I don't think this is racist

OK, this may sound like inappropriate affluence in a time of economic disaster, but I forgot my watch on a trip the other day so I bought another one. The reason is complicated: when I go overseas, I can't be bothered to change the time on my laptop and iPhone because I get confused about putting things into calendars and do it wrong. So it's easier to leave them on UK time and wear a watch set to local time. Anyway, the watch is an Accurist, but the instructions have an Epson logo on them. I'm not normally one to read instructions, but I happened to glance at the page about the stopwatch function, and I was intrigued to find a new timing mode that I hadn't heard about before.

I spent a few minutes wondering what "spirit" timing was -- I just figured it was some sporting term that I hadn't heard of, before I suddenly realised that I had been misreading the misprint. Say it out loud, and the instructions betray their Japanese origin.

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

Dum de dum dum dum I must be para-noid

I was walking down the road and the woman next to me -- mid-20s, standard chav attire of ill-fitting tracksuit pants and a T-shirt combined with a Croydon facelift -- was screaming obscenities into her mobile phone. This is considered normal in Digital Britain, so no-one paid attention. And nor did I. Until she started screaming "I am not f**cking paranoid" into the handset. A few seconds later, "NO, NO, NO, I'm not f**cking paranoid". I started to wonder if there was anyone else on the call. Remember that magnificent, and I do mean magnificent, book "The Airloom Gang""? Paranoid schizophrenics think they're hearing voices and they will project on to whatever new and slightly mysterious technology they can. Three hundred years ago that woman would have been screaming obscenities at the fairies at the bottom of her garden, now she is screaming into a mobile handset.

Since we're no longer institutionalising such people, and since there's only a limited number of reality TV programmes to put them on, we ought to have a proper debate about what to do with them. When the woman started screaming, I was slightly afraid. For all i know, she might have had a knife or something. It doesn't seem right.

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

Spreading out

In the City, spreads are measured in points. But, as I moaned about before, at British Airways the BA Miles spreads are absurd: they "buy" the miles back for about one-sixtieth of the price they "sell" them for. Their marketing department just did it again. They sent me an e-mail saying something along the lines of "you can now use your BA Miles to upgrade flights". OK. I have a Word Traveller Plus flight booked, so I phoned up to upgrade it to business for what I thought was a reasonable price of 25,000 BA Miles. No dice. There are no upgrades available on that flight. Nor, as it turns out, on any other flight in a one month window either side of it. Once again: I'm now more annoyed than if they had never sent me the email in the first place. I'm sure their marketing people must be wondering how to make travellers choose BA over other airline in these straightened times. Here's a tip: have a reward programme that is worth something, and makes customers feel good instead of continually infuriating them.

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

Boosh systems

If you've been to America recently, you'll have discovered (as least on British Airways) that when you log on to check in online you are directed to fill out your Visa waiver form online at the same time. The first time this happened to me, I thought that it was jolly modern and it made sense to fill it out before you fly, so if you tick the box that says "yes I am a terrorist" then they can stop you from getting on the plane. A good example of IT in action, as step on the road to Digital Britain, environmentally-friendly and efficient. Of course, I thought, it makes sense to do this online and I was am only surprised they didn't replace the paper forms with the online version sooner. But the system still offered me the option to print out a paper version, and I did it anyway.

When I got to America, I discovered that the online form-filling is in addition to the offline form-filling and hasn't replaced it at all. I had to fill out a green Visa waiver form just as before and the printed version that I got from the web (which could have coded all of the data in a barcode or something) was entirely pointless.

Thus the US government has, in the words of my childrens' favourite television programme The Mighty Boosh, combined the past and the future to create something that's not as good as either of them. This system isn't as good as an all-online digital system of the future and it's more expensive and inconvenient than the analgoue system that it is layered on. I wonder the Boosh's pronouncement isn't more generally true of Analogue Britain (the state we apparently trapped in until 2012, when the government's shiny new Digital Britain comes into existence). In fact, I suspect the government has actually had an operational strategy called Boosh Britain that has been in operation for some time.

P.S. I used to look at The Mighty Boosh the way my parents used to look at Monty Python when I wanted to watch it, but having actually watched it with the boys and think it's very funny indeed in places. Give it a try sometime.

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

We fought for this

Ah, the exercise of democracy. When I took no.2 son round to the polling station and into the polling booth with me, to show him how we in the free world make informed choices to be governed with consent, I hope I was doing something good.

When I got into the booth, though, I had to reflect. I took me a while to look through the list and decide, but I did eventually exercise my democratic rights. Sadly, my first choice was not available: the Scottish Nationalists were not fielding any candidates in Woking, so I was unable to express my deep and abiding commitment to Scottish independence through formal channels. I couldn't see Joanna Lumley anywhere on my ballot paper either, so that left me a bit stumped.

In an age of personal podcast channels, Facebook and post-industrial capitalism, the whole "party" thing looks a bit outdated to me. I would have preferred to have gone into the booth to check off against a list of policies, not against a list of chancers hoping to win the lottery by being elected to the European "Parliament" (I use the quotes because it's not a real parliament, just a talking shop). I want to see a list that instead of giving me the choice between John Smith, Fred Bloggs and Joe Soap gives me a choice between abolishing income tax, re-instituting the death penalty and raising the voting age to 31. That would be democracy.

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

Who would want to be a satirist in these times?

You've got no chance, going head-to-head with the madmen "in charge of" Britain today. The weekend papers were full of the story of the resignation from the Cabinet of Labour M.P. Caroline Flint, who was the minister for something or other. One of her reasons for resigning was

Several of the women attending Cabinet – myself included – have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing.

[From Caroline Flint: resignation letter in full - Telegraph]

It's an outrageous slur that she would allow herself to be seen as mere window-dressing, as this recent picture of her confirms.

No wonder she was upset: who, looking at this picture, could possibly imagine that she would want her femininity to form any part of her proposition, a point she emphasised when arriving for a Cabinet meeting the other day.

She won't survive a general election, but she must have valuable skills gained during her time as as a Policy Officer at the Inner London Education Authority from 1985-87 and head of the Women's Unit at the National Union of Students from 1988-89, before joining Lambeth Council as an Equal Opportunities Officer from 1989-91. I can see how this experience contributed to the governments stewardship of Britain in critical ways. But how will the Cabinet get by now? If we're going to get out of this recession, we need people like her.

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

Nature, nuture

Now, as I think we all know, political opinions are not founded on facts. Some research I came across proves this beyond any reasonable doubt.

Again, the findings suggest that facts that contradicted political ideology were simply not taken in; if anything, challenging misbelief with fact checking has the counterintuitive effect of reinforcing that misbelief.

[From Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does]

A good example is the incumbent Prime Minister, who seems more convinced of his unique genius the more the country collapses around him. The general situation may be even worse than the research suggests, however. Not only do people formulate political beliefs on dogma rather than evidence, but because they are, on the whole, a bit thick, they don't even understand the dogma. The result is that there is no political discourse of any value in this country any more. We may as well choose the next Prime Minister on a "Britain's Got Talent"-style phone-in as go through the ridiculous theatre of the secret ballot.

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