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So Magners are selling their Pear Cider on what they seem to believe is its unusual quality of actually containing what it says it does, viz. pear.

They clearly think they’re making a clever point about advertising, highlighted by some observational comedy on estate agents from ‘Steve’. (Steve, if they say it’s ‘light and airy’ and it only has one window which can open, try a different estate agent. It’s a crap time to be buying a house anyway.)

But I could put up with this non-selling point or this slightly tired joke if it wasn’t for the fact that Magners compound their lack of originality with an out-and-out LIE. Magners Pear Cider is NOT, as they claim, 100% pear. That would be pear juice. Either that, or the 100% is true and the cider bit is a lie. I won’t stand for either.

Their second statistic is even more dubious. ‘0% disappointment’, they claim. Really? How did they arrive at this figure? (I see no small print advising ‘disappointment measured from a survey of 200 pear lovers and rounded down to the nearest whole number’.) I wonder if it might not be a statistic at all but simply a guess, perhaps based on what they assume must be the response to their drink:

‘Look, honey, it’s a pear cider which actually contains what it says it does! My, I am pleased – I had imagined that, like Pear’s Soap, it wouldn’t really contain pears. But it does, and 100% pears no less! I must say, that leaves absolutely no room for me to be disappointed by it. If I could measure my disappointment now, I would say it would come it at around 0%!’

Whereas I’m guessing an equally common response is: ‘Mmm, so it’s cider made entirely from pears. Isn’t cider meant to be made from apples? Oh well, I’ll give it a try… *sip* Mmm. It’s okay I suppose, but the apple stuff is the real deal. This is mildly disappointing. Only mildly, mind, but certainly between 10% and 20% if such a thing could be measured’.

That Magners have based their television adverts around the lies of other products is more than a little ironic. And the fact that it’s Mark Watson trying to sell it to me doesn’t make it any better.

Just when I thought the hysteria over MPs’ expenses couldn’t get any worse, George bloody Carey wades in with an opinion as well. In the News of the World of all things, though at least that suggests he finally knows his place.

Not only are his observations pretty vacuous, they’re not particularly accurate either. Maybe matching the complexity of his thinking with that of his readership, he buys into the idea that the “clawing greed” at the heart of Westminster is a recent development, the “straw that finally breaks the camel’s back”. Whereas a cursory glance through the history books shows that the camel has been carrying this particular straw for a great many centuries. A 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister (as topical as it always was) had Sir Humphrey getting a 43% pay rise through Parliament by disguising it as expenses; that was the Civil Service, but the principle is the same and it demonstrates that clawing greed goes back at least to the Thatcher era. (I know! It’s bold and daring of me to associate Thatcher with greed. But I’ll stand by it. Though Carey might be reluctant to agree since Thatcher was behind his appointment as Archbish.)

Indeed, back when the reigning monarch wielded political power, one of Parliament’s only real areas of control was in money. Monarchs who needed money essentially did what MPs do now – they fiddled their expenses. Look at how Henry VIII justified the diversion of money that had been going to the Catholic church.

So it’s not that the expenses issue is a new one. Nor, to be honest, is it an issue that any independent review of the system is going to solve – you change the system, people will find a new way to get round it. No, the reason – the only reason – that MPs are being targetted by media, former Archbishops everyone who listens to them, is that we’re in financial difficulties and people need somebody to blame.

Lord Carey’s comments on moral authority might have been more pertinent if he had pointed out that the moral vacuum doesn’t lie at the centre of Westminster, it’s something we’re all responsible for. Fiddling expenses, or taking advantage of the system (I think we’ve realised there’s precious little difference) isn’t just a thing that MPs do – it is the way countries, businesses and individuals “play the game”. Ask any accountant. Most people who file a tax return will have done some creative accounting, especially in the area of expenses, without necessarily breaking a single rule.

Of course, MPs are much easier to hate for it because our taxes pay their expenses. But it’s a drop in the ocean compared to other things our taxes pay for – illegal wars, arms, utterly ill-judged reforms of the education system – and I know which one irritates me more. And let’s not forget, it’s ultimately our taxes which pay for other people’s tax shortfalls when they claim back for that “business dinner” with their “business partner”.

Somebody, somewhere, is filing an honest tax return and bearing the brunt of a whole load of slightly fraudulant accounting.

Okay, MPs are supposed to lead. They’re expected to set an example. Or so the media keeps telling us, though I’d have thought they should be setting an equally good example given their sphere of influence; perhaps we can also have an independent investigation into journalists’ expenses? (They could see what they could dig up on Lord Carey while they’re at it.) But anyone who wants to start talking about moral accountability ought to be very careful indeed that they’re not part of the system they’re criticising – because the problem doesn’t start with MPs, and it certainly doesn’t end there either.

A note to people who produce DVD packaging:

“Interactive menus” is not a special feature. It is simply a feature, not one that is special. If a DVD is to have any other features to choose from, a menu is pretty much essential; furthermore one needs to be able to interact with it, or it is not a menu at all, it is a list. A list of things that one can’t choose from.

Perhaps I missed a whole era of early DVD manufacturing where there were such DVDs, with films hidden on them that could not be accessed because people had not yet realised the importance of making their menus interactive. I can only imagine that if there was such a period it didn’t last very long. Certainly such hypothetical times have, if they ever existed at all, long since passed.

