Monthly Archives: September 2005

POLITICIAN TALKS SENSE SHOCK

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…and, even more surprisingly, it’s Tony Blair!

BBC: Full text of Tony Blair’s speech

…Global warming is too serious for the world any longer to ignore its danger or split into opposing factions on it.

And for how much longer can countries like ours allow the security of our energy supply be dependent on some of the most unstable parts of the world?

For both reasons the G8 Agreement must be made to work so we develop together the technology that allows prosperous nations to adapt and emerging ones to grow sustainably; and that means an assessment of all options, including civil nuclear power.

Texterity

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I gave Carolyn my old mobile phone a few months back. Her even older mobile phone was on its last legs. It finally died at the weekend, so I had a panicky phone call from Carolyn:

“How do you turn on your mobile phone?”
“Is this some sort of smutty joke?”
“No. I can’t work out how to turn it on. I think it might be broken.”
“Have you charged it?”
“Yes, I’m not totally stupid!”
“Have you read the instruction booklet I gave you?”
“Did you give me an instruction booklet?”
“Yes, I put it in the bag with the phone and the charger.”
“But how do you turn it on?”
“You hold down the ‘No’ key.”
“How am I supposed to guess that?… Hey! It works! Who’s this man with the beard?”
“Ah, the phone appears to have saved my old settings. That would be Charles Darwin. He’s my wallpaper.”
“How do I get the address book?”
“You move the joystick to the right.”
“There’s a joystick?”
“The little button between the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ keys.”
“I can see I’m going to have to read that instruction book.… Who’s Ann?”
“Ah, it appears to have saved all my old contact details as well. Ann’s a friend of mine.”
“And what’s this envelope thing?”
“That’s the icon for text messages.”
“What does ‘Sent (35)’ mean?”
“Oh, shit! You really don’t want to be reading those!”

Yes, I would have too.

Yesterday evening, I sent Carolyn a text message, asking if she’d managed to work out how to use the phone yet. I received her reply this morning:

wwx

I’ll take that as a no.

For more SMS-related hilarity with Carolyn, see:

2% Owl

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Hitchin and I have very similar senses of humour. So much so that Jen finds it a bit spooky. She first realised this when she made some comment to Hitchin, and he made exactly the same obscure yet hysterically funny joke that I had made on hearing the same comment five minutes earlier. (OK, maybe it wasn’t all that hysterically funny, but Hitchin and I both thought it was.)

Anyway, while we were staying with Hitchin and Soo last weekend, Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was on the telly, and Edwina Curry was asked which is the heaviest flying bird of prey.

“The condor!” shouted Hitchin and I in unison, before the answers were even shown on the screen. We then had a discussion about whether this might be a trick question, as scavengers such as condors might not count as birds of prey, but decided that Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire? probably wouldn’t be that devious (or, more likely, that it would never have occurred to them in the first place).

“I think I’d better ask the audience,” said the former junior minister for health, and Prime Minister’s mistress. So the audience voted. The result: 98% Condor, 2% Owl.

Now 2% Owl is exactly the sort of phrase that Hitchin and I find incredibly funny: it’s such a very small proportion, and such a very ordinary-sounding bird. So, for the rest of the weekend, we tried to slip the phrase two percent owl into the conversation whenever possible. You get the idea:

2% Owl
2% Owl (98% Fox)

  • “According to the nutritional information on the side of this box, these Cheerios are two percent owl!”
  • “Hey, you know that Keira Knightley? She’s two percent owl! You’d never guess it to look at her!”
  • “Did you know that the population of Bolivia is two percent owl?”
  • …and so on.

So there’s your new challenge, Gruts readers. I would like you to go out into the world and start slipping the phrase two percent owl into conversations wherever possible. But, to keep it funny, unlike me, you must never explain where the phrase came from.

See also: The Owl of Doom

Psy-chic

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I have just sent the following email to Stense (WARNING, it might freak you out):

S T E N S E !

O H   M Y   G O D !

You are so not going to believe this. It’s going to do your scatty, little mind in, mark my words:

Every now and again, I like to see what I was doing on the current date X years ago by going through my old letters to you (they’re the closest thing I have to a diary).

