Talk To Rex

I have been urged by text and tweet and email to sign this petition “against racism and division”… and I can’t sign it.

I’m dead against racism and division. Indeed I would put both near the top of my list of least favourite things. But I can’t sign a petition to say that the BNP do not represent me in the European Parliament, because – horrifically – they do.

I’m not happy about it. I didn’t vote for them myself. But in a democratic election they were chosen to represent my country, which means that for all that they don’t represent my views, they represent a majority. And therefore me. That’s the way democracy works. If we took a “not in my name” attitude to all elected officials we hadn’t voted for, over half of the nation would be ignoring most of the government at any given time, which is division – and we’ve already established that’s a bad thing.

At the time of writing, the Hope Not Hate petition has 21,095 signatures: clearly a lot of people feel strongly about this. But not enough people felt strongly about it to get along to a polling booth on Thursday and do something about it – indeed, in my constituency alone 97,013 did feel strongly enough to vote for the BNP, and even that wasn’t enough for a majority in this area. Those people have got to live with the indignity of – horrors! – a Conservative majority and a near win for UKIP, but I don’t see any petitions against it on the internet.

Not only is the Hope Not Hate petition of bugger all use to anyone, it’s churlish. If people want to do something about the new and scary threat of fascists holding real power in our country it’s too late to do anything about the election we have just taken part in (or, in many shameful cases, haven’t just taken part in). They need to do something about the next election – find an alternative to support and promote, talk to people, blog, tweet, point out to every single person you know what an absolute dickhead Nick Griffin is (indeed, in a political world of grey areas that is one of the few things I believe I can say is absolutely factually undeniable).

Or, if all of that seems a bit too much work, get out of bed and vote next time…

‘Oh… look! Look honey! Those crisps, they’ve been on TV! That’s means they’re, like, famous! Let’s get some before they all go! I know we’re only here to buy petrol, but I’ve never seen petrol on TV. Except in that episode of Heartbeat. Shit, petrol’s famous as well – go get some more! I’ll just grab these crisps!

‘Or is it the maltesers…?

‘Hell, I’ve seen them on TV as well, I’m going to have the crisps and the maltesers!

‘Come to thing of it, I’ve seen everything in this shop on TV – you know, in those bits between the actual programmes! And we could like, buy them for ourselves! That’s nearly like having a bunch of celebrities in our house! Quick, grab a trolley!’

General, my cynical view of government combined with laziness means that I am disgracefully disinterested in voting.

HOWEVER:

“The most recent and reliable polls consistently show that the BNP is very close to winning a number of seats in the European Parliament. Most polls show that BNP on 5-7% nationally which would give the BNP 3 seats and polls tend to underestimate BNP support.

The most recent You Gov poll on 1 June, the biggest so far of ,over 5,000 people, put the BNP on 7% of those certain to vote. On these figures the BNP could win a seat each in the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber and the West Midlands and East of England regions.”

Time to get out and cast your vote, folks.

(Am assuming this blog has a mainly anti-BNP readership.)

(If not I may have just scored a massive own goal.)

The desert menu arrives.

Him: Are you a cheese person?

Her: No, I just sweat a lot.

Let’s ignore the use of the apostrophe, for all that it is both incorrectly and inconsistently applied. After all, there is a slim possibility that “Party’s charity events” is intended as a single phrase, if a rather odd one.

Instead, let us examine the bold claim of this man (or woman) to be a “stormtrooper look alike”.

Are you a “look alike”, Sir (or Madam)? Or are you, as I suspect, simply wearing a costume?

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.