Names, Places & Sport

In my last job, there was an online tool to search for someone’s telephone number, address, email. It was a tool to facilitate efficient communication, no time wasted scrabbling around trying to find someone’s address. Do a quick search on whole name, part of a name, nickname (appropriately titled ‘prefers to be called’) and in a second or two you are communicating efficiently. Given the company I worked for had over 100,000 employees it was a very necessary and useful tool.

It was also a lot of fun.

100,000 is a critical mass of people. I’m no statistician but would guess for a population size of 1,000 there would be a lot of John Smiths, some Brian Jones’s and perhaps a smattering of Gillian McKenzie’s. I can also guarantee there would also be at least one poor unfortunate soul with a ridiculous name. Princess Sebastian Adolf or Billy Bum-whole.

So it became a competition.

Who can find the stupidest name in the system? I won with Amy Analzone (a real, genuine, bonafide, no shit name). I sincerely hope she doesn’t stumble upon this entry, poor girl.

Imagine for a minute would you, going through life with such a name. Who in their right mind would choose to keep it? And given there is an Amy, there must be Amy’s mother and father. Assuming they are married, Amy’s mum, lets call her Silky, must have thought, yes I will take on his surname after we are married. 

Why oh why did you do that Silky?

Or it could have been Amy, perhaps it was she who married into the Analzone’s but the question still remains, what on earth convinced you this was a good idea?

Only if the Analzone’s are billionaires would I start to understand.

In any event there must be millions of people out there with such opportunity limiting names. Would you for example even consider dating Billy Bum-whole even if he did look like Brad Pitt or hiring a Princess?

Place names are the same, there are hundreds of examples of stupidly named places. But in some respect these are worse, at least when you are naming a place you can choose it in its entirety, you are not stuck with a surname as in poor Amy’s case.

‘Well at least we’ve given her a nice first name’ I can imagine her parents saying, trying to comfort themselves.

What the fuck were the people of Yorkshire thinking when they named the town WetWang?

Every country has countless examples but my favourites have to be in Pennsylvania. 

I was driving through the state a year or so ago and was so surprised at some of the place names on signs I ended up studying a map and and realized there are loads, the state is full of them. If there is a record for most stupid names in a state (and there should be) Pennsylvania would win it hands down.

Here are some examples:

Deposit. Climax. Lick Run. Walnut Bottom. Lover. Burnt Cabins. Blue Ball. Bottom. Big Beaver. Intercourse.

There is also a town called Jim Thorp, which would probably win the prize for laziest.

Scene: Forest and high mountains. Trees, boulders and snow cover the vertigenous landscape. It’s cold and sunny. We see 3 men all sat on horses, they are deep in conversation. Two are wearing uniforms which proudly proclaim Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

Jim Thorp, sits on his horse, squinting at the two men.

‘Why do we need a name?’ He spits tobacco into the snow as if to underline his distaste at their request.

‘Like I was saying Jim, the railroad is coming’. Replied the buttoned up railroad official.

‘I heard you but why do we need a name?’

‘Becaaaause Jim, when the railroad comes, it will bring mail and addresses, town names are needed for a postal system to work. We need a timetable and a map as well’ the impatience in his voice was clear.

Jim, scratches his head and replaces the sun-bleached hat on his head. ‘But no one has ever written to me’

The official smiles at Jim’s simplistic country ways, progress is coming and Jim is not ready for it.

‘That’s what I’m saying Jim, its because you don’t have an address and the railroad isn’t here yet, but when it is, you can get letters’ he pauses looking round at his clerk and smiling a salesman’s smile ‘wouldn’t you like that Jim?’

‘But no one knows where I live and I don’t know anyone who can write’ He is shaking his head as he speaks and then starts to remake his pipe, stuffing it with tobacco.

The official turns to his clerk and speaks quietly ‘fuck it, lets move to the next town’ he writes JIM THORP on the piece of paper and pulls his horse around touching his hat as he does so.

Jim nods in return.

As they trot off, he turns back shouting

‘Jim, how do we get to that place where all the shagging goes on?’

Place names are great. Here in Switzerland my favourite, without a shadow of doubt, has got to be ‘Wank’ - a leafy suburb of Bern. Every time I pass a road sign with Wank or Wank Dorf in it I giggle the same giggle I used during my sex education classes, aged 12. 

I am sure the good folks of Wank are very aware of how well this translates into English.

