Have adjusted to life without a kettle and taken up filter coffee as my main beverage. See, in the local supermarket there’s only a small selection of instant coffee – no freeze dried instant coffee at all – and just two types of tea. Pretty obvious why, in hindsight, if boiling water takes a minimum of four minutes in the Microwave.

So here’s an example of how something as simple as the Mains electrical system – 110 volts AC instead of 240 volts AC (apparently this stops there being enough juice for British style kettles) has caused an entirely different beverage culture out here. Here filter coffee is the easiest and quickest thing there is, creating a huge market for filters, coffee beans and ground coffee and destroying the market for tea and instant coffee. No kettles, no tea.

Cause and effect, you see.

With that in mind I notice this curious story about the Governor of Massachusetts, one Deval Patrick. He’s a Democrat, if that sort of thing matters to you, and he’s just signed an anti-foreclosure bill (or anti-repossession for Brits!) which will mean, in effect, a delay of around a year between someone stopping paying and someone losing their house. It’s called “An Act To Stabilise Neighborhoods“, and it is intended that it will help individuals and communities stay together. It’s the only bill like it in America, apparently.

Critics and cynics, and I have to say this includes me, suspect that the knock on effect of this particular Act will be to make getting a mortgage in Massachusetts more difficult than it currently is. People already in their homes, whether they can afford them or not, will get to stay – at least for another year – and those who are stuck on the sidelines waiting to get their own home? Well, they’re going to stay stuck.

Says a lot that the rights of people in a house that they’re not actually paying for count for more than the rights of a company that lent them the money to live in that house in the first place, but hey, I’m a ruthless evil Capitalist so perhaps I’m missing something here, but isn’t this the sort of thing you expect from old Communistic Europe, not the brave new world of the United States?

Ho hum. Your strangely baffled and bemused correspondent, signing off…

“This is not about trying to save money. This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Say hello to the ill-considered world of one Mr David Cameron, who’s got what he believes is a great idea but absolutely no idea how to sell it. The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible, horrible name for a project that seeks to make some of the buttons and levers of the State accessible to the outer party members or something. That’s got to be a good thing, right? So why is he having such difficulty winning support for the idea?

Consider: At any point normal members of the public already have the ability to get together to build or start a school already. They just raise the money and do it, and voila. There’s currently nothing stopping them. The ‘catch’ is that if people want to send their little darlings to this new school they’d have to pay themselves. The world of free money is the exclusive preserve of the State schools.

So what is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ trying to achieve?

Imagine, instead, starting your own school AND getting the Government to give it the Free Money that’ll let you send your darling children to it.

No risk. No responsibility. Monkey see, monkey take.

Makes you wonder if this really will save any money. If anything it sort of sounds a bit… expensive, doesn’t it?

“This is not about trying to save money”

Ah. Right. Of course.

I’m just confused because people are attacking it (yes, really, attacking it) because it might deliver the same services for less money, which of course would be an abomination and an unspeakable horror. Those ghastly Tories! IT MIGHT COST LESS! AGHH! We’re dooooooomed!

But, no, calm your boots everyone. It’ll cost us more, don’t you worry. But, if it’s not to save money, what’s the point again?

“This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”

Oh. That… that sucks. Really?  That’s it?

The thing about giving individuals and groups access to public money to do stuff like this is that they’re not accountable. No-one’s really going to be accountable. It gives people access to public money without having to go through the democratic process and that democratic process is supposed to protect tax payers from the monkeys that would ‘fill the world with bananas’.

The democratic process will be sidestepped but the bureaucratic process, the bit where someone, somewhere, says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ is going to be enlarged and made more complicated. Someone, somewhere, will have to take responsibility for that decision to release the funding. Who’s that going to be? What’s their salary going to be? How many of them will there be? What sort of supporting infrastructure – call centres, form processing etc – is going to be required?

This is still taxpayer’s money we’re talking about here. You can’t simply invite this ‘bigger, better’ society to spend whatever it wants from the taxpayer’s purse and then have the politicians send the ‘bigger, better’ bill… or… is that what’s going on? Is this some sort of political game to (ironically for a Coalition obsessed with localism) render local councillors even more pointless than they already are?

I don’t know about you but I’m even more confused than I was.

I almost feel sorry for wannabe politicians that think that just governing responsibly might somehow be an attractive alternative to this most basic rule of modern politics. Cut the deficit? Forget it. Just spend the money. Spend, spend spend until you’re physically stopped, then blame the person who stops you. You’ll look like a saintly altruist who wanted to cure the world of all ills.

