Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

My friend Russ has long maintained the opinion that there is no problem in society that cannot be better understood by watching an appropriate episode of South Park. “There is a South Park for every part of life” he says.

It’s true. Whether you’re addicted to World of Warcraft, worried about the nanny state, campaigning for the decriminalisation of drugs or trying to understand the economy, there is a South Park to explain the issues and put things in perspective.

My friend Raby went one stage further to suggest that South Park could almost be seen as a modern day Bible – it is filled with parables about modern life, not directly telling us how to live right, but giving us a nudge in the right direction. Everything you need to know about life can be learned from the adventures of four boys in a snowy mountain town.

Last week, the 2012 Grand National took place.

Two horses died – According To Pete and former favourite Synchronised were both put down after taking nasty falls during the race. Despite attempts to reduce the danger, such incidents aren’t a surprise. Indeed, it’s more of a surprise when we get through a Grand National without any horses losing their life.

Take a look at the list on Wikipedia. Two this year, two last year, a total of 11 over the past decade – and this is just from one race! Open it up to wider events and we see the same trend – this year’s Cheltenham Festival saw no less than five horses put down.

No wonder people are starting to question whether there is a future for horse racing.

As you may be aware, the 2012 IPL season recently started.

I haven’t got round to watching any of it this year, but if I was, one of the first tasks I would have to do is to pick a team to support (because obviously, it’s more exciting when you are supporting one side or the other).

The question is though, why would I pick anyone other than Chennai Super Kings? Having demolished their opposition in the final last year, and previously won the tournament in recent years before that, they’re clearly the best team. So it then becomes very difficult to justify supporting someone else.

It seems wrong to support a team just because they are the best team, but given I don’t have any geographic bias to work on as I would with English football clubs, how can it really be justified to pick anyone else given I obviously want to be supporting the winning team?

Cyclists on the road have long been a contentious issue for drivers. Many drivers argue that they slow down traffic and don’t pay any road tax. Meanwhile, cyclists argue that not enough care is taken by drivers to maintain safe roads and that they are often the victims of accidents in which they come off much worse.

The issue seems to be that they are very much in limbo. They are road users in many aspects, but then they are also similar to pedestrians in many ways (so in some aspects, pedestrians are road users also).

Traffic lights are a very good example of this. I would say the majority of cyclists I see on the roads, that is to say at least over 50% of them, do not pay attention to traffic lights. They ride straight through them or sometimes mount the pavement in order to avoid them if you would go as far as to describing it as that.

My problem with this is that you can’t expect to be treated as a valid road user, if you’re going to jump red lights.

First of all, it isn’t safe. You can make the argument that it is safe because obviously a cyclist wouldn’t jump a red light when there was someone crossing but if you’re going to make this argument there is no reason why cars should still be restricted to stopping for red lights – after all, we promise to check if there are people on the crossing. Obviously, this would end badly. Why? Because it’s just not safe to let people jump red lights, whoever they are (including emergency vehicles, but there are greater risk of not stopping).

Secondly, it creates a separation between cars and bikes. If we’re going to maintain that cyclists are full road users who deserve just as much respect as drivers, then they need to be held to the same standards as cars and motorbikes – if you say “the law doesn’t apply to me because I don’t have an engine”, you’re unlikely to be granted the respect you are looking for either.

As a society, we need to make the roads safer for cyclists – and that is only going to happen when drivers change their attitude towards cyclists. But, when the majority of cyclists don’t follow the rules of the road, can we really blame drivers for not giving them that respect?

We make some pretty shocking television in Britain. For those who live elsewhere, they see what the US has sent them – shows like Friends, Scrubs and CSI, and think “yeah, that United States really make some kick ass television.” Then they look at the programmes we export and find such titles as X-Factor and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.

Both those shows were created in the UK and both have been hugely successful in franchising to the rest of the world.

It’s therefore easy to look at the shows we have managed to export, while our true gems like The Office and Sherlock simply get re-made by the US, missing the genius of the people behind the original series which made it so great in the first place, not to mention the best television we put out, shows like Horizon and Human Planet being largely ignored, and become depressed about our success in selling our output to the rest of the world.

But there is one show which has successfully gone out into the big wide world and carved out an international relationship. Top Gear. And why not? It’s a fantastic TV show.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Top Gear. Its reinvention in 2002 was a stroke of genius – time after time people say “I love Top Gear! I’m not interested in the cars, but the rest of it is brilliant.” That’s the genius, especially with the specials, it’s a really cool travel documentary about three friends that happen to be driving cars at the time.

