Christmas

When I was growing up Christmas was my favourite time of year and it remains so in many ways. You got time off school, loads of presents and you saw all your family and friends. Also, people were normally more cheery.

Nowadays all I seem to hear about is how Christmas lights are offending a bunch of immigrants so we should take them down. I never realised a flashing reindeer and a snowman could be distasteful. I’m not especially religious so maybe I’m missing the point but I always thought being tolerant of other people’s beliefs was a creditable approach. It seems not. Because the UK has veered too far in the direction of political correctness (so far that we’ve crashed through the barrier and emerged on the wrong side of the road) anything which might offend someone in a minority group is deemed bad. And then it’s probably banned.

I’ve done a fair amount of travelling, but at no point did I wander into a South East Asian country and expect them to change their traditions to suit me. I’d have had less respect for them if they did. I was a visitor in their country so I should have been expected to respect their customs and practices, and rightly so.

Anyway, that’s a minor rant but not where I was ultimately going. I do still enjoy Christmas even though I’m acutely aware it might make me a hypocrite if I’m not a Christian. For me, not much has changed in what I enjoy since I was a kid. I tend to add more alcohol to my festivities now and I don’t really hope for the latest Transformer as a gift (although it’s preferable to socks).

I can still be irritable though so appreciate not being interrupted during my evening meal with a bunch of carol singers wishing to regale me with Silent Night. In fact, let me expand that to Christmas music in general. Why, when you work in an office, is there always someone who thinks normal rules go out the window at Christmas? I’m not permitted to play Marilyn Manson in July, so why the hell do they get to play Santa Claus Is Coming To Town in December?

Once these people have finished decorating their desks with tinsel, fairy lights, novelty snowmen and any other nonsense they can lay their hands on they start on the music. Out come the crappy Christmas Compilation CDs and they decide that everyone within twenty desks would like to listen to a song no-one in their right mind cared about when it was released twenty years ago, let alone today. Throwing a couple of Christmas references into a crap song doesn't instantly transform it into something The Beatles would have been proud of. But that’s right; they decide on your behalf. Don’t question it though, because apparently having functional hearing and a reasonable taste in music to tantamount to being a “bah humbug miserable bastard”.

The Chairman at my company told one of the guys to turn his music off one year. No-one wants to hear the same CD on repeat every bloody day for a month. There’s only so many times I can hear Fairytale In New York before I start wanting to maim people (for the record, it’s about three times). Anyway, the guy in question thought he was joking until the Chairman repeated his request and then told me I could punch him if he played it again. True story. I think the last part might have been a joke, but I was willing to test him on it if I so much as heard a single bar from anything by Slade.

Rolling out the same films at Christmas is actually a positive thing. You can never have too much Indiana Jones, Star Wars or Batman at Christmas, although The Sound of Music is a step too far for me. I’ve absolutely no issue with Miracle On 34th Street being repeated each year because I can change the channel. But, if someone tied me to a chair and subjected me to it every day I should not be held accountable for my actions. Besides, watching these movies allows you to skip the Queen’s Speech while you’re tucking into a turkey the size of an ostrich. For a while I worked from home, which was lucky for me (and anyone who thinks they’re bringing Christmas spirit to the office) as I could listen to Nine Inch Nails without being labelled the Grinch. If I wanted to feel the Christmas spirit I’d go outside and throw snowballs at small children. It’s all about choice.

Still, I maintain a level of enjoyment over the festivities (a.k.a. drinking time) and getting people presents is now infinitely easier thanks to internet shopping. Now I have a daughter I’ll be able to indulge her at Christmas once she’s a bit older, although I have to say I’m a little disappointed. When you walk into any big toy store the options are endless; a giant sea of choice, wrapped in brightly coloured plastic and enticing advertising. I’m still drawn to the boy’s toys and who wouldn’t be? I had bucket loads of Star Wars figures when I was younger and you can still get them now, only they’ve been improved and there’s even more choice. Plus there’s loads of other cool stuff like dinosaurs with rocket launchers attached to their backs and huge race tracks you can snake around the house. What do they have for girls? My little bloody pony and some pretend kitchen sets? It’s about as dull as it gets. I’ll even avoid the sexist joke about kitchens (it’s too easy), but where’s the adventure in pretending to make breakfast? I’ll be the first to tell her; I’ve done it in real life and it’s boring. I wouldn’t necessarily choose for her to grow up wearing Doc Martins and sporting a shaved head but I wonder what damage I could possibly do by buying her the latest toy rocket launchers and machine guns each year. At least I could play with them when she got bored.

101%

If there’s one thing in life you can’t argue with it’s an absolute. Mathematics, for example, is a very black and white subject. Sure, you can display statistics in a way to suit your argument (“lies, damned lies and statistics”) but the simple fact is that two plus two equals four.