That’s how you really win in politics… or, at least, that’s how you win over the crowd on the BBC’s Question Time. He Who Promises To Spend The Most Money Without Explaining Where The Money Is COming From… wins.

Gah. Sick of this.

Yes, I know, I deserve everything I get.

Today Harriet Harman wanted to tell the world that the Coalition will put 1.3 million people out of work. Cameron responded by saying that the independent Office of Budget Responsibility has confirmed that they expect unemployment to fall, that more people will be employed by the end of the year than were employed at the start. He didn’t deny it though, which made me wonder what was really going on.

Round and round they went, with Harman complaining about the 1.3 of job losses and Cameron talking about the extra jobs.

It turns out, of course, that these 1.3 million jobs Harman is referring to are as follows:

Assuming the Coalition changed nothing in the Budget, and assuming the previous Government’s own predictions about the effectiveness of its plans were 100% accurate, and we didn’t actually need to take into account the unemployment and disaster that would be caused by having to go to the IMF for a bailout or worry about the consequences of unrestrained borrowing, and if the sun shines just right on exactly the right point on the tip of the Red Flag flying over Labour HQ then maybe, must maybe, there might be 1.3 million MORE new jobs by the end of this year (UPDATE: Ha! It’s not even that! It’s by the end of the parliament! It’s more slippery than I though) than there will now be. Of course, when you know you’re going into opposition it’s easy to make spending commitments you know are impossible, just to make the incoming Government look like bastards when they apply the reality stick.

And, worth noting, a huge chunk of these ‘job cuts’ are those absolute bullshit, flushing-money-down-the-toilet, making-things-worse-in-the-long-run ‘Future Jobs Fund’ temporary jobs for 18-24 year olds. Harman didn’t say anything about these 1.3 million jobs being permanent or full time.

So Labour’s still up to its old tricks, still spinning, still trying to make political capital out of anything they can get their hands on. Sure it sounds rad, groovy, right on and seems to care passionately about ‘the people’ but it’s all statistical bollocks based on fantasy budgets they never, in million years, expected to implement.

Well, that’s party politics, innit?

Nubcake

1. noun: Pejorative; A person of so little skill as to inspire mockery in others

England lose horribly. It’s a massacre. Disappointment turns to laughter. Got to love those Germans – they looked like they were having fun.

I’ll leave the final word to an Anonymous English Football Player:

Yeah, I’m well gutted about leaving South Africa and going back to my fit wife, fast sports cars, big screen telly and loafing around having a laugh until training for the next season begins. Absolutely gutted.

We’ve not seen it for a while, mostly because Labour didn’t cut anything anyone noticed which is how we ended up with the public financies in such a state in the first place. It’s where people seem to have an expectation that any cash or employment they get from the Government is somehow – or should be – guaranteed for life, forever, no matter what.

This belief seems to colour their reaction to everything. There’s no “well, it was good while it lasted, but time to move on.” The relationship is far more like that between a child and a parent: “You don’t love me anymore! You’re supposed to take care of me! Waaa!”

It’s a bit unsettling really. I just can’t relate to it at all. It’s like these people are from another planet. Compare and contrast that with what life is like for the private sector: Jobs exist so long as the company is solvent and has work for the employees to do. Orders and sales happen only if their customers need those products and services – nothing is ever certain, nothing is ever absolute. For me, that’s what makes life bearable – that the future is entirely unpredictable and full of surprises.

I like surprises.

Sadly for many people this doesn’t inspire the same “let’s ‘ave it!” attitude towards life that it does with me.

They don’t seem to get the same buzz of adrenaline from uncertainty and change – instead it makes them miserable and depressed, pessimistic and concerned more about what they’re going to lose than what they might gain in the long run.

They don’t relish the opportunity to try new things or explore different avenues – perhaps a lack of confidence in their ability  to adapt and learn new skills, or worst of all the mindset where people refuse to accept that their skills are “superflous to requirements”, that giving up and trying something else even if it makes things worse before it makes things better, is the only hope they have. Instead they wait for the world to change back to how it was… and it never does.

As an example from my own life, I invested a lot of time and effort in becoming a bit of a Javascript Ninja. I could (and still can) make extremely advanced and graphically awesome User Interface widgets for websites. What I discovered is that however worthy this skill might be, there’s no bloody market for it. No-one needs it, it adds nothing but ‘bling’ to a website, no-one’s willing to pay for it, so basically I’ve given up even trying to sell it. It turns out what is in demand are people with WordPress expertise, who can write plugins and customise themes to a professional standard. So, hey, I moved into that instead.

