My Blog ThingLooking at my RSS feeds today, I saw that the BBC News website is making use of an unusual image to highlight a story. It looks like something from out of the Bill, circa 1980s.
I guess they always have to dig a stock photo out of the archive for breaking stories, but why do they even still have this one?
I’m afraid to say that, after my previous encounter with a giant cardboard advert featuring Colin Firth’s big fat face, things have now escalated.
It is, I’ll admit, partly my own fault. After a while of walking past the banner for Sky television, I realised I don’t actually like Sky (being, as they are, part of an evil worldwide organisation with aspirations of world domination – one of several such organisations we have in the world, which is slightly unsettling). So, I dumped the cardboard cutout onto our paper recycling bin that sits in the hallway for junk mail.
This has had some unforeseen circumstances.
Since I didn’t damage the banner in any way, I just dumped it on top of the recycling bin. Which has basically lifted it about a foot off the ground. So now, whenever I come home, Mr Firth is staring at me through the window. It is quite unnerving to catch it out of the corner of your eye; it makes you feel like there is a child with an abnormally large head watching you.
*shudder*
Now, let me just clear this out from the off: I’m not particularly superstitious, I know the science in the film 2012 is laughably bad (see Dara O’Briain’s rant on “the electrons are angry”), and any correlation between the Mayan Calendar and the end of the world is nothing less than luck on their part.
That out of the way, let’s now turn to the facts. The world appears to be falling apart. Earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand and Burma, civil unrest in the middle east (at least, more than usual), the economy is wankered, and the sun is entering a period of high activity that could see solar flares causing disruptions to communications and systems on Earth.
Now, the threat of a world-ending cataclysm, at first, seems pretty laughable. As I said earlier, if you’re going to use the ending of the Mayan calendar as an indication of the end of the world, you might as well use Microsoft’s inability to plan computer calendars past the year 1999 as a sign the world was going to end in the year 2000 (and don’t get me started on the Y2K scare; people seemed to think that computers would ‘think’ the year was 1900, not 2000, come to the conclusion that they didn’t exist yet, and fail to work – that, at least, is how one BBC reporter described it). But, when the number of natural disasters is actually increasing, if there is even a single superstitious cell in your body, you’ll start wondering if there isn’t something ominous going on.
There isn’t, of course. We just notice them a little more because 2012 is reasonably fresh in people’s minds and people keep drawing conclusions, because humanity is quite a superstitious lot. Who doesn’t have a good luck charm, routine, or belief in a higher power? I do (not the latter, of course). All but the most hardline scientists probably have some kind of at least partially superstitious belief of some kind. I filmed an hour’s lecture last year in which an academic attempted to outline his argument for marrying science and religion (I could go on a complete tangent about that on its own. Let’s just say, I’d make sure they sign a prenup).
As a result, I have no doubt that there’ll be many scientists around the world on December 21st 2012 keeping an extra close eye on their instruments, and breathing a quiet sigh of relief when the world ticks over into December 22nd.
One thing I have learnt since starting to cycle more: everyone on the road is a cock.
I used to lump just cyclists into that category. They are, after all, quite the menace in central London where a significant proportion of them ignore traffic lights, zebra crossings and most other things that tell them to stop, presumably under some misguided notion that what they’re doing is saving the planet. Or maybe they’re just impatient bastards.
Of course, cyclists will tell you that white van men are the bastards. They’ll also tell you that bus drivers are basically white van men with government backing.
For me, the worst people on the road in central London are the taxi drivers. They block bus lanes, drive like they’re cyclists with four wheels, and have that same high-and mighty attitude that irks me so about cyclists.
This post isn’t about London, however, nor who I hate most on the road. As I said, I hate all of them. I can say this categorically as I have spent quite an amount of time as a pedestrian, a cyclist, a car driver, a van driver, and a bus passenger. I’ve seen it from most sides.