The Bern football stadium used to be called the Wankdorf Stadium. Thankfully someone had the foresight to change it before the Euro 2008 football competition. England were playing there, can you imagine the chants? It’s now the much less chant worthy, Stade de Suisse.

Australia is a good place for place names also: Dismal Swamp. Eggs and Bacon & Mount Buggery to name just three of what I would imagine is a very long and colourful list.

I like Australia generally. 

It’s an honest straightforward place and their place naming conventions reflect this. I am, for example, absolutely positive Dismal Swamp doesn’t have a nice lake and I shudder to think why Mount Buggery is named so but am sure it is appropriate.

I think the fact that beach volleyball was invented in Australia encapsulates all of this, it ignores feminism, equal rights, fairness and the like. It simply celebrates the female form and sport. It must be the only sport in the world which, as part of its rules, as accepted into the Olympics, stipulates exactly how high the leg has to be on the female swimwear.

Clearly it was invented by men, Aussie men.

Scene: Tin roofed bar somewhere in the outback. Flies and oppressive heat. The beer is warm and three men stand against a roughly made bar, each have a large glass half filled in front of them. The barman is not in sight.

George ‘I’m bored’

Jason ’Me too’

Phil ‘We need some women’

Long pause.

George ‘Lets invent a sport’

And so it went, beach volleyball was invented in that tin shed, probably, and I, like most men on earth, am eternally grateful to the hard work and creativity of George, Jason and Phil.

I also think the male version came out of this discussion but as I understand it men can play dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi should they wish, the rules are very loose according to the Olympic rule book.

Extract from the official Olympic beach volleyball rule book:

Dress code, article 24c, paragraph 57:

Rule 327 ……is shaved so no hairs are visible.

End Female dress code.

Male official dress:

Rule 1 : Doesn’t matter.

End Male dress code

Phenomenologist

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.

My physics teacher at school was rumored to be an alcoholic, apparently he would drink vodka in a white painted milk bottle in class so everyone would think it was milk. This was my explanation for receiving the mark I did for Physics. It all seemed to make sense at the time, I couldn’t learn physics as a direct result of him being an alcoholic. He would say things to the class which I simply assumed to be the ramblings of a drunken man. It was a foreign language. He would scribble things on the blackboard, little symbols, small apostrophes, lots of X & Y’s with little numbers above them and then turn to the class.

 ‘Any questions?’

Hmmm, how about fuck yes?

Lets start at the top left hand corner of the board and explain to me what that little angled dash means, if its not just a piece of chalk dust settling on your vodka laced spit.

A good team moves at the speed of the slowest member and in Physics I always felt I was bringing up the rear. It didn’t help that I was sat next to a young boy who ended up lecturing the subject in one of the cloistered establishments down south. I felt inferior, inadequate, thick, stupid and simply blamed it on Mr drunken milkman.

Looking back now, it’s clear to me where the blame lies for my abject failure in Physics. To be clear I never once saw him drink from a milk bottle. 

I know the reason and find it quite frustrating when reading, multiple times, the first sentence of this entry as I still cannot understand a single thing they are saying. It is a constant frustration given I know, I absolutely know, that science is cool and that the work a lot of them are doing is unbelievably interesting. 

Understanding it first however is an important prerequisite to getting a job in a scientific discipline and I always fall at this early hurdle. I probably need to know what a massive elementary particle is first I think. I am assuming here that ‘massive’ is a relative adjective, given the use of particle after it. This, I think you will agree, is a problem, is the Higgs Bosun massive? Like Elephant massive? Or simply massive relative to other particles which are smaller than, well, everything?

The folks not far from here at CERN buried under Geneva are pushing the boundaries of science, finding shit out about stuff which mankind has been searching for years. Take the search for the illustrious God Particle (aka the Higgs bosun), I have absolutely no idea or even the slightest inkling or what it might be or look like but with a name like that…….come on, who doesn’t want to search for it? 

Even Indiana Jones would be tempted.

I just glaze over, ignorant from it all. I try to understand, I really do, but just cant. It’s like someone has built a heavy lead door between me and this knowledge.

Nowadays science is cool, it gets headlines in the papers and the men at the forefront of it aren’t the bearded, wooly jumper types of old, no they are young and good-looking. They like the things I do, football, women, drinking, outdoor stuff but they have the added cool factor of being at the diamond tipped cutting edge of knowledge creation. Had I known what I know now it would have been a close call between football player, rock star or particle physicist as my preferred career choices.

