Great pub talk about stuff that doesn’t matter

Now, I know for absolute certain that there are a number of readers of this blog, but very few ever leave comments. The principal purpose of this entry is to try to get people to actually contribute. Well, and to improve my own social life. I REALLY want to hear contributions on this one folks, even if you come back and add them in six months.

The idea is to identify the top ten topics as a subject for pub conversation. A good pub conversation is something that people will tend to have strong opinions on, yet is completely inconsequential so is unlikely to accidentally offend or accidentally lapse into socially divisive profundity. It is a celebration of all that is great about shallowness.

Here are my starting offerings (forgive me for I shall doubtless add more as comments to my own blog, which seems faintly egocentric):

1. Who was the more talented Beatle? Lennon or McCartney?
2. At what stage exactly did Friends stop being funny and why?
3. Which year was the best for “Big Brother”?
4. What was the best number one of the 1980s?
5. What song would be a better national anthem for the UK than "God save the Queen"?
6. Which is the best ABBA album and single?
   

Feel free to contribute answers to any of the above questions, but PLEASE add similarly inane questions.

Cute and funny v tedious and depressing

When surfing youtube a while ago, I came across this brilliant spoof song by one Stephen Lynch. It really is funny and it's so worth looking at. I did laugh. Have a look at it by clicking here. That shoudl take you to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkx8khougwY

He's also a bit of a cutie to boot, eh?

Oh God, as I write this I'm watching East Enders special Christmas Day edition. Because it's East Enders, one of the longest running characters has just died. Why do they always do something miserable on East Enders for Christmas? I'm a bit "bah humbug" about Christmas, especially this year as the first Christmas since my parents split up, but I want cheering up a bit rather than depressing. East Enders is so self-consciously gritty that it's just plain depressing.

Japanese Paris syndrome

I just love this story I heard of today. Read it by clicking here. Honestly, it's so worth it.
It's almost wonderful how much different nationalities conform to the stereotype.

Cartoon legend snuffs it

It’s sad that Joseph Barbera has died. He was half of Hanna Barbera, who made the most excellent cartoons that people my age grew up with.

It’s always been odd to me that Disney have a bigger name, when Disney’s cartoon characters were frankly rubbish compared to MGM (who Hanna and Barbera previously worked for) and HB studios later. Really, the most minor characters in HB cartoons were better than any of the Disney characters. Rosemary the telephone operator’s bit parts in “Hong Kong Phooey” were more memorable than anything I’ve ever seen Mickey Mouse do. It’s such a shame that HB didn’t open the theme parks. Disneyworld is excellent (I’m gay, remember) but just how excellent would it be if the characters there instead of being lame arse nothingness like Minnie Mouse were instead Scooby Doo (not Scrappy Do though, which was a serious error), Top Cat, Hong Kong Phooey, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Dick Dastardly and Mutley? Disney, or more precisely Pixar, have come up with some excellent characters in recent years but HB were always in the lead when they were still in the game.

Isn’t it curious how if you were to ask people to name a cartoon character, many would say Mickey Mouse first, even though few will have ever seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Something to do with branding I suppose.

Christmas carols

I just heard a Christmas carol for the first time this year. It surprised me how lovely it was and how much it made me connect with childhood feelings of Christmas, instead of adult hassle of Christmas. One so rarely hears Christmas carols these days because shops just endlessly play bloody awful compilation albums of bloody awful Christmas pop songs. Instead of “silent night” or other beautiful songs, we endure an endless loop of Slade and Yoko Ono singing “a velly melly Cleesemas.” Happy Christmas (War is Over) my arse, Mr Lennon. I really do want the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be over, as do most people in Britain and America, but our earnest wanting doesn’t seem to make any difference. Christmas really isn’t about politics anyway, especially the naïve sixth form nonsense you passed off as philosophy. I've always really quietly had it in for the myth of John Lennon.

Stop! Season of goodwill and all!

I do wish that it were easier to hear more of “O come all ye faithful!” and the like. They are simply more lovely songs than the pop trash. I should remind you that this statement comes from somebody who genuinely loves "STEPS", so I've no objection to pop music whatever! There's a time and a place though. Do we not hear them because shops are afraid somehow of upsetting non-Christians? If so, isn’t the mere mention of Christmas a problem?

