// The World we Live In
Credit Where It’s Due
Now, I must admit that correspondence from my credit card providers always makes me feel a bit nervy. The monthly statements are bad enough, but when they send me something else out of the blue I always imagine that on opening it I’ll find a letter stating something along the lines of “you’re a fraud, we’ve found you out and you owe us mister. Oh yes, you owe us…”
So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I peeled open an envelope from Barclaycard last night, fully expecting – based on the previous horrors of my day – that judgement day had finally come and my savings were about to be shot away.
What I found instead was that they’d decided to double my credit card limit.
I must say this irks me somewhat. Considering the current economic crisis it strikes me as being hugely irresponsible to be increasing anyone’s opportunities for getting into debt, especially mine.
But there seems to be an odd attitude abroad at the moment. Everything seems to be geared towards making people more comfortable with spending their money to keep the economy going, and penalising those people who have, you know, not overstretched their mortgages, tried to regularly save and so on.
So please please please can someone explain precisely why spending your way out of debt actually works as a concept? Because at the moment it seems utterly nonsensical to me and I’m worried that by slowly paying off and closing down my credit cards I’m in some way ruining the social fabric of our country…
Posted on December 11, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 4 Comments
Carry on Sergeant?
I must say, I’m rather bemused by the national outcry over John Sergeant’s resignation from (the stupidly named) Strictly Come Dancing.
Now, I don’t care for either of them, but this and the continuing outry over how far some X-Factor hopefuls got just confirms my belief that there’s a problem with the way people in this country vote. Why in God’s name do people get so attached to people who are crap?
It’s a dancing competition for God’s sake. Entertainment yes, but many things are and as far as I’m concerned fun is something so fundamentally important as to be taken seriously. (In the same way as nothing is so sacred it can’t be poked fun of.)
I’m sorry, but people who are daft enough to vote for someone who can’t dance in a dancing show clearly deserve to lose their money in order to teach them a lesson. (Preferably to go to charity, natch.)
Jesus… this voting for people who amuse us is what got bloody Johnson in after all.
Posted on November 22, 2008 | Filed Under Film, TV, Theatre, The World we Live In | 1 Comment
A Tailor-made Saint
Yesterday was, apparently, the feast day of a patron saint of tailors.
But the best thing is the saint’s name: Saint Homobonus.
How cool is that, eh?
Posted on November 14, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 0 Comments
Bloody Hell!
I mean… I hoped he’d win, but… still.
Reeling just a little bit.
Lets hope his landslide victory doesn’t lead in eight years to the same disappointment our own President Anthony Blair took us on a journey to…
Posted on November 5, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 0 Comments
Feeding Frenzy
Coming back from Luton airport the other week, Theresa switched on the radio – as is her wont – to Radio 2 where, to a certain degree of horror on my part, we found ourselves catching the last half of Russell Brand’s radio show.
It was, naturally, the now infamous one with Jonathan Ross and the prank calls to Andrew Sachs. And at the time I thought (as I usually do of most of their material to be frank) that it was juvenile, puerile and that the whole thing was a bad bad idea.
Frankly I was embarrassed listening to it and felt really rather bad for Andrew Sachs.
But I can’t help but feel that the events unfolding over the last week were somewhat of an overreaction. Needless to say, the Daily Hate Mail led the charge, gleeful as ever to have a stick to beat the BBC, and Jonathan Ross, with. And it succeeded in whipping up the complaints from a mere couple after the show aired (which I’m genuinely surprised by – I would have expected more) up into the tens of thousands.
And I feel a little bit uncomfortable about that. If it hadn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t been for all of this it might have had the chance to peter out with dignified apologies and no carping and sanctimonious speeches and editorials, no villagers wielding torches and so on.
Sachs was owed an apology, now received (although why it should be our business to know this I have no idea – Ross at least tried to personally deliver his apology and gift privately) and I do think they should be rapped over the knuckles over the whole thing. But I absolutely hate seeing the BBC got at by the mosquitos of the tabloid press like this as if they are the arbiters of what is right and wrong.
I mean… the vacuous and borderline immoral shite that the free presses peddle is beyond belief and yet they get away with it time after time without censure.
Ultimately the only person out of this who has come out of it with any dignity is Sachs himself who, it is telling, was only after an apology.
His granddaughter on the other hand… I must say I’ve rather taken against. Anyone who uses the word “justice” to mean “I got my revenge” is as far as I’m concerned easily as bad as the Middle Englanders whose outcry inflated this whole affair.
Although seeing the Mail take up arms alongside a self confessed Satanic Slut has been deeply amusing.
I’m pleased Brand resigned in a way, though. Not so much because I can’t stand his work (and I really can’t) but because he has done the right thing.
And I hope that a good many politicians take note.
