She bought a book called “The Sisters Brothers“.  A proper book by a proper author done properly.

Now the “suggested searches” thingy seems to have been programmed by someone a little bit inept.

She keeps getting suggestions NOT based on content, genre, author or theme.  However she is getting suggestions based on the title.  What this means in practice is that she’s getting quite a lot of suggested incestuous pornography.  Fine you can skip it but it does give a bad taste when it just keeps on being suggested.  Not nice.  The somewhat unsubtle hint of paedophilia isn’t really wanted either.  Surprised that Amazon and Kindle are pushing this stuff without people having to ask for an opt-in.  Surely the “suggested reads” search shouldn’t send this stuff to people who haven’t asked for it.

And all to inconvenience the hard working people of this country who don’t have the luxury of working for the state.

Well if you read the Mail that is.  So what’s going on?

As far as I can tell people are complaining about yet another devaluation of current pension schemes (last devalued 3 years ago) and a salary freeze.  Add to that the general dissatisfaction inherent in any system when lunatics at the top screw up the whole system in order to flog off the things to the highest bidders who not at all incidentally fund the bosses political party.  Reference here: the boss of Care UK funds the health minister.

The main arguments against seem to be:

1 – How can health staff leave patients to suffer?  Well we’re not really.  If anything we’re protecting the services for people into the future.  The RCN never strike and the doctors are still at work (for now).  Physios and many nurses are off (amongst others).  I don’t think any of my colleagues want to do this but they’re angrier than I’ve ever seen.  It’s difficult to stand by watching your own future degrade as well as the dismantling of the services that cater so well for so much of the population.  If these changes go unchallenged then the NHS that so many fought for will be gone, probably for ever.  All to line the pockets of private health care companies; there is no other good nor valid reason for the current changes to the NHS.

2 – The pensions are better than private pensions.  If so then why the hell are people not fighting for better private pensions?  The bankers ripped off millions with dodgy pension management and they’re continuing to do very well with massive salaries and bonuses for their abject failure.  But it’s the public pensions that are seen as too generous.  Typical rhetoric to insist all are brought down; just when did people get so cowed that they’d rather that than fight for their own benefit?

3 – The pensions are unsustainable.  That’s simply not true.  The pension scheme is currently getting more in than it’s paying out and this is predicted to continue this way for a goodly number of years into the future.  So why mess with it?  A pessimist would say so that it’ll annoy the unions, cause strife (along with reducing real funding to services) and then they can stop the NHS providing services and flog a “failing” service to the private sector.

There was a lovely letter in The Times on Monday that referred to the strikes.  The author stated that “2.7m people are to strike” and also that “we hear that 2.72m people are now unemployed and would be glad of the work” so the conclusion is “The solution to this problem seems obvious!”

If I follow correctly then he’s suggesting that the 2.72m unemployed be brought in to do the jobs that the strikers are not doing today.  Not sure how well the hordes of uneducated and feckless included in that number would be as teachers, physios, nurses, court staff and more.  Maybe people actually think that qualifications are simply pointless exams rather than a pre-requisite to demonstrate that you know enough to do the job.  Bizarre letter.

If I were working today then I wouldn’t be working.

And to finish: You can’t get too much of this:

For instance that the Earth circles the sun and not vice versa.  Things like knowing what vice versa means etc…  And knowing what etc mean….

Two incidents have shaken this belief in me recently.

First was watching an episode of Millionaire.  There was a bloke on it who was an English teacher.  OK?  An ENGLISH teacher.  I emphasise for good reason.

One question: “What is the latin for cast list?”  OK I might not have answered straight away but on Millionaire they have multi-choice.  I can’t actually remember the options but they were as obvious as these:

A: Vice versa, B: Cave canum, C: Modus operandi, D: Dramatis personae

He had to use a life-line! Unbelievable.  And this was at only £1000, hardly high up the ladder.

This bloke knew nothing at all.  Had only one question that required no life-line and that was question number 1.  He eventually gave up on the 5th question which was about a Dickens character and which novel was he in.  Now I actually didn’t know the answer as I’ve not particularly read any Dickens but I return you to the fact that he was an ENGLISH teacher.  Surely some Dickens would have been on some syllabus somewhere in his past if not his own reading for pleasure.  Honestly.