So what’s wrong with 101%? My irritation in this matter is not with the number but the people who trot out this ridiculous figure. I’m not saying that 101% doesn’t exist, because clearly it does… but not in the manner often used. Allow me to elaborate. A box of Jaffa Cakes (yes please, if you’re offering) with 140% written on the side is fine. What you’re getting, effectively, is 40% more than standard (which would have been 100%). That’s all well and good because, to all intents and purposes (in this example at least), there is an infinite potential for Jaffa Cake supply.

Agreed? Okay, now take a finite supply of something and promise more than is available. I’d like someone to explain how I could change the tyres on 120% of my car’s wheels. What does that mean? Changing the spare tyre twice? It’s stupid. How about 150% of the UK’s population turning up to vote at the next election? Doesn’t work does it?

Can one of the sportsmen or politicians (or whoever) please tell me how they’re going to “give 101% effort” please? How? 100% is all your effort. All of it. So where’s the extra 1% coming from? If you found some more effort then you clearly weren’t giving 100% to begin with. It’s not rocket science.

Some people disagree. I had someone tell me that it meant “he was going to do better”. Really? Well that’s about performance or results, but not effort. Sure, performance is a sliding scale but effort isn’t. You simply cannot give more effort than 100%. It’s a mathematical impossibility.

It gets worse though. You see, it started with people saying they’d give 100% but then the next person wanted to sound more dedicated, more determined, so he’d offer 101% effort. That became the new 100%. But then things changed and 110% became the new 100%. If you weren’t giving at least 110% you weren’t trying.

I’d love to interview the next footballer who says “we’ll be giving 110% in the big game”. My retort would be simple. “Really”, I’d start. “110%? Well if you’re going to throw rules out of the window why are you offering only 110%? Why not 200%? Hell, if you were really dedicated you’d make it into four figures easily – a good 1000%. In fact, if you’re going to completely ignore the fact that there’s a mathematical ceiling – set at 100% - then why on earth are you not offering a trillion percent effort? Are you lazy?”

I doubt I’d last very long in that journalist role but I would have got my point across (really? Who am I kidding?). In a world where ‘txt spk’ is taking over there is no adherence to rules or logic. The player in question would shoot me a quizzical look before telling the next interviewer his team will play the next game with 117.3% effort. It’s a fact. Of that, you can be a billion percent sure.

Celebrity And Reality Game Shows

The very depiction of how far society has fallen. I have more contempt for people who religiously watch this drivel than I do for those who watch soap operas (and that means it’s a lot, by the way). I’m sure you’re aware of the sort of programs I mean; the likes of ‘Big Brother’ and ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’. There are likely to be more but it’s too painful to do the research if I’m honest.

What, exactly, is a celebrity? A quick definition to get us started: “A celebrity is a person who is easily recognised in a society or culture.”

That creates a fairly broad brush picture which captures a variety of people from sport, business, royalty, music, film etc. What you’re talking about is someone who’s ‘famous’ for participating in a pastime or career which places them in the public eye. That is all. So why are they supposed to be fantastic role models? Someone explain that to me please. I don’t care how many records Wayne Rooney has broken and I care even less about how many bedrooms his house has or what shade of red his Ferrari is. The ability to kick a ball with unusual accuracy doesn’t suddenly transform him into a paragon of virtue. In the real world it is less impressive than the correct use of grammar (which is a skill I imagine he’s yet to master). However, it’s entertaining to some and so he is paid handsomely and is thrust in front of school children as an example of what can be achieved with one’s life...

Except, of course, he shouldn’t be. It’s not his fault. He started young, like most prodigious talents, and very quickly had everything he needed handed to him. Having personal assistants is all very well when you’ve spent twenty years building a business empire but when you’re a teenage footballer, suddenly earning more money a week than most people do a year, it’s a little different. Reality, I’m sure, can become warped.

Again, I don’t mean to pick on Rooney; the same is true of many ‘celebrities’. You only have to look at Lindsay Lohan for someone who had the start of a career people would kill for, before she flushed it all down the toilet. Drink, drugs, more drink, mixed with drugs (probably), multiple prison sentences and trips to rehab pretty much ensure she doesn’t see much work anymore. Of course actors have recovered before, but I can’t really see Lohan performing a phoenix from the flames resurrection in the same way Robert Downey Jnr did.

‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ (from the snippets I’ve had the misfortune to see) really ought to be called ‘I Once Was Once On Page Six Of The Sun For Sleeping With A Footballer, Please Make Me Famous!’. Looking back at the ‘celebrities’ who have been involved in the past it seems a sad mixture of those who were famous (ten years previously) wanting to recapture some limelight and those who seem to have reached a plateau at ‘z list’ celebrity status and think a couple of weeks eating worms on the TV will boost them up a few levels. It’s this abominable excuse for entertainment that we have to thank for thrusting Kerry Katona and Katie Price back in front of the media. Thanks a bunch. All we needed was a bout of Katie (a.k.a. Jordan) Price banging on about her fake tits and how much she loves her kids while remaining under the illusion that she’s a supermodel. Most shocking, I’ve learned, is that viewing for this show peaked at almost 25% of the UK population. Words fail me, except to say I’m in favour of mass genocide if it means purifying the gene pool.

