the other day: you are the result of 4 billion years of evolution. Fucking act like it.

100TWC - Day 54: Health and Healing

I had a nasty experience recently. Immediately after it, I decided to make it the subject of this post, as part of the writing challenge. I've been coming up with ideas for each day's prompt in advance (which shouldn't come as a surprise) and at the start of the piece I check back at the few words or couple of short sentences I've written in my "theme pack" (a document that lists the themes, my ideas for the themes, how many are left to write, how many to decide what I'm going to write, etc), get the idea in my head, and set off writing.

Today, it's a couple of weeks since the nasty incident and I've calmed down a bit. With those two weeks' perspective I'm no longer angry. Just sad, and... well... a little resigned. Resigned to human nature.

Some of you already know I'm a Spiritualist healer. To anyone that's just visiting, or is a regular who didn't know that for whatever reason, there are a few pages about it (what it is, how I came to be one) on my website. Shortly after I finished my training, the Spiritualists National Union (SNU) asked me if I'd like to be a tutor for the course I'd just taken. It's a correspondence course (there is a practical element to the healing too, of course. You can't be healed by post) and they were in need of new tutors. Since I'd done so well on the course, achieving the highest mark in my graduation year and winning a prize for doing it, they thought I'd make an ideal tutor.

So since 1997 I've been looking after students from all over the UK and, more recently, overseas, as the SNU spreads its influence and offers the course to people from Europe and beyond. I've had some excellent students in all that time, many lovely comments, some that have required a little more help than others, some who have really struggled but even so done their best, and others who have for one reason or another given up part way through or even not started at all, after having registered.

But until the Sunday before last I have never, ever, been engaged in a shouting match with a student. These are, after all, people who are looking to be healers. Empathic, sympathetic, warm and generous people who want to give their time to help make others feel better. So not the kind of person, you would think, to have an over-inflated ego, a sense of moral righteousness, or - worse - one of entitlement where they believe the highest grades should be handed to them on a plate for a minimum of effort. Such were the sentiments behind the irate phone call I received from this particular student.

One of those people who ask a question and then immediately talk over the answer. Because they're not interested in your answer. They're only interested in telling you what the answer is. What the answer you should have given them is. And that answer is never a C grade. I've never had a C grade in my life and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you give me one now. I'm a teacher and assessor myself, I'll have you know. All courses all over the UK are governed by this or that official body and I know the rules. Show me where in the question it tells me that I need to answer in the way you say? The question asks for X and I've given you X so I should have top marks. I'll take this as high as I have to in the SNU. I'm not having it. I've let it pass and let it pass but I can't take it any more. Everyone at my church is AMAZED at what I've had to put up with and on and on and on.

A lot of the above paragraph is paraphrased or implicit (rather than explicit) in what he said but that was the clear message. Some of it is the real words. And with the best will -- and all the patience -- in the world I found it impossible, eventually, not to rise to the bait. Although I started off calm, I ended up literally shaking with rage. Which, you know, is the most annoying thing of all really. My reaction. The fact that I lost it, when all I really needed to do was keep calmly putting forward my view. My correct view. My 15-year-experienced-tutor view. My 55-year-old world view*. He hadn't done the work. For months he has been trying to get away with the minimum necessary to scrape through the course. And for quite a long time I've shrugged and warned and cajoled and suggested, and been ignored. And this time, finally, the chickens came home to roost and they didn't taste very nice. And there was a clucking and a ruffling of feathers in the hen house.

I hung up in the end. In the middle of a continued tirade from the other end, I hung up. And emailed him to tell him not to call again. I have no idea if he complained, or how high, or whether he's demanding a different tutor, or what. I strongly suspect our student/tutor relationship is too badly compromised to continue, which is a shame (in a way) because he's only one question away from finishing the course. If he can swallow his enormous pride and just knuckle down and get on with it. But I doubt that will happen. And I don't much care either way. One bad apple in a barrel of almost 150 students over 15 years. It's not a bad track record. The guy who organises the training courses was worried it would put me off being a tutor. I have a thicker skin than that. Yes, I was upset, but I got over it.

