Playing it Straight (or Jewish?)

Now I rather like trashy TV, me. It appeals to my inner chav.

To satisfy this need, the other night I was watching “Playing it Straight” on Channel ITV 7 (or something), as it’s mindless enough to watch whilst packing a suitcase. The idea is that a gorgeous girl needs to work out from a group of about 10 all very attractive men which ones are gay and which ones are straight. If she picks the man of her dreams, there’s a risk that he might turn out to be gay, in which case he wins $200,000 or something preposterous and she gets nothing except disappointment and national humiliation for the weakness of her gaydar. In a previous series, this happened but the deluding gayboy chose to split the winnings with her; presumably on strict condition that she didn’t try to celebrate with a shag.

It’s all fairly harmless fun, or so it seems. I happened to channel hop to something where some Jewish guy was being very earnest about persecution of the Jews. Fair enough, the Jews have had a seriously rough time. Then I realised that gays were also victims of the holocaust and are still seriously persecuted around the World.

Let me pitch an idea to you. How about a TV series where a group of blokes tries to get the amorous attention of a girl? If she accidentally picks one of the Jews though, he gets to keep the money and all the viewers get to laugh at how he was obviously Jewish and she must have very poor skills at spotting a Jew when she sees one. The point is that he’d have to hide his Jewishness for a several weeks to get there.

You buying the idea? Well, I hope not because it’s appallingly offensive. Yet we tolerate the idea that gay men hide their sexuality in the name of entertainment, with the show playing to every stereotype in the book along the way. The fact that this is OK (and that I’d not even thought it otherwise), yet the parallel Jewish show would have the square root of zero chance of being made really made me wonder. Either it’s time that Jewish people got over their past (and present) persecution, or that we gay men need to be much more alert to being ridiculed, lest this ridicule turn to something more sinister. Most probably some combination of both.

A query for Boris

Apologies for the lack of blog entries for ages. I've been simply excessively busy so I made a conscious decision to suspend just about all of my hobbies until I'd cleared my backlog. This included blogging.

Having moved to London recently for work, I have become reacquainted with all the city's good things (eg theatre) and its many bad things (principally everything to do with transport).
One of the things I have long despised about London is the sheer lack of taxis. London cabbies seem to be held in a public affection that I find wholly impossible to understand. There are too few taxis in London, especially at night. We all tolerate it and we shouldn't.
Boris Johnson is slightly mad but he's running to become mayor of London. Despite Boris's free market enthusiasms, I saw nothing on his website about specifics of exactly how he was going to improve London's pitiful transport system, should he become mayor. I therefore sent this query via his website:

"Hi

Could you please tell me what Boris’s position is with respect to taxi deregulation, or at least doing something that means it’s possible to get a taxi in London late at night? I’ve travelled to a lot of cities around the world and without doubt London has the most expensive, most hard-to-get taxis of any city I’ve visited. Many people don’t go into central London at the weekend because of the pain of getting home. This must be extremely bad for London’s economy and robs us of the facility to enjoy our city to its full potential.

If Boris were clearly to support a policy of loosening the grip that licensed taxi drivers have over cabs in London, he’d get my vote instead of Ken. I just can’t bear the idea of vast numbers of foreign visitors coming to London for the Olympics and finding that we have about eight taxis that work after 11pm and they cost a king’s ransom. In an age of GPS, there is simply no need for “the knowledge” and the restrictive practices that go with it. More, cheaper taxis would improve people’s lives much more than they might initially imagine.

Regards"

I shall let you know what reply I get.

Reinventing the wheel. Yet making it worse.

After Enron’s collapse, the US government passed a new law on corporate governance. This law placed all sorts of restrictions on what directors of listed companies could do, it imposed an obligation to maintain systems of proper controls; it tightened up procedures to ensure that auditors were more independent of the directors who appointed them, allowing the auditors to report more faithfully to the shareholders who were really employing them. So far, so good… sounding.