Back to ‘Big Brother’ then, which is not even about celebrities (however loosely you define the word). It’s about ordinary, every day people. For crying out loud. At least, I imagine, on ‘I’m A Celebrity…’ you could have fantasised about Jordan falling into a pit of alligators. No, on ‘Big Brother’ everyone is unknown and they’re in a house (not a jungle), which provides all the ingredients necessary to create possibly the dullest program ever. It’s ‘reality’ TV apparently. Reality? I often move into a strange house with a group of people I’ve never met before, all of us from disparate backgrounds. It happens all the time for weeks on end and is completely normal! Is it bollocks. Who cares who’s going to do the cooking or whether Dave thinks Carly’s fit but Jennifer thinks she’s a racist bitch? Yes, I know; loads of people apparently care. Only this time it’s not just the UK population which needs sterilising because this format has gone out world wide, creating Big Brother shows in dozens of countries. Apparently the Dutch version came first, which makes sense (if you’re sitting in a stoned high) but it doesn’t offer the rest of the world excuse.

I remember when the first series started in the UK, in 2000. I was twenty five and couldn’t understand why people my own age were obsessed with it (“tune in later to watch Alice brush her hair for twenty minutes!”). I was at my peak going-to-the-pub-and-falling-over age and everyone was acting like they were pensioners, devoid of any motivation to leave their sofa. This show ran for anything up to ninety four days at a time too – that’s three bloody months. Were people rushing home to spend a quarter of their free lives watching other people purposely doing nothing with their’s?

It would be slightly more interesting if there was the chance of Al Pacino coming to blows with Eminem over the evening’s meal allocation because they’re actual celebrities, but why does anyone care what these nobodies are doing? Big Brother just seems to be a stepping stone for moderately attractive, unknown girls to prance about wearing next to nothing knowing full well that desperate teenage boys will be wanking themselves into a frenzy and they’ll be a deal for a couple of photo shoots with FHM or Nuts at the end of the show. These girls will pop up in the paper for a while and then disappear without trace. How many pictures does The Mirror need of a drunken girl falling out of a nightclub, high on coke? There are enough genuinely famous people doing that to satisfy the demand, surely?

It all goes hand in hand with society’s fascination with so-called celebrities and what they’re doing at every waking moment. Glossy magazine exist to satisfy that very curiosity so that desperate consumers can see what dress Keira Knightley wore to the Oscars and whether the resident fashion ‘expert’ thinks she made a good choice. You can learn the nationality of Angelina Jolie’s next proposed adoption and whether Madonna will try and beat her to it. So what? Why should anyone care? You shouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean you can get away from it. It’s plastered all over the news stands, the TV and the internet. I do my best to ignore it but that doesn’t stop random people who I’ve never seen before being thrust before my eyes because they’re pregnant or they’ve had an affair. I just don’t care. At least in this day and age I can choose one of the three million other channels on TV or close the web browser and do something more worthy of my attention.

The Olympic Games

The 2012 Olympic Games kicks off this week, so I thought it a reasonable time to chuck my opinion about the whole thing into the mix.

I like the idea of the Olympics, bringing the greatest sportsmen and women in the world together to find out who really is the best in their chosen discipline. What makes the games more credible is the fact that it has history behind it. We all know it started in Greece at Olympia, but did you know it dates back almost three thousand years? Certainly puts the Commonwealth Games in the shade in that respect. At the last summer games there were 10,500 competitors from 204 countries. Impressive.

Well, kind of. What the hell were these people competing in exactly? They can’t all run the 100m (although it’d be fun to watch). I wonder how many events the average person on the street can name. A dozen? Twenty? Well there are apparently twenty six sports but after you break them into disciplines and weight divisions you’re looking at three hundred events (since a sport called ‘athletics’ would be pretty vague). That’s quite a lot. There are thirty four swimming events and that’s just races, not any of that synchronised stuff or falling off a tall ladder gracefully crap. Thirty four! How many different ways of swimming from one side of a pool to the other do we need? Surely it shouldn’t matter? No-one defines how people run in the 100 metres; they’re just told to do it as fast as possible. Same should apply with swimming: get from point A to point B as fast as you can. Job done. Besides would anyone really use the butterfly stroke if they fell out of a boat? It’s as pointless as the egg and spoon race at school, and they’re not making that an Olympic event.

There are plenty of daft events at the Olympics. You know what makes no sense to me? The walking race. Talk about an oxymoron; no-one ever raced anywhere by walking. Honestly, it’s so stupid it hardly bares thinking about. These people waddle along, looking like they’re in desperate need of a shit, for fifty kilometres. I just don’t get it. If it was a race then you’d run, or at least jog. Surely no-one takes them seriously. Are these athletes not good enough to run anywhere but they’re brilliant waddlers? Is it how the long distance runners start off and then they graduate into a sport where people won’t mercilessly take the piss out of them? And who watches each person for fifty kilometres in case they try and break into a bit of a jog when no-one’s looking?