Well, brace yourself, Stense, I know you’re into all that mystical shit, so this one really might freak you out a bit. Here’s something from the beginning of a letter I wrote to you three years ago today (look it up, if you don’t believe me)—I have emphasised the key phrases in bold so you don’t miss them:

I had a strange dream about you last night. No, not that kind of dream, you naughty woman. You turned up unexpectedly at [my house]. We were walking along the drive together, and you were telling me about something which was evidently very important, when I suddenly noticed that your hair was very different: it was incredibly straight and incredibly black and incredibly long (finishing about half way down your back). Once I’d noticed this amazing barnet, I became completely distracted by it, studying each strand of hair in great detail (no, really) and admiring how all the strands swished backwards and forwards together when you moved your head. Needless to say, I wasn’t listening to a word you were saying by now, so have no idea what you were trying to tell me. Stense has got long hair, I kept thinking to myself. Suddenly, I decided that I had to show Jen this remarkable haircut, so I ran into the house to get her out of bed. When I came back downstairs (leaving Jen to get dressed), I couldn’t find you anywhere. I ran all through the house (which turned out to be the mirror image of Irish Mick‘s parents’ house, and not like [my house] at all), looking for you, but couldn’t find you anywhere. I kept calling out your name… By now, Jen was on the landing (which was Carolyn‘s parents’ landing—the right way round), and said she’d come and help me look for you as soon as she’d been to the loo. She then stomped off (as only a person on a landing can stomp off) in the general direction of Carolyn’s parents’ spare room. Then you stuck your head round the door of Irish Mick’s parents’ downstairs loo with a cheeky grin on your face… You’d been seeing to your hair and had cut it into a short, stylish but clumpy affair, and had dyed it pure white with a few pale yellow highlights. The overall effect was not unlike a cockatoo. Then I woke up.

Jesus Haircutting Christ, Stense!

Is this totally freaky or what? Did I foresee your Hippy Chick Wig and your new blonde with highlights hair style THREE WHOLE YEARS AGO?

Coincidence? I don’t think so!

Listen, Stense, we have simply got to go to Australia together! (If you can’t work out why, check out my letter of 29th March, 2003.)

Love and psychic hugs,

Ri xx

P.S. This one is going on Gruts.

It’s a gift I tell you.

(No, I’m not going to tell you what was in my letter of 29th March, 2003, but here’s a clue.)

See also:

Every little helps

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This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone with a so-called loyalty card:

Guardian: Tesco stocks up on inside knowledge of shoppers’ lives

Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country—a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

Of course, the British public won’t kick up a fuss, because we’re talking about our favourite passtime here: shopping. That’s all. Nothing at all sinister. Just a bit of fun: 20p off baked beans for the loss of your privacy. Can’t say fairer than that, can you?

But you do wonder how much fuss they would kick up if the government or (heaven forbid!) scientists started making use of this database. Assuming they aren’t already, of course.

But what really pisses me off about loyalty cards (and yes, I do have one—the financial penalties of not having one make it a no-brainer) is that the loyalty is totally one-way. The information Tesco holds, or could hold, about me could be of great use to me as well. Two examples:

Customer preferences

About two years back, Tesco suddenly stopped giving their customers separate debit card receipts with their purchases. Instead, they started tagging them on to the end of their normal shopping receipts. This really pissed me off: I keep my card receipts in my wallet until I can check them off against my bank statement; now I am expected to fill up my wallet with long lists of stuff I have bought over the last month. (In fact, I don’t fill up my wallet; I very pointedly remain at the checkout until I have &nbspv e r y   s l o w l y&nbsp torn the debit card receipt from the bottom of the printout—using my loyalty card as a convenient straight-edge—filed it safely in my wallet, and screwed up the rest of the printout and thrown it into the bottom of the trolley.)

Every single week since the change, without fail, I have diligently filled in a Customer Comments form, asking for a separate debit card receipt (politely at first, increasingly less politely as time wore on, sometimes even resorting to rhyme: Oh wouldn’t it be neat / To have a separate Switch receipt?). I even made it on to the Feedback board one week:

Q: Can I have a separate debit card receipt?
A: We have stopped giving separate debit card receipts to save paper.

Save paper, my gonads.

So here’s a question: if Tesco can dedicate gigabites gigabytes [thanks, Keith] of storage space to keeping tabs on my every purchase, how come they can’t dedicate a single binary digit to recording whether I want a separate debit card receipt or not?

Purchase history

Tesco knows exactly which products I have bought from them and when. So, how come, during the recent Sudan 1 cancer dye scare, Tesco couldn’t give me a list of products that I had bought from them, that might still have been in my fridge, that might have been dangerous for me to eat?

Now that would have been loyalty in action.

Or would giving me a list have wasted too much paper?

Going through the motions

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BBC: Bush ‘caught short’ at UN summit

It’s a situation anyone could find themselves in—having to answer the call of nature in the middle of an important meeting. But when you are the US president, at a gathering of more than 150 world leaders, it is even more tricky.

While talk at the UN world summit was focused on terrorism and internal reform, George W Bush appeared to have been caught short. And, he is said to have turned to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for advice. “I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible?” a Reuters news agency photographer caught him writing in a note to Ms Rice.