In reality, it’s a mess. The ensuing Sarbanes-Oxley Act (so named after its senate sponsors) is an over-long mess of box-ticking specificity and officousness without much by way of principles. It’s a classic case of a bad law being passed in a hurry to achieve a noble aim. It also highlights another characteristic of America that I find irksome; the lack of willingness to look outside their own country for solutions.

In the UK, we had our corporate governance scandals a decade earlier with the likes of Robert Maxwell raiding his employees’ pension funds to bolster up his fraud ridden empire. Our response was various calmly researched evidence based reports, culminating in the UK Combined Code. The Combined Code works. You can also print it out and fold it and put it in your pocket, which always seems a good characteristic to me of well drafted laws. Its authors, especially Sir Adrian Cadbury, are eloquent champions of practical, good corporate citizenship. Many of the “innovations” of Sarbanes-Oxley were rather similar to the UK’s existing rules, yet with an impractical bent added to them. They were thus neither innovative nor efficacious. There is fairly compelling evidence that directors of US listed companies are now unwilling to take normal commercial risks, such is the fear of personal liability they work under. This risk drives up their salaries. They are cutting back fiercely on R&D. Their companies are holding excessive cash balances. In other words, they’ve become scared of their own shadows. This is a bad thing in a free market system. At the same time, accounting firms and lawyers are all making bumper fees on “S-Ox” advice to directors, which I am sure is generally a lot of money for stating the obvious, yet providing directors with a literal “get out of jail” card if anything should go wrong. The whole thing means that investment is not happening and resources are being squandered.

Perhaps it’s because we’re a small country, but in the UK we have a noble tradition of looking abroad for solutions before trying to fix problems ourselves. In my experience, we should generally look to Australia first for solutions to most problems. No nonsense Aussie pragmatism has generally solved most problems already I feel. Our national football team has recently been managed by a Swede. Our royal family are basically German. We’ve allowed our domestic car manufacturers to die, because we knew they were rubbish. Nationalism should not be allowed to get in the way of commonsense.

Sarbanes-Oxley could be greatly improved by scrapping it, especially section 404 (too tedious to bore on about why here) and replacing it with the UK’s Combined Code. But that’s not going to happen.

28 years since they blew up Mountbatten

On this date in 1979, the provisional IRA blew up a small boat off the coast of Ireland that was owned by Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin or something or other of the Queen. I remember it very clearly and, interestingly to me at least, despite the fact that I was just ten years old and despite the time that’s lapsed, my views haven’t much changed.

Even at the time, I remember having formed the idea that Lord Mountbatten represented everything wrong about Britain and its colonial past. He was born into supreme privilege and despite having no recognisable skills held a series of lofty positions, including being the last Viceroy of India. Leaving aside the fact that Viceroy is a silly concept and Britain had no right to occupy India or anywhere else in the first place, surely such an important position ought to have been filled by somebody with some relevant skills, rather than simply being closely linked to the royal family. I have read a number of analyses of the latter days of British rule of India and in particular the manner in which Britain withdrew in an unorganised fashion; leading to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. No historian I have read had much good to say about him. He must have stood on many people of more lowly origin but incalculably greater talent in his allegedly distinguished career.

He had a castle in Ireland, apparently some relic of British imperial rule there too. Every single aspect about him that I have ever heard of says uniformly “upper class twit”. I have much respect for the institution of constitutional monarchy and great respect for the Queen as our head of state but, paradoxically I’ll accept, I have a considerable loathing for power that comes from inherited privilege. This is especially so when it’s twinned with natural arrogance.

One of the reassuring things about the British royal family is how essentially middle class they are in their values and lifestyles, despite the opulence that surrounds them. They are, however, surrounded by a ring of toffs who I to this day hold in considerable contempt. Many of said toffs are relics of defunct foreign royalty; deposed in their own country for being generally objectionable. Lord Mountbatten’s real name was Von Battenburg. Go figure. Prince Phillip (unloved husband of our Queen) is truly Prince Phillip of Greece. Prince Phillip is Louis Mountbatten’s nephew. Go figure again.

