Talk To Rex

I have just come across a company called Helapet. Helapet is a leading supplier of disposables to the UK Hospital market. But it occurs to me that it is also the way that Anthony Windram would pronounce “Heliport”.

Busy writing an awful lot of dull things I won’t bore you with (much use of restraint to avoid describing competitors as “febrile”). And nursing a sore shoulder, which either came about due to holding a camera on my shoulder on Sunday or – less likely – due to my lovely new scarf, which I maybe tied a little too enthusiastically round my neck this morning.

It really is very lovely. Cashmere, and everything.

Today, words beginning with the letter ‘F’. Try to get them into conversation. Try to get them into a Valentine’s message. Here they are:

Fey

This is a fantastic word, because it means so many things. Doomed, according to the Scots. To clean out, if you believe Tusser (whoever he is). Slightly mad, which is of course one of the best meanings. Suggestive of an elf, which is certainly how I’ve always taken it (with an undertone of effete). And finally, Chaucer thought it meant faith – but then he was, well, fey.

Funicular

Related to a cord or cable – most useful as in “I say, is that a funicular railway adorning the horizon? What larks!”, which can only really be carried off by a young bounder in Austria. Who is probably a bit fey.

Febrile

Feverish. I also use it to mean childish, in a slightly metaphorical, slightly wrong, fashion.

Happing effing!

The biscuits currently sitting in the biscuit box at the office in which I occasionally work are those rectangular sugary ones labelled “Nice”.

Although not my favourite type of biscuit, they really are extremely nice. I had eaten several today when I suddenly stopped and thought, “Why bother to label the biscuits “Nice” when it’s patently obvious to anybody eating them that they are nice?”

For a while I wondered if this was the equivalent of signing for the deaf in orchestral concerts, a description of the biscuit for people unfortunate enough to lack the ability to taste.

Then a more sinister thought occurred to me. Do the makers of this particular brand of biscuit hope that, with the subliminal suggestion that the biscuit will be nice imprinted on the eater’s brain prior to eating, the eater will naturally assume that it is nice without actually bothering to taste it?

Well, thought I. They will not entrap me with any such psychological ploy.

Then I realised that I do think the biscuits are nice. I was munching my way through my seventh for precisely that reason. Alarmed, I wondered if my mind had been twisted by the subliminal suggestions of the innocent-looking writing on the front of the biscuit. Of course, there was the possibility that the biscuits are actually nice, and my taste buds had not been fooled at all. But how to be sure?

I decided to set up an experiment; I prepared three biscuits, one with the word “Nice” on the front as usual, the basic biscuit under scrutiny. Secondly, I took a biscuit of the same brand but scratched the word “Nice” off with a paper clip, to see if that made a difference to the taste. Thirdly, as a control, I had not a biscuit at all but just air.

The air tasted of just air. The unaltered “Nice” biscuit tasted nice. The biscuit with the word “Nice” scratched off it also tasted nice.

What am I to conclude? Have I been exposed to the “Nice” biscuits for too many years to be able to resist the suggestion of the word “Nice” even when it is concealed? Is the taste of the biscuit alone now enough to fool me into enjoying it?

It is a frightening thought that biscuit companies hold such power over consumers.

Noticed two adverts on the tube this morning. The first is by Refuge, showing a group of twenty-somethings at a dinner party, all laughing away merrily and not looking while one of the men smacks his partner to the floor. The caption is something like “Domestic violence: don’t look away”. Pretty powerful, I think.

Adverts that tell you something, not sell you something, tend to be more worth looking at, in my opinion. There was an online advert for Customs & Excise when they were cracking down on illegal cigarette importing – one of our designers created half a dozen fake “get your ciggies from Spain” websites (which were truly vile, and indistinguishable from the real thing), and when you clicked on an offer, a big menacing face popped out and told you off for being naughty. Although I’ll admit most of the enjoyment we got was in figuring out how utterly naff the designs needed to be to be convincing.