Also, who came up with the triple jump? A hop, skip and a jump. What logical combination is that for anything? The long jump makes loads of sense – see who can jump the furthest, but who thought, “let’s do that, but with a whacky combination of moves before the jump?” Did anyone test them for drug use?

Every now and again a bunch of people get together and lobby for additional sports to be added. Normally the people doing the lobbying are the people who are really good at the sport in question. Makes sense to me, which is why I’ve been lobbying (unsuccessfully) for Jagermeister drinking to be included in 2012. American football was included a couple of times (1904 and 1932) and guess what? That’s right, almost everyone competing was American... because no-one else plays it. That’s a sure fire of boosting the medal haul, eh? Hot Air Ballooning was included once, and I’m all for that. As long as it’s combined with shooting that could be loads of fun.

Football (the real name for what some people refer to as soccer) is an oddity at the Olympics, mainly because countries are restricted in who they can use. Obviously there are many, highly organised and well known football leagues around the world governed by FIFA who don’t want something as trivial as the Olympics overshadowing the World Cup. So the compromise is that Olympic football squads need to be compiled almost entirely of players under the age of twenty three. While I understand the issue it does serve to make something of a mockery of the Olympic competition.

Every time the Olympics (or any sporting event for that matter) comes around the media become obsessed with how well Great Britain is doing. Because of the pessimistic nature of the media we never think we’ve done as well as we should have done, but let me tell you that we’re third in the combined (summer and winter) overall medal table, behind the USA and Soviet Union. The latter doesn’t even exist anymore so we’ll overtake them eventually (although the ‘new’ Russia will probably have overtaken us by then). The USA’s population count is five times ours though and Russia’s is double, so they both have a much bigger pool of talent to choose from. In that respect we’re doing well, since we’re only the twenty third most populated country in the world.

We could be doing better though and you know who’s to blame? Schools. Yes, schools are to blame with their ridiculous ideas around stopping kids competing with one another. Let me tell you something else, the person who said “it’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part” was a person who never won a thing. How could they have? You never heard Linford Christie say that after he won the 100m gold did you? I bet the bloke who came last did though.

So now schools have stopped competitive sports on the basis it excludes those who are not good at it while lowering their confidence and self esteem. Here’s a newsflash for the morons who came up with that pseudo-protective claptrap: life is a competition and the kids you’re trying to shield need to get used to it. The sooner they do, the better, because you can’t stick them in a protective bubble for their entire lives. Will they get the same protection at interviews so they won’t feel bad if they don’t get the job? When they’re looking for a partner and their ideal one chooses someone else who will pat them on the head and offer consolation? If anything you’ll be leaving them at a bigger disadvantage because some schools will be sensible enough to continue competition and its children will embrace it from an earlier age.

If schools stop mucking about we can look forward to the next generation of successful sportsmen and women coming through the ranks, otherwise we’ll be left with a bunch of crying babies. That’s never going to look impressive when the Olympics are broadcast to the world.

Update: Even British Prime Minister David Cameron agrees with me. I didn't know he was a reader.

Football

It’s a divisive subject, make no mistake about it. The very mention of the game will have some people frothing at the mouth about a mistake (or wonderful piece of skill) while others will be equally animated about what a pointless game it is, supported by neanderthals.

I like football, but I’m not a neanderthal (although I am biased). I think my enjoyment came from playing the game first, as a kid, and being a fan came second. Still, I enjoy watching the best players in the world dazzle audiences with breathtaking moments of skill. Like most people though I do not enjoy watching some chancer collapse like he’s been shot in the face because an opposing player brushed his elbow. Gamesmanship, or ‘cheating’ as I like to call it, is increasing within the game but I see little effort to stamp in out (excuse the pun). These cheats never seem to be punished after the game when video replays clearly show they’ve tried to con the ref (and a couple of million people watching). How do these guys have the nerve to face anyone when they know TV cameras will have captured them writhing around the floor in pretend agony before jumping to their feet with a smile on their face once the referee falls for their charade and cautions the other player? It’s embarrassing.

What gets me really going is the word soccer; a word invented to describe football by people who barely play the game (because they quite liked the name football and wanted it for their own sport). Look, we had it first okay? Please make the effort to come up with a more appropriate name for American football. If we’re being accurate, maybe you could go with Handegg since you throw the ball and it’s shaped like an egg. See what I did there? How you can pretend to call a game football when neither a foot nor a ball is involved is beyond me.

I have nothing against the game of American football. It doesn’t really interest me and I don’t find it entertaining but, as an Englishman, I’m not about to go down the ‘real men play rugby’ road I hear so often because I do understand the differences. In rugby you play the ball, in American football you play the man and if someone weighing 130kgs was running at me with the sole intention of flipping me upside down then I’d want armour too. And maybe a gun.

Of course the thing which really gets the anti-football brigade in gear are the salaries. As we know, there is no salary cap in place. When the old English First Division ceased to exist and was replaced by the Premier League (in 1992), the average salary of a player in the league was reported to be £75,000 per year. By 2000 this figure had risen to £409,000 and was up to £676,000 in 2003. Now it’s around £1,200,000. That’s more than £21,000 a week, which is around the national average wage… for a year.