The second incident was at work the other day.  It was a team meeting on a morning after I’d had a rotten night of no sleep so I was drowsy and narky to say to the least.  I can’t really remember quite how we got there but I needed to know the name of the 1st president of the US (some obscure point about honesty I think) and my sleep-deprived mind couldn’t bring it forward so I asked the team.

“Oh you know the 1st American president, oh what’s his name oh you know…” etc.

And they didn’t answer.  They couldn’t answer.  Well one could, one who’d also done O-levels may I say.  But the others looked at me and I couldn’t tell why.  Nobody said anything.  I became mildly agitated as I assumed they were just being pains and annoying me.  Surely they knew such a simple piece of info as this.  So I asked again.

“No come on what’s his name?  You know chopped down the tree, can’t tell a lie father etc…”

At which point one of the brightest and most able team-members turned to me and asked:

“Alby. Why would we know American history?”

Gobsmacked I was.  Reminded me of a time long ago when I used the word “posthumous” in the office and not a single person in this office (a large dept in a major bank) knew what it meant.  I think it’s people’s lack of interest in knowing stuff that genuinely upsets me.  Very disappointed.

How on earth is iTunes supposed to work?

I have a bunch of podcasts wot I’ve downloaded (not via iTunes) and want to put onto the iPod.  It won’t let me put them in the Podcast’s section.  Is this in any way possible?  If not, why the hell not?

OK so assuming iTunes won’t let me do something you’d think would be pretty straightforward how’s about this then?

Load them up as an album into the “Music” section.  Easy you’d think eh?

Well I’ve tried multiple times to use “Add folder to library”.  This has the wondrous effect of putting 3 of the 18 episodes into iTunes and leaving the other 15.  These three seem to be at random and I have no clue why those three and not the others.  I’ve changed the tags on the files to all be the same in terms of artist and album, the series is in order with track numbers from 1 to 18.  The only difference is the title of each episode where only the episode number is different.  There are no other differences at all in the tag info.

So that doesn’t work.

So I try “Add file to library” and pick the ones I wanted.  This apparently does nothing.  None of the episodes that wouldn’t import from “add folder” will import into iTunes. Why the hell not?

So once again the user-friendly company wot makes such easy to use products so ever so well has made something that should be easy in a couple of clicks apparently impossible.  Bloody ludicrous.

Any ideas how to easily import an audio file into iTunes without a bloody aneurism-inducing fanny around palaver?

No in fact it was the entire front page as far as I could see.  There was a story about the BBC (filth-ridden, tax burdenous scum the lot of them) and how they scandalised the nation by broadcasting a rude word, no THE rudest word, at 6.30pm on a Friday a few months back.

I don’t know how we all missed the story when it happened as it was obviously a massive thing to be deserving of a whole front page of a national newspaper.  Clearly there can be no other things of national and international importance ongoing that deserve precedence over this outrage.

I wasn’t about to buy the rag so I looked online when I got home again.

Once into the detail of the story it turns out that they didn’t broadcast the word at all, merely hinting at it in a scripted link between questions on an episode of the News Quiz.  So could this be right?  A national front page story about a swear word that wasn’t even uttered?  Apparently so.

Brace yourselves, I am about to repeat the joke:

“The tories, putting the n into cuts”

A little risque but hardly deserving of moral outrage.  Despite the not-at-all feigned outrage, of this utter non-story the paper even then re-prints the joke in full without any censorship.  So not even a slight bit hypocritical then?

The BBC has had a long history of risque comedy on the radio from the Goon Show’s “Hugh Jampton” through Round the Horne’s beautifully disgraceful pushing of the boundaries to near breaking point to ISIHAC (“brushing the dust and wax off in the dark”) and more.  So what’s special about this incident?

And isn’t radio 4 supposed to be a grown-ups channel?  I hardly think there’ll be a million bored and impressionable teens sat listening to the News Quiz of a Friday evening.

Was it a cavalcade of complaints that set this off?  No?  In fact there was a startling total of 1 complaint.  Yes, 1.  Against one of radio 4′s most listened to shows.  Thankfully the complaint was thrown out.  This was what kicked off the news story.

