The BBC

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the BBC is far too left wing liberal and over represents women and minority groups. I am told (by a woman with left wing liberal politics) that there a small number of bigots who always say this about the BBC and that people in the US say the same thing about CNN. Well, I'm not saying that I disagree with equality and that my politics aren't liberal (in places). I'm saying that the BBC should be upfront about its agenda or it should be politically neutral and objective. Take BBC breakfast news as an example. On the show today they had features about daycare centres that offer others services such as dry cleaning, a report into the best ways to keep children occupied during long summer car journeys and an examination of why most primary school teachers are women. I don't have a problem with this content but it is not news and should not be labelled as such. Thank god I have BBC radio 4 when I leave the house.

Orange gigs'n'tours

Orange have a new offer to their customers. You get to reserve concert tickets 48 hours before they go on sale. Sounds great from an Orange customer perspective but any band that is willing to treat fans like this isn't worth watching. The argument can be made that most live events are more accessible to those who pay more; corporate boxes in football and snooker etc. But this Orange thingy is pure queue jumping which is a very non-British thing to do. I don't know why I'm bothered; the acts that are in partnership with Orange aren't the type of acts I'd like to see anyway. Shed Seven anyone? Lily Allen (*shudders like Homer when thinking of Patty and Selma*)? Amy Winehouse ('I'm on drugs, aren't I kewl)? The Streets (geezer, music once OK, now reported lost somewhere in celeb land)?

New Interpol Album

The first two Interpol albums were great and I've been looking forward to the new one. Having listened to it I must say I'm underwhelmed. There is a review over at Pitchfork who normally get it right. The main problems are this; the drums and bass have been subdued, the deep Paul Banks vocals have been lifted too much, the songs are bloated and uneconomical and there aren't many tunes in there. One or two tracks are OK. I disagree with Pitchfork in that I like the opening track. The best track is Heinrich Maneuver and it is here that Interpol keep all the elements of their dynamic that worked on previous albums. The overall problem is that the band, in "seeking to freshen its damp atmospherics", has overstretched itself. They aren't capable of opening up their sound in the same way Joy Division did with Closer or Radiohead did with OK Computer. And the cover of this record really sucks.

Tesco Beware

Tesco is the giant of UK consumer retail. 1 in 8 pounds spent on the high street goes to Tesco. I have been a Tesco customer for many years now and I like the range of goods, the low prices, the clean bright stores and, most of all, the loyalty clubcard. However, I have noticed that things are starting to slip. The fresh food is, to put it plainly, awful. The quality of the fresh meat has dipped considerably and the fruit and vegetables are always low on stock and the only options seem to be multipacks whereas I want to pick my own. I now shop elsewhere and I'm prepared to pay more for the extra quality. I've heard grumbles from others too and Tesco should be careful. If all of their customers feel fed up and start to leave in droves it will be very hard to coax them back. Food is why people enter your supermarkets. Don't take your eye off the ball because it might be more than just this one loyal customer that you loose.

Stupid Humans

The human race is bloody stupid and, therefore, doomed. Yesterday, during a 15 minute TV programme designed to summarise all the important recent events in the Universe the newsreader spent a minute describing which man had managed to most efficiently try and get little plastic balls into holes in the ground by hitting them with metal sticks. I will never understand the appeal of playing golf, let alone watching the silly 'sport'.

The Simpsons Movie

The Simpsons is undoubtably one of the all time great TV shows. During seasons 4-8, the 'golden run', it was untouchable. It jumped the shark in season 9 and in later seasons the great gags were diluted and it became too self aware. There was nowhere left for it to go but more and more over the top. Now there is a long mooted movie. I've not seen it and I'm not sure how good it will be. Some cartoons make the transition to the big screen OK. South Park the movie was superb. But The Simpsons was all about riffing; small side gags based around pop culture refererences or the large cast of characters. The movie will live or die by how it manages to balance the overarching plot with the small gags and nods. I'll post after I've seen it. Matt Groening assures us it is brilliant. But he still thinks the show is as good as ever and methinks he is a little too $ obsessed to be objective. A trip to the cinema will tell.

Nintendo Wii

I treated myself to a Nintendo Wii games console. It is superb. I've never been much of a fan of games consoles in the past but this is so much fun. Everything is much easier and more intuitive. A game of bowling is very much like the real thing. It is really easy to suspend your disbelief and really get into a game of tennis. I can't wait to try out some more games. I do hope that Nintendo keep supporting this console and making games for it.