And, in a nutshell, that’s all markets really are. What’s to be afraid of? What’s wrong with it? Should I be entitled to claim unemployment benefit simply because no-one wants a Javascript ninja? Of course not! I do the work that needs doing, and if I don’t know how I learn.

Thinking about it I suspect that it is this illusion of security and insulation from what people in the private sector go through that attracts people to Government solutions to problems in the first place. To me it feels like they want the world to stop altogether, to crush the variables out of existence so that all that’s left is drudgery and waiting to die.

But, as this last budget has demonstrated, the truth is that people cannot and should not rely on the Government. Governments change. Attitudes change. The public financies change, too. You’ve got to keep the Golden Goose alive if you want to keep stealing the eggs, and right now that Goose is on its last legs.

To quote my all time favourite song lyric ever: “Life is unfair. Kill yourself or get over it.”

Yes, I have seen ‘The Pandorica Opens’, please let me read this ‘review’ of yours.

UPDATE: I have watched this episode a second time now, and have picked apart “Season 5″ for the unanswered questions and clues about how this might all be resolved with the result that my opinion has softened. I did actually enjoy this episode, for what it’s worth. This whinging is more about the show as a whole, which really is badly timed because Moffat might – just might – be about to prove me massively wrong. With that in mind, back to the original post..

The non-spoiler version is pointing out my frustration with cliffhangers and the limitations of the ‘Monster of the Week’ formula that this show is bound by.

Mr Moffat’s already got himself a second series. He can afford to be braver, more innovative. Even though the post-Movie revived series has been around for quite a while now, it’s still feeling quite fresh and full of potential, but the format is still an antique, not having changed much from the days of the First Doctor.

It feels decades behind some of the shows coming out of America. It’s nice that Moffat’s brought in the mystery of the ‘crack’ into most of the episodes, but in reality they’ve simply been teasing. It’s not materially changed anything that’s happened. None of the characters have really learnt anything, or changed, or progressed. Nothing’s been resolved or will be. You could easily miss every episode between the first episode and the last and you’d really have missed out on nothing.

No, Doctor Who remains bound by the terrible power of the reset button. Nothing ever changes. The episodes end, the button is pushed, and while the faces and names change over time, everything always goes back to how it started: A man, in a box, travelling from place to place battling against the monster of the week.

Moffat’s abrupt cliffhangers are infuriating, too – and also a throwback to old black and white adventure shows like Flash Gordon. It’s lazy, sloppy writing. Considering how this episode ended, it’s going to require a Deus Ex Machina to resolve. It leaves viewers with an incomplete, unresolved experience and then, next week, gives them another incomplete experience too. Even if you have a cliff hanger, even if you’ve got a long running story arc through your series and through your show, every episode needs a satisfying beginning, middle and end. If you can’t do it, show the next episode straight away. Make it double length.

It’s called treating your audience with the respect they deserve.

I don’t know why I care about this so much, if I’m honest. I just can’t stand that the reasons given for choking the only half-decent SF show the British put out is by saying “it’s only a children’s show” or “it’s traditional”. Not good enough.

Warning: There may be spoilers in the comments. You have been warned!

Perhaps it’s the fact that they get paid £750 for a defeat, £1000 for a draw and £1,500 for a win – a sum so low that this year they’re donating their fees to charity it matters so little to them. They’re doing it, apparently, for the love of the country. They’re doing it for the English, most of whom think they’re shit and not trying hard enough.

That’s why Wayne Rooney decided to have a go at the crowd for booing them, and you know what? I agree with him. If all he’s getting from this tournament is shit from the manager, shit from the press, shit from the crowd and finding the games themselves frustrating… what exactly do you expect to happen?

They are not performing monkeys. They’re not your slaves. They’re professional sportsmen who seem to be coming to the conclusion that none of this is worth the aggro… and I think they’re right. It’s not.

They’ve got nothing to prove individually – they’re already in the best clubs they can get into, their jobs are secure. They’ve got all their advertising deals already sealed and signed irrespective of how far they get in the tournament. There’s nothing – absolutely nothing – in it for them. Not one single thing that, when you really think about, means anything at all to them as individuals. National pride? What if they’re not really that Nationalist? I mean, these are guys who work in the most ethnically diverse professions in the UK. They work with people from all over the world, and they see that it is good. We expect them to be Nationalist about it? Really?