In short, they don’t learn stuff from others, they discover stuff. Going boldly where no man has gone before and I for one am insanely jealous of them.

Every morning I sit at my desk, turn on my computer with a mouthful of croissant and a cup of coffee. I check my agenda for the day and start dealing with mundane emails about mundane things.

They sit at their desks with a mouthful of croissant and coffee and wonder what particle, bosun or space worm hole they will discover today. They get to name stuff, important things like the building blocks of everything we know and can touch – they name the universe.

As I am wondering how to right align all my bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation they are discovering what black holes are made of. I am talking about financial statements and they are figuring out how the big bang happened.

A good proportion of the population believe in creation. They believe that god created everything and put man, in his image, on earth. Everything happens for a reason, normally because god wills it. This is simple and a nice story. I actually wish I had the faith to believe in something so simple and which helps explain everything which happens to me and to the people around me.

Science does not proclaim to have the ultimate answer and I like this. Its much more believable. For every theory developed another one comes along to try to prove it wrong. Its like a welcome competition, an evolving belief system to find the truth. 

Perhaps, ironically, at some point in the future it will become a new religion in itself.

I believe that anything which challenges the existent beliefs or thinking of its time has to be a good thing. Rock and roll did it, moving pictures did it, archeology has done it, the railways did it, Darwin certainly did it and science has always been doing it, it just seems to me to be doing it a lot more now. Or at least the people doing it look better.

Is science the new rock and roll?

Probably not but its not that far removed and looking back its close enough to wish I hadn’t giggled at my teachers drunken ramblings and took the time to work out what the little ç sign meant.

Then, and only then, would I even have stood a chance of understanding 'quantum chromodynamics' and maybe if I was really good I would be able to pronounce 'phenomenologist' correctly.

This is the one

Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Beatles, Bob Marley, Joy Division, Janice Joplin. Living fast and dying young, these musicians existed for a moment and then were gone, leaving only a starburst of happy memories for the people who were lucky enough to have witnessed them and a catalogue of wonderful music.

The Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, every 80’s band which existed and are now touring at Christmas, Status Quo, U2 and even, I hate to say it, Led Zeppelin. This group of illustrious musicians have all made that serious mistake of either not dying young or continuing well beyond their sell by date.  The ones which reform after a hiatus of far too many years are even worse still.

I was a huge fan of the Jesus & Mary Chain during the 1980s.

They wore leather trousers and boots, had wild hair and sang songs about sex and drugs. They got drunk in the Blue Peter garden – I challenge any 19year old boy at the time to have not liked them. I saw them performing on television last week, fat and balding and now when I think Jesus & Mary chain I don’t think, cool and rebellious anymore, I think sad, fat men desperately trying to recreate something which has long since gone – they have ruined it for me.

My advice, should they ask, would be - don’t do it and if you have done it to stop it immediately. Take Paul McCartney as an example - still sporting the tight clothes and that look of faint shock as he sings. This might have been endearing to the girls packing out the Cavern Paul, now its just crap.

Off the top of my head I can only think of two who have managed to do it well, that is The Who and Tom Jones. Now I will own up to a personal bias towards The Who but I have no time at all for Tom. I can however see how he has managed to stay up to speed and relevant, reveling in his age rather than trying to hide it behind makeup and personal trainers.

You will therefore understand my absolute dismay when I read about next year’s reunion of the Stone Roses.

This was a band which in my mind quite comfortably sit alongside the rock gods I have already mentioned. For a very short period in the late 1980s and part of the way into 1990 they ruled supreme with their anti-fashion and of course the music. 1990 was for some, the second summer of love and the Stone Roses provided the soundtrack. They were cool, young and didn’t give a fuck. Their 60’s inspired music was the perfect tonic for a generation of 18-25 year olds dying a slow musical death at the end of a musically dire decade. The whole Manchester scene came along and turned this on its head. In my opinion the 1990’s was a great period for music and the Stone Roses were the catalyst for this change.

I saw them in their last concert in 1990 on Glasgow Green. It was summer time and the air was thick with varying types of smoke. Inside a huge marquee the Roses blasted their way through their short musical repertoire, the atmosphere was electric. Nothing was going to stop this - this would last forever.

Of course, summer became autumn, the Roses split and we all got older, got jobs, stopped smoking and joined gyms. Their legacy was untouched, a legacy which remained intact. That is until last month.