But as I said right at the off, my main feeling now is one of sadness. That someone with that amount of hubris cannot set it aside and focus on the long term goal. If he wants to help people, then he really needs to be able to understand them better. And do the work.

*His opening gambit, at the start of the phone call, had been to say "I don't know how old you are, but..." so I told him. Quite took the wind out of his sails to learn I was three years his senior. I'm certain he was expecting me to be younger so that he could play the "age and experience" card on me. Shame ;0)

100TWC - Day 34: Shades of Grey

How many shades of grey do you think there are? I'm guessing that, unless you've been entirely out of touch with the zeitgeist over the last few months, the first and possibly only answer that's popped into your head is: 50.

I haven't read it. I don't intend to read it. Not my kind of thing at all. But I have read reviews of it, and while I'm the first to admit that one should never judge anything solely on the basis of reviews of that thing, the reviews I've read of 50 Shades of Grey have been universally condemnatory. Sometimes exceedingly eloquently so. And other times side-splittingly amusingly so.

So, armed with my Shield of Smug, I will continue to protect myself from being sullied by any and all exposure to the actual text of the document in question. Unfortunately my shield is of little use against other works of similar "quality," many of which regularly crop up as book club choices. I can't remember how old I was when I began to think, while reading, "God. I could write better than this," but I was almost certainly still in short trousers.

In the intervening (*counts on fingers*) 46 years, things haven't got much better. Of course, I've read some good stuff during those years. Many, many examples of excellent writing that have thrilled, captivated, engaged and transported me to their writers' worlds. But there's an almost equal number of appalling turkeys in the mix, and the question that comes back to me, time after time, is: how on Earth does this drivel ever get published?

As a writer myself (if you hadn't noticed) I'm all too painfully familiar with the concept of a publishing gatekeeper. Enough of them have slammed their blimmin' gates shut in my face over the years, so I should be. They have SUCH little time, and SO many submissions, and they can ONLY take on ONE new writer this year. So I'm sorry, your manuscript is not what we're looking for, or we're not actually looking for anything at all, or we're too busy with our existing client base, yadda yadda yadda.

So if all that's true, wouldn't you think that they would expend their oh-so-precious time and resources actually sifting out the nuggets from the endless piles of dross that fly across their desks every day? Is it just that they become so exposed to utter crap that when they eventually bother to read a piece that's just this side of crap, they think they've uncovered the next Virginia Woolf? A woeful lack of perspective brought on by living too close to worthless rubbish.

A little while ago I read an interesting bit of speculative insight into what might be going on. It debated the success of books that are really quite badly written, versus the opposite story, often told, of the well-written book that doesn't do well with sales. There's an example of this latter category in the side bar over there on your right. Cough. It's a common theme with self- or e-publishing that the gatekeeper I referred to above -- agents and traditional publishers, editors, etc -- has been removed from the process and hence (potentially) the floodgates have been opened to (yet more) half-arsed dross. But through all this, the interesting point of the article was that really successful books have a compelling story AND are well-written, but books will also generally do reasonably well if they have the former but not the latter.

That is to say, a poorly written book that has a compelling story will still be read. A well-written bore will not. This is an unpalatable truth for those of us writers who take utmost pride in the craft of writing. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, tone, vocabulary -- selecting EXACTLY the right word to replace the ALMOST right one -- this takes a lot of effort. It took me, for War of Nutrition, years. Literally. Although admittedly part-time. To the majority of readers? It doesn't matter. They absolutely do not care if I chose one word or the other. Whether I keep to the point-of-view rules or not.