Someone at the BBC has a sense of humour. The above news item was shortly followed by:

We share your pain, Mr President.

Turn of Phrase

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Rochdale Observer: New warnings over asbestos levels

… Councillor Tom Stott, one of a six-strong working party set up to look into residents’ concerns, said: “Anyone who knows that site knows how much asbestos dumping took place. It was only in the 1960s, when there were problems at a factory in Hebden Bridge, that the companies began to tighten their reins.”

Presumably they tightened their reins at the same time as they were shortening their belts.

See also: Taglines

Lateral thinking

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I like the cut of this fellow’s jib (and, indeed, his giblet):

Pledgebank: I will buy a steak every time an animal rights activist threatens or harrasses any other person but only if 10 other people will buy meat when they do this too.
— David Quinn

Do you see what he’s doing there? He’s messing with what’s left of their minds. Very clever.

Here’s another one that will do their heads in:

Guardian: When meat is not murder

Would you eat steak if it had been grown in a petri dish?

Go on, then, liberate that!

Ich bin ein Berliner

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New-look Guardian
The Grauniad this morning.

Berliners… Mmmm!

The new-look, new-size Guardian is rather tasty. It’s a pity they’ve got rid of the Helvetica font headlines, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.

Not that I actually read the Guardian, you understand; I just tend to buy it and leave it lying around the house to give the impression that I read it. Perhaps, now it’s a more manageable size, I might be tempted to open the damn thing a bit more often. I doubt it, but we’ll see.

On the down side, I’m supposed to be decorating this week. When it comes to decorating, broadsheets give much better coverage.

I will never need to know the chief export of Bolivia, sir

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And for those of you who, like me, thought Geography was a total waste of time at school:

BBC: Award for tsunami warning pupil

A schoolgirl who raised the alarm to save about 100 tourists from the 26 December tsunami has been honoured.

Tilly Smith, 11, from Oxshott, Surrey, spotted key signs in the sea in Phuket, Thailand, that she remembered from a geography lesson two weeks earlier.

She persuaded her parents, seven-year-old sister and other tourists to flee their beach and hotel.

Hippy chic

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Hippy Chick
Oh, Richard, you really shouldn’t. No, I mean it, you really shouldn’t.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might remember that I posted some birthday presents to Stense on Saturday.

Well, Stense was so excited by my enormous packet that she simply couldn’t contain herself any longer: she started opening her presents early! Not all of them, you understand; just three.

And what did she find when she tore open her second present? Something that can only be described as a Hippy Chick Kit. (It’s an extremely tired private joke, don’t ask.)

Stense was so delighted with her present that she texted me a photograph of herself wearing her new hippy garb.

I’ve decided to buy her a nurse’s uniform for Christmas. (Hey, it’s worth a shot!)

Note to Stense: Now I know I might have sort of implied that there was no way on Earth that the above photo would end up being published on Gruts, but I might have sort of totally lied too. I have my public to think about. Learn to live with it, and mellow out, dude!

Oh, and Happy Birthday, by the way! You don’t half scrub up well for an old girl.

My reputation precedes me

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Conversation at Tesco:

Checkout girl: Oooh! What an enormous, flabby penis!
Me: I beg your pardon!
Checkout girl: What an enormous bag of peanuts!
Me: Oh, right! Yes… They’re for my garden bird-feeder.

I could have written for The Two Ronnies you know.

More commerce-based hilarity:
[Doesn't an awful lot seem to happen to me at Tesco?]

I have seen the future of sociology

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…and its name is Bruce Springsteen:

BBC: Academics to debate Springsteen

The life and works of Bruce Springsteen are to be discussed by academics at a conference devoted to the star…

Discussions include “A Marxist Perspective on Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The Boss and the Bible”.

I bloody hate sociologists (not, it has to be said, without good reason). Why do they insist on trying to be so bloody academic all the time—without actually saying anything of note whatsoever, I mean? Why can’t they just say, Bruce Springsteen makes great music? Because he does actually make great music—even though it’s not particularly cool to admit it.

Another thing it’s not particularly cool to admit is that Fitz is (occasionally) correct: I once asked him “What the hell is sociology, then?”, and he replied “The Society section of the Guardian posing as science.”

No good deed ever goes unpunished

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I popped down to the post office this morning to post Stense‘s birthday presents. I got there ten minutes before it was due to open, so I waited. Eventually, just as the doors were being unlocked, an elderly woman weighed down with a large shopping bag appeared. I insisted she go before me, explaining that getting my parcel weighed and stamped-up would probably take a bit of time.

The elderly woman thanked me, shuffled up to the counter, and proceeded to remove bag after bag of copper coins from her shopping bag. “Can you change these for me, please?” she asked.