I watched in absolute horror as four men sat giving a news conference to announce their reunion - we have unfinished business they told the packed room.

Each of them have aged very badly. Ian Brown 20 years ago had Jim Morrison-esq boyish good looks - now he looks like a mummified scrotum. The rest are the same, the only exception being Reni, the drummer – he looks like a normal 40 something man, because that’s exactly what he is. He gave up the rock thing when they split.

All in all it was a little embarrassing to watch. In fact Reni and John Squire looked like they would rather be anywhere else rather than sat facing the packed media scrum.

Only Ian Brown and Mani seemed to enjoy it. They walked in with a cocky swagger, full of themselves – look how great we are. Again, this works well in your 20's, aged 47 it’s just looks silly, or odd. Like a bearded man in a dress with a deep voice.

I am not sure how this reunion can have any upside at all, other than making millions for the four band members what’s the point? This is probably the only point.

From my perspective this can only be a lose-lose situation. Like Maradonna doing anything else in football again, or anything at all again for that matter. The only way is down.

They will not be able to recreate the sound - that I guarantee. Either they will rehearse too much and sound good (they weren’t noted for their live ability) or worse still, be bloody awful and in todays X-Factor world this will be a disaster.

Either way I am totally against it and will boycott it, I might even protest.

All I want is to be able to play the music to my children, tell them stories about how good they, and a lot of other bands, were. I want to be able to say it without running the risk of them saying ‘yeeeesss dad we saw them on the TV yesterday and they were fucking awful now please put One Direction back on would you?’

Please, please, please, please don’t do it.

Its easy to criticise

Everyone has the right to protest.
In fact the right to protest or simply disagree en-mass is one of the defining characteristics of a free society and I am 100% onboard with this - no argument at all.

Sometimes though, actually more often than sometimes I find myself questioning the logic and rational behind such protests.

What exactly do the protestors want to get out of such public displays of support or disagreement?

In my mind there are two types of protest, the safe type and the pointless type.

The safe ones are generally marches against things which no one really would disagree with or at the other extreme, for things which people absolutely disagree with. The key point here is neither are going to change anything, raise an eyebrow or even get a mention in the houses of commons. Examples of such protests or marches would be marching against racism or for racism, for and against Nazi’s, terrorism, cute dogs, violence against women/men/homosexuals etc etc, the list is never-ending. I say these are safe because the people marching through the streets know, they absolutely know, that regardless of their numbers nothing will change.

The pointless ones are a little bit worse in my mind because they ignore the basic rules of human nature, society, physics or facts. Examples of such are marching for world peace, for curing death, to make everyone happy or to eliminate corporate greed.

Which leads me to the point of this blog entry - the current ongoing, ‘Occupy’ protests taking place around the world.

These are, in my mind, a perfect example of a pointless protest and one which I freely admit I do not entirely understand.

Reading their blurb they are primarily against social and economic inequality and corporate greed and are going to camp out in various cities until…well that’s not entirely clear.

A better world, magically materialises perhaps?

My issue with this particular protest is not that their mission isn’t worthy – social inequality and corporate greed is very worthy, could probably only be trumped by sick kids or cute kittens. No, my problem is the tabloid dumbing down of the issues and the outcome they want, or I am guessing they want, because I am not 100% sure what it is that they want.

They hold banners claiming bankers to be the scum of the earth, the devils who brought us to the brink and companies are just as bad. Why should we, the tax payer, have bailed out the banks with impunity, dropping gazillions of Euros, dollars and pounds into the banking system with no return? We have no jobs whilst they pay themselves staggering bonuses.

No! No! No! - someone will pay - and we will sit here until they do.

Firstly my issue is this, without a society full of willing people the bankers simply wouldn’t have been able to sell their dirty, credit loaded, products. It’s a bit like a drug addict complaining about his dealer. Anyone who stupidly took credit, had a job or bought something during the last 20 years is partly to blame, not just the credit dealing bankers. We all fell for it. 125% mortgages, wide screen TV’s, holidays we couldn’t afford, designer clothes, SKY TV, the Premier League. Even if you didn’t have a loan or a stupidly oversized mortgage we still took advantage of an economy which was booming on, well credit. Directly or indirectly we are all complicit in this to a more or lessor degree.

Secondly the bailout. I too am annoyed that taxpayer’s funds were used to bail out these private companies but I don’t understand what exactly they would have done differently. I have no plan B?

Just let the banks fail?