Now not saying that he deserved to die, but he did mouth off an awful lot and frankly if anybody is ever a legitimate target (big “if”), it was him and everything he stood for. At the time, I distinctly remember saying “no loss” or words to that effect, to the considerable surprise of my family. Having learned more about the man since, I’m afraid my sentiments remain entirely the same.

I must have been a very odd ten year old.

Why I love the BBC

I note that the BBC has been denied the licence fee income that it wanted. I am saddened by this as I personally am willing to tolerate some inefficiencies in the BBC if allowing some inefficiencies to exist means the BBC can focus on making programmes and not playing politics with the latest government fashion for consultants and targets.

We in Britain have this curious system of licence fees. If you own a television in the UK, you have to buy a licence for it, at an annual cost of GBP 135.50. This is used directly to fund the BBC, without going through a central slush fund the way our car licences do. Many people resent paying this, especially those on lower incomes who are less likely to watch as much BBC output as the intelligentsia. I think they have no idea what good value for money it is. For this fee, we get four main television stations, a suite of stations for kids (meaning that parents can park their kids in front of the TV in the knowledge that the kids aren’t being sold to by advertising). We get seven national radio stations, from the wonders of radio 4 (talk radio as it ought to be) to pop music. There is a network of local radio stations, which I’m not interested in but I’m glad they’re there. We get the outstandingly excellent BBC online, which I notice is most people’s home page, throughout the world. Per service provided per day, it’s amazingly cheap.

The BBC works out therefore at GBP 11 per household per month. Many, many people pay over three times that for satellite channels which are, in my opinion, rubbish. I’m glad that the choice exists but we need to remember that illusion that commercial channels are free really is an illusion. Commercial channels make revenue from advertising. Coca Cola, for example, must match the commercial spend of Pepsi to stay alive. Hence companies have to pay lots of money on advertising, which is passed on through the cost of their products. It’s a form of indirect tax. I believe that studies suggest that the true cost of commercial television is at least three times higher than the cost of the BBC.

I take heart from the fact that political parties all accuse the BBC of bias against them. This means the BBC is doing its job of investigating and not pandering to power. This is in marked contrast to American news stations, about which I have nothing much good to say at all.

I really believe that the BBC sets the standard in broadcast journalism. We Brits are no better than any other nation at believing our own propaganda and so we should be sceptical about generally touted views such as this. For example, my travels around the world have confirmed for me once and for all that Britain’s NHS resolutely is NOT the envy of the world, despite what people and politicians say. Indeed, most countries are somewhat bewildered by it. I’d take the Australian or French health care systems any day. The BBC really does stand for the best of British though; sometimes the received wisdom is actually wise. When big news breaks (and I mean news that people actually deep down believe is news, not missing kids in Portugal), they all switch to the BBC. BBC America enjoys a similar effect in the USA, I’m told. News and current affairs are the raison d’etre of the BBC. I’m awfully glad that more lowbrow channels exist, for I love my dose of Big Brother, but the BBC stands unique.

I believe that the licence fee is unfair and I think it creates an annual public relations nightmare that the BBC ought to live without, although this doesn’t mean the BBC ought to take any advertising. The BBC ought to be funded out of general taxation, with fees set by an independent board of governors with limited ability for the government of the day to resist this. It’s right that the government of the day has little control over the BBC’s policies but has control of the purse strings with the annual fight over setting licence fees. The BBC ought to be entirely independent of government, guaranteeing its constitutional place as the core of the independent news media. Partiality becomes obvious when compared with the litmus test of the BBC’s coverage.