Whether they can't tell the difference, or they don't notice, or they DO notice but they don't care because the story is SUCH a page-turner… I don't know. But even quite a few 1-star reviews complaining about grammar and spelling will not slow the sales of a book that also has a good smattering of 5-star reviews saying "I couldn't put it down." It's galling, and I would never lower my standards to get a book out faster based on that truth, but that doesn't make it any less of a truth.

In the case of 50 Shades of Grey, many many reviewers bemoan the awful English. The poor sentence structure and grammar. The parroting of hackneyed phrases. The bad word choice. But the sad fact is the subject matter had a popular launch point (as Twilight fan fic) and has an even more popular, naughty, faux shocking, main subject. And it sells by the million.

So have I told you how good my book is? It's got chases and set backs and world-wide sickness and a hero who... [spoiler deleted]. And it's got a bit of risqué sex. And some regular sex. And every single person who has read it has told me how much they enjoyed it, and what a page turner it is, and some of them have even gone into print on t'Interweb to say so. Publically. For which I'm sincerely grateful. But as of now, it's not selling millions. Unfortunately.

I live in hope.

Yodelling would have been more productive

"Please call me to arrange redelivery of your parcel" read the message on the little green card I found on my return home yesterday. It was from Yodel. Never heard of them, but a quick Google reveals it's the new name for Home Delivery Network. Sod's law, really. I was only out of the house for an hour. I've been in all week.

I called the number as soon as they opened this morning. 8am. It went to voicemail.

Hello. This is the Yodel service centre at Ashton.

Well, let me stop you right there. Because surely to justify the title "service centre" you have to, you know, provide some service. And I've been calling that number all day and getting no reply, so I ain't seen much service to speak of.

All our operatives are busy dealing with other customers.

Maybe it's just because I've dialled the number over 100 times today, that I have a vision of "operatives" being just one overworked postal worker rushing between the office and the storage depot. The alternative vision jostling for ascendency in my mind's eye was of a depot full of operatives dressed in festive costume sitting around sipping sherry and eating mince pies, telling each other to "let it ring - it's Christmas!"

But if you leave a message and a contact number we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Well, no you won't actually, because immediately after the conclusion of your message that nice lady from BT comes on to say

This mailbox is full. Please try later.

And close the call. The only option is to ring again. Which I did. Over and over.

Now I know what you're thinking. Maybe there was no-one there. But while the majority of calls went to voicemail after 30 seconds, just occasionally one would be diverted immediately, suggesting that someone was on the phone at that very minute. During the morning, such an event would spur me on to dial a few more times, thinking if there was someone at the desk right then, I stood more chance of getting through. In this case, more chance was equivalent to two or three times nothing. Still nothing.

While I ate lunch, I dialled the number constantly for over half an hour with no luck. Then, I got the engaged tone. Back came the nice BT lady to advise me (in case I didn't recognise the engaged tone which, you know, hasn't changed for at least fifty years):

The number you have dialled is busy. To use ring back, key 5 now.

Yes! Ring back! Great idea. I keyed 5.

Ring back is not available on this number.

Well why did you offer it to me then you utter arse?

In sheer frustration I Googled "yodel couriers". I had typed only half of "couriers" when the second suggestion in the list changed to "yodel couriers complaints". Oh dear - that doesn't look good. I followed the first link, to a review site.

First time I've ever known a company to have an average of 1 star (yes, out of 5) after 1203 reviews. That's a pretty impressive indictment. I'm surprised any online retailer still uses them.

My package turned up around 3pm. I never did get through to the "service" centre.

"Ah, Yodel!" I cried as the courier handed over his ruggedised tablet for me to sign. "I've been trying to call your depot all day."

He looked sheepish.

"Wasting your time there, mate."

Tell me about it.

Of Bosuns, Bosons and Bozos

The hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson has been much in the news this last week, as the particle physicists at CERN pore over the latest outputs from the Large Hadron Collider and believe they may have seen tantalising hints of its existence.