Away on an experiment

So I've been away from home for the last six weeks doing an experiment (with a week in Germany for a conference, see earlier post). The experiment was done in a room the size of a sports hall and we were sat in a little shed on stilts. Outside the shed was a big ion source that makes a noise like a jumbo jet taking off. The job of the ion source was to make a beam of hydrogen atoms. As these entered the shed we directed them onto a crystal we had made and from the way the ions bounced off the crystal we could work out the crystal structure. All very good in principle but in practice there is a lot of waiting around. A piece of kit so big is ripe for problems. If it wasn't the beam going down it was the detectors not working right (counting atoms that weren't there) and if these two both worked then our crystal preparation recipe hadn't worked. Out of the five weeks in the lab we got about a week and a half where things were good and we worked all day to get as much data as possible. Now I have to analyse the data and see if we got anything good and try and work out if we managed to make anything new and interesting.

Notes from the underground

The coal mining industry was the lifeblood of South Yorkshire. People were encouraged not to seek further education and to get a job in the local heavy industries. This was yanked away in the 1980's and the place really suffered. The jobs have recently been replaced with factories and service jobs. This has meant that a lot of EU workers have moved into the area and they are very welcome and make a valuable contribution to the economy.

This isn't strictly true. I have heard many shocking facts from people who work alongside the visiting workers. A guy with a family who has been waiting for council housing has been bypassed on the waiting list by visiting workers. When he challenged the authorities they said that the visiting workers had 'different circumstances'. The factory owners benefit from the cheap immigrant labour. They provide accomodation for their workers and pay reduced wages, very little of which go into the local economy because the visitors save it all up and take it back home. The most shocking fact is that they are allowed to claim child benefits for children back in Poland and Portugal. Surely this is wrong?

Retail Therapy

I had to do some shopping yesterday at the mall. This is the same mall that was devastated by floods recently. We were led to believe that all services were back to normal. They aren't. The place is a disaster still. The only food place open downstairs is McDonalds but, like the cockroaches, they would even survive a nuclear war.

The one shop that always irritates me is Debenhams. They arrange the clothes by designer and not by item. This means if I want a pair of trousers I have to look around the clothes for every designer. Ugh. I don't think to myself 'I'm going to buy a so-and-so t-shirt today'. I shop by item and it would be nice to have all the t-shirts in one place to choose from. This is why I never spend money in Debenhams.

Charlie Brooker on fashion

I don't like to quote other blogs because it feels a bit lazy but the Charlie Brooker blog on fashion is so good it should be in the Penguin book of quotes or something;

"It's a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it?"

"As far as I can tell, fashion is nothing more than a handy visual system that gives people with no personality some palpable criteria to judge each other by."

"I hate shopping for clothes so much, I wear things until they fall apart. Right now, the soles of my shoes have worn so thin I can stand on a penny and tell if it's heads or tails."

The football association (again)

The FA really burn my waffles. There is huge controversy at the moment because one team got relegated from the premier league costing them £60 million ($120 million). The team that didn't get relegated survived because their star player almost single handedly saved them. But that player was fielded illegaly because the team did not declare that he was owned by a third party, which is illegal in the UK. The team in question were fined £5 million but were not deducted points as the rules state and they survived relegation. Cue uproar. The FA could have fixed this. When a club wishes to field a player they should sign a piece of paper that states who owns that player. The small pring should say "I declare all this information to be correct and if it is later found to be incorrect then we accept a 10 point deduction." Problem solved. But the FA didn't do this and only later found out that West Ham had witheld paperwork (lied). West Ham are quite a historic and prestigious club and many ex players are powerful within the game. The FA now has to face allegations of bending the rules to save one of the special kids in the class from being expelled.

Live Earth

Live Earth was supposed to raise awareness for green issues and climate change. Madonna urged the audience to jump up and down to change the world. This from a woman with investments in some of the most polluting companies in the US. I have a real problem with wealthy musicians telling me to fly/drive less and recycle more. A touring band generates a vast amount of CO2 and waste. The concert has not been well received. TV viewing figures were very low in the UK and there were complaints about the sound quality in the stadium and the clips that were shown on TV attracted more complaints for the songs that weren't shown than the swearing. I'm glad I didn't go. It seemed to be about neither music nor the environment.

Practical joke

Here's a good one. Put a can of shave foam in some liquid nitrogen. After about 30mins take it out and peel off the can. Put the frozen block of shave foam in the back seat of a car before the journey starts. As the foam heats it will expand and fill the whole of the car and scare the driver witless. He he. In many ways I'm quite a small minded person.