Cashing In

Clearly some people will go to extraordinary lengths to get hold of money.

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Somehow the BBC website has converted $355 in to £240. XE.com currency conversion calculator gives the conversion as £180, as The Guardian did. Worrying.

Title

And?

This is quite a badly written piece as well by the BBC journalist and the same four-line quotation is repeated twice in five paragraphs. If the Beeb does have to sack 1,800 journalists, and if Jonathan Ross really is worth 18 million, then this writer could well find themselves clearing their desk.

Around Every Corner

I thought this picture was a rather extreme example of some of the terrifying sights the service personal encounter in Iraq on a daily basis.

God Bothering

I’ve read some pretty barmy stuff in my time but I think this story about a judge in India ‘summoning’ two Hindu Gods to help in a legal dispute is the most preposterous and ridiculous thing I might have ever read. It is made all the more brilliant by the BBC’s utter lack of humour and completely straight reporting.

When you look at the details of the story it takes on an even higher levels of incredulity. I quote: “The gods have been asked to appear before the court on Tuesday, after the judge said that letters addressed to them had gone unanswered.”

The letters went unanswered? How surprising. But the reasons for this are that, “Judge Singh sent out two notices to the deities, but they were returned as the addresses were found to be "incomplete".

What on earth ‘did’ he put on the envelopes?

So he has taken out an advert in newspapers – because all deities read the news – although surely being Gods, they know everything anyway? Unperturbed the notice states:

"You failed to appear in court despite notices sent by a peon and later through registered post. You are hereby* directed to appear before the court personally.”

That will definitely work.

The year 2007 – legal disputes between Gods and priests – letters and adverts to the Gods asking them to appear in person in court sent by a judge – unbelievable.

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*The spelling on the BBC website is herby.

It's Not News

A learned friend of mine recently wrote a blog about the low-level news reporting that takes place on BBC News in the mornings. Today I saw a piece that final did for me in my frustration at this version of ‘news’ they offer us.

They had KT Tunstall (looking utterly mental in big owl glasses, and wearing a spangley black and silver top – at 8am!) "teaching" their sports reader (??) to play the guitar on the basis it linked in to some new initiative. They showed some pre-recorded footage of her teaching him some chords (it was even less exciting than it sounds) and then in studio, live on-air, while I was getting ready to go to work, they spent about 2 minutes fawning over her and him as a teacher / student dynamic and then he proving what a good teacher she was by playing the ‘E’ chord, very badly.

It's 8am! All I want is travel information from the local London news, and some good, crisp news reporting and comment on stories that might be worth knowing about. I don’t mind hearing about a new music initiative, but only a) if it’s one of the lighter, last stories in the bulletin, and b) it doesn’t involve celebrities (Why do we HAVE to have “celebrities” for everything?) and c) if you have to have inane froth save it for BBC News 24 which is a joke of a TV channel anyway.

Yes I could listen to the radio, but I shouldn’t have to choose. I don’t like the radio in the morning; I find it hard to concentrate on, too noisy, and impossible to pick up a continually clear signal. Plus there is no guarantee you will escape this banality there - see.

In short: No KT Tunstall teaching sports presenters the guitar at 8am when they should be reporting on stories such as, the government in disarray, police officers getting away with crimes, and the ‘best story of the year’.

Comment, context and criticism

Morrissey’s response on the Guardian blogs section is very interesting – for many reasons – but for me the most interesting side is his very cutting and succinct arguments on why the NME is a pathetic shadow of its former self, full of “cheers mate, got pissed last night, ha ha” interviews.

It’s a pretty fair summation and is very interesting coming from a man who has appeared on the cover, and even been awarded their “God-like Genius” award. Mercifully he turned it down.

Whether or not he answers the accusations of racism is up to you – perhaps Morrissey was merely stating a few home truths in relation to the past and the present? Or that perhaps what he was saying was neither a Black or White statement but merely a ‘shades of grey’ comment on the changing face of British society? That these changes have brought positives and negatives? That perhaps looking at his comments in the context of history would put them in perspective – and let newspapers like The Guardian provide better coverage of the whole self-indulgent affair then they did?

Perhaps, but context, history, and ‘shades of grey’ are never good for selling newspapers and getting website hits.

Can bites Dog

I mentioned two posts previous that the picture of dogs in garlands was my favourite BBC news story picture. Well it has been well and truly surpassed by this fantastic effort. Is it worth a BBC News Online entry? Probably not, but it’s great.

Free Rice

This is a great example of the power of the internet. Just by playing a game to increase your vocabulary you can be actively helping to donate rice through the UN food programme for affected parts of the world. A look at the ‘totals’ page makes for interesting reading too as you can see how the game has been gradually picked up around the net which has led to higher and higher donations of rice.

