Blue Witch

Winter of Discontent

I seem to have fallen into a Blue Hole.

Possibly this one.

It's full of customer dis-service, moaning whingers, scroungers, idiotic government directives, depersonalisation, lying adverts, misleading offers, companies who won't honour promises (without serious application of Large Witchy Sharp Teeth and threats of Spells), regulatory bodies that couldn't regulate their own dietary intakes, delinquents, thieves emptying heating oil tanks locally, and T£$co shoppers who still don't get it.

I didn't even cheer up when a Prospective Business Review Rep, to whom my latest online 0% balance transfer application had made me refer, asked, "Are you a stoozer?" to which I replied, "Sorry? A what? As I put on the application form, I'm a Witch!" before she agreed to give me a card after all, and with an £8K limit. The game's getting harder, but it's still there to be played.

Some sun is required, and there is nothing sunny in weather, or outlook, in England at present.

So, I'm off soon; see you all again at the beginning of February.
Be good.

Friday Question

TV's gone mad with food programmes.

Cleaner BW, who does a few hours a week as a supervisor in Local Small Town S-Supermarket told me yesterday that there was a blood-drawn and hair-pulled fight between two women wrestling for the last organic chicken in the store last Saturday (Vicki Pollard types apparently). And a huge pile of going-out-of-date factory farmed ones that they couldn't even get rid of on reduced..

I don't understand why people ignore the bleedin' obvious until it's thrust in their faces by pop-TV. The old 'GIGO' expression springs to mind - except that if you put garbage food into your body, it generally stays in and doesn't come out. Except later, as health problems. Hindsight is going to be a wonderful thing for the fast-food take-away ready-meal generation bought up on trans-fats and artificial additives.

I've half-seen a couple of programmes recently looking at the nutritional and calorific value of restaurant or take-away food. Bandying figures around like, "Most people eat out two or three times a week," and going on to show just how badly conceived many of those meals are.

Probably because we live in the middle of nowhere, and usually cook from scratch with home-produced ingredients wherever possilbe, and don't eat meat, eating out isn't any kind of pleasure. Even when we do, I invariably end up thinking I could have made better at home for a tenth of the price, and I wouldn't have had to put up with badly behaved kids/muzak/bad service/uncomfortable chairs/horrible lighting/unwiped tables/improperly cleaned crockery and cutlery/wondering what actually went in the food described as vegetarian/wondering about the food prep and handling, and food storage practices in the kitchen.

We had a quick tot up last night and decided we just couldn't count up meals out on a weekly basis. We reckon that, over the year, including meals eaten out when on holiday, and when work lunches have been forgotten, I probably have about 15 bought meals out a year, and Mr BW has about 55 (he has fish and chips in the work canteen on some Fridays). Not many, I suspect, compared to some people.

How many meals out do you have every week (or year, if week doesn't work as a unit for you)?

(Bought sandwich-type lunches, take-aways, and fast food count just as much as restaurant meals.)

Thought for the day

You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

- Buckminster Fuller

Hyacinths

The Old Friends BW brought a bowl of 3 blue hyacinths when they came to see us a couple of weeks ago. No special type, just the sort that are grown in a plastic bowl for indoor use. The bulbs were pretty small too.

They currently have 5 huge heads, gloriously blue, with green tips on each blue petal (or whatever hyacinths' flowery bits are called). There are at least 2 and possibly 3 or 4 more flowers coming. I don't think I've ever seen more than a large and a tiny flower spike per bulb before.

I think a spell has gone wrong. Or right. Or it could have been the fact that when Mr BW noticed the first head drooping one blustery freezing evening last week, in the absence of anything else indoors, and not wanting to brave the elements to go outdoors, he propped it up with a wooden spoon.

It's competition time

Chitty Chitty G1ass Mi1dred says, "If you can guess why, and from where, the piece of metal below (approx 20cm in diameter) was removed from Real Mi1dred's metal body, you can have it.


In case it helps, one side is Mi1dred Blue (unpolished though, so not as pretty as her polished colour) and the other side is dimply black.

