Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Batty Witch
We have a pair of bats, for the first time ever. We've seen the odd one late on a summer's evening before, but never a pair, in daylight. I've just spent 15 minutes watching them circling around. Beautiful.
To go with our new pair of D'Oves which are about to fly.
Mr & Mrs D'Ove have started on the next set already - they've built a new nest in one of the other holes in the D'Ovecote, and one is sitting on the new eggs while the other feeds the ones that aren't quite independent yet. Talk about multi-tasking.
Obviously trying to make up for the ones that disappeared - which we now suspect were taken by a sparrowhawk rather than shot by the gung-ho farmer.
Post-its
How could we live without them?
They're made with 100% recycled paper, and I've never yet known one to leave a sticky mark, or to lift the surface off anything it's been stuck to.
Today you are invited to vote for your favourite standard size(s), and colour, and then put your most unusual use for them in the comments.
As I've found before, poll software really doesn't like me. Grrr. Neither this nor Sparklit will render properly across all browsers. If you're using Mozilla, the size poll doesn't seem to want to appear, even though it's a separate post, so do put your choice - small (rectangular), medium (square) or large (rectangular), or any combination of these - in the comments and I'll add your vote into the final scores.
Google improvements
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. "March 29, 2004 Google Inc. today released three new innovative features that demonstrate the company's ongoing commitment to improving the search experience for users. The new offerings include a revolutionary search engine that uses user preferences to match search results to their interests, a service that delivers search results via email, and an enhanced interface for Google web sites worldwide."
And Google News now displays thumbnail images of photos that relate to news stories.
Looking especially promising is the new "numrange search. For example, suppose you want to search for results about Mt. Everest, but you're actually interested in things like the base camp and events that have happened at a certain elevation. If you do the search everest "21000..21500 feet, then you'll results specific to that elevation. The base camp seems to be reported at anywhere from 21,000 feet to 21,300 feet, for example - this search will find all the references."
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Hot Cross Buns
Is it just me, or are the sad examples in all the supermarkets getting drier and less fruity?
Maybe it's because they seem to be churning out 2 packs of 6 for £1 or 50% extra free, but the quality has definitely gone down. Or maybe the bakers are bored - they do seem to have to produce them almost all year round these days.
Even with butter and even several days before the sell-by date they are still unpalatable. A complete waste of calories.
I could make some, from my Grandmother's wonderful old recipe, but then I'd eat them.
And, I can't make them without recalling the year (I think it was 1981) that Mummy BW left me to make 48 for some event at her school. She wasn't very pleased when she returned home to find 4 dozen currant buns. "Where are the crosses?" she wailed. "They're atheist buns!" I replied. Which would have been fine were it not a church school...
The end of an era
Tis a sad day today.
My Post Book, started on 7th October 1991 is full.
It's an A4 hardback book (with a blue cover, naturally) in which is listed every single piece of correspondence I've sent, and everything I've ordered by phone or on the net, in the last twelve and nearly a half years.
It's all very organised. There's ruled columns for the date, the addressee, and the class sent, a column to tick if a reply is required, and a column for the date the reply is/was received.
It's a wonderful way of ensuring that nothing slips by, and everything that should arrive at The Coven does. Some might call it obsessive, but it's not a chore. When sending something, stamps come out of my right desk drawer, the Post Book comes out of my left desk drawer. It's a reflex action. I could start Volume 2 on my PC. But there's nothing quite like leafing through the old entries to stir up a few memories, so I shall carry on with the paper version.
Now, all I've got to do is remember where my store of new A4 hardback lined books is... I already know that I'm not going to like Volume 2 as much as Volume 1 though as my supply are maroon rather than blue covered.
Monday, March 29, 2004
Top Ten
Further to my coverage last week, The Plain English Campaign's top ten most irritating phrases were:
1 At the end of the day
2 (joint) At this moment in time
2 (joint) Like
4 With all due respect
5 To be honest
6 Touch base
7 I hear what you're saying
8 Going forward
9 Absolutely
10 Blue sky thinking
There was a great deal of media coverage (although I didn't see any more than the top four phrases mentioned) and almost a thousand people joined the Plain English mailing list as a result.
Turning dreams into reality
With my 'social anthropolgy' hat on in addition to my Witch hat, I'm aware that there's a lot of unease around in parts of this little corner of blogland.
Times are a-changing.
I've changed my reading and commeting habits a bit in recent weeks, due to an increasing unease with the use of the medium, and others have found new jobs or new interests that leave them less time. There's also been more face-to-face meetings.
Last week I stumbled upon an article by Douglas Adams (yes, he of Hitchhikers fame) written nearly 5 years ago now. This piece first appeared in the News Review section of The Sunday Times on August 29th 1999.
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the InternetA couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps, for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.
But the change is real. I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’
‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’
‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Of course, there’s a great deal wrong with the Internet. For one thing, only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected. I recently heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet would always be just another unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor for the following reasons – that computers would always be expensive in themselves, that you had to buy lots of extras like modems, and you had to keep upgrading your software. The list sounds impressive but doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The cost of powerful computers, which used to be around the level of jet aircraft, is now down amongst the colour television sets and still dropping like a stone. Modems these days are mostly built-in, and standalone models have become such cheap commodities that companies, like Hayes, whose sole business was manufacturing them are beginning to go bust.. Internet software from Microsoft or Netscape is famously free. Phone charges in the UK are still high but dropping. In the US local calls are free. In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.
Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’
But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.
However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.
That article made a lot of sense to me.
And then there are orkut communites.
"orkut.com is an online community website designed for friends. The main
goal of our service is to make your social life, and that of your
friends, more active and stimulating. orkut's social network can help
you both maintain existing relationships as well as establish new ones
by reaching out to people you've never met before. Who you interact with
is entirely up to you. Before getting to know an orkut member, you can
even see how they're connecting to you through the friends network."
But, actually, it's all a bit false, isn't it?
Indicative of something not quite right in the real world, I'd say.
And, outside in the real world.... I'm increasingly uncomfortable living where we do.
I find that the attitudes, manners and values of the sorts of people who are moving into this area are totally alien to anything I believe in, or want to associate with. Old before my time I may be, but any sense of community or co-operation or being happy to do something for someone else with no expectation of a payback only seems to exist (in anything other than tiny pockets) in groups of people who are twenty or thirty years older than us. In general, people don't have time for each other. The pervasive attitude round here is selfish, self-centred and self-obsessed. People judge each other by what they have, in material ways. Never mind whether or not it's paid for... or how the hell they're going to service the interest on the debts, let alone save for their future.
The increase in traffic is making it impossible to get anywhere without it being stressful, time-consuming, and often downright dangerous. Even walking down the small road outside the Coven now involves taking your life in your hands, because there are no footpaths and people insist on driving at 70 or 80 mph around blind bends. It now takes Mr BW three-quarters of an hour to travel the 9.4 miles to work.
We've always intended to go and do 'something else' when Mr BW is 50. Everything has been set up financially to allow us to do that. But, recently, we've realised that we don't have to wait another 10 years. If we can find the right place, at the right price, we can go now.
What we'd really like to do is to pick up The Coven and dump it in the middle of nowhere in a 3 acre plot, away from roads, airports, people, so we can be self-sufficient. But, that isn't going to happen, so we have to find a substitute Coven. Once we've paid off the remaining mortgage we have roughly £350,000 in equity and other easily, immediately, realisable assets. Which sounds a lot, until you start looking for somewhere that meets our criteria... in this country.