Sticking with my recent theme of poor science coverage by the nation's media, this has largely been reported as a search for a totally different entity. Something apparently called a Higgs Bosun. Now I'm not overly familiar with the subject, but to me a bosun has always been something to do with sailing. The oldest rank in the Royal Navy, more properly rendered as boatswain, and the chappy who supervises the deck crew. He also, optionally, may have a locker. But he's got absolutely fuck all to do with particle physics.

Now I know it's an unfamiliar term, but you radio and TV Johnnies really mustn't use that as an excuse to fall back on something you ARE familiar with. It's a BosON. Phonetically: BOSE - as in the world-renowned purveyors of high quality audio equipment - and ON - as in the opposite of off.

I really don't see what the problem is. You never see or hear of people referring to protuns, or neutruns, or electruns. Surely even the densest of media hacks must have noticed by now that sub-atomic particles generally, with some notable exceptions, have names ending in -on. And that this not pronounced un.

I know I shouldn't really get so wound up about this stuff but, well, I do. It's just not proper.

Unwired

Virgin Trains, eh? It's been a while, but this week I had occasion to delight in their services again. Since I last travelled they've been plastered with WiFi stickers. HotSpot (they shout): fast, reliable, wireless internet. Log on now.

Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?

Leaky

When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.

Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?

And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?

He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.

After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.

The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!

I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.

For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(

Sign of the times

I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."

That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."

There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.

Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.

Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.

Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."

And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?

Polish.

Beyond ridiculous

Even as I start to write this I can't believe I'm (a) wasting my time with it and (b) sufficiently annoyed with what is essentially a vacuous pile of herd-fodder to bother devoting a post to it, but we just got through watching this year's X Factor "Judges' Houses" round, and I'm dumbfounded at the depths they've plumbed for the inevitable "twist."

I can't remember when it first happened and I certainly can't be bothered to look it up, but by now regular viewers of X Factor are very familiar with the concept of Manufactured Groups at boot camp.

It started one year when the number of groups being put through was pitifully low. Suddenly someone had an "idea." Let's take all these soloists that haven't quite made the grade individually, put them together and pretend they're a group! I swear one year two out of the three groups that made it through to the final rounds hadn't existed at the start of auditions (I *have* checked this, and it was series 4 - 2007 - the culprits being "Hope" and "Futureproof". I'm sure you remember them).

So we've been used to this for at least the past four years and the number of groups going through from initial auditions has continued to be... on the low side. Is anyone surprised? Why would you audition as a group when there's a very public history of the producers making groups up on the spot and giving them - effectively - a free pass to the later rounds at the expense of people who have been singing and practising together for more than a week.

Well you may have thought that was ridiculous, but here's where the title of this post comes from. Because THIS year's shenanigans have taken that level of ridiculousness and multiplied it not once, but twice.

First of all, the groups that were manufactured at boot camp were still not good enough, so right at the end, a few members from a handful of groups were given "a life line." Formed into a new stratum of meta-manufactured group made entirely from left over pieces of worn out manufactured group, these groups were then given tickets to Judges Houses. Or judge's house, in fact, since there's just the one for the groups.

With stupefying surrealism, when THOSE groups weren't good enough either, another random selection of members from two groups were given another "life line" (these really are 'cats' - and they haven't yet run out of lives) and made into a third level of uber-meta-manufactured group who then (surely not?) made it through to the final.

Like I said: beyond ridiculous.

One of those things

Whenever you visit another country, you see things that are better than back home, things that are worse and, just occasionally, things that make you scratch your head and say: WTF?

For me, from the very first time I saw one 10 years ago, to the most recent time today (and every day of this trip so far), one of those "wtf" things is the All-Way (or 4-way) stop.

In the UK, and as far as I can remember in every other European country in which I've driven or been driven, whenever two roads cross there is the concept of one of them being the "major" road, and the other the "minor". So you get something like this:

Cars on the horizontal road *always* have priority; those on the vertical roads have to wait if there's traffic on the horizontal, or at least slow down to check and "give way" before turning out/crossing.