I do like to hear “Stop the Cavalry” by Jona Lewie and the Band Aid song though. They can stay.

Financial learnings of the Great Britain for make benefit glorious nation of Romania

Greetings from Bucharest Otopeni airport. I’ve been in Romania for a few days, teaching how to account for complex financial instruments that to a large extent don’t yet exist in this country to a small group of appreciative, motivated and generally pleasant people.

I am fond of Romania. The Economist newspaper recently fairly described it as a charming and spirited place. These are the last couple of weeks of Romania being in Europe but not in the EU, as 1 January heralds what I hope will be a real new start for this poor but potential-laden country.

If you sneer at the idea of Bucharest, first look at the town around you. If you live in Wigan, your home does not measure up to Bucharest in terms of charm, prettiness and things to do. It’s also unlikely that your neighbours are as nice. Here are some things about Romania that I find interesting:

• “Cold Mountain” was filmed here. To be fair, so was much of “Borat”. Much of the Romanian countryside is remarkably beautiful.
• The people from Borat’s village are much miffed at being misled about the eventual film. They are each speaking in Romanian in the film, which is odd as Borat himself speaks semi-disguised Czech.
• The price of land around Bucharest has gone up by a factor of about 20 in the last few years.
• A few years ago, I failed to take advantage of an investment opportunity to buy land in Bucharest.
• The language is surprisingly easy to understand, being that it’s the closest surviving language to Latin. As almost all the TV’s in English with Romanian subtitles, just about everybody has enough English to communicate and they’re happy to.
• The people are distinctly Latin in temperament. They have little of the sullenness and arsyness that so characterises many Slavic countries.
• Ceausescu’s “securitate” had a reputation for being the most brutal of the communist secret police. They’d have to be; getting Romanians to obey anything, including traffic signals, would require some measure of brutality even today.
• The currency is the new leu (lion in English). The old leu was hyperinflationary, meaning that an average hotel meal could easily set you back over a million. There were 50,000 to the pound. Last year, they launched the new leu. This confusingly knocked off four zeros instead of a vastly more intuitive three or six. New sparkly indestructible Australian style plastic bank notes were issued, to replace the sparkly plastic indestructible bank notes that had only very recently been introduced.
• People still speak in terms of the old leu. When somebody asks for 26,000 lei, they really mean 2.6 lei. Generally, I meet this confusion by stuffing the equivalent of a 50 pound note in their hands and wait for a total surprise about how much change I get. To date, I’ve never been short changed, despite it seeming that I haven’t the first clue of what the money means. (I have a habit of checking afterwards when I have time). I fear that the same would not be true of taxi drivers and street hawkers in England.

At airport security, the same rules apply here as in the UK; with our recent paranoia that small bottles of water may be an immediate threat to life. In the UK, there are always the plastic boxes the other side of security that contain a querulous and petty little collection of nail files, small nail scissors and the occasional corkscrew. I just saw a similar collection here, except that it was augmented by flick knives, Swiss army knives and, most amusingly, a foot long wooden mallet with metal spikes at the end of it. This didn’t fit in the plastic box, so had been left on top of it, within easy reach of anybody else who had just passed through security. I can only imagine the argument that would have ensued as this was confiscated; presumably from an irate chef. It would not have been out of context to see hand guns and assault rifles in there as well.

In Russia, I’d find all of this truly scary. Somehow here in Romania, it’s funny and oddly charming. As the Economist said, it’s a charming and spirited place.

A rant about organic food

I’ve just been reading some facts (I like me facts, me) about how it’s actually more environmentally friendly to buy New Zealand lamb in the UK than Welsh lamb. This is a thorny subject which I suspect will elicit a response from a certain blogee and I have to say I’m not convinced entirely, but it’s interesting to consider the facts. What appears to be the right thing to do so very often isn’t. For the curious or the Welsh amongst you, this is apparently due to the fact that production in New Zealand requires virtually no energy and the meat is cheaply transported by slow, densely packed boats.

