The race to the bottom

For reasons to dull to expand on here, a young friend is visiting from the continent. For further reasons to dull to expand on here, a similarly-aged (early 20s) acquaintance was off to a night club in a nice Surrey town and offered to take her along. She had a good time, but when I asked her how the night had been she explained that the was shocked by what a bunch of drunken fat slags English women were (I'm paraphrasing: she speaks much more politely). I explained that it was the result of widespread state education and left it at that. But she quizzed me further, and asked why, in particular, the English women wore such short skirts because (and I'm not making this up) when they were drunk in the nightclub they were climbing on tables and chairs to dance and because they were wearing only thongs they were (as my continental friend said, in a slightly embarrassed way) "showing everything". I was at a loss to explain this particular phenomenon, having not been in a nightclub for some years. In fact (and I'm not making this up either) the last one I attempted to go to was in Bracknell and I fled after only a few minutes inside. The pounding music, unfamiliar and disorienting surroundings, the flashing flights and blank faces caused temporary madness and I became convinced that I was in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

Anyway, scratching my head for a satisfactory explanation, and working from first principles, I told my friend that because there are some few eligible men in Britain (ie, men who can provide a better standard of living than the welfare state) there is intense competition to attract them. But since the men are not interested in the women's personalities, skills, potential or other attributes (since they will not be sticking around even if they father children) they are only concerned with mating signals indicating the women's availability for sex, and this is the function of the short skirts. Once again, evolution by natural selection is inescapable: the competition means the skirts get shorter, just as it makes peacocks' tails bigger.

My friend also wondered why everyone got do drunk that there were almost insensible. Here I was able to offer more informed opinion. It's in our nature, unfortunately, going back to Anglo-Saxon times.

Tea and coffee did not exist in Anglo-Saxon Britian and water was not always very clean so most Anglo-Saxons drunk beer. Even children would drink beer.

[From Ashmolean Museum: Anglo-Saxon Discovery - Eating and Drinking]

I have a memory of once reading that the Pope's first emissary to England, back in the Dark Ages, said that the English couldn't be converted to Christianity because they were too drunk all the time. Perhaps there is a new Dark Age dawning.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Is it concrete all around, or in my head

I've been having some profound thoughts about how brains work, partly because of something I read in Prospect about MRI psychology and partly because I was listening to music earlier on. I was on a fairly long flight and I started working on the plane as soon as the seat belt light went off -- I like the BA business class seats and they have just the right working position for me so I like to get the laptop out as soon as possible -- and fired up my iPhone for background music. I chose my "Mott" playlist, which comprises a few different Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople albums. It starts off with one of my all time favourites, the Ian Hunter Band's live double, Welcome to the Club, and includes both live and studio albums. Anyway, when "All the young dudes" came on, I felt the tears welling up again. How can music, especially such familiar music, make you cry? In the case of "All the young dudes" I sort of understand why, because it's about my feelings for my sons, but in other cases I have no idea why some tracks elicit emotion and others just don't. Another of their tracks -- "Saturday gigs" also makes me feel very emotional, but doesn't make me cry. On the other hand, Ian Hunter's "Sons and daughters" makes me feel like I want to cry, but I don't. Very puzzling. It's not just Mott the Hoople, of course. We were listening to a Tim Minchin album the other day and one of the tracks -- about your kids growing up -- had me blubbing like a schoolperson. You have to be pretty talented to write something like that.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]

Back in the SSR

A correspondent (well, ok, GSE) writes mentioning the antics of the commissariat in the Socialist Scottish Republic (otherwise known as the SSR). I read in the newspapers of another tidal wave of lunacy about to break on the shores of that once proud nation. The commissars are to decide retail prices, just as they do in North Korea and Venezuela. In the case, rather than basic foodstuffs being the subject of the economically illiterate targets, it is alcohol. Actually, come to think of it, that probably is a basic foodstuff in Scotland. Anyway, the retail price is to be fixed, which means that virtually no alcohol will be bought in shops or pubs anymore and all trade will go through the black market, exactly has happens anywhere else that you try to fix retail prices under a socialist regime (eg, Zimbabwe). (By the way, price controls never work: it doesn' make any difference whether the regime is socialist or not, it's just that only socialist regimes would think or trying them any more.)

I notice that El Presidente Comrade Chavez' attempts to fix the price of rice have been so successful that he has had to send the army in to rice processing plants to restore the supply (this won't work -- you can't detain the laws of economics without trial) and I imagine the same will happen in Scotland sooner rather later. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that the Scottish Parliament is drafting new Sumptuary Laws as well. Incidentally, El Presidente has also threatened to expropriate part of the industry and pay for it by printing money, a tactic being successfully employed in other countries run by Marxists such as Zimbabwe and Britain.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Quiet riot

The newspapers have been reporting that the police are concerned that this summer will see England hit by a tide of middle class rioting brought on by resentment about the banks and the government. I'm not entirely sure what a middle class riot will look like ("what do we want" / "a reasonable pension" / "when do we want it" / "as soon as is prudent and affordable") but in a naughty schoolboy kind of way I'm sort of looking forward to it. Working class rioting is pretty hopeless -- they usually smash up each others houses -- and I'll be expecting something better from the privately-educated on career breaks.

