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Monthly Archives: December 2008
Hoodie
On Tuesday lunchtime, I saw a hoodie cruising round the Albert Dock in Liverpool, blaring gangsta rap from his pastel-blue Peugeot 205.
Not exactly a gangsta’s car.
Iconography
Horrendously misfiled
Spotted in Borders while buying Christmas presents the other week:
Not where I'd have put them.
The late Simon Gray would be laughing his head off to see his diaries on sale in the self-help section. If you are thinking of giving up smoking as a new year’s resolution (and you really should), then Simon Gray’s books about utterly failing to do so are almost certainly not for you.
See also:
Anything to keep Nite Owl happy
Meretricious, and condiments of the season to one and all.
21 not out
oasting conspicuously absent friends encore une fois.
You will let me know if I’m becoming predictable, won’t you?
See also:
Away in a Pret a Manger
I bought my lunch from Pret a Manger today. They’re expensive, but their butties are rather good. Or so I thought.
I hadn’t tried their all-day breakfast sandwich before, but I like breakfasts, and I like sandwiches, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Have a guess what Pret a Manger put inside their all-day breakfast sandwich. Go on, have a guess.
Well, yes, obviously they put bacon in their all-day breakfast sandwich. And egg. And sausage. And tomato. Yes, but try to guess what else they put in their all-day breakfast sandwich. Something you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
Cress.
I shit you not. Cress. For breakfast.
The dirty, dirty bastards!
See also:
A toast
Mary Pickles
Farmer
(1926–2008)
Cheesy grin please, Prime Minister
I don’t know who picks the photos for BBC News stories, but I’m pretty sure the person who chose the photo to accompany the current top story must be a closet Tory:
Not into cars
I’m not into cars. As long as it’s reliable, has reasonable acceleration, and gets me from A to B, I’ll drive pretty much anything. I don’t get people who want to change their cars every couple of weeks. My own car, Murphy, passed the 140,000 mile mark this week. I’m kind of hoping he makes it to 200,000. If he does, I’ll be hoping for the quarter-million. Murphy has been a great little car.
To be honest, I don’t know much about cars either. I even find it difficult to tell them apart. Jen is very good at identifying cars. She says cars are easier to identify than birds (which I am good at) because, unlike birds, cars have their names written on the back. I suppose she has a point.
Sometimes, when we’re driving together, Jen will tease me by asking me to identify the car in front.
“What’s that car?” she asked me once.
“No idea.”
“Yes you do. You do know what kind of car it is.”
“Give me a clue.”
“OK… You’re driving one.”
Like I said, I’m not into cars.
But what I am into is Top Gear. The thing I like about Top Gear is that it is unashamedly for something. The entire premise of the show is that cars are utterly brilliant, and anyone who says they’re not isn’t worth bothering about. It makes no pretence at neutrality. It is totally biased, and totally entertaining. It’s also beautifully shot, and pretty damn funny. Last week’s review of the new Ford Fiesta was particularly so:
Irritating little Welsh no mark
Richard Dawkins’ successor as the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, hits the nail squarely on the head in an interview with New Scientist:
What’s the one thing you’d most like to achieve during your tenure?
If the likes of [radio presenter] John Humphrys, who interviewed me recently, will stop asking “So what’s the point of science?” and start to ask interesting questions about science itself, that would be a good sign.
John Humphrys is the reason I no longer listen to the Today Programme. Him and Thought for the Day. He has a reputation for being a tough, no-nonsense interviewer, but his reputation has gone to his head, and now he’s just a rude, cynical bully. When he interviews a politician or public figure, they are immediately on the defensive, so he gets very little out of them. The BBC has far better interviewers, such as Edward Stourton and Eddie Mair, who are polite to their interviewees, often charming them into a false sense of security before hitting them with the killer question. Humphrys, on the other hand, just makes people clam up.
“I’ve never heard such a load of unsubstantiated nonsense in my entire life,” said one lady politician in answer to a question from Eddie Mair a couple of years back.
“You should tune in more often,” said Mair.
That’s the way to do it.
I don’t know how Marcus du Sautoy responded to Humphrys’ facile question, but I hope it was along the lines of “Fuck off, you irritating little Welsh no mark!”. Although somehow I doubt du Sautoy will be familiar with the delighful Scouse term no mark.
‘Sea kittens’, I shit you not
You couldn’t make this up. Those awfully level-headed chaps at Peta are trying convince us to think of fish as ‘sea kittens’ to put us off eating them.
They’re not from round these parts, are they, boys and girls?
Sea kittens and chips… Mmmmmmmm!
Compare and Contrast
For reasons I won’t go into, I was just admiring the cover of Cheryl Ladd’s classic 1978 eponymous album, which I have on vinyl (a real collector’s item), when I noticed something uncanny. Compare and contrast:
Winston Churchill
Cheryl Ladd
We have a right to know.
Three magic words…
Hungarian sausage commercial:
[via BoingBoing]
So
Fitz is fed up with people trying to be funny by saying interweb on the radio.
I spend over three hours commuting each day, so I listen to a LOT of podcasts. Most of them are made specifically as podcasts, while the rest are normal radio programmes converted into podcasts after they have been aired.
Many of the podcasts I listen to take the form of conversations between two or more people—either as formal interviews or informal chats. Over the last few months, I’ve begun to notice how many people in these conversations begin their answers to direct questions with the word so—even when what they are about to say is not a consequence of what they’ve said previously.
“How do you intend to vote in the next election?” a hypothetical questioner might ask.
“So I will be voting for X,” might be the hypothetical response.
These sos are not at all necessary and get to be mildly irritating once you notice them. Which is why I’m mentioning them now: so that you will start to notice them, and will be equally mildly irritated.
I think it’s an attempt to sound a bit more intelligent. If you begin a sentence with so, it implies that it logically follows on from what you were just saying—SO it stands to reason that you must be making a logical, cogent argument. Even when you’re not.
It’s not just a British thing. The Americans are up to it as well. In fact, they probably started it knowing them: I don’t know why, but it just sounds American to me.
If, by any chance, you have picked up the new habit of using the word so in this way, please stop it. It doesn’t make you sound more profound; it just makes you mildly irritating. And if you notice anyone else doing it, tell them from me to stop being so ridiculous.
Vandalism
Some of my fondest memories are from my childhood holidays on the east coast of Anglesey. Every summer, we would stay in a caravan with magnificent views across to Puffin Island and the Great Orme at Llandudno. My parents still go there several times a year. My mum has been going there for over 60 years.
Today, some wanker in Whitehall has authorised the construction of 250 turbines 540ft tall slap bang in the middle of my favourite view. It will be the second biggest offshore wind powerstation in the world.
What makes this utter waste of money and environmental vandalism even more annoying is the fact that there’s a nice, discreet nuclear powerstation just around the corner which needs replacing, but nobody has the balls to do anything about it.