Even those that do object to the show are usually only objecting to the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is one of the most offensive people on TV at the moment. Granted, he does say a lot of inappropriate things but then his TV personality is set up to be controversial – he is a man who is paid to have strong opinions.

As a result, the British version of the show is one of the most watched TV shows around the world. It has readily topped the list of most downloaded TV shows, indeed in 2007 it was the second most downloaded show of the entire year, beaten only be Heros and topping Lost, Prison Break, 24 and Family Guy, the most popular shows coming out of the US at the time.

Add to that the spin-off franchises which exist in Australia, the United States, Korea, China and Russia and you have one of the most popular TV shows currently produced in the UK.

Of course, for a rather differing opinion, you might want to check out Stewart Lee’s opinion.

Last night, I tried to access a website using the 3G internet on my phone.

I couldn’t. Why? Turns out O2 now censor their internet traffic. Instead of presenting me with a web page, I was re-directed to another website telling me that I had not verified I was over 18 and therefore would not be allowed access to said website.

I wasn’t even on an adult website. I was on a clothing website. But because the site contained certain keywords, I’m not sure which ones, it must have picked up on that and decided the website contained material of an adult nature and therefore decided to block it.

I don’t think they should be censoring anything (they can add a parental lock-out that you can opt into if they wish, but I don’t think you should have to opt out of censorship), but even if we accept it’s fair play to automatically censor my internet usage, they know damn well that I am over 18 because you have to give them your date of birth when you sign up for your contract.

Secondly, the site they redirect you to is one called bango.net. Not o2.co.uk. This would have been a little more reassuring, but a website I’ve never heard of? I had to text my friend to check if it was legitimate. Seriously, WTF? We’re always being told to beware of phishing scams, and they companies pull shit like this. No wonder banks are constantly being defrauded when companies imply that actually we should trust these random third party domain names!

Thirdly, it turns out that bango.net is a third party company that they just use for payment processing – so O2 are effectively forcing you to give your personal details to a third party who could be doing anything with your details. The only way round this is to turn up to an O2 store with photo ID, which I would have done if it wasn’t Easter Saturday and I was no where near an O2 store.

Fourthly, you have to give a credit card to authorise it online. But this doesn’t actually prove I am over 18 because some banks will issue cards to under 18s as second card holders. So they might as well just rely on the date of birth I give them.

Finally, because of the way that they set the technical implementation up, even after I had verified with my credit card (I had to use my backup credit card as they don’t accept Amex, or indeed anything other than Visa or Mastercard, so they’re not making it easy) I still couldn’t access the website I wanted because it kept redirecting to the age verification website, which then saw I was verified and redirected to an O2 portal page. I could probably fix this by clearing my cache, but I don’t want to clear my fucking cache, my cache is there for a reason. If they had put more thought into the technical implementation they could have done it in such a way that this wouldn’t have been necessary.

You may have heard the campaign that kicked off regarding a t-shirt on sale by Topman.

It seems pretty justified to kick off a campaign about it – the t-shirt itself is a list of “excuses” for domestic violence. That’s in incredibly poor taste and how anyone could think that was a good idea to put it on a t-shirt is beyond me. Only a complete moron would read that copy and think “yes, it would be clever to put that on a t-shirt.”

The t-shirt in question is:

However, the campaign itself doesn’t actually seem to go after the idea that the t-shirt is in poor taste, but rather makes the claim that it is sexist.

This I have to take exception to. Nothing on that t-shirt suggests that it was a man that perpetrated the violence or that a woman was the victim. It could be a quote from a woman who has just beaten up her husband. Or one partner from a same sex relationship. It is in itself sexist to presume it’s male on female violence.

This is one of the biggest areas for Men’s Issues. Research shows that women are just as violent as men but thanks to the social stigma, domestic violence in which men are the victims goes significantly underreported.

So, while we’re boycotting Topman for selling this crap, lets remember why such items are so offensive. Domestic violence is unpalatable, regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.

Two years on from The Zuck officially announcing that the age of privacy was over, the government are once again on a beeline for another giant step in privacy invasion. The question is though, who is going to stop them?