The main problem is that everyone on the road – from buses and vans down to cyclists and pedestrians – are all out for themselves. They seem to forget that for just about every situation, someone has a right of way.
I’m the sort of person that will take a risk in order to enforce his right of way. I’ve stared down buses at zebra crossings, had collisions with cyclists and near misses with cars. I also like to go out of my way to remind people exactly who has right of way in any given situation.
I do find this sometimes annoys people. One cyclist who ran a red right in front of me a couple of years ago received a copy of the London Lite to his face as he cycled past. This upset him so much he threw his bicycle at me.
Take last Friday morning too. This time I was the cyclist, and the pedestrian was the one on the receiving end. One the way to the station, there is a left turn into a side road where the cycle racks – and station car park – are located. Now, I know that, if a vehicle is turning into a side road and there are pedestrians crossing, the pedestrians have right of way. As I approached the side road, there was a woman walking along, heading towards the junction. I signalled courteously and kept my hand out whilst waiting for her to look around prior to crossing the road, in keeping with the green cross code.
She didn’t.
As luck would have it, the timing of both our journeys also meant that we would both be occupying the end of the side road at the same time. And she still hadn’t looked around to see if something was coming. So I decided to ‘ping’ her to teach her a lesson. I made a point of cycling in front of her and let out a ring of my bell as I passed.
With a start she jumped out of the little world of her own she was occupying, and entered the real world.
“What are you doing, you idiot?!” she exclaimed in an Eastern European accent of some ilk, before waffling on about how I was the vehicle and as such she had right of way. I tried to explain to her that the road was by definition the place for vehicles, not pedestrians, but she was having none of it.
So ultimately, I came across looking like a cock cyclist to this dozy cow, despite me being perfectly in my rights to do what I did. As for the woman, next time she doesn’t look before crossing the road it’ll be a lorry she ignores, and she’ll only have herself to blame.
I don’t have encounters like this that often any more. Time was I would go out looking for trouble like this; deliberately pausing in front of a cyclist who was about to run a red light so he’d have to avoid me, for instance. However when I began to try to curtail my anger late last year I stopped doing it, and after that they dropped in frequency. I still have them from time to time – not long after I decided I would stop baiting cyclists I made the mistake of crossing the road at a pelican without looking out for bikes, and got hit by one – but these days they find me.
I’ll still enforce my right of way to the last, though.
By my count, Fearne Cotton raised nearly £2m for Comic Relief by wearing a swimsuit. Or rather, a large number of perverts raised nearly £2m for Comic Relief by wanting to see Fearne Cotton in a swimsuit, which ultimately amounts to the same thing but is slightly more relevant to this post.
If you’re not familiar with how she managed this feat, let me fill you in: Fearne Cotton was a guest on Chris Moyles’ record-breaking 52-hour-long show on Radio 1, and promised that if listeners broke through the £2m barrier of funds raised by the show (which was sitting somewhere round the £1.7m or £1.8m mark, I believe), then she would wear a swimsuit for the Radio 1 webcam. Suffice to say, the listeners surpassed this, hitting a mark slightly over £2.4m, and then crashed the Radio 1 website in their attempts to view the fruit of their endeavours.
Capitalising on this, on the Comic Relief broadcast on BBC One on Friday night, Alan Carr made the promise that if they received 100,000 £10 texts by the end of their segment, the viewers would again see Fearne in her swimsuit. They received 120,000 such texts, raising £1.2m, and the perverts were once again sated.
This, to me, sounds a little odd. Let’s be frank here: no one pays for porn on the internet. There’s so much free stuff out there there’s simply no need to invest in decent pornography any more – unless you have very, very specific tastes, of course.
And yet, a bunch of men nursing semis donated a combined total of almost two million pounds in order to see a girl in her swimsuit. A very specific girl, I grant you, but even so – two million pounds?