Take organic food. Well, if you must. It is now a talisman of being posh and English to buy organic food, as to feed kids anything other than organic food is seen as downright evil. I’m afraid I think the evil is the school run filling the middle class roads with cars and helping fragment society, but that’s a different matter. Here are a few facts about organic food that somewhat challenge the bogus green credentials of “going organic”:

It takes vastly more space to produce than intensively farmed food, especially organic meat. There’s not enough land for Britain to feed itself organically.

Organic is resolutely NOT a synonym for environmentally friendly. It is very rarely produced locally, often instead being airlifted from warm places far away. Sorry folks, but if you want organically produced asparagus and mandarins with your Christmas dinner, they didn’t grow in the Costwolds. They started their journey to your table being packed into a crate to fit into a 747 somewhere a long way away, quite possibly by people who would see a job with Nike in Indonesia In environmental and ethical terms, the avoidance of pesticides isn’t the issue. as a bit of a step up in their earning potential.

Farmers’ markets are bollocks. Have you ever seen the inside of a Tesco truck? It’s packed to utilise every centimetre and is a remarkably efficient way of getting stuff from its point of production (“A”) to its point of consumption (“B”). Driving a 4x4 with one passenger to a farmer’s market 20 miles away to buy some carrots and broccoli produces a warm feeling of being at one with nature, but also a much bigger carbon footprint than Tesco’s mass logistics. Of course, it would be rather good if Tesco favoured local suppliers and they would if we really wanted them to. Tesco would sell pretty much anything if we showed any sign of wanting to buy it. That’s the plus side of them being psychopaths.

I am always amused at the sight of 4x4s parked outside organic shops (there’s one in Chorlton in Manchester if you fancy a look at what I mean). The irony would be funny if climate change weren’t such an immediate crisis. The reality, of course, is that people aren’t actually buying organic food. They’re buying the idea that they’re a nice person and they don’t care to look too deeply under the surface to things as pesky as facts.

While we’re on a roll, let’s have a look at the Common Agricultural Policy.

The CAP is an abomination. It may have made some slight sense in the 1950s (especially if you were French) but it’s a nonsense now. It indisputably keeps the price of produce higher than it would naturally be. I’ve heard reliable estimates that each family in the UK pays EUR 900 more than it would need to each year because of CAP subsidies.

Such things don’t especially bother me because, let’s face it, me and pretty much all of my friends can afford to pay this premium for keeping Provence real priddy for our biannual trips to the Med. But a high proportion of Britain’s population get by courtesy of the ASDA value range. These kinds of costs matter to somebody earning the minimum wage. They matter a lot.

By keeping prices artificially high in the EU and paying EU farmers to over-produce, it makes it mightily difficult for farmers in developing countries to get a fair price for their goods. The CAP is a cruel barrier to fair trade and we owe it to people in developing nations to abolish it.

Which leads me onto “fair trade”. Ah, perhaps I should leave that for the next post while I wait for your shouts at me.

Gym bunnies

Today’s been busy so far. I’m flying to Prague for work and am on a Friday afternoon flight from Manchester to Prague. The flight, predictably, is full of stag night boys, each of whom is determined to have the time of his life. If that’s not possible, each seems to be earnestly determined to beat their “PB” for beers sunk. The drinking has clearly started and as far as I can see it’s all a very well intentioned affair. Nevertheless, the Friday afternoon MAN – PRG flight is basically the preserve of stag nights up for “doing it large”. Henceforth, I shall refer to Friday’s flight OK645 as “the vomit rocket”.

I managed to get to Homos Place for a personal trainer session this morning, which I’m proud of managing to squeeze in. Once again, there were two muscle men, who I think are German judging by their accent. I’ve no idea if they were trying to be funny (I instinctively assume not) but they were weightlifting together and rather egging each other on, in heavily accented English. Here are some of the phrases used to encourage each other through the pain of lifting remarkably big weights:

• “Harder! Come on, harder!”
• “Take it! It’s no good if it’s not hard!”
• “Hard, you want it hard!”
• “Yes, come on, that’s it, PUSH!”
• “Come on, make it hurt!”
• “Give me more, you KNOW you can give me more!”

Andy (personal trainer) and I rather followed them around for an hour, as it was completely class entertainment. I don’t think that they had any idea how much like some bad porn film soundtrack they sounded. We giggled like schoolgirls at some of the stuff they were coming out with. It’s all great fun.