However, in North America, while this system applies to "really" major roads, in general it isn't extended to the vast network of roads around local suburbs. Here, there is no concept of a 'priority' road. All roads are equal. And because of that, when two equal roads cross, you get an All-way stop.

What a crazy, outmoded idea! Self-explanatory I'd hope, but just in case: everyone approaching this crossroads has to stop. Always. Even when there's no other traffic around at all. And because the roads and verges here are so wide, mostly you can see down the approaching roads for anything up to 100 metres. Easily far enough to tell that nothing is coming. And of course two cars coming from opposite directions and intending to go straight on would have NO effect on each other whatsoever. But both still have to stop, and then set off again.

What is even more surprising to me, as someone who spends a lot of time bemoaning how everyone ignores the rules of the road in the UK (especially cyclists), is that everyone rigidly obeys this rule. No traffic cops around, no cameras, and yet everyone stops. Always. What a waste of fuel, wear and tear on brakes and clutch, and time. And on suburban streets it's not unusual to have one of these every couple of hundred metres. You're not even allowed to "give way" (a concept that doesn't seem to exist here) - i.e. slow down, check, and proceed. No, it's a mandatory full stop. Does my head in every time.

How did this happen?

Something about our flight to Toronto yesterday triggered one of those gestalt moments for me. A chilling realisation of a modern truism. And it's this:

When I was young, the world was geared around older people. Us youngsters had to defer to our elders, treat them with respect, shut up and get on with doing as we were told, and not make a fuss.

Now I'm older, the world is geared around younger people. Us elders(*) are invisible. Virtually ignored by marketeers, shoved out of the way in queues and generally not given as much respect as people of our age commanded in "those days."

So it seems, or at least yesterday it seemed, as if somehow everything had flipped 180° and I'd missed that crucial nexus - if it ever existed - when I was the "right age" for the world.


(*)OK, 54 isn't THAT old, but... you know... sometimes it FEELS as though it is.

Something fishy going on

Why is it that it takes a "celebrity" to tell us something is bad before there's even the ghost of a chance that anything will be done about it?

The European Union regulations about catching and landing fish have been broken for years. In an effort to "protect" species whose populations are either on the verge of crashing, or have already, they limit fishermen to a given number of thousands of tons in a year, after which it is illegal to land any more fish of that kind.

Unfortunately, none of the massed intellect of the EU agricultural and fisheries policy units was capable of realising that there are no nets in existence that can differentiate what they are catching. The nets go down, the fish come up, spill out onto the deck, die, and then - if they are "over quota" - they're thrown back into the sea. Dead.

How is that protecting populations? It isn't. How long has it been going on? Years. What's been done about it? Nothing. Until along comes Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, kicking off a campaign very much in the vein of Jamie Oliver and his Turkey Twizzlers, designed to wake everyone up to the problem and do something about it.

Laudable, and I can hardly complain about him or his campaign since he has already - allegedly - secured Tesco's agreement to moving to 100% rod-and-line caught tuna (as opposed to trawled tuna) by the end of 2012. Now, if you were a cynic, you might think "well, yes, that's two years away. Who's going to be monitoring their progress? Who's going to be shouting the odds if they don't quite manage it?" But at least something is happening. Something more than could be achieved by consumers alone.

And that's my beef, really. How is it that something so patently ludicrous, that doesn't achieve the protection it was intended to and at the same time affects the livelihoods of every European fisherman for no benefit whatever, has been allowed to carry on for so long? And why does no-one pay any attention until a bloody TV chef steps in?

In among all the posturing and self-congratulation there are some interesting statistics. 50% of the fish we all eat comes from three species - salmon, tuna & cod. Add haddock and prawns and you're up to 80%. Is it any wonder the populations can't sustain themselves, faced with automated, computerised trawlers pulling hundreds of thousands of tons of them out of the sea every year, and then throwing half of them back dead?