Oh - and, if you do win this historic piece of motoring history, you must promise to treasure it forever - there will be spells if you dispose of it, ever. And I'll know :) (you could always return it when you've tired of it and/or cut your hand enough times on it, and we'll have another competition...).

Useful financial calculator websites

UK Debt stats (as of December 2007):

Secured debt: £1,177 billion
Unsecured debt: £223 billion
Credit card debt: £54.80 billion

Average credit card APR: 17.7%

Of the £54.80 billion credit card debt, approximately 74.2% is ‘interest bearing’ (eg, £40.66 billion is carried over each month). This means that the UK is paying around £600,775,140 every month in credit card interest (that's about £13,716 a minute). And that's not including loans, mortgages, or other types of debt.

These figures are from a great new site, http://www.whatsthecost.com which provides a number of free, easy to use, on-line calculators to help you calculate the cost of various financial products such as loans, credit cards and mortgages. Rather than going to a debt management company, or consolidating your loans, this site contains the information you need to understand debt and to get debt free yourself.

There are tools here to help calculate the real cost of loans, the real cost of borrowing on credit cards, how much you could save by overpaying on your mortgage and more.

To find out how much your loan is really costing you in interest, click here.

To find out how much your credit card is really costing you in interest, click here.

Meanwhile, if you're one of the ever-increasing army of Blue Stoozers (and there's no way that anyone will guess the identity of the latest recruit ;)) if your preference is to beat the banks at their own game with a bit of stoozing, you can calculate how much profit you'll make from stoozing (borrowing money at 0% from a credit card and keeping it in a high-interest savings account for the duration of the interest free period, and then repaying it before interest becomes due at the end of the 0% period) here.

If you have an existing balance on an interest bearing credit card, you can find out how much you'll save by transferring to a new card with a 0% balance transfer deal here. If you need advice on the best 0% balance transfer option for your particular circumstances, it's here.

As I always say, to be a successful stoozer takes discipline and attention to detail, so don't try it unless you have mild OCD and/or like a challenge and the idea of a bit of revenge on the banks for all the interest you/other people have paid in the past. And you must never, ever, ever, use cards you're using for 0% balance transfers for purchases. In my opinion, the biggest returns from pure stoozing are made by people who are higher rate taxpayers and have an offset mortgage, but, using a cash ISA (you've 11 weeks to make use of this year's £3,000 tax free savings limit if you haven't already, and from the next tax year (April 6th) the maximum investment in cash is £3,600 per year) and/or the best savings account around, you can still make a tidy sum.

Those new calculators above are fantastic for working out exactly what profit there is to be made on a particular deal, as they use all the factors - balance transfer fee, 0% interest free period, minimum monthly repayment, your tax rate, and the savings rate where you plan to stash.

And if you're still wondering "Why bother?" well... one of the Blue Stoozers has successfully used the system to pay off their mortgage, and we've made somewhere between £30,000 and £40,000 by using the system (but, I was an early adopter, who worked out the benefits for myself before the financial media jumped in and encouraged everyone to participate - there was more to be made in the early days as there were no balance transfer fees to reduce potential profit).

If you've got questions, stick 'em in the comments and one of the Blue Stoozers will no doubt give you an answer.

Competition

Now, suppose I had a piece of Mi1dred to give away to a lucky reader.
What appropriate competition could I have?

Through the Keyhole: a peep into a non-blog commentator's life

Having won the 98th MBWLA (see below), Debster has responded to my spell, and we have a peek into her drawing room. It must be a drawing room rather than a lounge or living room because it has tapestries and firescreens. How posh!

As requested, she has provided a picture of her mantlepiece on which she has her trophy displayed. Can you spot it?

And look, she already had trophies! What might they be for?
Of the MBWLA Trophy, she said, "hope you can see it, it was a piddly little thing on the paper."

Not only can I see it, but I can see two of them. Now, did I say have two trophies? Next she'll be selling them on eBay!!!