Without a mortgage, and with a bit of land to grow what we need (only a small extension of what we already do here anyway), we can live on my £9K pension income. Both of us have many skills and could easily make a few extra quid if we needed to for any unforeseen reason. Plus, realistically, and without wishing to appear callous or mercenary, there are also likely to be considerable inheritances coming our way.
We've spent the last few days searching Shropshire, Herefordshire, and the Welsh borders, but have ascertained that we're not going to find what we want round there, because the differential in property prices isn't what it was four or five years ago. But, we haven't given up, and we'll keep on looking until we find our escape from the madness that is the South-East...
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Value Witch
0870-, 0871- and 0845- telephone numbers are rarely considered as 'inclusive calls' as part of mobile or landline phone packages.
Did you know that companies using 0870- and 0871- numbers get a cut of the call costs?
As I've mentioned here before, most companies using them will, if pushed, give you a geographically-based number, which can then be called using inclusive minutes.
Now there's a website that lists them all!
British TeleCON
Wonderful news from BT this morning that they are slashing prices.
Or, so anyone would think, from the media spin that it has been given.
However, always one to keep my Value Witch eyes firmly on these money-making opportunistic capitalist giants, I've just dug around a little bit.
Because we have no option but BT in this area, we have to purchase line rental from them. We are in a non-Broadband area, so are forced to rent 2 lines. Amazingly, despite it being double the paperwork for them to produce and send out, it is cheaper to have 2 lines on separate accounts with separate bills (as you can get a direct debit discount and inclusive minutes to the value of £6.45 on each bill).
As I get £15 of inclusive calls per month from NTL with my NTL internet package (which costs £15 a month - good Value, eh? :)), I never use more than the inclusive calls on each of the two lines, therefore, I use BT Standard Rate, which, after direct debit discount is £28.49 a quarter.
Now, I see that BT are abolishing Standard Rate and moving all these customers onto Together Option 1 at £31.50 per quarter, with no inclusive calls.
Leaving me, and people like me £3.01, plus £6.45 lost inclusive calls, worse off, on each line, every quarter. In total, (£9.50 x 2) x 4 = £76 per year.
Value?
I think not.
And I have no choice.
I think I'm taking this one to OFTEL OFCOM.
Update: Thursday lunchtime, email reply:
Dear Mrs Blue Witch
BT Line Rental Increase
Thank you for your recent enquiry in relation to the above matter.
We are aware of the announcement from BT of 24 March 2004. Ofcom are considering a full investigation. We can't comment further at this stage because we need to look at the detail of the announcement.
If Ofcom does open an investigation our conclusions will be published on our website.
Yours sincerely
Ofcom Contact Centre
The phrase "as much clout as a blancmange" springs to mind...
The most disliked new phrases
You read about it here yesterday.
Today, I've heard it discussed by Natasha Kaplinsky and Bill Tunbull on BBC Breakfast, then Jeremy Vine on Radio 2, then by the Channel 5 News at Noon team.
Plain English supporters around the world have voted "At the end of the day" as the most irritating phrase in the language.Second place in the vote was shared by "At this moment in time" and the constant use of "like" as if it were a form of punctuation. "With all due respect" came fourth.
The Campaign surveyed its 5000 supporters in more than 70 countries as part of the build-up to its 25th anniversary. The independent pressure group was launched on 26 July 1979.
Spokesman John Lister said over-used phrases were a barrier to communication. "When readers or listeners come across these tired expressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message - assuming there is one! Using these terms in daily business is about professional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ringtone on your phone."
The Power of Witch
It must be something about being ill, but my Witchy Powers are working overtime. I am spooking myself.
I've been a bit of a naughty Witch actually.
I was trying to help.
It sort-of worked.
I've managed to get all the 130-odd new London bendy buses that lots of the London bloggers don't like off the roads for at least a week. Just a few, erm, small fires. And I don't think anyone was hurt? And it gave lots of small boys lots of fun looking at the fire engines, didn't it? :)
I went a bit too far this morning though, and now a Routemaster is on fire at The Angel.
Well, it was a complicated spell, trying to get the Routemasters back to replace the bendy buses.
Busest stop while I'm ahead, I suppose.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
The evolution of language
Recently the Plain English Campaign asked supporters to send in their "most detested tiresome expressions."
Last Friday's weekly email contained the complete list of suggestions submitted.
There are 230 expressions.
I'm guilty of using 56 of them myself (some even in written form), I found.
But, I also find it quite difficult to know exactly what is offensive or tiresome about some of the phrases on the list (particularly when they are single words). And, I could add a few to the list. "Fusion", for example.
This week they are going to be announcing which phrases were voted the worst. I thought that we could see whether our dislikes matched theirs.
Which 5 of the phrases below do you dislike most?
(and apologies to someone for number 41, it really does appear in the list :))
+/- (for about)
24/7
8 (as in m8)
9/11 (nominated for turning an enormous event into a throwaway phrase)
absolutely
act of terror
address the issue
after all has been said and done
ahead of (or behind) the curve
almost unique
another bite of the cherry
around (about)
as I say
at the coal face
at the end of the day
at this moment (or point) in time
avoid like the plague
awesome
ballpark figure
basically
basis (on a daily basis, instead of daily, and so on)
bear with me
because then they'll win (about terrorists)
begs the question (used incorrectly)
beloved (spouses and children)
between a rock and a hard place
big ask
blasted (verbally attacked)
blue sky (thinking)
blustery old day (weather forecasts)
boggles the mind
bored of (instead of bored with)
bottom line
brilliant (TV presenter-speak for something quite adequate)
can I come to you first? (broadcasting)
closure
coming up (broadcasting)
cool
cost neutral
crack troops
diamond geezer
do you have a problem with that?
dog eat dog world
don't fight it
downplay
draw a line under it
drop dead issue
dude
egregious
engage with
epicentre (used incorrectly)
even as we speak
fantastic (TV presenter-speak for anything that's quite good)
fast tracking
for your comfort and convenience
framework
Frankenstein foods (for genetically modified)
from a practical point of view
from the same songbook
full plate (has a lot on his plate)
fuming
get a life
get my mind around it
get the job done
give me a bell
glass half full (or half empty)
go like hotcakes
going forward
governance (instead of 'management')
green light for....
has seen better days
he/she
heads up
hearts and minds
high-level view
historic
hit the ground running
hit the nail on the head
how cool is that?
human resources or HR (instead of personnel)
humankind
I hear what you say
I must admit
I was programmed in
I wouldn't die in a ditch over this
if it ain't broke - don't fix it
if you like
I'll get back to you on that.
impact
implementation architecture (instead of "ways of doing things")
important
in a holding pattern
in actual fact
in back of (for behind)
in fairness
in harm's way
in order to (instead of to)
in terms of
in the event
in the picture
in the real world
in the twenty-first century
in yer/your face
incredible
individual (for person)
inform (instead of guide, direct, manage, govern, influence, determine, etc; e.g. "This will inform our policy")
issue
it's down to...
it's not rocket science
key
kinda
kinda like
latest news (it's not news if it's not latest)
learning curve
let's put the flesh on the bones
level playing field.
leverage (as a verb)
like
literally
look at it in perspective
love-hate relationship
low hanging fruit
magnificent offer
mark it down
mint
move the goal-posts
multiple (for numerous)
near and dear
needs to move on
networking
nightmare
no, you're all right
no-brainer
not a happy camper
not a problem
not in my name
not to put too fine a point on it...