Let’s not forget that those are the average figures. Some will be earning less, but then many of them do little more than warm the bench for a team fighting relegation week in, week out. At the other end of the scale some players are earning mind boggling figures. After Wayne Rooney stated his intention to leave Manchester United he was eventually persuaded to stay and this was doubtless aided by a significant pay rise. Estimations vary, but the figure banded around is around the £200,000 mark… a week. That’s a cool £10m a year, before personal sponsorship deals. It’s not that unusual though and there are more than a few players on similar amounts of money, if not more. When Christiano Ronaldo left Manchester United for Real Madrid in a world record £80m transfer in 2008 he struck a deal which earned him cash by the bucket load. But the salaries from their clubs don’t present the whole picture. According to Forbes, David Beckham and Ronaldo collected £29.3m and £27.1m respectively last year. Reckon you could get by on half a million pounds a week?

The trouble is, people see these figures and they then see the country in a recession and people struggling to pay rent. What do these footballers do that deserves so much money – a ludicrous amount of money? They’re not curing cancer and they’re not saving lives, they’re simply playing a game that many people do across the world for free. Fans are being charged more and more at the turnstiles and must wonder sometimes why they bother when they see a dire performance from one of their team’s players before he hops in his Lamborghini and heads back to his eight bedroomed mansion.

The answer is simple: supply and demand. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. You might not agree with Ronaldo’s wages but the point is that you cannot do what he can with a football. People pay to be entertained by him, media pay for broadcast rights and companies pay to be associated with him. Absolutely, it is a far less significant role than the nurse at your local hospital but many more people are capable of performing that role and the salary reflects it. It might not be right and it might not be moral, but it is the way of the world.

Former player Robbie Savage waded into a discussion on the subject, citing that his fellow professionals were worth the money. He was quoted out of context by the press, even though he said that soldiers and medical professionals should be paid more. His final point was “who wouldn’t take the money if it’s on offer?”

Football is not alone in this respect. Forbes list the top ten highest paid athletes and it only contains two footballers. The rest come from boxing, golf, basketball, tennis and American football. Despite Tiger Woods suffering sex scandals, the break-up of his marriage and the loss of sponsors he probably wouldn’t get out of bed for Ronaldo’s wages. He reportedly pocked £37.8m last year. Although that’s a huge amount of money he was still beaten by Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao with the former collecting a very tidy £54.2m. I’m sure that’ll be comforting while he’s sat in his jail cell.

There has to be a ceiling for these wages, but you wonder where it is. Go back to my earlier figure of £21,000 a week for the average player in the English Premier League and compare that to the £100 earned by players when England won the World Cup in 1966. That’s quite some increase (even when you include inflation).

Having said that, after England’s recent performances many people would have begrudged them earning even £100. This is a common complaint: do these millionaire footballers care? Of course they care, but do they care enough? After all they’re set for life and have everything they need. I’ll be honest, I can’t understand an argument which revolves around saying, “you’re paid a fortune, just do better”. You could pay me millions and I wouldn’t be any good; the money is irrelevant in that respect.

Experts

This is going to maybe sound a bit odd, so bear with me a second: what is the point in having experts? There exists at least a thousand ‘experts’ in absolutely anything you could possibly mention. Don’t believe me? Name something then. There are experts in everything from growing grass to putting a bloke on the moon.

I’m not decrying experts as a whole because I reckon putting someone on the moon is pretty specialised and a damned sight more complicated than getting grass to grow (side note: it does it by itself! You’re no more an expert in that than I am in making the sun come up each bloody morning!). My beef is where there is no proven correct answer and you end up with a group of spectacle wearing men in white coats arguing at two polar opposites. Surely at this point you cannot regard them as experts anymore than a ‘bunch of people who have an opinion’?

Want some examples? Global warming. On one hand it’s being caused by me every time I turn on a light or start my car. On the other hand, shit happens and the planet naturally cycles through phases of warming before cooling again. There you have two camps of thought which could not possibly be any further apart. One of these camps is very, very wrong. No longer are they ‘experts’ and they might consider re-classifying themselves as ‘idiots’. Which camp? I don’t know, I’m not the one professing to be a bloody expert.

Another example? Food and drink. Not a day goes by without some media-spotlight chasing ‘expert’ proclaiming that his research conclusively proves you’ll die for eating something which was previously considered healthy. That on its own would be fine, and useful information, if it wasn’t for the fact that all these ‘experts’ contradict one another at every turn. Not only do they contradict one another but they’ll also leave out critical details when presenting good news. For example, red wine is good for the heart, but will give you liver failure. I’ve stopped paying attention now because otherwise I’d never eat anything. I expect I’ll open a paper tomorrow and discover that potatoes are good for my digestive system but will make my head fall off. On balance, they’re probably best avoided but then except another ‘expert’ will denounce the theory completely and state that potatoes are wonderful for my joints and my head will stay exactly where it is.