And, oh dearie me, there are still cards up a week after all traces of the FOTCR™ should have been removed to the recycling bins. Obviously too busy reading and commenting on blogs to attend to such matters of superstition ;)

And for all those blog-owners who have ever heard Debster wail, "Kitten pictures required!", and wondered what hers looked like, she kindly also supplied a picture of "...my pussy... being cute on FOTCR Day." She offered a picture of her daughter's pussy too, saying, "It looks exactly like mine, but with bigger ears."

One can only wonder whether her daughter looks exactly like her but with bigger ears too...

Thanks for your sportingness, as ever, Debster :)

Now, in true Through the Keyhole stylee, who'd like to comment...

The 98th Make Blue Witch Laugh Award

It's back! After 5 months absence, something made me laugh out loud again. It was actually over a week ago, but I wasn't able to post it last Saturday, and I'm still giggling when I think about it now.

For anyone too new to know, the last 97 Awards are linked from the sidebar. A warning though... many of them are temporally contextual, and/or, I suspect, otherwise understandable only to me, and my different sense of humour, despite my efforts to explain them.

As ever, coming later...

Much later...

Now, I don't know whether Debster's 'kittens?' comment earlier was a good guess, or just her usual favourite response, but, that's actually what wins a muchly rare these days BW Trophy and 2 sweet points.

It started here, where Debster replied to drD's NY Question about what his readers would like to see him write about this year by asking for kittens, even though she must know by now that he only has hamsters. In thongs. Apparently. Anyway, I sent her over to Gordon's, because he was in the throes of getting a kitten, and, well, as I'd not seen Debster there, I thought he might as well share the pain of constant pleas for kittens.

Afterwards I felt a bit guilty, and commented:

Sorry about sending Debster over. Her real name isn’t Debster at all, it’s ‘kitten picture required’, as you’ll probably find out for the rest of blog time now :)

Blue Witch, Thursday, 3 January 2008

Debster replied:

BW you slander me horribly! As you know I am a lady and like ladies things, like looking at pictures of kittens and thinking about embroidery … and anyway surely that is the *real* purpose of the internet, not that porn malarky?

Debster, Friday, 4 January 2008

Now, I don't know about you, but that phrase conjures up but one thing in my mind.

I am now forever thinking Debster rides a tandem and has a tache.

Blue Witch, Friday, 4 January 2008

She went on to claim otherwise (if you want to know, see the end of this long comments thread), but I still prefer my version :)

As commenters don't have blogs on which to display their Trophy, I expect Debster to print one off, cut it out, and put it on her mantlepiece. And then send us a picture - kittens optional ;)

Friday question

If you just want the question, skip to the end - it's in bold so you don't miss it amidst the waffle!

More and more I see people come onto TV full of what seem to be good ethics and morals, seemingly with the best of intentions, and then a taste of success, and the chance of a quicker buck, goes to their heads. They somehow forget their purpose, and it turns out that their values and beliefs have a lower price than one might have hoped. Ah, the joys of 'principled capitalism'.

A bit like some 'bloggers with book (or paid blogging) deals' I think. Whatever they may have claimed in the past... the lure of money brings out the worst in people. Everyone has their price it seems. But, let's not side-track onto that path now.

Clicking around blogland yesterday, I was, frankly, appalled, at the number of people supporting, and encouraging people to join, Hugh F-W's Chicken Out! campaign for an end to factory-farmed cheap chicken.

Appalled because, it's as if no-one's ever thought about how chickens are 99p each in supermarkets before. It's not a genuine one-purpose campaign. If you look carefully at the questions asked, it's very clear that it's not a campaign per se, it's a cover for a marketing exercise. They want your email address. They ask you if you are an Axminster Resident or Shopper. Why? H F-W convereted an old inn in Axminster to an organic produce shop and restaurant last autumn. They want you to sign up to the River Cottage newsletter, stuffed full of advertising. Have you seen the price of his courses? Smallholding, but only for the largeholder!

I haven't watched the chicken exploitation programmes, because (a) I don't need to, and (b) I can't bear to watch animals being abused, or 'kept to make good TV'. I've seen it all before, and in real life. But I did spend half an hour yesterday reading about the programme. I have also been a vegetarian for 37 years. And I care passionately about these issues, and about animal health and welfare.

