Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Is anyone else rather gutted that Jon Stewart is coming back?

Jon Stewart is a great host for The Daily Show and I enjoy watching him on it. I also blogged about it a few years ago.

But having said that, John Oliver is brilliant!

You might have already seen this…

The best was yet to come, though. When John Oliver took over as guest host for two months while John Stewart was away directing a movie, he truly came into his own. Check this out…

I’m going to go as far as to say I think John Oliver is actually a better host of the show.

The warm weather has got me thinking about hose pipe bans. I’m not sure whether they are instigated by the water companies themselves, or by a statutory instrument of government, but either way, it is at the hand of the water companies themselves, complaining about the lack of water. Sometimes this can be attributed to exceptionally dry weather, but often it can just be the case of the private sector cutting water reserves in an attempt to extract more profit.

Therefore, in my opinion, if a water company fails in this way, they should be fined. And fined heavily, because water is quite important.

But extending this, we could regularly fine them, and restrict the profits, for the greater good. Utility companies, and indeed many other natural monopolies that were previously nationalised and have since been sold off, often report large profits. This is just more money passing to the rich, from the poor. Which is bad.

However, we privatised them anyway, because we’re told that private companies run more efficiently.

But why do we let them make such high profits?

Consider if we bled them dry. We hardly let them make any profit because of the price caps and fines we imposed on them. Would this make them less efficient? I suspect not. I think, if anything, they would be forced to run themselves more efficiently in their desperate bid for survival. It would encourage the very efficiently we originally privatised them to bring.

The consequence however was that private investors were less likely to invest in infrastructure. But how much money actually ends up being invested in infrastructure now? Clearly a lot less than could be given the profit given out to the shareholders.

More importantly, if you have just skimmed most of the profit from a private company and taken anything they have left back in fines, you suddenly have a lot of spare money. Money that can then be used by the government to subsidise investment in infrastructure.

There is a saying, “don’t read the bottom half of the internet”. It refers to the fact that while you might get polite and intelligent content at the top of the page, you’re unlikely to once the comments section opens up.

This is a good lesson for live. People are dicks on the internet.

A lot of people don’t seem to have spent much time on the internet though, and are then surprised by the unfriendly comments that they find. Even Richard Dawkins didn’t know until 2010.

But some people think they are unfairly targeted because of who they are. Some people may be of course, but I think it’s important to remember that regardless of who you are, the background hate of the internet generally runs pretty high. Here are some of the comments I’ve picked off my YouTube channel:

All those chicks have no taste though man. SO FUCK U.

There is nothing ‘cool’ about a camera which does a good job of showcasing that face.

what a tard you are

Ur an Idiot Get urFuckin Fact Straight u White Retard

do ur homework u white piece of shit.

umm you looked kinda like you on drugs but yeah i loved that movie and you did a good job

You’re on the right track, kid, but you need to get your hair washed and trimmed.

im reckoning by your dodgy mullet that this is common in your family?? you wouldnt be out of place deep deep south playing a banjo

Fucking idiot.

xmeltrut  ur fucking a dick ibet zain buksh whould fuck ur ugly face ur video sucks and u look like a girl u dickhead

they did die ur fucking dumb

oi u fuck face they did die

Damn you’re ugly.

You look like Trevor from the Trailer Park Boys….

fuck all athiets i hope you will enjoy getting your maginas ripped off in hell death to the athiests

Lmfao, get a gf. Shag her and get a life

you look like a monkey

this guy in the video is an idiot

Lose the drug culture look and maybe i’ll watch the video next time…….Nobody will take you seriously looking like that.

peado’s say i will touch you and you will be healed

haha killing jews lol kill six million jews and burn there corpses lmao

You’re probably thinking that I’ve picked off the worst, most abusive comments. But I haven’t. In fact, the majority of the comments on my YouTube account have been deleted, because the accounts they were posted from have since been flagged as abusive or threatening. What you see above is actually the nicer disparaging comments that get posted.

The take home message is that everyone gets verbally abused on the internet. It’s sad; I wish it wasn’t the case. But for the moment, it is. And much like an insect bite, if you scratch at it, chances are it will get worse.

Here is an inaccurate meme to help you remember it.

It’s inaccurate because posting abusive messages online is not trolling. It’s just being a dick. But that is a different rant.

There has been outcries in the past that the Post Office is closing all it’s branches and what a travesty it is.

Good. I hope it does go bankrupt.