For years ‘experts’ thought the world was flat. At no point during their retarded bickering did anyone think to hop in a boat and go and find out (mainly because they were worried about falling off the edge. Really?!). For centuries the likes of Pythagoras and Aristotle claimed the Earth was spherical, whilst being laughed at. Eventually someone did jump in a boat went, looked and didn’t fall off the edge. The only thing he needed to be an expert in was pointing a ship in one direction. All the boffins left at home had little idea of the outcome, so what value had they added? If I want to know whether there’s a shop around the corner I’ll go and have a look, I don’t need a team of experts to theorise over probabilities and give me an answer which proves nothing either way.

The BP fiasco at the Deepwater Horizon rig made headlines across the world, for months. Why? Because it took them five months from the date of the explosion to completely seal the well and stop the thing pumping oil into the ocean. Let me say that again: five months. And this was major international news; the biggest environmental disaster in years and one of the biggest oil spills ever. It cost billions of dollars in clean-up money and the lives of countless animals. So, how many experts do you think were involved? I’m gonna go long and plump for ‘just about every marine and drilling expert on the planet’. Why did it take five months then? I’m going to guess again: because they were probably all sat in a bloody room disagreeing with each other.

So called ‘experts’ will disagree on many things which could kill us. Mobile phone technology and wireless networking still haven’t been put to bed although the general consensus is they’re okay. What, completely okay or only a small percentage of users will develop brain tumours and die? We need to know, because there’s still a group of ‘experts’ who aren’t convinced, even though they could end up looking really stupid if it’s all fine and dandy.

The ‘experts’ I have the least amount of time for are those in financial markets. These guys don’t even have to back anything up with proof! If a scientist makes a medical breakthrough he would be expected to show the calculations and substance behind his findings. Not so in the financial market. It seems that if you work for an estate agent you are automatically a ‘property market expert’ and what you say regarding the future of the market should be taken as gospel. Just because someone showed a couple round a two bed flat in Clapham he is not qualified to talk about the state of the recession. The same thing applies to bankers, except more so because they’re the very reason we’re in a recession. 

I could probably go on for days on the subject, but I’m sure I’ve made my point by now. Sure, people will disagree with each other but if one side has a well based, water tight and scientific explanation why something happens then anyone who doesn’t agree is moronic. They’re likely to be in the minority once everyone else has sided with the smart bloke anyway, so no-one will listen. The fact that things don’t happen this way leads me to believe that most of it isn’t water tight and isn’t scientific. In fact, I bet they’re all just winging it.

Advertising

Advertising at its best is informative but at its worst it’s annoying and invasive. The trouble is it’s mainly the latter and there’s no way of getting away from it because it’s everywhere; TV, magazines, the internet, the roadside and even your own home when leaflets get pushed through the front door. Truly, to escape advertising you need to abandon technology, move to the remotest place known to man and never again purchase a packaged product.

Magazines, realistically, have had their day. With the exponential growth of the internet the sun is setting on their monopoly, so to keep revenue up they seem to ram as many adverts as possible into each edition. At first glance these magazine might look good value for money but you’ll spend half your time flicking past pages of ads for shampoo and cut price camping gear. For some reason they also insist on inserting a million leaflets of varying sizes so that when you pick the thing up they all fall on the floor. It’s not in the least bit annoying.

Even the BBC, which is free from commercial advertising due to being funded by a tax, still jumps in on the act. Instead of taking money to advertise other people’s products, they spend the time advertising their own. It’s still better than the alternative though, which is why I won’t listen to any non-BBC radio station. I don’t want to hear the same Carphone Warehouse advert sixty times on my way to work, or have some annoying jingle stuck in my head all day because a certain advert was playing as I parked my car. Call me crazy but I’d like a radio station to play music… which they mostly don’t, so I listen to CDs instead.

Satellite TV is no better either and the bastard channels conspire with one another. There are about a billion music channels so what would you think the odds are of them having conflicting advert time slots? You’re watching one music channel when it breaks for adverts (you know, all those absurd ringtones for sale) so you change to the next music channel. Which is also on an ad break. And the next one. And so on. They also alter the volume levels so that when the adverts come on they’re about three times as loud as the programme you were watching so your gran’s hearing aid explodes and the dog shits herself.

With the advent of technology you should do what I do, which is never watch anything ‘live’. You simply record it and start watching your programme ten minutes late. That way when the advert break kicks in, you can simply fast forward it. By the end of the programme you’ve pretty much caught up and haven’t wasted the time being subjected to that singing twat in the Go Compare commercials. It also stops the mood being ruined when some TV company genius decides to drop an ad break straight in the middle of the pivotal emotional scene (because nothing says “I’ll help you battle your debilitating illness” better than switching to an advert for garden peas).