I could not, ever, for any amount of money, bring myself to set up, or have anything to do with, an intensive meat-rearing system (actually, any meat rearing system), particularly just to make a point for TV (plenty of footage of this already exists), and I'd find it easier to kill a human that I disliked than any animal I'd had as a Familiar (which is the same as saying any animal I'd kept).

I've been pondering for some time what the next fad in TV programming would be.

House and garden makeovers were replaced by property development and housemoving (upshifting, downshifting or deserting the UK) programmes, and sensible cookery programmes where people were taught to cook were replaced by programmes more focussed on looking at Nigella's bum and cleavage.

And now I have my answer.

It's programming about food production.

What I want to know is, why is the rest of the world only just waking up? Or caring?

Why has it taken 40 years for them to show on TV what I have known about all along?

I ask questions about what I eat and goods I buy. I read labels. I think. I research (and I don't mean reading the BBC's version of things, neatly plated-up on their ever-sinking news website either). Because I care about what's in food and who/what has been abused in the production of food or goods. I always have and I always will. I won't wait for the media to tell me about it, in their biased way. And I'll always ensure that we grow or make as much of what we eat as possible.

I despise characters like HF-W who will use issues to their financial advantage. People who care don't take fiscal profit from their campaigns. They don't market themselves as a brand, and they don't build empires based on their TV salaries.

Living ethically, naturally, and sustainably, is a way of life and a way of thinking that is totally incompatible with media-driven capitalism, commericalisation and consumerism. H F-W isn't a true smallholder, he's an exploiter.

Now, there's plenty more where that came from, but, in case anyone is still reading, best get on to the Friday Question.

What do you think will be the next TV food campaign?

First there was improving the nutritional value of school dinners, now it's outlawing cheap chicken (and don't forget the government still haven't set a defininte date to outlaw battery egg production, despite EU pressure). I doubt it will be non-organic milk or non-organic carrots, but those two things would be high on my list of other food-rearing/growing practices that are highly suspect.

Thought for the day

It is not the mountains that we conquer, but ourselves.

- Sir Edmund Hillary (July 20, 1919 – January 11, 2008)

Here's just one example...

... of what I was moaning about the other week.

The media making headline news out of stories that are NOT what research has shown (and not referencing the original research paper so one can't easily make one's own judgment). Due in no small part to the research itself using suspect methodology, but...

This was brought to my attention by a colleague, who said:

The BBC said (see here for full story): "England falls in reading league" "The reading performance of children in England has fallen from third to 19th in the world in a major assessment."

However - this fall was partly due to the increased performance of the Russian Federation, Hong Kong and Singapore and the methodology used to calculate the results.

For those who are interested in reading the full report, it can be found at http://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/other-publications/downloadable-reports/pirls-2006.cfm.

And for those who are interested in stats and the impact of methodology, Appendix 5 is an interesting read

Methodological issues:

Of the ten block items used to access children in 2001 only 4 were the same in 2006 and when the comparison between 2001 and 2006 is made just on these different block items the difference disappears. In fact the mean in 2006 is 0.3 higher than in 2001.When a different methodology is used to link the 2001 and 2006 scores the appendix suggests that :

“None of the changes in overall or literacy scores between 2001 and 2006 are significant when design effects are accounted for using multilevel modelling”

And the dear old Beeb were at it again yesterday* morning. Breakfast delighted in telling us, every half hour, as they do, that, "Social mobility has decreased since the 60s as bright children from poor backgrounds are achieving less than average children from affluent backgrounds."

I actually don't think that a rigorous literature review of recent research shows that at all.

But, more importantly, I don't think that social mobility is about academic achievement. It's more about whether someone who leaves school with no qualifications can get to live in a million pound house inside 10 years. And the nasty people with no respect, no manners, no breeding, but pots of money, now cluttering my local streets, and the streets of most other small towns in the home counties show that it certainly isn't pieces of paper from institutions of learning that make you rich these days. Del.