J.G. Ballard predicted all of this some time ago. And I bet he's right that the thing that will finally bring the middle class to the barricades -- instead of dispatching working class footsoldiers -- will be parking, I think because that's where the private / public interface is most acute and visible. It almost happened it Brighton :) so it's only a matter of time.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

A better class of rubbish

Now that I've become a cyclist, I have a much more accurate picture of the rubbish that is strewn along the highways and byways of our great nation. When you're zooming past at 50mph, it just looks like undifferentiated garbage, but when you are pottering along and seeing it close-up, you'd be surprised at the variety. Yesterday I noticed, for example, a whole pile of old tyres dumped in a lay-by alongside a couple of bags of general household rubbish and the usual piles of empty lager tins and bottles. Now, I can see that care for the environment has dropped some way down the chav list of priorities here in the Zimbabwe of the North but I still wonder why it is that the typical British street is so much more disgusting than the typical street in, say, Germany or Spain. I don't have any particular hypothesis to test, other than the general degradation of the population, but I'm sure there must some more accurate sociological explanation. I would call the council to complain -- goodness knows why -- and ask, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell me it is Mrs. Thatcher's fault and ask for more council tax.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

And the Oscar for most bored listener goes to...

I don't care about things like the Oscars, and reacted very badly to a radio report I heard the other day which had either an actor or director (I didn't catch who it was) talking about "British" success at the Oscars (I haven't actually seen "The Reader", the Kate Winslet film about underage sex, so I don't know how British it actually is) whilst simultaneously calling for more public money for the film industry. Why we should be subsidising rich people to make films I don't know -- if they want more money for films they should ask Kate Winslet for it, not me -- but the person on the radio seemed to think that wealth transfer from me to Kenneth Brannagh is a natural state of affairs and that only a churlish philistine would object to it.

Well I do. Although I like films, just as everyone else does I suppose, I'm not really that interested in them or the actors. I can remember years ago talking to someone about Alien, which is one of my all-time favourites, a film that I've seen countless times. They asked me something about one of the actors in it, and I hadn't got a clue, because I didn't pay any attention to them outside of their characters in the film, if you see what I mean. My all-time favourite film is the original Australian cut of Mad Max, and my opinion of that film wasn't changed one iota when I found out that Mel Gibson is an anti-semitic nutter, because I wasn't interested in him in beyond the context of the film. I'm not saying the Oscars should be banned -- I don't feel that strongly about them one way or the other -- but I do wonder what they are really for.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

More about miles

I recently wrote a whinge about BA miles and how useless they are because you can't use them in the school holidays. I only posted this to this blog, which does not have a readership of millions and, I am certain, has absolutely no influence in the world at all. But because my blogs are linked to Twitter, there was a corresponding tweet (with "BA" and "miles" in it).

A couple of days later, I received a letter from British Airways. It did not refer to the blog post or the tweet, but said that British Airways talk to 150 Gold members every month to see how to improve the Executive Club and that based on those conversations they had decided to allow Gold members to book reward flights (for double the miles) during school holidays. I'm sure this must be a complete coincidence, since I don't believe that BA's marketing department could be so ruthlessly efficient as to monitor Twitter to see what nobodies like me are saying about their service. But it did make me think.

So I decide to reinvestigate. I logged back in to my Gold account, and tried book a flight to San Francisco. The July flights are only available (at the time of writing) for two days (10th and 16th July) and those are not in the school holidays. The first day in the school holidays for which a flight is available is 5th August. So, if I exercise my right as a Gold member to go out at the end of July and come back a couple of weeks later, it will cost me 100,000 BA miles plus UKP 212. If I pay for the ticket, it will cost me UKP 689. This makes 100,000 miles worth UKP 477. Say UKP 500. That's 200 miles per UKP 1, so I'm "selling" the miles for 0.5p each.

Now, in a couple of weeks time I have to travel to a European capital city. The BA business fare is 582, the "rival" operator (not one of the budget airlines) business fare is 488, so say for sake of argument it's a UKP 100 premium for BA. This will earn me about 3000 miles, so I'm "buying" the miles for 30p each.

Perhaps my arithmetic is rusty, but it appears to me that BA are selling me miles for SIXTY TIMES the price they are buying them. Now, this isn't quite the equation because (as I'm sure is the case for most people) it's their company that buys the miles. Nevertheless, it means that whereas before I tried to redeem my miles I used to travel BA as a matter of course, imagining that the miles would be some compensation to my family for me being away so much, now that I've actually tried to redeem the miles I'm less likely to travel BA in future, so I still don't get the marketing policy. It should be an integral part of Silver or Gold status that you can use your BA miles to earn rewards whenever you like. I can understand why rewards seats are restricted in general, but they should not be restricted for the most valued customers.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]