Let’s think about that for just one second, what would happen if, say for example, one evening I looked online at my bank-statement and thought for even a second, I could not access the number shown on the screen, or worse still that it didn’t really actually exist? What would happen if the rest of the bank account holding population in the UK or the world for that matter had the same thought?

Can you envisage a society where everyone takes their pay in the form of cash and keeps this cash at home? Can you imagine a society where banks did not exist? Panic, disorder and the gossamer-thin belief system which underpins our society would fall away immediately and we would be on a fast track to becoming a barter society relying on pigs, beads and druids. In other words the UK, circa 527AD.

Ok I am exaggerating here but a run on the banks is something we want to avoid, even at its most basic level we would find out very quickly that the numbers on the computer screen were just that and nothing more.

This, in my humble, simplistic, Tory-boy view, is much, much, worse a scenario than the bailout which ensued, however much it sticks in the throat

The status quo is like a cold war, a mutually assured destruction and I would like to keep it that way.

The bonuses which are being paid are obscene, yes but the harsh realities of life are that if one bank or corporation stops them the staff will leave, or the talented one who can will. That’s just simple human nature, nothing more.

That’s just the banks, what about other corporations which are making billions hand over fist? Should we control them and stop them from feeding on people’s misery?

No, actually we shouldn’t.

Not unless, that is, we want the whole world to turn communist overnight. We can tinker at the edges, with legislation and we do but really, a company is just a vehicle to make money, nothing more and the ones which do it very well seem to be the ones targeted here.

All except Apple curiously.

The only way to bring the whole messy affair under control, stop large bonus’s, the migration of talent and make sure companies are basically good world citizens is do it in a well coordinated way across the globe.

Outside of creating a world government I would contend this is a bit of an ask and without wanting to sound fatalistic I am yet to be convinced that the appearance of a few bearded or bead wearing campers outside St Paul’s and Wall St is going to achieve this.

I know it’s easy to sit on ones backside, not take a stand and just criticize but its also easy to lash out and blame someone else, anyone other than yourself.

Unless these protestors become the catalyst for the creation of a world government, or society I cannot see them changing anything, anything other than, say, the toilet provision just outside of St Paul’s .

I will opt out and drop this protest into the ‘pointless’ category for now.

I will also continue to look at the numbers on my bank statement and kid myself that there actually is a money filled box somewhere in the vaults at Credit Suisse with my name on it just waiting for me to appear someday.

I sort of like it that way.

Homework

30 mins to lights on

The boy huffed, puffed and dragged his way from the living room to the kitchen. He adopted the gait of a man walking to his execution, slow, painful, with any opportunity for delay or distraction taken.
Skirting boards were immensely interesting, the woodchip covered wall a source of wonder and the BBC news, Economics Correspondent a man worthy of a 10 year old’s interest.

Time lapse cameras would have picked up on his progress but to the naked eye he was motionless.

‘Get on with it’ snapped his father.

The kitchen was filled with the echo of tea recently consumed. Dishes were being washed, leftovers being saved, the yellow Formica covered table shone dishcloth damp. His wallpaper covered school jotter stuck to the wet surface and he desperately looked around for a reprieve – anything would do.

‘The longer you delay, the harder it will be and remember you’re in at lights on’ his mother said calmly without turning around from the stainless steel sink.

Pots, pans, dishes and cutlery were being mixed briskly in a gravy coloured soup.  

The boy didn’t respond, he opened his jotter and studied the contents. Pages of numbers and symbols littered its pages, an alien script created somewhere far away from home. Kitchens and fractions, totally out of context like Cowboys and Igloos. Instantly his mind drifted to a shootout on a high plane, rocks and boulders littering a mountainous landscape and the echo of mulitple Winchester rifles filling the crisp cool air. He was looking down on them, the baddies, broken teeth and dark horses – his aim was true, their shots were not and simply ricocheted off boulders surrounding him. He would win this standoff – an ultimate confidence bourn out of witnessing this scene hundreds of times before.

He always won.

20 mins to lights on

Outside the muffled sound of a ball hitting the gable end of the house brought him back to the kitchen and only served to increase the pain. He should be out there in the late summer evening dribbling through wave after wave of defenders before smashing it, top corner, against the wall. The lack of chalk on the ball proving the point that it didn’t hit the post and come out. ‘ it was a goal, see?’ He would say pointing to the clean plastic ball. They would study the ball for any scrap of chalk dust post and then concede the goal. 10-7.