So I do wish that we’d stop making the lives of those who run the BBC so bloody difficult. We seem to mourn the BBC rather than celebrate it. Sure, the BBC is occasionally politically biased. Sure, it can sometimes be a bit smug. Sure, I’ve met some people whose puffed up “I work for the BBC” manner does little to make up for their actual unendurable mediocrity. Overall though, the BBC is a thing of wonder. It’s always the thing I miss most when I’m out of the UK. Please let’s keep it special and realise how much value it gives to our society. Without recognising its value, we might lose it. Trust me, once it’s gone, you’ll miss it more than you’d ever imagine.

Dodging Dean

I’m currently on yet another work trip to Jamaica. As more frequent readers will know, I have rather mixed feelings about Jamaica. The last week has made me significantly fonder of it.

When I arrived, the taxi driver told me that a star was coming. Excited by the remote possibility that Matt Damon had finally come to claim me as rightfully his, I asked for clarification. Then I realised that “star” was heavily Jamaican accented “storm”. In these parts of the world, you don’t hear people talk in hyperbolic terms about hurricanes; they just talk about storms. If they’re recalling a particular storm, they talk about Gilbert or Wilma, as if talking of members of their family. Ivan is the Jamaican equivalent of Voldemort: the storm that shall not be mentioned by name. Ivan made a right mess. Ivan was a bastard.

I rather like the fact that they call a hurricane a storm. That is, after all, what it is, albeit a bloody big one.

Talk of the impending storm was always there in the background of most conversations, but it only came to the foreground on Friday. Hurricanes tend to change directions so often that people keep a watch on it, but don’t get too jumpy until a strike seems imminent. As ever, I was amused/ bemused by CNN, where presenters openly and pompously stated that the people of Jamaica They really weren’t; they just deal with stuff as it happens and in a proportionate way. God, I despise the American “news” media, for their sheer lack of professionalism. Huge storms are a constant risk here. If people panicked each time one might strike, they’d live in constant, debilitating fear, so the people of Jamaica keep are wary, but they don’t get carried away. Most people are OK in storms. Generally, if you have a house with a roof that’s not made of corrugated zinc, you’ll be OK. If you live away from the shoreline, you’ll be fine. It won’t be fun, but you’ll be fine. And it probably won’t happen anyway, so (to quote one of my colleagues here) “will ya get a grip, man!” I feel that Jamaicans could teach many people in the world a thing or two about dealing with the distant threat of terrorism. My own anxiety about hurricanes is understandable, but it’s fuelled by the media and is thus disproportionate to the real risk. were ill prepared and in denial about the impending catastrophe.

In fact, Jamaica has a very well organised system of dealing with impending hurricanes. They take the power grid down a few hours before the storm hits in order to minimise damage that live wires inflict upon themselves and thus minimise overall down time. They offer shelter to the poorest. They impose a curfew to limit looting because, God knows, there’s no shortage of less savoury Jamaicans who love nothing more than a nice bit of looting. In other words, they have it pretty much sorted. They know that hurricanes are a threat to the poorest and that’s where they dedicate their efforts; the rich are well enough resourced to look after themselves. The Jamaican authorities apparently spoke to FEMA in the USA as Katrina headed for New Orleans and said that their experience would be useful to help the poor of Louisiana, seeing clear parallels with their own situation. With predictable arrogance, the US authorities spurned the offer; countless Americans suffered or died as a consequence, while the authorities focused their attention on marshalling fleets of underfilled 4x4 cars out of town, leaving the poor in their homes below sea level to suffer without support.

I’m sounding rather anti-American. I don’t mean to; I like America and I adore the American dream. I just find it extremely frustrating and arrogant in parts.

We finished work at lunchtime on Saturday, three hours early to give people time to board up, etc. Most people have some and basics ready; only the terminally badly organised made a run on the supermarkets. Again, the news coverage was misleading. I’m afraid that if people can’t work out that they need to have certain non-perishable basics (torch, candles, battery powered radio with spares, tinned food, manual tin opener, bottled gas stove) ready for the season for the hurricane season, the Darwinian order is that their terminally poor organisation puts them at serious risk of involuntary removal from the gene pool. These people were a minority, but a minority that provides good pictures for television. Hence the World is presented with them as the norm.