It’s continuing existence is a stain on our society. An affront to the basic concepts of free market that have built our entire civilisation. It is, in my opinion, a useless, badly run and incompetence organisation that is unable to do anything right.

Have you been in a Post Office recently? Their customer service is terrible! Go in at lunch time and expect to wait up to an hour if you need counter service. I’ve never seen all the windows open, it’s not that they don’t have the space. They just don’t make enough staff available, resulting in huge queues.

Their credit card is a travesty. Run by the Bank of Ireland, who I assume believe the internet is some kind of dark magic, their online service has an uptime of less than 50% in my experience. Every time I log on, if I can log on, half of the information is missing. Usually the summary, but I’ve also noticed that their online statements sometimes miss transactions that the paper statements include!

What really gets my goat is a recently passport application I put in with them however. Not wanting to take any chances I paid the £8.70 or whatever it is for the Passport Check & Send service.

A week later and HM Passport Office writes to me to tell me that the application is incorrect! What is the point in having such a service if they don’t properly check it?

You would think they would be more apologetic, but they’re not. All they offered was the £8.70 to be refunded, and having phoned an expensive 0845 number to get my refund, they then said they would send me a letter out and I would have to take the letter down to that branch and get the refund back over the counter!

When I add up the value of the petrol to drive over there, and the parking, it basically isn’t worth it, even before factoring in the hour of my time at least that it would take to accomplish the task.

There is a reason all the Post Offices are closing down. I believe that reason is thy are obsolete and incompetent, and they fully deserve all the problems they are facing.

Straight Pride UK promotes the idea of having a straight pride, alongside a gay pride. Fine, no problem with that. Not sure I see the point, as situations where I feel discriminated against as a heterosexual are reasonably infrequent, but each to their own.

In fact, their wording starts off quite nicely.

There is nothing right with being homosexual, there is nothing right with being bisexual, and there is nothing wrong with being heterosexual

But then it says this.

being proud to be of natural orientation

To me, that implies that being homosexual is not a natural orientation. Which is where I start to take issue with it. Any sexual orientation you are born with is a natural orientation.

And if it is natural, why should we be proud of it? Sure, it’s great being straight. The majority of people in our society are straight and this being straight gives me a large selection of potential partners (ideally I would be bisexual but you can’t choose how you’re born), but surely something I have no control over, and was given randomly at birth is not something I should be proud of?

Their Twitter strap line is worse.

A voice for those practising traditional lifestyles & relationships. Those who want to celebrate being of natural born orientation & traditional family values.

To call the homophobia experienced in the twentieth century traditional relationships does a rather large disservice to extensive periods of history. And what are these traditional family values they speak of? Presumably a time before martial rape was criminalised because I can’t think what else is different between a loving couple marrying and adopting today to one of fifty years ago.

Then, as you reach their aims page, you begin to suspect the entire thing might be a troll.

Heterosexuals do not have equality, homosexuals have more rights then any sector of society. They have the right to take over city streets, dress ridiculously, and parade with danger and contempt, invade hotels and B&B’s run and owned by people who object to homosexuality, and then sue them when refusal is given.

Surely it must be, because no intelligent person could believe this, could they?

Having recently established my publishing company, a letter arrived from a company called Switch Media. I assume they monitor all company registrations and send letters out based on that, because I haven’t had any dealings with them before.

To my mind, it’s tone is rather fraudulent though. It begins…

Dear Chris Worfolk – Welcome to Switch and Congratulations!

Welcome to Switch? I haven’t joined Switch. I don’t even know who they are. But it goes on…

We are pleased to inform you that your Company registration number as issued by the Registrar of Companies is:

I think this reads like they’re trying to fraudulently pass themselves off as an official body that you have registered your company with. In reality, they’re a web hosting company trying to flog you some website package.

Last Sunday the UK celebrated the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years.

Except it wasn’t. It was 77 years since Fred Perry won the men’s singles title, but the last winner of a women’s singles title was Virginia Wade, a mere 36 years ago in 1977. The Guardian sums up the newspaper headlines:

Times: “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.”
Telegraph: “After 77 years, the wait is over.”
Daily Mail: “Andy Murray ends 77 years of waiting for a British champion.”

You can argue that it was implied that they were taling about the men’s singles title, but that is as much the point – we forget about our female players because the men’s game is considered more important than the female one.