I don’t really know a lot about football – so take this entire post as the entirely ill-informed load of rubbish that it is (and understand that’s why I’ve sworn an oath not to mention the World Cup on Twitter) –  but I do think they’d be better off sending a bunch of unknown younglings at the beginning of their careers to go out and play like those careers depended on it. Send a team hungry for success with something to prove, instead of a bunch of pampered fat millionaires who perform best when playing for successful teams and huge buckets of cash: Neither is true of the English National Team.

Just saying, like.

Today’s piece of feminist baiting is the news that “Put down that beer and wash the dishes! Wives spend ‘six days a year’ nagging their husbands“. Hee! It’s man-hating too! Men are infantile morons who do absolutely nothing and need wives to act as a mother substitute because they’re so dirty and lazy! Everyone’s a piece of shit to the Daily Mail!

But, okay, let’s see where this has come from:

A study of more than 3,000 people carried out by health campaign group Everyman…

A study! Oo! Impressive. Very scientific, obviously. So, off I go to the Everyman website to find out some more about the study.

Survey conducted by One Poll with a sample size of 3,000.

Ah. So… not so much a study as… well… a survey. Disappointing. How was it conducted? What was the methodology? What questions were asked? Call me a bit sceptical, but I’m not entirely convinced by the soundness of this particular ‘study’.

No doubt Everyman imagined they’d get a nice, controversial story in order to help them with their campaign to raise awareness of testicular and prostate cancer. They write,

Women play a vital role when it comes to the health of the men in their lives and they generally lead by example in keeping up with medical checks.

Men on the other hand commonly need more convincing to go to the doctor if something is wrong.  In the case of cancer, if symptoms are picked up early, the chance of recovery is so much greater. It’s imperative that men put more emphasis on their health, otherwise the nagging will continue!

In other words they’re being provocative in order to try to save some men’s lives. The Daily Mail, on the other hand, doesn’t really care about all that fluffy, poofy nonsense and writes,

Other complaints included not helping to wash the dishes, drinking too much and not visiting the doctor to get checked out.

The majority of women were not ashamed about nagging, with 87 per cent admitting to giving their partner a hard time to get them to do something.

I’m sure the Everyman campaign are simply thrilled by this “Hee! Women are total c**ts aren’t they?” coverage their efforts have earned them.

For the absolutely broke, there’s the cheapest instrument of them all – and, in fact, the most complicated, most versatile and most powerful – the human voice. Sadly this era of professionalised music and the selection of several thousand of the absolute best singers from a human population of over 6 billion has given most people an inferiority complex, that ‘singing’ is only for those with professionally trained voices. Plus, of course, we don’t value what we haven’t paid for. Our voices came free… what use are they to anyone?

As a compromise, for the princely sum of £1.50, you can buy a kazoo. Anyone can play the kazoo, but it works, again, through singing. You do most of the work, the kazoo just makes it sound awesome.

Enter then, stage left, the Vuvuzela. A cheap moulded piece of plastic that, when blown into, emits possibly the lowest quality, least pure, least… well.. anything.. B flat note ever heard by humanity. What it lacks in quality, it makes up for in sheer unadulterated volume. Blow one straight into someone’s ear and you’ve damaged their hearing forever, unless they’re already in a Metal band and therefore have no hearing to speak of anyway.

It’s got another advantage, too. Everyone  - and I mean everyone – is born knowing how to play the Vuvuzela and, even better, you already know every single song you can play on it – after all, there’s only one.

The song is called, “Look at me, I’m an annoying tit”. It’s an uplifting anthem in celebration of finally reaching the lowest – and I really really mean the lowest – common denominator imaginable. In a world of Vuvuzelas, the maestro and the pleb exist side by side, equal at last. It creates a world where everyone can have a go, no training, talent or money required – the damn things are the cheapest possible instrument conceivable. They are to music what Ikea Lack tables are to furniture – the basic essence of the thing reduced to the absolute, absolute minimum. Even a choice of note is considered a decadent, materialist and socially divisive western luxury.

Normal music is played by some sort of musician and listened to by others. In the crowds of football stadiums, how do you ensure the entire crowd can sing the same song? Simple! You all sing the, “Look at me, I’m an annoying tit” song.

All individuality removed, all identity removed, human beings reduced to identical noises in a swarm. The dream of equality realised at last.

It is, quite possibly, the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.