* this post has been sitting in drafts for a month, so, not yesterday, but 12th December. However, they probably reported several things equally dubiously yesterday.

Guest Post from Mi1dred

Well hello my lovelies. Long time no chat. It's been a quiet few months for me. I have been out and about a few times, but not too far away.

Mr BW has been tinkering with my bits. He made his first ever eBay purchase to get me a new odometer as my mileometer did not work, and on being taken apart in an attempt to fix it, he found that it was missing some vital bits and so irreparable. Mr BW was cleaning and greasing the new speedo to make sure it worked well and unfortunately he knocked the mechanism off the top of the freezer in the workshop and it landed on the dial, breaking it. I didn't know he knew so many naughty words.

Anyway, 2 days later and the 2 broken speedos had been turned into 1 working one and all was well, so the BWs now know how far and how quickly I am travelling. Unfortunately a check against the sat nav has shown that the speedo reads about 10% high, so my comfortable 30mph is now actually only 27mph and I am even slower than thought.

Anyway, that aside we all had a lovely day out on New Year's Day. We met up with 25 cousins in a churchyard, and then had a drive through the local countryside to a pub for a lovely lunch (at least the BWs had a lovely lunch, I just sat outside and got cold), before getting home just before it got dark.

We had a close run where about 30 roe deer ran across the road between us and the car in front. Two literally rolled down the bank a few feet in front of us before jumping up and running across the fields; an amazing sight.

Mr BW has now assembled all parts to remove my fuel tank to replace the broken bracket and check out the tank level indicator (the last of my dials not to work). My new steering arm is now also here, so I think I will be laid up in the garage for a while. But it is going to be cold so that's OK and I should be ready and raring to go ready for the Spring.

In the meantime Mr BW has gone all arty and made a version of me in stained g1ass over the Christmas break

So toodle pip for now and a Happy New Year to everyone.

M1ldred

(BW adds: I have been a daft and overdoing things Witch over the past week, so am currently trying to recuperate a bit from the collapsed heap of Blue clothes in the corner that I became; I will post a picture of G1ass Mi1dred asap)

Thought for the day

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lies our growth and our happiness.

- Stephen Covey

Back to the future, Part 5

What to write?

I wrote it once yesterday afternoon.
I wasn't happy with it.
Then I thought I'd copied it to the clipboard just in case I lost it when I saved it as a draft. But then I lost it anyway. Somehow.

You see, I was having 3 email conversations at once (how anyone manages the simultaneity of MSN and the like I have no idea) and also trying to discover who sang something with a lyric like, "...it's 10.21, she's looking at her watch..." in it (that had something to do with 9.42 as a train time in one of the 3 e-conversations), and finding Google didn't know, so I'd either imagined the lyric or got the time wrong. I think it might have been something by Squeeze. Anyway, one of you will know. That's still a good thing about blogging. Someone always knows when you don't, and will happily spare the time to share their expertise and skills.

In fact... I think that's probably the best bit left about blogging these days. Oh, I've bemoaned the decline of the community aspect almost every anniversary since I started (just see every January 4th in the archives - I even wondered about reposting my 3rd blogday post and seeing if anyone noticed ;)), but it's actually got a whole lot worse since blogging became hijacked by the mainstream media who once decried it.

Blogging is now just another facet of the huge media machine than runs the world these days. So like life that it's unreal. Plus, from once being part of a shared something, where everyone contributed, it now feels very much as if a lot of people just pop by to peek through the curtains and sneak silently away (and that's no offence to lurkers, I just wish you'd delurk to say hi a bit more occasionally). I do appreciate those of you who still drop by and comment (as I've said before many times, a blog without comments is just a website), but, I still really miss many previous blog buddies, and those who now blog only occasionally. You know who you are. There's a shared history and understanding to some things that is irreplaceable.

Still, as I was saying over here yesterday, in response to this 'State of the Blogworld' Address,

It's all as important to you as you let it be after all.

If you don't buy into the blogebrity thing, then it doesn't matter, surely?