I was planning to go to Florida for a few days in any event, as I had a layover and I’d prefer to spend it in Florida than Kingston. I brought my plans forward a day, as although I was rather tempted to experience a hurricane, but I feared the potential lawlessness that may follow from a direct hit from a category 4 storm. Jamaica’s not the most law abiding of places at the best of times. Desperate people and stretched emergency services could be a bad combination. I realised it would be foolish to stay, so I left, but I felt a coward in doing so. In the end, I left to avoid days of involuntary disconnection from my creature comforts, like itunes, blogging and Facebook. That’s the measure of how shallow I am.

The phrase “calm before the storm” should be taken fairly literally. One does indeed experience a significant calm, with blue clear skies and little wind. I can’t be sure that I’m reading something into this because I knew of the imminent storm, but there was a sense of something unreal. Atmospheric pressures plummet as a hurricane approaches, so perhaps we can all sense that? Certainly, the low lying land by the sea on the way to the airport was oddly flooded by a calm sea. It just looked and felt odd; the same way that a solar eclipse feels strange even before totality; the light is like twilight but with no long shadows. It’s obvious that something eerie is approaching. Seasoned locals told me that suddenly elevated sea levels are their natural warning to batten down the hatches. The low pressure literally sucks the sea up a good few feet. This is what causes the most damage; sea levels are high even when calm. Add a big storm to that and you don’t want to be too near the sea, or live below sea level. Guess where the rich people and the poor people live?

Let me just do a quick diversion into the story of the flight out. I got a flight to Atlanta, which Delta had laid on specially, presumably as a profit seeking enterprise. The flight was busy but not full. Stories of planes leaving full with stranded distraught people left behind do not tally at all with my experience. Despite the sense of emergency and despite having driven past homes that the very poor were in serious danger of losing, there was still no end of fuss from the overprivileged, overpampered and plain overfed passengers. The two girls in front of me (who were morbidly obese and were Jamaican-Americans I think) had asked the crew for four packs of peanuts before we’d even pushed back. They were, so they said, “starving”. I shit thee not when I say that one even pushed the crew call button to ask for more food as we were rolling along the runway for take-off. Trust me, they could have not eaten for three months and still be far from even thin. One had come equipped with a special extender seat belt because the standard one couldn’t reach around her girth. There’s something utterly wrong about this kind of scenario. I felt like I was one of Marie Antoinette’s closest helpmeets at this moment, just for being there. Some inner sense of morality made me decline the free food and drink. It just seemed wrong to feast as we flew out of a potential disaster zone. The people who’d driven us all to the airport, who had handled our bags and efficiently screened us through security were all staying and they weren’t making any fuss, yet “we” continued to be unreasonable and demanding. They had every reason to hate us, yet they didn’t seem to. Indeed, they mostly seemed to think it was a lot of fuss about a “starm” that might not even strike anyway, although it was seen as a real risk. It was seen as a particular risk as it had a male name. In a place as superstitious as Jamaica, the pattern that hurricanes with male names are the ones to hit the island has not gone unnoticed.

I’ve blogged separately about Atlanta airport, but I truthfully believe that riding out a category 4 storm would be less stressful than flying through American airports on international flights with American airlines (any of them rather than American Airlines the company, hence the lower case a in airlines; grammar matters!) I loathe Atlanta airport and the fuss coming out of Fort Lauderdale I shall bang on separately about that. Suffice to say that the calm way in which Jamaicans deal with real risks in a proportionate way compares exceptionally favourably with how the US government deals hysterically with overstated risks of terrorism. The Jamaicans address their risks; the Americans make lots of noise and fuss but don’t deal with the actual risks in anything like an efficient manner. today was inexcusable and a major security risk in itself.