no-win situation
nucular (spoken, for nuclear)
obviously
offer (as a noun, in marketing usage: The British Council's offer is ...)
on the ground
on the same page
ongoing
ongoing
our top story
over the top
overfly
paradigm shift
per se
personally
please do not hesitate to contact us
prioritise
proactive
push the envelope
quality time
quantum decision
quick win
ready to rock 'n' roll
right now
robust
run that past me again
same exact thing
say again... (pardon)
scope (as a verb, meaning define)
seriously (as in I am seriously rich)
sexy
short of (two sarnies short of a picnic, two streets short of a block...)
sign on the dotted line FOR ME (spoken by unintentionally honest sales agents)
singing from the same hymn sheet
slam (verbally attack)
sooooo
sorted (for sorted out)
spits and spots (rain)
spread like wildfire
strawman
superb offer
sustainable
sweet (as in "sweeeet")
synergies
tad (as in small/little)
take this on board
target
telephone tag
that said,
that's what it's about
the ... behind me (TV reporters identifying their patently obvious location)
the fact is (or the fact of the matter is)
the last time I checked
the name of the game
the people out there (for television viewers)
the white stuff
thinking man's...
thinking outside the box (or the nine dots)
third straight week
this door is alarmed
to be honest with you
to let you understand
to up
touch base
tragedy
trickle-down effect
truly (grateful)
turned the gun on himself
two pronged approach (or two tiered approach)
under the radar screen
underpin
unrepeatable offer
untimely death
up in arms
up to (amount or number)
upcoming
usage (for consumption)
user friendly
value-added
wake-up call
we apologise for any inconvenience caused
we don't want to reinvent the wheel
we have to move on
we hope to get a result
well happy/angry/hungry
whole entire
wicked
window of opportunity
window (gap in diary)
win-win situation
with all due respect
woefully inadequate
your good self
yourself (you)
Whew, you got to the bottom of the list!
Now, put the 5 phrases from this list that you dislike most in the comments box.
Thought for the day
Urban initiatives in many areas are failing in this country.
One element is the lack of a robust theoretical underpinning for many of the current policy initiatives.
Solutions may lie in the ideas of risk, resilience and protection; and the
notions of human, cultural and social capital.
I've lifted and modified that from an education conference e-mail-out. Good, isn't it?
Monday, March 22, 2004
I'm never ill so I'm useless at it
Thought for the day: other than, "I think I'm going to die," I can't think of one...
I don't know where this bug came from, but I've had it since Thursday and it keeps getting worse. It starts with a dry cough, then progresses through fever, headache, sinus pain, cold symptoms, worse cough, even worse cough, even worse headache, even more sweaty fever, muscle weakness, lack of co-ordination, back of eye ache, coughing up pieces of plastic-like green phlegm (yeah, OK, I'll stop :))... Oh, and Mr BW now seems to have it too, although he hasn't listened to a word I've said and has gone off to work regardless.
On a separate, but equally annoying issue, my GP is of the opinion that I might be prematurely menopausal. Well, that's fine by me because I calculate that, given that I'm 41 and that the mean age of menopause in the 5 other women on my mother's side that I know about was 56, that's a saving of about £900 (at today's prices) over the next 15 years. There are always Value Witch angles to everything :)
Now, this may be co-incidental, but, what I didn't reckon on was that this hormonal upheaval was also going to result in my voice breaking. So far today 2 people that I know well have rung up and said, "Oh hello Mr BW, can I speak to BW please?"
Obviously, as my voice is 2 octaves lower than normal, and because I start coughing if I say more than 2 sentences, I can't use the voice recognition software, and my RSI got bad again over the weekend with all the mouse-work inherent in the Photoshop Course we went on.
Since this started I've had umpteen honey and lemons (2 bottles of lemon juice and 2 jars of honey's worth, actually), an uncountable-in-my-current-state number of painkillers and enough Olbas cough pastilles to stop any normal cough twenty times over.
I keep thinking this must be nearly over, but it just keeps getting worse. Oh, sigh. Anyone else had this or know anyone who has? How long does it last?
Right, that's enough self-pity, I'll put a pretty picture on top of this post quickly :)
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Saturday, March 20, 2004
The 45th Make Blue Witch Laugh Award
This week there are 5 contenders.
Contender 1: It started before 9.30am on Monday morning... most unusual. dave commented to my 'What do people say when they want to use the smallest room in the house, I've taken to saying "May I use the facilities?"' question with:
i too find it best to say "can i use your toilet please".asking to use 'the facilities' at our house would result in raised eyebrows and darren reaching for the key to our 'special' underground dungeon.
Contender 2: Steve:
Demographically speaking, gay men are virtually indistinguishable from teenage girls. Maybe there is some weird neurological disorder whereby people that work in marketing can no longer actually see the person, just the lifestyle."Bob, this is Gloria."
"Hello, white middle-aged woman who buys her groceries from Asda."
Obviously in such a world, said impaired marketeer would see gay men and teenage girls as a pulsating mass of man-lust, alcopops, boy-bands and embarrasing sex-toys purchased with your best friend, laughed about and then used every night, tweaking nipples and moaning "Give It To Me Brad".
Try as hard as I might (and actually I don't try very hard), you could swap me with a 17 year old girl from Harrogate called Stacey and very few of my friends would notice the difference.
Actually, I think this was even better in its original in the flesh version. So to speak :)
Contender 3: Dave. (Today is the day he thought would never transpire :)
New Makeover ShowInspired by Blue Witch's post about future trends in TV programmes, I was going to put this in her comments but it sort of grew a little too large for that so I thought I'd post it here instead.
What's that I hear? Me? Stealing other people's ideas? Never. I was inspired.
Anyway, I saw the following at the end of a largely forgotten BBC press release about maintenance budgets or something:
--*--
Coming to the BBC2 schedule this autumn, the hottest new makeover show for years. 'Makeover Show Force Invaders' will follow a group of programme creators as they spruce up tired, old makeover shows. The team, lead by Andi Peters and dressed in brightly-coloured jumpsuits, will have just over 27 hours and a budget of £450 to transform the old formats before they surprise the presenters of the show on their next filming day.
In the first episode, the Force Invaders tackle Ground Force. Watch as they make Charlie, Tommy and co film the show in the dark while dressed up as garden gnomes.
"We thought doing up the gardens in the dark would present more of a challenge and give the show a bit of 'edge'. Dressing them up as gnomes was just a bit of fun, really." says Andi.
In other episodes in the series, Kim and Aggie are forced to do How Clean Is Your House using only their tongues and a pair of brillo pads and in Home Front, the team swaps things around so that Diarmuid creates the garden in the house, complete with concrete and steel 'monolith' and Laurence builds a new living and dining room outside.
At the show's launch party, attended a dazzling array of D-list Cable TV celebs, Andi said, "We feel we've been given a mandate by the BBC to create new, innovative, pioneering, ground-breaking makeover shows. Hopefully, the changes we make will stand the test of time and become the standard of makeover shows yet to come."