In the same way that if you don't buy into the advertising and marketing and mediaification and spin and hype of our world it can be a less personally challenging and more personally nourishing place.

Anyway, I think that losing the 5th Blogday Post was a sign.

Regular readers will know how much I like my signs.

All my spells have been to no avail.
I have battled the urge for 5 years now.
I am giving in.

I am continuing to unleash Blue Witch on the world.

Sorting

I was going to finish writing something controversial today, but then I thought that it's a bit early in the year for that, and when I came to look at the draft post there were 4 different controversies that I thought I should divide up into separate posts. I learnt long ago that if you put too much in one post people give up on it. And, let's not use all the gunpowder at once, eh? I know how much some of you enjoy a good debate ;)

And then Cleaner BW arrived and I felt shamed into starting Operation Clean Up in the Inner Coven because she reminded me that I'd told her at least three times before, going back well over 2 years, that it would all be sorted by [the next time she came back after a break]. Whether or not Mr BW has been having secret talks with her, I have no idea, but, anyway, I have to get on with it.

Here's something that puzzles me. Lots of kind people bring us egg boxes. Almost all of them stagger to the door with bulging carrier bags. Bulging but very very light. Why don't they simply stack the boxes one inside the other?

Similarly, in a school just before the FOTCR™ (I'm determined to get that in as many times as possible while it's still even a tiny bit relevant - which is, I suppose, Twelfth Night - which is on Sunday, for those of you who are unsure when to take those decorations down to avoid a year's worth of bad luck), the secretary was bewailing the number of recycling bags they were getting through since the installation of a very posh and very costly (you can tell it was an independent school) staff drinks machine. I peered in the one at her side. Full of plastic cups. Having delivered a BW Lecture on Bring Your Own Mug To Save The Planet, and 98p per recycling sack, I pointed out that, if plastic cups had to be used, mucho space could be saved by stacking them one inside the other.

It just seems so obvious to me... uncommonly rare these days, common sense.

Time flies

Well that's 11 days gone, and I have no idea at all where.

I'm tireder now than I was then (doing lots of nothing much end-on is much harder than doing something, then do absolutley nothing, as I normally have to), and, other than a swing-bin full of glass recycling, indicating rather a lot of bottle-opening, I'm not sure how much I achieved.

I made some buttons and Mr BW made a stained glass Mi1dred.

Mi1dred was clearly delighted with it as she rewarded us by not only not breaking down yesterday, but also by doing an emergency stop in time for us not to get hit by 20 or 30 roe deer omiting to use the Green Cross Code and running across the 8 foot wide, high banked, country lane/track we were travelling in at the time, just in front of us.

Other than that... did I do any of the things I needed to do?

For instance, tidying up? Erm, not much. A bit in The Studio, but The Inner Coven still resembles a paper recycling sorting facility. After a major hurricane has passed through.

I did check all the stoozing deals and sort out a couple of financial things, and do a tax return (on FOTCR™ Eve no less!), but that's more like fun than work. Hmmm... anyone want to come round and tidy up in exchange for me setting them up with a stoozing scheme? I'm just not made to do mundane work like filing and declutering.

I have just spent nearly 3 hours totting up and indexing my last year's professional development record. Only to find, when I came to submit it electronically, that the daft system had allowed me to fill in next year's record, which I can't submit before the end of the year. Most people would just sigh and copy and paste, but I, being me, wrote a snotty email saying what a daft and bloody useless system, and listing 3 things that should and could be improved. Then I thought better of it, removed the snotty bits, added some grovelly bits, and was duly rewarded by an almost instant response saying how sorry they were for the problems, and that it had all been re-dated and sorted and they would get to work on my very helpful suggestions. Would that there were three words that worked as well as "Happy New Year!" for use all year round.

I have just received a FOTCR™ card in the post. The Royal Mail obviously felt bad about having kept it so long so had omitted to frank the stamp, so at least I can re-use that. Now, is this the first of this year's, or the last of last year's?

Thought for the day

Hope smiles on the threshold of the year to come, whispering that it will be happier.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson