On account of its being Halloween, here is a scary movie what I shot in my cellar last week. It is unsuitable for people with a nervous disposition.
Scary movie
7
Monthly Archives: October 2009
I’ve been a bit busy this afternoon…
…did anyone happen to catch the result of the Liverpool–Man Utd match?
Unpukka Cwistmas fakewy
It was 17.5°C in Hebden Bridge on Friday afternoon. I know, because I checked on my car’s thermometer. The reason I checked was that the centre of town was covered in snow.
But it turned out that it wasn’t snow; it was fake snow. Jamie Oliver was in town filming a Christmas ad for Sainsbury’s.
So, when you see the ad, I want you to shout at the telly, “THAT’S NOT REAL SNOW! I KNOW FOR A FACT: I READ IT ON GRUTS!”
My farmer friend and her friend popped into Hebden Bridge shortly after the filming had finished. “What’s that dreadful smell?” she asked.
Jamie Oliver’s cooking, apparently.
Thou shalt not bear false witness
A misleading chart.
Wow! Look at that! The Anglicans are over half-way up the chart when compared with the whole population, and the Catholics over a third of the way up. Not bad!
Until you realise that it is the areas of the semi-circles we should be looking at, not the diameters. The clue’s in the figures given in the labels on the chart (which totally misleadingly point to the semi-circles’ diameters): 65.6M population, 9.3M Catholics—that’s one in seven a Catholic, not one in three. 65.6M population, 26.5M Anglicans—that’s 40% Anglicans, not over 50%. But who’s going to check the figures when there’s a simple, reassuring chart? Apart from me, I mean.
How I would have drawn the chart.
Actually, it’s even more misleading than that. Think of the chart as being like a Venn diagram: Anglicans are indeed a subset of the entire population of the UK and Ireland, as are Catholics, but Catholics are most definitely not a subset of Anglicans. In fact, you could argue that the exact opposite is true: historically, the original Anglicans were a subset—or, rather, subsect—of the Catholic Church. And some of them might soon be again, according to the BBC article.
Setting aside the question of what counts as a Catholic or Anglican (I am a devout Atheist, but I was christened against my will by the Anglican church, so does that make me an Anglican?), and setting aside the fact that the church membership figures quoted were provided by the Catholic Church and the Church of England (who might be a little bit biased), this chart seems designed to give a misleadingly high impression of the churches’ memberships. It would be interesting to know whether the BBC just obtained the figures from the churches, or whether they obtained the chart as well.
I have banged on previously about how 3-D pie charts can be misleading, but I find these overlaid semi-circular charts far more obnoxious. What on earth is wrong with showing a simple, 2-D pie chart?
Rant over.
Rucksack enigma
I just saw an elderly gentleman get out of his car with a rucksack already on his back.
What on Earth was going on there, do you reckon?
I wondered whether he might have accidentally forgotten to remove his rucksack before he got into the car. But that seems unlikely: even if he had forgotten that he was wearing his rucksack, he would surely have noticed it when he sat down. It must have been extremely uncomfortable.
Then I thought that perhaps the elderly gentleman must have had short legs, and couldn’t reach the pedals without some sort of padding at his back. But his car was a Vauxhall Corsa, which is a pretty small car, and I’m pretty sure they come with seat adjusters. And, besides, surely some sort of cushion would have made a far more appropriate booster. And, besides some more, I couldn’t help noticing that he was about six feet tall, give or take.
When I told Jen about the elderly gentleman I had seen getting out of his car with a rucksack already on his back, she suggested that perhaps his wife had put it on for him, and that he was incapable of getting out of it on his own. If a man were to say such a thing about a woman, elderly or otherwise, he would no doubt be accused of rampant sexism, but us chaps are increasingly expected to put up with this sort of nonsense. I am sure that anyone who could parallel-park a Vauxhall Corsa as well as this elderly gentleman clearly could would be perfectly capable of manoeuvring himself out of a rucksack. It’s not exactly rocket science.
Unless, of course, something had gone wrong with the clasp on the rucksack. Perhaps it had jammed. Perhaps the elderly gentleman had been stuck inside the rucksack for weeks, but was too embarrassed to ask for help. Us chaps tend not to like asking for help. The poor fellow! If only it had occurred to me at the time, I might have asked if he needed a hand. Well, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have: us chaps tend not to like offering to help either.
But the whole affair is, I’m sure you’ll agree, very intriguing. There’s some sort of back story there that we aren’t party to. Something that explains the elderly gentleman’s apparently odd behaviour. In fact, I’m half tempted to pop back into town to see if he’s still there, so I can ask him about it. But I’m not going to.
Sometimes life’s little mysteries have to go unresolved.
Go for the prize, keep your eyes on the road ahead…
Fitz has done another one of his homemade Dunlin video things:
Re-engaging the public
BBC: PM agrees to TV election debate
Gordon Brown has confirmed he is willing “in principle” to take part in a TV debate ahead of the election.
Yeah, that’s really what we need to re-engage the British public with politics: another platform for our party leaders to say nasty things about each other, while failing to answer any of the perfectly reasonable questions put to them. Pardon me for not watching, but I think the Hairy Bikers might be on the other side. They usually are.
Call me cynical, but this proposed TV debate is not going to interest anyone other than the six people in this country already interested in all this politics crap. The British public doesn’t want any more pointless debate amongst its political leaders; it wants action. We don’t want to be bored shitless by politicians; we want to be entertained. We want excitement. We want politicians to stop pussy-footing around and get stuck in.
A former Deputy Prime Minister showing how it's done.
No, I don’t mean a metaphorical cage fight; I mean an actual, no-holds-barred cage fight. In a cage. Stripped to the waist. Last man standing becomes Prime Minister. Be honest now, wouldn’t you pay good money to watch that? It would justify the licence fee on its own.
I’ll bet Gordon Brown is handy with his fists. And he clearly has weight advantage over his political opponents. But I hear he has a glass jaw—and, indeed, a glass eye. That should even things out a bit, as David ‘Baby-Face’ Cameron feigns a few left jabs, then unleashes a flailing haymaker from the far right. Meanwhile, Nick ‘Kidney-Punch’ Clegg (OK, I had to look his name up) is kneeing Ian Paisley in the nuts, while gouging out the eyes of the leader of the BNP (whose name I won’t dignify by looking up).
Just think how much more respect our leader would command in the international arena if he had gained his post in a caged one. “Careful what you say to the British Prime Minister, Mr President: they say he killed a man with his bare hands!”
The party leaders spend all of their time these days bragging about how they’re going to make deeper cuts than their opponents. Isn’t it time we gave them knives and told them to put up or shut up?