Contender 4: Blue Ray tackled the politics of links:
Official RW4 linking policy. I do believe in the link etiquette of exchanging links. You put a link to me on your site, I will do the same. Unless you are Guardian.co.uk. In which case you and your outmoded ideas can fuck right off and die. :-)
Contender 5: mike on the first day of this year's Witch Which Decade is Tops for Pops? analysis (which needs your votes if you haven't already, incidentally) (and I don't care if he was being serious, it made me laugh):
...The Wombles, with an extended version of the theme tune to their animated TV show. Dismissable kiddie crap, then? Actually, no. This, and many of The Wombles' surprisingly long run of hits, is of a much higher musical order than it strictly needs to be, with its deft, distinctive melody underpinned by a really rather lovely orchestration. Nestling between the whimsical jauntiness of the main refrain, there is even a hint of real wistfulness in the "Uncle Bulgaria" verse. You won't find such richness in the collected works of The Tweenies or The Teletubbies, that's for sure.
Far too many mentions of The Wombles around and about recenty for comfort actually... (I think you have to be of a certain age plus or minus four decades, don't you? :))
Winner very much delayed this week... not due to the vagaries of the Orange mobile network in remotest Suffolk as I'd feared (they must have put up a new mast since last I was there), but because I've been a very, very, very ill Witch. Last night I thought I was going to die, so I couldn't begin to start thinking about transmitting the winner of this week's MBWLA. Anyway, I didn't die, although you could have wrung out the bedclothes when I awoke this morning, such was my nocturnal fever, and, I got through the course somehow, and also learnt something along the way.
So, the winner is ... Steve. And, I hasten to add, not because I think that what he says is true in any way :)
Friday, March 19, 2004
Of Course
Well, we're off to this picture to learn to play with our pictures.
If my spell works properly, the MBWLA should appear magically tomorrow.
Friday
I feel like death warmed up, but not much. Actually, I think I've been over-heated as my temperature currently seems to be 37.7 degrees (it's usually 36.9 - I'm a cooler than average Witch, you see :)). I'm never ill. Except today, and I'm sure that's only because we're going away for the weekend on a course. Coughing, spluttering, aching, dizzy. Sigh. Back to bed for a couple of hours in a mo'.
It's really windy here. The D'Oves are having trouble flying back to the D'OveCote with food for their chicks (well, actually they're called squabs, but that's a nasty word, so I'll call them chicks). They keep getting blown off course. I shouldn't laugh at them, but it's so funny watching them unexpectedly get gusted and miss their intended landing spots.
Question: Mr BW and I were discussing the tabloid-sized broadsheets last night. Largely because they are making my life a misery. They take much more folding and manipulating than the broadsheets used to when used to line the bottom of the hens' ark. We didn't know what they are called. I consulted The Oracle who confirmed that, as far as he knew, no appropriate term has yet been invented. 'Broadloid' or 'Tabsheet' are too obvious. Any better ideas?
Thursday, March 18, 2004
Today's post
Today's theme is the same as last night's.
It's continuing in the comments box under the last post yesterday.
In case anybody other than me is interested :)
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
TV shows - what comes next
As threatened yesterday, I shall now share my view on what the next trends in TV programming might be.
Obviously these are not likely to be short-term trends, as DG pointed out in the comments that there is a BBC webpage appealing for mugs people to participate in upcoming series that have already been dreamt up.
Actually, the more I think about it, my two identified areas may not even be likely trends at all, as both, while absolutely central to where things are at in this country at present, are not exactly 'sexy' subjects, or subjects that it would be easy to present in an entertaining way, to appeal to those who need them most. And there may be capitalistic reasons why some of the Governing Forces in the developed world may not think it is a good idea. A Cynical Witch, me.
So, I shall rephrase and instead share my vision of what the next trends in TV programming ought to be.
Although it grieves me to say, I perceive that TV is now viewed as escapism, rather than educational, by most people.
Therefore, I'm now not at all convinced that programmes on either:
(a) Coping with stress
or
(b) Coping with debt
are likely to be big hits.
More and more large organisations, in both private and public sectors, are buying in training, or services, from consultants, counsellors, alternative therapists (yoga, reiki, massage, aromatherapists, reflexologists etc), personal trainers, fitness instructors etc in an attempt to reduce the days lost from employees' stress by encouraging staff to engage in stress-reducing activities.
However, in my opinion and experience, the source of most stress to many people in the workplace is other people.
The stress reducing activities that seem to be on offer deal with the effects, not the causes.
Again, in my experience, very little training is offered to employees (other than those responsible for managing people) to help them learn new skills to enable them to think and behave differently about resolving conflicts and differences of opinion between individuals. There are so many techniques for defusing situations that are very easy to teach, that could make a real difference to many people's lives, at work, and at home.
And what of debt? Consumer debt is at an all time high, and growing at several billion pounds a month.
OK, so there have been programmes like Alvin Hall's 'Your Money or your Life', but they always seem to deal with extreme cases, and do nothing to teach the basic skills of personal finance. It's not rocket science. It's common sense. Although, apparently, not that common.
For an increasing number of people, money is now the master rather than the servant. I hate to mention my hated 3Cs again, but Commercialism, Consumerism and Capitalism have so much to answer for.
Last year, the number of people who were declared bankrupt increased by 30% to nearly 50,000. The Consumer Credit Counselling Service (a charity) says calls to their debt help line in January were up by 11% on the previous year.
As Elton John once said, "I love my possessions. I get more love from them than from most human beings."
People increasingly say they are stressed and that they spend recklessly as a result. Binge-drinking has been in the news this week. Binge-shopping (call it retail therapy if you must, it amounts to the same thing) is all too common. A tenth of UK spending is now funded by credit.
In May 1997, our total personal debt in the UK (including mortgages, credit cards, personal loans, overdrafts and so on) hit £500 billion. By this January, it had almost doubled to £945 billion. £171 billion of this total is unsecured credit, which is an alarming average of £7,900 per household.
The Financial Services Authority last year calculated that over six million families and individuals were having problems meeting their debt repayments. Those in most difficulty were spending almost a third of their incomes (31%) on interest repayments.
To summarise, then, 1,500,000 working days are lost to stress annually at a cost of £1.24bn (research by Personnel Today and the Health & Safety Executive, October 2003 (HSE)). Unsecured consumer credit in this country is currently over £171,000,000,000, or an average of £7,900 per household.
Both these situations are totally unsustainable in the long term.
But, there are no TV programmes that deal with effective and simple ways to reduce either stress or debt.
The world's going mad. Or broke. Or both.
Something needs to be done.
Only TV could reach the masses.
Assistance required
Please will anyone who is not an "uncultured barbarian" like me go and help solve this puzzle?
Stealing time
Just time for a quick 10 minutes away from what I should be doing to tell you about the erm, situation involving a stray cucumber in the back of my car...
Scene: Monday, taking older*, but very broadminded, friend to weekly watercolour painting class. Arrive at place where class is held and park. Open hatchback to remove equipment.
Friend BW: Erm, forgive me BW, but what is that and why is it in your boot?
Me: Ah, so that's where that cucumber got to! I thought I was short of something when I got home from shopping at the end of last week...
Friend BW: *smirking* Riiiight...
Me: *sidelong glance* Now come on, what are you really thinking?
Friend BW: Well, I know you and your innovative methods of stress control, and I also know how you're dashing around at the moment. I did wonder whether it was there for, well, instant relief in country gateways?
Me: Now, there's an interesting thought... haven't got time to park up though... I wonder...
Friend BW: I've never really known if they're best used with or without the cellophane...
* Now, when I say older I mean 70 this year...
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Time manufacturing spell needed...
How do you evening- and weekend- only bloggers cope? I'm really busy work-wise at the moment (that is, out-of-The-Coven work, not the boring paperwork - that nightmare is next week) and am sooo behind on reading, let alone posting...