Therefore, an “interactive menu”, or to put it plainly, a “menu”, is something we generally expect on a DVD, except perhaps on an illegal bootlegged one. If you consider a menu a special feature you might by the same logic list “not an illegal bootleg” as a special feature, and that would be silly. A DVD not being an illegal bootleg is a feature, but like interactive menus it is not one that is special.

“Scene access” is not a special feature either. For all the reasons stated above, it is a feature. But if you bother listing it on the packaging you might just as well start listing features like “plays on a DVD player”, or “circular and flat”, or “contains sound and moving pictures!!!”.

And finally, if you happen to have listed the film itself as a special feature, that is most certainly not right. The film is a feature, but only a very basic feature for a DVD of that film. If you consider the film to be special then that is lovely for you, but very much your subjective opinion and not one I want shoved down my throat thank you very much.

Eight minutes. I wasn’t far off.

You could be forgiven for not having realised that, as of today, a European Union directive requires all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls for 12 months, since the government have been so sneaky about it (clearly their information is a lot less public that ours).

I have already discussed the worrying implications for people who visit odd websites, and naturally privacy is an issue (you don’t want the Home Office knowing about all that Harry Potter porn you’ve been looking at), but another issue for concern is that the extra storage needed for all this data will be paid for by the Home Office. Which means bigger tax bills all round (one mobile phone company alone is charging the Home Office £875,000 to retain the information).

Obviously in a time of financial crisis we’d all like to avoid this unnecessary cost, so here are a few tips to keep our taxes down and also maintain a modicum of privacy:

1. If you visit a website which lots of other people read, print out the best pages so they can all look at it without building up additional data for internet service providers to store. Or if it’s a particularly embarrassing website, get somebody else to print it out for you.

2. Stop using the internet to send messages. Now may well be the time to return to simpler, older methods of communication – in offices, slipping notes across desks, or those whooshy vacuum delivery systems that go through whole buildings, make for methods of communication which simply can’t be tracked by the Home Office, and cost the taxpayer nothing. As Young Letter Writer of the Year 1987 I thoroughly advocate the return of the good old-fashioned letter for more personal correspondence.

3. If you absolutely MUST send an email, try to include in it as much information as you can about any terrorist attacks or groups you are aware of. That way it’s not a complete waste of money when that email is stored for the next 12 months.

4. If you’re going to look at porn, use good old-fashioned pay-per-view channels rather than the internet. That way the Home Office will never find out. Unless you do something stupid like sticking the cost into the Home Secretary’s expenses claim…

I seem to be getting a lot of spam these days asking the question “can she have multiple orgasms?”. Or rather, a variant of some sort where one of the words is spelled incorrectly: “cann she have multiple orgasms”, for instance, or “can she haves multiple orgasms”. They always spell “orgasms” right, but then that’s probably all they’re really thinking about.

I don’t look beyond the subject line, because it’s functionally equivalent to those terrible panel sessions they have at some of the conferences I go to where the name of the session is a question, and the answer is one word long and obvious (or at least “obvious to those skilled in the art”, as IP lawyers would no doubt put it). I’m pretty sure if I start looking at the main message of the spam I’ll see that it’s been written by a creative director for Razorfish.

If they must start their spam with a question, surely there are more interesting ones in the same general area? “Is she getting multiple orgasms?” for instance. Or even “why isn’t she getting multiple orgasms?”, if we’re going to be pessimistic about her sex life.

Or just skip the question and be honest: “you’re rubbish in bed, buy stuff from us so you’ll still be rubbish but can blame us instead of your inability to find the clitoris”.

A story here about the Home Office’s plan to monitor web-browsing habits to build up a database of our very private details. Civil liberties, blah blah, more data to be lost on trains, blah blah, etc etc.

Beyond the whole worrying idea that this level of surveillance is building up detailed private information about all of us, there is an issue here which nobody seems to have mentioned yet – viz. the plain and utter wrongness of the idea that a person’s web browsing habits can build up a clear picture of who they are (or to quote Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, “who I’m associated with, perhaps what my politics is, what my religious preference is and shopping habits are”).

Okay, in many cases that’ll work, because many web users are simple people with simple needs and their browsing habits will be restricted to social networking, news stories, fundamentalist religious websites and ebay. But let’s look at those of us who aren’t so simple.

Case study #1: let’s imagine the Home Office pieced together the character of John Finnemore from his reading habits at the British Library; a cursory sweep through his blog suggests they’d be left with the baffling image of a man whose professional song lyric writing, primarily in the style of by P. G. Wodehouse though possibly influenced by Idi Amin and P. L. Travers, is shared with his enthusiasm for barbed wire (specialising in the area of early US barbed wire patents) and cowology.

Case study #2: as previously discussed, one of the searches that brings readers to this particular blog is the desire to see Harry Potter porn. This was due initially to an unwise post by Mr Aylett, but latterly is something I have become oddly proud of and try to perpetuate with semi-regular mentions of Harry Potter porn. However, I feel it gives a not entirely accurate indication of the content of this blog. Or, to turn that on its head to create a picture of our readers, whilst it might be assumed that they are all literate, intelligent, politically aware writers and Doctor Who fans, a lot of them are in fact just Harry Potter perverts.

Clearly if the Home Office were to start creating databases of the above examples it would be John Finnemore who’d be locked up and our readers who would get off scot free, which is entirely the wrong way round.

I’m told that Bedford’s main parish church are going to install a memorial to the BBC.

Bit premature, I wonder?

On the drive from Cambridge to Bedford there is currently a road sign which says “Sign not in use”.

Is it any wonder we’re in recession?