Over a million tons of fish a year are thrown back. Caught, dead, and unable to be landed, sold or eaten. Meanwhile stocks of sardines, herring, and white fish like whiting, hake, coley - that you really would be hard pushed to tell from cod, especially in fish fingers - are plentiful and ignored.

Well, I guess any progress is better than no progress. If you want to sign up to help his campaign (I have), it's at Fish-Fight.net, and the TV programme begins for those in the UK (or those who can watch online) tomorrow night at 9pm on Channel 4.

The Z Factor

I haven't written much about this year's X Factor. In fact, on checking, I haven't written anything at all about X Factor on this blog, ever. Which is strange for someone who used to write between 1 and 5 "TV critic" posts a day on TV Scoop. Why is that, I wonder? Well the title of this post might give you a clue. I honestly don't think I've seen such an array of total bollocks claiming to be singers in my life, and last night reached the absolute nadir of the dregs of the pit of Hades.

"Rock Night" it claimed to be, so you'll pardon me for expressing some surprise at the collection of bland ballads we were subjected to, all (naturally) greeted with effervescent enthusiasm by the four judges who are, apparently, increasingly losing the plot when it comes to having any discernable clue what they're listening to. Take, for example, Rebecca. One of the best of the bad bunch, I'd have to agree, but what's with Dannii's comments? The acts performed two songs last night, as we're getting down to smaller numbers now and they need to pad the show out a bit to maximise the ad revenues. So for her first song, Rebecca, as is her wont, stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. "That was nice," Dannii enthused, "but I'd like to see a little more performance. You know, move about a bit." (I'm paraphrasing). So here's Rebecca's second number, where she stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. And a couple of times, still standing on the spot, swayed her hips a bit. "Now THAT's the kind of performance I was looking for!" gushed Dannii. HUH?

But it would be wrong to single out Dannii in the stupid comments stakes. They're all just as bad as each other, trotting out the same old (and I mean... OLD) clichés time after time, making it their own, believable, relevant, true recording artist, with a liberal smattering of the usual "do you know what"s and "let me tell you"s added in to make absolutely sure that we all fall asleep.

If I didn't believe this show had jumped the shark before, I certainly reached that conclusion very early on in this series. The "vote for the worst" campaign has literally its worst contestant this year in Wagner, and while the thought of "sticking it to the man" is mildly amusing and diverting it doesn't make up for the pain of having to sit - sorry "fast forward" - through his performances week after week. The predictable stories of judges' in-fighting, vote rigging, and production hoopla to keep the most controversial contestants in the show as long as possible have verged on the disgusting this year, but above all the media hype towers the dark truth of an almost incredible lack of serious talent in the line-up.

Of all last night's dross only Matt Cardle's Nights in White Satin (or "Knights..." as the ITV X Factor home page has it this morning. LOL) came anywhere close to being what I would call a half-decent performance by a new artist and even that started off weak and ended up edging towards a shout. And yet after every screeching, out of tune, boring repetition of songs we've heard a million times before, we're treated to the spectacle of four "experts" telling us we're listening to pure gold, when it's clear to anyone who can be bothered to open up their eyes and ears that they're watching, at best, glorified karaoke without a shred of originality and only the merest hint of musicality every so often.

Come on, Cowell. Haven't you made enough money yet? Piss off to America with this worn out formulaic crap, and give us our Saturday nights and our traditional Christmas No. 1s back again.

What is it with scaffolders?

We've had scaffolding up twice since we've lived here. The first time, when we had the roof replaced, it stayed up for several weeks after the work was finished, and wasn't taken down until we'd prompted and poked and urged and pleaded several times.