Anyway, my little query this morning about the next trend on TV raised some interesting ideas and smiles. But not, however, either of the things that I think will be along soon.
Maybe I should just patent the ideas and get on with writing the stuff for them?
*Goes off to assess commercial viability of ideas before deciding whether to blog them*
(actually, off to have some dinner, however, the other idea sounded better :) )
Predicting TV trends
In the beginning there were 'how to' gardening and cookery programmes.
Then came house makeover, garden makeover, garden and house makeover, and person/health/fitness makeover programmes.
Next there were move your house, clean your house and tidy your life/house programmes.
Alongside these were fly-on-the-wall docusoaps, 'reality TV' and 'manufacture a pop-star' programmes.
I have a very clear view of 'what comes next'.
But, before I share it, what do you think will be the next trend in TV programmes?
Monday, March 15, 2004
Terminology
Yesterday after calling me "our esteemed necromancing friend" (which I had to look up - luckily to find that it didn't mean what I feared, nor is it true ;) ), Ray was wondering about watching all 9 hours of the LOTR films back-to-back.
"If I start the first one soon at about 8.30, then including ‘comfort breaks’ (A wonderful American euphemism for having a pee. Also ‘rest rooms’. They must marvel that we have founded an entire culture on toilets and toilet humour, when they seem unable to even bring themselves to say the word. Never mind our Continental European cousins, for whom the entire world is potentially the smallest room in the house.)"
That got me thinking.
Not about LOTR because my interest in that is less than zero :)
But about what one is supposed to call the smallest room in the house, in this day and age, in different sorts of company?
Years ago I bought a book on etiquette. I can't remember now what it said you should say in different situations (and I long ago lent it to someone and never got it back) but it seemed outdated to me even at the time.
These days I tend to say "use the facilites" which seems to work well in all situations, with all different sorts of people. But I don't know what the 'favoured terminology' is these days?
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Who, what, where, why, how?
There's nothing nicer after a cold and wet three hours tidying up the ravages of winter in The Coven Grounds than home-made gingernuts and hot tea.
That is, other than 1000-odd photos of our trip to put into albums. Unbelievably, it's a month now since we got back, and Mr BW had sort-of forgotten that I wasn't allowed to get too many of my digital images printed. And I did an excellent deal with a nice man in the camera shop. Just over 10p per image :)
So, log burner nicely full of sawn-up friend of BW's old fence and birdtable, BW nicely full of gingernuts, soon to be followed by red-wine, and down memory lane we go.
What's this and where did we see it?
96 down, 4 to go...
There are still 4 answers needed to complete Wednesday's 80's lyric quiz.
42. Because the law don't change in people's minds
56. Chez les Blacks chez les Sikhs chez les Jaunes
75. I'll lay down my coat so you can walk over a puddle
90. It was 4am in the morning
Any ideas?
And there's still loads more to get over here...
(and Mark's back tomorrow, and I still can't get into Blogger. Let's hope he doesn't bring back more than his £145 of allowed goods from the US because customs are clamping down according to BBC Breakfast News today - BW recommends: post the receipts to yourself, remove the packaging, or cut off the price labels, bin the boxes be good and declare everything and pay the duty :))
Look before you leap
Someone this morning contacted BBC Breakfast News to point out that it was exactly 911 days between the American and the Spanish atrocities.
Initial quick calculation - 9th September 2001 to 11th March 2004 (2.5 years) - suggested to me that they were wrong, but, I was intrigued.
A quick scrawl on a piece of paper in between munching honey muffins suggested that the person was correct. Except that they forgot the leap year day.
912 days, by my reckoning. Although I suppose you could say that there were 911 days between the incidents.
Unless I've done my sums wrong...
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Unspeakable
I heard on the radio news earlier that someone has stolen a Book of Condolence from somewhere in Madrid (can't find it on any of the news sites, yet, though).
The Spanish authorities have now arrested 5 people in connection with the bombings. 3 Moroccans and 2 Indians.
The 44th Make Blue Witch Laugh Award
This week there are only 5 contenders.
Last week there were knock-off Award Trophies around. This week we have knock-off Acronym Awards. Good try billy. Good try. But don't give up the day job :)
It's been a particularly trying week for me too. I've been trying and everyone else has been trying to prevent me trying. So, not much has made me laugh. It's really all been about what has caught me at a good moment.
Contender 1: My 'half brother'. The more he writes, the more I think we are really half-brother and sister, or, at least, that our parents attended the same (non-)parenting classes. It's all really funny. This line made me laugh first, then it carried on...
...I spent the rest of the day in my bedroom where I was supposed to be "thinking about what I had said"
Oh yes billy, I sooo identify with that...
Contender 2 Douglas c/o Oddverse. Or, caring for Oddverese. I'm not sure.
I've been rummaging around in here. You wouldn't believe where he keeps the teaspoons and that locked trunk under the stairs is worrying me for some reason........
Any views I may express here are mostly mine and may not be those of the site owner. I say mostly because I'm very impressionable.
Contender 3: Gert:
A few entries ago, I made a disparaging comment about accountants, and both Zoe and Cindy leapt to the defence of accountants. My long experience of accountancy has enabled me to meet countless accountants, through work and socially. In terms of personality types they are not only diverse in gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, religion etc, but also incredibly diverse in pastimes, including semi-professional violinists, unicycling jugglers, local politicians, hockey players, rowers, thespians, and of course, train spotters.
Nevertheless, there is a streak running through the accountancy profession of a certain type of person who totally lacks anything that resembles social skills.
Contender 4: I shouldn't encourage people to post perverse comments to serious posts I've written. However, after the sort of day I'd had on Thursday, Ian's comment to my "What's the best advice you've ever been given?" question made me laugh:
Put the gun down, and come out with your hands up.
Contender 5: DG's ode to the Routemasters. Those lovely buses that mean you don't have to walk a step more than you have to, if you're brave.
Below I've put together a list of the 16 remaining routes on which Routemasters are still running. The eight routes marked in red are scheduled to lose their Routemasters later this year. Ken, you're a bastard. In the meantime, the best places to go and see Routemasters in action are Oxford Street (ten routes), Marble Arch (nine), Hyde Park Corner (nine), Piccadilly Circus (eight) and Tottenham Court Road (eight). I particularly recommend a trip to Piccadilly, along which every single bus is still a Routemaster. It's tourist heaven, while stocks last. But less than three months to go, sob.
Ooops, rather delayed winner today, sorry. It had to do with collecting a load of firewood from a kind soul who felt sorry for us, freezing here in this Coven. Oh, and then the realisation that there wouldn't be plug plants around for much longer, so buying about a trillion of those, then starting to pot them on, then we needed paraffin for the greenhouse heater... and the holiday photos were ready to collect and, and... and... we didn't even get round to the pruning and shifting the tonne of gravel.... Anyway, I think billy just has it. Well done to all of you though.
Friday, March 12, 2004
Value Witch
At one time there were several places on the net where you could get free delivery on books. I thought that there were none left.
However, I have just found that the Ryan Air Online Shop offers free delivery on everything.
It's basically an click-through umbrella for lots of different retailer shops, including W.H. Smith, Allsports, Thorntons, Dixons (although Value Witch recommends you avoid them), Gadget Shop, Etam, Whittards, The Perfume Shop, Oddbins, Toyworld Store and loads more.