At least with the above example you don’t actually miss any content (you’re just left with a deflated atmosphere which the director spent months perfecting and an hour of the film building up to). Watch motor racing and you’ll curse when it goes to a commercial break halfway through the race and then curse some more when it returns and you discover the guy who was leading is sixth, the guy who was second has crashed and the new leader appeared from fourth to capitalise on the confusion. But at least you’ll have learned that The Sun has an exclusive interview with a celebrity (you’ve never heard of) about her marriage break-up (which you don’t care about).

Anyone who’s used the internet will be familiar with pop-up advertising which, helpfully, opens a hundred new windows about Viagra and sex with college students when you click on a link about a kitten stuck in a tree. Thankfully enough people saw a niche in developing software to block it all, but it still persists.

Surely it’s the people who accost you in the street who are among the worst though. These are the people who you deliberately go out of your way to avoid making eye contact with and yet they still thrust a leaflet under your nose, advertising something to revolutionise your life (cut price carpet cleaning services! How did you survive before?). The correct response is to say, “If you want them put in the bin, do it yourself”.

Advertising has its place but its place is not right under my nose. I’m a big film fan, so I like to see all the trailers and artwork for movies before they’re released. I’m aware that many people aren’t though so I wouldn’t want them splashed across every medium going (even I got to the point of violence about how many times I was subjected to the bloody Avatar trailer). What’s the answer? Well, in this case I know where to go, specifically, on the internet and I watch all my trailers there. Problem solved. Granted, I don’t imagine there are many avid fans of toilet cleaners who will sit, with baited breath, waiting for a new, improved formula. But on the other hand, as much as I like my toilets clean, I really don’t care.

If you’re going to subject me to commercials for a product I’ve never heard of (and don’t care about) at least make it entertaining. After all, that’s why people watch TV; to be entertained. I actually don’t watch much, but one of the greatest (and simplest) adverts ever was a John West tuna one where a bloke has a fight with a bear, which clobbers him with a roundhouse kick before getting kicked in the nuts. It’s entertaining because it’s funny and it’s funny because it looks real. And I don’t even like tuna, but I remembered it so it’s successful. If I was ever tempted to give the fish another chance, John West is the brand I’d head for. At the other end of the scale I doubt I’ll ever forget the aforementioned Go Compare brand but I’d chop my arm off before I used any of their bloody products, out of general principal.

John West: Genius.

3D Movies

3D isn’t new. Back in my youth I remember having plenty of pairs of those crappy card glasses with one red and one blue ‘lens’ (that’s code for coloured piece of transparent plastic). Comics looked like a weird distortion of colours without the glasses and not much better with them. The same was true of cinema. 3D films have existed for a century although it never really took off and was avoided by mainstream (one exception which sticks in my mind is the poor Jaws 3D from 1983). Admittedly I haven’t seen groundbreaking 1903 film, L'arrivée Du Train but I bet the locomotive in question looks resplendent in various chunks of red and blue.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock you’ll be familiar, in name at least, with the film that kick-started the current 3D frenzy; Avatar. As I said, films were released in 3D for many years prior to Avatar’s 2009 release but it was the first movie to really capture the public’s imagination due, in part, to technology advancements and the vision of James Cameron. Oh, and the fact that the movie studios realised people would stomach an additional premium to see 3D movies.

Avatar went on to take $2.7bn at the box office, eclipsing the previous recorder of twelve years, Titanic, by an eyebrow-raising $940m. Not a bad hit rate for Cameron, since Titanic was the previous movie he’d directed. Anyway, many people have criticised the $2.7bn figure, pointing out that (even with inflation considered) 3D ticket prices are more expensive and so the success is skewed. Either way, studio bosses who can sniff money from half a mile away quickly jumped on the bandwagon. In the year pre-Avatar twenty 3D films were released. In the year that followed that number had almost doubled, with thirty eight. The following year saw fifty six released. You get the picture.

A number of these later releases have been retro-fitted, meaning that they were shot in conventional 2D and then converted afterwards during post-processing. Cameron, in particular, is especially disparaging of this method. Why? Because the effect is not as realistic (and by ‘not as realistic’ I mean, ‘it looks crap’). The Clash Of The Titans remake is one film that had the 3D conversion treatment, and I can vouch that it adds nothing to the film and, in fact, makes it look laughably bad in places. Who did they give the job to? Did someone download a shareware copy of ‘My First 3D Movie v1.0’ from the web and use that on an old 486 PC? Piranha 3D was also manipulated this way but I was too caught up in Kelly Brook being motorboated by a porn star to pay attention to the quality of the conversion (it’s got piranhas in it though and they fly out of the screen!).

Avatar was filmed with dedicated 3D cameras but it’s a very expensive way to shoot. Studios have, therefore, started pumping out these 3D conversions, but why didn’t they do it sooner? Because it’s still a bloody expensive process. You’re looking at a cost of up to $100,000 per minute of film. The decision to convert Clash Of The Titans was apparently made late in the day and yet still took ten weeks, at a cost of $4.5m. However, on the flip side they’re now in the position where they can charge an additional $5 a ticket to see the movie, which pushes the income beyond the additional expenditure. It’s the very definition of the phrase ‘cash cow’. Who cares about the quality?