Many people have taken this is a commentary on how we should reflect on our attitudes about women and care more about the women’s game. But this is a universal problem – nobody cares about women’s football. Or women’s golf. Or women’s rugby. Or indeed almost any sport! The men’s game is almost always considered more important.

The simple solution, therefore, is to stop segregating sportspeople by gender.

Do away with men’s and women’s tennis, and just have tennis, where everyone is allowed to complete on the same terms. No more would a female winner of Wimbledon be related to merely being the “women’s title winner”; she would be crowned the greatest tennis player of them all!

I first wrote about this in 2011 while nobody was watching the women’s world cup final that was being shown on BBC3, instead of BBC and ITV simultaneously as the men’s game is. Japan won, by the way.

Combining the competitions into one would stop the second class treatment of women’s sports and allow them to achieve to the highest heights, rather than being restricted by a very opaque non-metaphorical ceiling.

You can argue that women would not be able to compete with men at the same level, but this is, I’m sorry to say, the very definition of prejudice. You have to treat people as individuals and give them the same opportunities are everyone else. Saying “women are often weaker than men, so we’re going to prevent all women from competing” makes no sense in civilised society. Try telling Venus Williams she is too week and feeble to play against you – she’s 70mm taller than I am!

If you should still insist that it would be unfair on women who never get a chance to win, consider that most people don’t. I’m never going to win a Wimbledon tennis title; I an entitled to special circumstances that allow me to win despite not being the best also?

Switching to a characteristic other than gender quickly makes you realise how silly the split gender argument is. Imagine if we decided to split long distance runners based on their skin colour. Have a black marathon and a white marathon. How ridiculous! But when it comes to gender, we find it perfectly acceptable, almost certainly because that is what we have grown up with.

In the modern day, as we strive towards an equal, fair and just meritocracy, everyone should be allowed to compete in the same competition – regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, or gender.

Watching Star Trek Into Darkness was my first experience of 3D cinema.

On the whole, I’m not totally sold on the idea. Comfort-wise, it was fine. It was uncomfortable at first, but that was probably because I was expecting it to be and once I settled into the movie, it was fine.

I found the 3D pretty tacky though. It reminded me of pop up books where there are just certain things that pop up – one character would be further forward than another but everything else still felt rather 2D. I also didn’t like the way they would constantly only have one character in focus at a time.

A few of the effects worked quite well though, I think I probably ducked a few times when things came flying out the screen. It was good, but I can’t say I was amazed.

Earlier this year I started sessions at Leeds Counselling, and having recently terminated them, I thought I would write about my experiences. I’ve kept a detailed diary of my thoughts while using the service, but as there is a certain level of confidentially associated with counselling services, I’ll only discuss some general ideas here.

I think I did ten sessions in total, and then terminated the service for a number of reasons, but mainly because I didn’t feel we were making any progress.

When I started the sessions, I was told that she hoped we would be able to make some progress early on – nothing major, but we should expect to see something after three sessions. As this deadline was reached the estimates increased, and increased again, and I still don’t feel like any sign of progress had been made. Perhaps counselling just takes a long time, but I feel it was rather misleading if this is the case.

Having spoken to a number of counsellors, it seems clear that nobody in the field of counselling really knows what it is. That is to say, if you compare it to a field like CBT, which is quite specific and has methodology and a clear expectation of results, counselling seems very fuzzy and nobody can really define it very accurately.

I didn’t feel there was a strong knowledge of mental health. For example, I had to explain a lot of the techniques and ideas behind CBT. Obviously I’m not expecting them to be CBT experts, but you would expect people who work in mental health, particularly people who tend to deal with clients who have previously done CBT and then being referred, so have a basic knowledge of the subject.

I also found it incredibly similar to Scientology. This could be because Scientology copied many of its features to give it a feeling of legitimacy, or for some other reason, but the principles behind Scientology and counselling bare a very strong resemblance.

Leeds Counselling charge me £47 per session, meaning I have invested over £500 in their service once you include the initial screening. That is a worthwhile investment of my time and money if it was having a positive impact on my health, but as I didn’t seem to, it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

Earlier today, new figures for the UK Peace Index showed that murder and violent crime rates have fallen significantly over the last decade.

The figures, reported on BBC News, show that the murder rate has almost halved since 2003, and violent crimes have fallen by a quarter too.

Obviously this is good news. It’s easy to become demoralised about the state of society because an ever increasing global news coverage can sometimes bring out the worst. But the reality is that every year progress is made, the world gets better and people live longer and happier lives.