You need to register, and I found the site very slow, but, with free delivery on everything (from places that usually all charge delivery), it's got to be worth a go!
I've just ordered a book from W.H. Smith and saved £2.99 delivery charge.
I hate computers, Part N
Guess what?
I was busily dictating a report and everything went dead. It wasn't a power cut as the monitor light was still on. After prodding and poking helplessly for five minutes, I gave up and rang Little Computer Man.
He was out on a job but his wife tracked him down and, amazingly, he had just finished what he was doing, and was only five minutes away.
Half an hour later and my PC now has a new power supply. Complete with green and blue unnecessary lights. "What are those for?" I asked. "Ah, they're to satisfy the designer people who have clear sides on their cases," came the response. "Actually, BW, the case is now the only part that we haven't changed at least once in the last three months." My PC appears to be spending money faster than I can earn it.
So, if peer at my PC tower in the dark under my desk, it now glows red, green and blue from the chinks in its case. Disco anyone?
Friday distraction
Hot on the heels of Dave's flash blogging comes Elsie's blog dogging.
Join in here.
BW should not leave the building
As anyone who's ever walked along a street with me will know, I am a danger to myself when out with another.
I just don't pay attention to where I'm going, as I am usually deep in conversation and seem to be totally incapable of multi-tasking in these situations. Luckily, I have this uncanny way of re-diverting my attention to the physical dimension, so avoiding injury, at the last millisecond.
I rarely actually manage to walk into lampposts or other street furniture, although I have come within millimetres of many face-to-face encounters.
Mr BW is quite used to this and has ways of ensuring that he guides me without me being aware of his intervention. I think that he once did consider using reins, but thought better of it.
Yesterday I proved that I was actually a danger when out on my own too.
On my way home from the place I'd been working, I went into town. As ever, I parked in the Debenhams' car park as they give free parking to their gold card holders (and I once spent enough in a month to qualify, apparently for all time, which is a not insignificant annual saving in parking charges).
They had changed the place you have to go to get your ticket validated. It is now in the lingerie department. It was almost closing time and there was no one on the desk. I looked around impatiently and there was no one in sight. I looked back to the desk and saw what I thought was one of those old-fashioned bells that you hit to elicit attention.
I hit the bell.
No sound.
I spied another similar bell.
I hit that bell.
The bell made my hand wet.
I was confused.
About the same time as the absent assistant appeared, I realised that the 'bells' were, in fact, perfume testers.
I am one of those people who hate cheap perfume.
In fact, I hate most perfumes.
The sole exception to that is Diorella.
After a shower last night and a shower this morning, I can still smell the nasty stench of the awful artificial concoction. I wonder if those shiny metal stones that remove the smell of onions and garlic from your hands so efficiently will remove the smell of 'tarts' perfume' too?
Cause for concern
What the hell are we going to do with President Shrublet?
Mr BW told me that he yesterday referred to the Spanish terrorist (aka, by themselves, "armed Basque separatist group Eta") organisation as 'E-T-A' rather than the conventional 'Ehter'.
How can someone supposedly in charge of the richest and most influential country in the world be so ignorant?
Thought for the day
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
Advice
Someone asked me yesterday what were the 3 most useful pieces of advice I'd ever been given.
I couldn't immediately think of anything serious and avoided the question in my usual sweet way. By coming up with a funny story. It doesn't bear repeating as it was person and situation specific, but it was a neat way of side-stepping the question, something at which I excel, so can therefore easily spot when others do it.
However, it did get me thinking and I've now come up with the following:
1. There must be 50 ways to leave your lover
In 1988 I was trapped in a relationship that was going nowhere. I had been due to get married in the summer of 1987, but called it off 3 weeks before as I knew that something wasn't right. Exactly what is a story for another time. However.
I was doing my professional training at that time and was fortunate in being given an extended placement with Mike, an incredibly insightful man, some 17 years my senior, in Bristol. We got very friendly (although purely in a platonic way).
One night, over about the 6th large G&T Mike finally had enough of my whingeing about how I couldn't get rid of aforesaidmentioned person (after I called off the wedding I continued to live with him and, indeed, he moved into the house I bought to escape the situation - another long story).
Mike said, "For goodness sake BW, if Paul Simon can find 50 ways to leave his lover, I'm sure someone like you could come up with at least another couple!"
Soon after that I kicked out the dead-end relationship and changed the locks.
2. Always eat something before leaving the house in the morning
Strangely, this one was from the mother of the bloke I nearly married. Odd woman. Irish Catholic who'd been a nurse in the East End during the war. Could talk the back leg off a field full of donkeys. Now dead. Her, not the donkeys. Although they would probably have died of boredom. One night, sat in front of her Aga in her large farmhouse kitchen, listening to her going on as she always did, her dulcet tones lulled me to sleep. It was only when I started snoring that she actually realised she'd been talking to herself for an hour and a half.
As a student, I used to drink a lot of coffee (a very large jar of Nescafe a week), never ate before lunchtime (and sometimes not then) and constantly felt awful.
Staying with them over a summer vacation, she got me into the habit of always eating breakfast, and I've never looked back. Now, we tend to have just fruit (melon and mango, or grapefruit) and tea in the week, but we have cheese and black pepper muffins with marmite, or occasionally marmite covered in cheese, depending on how the cholesterol level is feeling, and fruit juice, at the weekends.
3. Use an imaginary plastic protective bubble to protect yourself from people/ situations that you think are difficult, or that start to get difficult
I've mentioned this before. Something I only recently started using, although I'd known about it for a long time.
This is a wonderful visual / kinaesthetic device that helps you resist taking on things that really aren't your problem.
The danger in most situations is that you get drawn in and start dealing with others' shit, which really isn't yours, and make their problems yours. Which is helpful to no-one. The bubble insulates your energies and your thought processes, and allows others to throw whatever they like at you without it 'hurting' you, so leaving your energies intact to use as you choose.
What are the best piece(s) of advice that you've ever been given?
Thought for the day
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Name that tune quiz
Sorry - still no time to update at the moment - scroll down to the bottom to see the numbers remaining to be identified.
8am Thursday - still 4 to get...
10am Sunday - to save me spending hours sorting out all the answers - note to self, doing things as an ordered list is not a good idea - I've now discovered that all the answers can be found here.
Somewhere the other day, while looking for something on a search, I stumbled upon a complete page of single lines of lyrics from 80s songs. There were some wonderful lines.
There didn't seem to be any reason for this page, and no titles or artists were shown. I grabbed the text, but seem not to have grabbed the URL. My PC had its faulty new motherboard changed yesterday afternoon, so I cleared all the caches and so now can't credit the original author. So, apologies to whoever.
Running my eye down the list, I could easily get perhaps 60% of them. Another 30% I could hear in my mind, but not get one of the title or the artist. The remaining 10% were a mystery, although if I heard them I could probably identify them.
So, today's challenge, can you identify the artist's name and the song title of these?
There's 100 here and another 100 over on Mark's site.
Maximum of 10 guesses each only, please, in each place, until 2pm GMT, then another 10 each will be permitted. And let's see if we can do it without Googling the answers, eh? :)
I'm dashing in and out today, so will add in the answers to those guessed when I can.
- My job is very boring I'm an office clerk
Martha & the Muffins - Echo Beach - First they'll take your pride; turn it on its side.
Wah! - Story of the blues - Some way after midnight in my wildest fantasies
- Don't say you're easy on me.
Duran Duran - Is there something I should know - My head is in a spin. My feet don't touch the ground.