And this got me thinking. Not about Fearne Cotton in a swimsuit, there’s now enough shots of that on the internet to keep everyone happy. Men (and presumably some women) around the country have put their hands in their pockets (get your mind out of the gutter, you know what I mean) for a good cause. And also to raise money for Comic Relief. If they had done it at any other time of the year, how many would have done this so readily?
In other words, because it’s for charity, there’s no guilt for paying to see a girl in a swimsuit. Which brings me round to a solution that would benefit both the ailing porn industry, and raise a raft of money for charity. Let’s go back to paying for porn and give half of the money raised to charity. That way, we get porn with no guilt (unless you make a mess of course, but then that’s your own lookout), the porn industry gets an income that must be higher that what they’re currently getting, and we raise money for good causes.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
At some point over a weekend a while back, some representative from a major well-known satellite broadcasting organisation managed to get into the lobby of our block of flats, and get some advertising in place.
Now, whenever I get home, I’m greeted by this mug:
Maybe they suspect I live amongst the sort of housewife types who’d go weak at the knees at that type of thing?
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the iPhone 4. It is a massive step up from the previous generation iPhone and leaps and bounds ahead of any other smartphone on the market.
One of its highlighted features is a front-facing camera, something that had been repeatedly requested by iPhone fans using the earlier generations of the device. And it’s great; the video chatting feature (dubbed FaceTime) works effortlessly well and the video quality, although not substantial, is not bad. The front-facing camera is also pretty good for self portraits, although it is a bit low in resolution (640 x 480 pixels, if it interests you).
The problem comes if you are trying to take an early morning photo of your cat being cute, and forget that you last used the camera app in front-facing mode, because then you are confronted with yourself in all your morning splendour:
I can’t help but notice that #prayforjapan was trending on Twitter. If you’re of, let’s just say, a certain age, or not that technically inclined, that probably means very little to you. Don’t worry, Wikipedia is around to help you. Or, find a young person and ask them.
Putting it bluntly, that annoys me. That #prayforjapan is trending, that is, not that you might not know what trending means. Basically, it means an awful lot of people are mentioning praying for Japan after the earthquake and tsunami that have decimated the region.
That pisses me off because – and let’s be frank here – praying in and of itself does absolutely fuck all to help Japan. You might as well sacrifice a stoat or masturbate to pictures of George Takei. But Twitter is currently full of people who appear to think that praying for Japan – or even worse, just putting #prayforjapan in a tweet – is all they need to do to help those in need.
Let’s get this straight: I’m an atheist. I don’t believe religion should have a place anywhere in politics, policy-making or public policy. I’m okay with people having a religion and praying and all the rest of it – if it brings them comfort, so be it. I draw the line at forcing that religion on others, and at using religion as an excuse. And don’t get me started on the Pope (although I can just point you at this video, which at least covers some of it). Seriously, don’t get me started.
So when I see someone say, “I’m praying for you” to someone (I see it from time to time on some forums I frequent), I can appreciate the sentiment intended when it is meant as “I’m thinking of you” (which is what I presume an less godly person would say). But when someone is genuinely in need and the response is only prayer then – and I mean this in the best possible way – fuck off and take a damned reality check. If you believe in a god that can intervene in such away as to help those in Japan then, surely, that god could have prevented or even caused the disaster in the first place?
Oh yes, and if anyone starts blaming earthquakes on the rise of homosexuality, promiscuity or a godlessness – as some tried to after the Christchurch earthquake – then they should be put in a home.
And, if you want to help those in Japan, pray if you must, but whatever you do, pop over to the British Red Cross website and donate some money too, and make a real difference.
In early January I began to concentrate more on blogging. There was no new year’s resolution involved, just a desire to actually find something productive to do with my spare time, something I tend to have a fair amount of over Xmas. I got this website up-and-running, created a couple of new blogs and, for reasons I haven’t yet actually been able to fathom, got on with it.