The other advert I noticed this morning was for the last series of Friends. It’s frankly awful – actually a series of adverts, each with a large picture of something associated with the series (a pair of reclining chairs, a duck and a chicken, a crowd of people asleep) and some slogan I forgot pretty much immediately. Although I’m not really the target market, so who cares? And it’s certainly better than showing photos of the cast.

I’m wondering if perhaps informational adverts are just easier to make well than ones that sell – selling things gets caught up with psychology, while conveying information is something people have done for thousands of years. Or maybe it’s just that Refuge have more money than … Channel 4?

What I was thinking was, there’s never been a play written about indecent assault in a Post Office. It could be called “You are being held in a queue”.

All too often it was the day where I would be the person who didn’t receive a card and had to make jokes about sending cards to myself.

Which I never did, by the way.

I only ever sent one, in 1996, and I’ve received all of two valentine’s cards in my life. And one of them was a joke, I think.

But what are you supposed to DO, or BUY – I mean, MSN advises you that a nice champagne for under £40 combined with a Will Young CD will do the job, but frankly I’m not sure that’s what I’m after. Think a Will Young CD might just be insulting.

At the end of the day it’s just something else to worry about, isn’t it? Like Mother’s day. How to make your Mother love you more even when it’s no longer convenient to pop down to a newsagents and buy one of the two remaining Telegraphs.

I wish I was like Tony Blair and had other people to deal with it for me.

I’m a bit pissed, by the way, and it’s only 14.33.

Any ideas, though………

Just to prove that, despite anything I may have written or said recently, I can still take an anti-BBC view at times, have a quick look at this report on the MyDoom virus. It’s a paragon – of bad writing and slopping reporting.

Firstly, the bad writing. This is actually something that plagues BBCi: the inability of its journalists to manage paragraphs longer than a single sentence. From Elements of Style, the 1918 classic on how to write English, we learn that “as a rule, single sentences should not be written or printed as paragraphs”. Paragraphs give individual topics, and if a topic is so small it only warrants a single sentence, it really should be married to something related to make a larger topic. There’s worse, but it’s minor by comparison to the other issue.

There are two stories here: SCO vs Linux (SCO claims copyright on some parts of Linux; many people, including IBM, disagree, and SCO is busily suing various parties to make its point), and the MyDoom virus. MyDoom has infected hundreds of thousands of Windows computers recently, and was designed to attack the websites of both Microsoft and SCO. Microsoft has been unaffected (partly due to their own security measures, but mostly because the version of MyDoom set to attack them didn’t spread as widely). SCO’s website is unavailable at its normal address at present, and the company is running a website at a different address.

All well and good. The BBC article blurs these two stories together, not bothering to mention Microsoft at all, and making it sound like not only are the two stories inextricably intertwined , but also making Linux supporters out to also be supporters of creating a virus that has caused some amount of havoc, a fair amount of panic, and some financial loss. The article says “there seems little doubt that SCO was targeted because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system” which, while strictly true, gives the impression that it’s those “many people” who have created MyDoom, not (as is more likely) some loner who doesn’t get on well with other people. By stating “if anyone’s anger has no measure, it is the wrath of internet zealots”, the association is made, plain and clear. That’s getting pretty close to defamation, and if I were, say, Alan Cox – Linux advocate, British citizen, and generally honest and nice chap – I’d probably be writing to Mark Byfod right now asking what the hell they think they’re doing.

And who is stupid enough, in this day and age, to fling around phrases like “it’s hard to see how any website could withstand that kind of clever evil” when talking about a computer nerd? Evil? Has he been talking to Donald Rumsfeld again?

Oh, enough. My rant has died down. Have a good afternoon.

There is no news today. No news. I got to page 27 of Metro between King’s Cross and Baker Street – I usually get to page 7. If I’m lucky. Page 27! That’s deep into the lifestyle fluff!

The only interesting bit was on page 9, where they remember a 22,000 mile taxi journey taken by, among others, Mark Aylett. But maybe it’s just interesting to me.