Money Makes the World go Round

Guinness has unveiled their new advert that cost 10 million pounds to make. 10 million! And it’s not even that good. (I can’t link to it as work have banned youtube – you can’t blame ‘em, they want to make money).

It’s a horrible thought - all that money being spent on something which is just a giant dominoes game with cars, hay and books. Dominoes are hardly an original idea either. And this is probably before the ad agency even picks up its fee. Guinness is hardly a struggling company. I wonder how much money was given to the random Argentinean village that it was set in.

And then as if that wasn’t heinous enough a restaurant in New York has launched a pudding that costs $25,000. It’s just not necessary. Anyone spending that amount of money on one piece of food should at least match the amount with a donation to charity.

I’ve nothing against free market capitalism at all, but surely basic decency and restraint could be shown? If that has made you all down then at least read / look at this story about dogs being treated really nicely – for one day at least. (The picture I have used is possibly one of my favourite BBC news photos of all time.)

Old News

A nice story here on the BBC website about children who were born when the BBC launched its internet site ten years ago thinking up how the news might be delivered in the future.

My only query is that for a piece all about new technologies and fancy news delivery services is why on earth does Picture Eight show a piece of paper pegged to a line with two odd pegs and written with a pen that was clearly low on ink. It's hardly high-tech.

Even in ‘my day’ we had blackboards and didn’t rely on washing lines and pegs.

A Toast to Planning

Why would Tesco produce a toaster that doesn’t accommodate a normal size piece of bread?

If you are manufacturing a toaster surely the most fundamental design element it needs is the ability to house the bread, followed by the ability to toast it. I mean for a toaster that’s pretty much the main two objectives: 1) accept bread, 2) toast bread.

But for some reason the toaster we now own in our new house doesn’t do this. Despite using a slice of highly mainstream and commercial bread – a good staple size to test against I would have thought – the toaster is unable to accept the bread horizontally so it must be placed vertically. This of course leaves around 1/8th, possibly 1/10th, protruding from the toaster which means you either have to waste the aforementioned size which doesn’t get toasted, or keep and eye on the bread-becoming-toast, to turn it around to try and ensure both ends of the bread are toasted – which means the middle becomes more toasted than either end, giving rise to a slightly disconcerting taste sensation whereby the toast start mildly toasted, becomes moderately toasted before reverting to being mildly toasted again.

The whole point of a toaster is to remove the element of watching, a-la the grill which requires constant supervision, but with this method you are once again chained to the kitchen watching the toaster, wasting time when you could be doing other useful 'morning' things. And all this because the 'geniuses' who designed these infernal contraptions didn’t think to measure the average size of a piece bread before they started mass-bloody-producing them.

Every little helps? A little bit more thought would help a lot.

Troubled Bridge Over Water

Having lived in Cardiff for four years I can only agree with the sentiments made in this story about the toll charge only taking cash. Some of the comments below make interesting reading too.

It’s so pathetic and bureaucratic that in the year 2007 when people can now pay with a VISA Paywave system in shops for payments under £10 in 10 seconds people can’t pay by chip and pin on a major bridge which deals with 10 customers a second roughly.

Futhermore as many people say in the comments there isn’t even a cash machine for people to take cash out on site. Instead they are made to drive back to England to get cash – with the effort of closing two directions of motorway east and west to escort the car across the road – including if you have £5 and not the final 10p that was added on recently.

The answer here is for drivers to form an unspoken system whereby if someone in front can’t pay the fee the person behind, or nearby, pays the fee, they exchange details and send the other person a cheque for their help.

Nonsense

The stupidity of the modern world is almost funny. Almost.

Wanting a loan from Barclays to pay off a career development loan I have, with Barclays, was met with the information they don’t give out a second loan, even if you are going to use it to pay off the original loan that is at a higher interest rate. So even saying, “you realise I’ll just go to another bank and they will get the money instead?’ is met with a cheery “oh yes, it’s just company policy.”

So to Bradford & Bingley – a company I’ve long thought was above such random stupidity, but alas, no. Firstly they wouldn’t give me a loan because I hadn’t ‘started’ work yet – even though I had proof of upcoming employment. Then, after starting work, moving to London and sort myself out, I give them a ring, they’ve changed the system. You have to be 23 to get a loan. Why? Just new policy (admittedly I didn’t really push for a full answer but that was the gist). So despite being able to afford the repayments I can’t get a loan – they are now losing out on the money I wanted to give them instead of Barclays.

Isn’t that ageist anyway? Not giving me a loan I can prove I can afford because of my age? Probably not. But it still makes no sense to me.

What was it Jarvis Cocker said?

Captivating

This story - although confusing to read with all the mad acronyms flying about - is a really interesting example of just another way the internet uses the power of sheer numbers of people to get a task done. Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia and now, for example, if you wanted to comment on this blog post, you could be helping to transcribe an ancient text to the internet by typing in a blurry word - which I think is great.