As I mentioned at the time, I find it hard to relax properly when the house is surrounded by scaffolding. First floor windows in older properties, inevitably, are not as secure as ground floor ones. They don't have to be. Opportunist burglars don't carry ladders, and even planned burglaries don't usually involve clambering in through an upper-storey window. So I prefer to get it down as soon as practicable once the work is completed.

Our second experience of scaffolding has, so far, been if anything even worse than the first. Admittedly it's not all round the house this time - we've had the gable end repointed - but it is full height and it has been here since the middle of August.

The work was completed before our recent visit to Toronto, so as we were gone for 12 days we fully expected to find it gone on our return. No such luck. A phone call to the builder revealed he was just as surprised as we were, since he'd spoken to the scaffold guy before we went away. After chasing him, we were promised it would be gone by the end of that week. Then by the following Tuesday. No, Friday.

By now the excuses were coming thick and fast. He'd been on holiday, and his men had let the jobs pile up while he was away. He didn't know why it hadn't been done but he'd chase them up. They'd been onto our road and taken down the wrong set of scaffolding from someone else's house (!).

Finally with dark talk of "repercussions" and penalty payments, we were finally promised - no, really - that it would come down on Friday last. And did it? Well when the clock had ticked around to half past two in the afternoon I did begin to lose hope. They eventually arrived just before 3pm. It was gone by 5.

See, as far as I can make out, the thing with scaffold is, you pay for it up front and they come and erect it when you say you need it. But from that point on, there is absolutely no incentive for them to remove it, until the scaffold firm themselves need it for another job. It's like your house is their storage yard, often with built-in advertising. Removing the scaffold takes time and effort, and they've already had their money, so it's time and effort they feel they're not getting paid for.

If we need any more scaffold in the future I think I'll be making sure the penalty clauses are written in from the start, or hold back some money until they take their gear away. Tch.

OB

I may have ranted about this before (although I've checked, and I can't put my finger on the post at the moment), but one edition of the evening news last week really brought it into sharp focus. The problem? Outside broadcasts as a way of lending faux "realism" to news items. It does my head in on a regular basis, but on this particular night we were treated to three in quick succession.

Coverage of the inquest into the London Tube bombings? Let's have the reporter standing outside Aldgate tube station.
Wayne Rooney possibly leaving Man U? Stand outside Old Trafford.
Reporting the latest on the Government Spending Review? Stand outside Number 10.

WTF? The BBC have just had a 5-year licence freeze imposed and are supposedly wringing their hands trying to work out how to save money. Well apart from the obvious - cutting the salaries of prats like Graham Norton, Chrisses Moyles and Evans, et al - you could start by bringing these reporters in out of the cold. It adds a sum total of zero importance, content, or gravitas to a news report to have a reporter on location if all they are doing is standing and talking to the camera. They may as well be in the studio. They'd be warmer, happier and more relaxed. The viewing public wouldn't be subjected to that annoying satellite delay between the anchor handing over to the reporter and the reporter hearing that handover and starting his/her report. And most importantly in these straitened times, the Beeb would save a whole bundle of cash.

I don't know who thought up the idea of OB as a generic news coverage staple, probably someone with a vested interest in increasing the number of OBs, but it was a bad idea right from the off and it should be stopped. Now.

Commercial-Time

I've been trying to work out why I found the adverts on Canadian TV so intrusive and irritating. Canadian Broadcasting limits advertising to 15 mins per hour on commercial channels, but "only" 12 minutes per hour on "Specialty" channels. However those numbers apply to real commercials - i.e. those advertising product. From my admittedly brief exposure, it doesn't cover trailers. And it doesn't excuse the extremely annoying habit - something we don't have in the UK - of running the same ad twice in the same break - sometimes only 30 seconds apart - or running very similar ads, such as hair care products for two different types of hair, which have almost identical wording, serially. The worst we ever get is a repeat of the last few seconds of an ad - these agency types have learned their lessons about the way memory works - to "fix" the product in viewers' minds, but these almost always run at the end of the ad break, separated from the original by up to three or four minutes.