Probably nobody. In fact, it’s already too late for that. They already track who we send emails and text messages to. They might not have the content of them yet, but they can already see what is going on. So despite the fact that we have freedom of association, and therefore I have every right to be friends with terrorists if I wanted to, chances are none of us would because our the government would then be watching everything we do and our telecommunications providers would have no option but to hand the records over.

So the downward spiral into Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to be well underway. In fact, Cameron doesn’t even need to install telescreens into our homes because as CIA director David Petraeus pointed out last month, we’re installing the gadgets for them.

But even if we did recognise that our freedoms are quickly being eroded, who is actually going to stand up against it? The answer is probably very few of us. Because ultimately, privacy is something that you can live your life without.

Of course, nobody wants to, and the visions from Nineteen Eighty-Four are horrific, but a slow, gradual erosion of our liberties isn’t going to affect our lives too much and unless we’re going to look at the bigger picture, it will be reasonably easy to swallow. I mean, the government already tracks all the messages we send and receive and watches us on CCTV on all the roads and city centres already. But we all accept that now.

Motiving yourself to get and there and do something about the bigger picture is never easy because there is little motivation to take care of it now. Not to mention that the government has got us so scared of terrorism that we openly invite many of the security measures put in place – just look at what Bush managed to push out in the Patriot Act.

Day to day, the invasion of privacy is just a purely intellectual exercise – we have nothing illegal to hide, it’s only the terrorists who need to be worried. Of course, we would prefer to have privacy, but it isn’t like we need it to go about our lawful lives.

Furthermore, what can you really do about it anyway? Chances are it will never feel like we’re now at the line that we must draw and go no further – it will continue slowly and gradually. Much like the slow ticking of the evolution clock, there is no definitive cut-off between here and Nazi Germany.

Indeed, we have many of the tools to do it now. You can route all your internet traffic via an anonymous proxy. But almost nobody does. It’s just too much effort. That’s the problem – it will simply be easier to just swallow the erosion of our civil liberties than it will to fight the fight. So where do we go from here?

It’s a hard life being a petrol tanker driver. Having to struggle by on an average salary of £45,000 a year. How do they cope?

Actually, as a result of finding out how much they rake in, I’m thinking about suggesting to Elina that she retrains in HGV driving as there seems to be far more money in it than translating, not to mention an ever widening variety of role models such as Lisa Kelly.

Anyway, onto the real topic. It’s easy to say that the mini-crisis we recently experienced was caused by politicians. It is easy to say this, because it mainly was. What is a ridiculous thing to say, everyone should panic and start storing fuel in jerry cans.

But to let the media off would be short sighted. Even the BBC for example where jumping on the bandwagon (or should I say tanker) with a count of how much extra money the petrol companies were making out of the increase in petrol sales.

That doesn’t make any sense. Why would people by more petrol overall? Surely they would just ensure their cars are filed up, but they wouldn’t burn more petrol, so they wouldn’t buy more in the long run. If anything they will look to conserve fuel, and therefore will actually cost petrol companies money.

A proposal by the government to introduce regional variation in public sector pay has been greatly discussed in recent times. The idea is that because the cost of living is more expensive in one place and less expensive in others, pay should variety to reflect that.

Having listened to the arguments on Question Time last Thursday, one of the suggestions was that, taking teachers as an example, the areas which have higher pay would then become magnets for the best teachers and other areas would be left with lower standards.

This completely misses the argument that the cost of living is different and therefore the pay would simply reflect this – in actual fact, it is the lack of regional variation should cause such a problem – if you get paid the same but your cost of living is cheaper, your effective pay is currently higher in the North East than it is in London.

However, I don’t support regional pay variation for that reason.

I’m going to use London as an example here, but in reality London could be replaced by any other big city. Indeed, London is perhaps not the best example given a divide in pay already exists in the form of London weighting. But given its relative size to other places in the UK, I’m going to proceed none the less.

Whether you truly believe there is a strong North South divide or not, it is hard to deny that as a country, we are very London centric. Not to the extent of other countries (Helsinki in Finland for example), but the best jobs, the biggest companies, museums, theaters, events, etc, etc are almost always bigger and better in London.

It then becomes self propelled – the big cities become more attractive places to live as they grow and grow, adding more exciting attractions, therefore attracting more people, and the cycle goes on.

London in itself is attractive enough to bring in talent in the public sector, and therefore we don’t need to offer people a pay packet which is effectively equivalent to those in other areas. To maintain a balance between the biggest cities and the rest of the country, we actually want to pay people more for not living in these places, which are attractive enough already.