His mother leans over and taps the blank page in front of him before leaving the kitchen to join Dad in front of the TV.

The folded page of fractions was carefully spread on the table, his jotter open on the next blank page. Homework for Wednesday was carefully written at the top, underlined three times. 

10 questions remained, from a total of 10 questions.

Question 1.  ½ x ¼ =

The heading is underlined a fourth time. TV sounds, music and chat, worked its way through the gaps in the door along with the smell of cigarette smoke. He hears a shout and another thump, goal scored or missed. 10-8.

15 mins to lights on

Question 1. ½ x ¼ =

What was the rule, multiply them side by side? Or opposites then add? Either 2/6 or 1/8. He guessed at 1/8 and moved to question 2.

The list of questions fell away on the page, reaching as far as his eyes could see, all the way to the paper horizon, no way he will finish them, no way at all. He heard his father’s voice from the room next door, deep and friendly.

No way to finish them properly.

Question 2. ¼ x 200 =

He scribbled 100 down on the sheet and moved on, Question 3 = 75, Question 4 = 2/3, Question 5 = 30…….

Question 10 ½ + ½ + ¼ =

He scribbled down 36 and closed the jotter.

Filled with instant energy he jumped up shouting towards the door ‘that’s me finished mum, can I go out now?’

‘Let me see’ came the response.

He grabbed the jotter and burst into the living room, opened it up and showed the list to his mother. Smoke filled the room. His mother was sat on the brown couch, father on the seat. The daily magazine show fuzzed through the TV in the corner - an uninteresting noise.

He stood skinny and agitated, awaiting her judgement.

Q1 = 1/8, Q2 = 30…….Q10 = 36

 She studied the page - answers but no questions.

‘Good lad. Now remember lights on?’

‘yesss muuum’ he shouted running out of the house, doors slammed and his slender presence left a cartoon void in the room between the two adults.

10 mins to lights on

10-8. 80 minutes gone. 

2 goals would salvage a point, 3 would win it. It would be the upset of the season. Time to bring on the super sub and under a cacophony of cheers and music he calmly walked onto the pitch to join his 14 team mates. The commentators were beside themselves with excitement.

Angus whispered ‘watch out for the wee girl in the red t-shirt, Sarah’s English cousin – she can play’.

He nodded solemnly and ran after the ball as the street lights came on, early.

There’s something Vichy about the French

The problem with France is........ Blank.

Everyone has their own ending, my favourite, often quoted one, which is supposed to have come from George W Bush is ‘they have no word for entrepreneur’.

The veracity of this quote is questionable but I like it anyhow.

In a Mike Shanks fantasy game of Blankety Blank the winning answer would be ‘the French’. Another quote of course but one I subscribe to. France is a wonderful country. From North to South it is full of beautiful and mesmerising scenery, history and has such a varied topography & climate, from High Alps to Mediterranean beaches. Who wouldn’t fall in love with such a country? The food is fantastic and the wine is superb.

So why is it every time I go there I find myself getting annoyed and wound up?

Why can’t I enjoy a coffee and pastry on the Champs Elysees without feeling like I am being ripped off and that I should drink and eat very quickly because the waiter has something better to do. 

Why does he throw the change at me from a distance and why does it take a day to navigate my way through the bureaucratic process nightmare that is Charles de Gaulle airport? 

Why do they mutter ‘English pig’ under their breath when I am purchasing something? Why do they love small pathetic, yappy dogs and have 26 different ways of saying ‘I give up’?

I have been treated badly and ripped off in a lot of places around the world. I have had my wallet violently taken from me in Prague and under threat in Istanbul, been sold products which didn’t actually exist in Jamaica, paid 6x the going rate for something in a lot of countries spanning both Africa and Asia but in France its somehow different.

In France if a waiter is rude to me or if a woman elbows me out of the way in a queue I detest that more than any of the other, more serious and sinister, things which have happened to me. I think this is because it happens all the time, everywhere in the country, it’s not a random isolated incident. It seems that the national sport is treat Mike Shanks, the English Pig, badly.

Some time ago, I was sat in a Chinese teahouse in central China. My fiancée and I had just returned from exploring the wonder that is the Terracotta Warriors near to the city of Xi’an. We were tired, jet-lagged and needed a rest. We ordered 2 teas from the incomprehensible menu and rested. I had always been under the misconception that tea in China was good. For all the tea in China, right? 