One evening I finally managed to watch a movie from beginning to end. Aliens. It was scheduled to air over three hours, which given its posted running time on IMDb of 137 mins leaves 43 mins for ads - 14.33 per hour. But they're not evenly split. The first hour felt almost like UK television. The first break didn't come until 20 past the hour, and the next was twenty minutes later, each one showing only 3-4 minutes of ads. I should have been wise. As the film continued, the frequency of breaks increased, to the point where the last half-hour of the film suffered three breaks of five minutes each.

I have no idea how the law constrains the incidence of ads. My Aliens experience would suggest that rather than being a rigid per-hour limit, that "15 minutes per hour" is an average. Being allowed to relax the grip of ads in some hours only to tighten it fiercely later, destroys any enjoyment.

I used to think I'd be able to live in Canada. That I'd actually quite enjoy it. But if I ever had to, I don't think I'd be watching any live TV. I'd be PVR-ing everything and spending a lot of time with my finger on the FF button!!

Pensions again

At a time when I'm feeling particularly sore about my own pension - having had it ripped out from under me after 33 years by a company that took years of "pension holidays", and variously used the fund to pay off criminally negligent senior executives and to bankroll redundancy programmes - here comes a Panorama expose showing that I wouldn't have been much better off in a privately-held scheme.

Panorama: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/10_october/04/panorama.shtml

Pay in 120,000 over 40 years; lose almost 100,000 in fees and commissions.

How is it even legal to have 80% of your money taken away from a pot that is supposed to look after you in your retirement? Why are the fees so high? Because the average length any particular share is held is now one year, and buying and selling the porfolio contents - the "churn" - attracts bumper brokerage charges and fees. And then there's the bonuses to pay, even if the fund hasn't performed well. And finally - surprise surprise - many of the investments involve kick-backs to the fund managers, incentivising them (see how effortlessly he invents new verbs!) to leave your money in under-performing investments because they pay the biggest bribes.

Yet another example of how the financial world stinks, and lines its own pockets at the expense of the ordinary guy struggling to put enough by to be comfortable in old age. Is it just me, or is this kind of thing becoming WAY too common these days?

Bloody Hell

I've had a gmail.com email address for almost exactly two months. Two months and two days, to be precise. I've never, so far, used it for anything. No subscriptions, no web forms, no purchases. I've only even disclosed what it is to very close family and friends, none of whom has ever used it.

I was spammed on it just now.

How does that work then? I only created the bloody thing as insurance against the day (rapidly approaching) when I'd have to abandon my main addresses at johnberesford.com.

It's about time something sensible, serious, and technologically impregnable was done to sort out flippin' spammers once and for all.

Flasher

I've long been of the opinion that just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean you HAVE to.

If only BBC programme designers shared that opinion.

Recently we've been subjected to a series of really annoying animations on BBC News output. Whenever they put up a list to underline whatever point the talking head is making, each list item is accompanied by a matched pair of brackets - [ ] - that appear over the middle of the item and then gradually fade out as they slide apart heading for the start and end of the word respectively.

This is the wonderful world of Flash animation. A tool that has its place (probably) and can be very effective (occasionally) but which is so overused and ubiquitous now that it's become a joke. It is no longer clever or cool, assuming it ever was. It's been used in the title sequences of dramas for several years, as the actors names slide over each other in opposite directions, fading in or out as necessary. Or expanding as they fade - a trick that belongs in Flash 101.

None of this adds anything to the piece, whether it's a credit sequence or a news graphic or whatever. It's a distraction, and an expensive distraction at that, as it presumably requires the services of a graphic designer. Still, I guess the producers figure they've got all these graphic designers sitting around, right? May as well use them for something. And if you don't need a pie-chart for your particular piece, what are you gonna do? Go on, stick some Flash animation to the viewers. At least the more moronic ones will be impressed.