Feels like I'm in love - Kelly Marie - I never did good things. I never did bad things
David Bowie - Ashes to ashes - We are the ones that make a brighter day, so let's not give in.
USA for Africa - We are the world - So he told it all and, in return, he got a credit card and a Thunderbird
Kid Creole and the Coconuts - Stool Pigeon - And if you say run, I'll run to you.
David Bowie - Let's Dance - Ronnie Kray, do you know my face?
- What do you think? Can't think at all.
- You won't settle down, you've got both feet off the ground
- All we wanted to do is have a good time, then they went and took our house away.
- Imagination never lets us take the blame.
Go West - We Close our Eyes - Don't need no credit card to ride this train
Huey Lewis and the News - Power of Love - I've been to paradise.
Charlene - I've never been to me - All the world is football shaped, its just for me to kick its face
- He’s his family's pride and joy, his mother's little golden boy
The Undertones - My perfect cousin - Where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake I fear?
Haircut 100 - Favourite Shirts - Across the Serengeti
- Hand in hand is the only way to land, always the right way round
The Cure - Love cats - I've got this feeling I'm in motion, a sudden sense of liberty
New Order - True faith - And all I wanted was a word
Madness - Michael Caine - We’re not going to live in silence, we're not going to live in fear
- So what do you want of me, got no words of sympathy
- I could sail a mile down the Nile
- A pseudonym to fool him, she couldn't have made a worse move
Kate Bush - Baboushka - The head of the herd was calling far far away
- We could dance and party all night and drink some cherry wine (ah-ha)
Jermaine Stewart - We don't have to ... take our clothes off to have a good time - If there's music we can use it
- Nothing to do all day but stay in bed
- Summer in the city when the air is chill
Aztec Camera - Somewhere in my heart - Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque
Prefab Sprout - King of Rock 'n' Roll - Look these eyes are just holograms look your love has drawn red from my hands
- Been on the bottom line sure ain't no fun
- You know the rules and so do I
Rick Astley - Never gonna give you up - Politician granny with your high ideals, have you no idea how the majority feels?
- They asked me how I got her I said, "I saved my money"
Deacon Blue - Dignity - You could've turned around and hit me and I wouldn't have cared
Bardo - One step further - The room is lit red danger
- there's danger in emotional ties
Wham! - Young guns - Because the law don't change in people's minds
- Swatted him just like a fly
- More than an ocean keeps us apart
- are you somewhere feeling lonely or is someone loving you?
Lionel Richie - Hello - damn hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Beastie Boys - Fight for your right to party - it brings out the animal in me
Toto Coelo - I eat cannibal - Tonight is the night for feeling alright
- Lenny Bruce is not afraid
- when we made love you used to cry
- just one smack and I was out of whack
Fat Larry's Band - Zoom - And many fantasies were learned on that day
- Wows are few, frustration more common
- and the judge and the jury, they all put the blame on me
Bananarama - Love in the first degree - Le rum et mumba, embouteillages
Vanessa Paradis - Joe le Taxi - Chez les Blacks chez les Sikhs chez les Jaunes
- If so how often? Which do you choose the hard or soft option?
Pet Shop Boys - West End girls - Money’s all that you can score
- Words in pictures, words in books
Tom Tom Club - Wordy Rappinghood - I’m looking for someone, someone I know I can count on
- Tongue's tired, too short of breath to even try. Ooh, try a little harder.
Kajagoogoo - Too shy - You're such a hot temptation
Black Box - Ride on time - Let's head for home now. Everything I have is yours.
- You can have a big dipper; going up and down, around the bends.
Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer - And you go home and you cry and you want to die
Stone Roses - ?????????? - Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind. I always give it up for the touch of a younger kind.
- One hundred million castaways looking for a home
The Police - Message in a bottle - New York, London, Paris, Munich
M - Pop Musik - Talk about it talk about it talk about it talk about it
- You've got the power to know
- And I've never been close in all of these years
- I get up but nothing gets me down
- Run from the sun little one
- You know you're missing out on something and that something depends on you
- I'll lay down my coat so you can walk over a puddle
- Don’t drink, don't smoke, what do you do?
Adam and the Ants - Goody two shoes - Yesterday I felt so old it made me want to cry
The Cure - Inbetween days - I love you more than you love me
- She unscrews the top from an old whisky bottle
- These are the days when you wish your bed was already made
- I don't feel too steady on my feet
The Stone Roses - She bangs the drums - I want to be with you be with you night and day
- Got to find a way, find a way to get a way
- Those two wet gits with their girly curly hair
- Rolling like thunder under the covers
Elton John - I guess that's why they call it the blues - Working in a factory eight days a week
- We're gonna drink a barrel and much much more
- Some of them want to be abused
Eurhythmics - Sweet dreams - How can we dance while our world is turning
Midnight Oil - Beds are burning - It was 4am in the morning
- How long, how low, how high can you go?
Curiosity Killed the Cat - Misfit - Take or leave us only please believe us
Mel and kim - Respectable - I've got something to tell you, I've got something to say
Billy Ocean - When the going gets tough - She knows I'm there, I'm always there but heaven knows
- Blessed is the millionaire who shares your wedding day
- It’s the house on the hill
Lovebug Starski - Amytiville house on the hill - Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone and Judy left the same time.
Barbara Gaskin - It's my party - You took a whole lot of something from a handful of nothing
Alison Moyet - All cried out - As you walk on by, will you call my name?
Simple Minds - Don't you forget about me - And love means nothing in some strange quarters
Culture Club - Karma chameleon
All the answers can be found here
Thought for the day
Persons who habitually drink water become just as good gourmets about water as wine drinkers on wine.
Tuesday, March 9, 2004
Call centres
I've said before on here that I will not do business with UK companies who have call centres in India.
Where we already have a relationship with a company who relocates its call centres to India, it is a more difficult decision. Particularly when the company in question is a credit card company who give us 2% cashback on all purchases (alas, this card is no longer available, so I can't direct you to it). The economic benefits of this to us are substantial, and the company have only recently moved operations abroad.
Yesterday, Mr BW was trying to sort out an error they had made. We are firmly of the opinion that if a financial institution make an error, and consequently try to charge us money, not only should they rectify the error, but they should also give us an equivalent (if not greater) sum of money than they tried to charge us, as compensation.
Our bottom line in such situations is, pay up or we close the account.
However, people in call centres in India work to scripts. They are not used to dealing with 'discerning and demanding customers' such as ourselves. Eventually, if one is insistent enough, they pass you back to customer care, which seems (in our experience anyway) to be in the UK.
Once back in the UK, it is usually possible to get things sorted out to our satisfaction.
It also appears that there exist back door telephone numbers to ensure that you can always reach a person in the UK, every time you call. But only if you are insistent. This may involve threatening to close your account unless they can give you such contact details.
Similarly, there are usually back door telephone numbers to get straight through to an operator at companies who insist on making you jump through long-winded electronic push button five followed by buttons one, two, three and four, hoops.
And you can usually get geographically-based numbers out of companies who use 0870- numbers (which cost more than goegraphically-based numbers on most non-BT and mobile services). Again, you have to be insistent, and not be palmed off by the person who answers the phone. Sometimes the numbers are only known to/issued by the supervisors or managers.
I believe that we are at a crossroads in terms of the future of call centres in this country.
If we, as consumers, do not give the senior managers in such organisations a clear message that it is unacceptable for them to make the enormous profits they do, while providing an unsatisfactory level of customer contact (based in India), then the future is bleak.