Wrong - tea in China is simply hot water with a couple of flavourless twigs thrown in – Tetley would make a killing over there.

Anyhow we consumed the twig soup and waited for our young, appropriately dressed, waitress to return with the bill. She held out her hand and rattled something off in Chinese to my fiancée. My future wife’s Mandarin is good but she had clearly misunderstood and asked the young lady to write it down, just to be sure.

We had made the simple, non-worldly wise traveller mistake of not asking the price before we consumed and this young lady was going to make us pay. The number she wrote down was the equivalent of £10, for two cups of nothing!

We looked at each other as the realisation set in – we had been ripped off, again. Shaking our heads and throwing daggers at the waitress we took the notes from our bum-bag and passed them over.

All the time the girl smiled a knowing smile, a ‘I have won and there is nothing you can do about it’ smile. A ‘you are a million miles from anywhere near your comfort zone so don’t even try to argue with the bill’ smile.

Looking at the notes in her hand she addressed us both and spoke in a broken, heavily accented English.

‘Each’ was her reply.

I look back on this incident fondly and with humour. Yes we ended up paying £20- for two cups of hot water but we learned a valuable lesson that day and the young girl most likely needed the £20 more than we did.

If that had happened in Paris I shudder to think what my reaction would have been, I would probably still be languishing in a Parisian jail today telling everyone I am not English.

I am generalising of course, not all French people are rude, arrogant and have a superiority complex the size of the Louvre. It’s just that a significant proportion of the population do.

Could it be that my good old-fashioned British sense of fairplay is the root cause of my distaste?

The last time the French won against the British was 1066 but they managed to totally alter the culture and language of the UK, we have beaten them on every occasion since but I am at a loss to come up with anything in the French culture which is British.. The French refusal to buy British beef after the mental-cow outbreak, we won the court battle, they refused to pay the fine and quietly some time later the debt was written off. Retirement age, French Unions, the ghettos (Banlieues) all support my theory that the French don’t play fairly and I haven't even mentioned the war or the Vichy. I think it is this coupled with my own, less than positive, experiences which tip me from general dislike to writing a blog entry about them. 

Like I said I am generalising here, I work with and have met a lot of nice French people some I would consider friends, but compared to, say, the Italians there is no competition.

I will however continue in my quest to rid myself of such a negative bias. Its not healthy and I will continue travelling there, drinking their wine, quaffing the Fois Gras and Crème Brule until my distaste for them disappears or I die of an artery induced heart attack.

How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb?

One - he holds the bulb and all of Europe revolves around him.

Vive la France.

Skynet

$23,698,655.93 is a large number.

A very large number indeed.

Its the sort of number which normally precedes the fantasy lottery game - what would I do if I won gazillions on the lotto? A big house? Boat? Aston Martin? Give some to the family, splash the cash then bugger off and live somewhere sunny where you look great and everyone laughs at your jokes.

Earlier this year this sum of money could have bought you one book.

A paperback book.

A not very rare paperback book.

A not very rare paperback book about the breeding habits of flies.

The world of Amazon went mad for a short while and created its own, single item, Tulip bubble, for Peter Lawrence’s The making of a Fly.

This was not the result of a deranged employee nor a devious student up to hi-jinx.

No this was the work of a faceless/nameless/emotionless algorithm, one which was programmed to set the pricing of products on Amazon.

Without wanting to keep typing the word algorithm I will, for the purposes of simplicity, call it ‘Skynet’

Skynet was originally programmed to ensure that the pricing of company A’s products was always priced slightly above company B’s pricing for the same product.

The reason for this was that company A did not actually have the product, in fact it had nothing other than Skynet and a bank account. It would buy the product from company B, ship the product to the purchaser and earn a small margin.

Company B’s Algorithm, lets call it Matrix, was also programmed to do the same thing and hey presto! We have a mirror, looking on a mirror, on a mirror, on a mirror…..

Skynet and Matrix slugged it out over a couple of days before someone, a human someone, called Sarah, stepped in and pulled the plug.

The result was a slightly overpriced book and an interesting insight into how computers are quietly ruling the world.

Imagine if Skynet was set loose on air traffic control, or oil production or city planning.

Imagine if someone allowed Skynet to take control of the military in country A and the Matrix was rolled out in country B?

I paid good money to watch Alien vs Predator and it was shite. I have heard that Cowboys vs Aliens is also not worth the admission fee.

Skynet vs Matrix anyone?