So what do I think? Not that you should really care, but I’d echo Cameron’s sentiment that, essentially, bad 3D is worse than no 3D. I haven’t even mentioned that the 3D process darkens films markedly (a criticism which plagued The Last Airbender). Do it properly, or not at all.

Personally, I don’t really care which way movies go as long as they’re good. I don’t want to see crap 3D any more than I want to see bad CGI. I look back on some of my favourite films over the last few years and I’m grateful that 3D wasn’t around to ruin them. Make good movies first and foremost and don’t attempt visual spectacles at the expense of everything else. And this applies to you too Cameron, so don’t sit back all smug. Yes, Avatar looked fantastic but as a film it’s only passable and very clichéd. I watched it once and enjoyed it, but I’m not tempted to make repeated viewings. And you’re responsible for a million parodies and endless ‘giant Smurf’ jokes we’re bombarded with every time it’s mentioned.

Fox Hunting

Apparently foxes are a pest, hunting is traditional and if we go gallivanting around in the country tearing them limb from limb everyone is happy. Bollocks.

I don’t consider myself to be a tree hugging, animal loving, eco-mentalist but some things stand out as being patently wrong. Fox hunting is one of them. And I don’t even mean the fact that people wish to hunt them, it’s the method in which they want to hunt. The proponents are not hunting these animals stealthily with rifles or poison, no, they’re talking about a large group of dogs (trained to kill) and a group of pretentious toffs on horseback. The whole lot of them will tear across the countryside, trespassing into private land, damaging property and chasing their quarry for miles before it is finally caught and savaged.

So, what’s the excuse for this barbaric behaviour in this day and age? It’s a 500 year old tradition. So was chopping people’s head off but we eventually saw better of that and changed the way we dealt with things. It’s a really poor excuse and yet seems to be the one that every supporter wheels out. It used to be tradition to burn witches too, but I note that David Copperfield never seems to get any grief.

What’s next? Oh yes, the vermin argument. Foxes are a pest to farmers and need to be controlled. Forget that nature is proven to do this all by herself, let’s make man the decider of the fates of all species shall we? Foxes play a role in the population control of other animals, such as rabbits, moles etc but this seems to be glossed over. I’m sure farmers love a big family of moles messing up their fields. Anyway, let say they’re right – foxes are a pest and their population needs controlling. Don’t we normally do that with poison or disease? After all we used Myxomatosis to try and control the aforementioned rabbits. Maybe if we hadn’t killed all the foxes we needn’t have bothered. If you really want the sport element, take a rifle and stake them out. At least when you shoot one there’s a better chance of a quick death and you won’t have run a pack of dogs and horses across someone’s back garden.

So what other excuses do they have? Oh yes, employment. Think of all the job losses! Again, the absurdity is astounding. So the fact that a practice provides employment makes a justifiable excuse for its existence? Well in that case if we re-introduced some old-school Roman gladiator schools and amphitheaters we’d create loads of jobs. We could even use unemployed people as the gladiators; everyone’s a winner!

No, in reality there is no place for fox hunting and not one reason I've heard comes close to convincing me otherwise. It’s an excuse for ostentatious upper class aristocrats to dress like nineteenth century military officers and prance about on horseback, supposedly charging into battle. Grow up.

Toothpaste: A Marketing Scam

This subject’s had me scratching my head for years. You go to buy some toothpaste and head for a leading brand (because you don't trust the supermarket's cheap own brand to actually work). Upon strolling up to the display, what are you presented with? A plethora of colours designed to confuse you into buying the most expensive option. It's a marketing masterpiece. I mean, a quick look at the Colgate website reveals the following options:

Colgate Total Professional Weekly Clean;
Colgate Total;
Colgate Total Fresh Stripe;
Colgate Total Plus Whitening;
Colgate Total Advanced Fresh;
Colgate Total Advanced Clean;
Colgate Sensitive;
Colgate Sensitive Pro-Relief;
Colgate Sensitive Whitening;
Colgate Sensitive Multi Protection;
Colgate Sensitive Enamel Protect;
Colgate Time Control;
Colgate Oxygen;
Colgate Cavity Protection;
Colgate Triple Cool Stripe;
Colgate 2 in 1;
Colgate Sensation Deep Clean Whitening;
Colgate Anti-Tartar Plus Whitening;
Colgate Ultrabrite;
Colgate Smiles;
Colgate Max Fresh;
Colgate Max White;
Colgate Blue Minty Gel.

What the hell? That is the honest-to-God list of toothpastes taken from Colgate’s website. I’ll save you counting them; there are 23. I don’t think I’d be alone if I said I just want the one that does everything. If I get Ultrabrite does that mean I'll have shiny teeth but they'll fall out because my gums are weak? Does Max Fresh give you awesome minty breath, but black teeth?

Which one does it all, dammit?

Maybe you're supposed to buy one of each and mix them up in a bowl before dipping your brush into it each morning.