This hasn’t been my first foray into the blogging world (some call it the ‘Blogosphere’, but that is one of my least favourite words, along with ‘lush’ in its current slang state). I began my first blog last May, the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. Unfortunately due to a lack of drive and a lack of focus, I never really kept it up-to-date, and it had less than a dozen posts from its birth to the end of last year.
In January, however, I sat down and registered this domain. I would’ve preferred robhoward.co.uk or some such thing but all the good ones were taken. Annoyingly, although taken, most of them weren’t actually in use, but hey ho.
Whilst in the process of setting up this blog, I came up with the idea of Creative Splurges. This put me, for a little while, in a bit of a quandary – I’d registered rob-howard.com but had a new blog idea that I didn’t want to waste, or put on a URL that didn’t match. So, I registered Creative Splurges at WordPress.com.
Shortly thereafter, it hit me – my old blog failed in part due to a lack of focus. So, I should set up a handful of more specialised blogs, so that I wasn’t left with a single blog that had a random assortment of posts. To that end, I also set up Outdated by Lunchtime to cover my slight fascination with new tech. The Whimpering Pen has actually been registered since last August but I’ve still not actually got it going. One day, people. One day.
So, there it was; I had my creative outlet, my tech geek outlet, and my press rant outlet, and rob-howard.com to pull them all together and provide a spot for the posts that weren’t related to the other blogs. Not wanting to waste the work I had previously spent on my old blog, I took all of its old posts and shared them out between this blog and Outdated by Lunchtime depending on their content (which is why this blog has posts on it dating back to last May).
And that was it: my own bogging network set up. Now all I had to do was write stuff.
It started slowly. I managed a total of seven posts in January; three here and four over at Creative Splurges. The three on this blog were pretty much warmups whilst I got my oar in – if there was anyone checking this site back then they’d have seen the appearance of this place change almost daily for a while as I tried to settle on a design I liked.
In February, however, things took off. I started posting on Outdated by Lunchtime on the first day of the month, and managed to make quite a few posts here and at Creative Splurges. All told, there were 37 posts across the three blogs. And that’s with a blackout mid-month.
So far, March has seen eight posts, not including this one. Not bad for only the twelfth day of the month. That said, Outdated by Lunchtime seems to have been singularly devoted to the iPad 2 this month, and that is probably likely to continue because, truth be told, I’m a little obsessed with it.
I still can’t actually work out why I’ve been able to keep this up when all previous attempts at this sort of thing have failed. In mid February I announced this blog to my Facebook fraternity and declared that most future correspondence would be coming through here, rather than in the form of Status Updates. In many ways a bold move and one that no doubt has helped me keep writing – I actually have an audience now, albeit one consisting of my small group of Facebook friends. I don’t think that’s it though; I seem to have managed a shift in attitude that encourages me to turn random thoughts into blog posts. Having a WordPress app on my iPhone has helped immensely too; being able to grab my phone and quickly write down stuff whilst being nowhere near a computer (more often than not on a train) makes this sort of thing quite a bit easier.
Hopefully I can keep this up. Admittedly things seem to be slowing down a little this month. Don’t worry, I have excuses prepared. Firstly, I have written a few drafts, but they are proving to be a little difficult to wrap up and present nicely and so are, for now, staying as drafts. I guess my standards are raising. Secondly, I have had a few off-putting experiences which have managed to knock a bit of wind out of my sails; the iPhone app I was praising only in the last paragraph managed to get itself in a tizzy and destroy one of my more delicately crafted drafts, which now needs to be restarted from scratch, and I’ve also encountered a few issues with the hosting of this blog, namely Server Errors which I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of and which have also occasionally destroyed work (and if you’ve experienced them too, then I apologise).
Still, I’m moving onwards and trying to not let those pesky little issues hold me back. March is already approaching its halfway point, let’s see if I can average a post a day again.
I wouldn’t hold your breath though.
I love a badly worded headline. Nothing like it for a quick giggle. Today’s comes from the Bournemouth Echo:
Annoyingly, the RSS headline differs from the actual page headline.
My Blog Thing 