The alternative is, at every opportunity, to make your feelings on the service known. We certainly do :)
Dog eat dog
Mark has gone off to Miami, leaving me n Elsie in charge. Baaaad move Mark. Bad move ;)
We have complete control over his blog. We're turning it upside down. That is, turning BM into BW. Well, he's already got a BMW (*shudders*) badge on his blog, so, why not? :)
He's sent us a £5 voucher each as a bribe to play nice but, hey, since when have me n Elsie known about playing nice? :) (actually, it was a competition prize - and thank you Mark, I need some new blue mascara, and Boots No. 7 are just about the only manufacturer who still do it, 24 years on from when I started using it, so it will be very useful).
I used a particular word here once last Friday. Within 8 hours I'd had my first search (I've noticed others around noting how fast Google is now picking up words used).
So, over at BM's, I'm playing the search engine game at the moment. I've put in some of the search strings that have ended up here recently. Go and add some info for the searchers who arrive. It doesn't have to be correct, or, from your own experience, either :)
Thought for the day
Life is about more than just maintaining oneself, it is about extending oneself. Otherwise living is only not dying.
Monday, March 8, 2004
Correction
Seeing the comments about books under the post below reminds me - I've mentioned the "What Color(sic) is Your Parachute" book out and about a lot. What I didn't realise until last week is that there is a book as well as a workbook. It's the workbook that I think is truly helpful. I wasn't overly impressed with the book itself, and you don't need to have read the book to get a lot from the workbook. Workbook details here.
Status anxiety
If you could scoop out the inside of my head and put it into words, it would say pretty much the same as the two hour C4 programme on Saturday night presented by Alain de Botton, called Status Anxiety. One of the best thought out, researched and presented programmes I have seen in a long, long time.
"High status is thought by many (but freely admitted by few) to be one of the finest of earthly goods. For this reason, we worry whenever we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society. We worry that we may be stripped of dignity and respect, we worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one."
As I've said many times before here, I hate the 3 Cs - commercialism, consumerism, capitalism.
I don't subscribe to a need to measure myself in materialistic terms, or, indeed, against anyone else's achievements, or (and this is a much more recent personal understanding for me) against anyone else's expectations or standards for me.
I avoid the media, and its encumbent pressures, as much as possible. We don't live in close proximity to anyone. We don't have the demands of family. So, I don't feel the pressure to conform any more.
A Deacon Blue lyric that has always made a lot of sense to me is 'Dignity'.
There's a man I meet walks up our street
He's a worker for the council
Has been twenty years
And he takes no lip off nobody
And litter off the gutter
Puts it in a bag
And never seems to mutter
And he packs his lunch in a "sunblest" bag
The children call him "bogie"
He never lets on
But I know 'cause he once told me
He let me know a secret about the money in his kitty
He's gonna buy a dinghy
Gonna call her dignityAnd I'll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I'll be on my holidays
They'll be doing their rounds
They'll ask me how I got her I'll say "I saved my money"
They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called dignityAnd I'm telling this story
In a faraway scene
Sipping down raki
And reading maynard keynes
And I'm thinking about home and all that means
And a place in the winter for dignity
And I'll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I'll be on my holidays
They'll be doing their rounds
They'll ask me how I got her I'll say "I saved my money"
They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called dignityAnd I'm thinking about home
And I'm thinking about faith
And I'm thinking about work
And I'm thinking about how good it would be
To be here some dayOn a ship called dignity
A ship called dignity
That ship
Central to Dignity is Respect.
It doesn't matter what you do or what you've got, as long as you respect yourself.
I respect myself. It's taken me a long, long time to actually be able to do that. Past wounds have taken a long time to heal. But, I now know that respect is so central to my view of the world that I am no longer going to tolerate those who can't respect me.
In the past I'd have put up a gallant fight, because I'd have thought that if I tried hard enough, I might have changed something in their view.
Now, I'll just walk away, every time.
Because, if someone can't respect me, then they can't respect themselves. And that's not the sort of person I need around me.
The programme mentioned one of William James' ideas:
self esteem = success / expectation
To raise or lower the former involves just changing either of the latter.
A lot of people feel that they have no choice and that these things are out of their control.
Everyone has choices I say.
What is missing for most people is motivation.
Before I left the full-time rat-race I thought it couldn't be done. I had many concerns, almost all of them financial. Although, in retrospect, I think 'financial' probably sub-consciously equated with 'status'.
I read Downshifting by Polly Ghazi & Judy Jones and changed my mind. As it says on the back cover, "For many the dream of having it all has turned sour, so more and more are opting for a better, simpler way of life." Oh yes.
And here's a starting point.
There are 2 more parts to the Status Anxiety series.
And a book. Now there's a surprise :)
Oooh, and I've just found that Vaughan has written about it too.
Thought for the day
There are a billion people in the world without access to clean water.
There are over two billion who lack safe sanitation.
A child dies every 15 seconds from water-related diseases.
Sunday, March 7, 2004
A dying breed
I haven't been able to get to the Nice Ladies' Committee Meetings, held on the first Wednesday of every month at 8pm, for a few months (work and holiday got in the way).
They miss me when I'm not there. They tell me so. At first I thought they were being polite. But, over the eight and a half years I've been involved (it started by accident, as I could see it as a good way of networking within a new community, and it sort-of grew), I've slowly understood that they really mean it.
Within groups, people take on roles. People often play different roles within different types of group.
Within that group I'm the creative/ challenging/energizing one who, unfettered by the idea of how it's always been done or of what's proper, can say, "Hey, hang on, that doesn't make sense!" or, "Is there a better way of doing that?" or, "Why do we have to do that?"
I've never really thought about how I did it until this week. And it was only when someone said, "It's good that BW is back because we're laughing again!" that I realised it's probably my sense of humour. Or lack of one. I'm not sure which.
I laughed when the minutes of the previous meeting were read:
"Members were asked to remember to bring nappies and STs for [man's name]."
"Sorry," I said, laughing, "but what on earth is [man's name] going to do with 'nappies and STs'? I know that it's 30 years since some of you used them, but I'm not sure that they're referred to as 'STs' any more!"
Then, everyone laughed, and the minutes were changed to make more sense ([man's name], who lives locally, regularly takes supplies of essential items out to a project in a very disadvantaged area of Eastern Europe).
I laughed when the comment, "The new suggestion box is as yet unsullied by ideas" was read out.
Once I'd started, they all started. I don't care if they were laughing at, or with me, because, eventually, I was asked what was so funny, and it gave me a way to make a point without upsetting anyone. "Why," I asked, "have you decided to have a suggestion box if you're going to feel it's been "sullied" if anyone dares suggest anything? If you want opinions and ideas, don't expect people to feel able to provide them, ask them, let's have a questionnaire to elicit their thoughts!"
Within that group, I've always been the youngest (by, probably, 15 years), the only one who hasn't raised a family, and the only one who has had serious mental health problems. But, none of that matters. We all share a vision that by working together we can make things better within our local community. No-one does anything for their personal glorification, no-one bickers, or back-stabs, we discuss things, plan things, then get on and do them. Everyone mucks in and things just happen. Everyone respects everyone else's skills, experience and ideas. Everyone is incredibly supportive. We empower each other. I love working with the group. It is comfortable and rewarding.
Sadly, groups like that are dying.
Probably, I think, because of the image they have in society. An image seeped in trad