So back in Jamaica, things are almost normal. The eye of the storm passed about 50 miles to the south of the island and it didn’t intensify to category 5. There’s a vast difference in the destructive power of category 5 compared with category 4 and a huge difference between a direct hit and a near miss. This hotel is still running on its own generators, but all is near normal. Only the pool remains closed. Such is their lack of fuss that I imagine there’s a good reason for the pool to be closed. I expect it will open again just as soon as they’re sure there’s no more glass in the bottom of it, or whatever the danger is.

I was staying at the Pegaus hotel. Courtesy of airlines’ odd pricing, it was cheaper for me to bundle two weeks hotel stay with the flight rather than just the flight, because it was then deemed to be a holiday. This means I didn’t check out of the hotel when I left, because I expected to come back. I did tell reception what I was doing, but I think they were a bit too preoccupied with the matter immediately in hand to pay much attention. When I arrived today, I found out that the hotel was closed as there had been a fire there. I began to explain what I’d done and the girl smiled and said “Ah, you must be Mr [my name]! We’d wondered what had happened to you!” For a hotel with hundreds of rooms, this was rather cute. It’s not been a good 12 months for the Kingston Pegasus hotel. Firstly it achieved notoriety for the alleged murder of Bob Woolmer. Then came Dean; immediately followed by a fire that caused its temporary closure. Apparently, one of the backup generators caught fire, with this fire spreading to the storeroom where they keep the drink. Jamaican rum, I am told with some chuckling by the remaining staff, turns out to be a mightily good fire accelerant. You couldn’t make it up, could you? So they booked me into the neighbouring hotel, from whence I presently blog. All is fine. It would be better if Sprit Airlines had managed to deliver my bag to Kingston as well as deliver me. My recent experience is that the people of Jamaica make considerably less fuss about hurricanes and hotel fires than the people of America make about routine baggage handling. I have decided that there is much about Jamaica that I like. If ever I’m here again when there’s a “starm cummin’”, I shall choose to ride it out.

STOP PRESS! Atlanta airport WORSE than LHR/ LGW!

Forgive the laziness of this posting. I admit that it's a cut and paste from an email I just sent to a friend. I'm still steeling myself for the blog about hurricane preparation that just has too much to say and will need serious editing down.

(Australian friend had just described herself as being so tired she was "flat out like a lizard drinking").

I love the slang “flat out like a lizard drinking”. I don’t entirely know what it means, having no more than the most trivial of knowledge of lizards and their habits, but I like the imagery of it. I’m in the USA at the moment, so anything figurative, metaphorical and generally not desiccated of all irony works well with me. As I’m sure I’ve banged on about a hundred times, America enthrals and appals in equal measure for me. Excuse me here while I relive a horror to help exorcise the ghost of it and deal with the stress….. I got here yesterday, having experienced the quite shocking horror of the process of arriving in Atlanta airport from an international flight. I won’t go on, but suffice to say that it was an entirely unnecessary drama and chaos that I seriously doubt even the Czech Ministry of Bullshit could have come up with. Basically, you go through immigration (drama), collect your bags (unseemly drama) then go through customs (drama). So far, so normal. However, you then re-check your bags as if embarking on a ghost flight, go through security for some ghost flight (utter drama), get a train to another part of the airport (drama as the layout of the airport makes no sense and the announcements are entirely unintelligible even to a native English speaker), get back on the train after getting off at the wrong place several times, then appear in some vast hall that merges seamlessly into a car park where there is a rabble of shouting people climbing over each other and shouting some more. This is the second baggage collection from Hell experience in an hour, but this one is so very much worse than the first. Last night, it took me nearly two hours to find the bags that I had already picked up in the same airport. As the whole thing is open to the general public, there’s always a very strong fear that it’s just been nicked by one of the many hovering n’er do wells. Just appalling: quite the worst airport experience I’ve ever had, including the Balkans, Africa and everywhere in Eastern Europe a decade ago. The whole scene was a disgrace to civilisation. The evil genius of the Bush administration is that somehow everybody blames this state of affairs on the irksomely misnamed “war on terror”. So don’t blame non-existent organisation, blame the darkies.