But what’s the actual story here?  Could it be the Mail’s relentless campaign to use any ammo whatsoever to try and kill the BBC?  The most respected broadcaster anywhere in the world?  Probably.  What a depressing world it would be if the piece of vile nastiness that is the Mail manages to impoverish the culture of this country yet further.

’twas an advert for some bloke who is (take a deep breath)

• an astrologer
• palm reader
• face reader
• numerologist
• spiritualist
• vedic
• vaastu expert
• psychologist
• expert in tantric

Wow.  I do hope he’s actually a psychologist as I believe it’s actually illegal to claim that you are if you’re not.  All of the other things are mainly bollocks.

The next line states that he

“predicts the past, present and future”

Coo! Predicting the past and present eh?  Tricky stuff!

He’s inviting enquiries for lots of personal problems.  You know the stuff, all very tedious like marital issues etc.

Then we get to “eduction”.  I guess he means “education”, bit of a faux pas to mess up that word tho.  The next bit is about improving your lot at work; ie looking for a “promototion”.  Not sure I’d follow this bloke’s advice.

I mean really!

The rest of NLP seems based on the premise that copying behaviours that happen when things work well leads to things going well.  EG. When you meet someone and get on well then things like mirroring happen – ie when they take a drink, so do you…  Well apparently if you consciously adopt these mirroring techniques then rapport will follow.  Not sure about that.

So anyway the course kicks off with the 2 presenters (very slick and practiced) letting us know what we’re in for.  My open-mindedness lasted as long as it took one of them to utter the immortal words “Me and Vicky are the best people here”.  How odd.

Apparently we live in 2 worlds.  The first, the external world is governed, would you believe, by Newtonian physics.  Not sure that many physicists would be happy with that definition.  I thought we’d got past that in the 1920′s, you know what with Einstein and everything.

Things improved a little with the “second world, the internal world”.  This apparently is governed by “Quantum physics”.  I believe I failed to stifle what can only be described as a “guffaw”.  The first of my obvious skeptic moments of the day.

Then we talked about “energy”.  Yes this energy was vague and unidentified.  You know this energy, the kind that people can pass on or suck out of you.  Yes that energy.  They did present a demonstration of this to allow us to figure it out.  They had a doll, we had a circle of us and wouldn’t you know it the doll played music when we completed the circle (with 2 people holding one hand of the doll each).

This demo was completed by the presenters telling us to break the circle, and wouldn’t you know it the music stopped.  Wow!  A palpable “ooh” came from some of the course-goers.  I couldn’t help thinking “isn’t this simple electrical conduction?”  Breaking the circle breaks the circuit, completing it, well, completes it. Derr!  Ah well maybe it wasn’t conduction but some sort of personal energy circle we managed to create.

Then there was the classic power band demo.  Have a look at this link for details.  Instead of the band they had you doing the test while lying and when telling the truth.  Apparently you are weaker when you lie.  As if.  They mentioned studies but there was no documentary evidence shown.  Pfft.

And on it went, nonsense “thoughts are holographic pictures”, argument from authority “we’ve worked with Paul McKenna”, laughable simplification “good and bad brain juice” and finished with bad meditation as relaxation.  It felt like being at a cult indoctrination.

I tried to inject some explicit skepticism at one point.  We had to look at someone and talk about a subject without moving eyes (ie not to gaze into the distance to figure stuff out, the way we all do when conversing naturally).  As you may expect the conversation was more monotonous.  Their reasoning was that this happens because your eyes and their movement somehow links to thoughts and losing that means you can’t summon up thoughts as easily.  I argued that surely the act of forcing your eyes to stay still adds a layer of complexity rather than takes something away.  IE The need to consciously act in an unnatural manner, hence thoughts become harder as you’re now multi-tasking.  They totally brushed over their answer to my point.  Grr.

So a wasted day?  Not completely, I did see 3 patients as well that day.  I can’t believe that in a time of belt-tightening the local trust is spending money on this nonsense.  There were 35 people there that day, and this was one of 3 days worth of courses.  So let’s say 100 people doing the course.  I could have seen more than a dozen patients that day instead of listening to people spouting bullshit and probably getting paid far more for it than I do.