Posted on October 30, 2008 | Filed Under Film, TV, Theatre, The World we Live In | 2 Comments
Maltese Musings #3 – Boyz II Men
It’s interesting, I think, how different nationalities’ males age differently. When I was in Berlin, for example, I found it quite striking how many of the German boys (for which I also include young men) were amazingly chiseled and smooth of skin, and yet from observational evidence it seemed as if their destinies would involve a sudden transformation into pink leather the second they hit 35.
Now, other Rob, with whom I do the Griffin Quiz, mused prior to the holiday that he’d heard Maltese Boys were hot and I remember assuring him I would verify whether or not this was true.
But actually that kind of became rather tricky. Malta’s primary industry is that of tourism, which kind of made it difficult to tell whether the guys we were (hopefully) subtly eyeing up were Maltese, foreign tourists, or foreigners who’d settled in for a bit. So basically anyone of a vaguely Mediterranean bent got lumped together into one, really.
But yes, within that category there was a certain amount of hotness it must be said.
One thing, though, to hark back to my earlier point, was that even if you did sit and decide on some alleged Maltese Boy who you thought was fit, there was always the ever present spectre of the Maltese Man to take the edge off your enjoyment. There were, on the whole, a great number of older Maltans who had a clear enjoyment of food and beer and a definite aversion to hair removal.
I generally thought I’d be too scared to get off with a guy in case I accidentally pulled a ripcord and had to watch as he suddenly inflated and sprouted new fur.
It’s a crass generalisation of course (and us Brits don’t exactly age well a lot of the time) but the observational evidence was certainly in support of the theory.
Posted on October 25, 2008 | Filed Under Holiday Excess, The World we Live In | 0 Comments
Working from Home
What a marvellous invention this is. There are, I think, fewer greater pleasures to be found in life than emerging from your pit of a grey weekday morning and making a cup of tea at the same time you usually find yourself hoofing it for the bus in the pouring rain.
Of course, the downside is that I’ve spent the day trapped in a cold house waiting for the plumbers to arrive at some unspecified time in the morning to fix the heating. But hey.
The arrived an hour ago which somewhat stretches my understanding of the word “morning” but who am I to judge?
Happy National Customer Service Week, by the way…
Posted on October 7, 2008 | Filed Under My So-Called Life, The World we Live In | 0 Comments
And lo… the pillocks crumble…
A friend of mine on Facebook pointed me in the direction of this article by Mark Steel entitled “Quick These Bankers Need Rescuing” and I have to say I think it’s one of the best articles I’ve read in a while. (I’ve always liked Mark Steel – he’s very sharp.)
The opening paragraph sums up my current feelings on the banking crisis quite well:
The next move, presumably, will be to nationalise the country’s gambling debts. To revive confidence amongst blokes in betting offices, the Government will hand over ?Ǭ£300bn to cover the money they’ve lost. Then a leading gambler will be quoted as saying: “This package goes some way towards restoring calm. The last week has been horrendous. One of my friends lost a ton on an 8-1 shot he’d been assured was a banker by a minicab driver.”
The thing that’s currently galling me is the Prime Minister’s decision to up the guaranteed savings limit from ?Ǭ£35,000 to ?Ǭ£50,000. Which, given that the ordinary man and woman in the street was probably well covered by the previous level, means that what he’s doing is bailing out the people with lots of savings – precisely the people who have been benefiting from the dodgy banking practices they knew were shameful anyway.
So frankly I think I’m well justified in thinking “fuck ‘em”.
Posted on October 2, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 1 Comment
A Question of Democracy
Much is being made at the moment of the fact that Gordon Brown is under attack from inside and outside of his own party and generally it does look like he won’t be able to hold on much longer.
I think this is all generally pretty unfair, to be honest, but there we go. That’s a discussion for another day, really.
What is annoying me though is the constant references to what will happen if he goes and that the country will then end up with another prime minister that it didn’t vote for.
Er… hello? Since when has this country voted for its Prime Minister? I think, roughly, it comes to about never. It votes for its governing party, and the leader of that becomes Prime Minister. We don’t vote for the guy at the top, it’s not the way the system works. Please, people, try and put that idea out of your heads.
So if shortly a general election is announced please don’t vote for the party based on the leader, vote for the party itself. (And if you do that, you’ll note, Cameron becomes a much less attractive option, because however reasonable he sometimes looks, the Conservative party itself is still definitely a bunch of c**ts.)
Posted on September 14, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 2 Comments
Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious #4208
Yes folks, today’s “no shit, Sherlock” award goes to the researchers who have decided that good posture is a way to combat back pain.
Thanks guys. What next: the best way to avoid a hangover is not to drink excessively?
Posted on August 20, 2008 | Filed Under The World we Live In | 0 Comments