Not happy.

N came home from school looking terribly excited.  Apparently they did a poetry competition at school some time ago (first we’d heard of it mind).  She waved us a serstificate wot said that she’d won and her poem was going to be in an anthology of the best poems in the competition.  Hurrah!  Very well done little girl.

Very pleased for her. She was beaming and proper excited.  A published poet!  At 5!

Then we get the bumph.  The book is apparently a proper book and will be in the British Library!  Well ooo.  Doesn’t every book published in the UK get put in the BL?  I thought so.

And then we get to the price.  £16.99 per copy!

For a kid’s book?  Forget that for a lark.  We just bought a hardback, illustrated Alice in Wonderland for a quid.  Is this anthology of children’s poems really worth 17 copies of Alice?

Cue some harumphing.

Well this morning it turns out that pretty much everyone at the school who submitted anything is also “a winner” and has got their own poem published in this book.  Some were calling it a scam, others were upset as they’d already paid for it.  Who wouldn’t want to see their child’s work published?

I don’t really blame the school for this, mind you they could have checked the internet say as there are loads of complaints about these scams.  But aren’t the people responsible for this scam just scum?  Horrible thing to do.  The children are so excited and who could refuse buying their published work?

Well us for a start.  I expect a strongly worded complaint to the school to be forthcoming soon.

It’s a word and the word is “baby”. 

Note it’s the word and not the actual thing that I hate.

Actually it’s not even the word itself.  “Baby” is a very useful word and describes exactly the thing you mean when you use it.

But the way it’s used in one particular way really grates.

For instance: On a piece of health advice from the local health visitor (interfering old so and sos the lot of them) it may say something akin to:

“When placing baby in bed, make sure that baby is on her back.”

The first, minor, irritation there is that babies are almost universally female in these things, assumedly the nasty militaristic nature of boys has not yet surfaced hence the natural feminisation.

But my main gripe is the use of the word “baby” to substitute for a name.

It’s ludicrous and annoying.  When would one say:

“When plumber comes round make sure you have choccy biscuits and tea a plenty”?

Or:

“I can’t move this heavy item I must get man in to move it for me”?

Well you wouldn’t and that’s my point.

Please health staff use a bloody article will you!

I had a christmas do at work in the other day.  It was in a caff somewhere near the main shopping precinct/mall.  As it happened I had a few minutes to browse the local shops.  My word!  Does anybody actually buy the shite in the shops nowadays?  Unbelievable!  Cheap tat sold as luxurious, electronics that work but seem utterly pointless (3d telly I’m talking about you) and many many more examples of just how to wreck the planet for no good purpose.

Then the food was very “meh” and they sold drinks at about £5 a pint.  Hardly worth it but I’m sure they’d claim a certain ambience. Oh yes and we had crackers (christmas ones not Jacobs ones); every single one of the dozen or more we had included exactly the same “novelty”.  I’ve said it before but novelties only count as novel when there’s one or two of them.

The big news on the telly seems to be that X Factor and some ridiculous dancing show are the new “bread and circuses” distracting huge numbers from the realities of life.  I watched a bit of the beeb one which seemed to be a geriatric trying to do jokes followed by some z listers (and Pamela Stephenson) hurling themselves around a bit notable only for some Tory MP to embarrass herself to the background of derisive hooting of many a phone voter desperate to keep her in so they could hoot derisively again in future weeks.

But tonight I’ve actually caught a song’s worth of the X Factor.  Really?  Is this good enough folks?

Some woman murdering a classic track (in this case “Sweet Dreams” by The Eurythmics) with ludicrous dancers while stationary warbling standing on a dais with wobbly legs as well as vocals.

And the winner is Cowell who proclaimed something like “a great choice of song and a fantastic performance”.  No it wasn’t.  It was an ok Kareoke performance with ideas far far above its station.  How people can’t see that the only winner of this ridiculous piece of crap is Cowell escapes me.

Come on people there’s so much more out there that’s infinitely more inspiring and emotional and wondrous than the utter crap htat’s being fed through  the telly nowadays and it’s really not hard to find.

It’s a damned good job we have the students around to demonstrate that some people still care about life and haven’t just given up.