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War Of The Worlds

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Saw War Of The Worlds (2005) in the cinema on Sunday night, and I have to say that I was jolly impressed. I was slightly dubious about it because of a number of reasons, most notably:

  1. it is a remake
  2. of something that was originally not based in the US
  3. and written by a famous non-American author
  4. that has Tom Cruise in it
  5. and is directed by Stephen “Hollywood Ending” Spielberg
  6. and had the potential to be rather similar to Independence Day

The last point proved to be very false (save perhaps for the physical appearance of the aliens themselves), and despite the other points it was actually a remarkably good film. It’s certified 12A, but it is genuinely very frightening in some parts and probably should be a 15. There’s a couple of things I don’t like about it, in that there’s a glaring goof early on in the film when someone’s using a camcorder after an electromagnetic pulse.

There’s also the ending scene where everyone’s alive and well with the grandparents in their fresh, clean Christmas-present knitwear smiling in a somehow unscathed street in Boston, but to be fair this is actually true to the original, where the journalist returns to his alive and well family in an otherwise completed levelled Leatherhead, so that was very convenient for the Hollywood ending.

I liked the way that you didn’t see the big picture. Rather like Signs, you only get to see events from the perspective of the central characters, which are normal working people, rather than presidents and military generals and unsung heros. There was also none of the rubbish like “… and only one ordinary man has the key!“, Cruise’s character isn’t a hero, he’s just a normal man trying to protect his family. The events of the aliens’ demise simply unfold around him, he has nothing to do with it. It was very gritty and very real in that respect, he remained totally helpless and powerless.

Definitely a DVD purchase, possibly even a second viewing in the cinema.

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Democracy? Pfft!

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People say there’s no reason to be bitter about the outcome of the election. Labour won it fair and square, right? The result reflects the will of the people, like in any good democracy? Rubbish. There was nothing “fair and square” about this election and there’s every reason to be bitter about its outcome.

Now, let me blind you with statistics. Let’s first of all discuss this “will of the people” thing. While it is true that, by a whisker, Labour won the greatest proportion of the votes (35.2%), consider the following:

  • 35.2% is way under half of all votes cast. This means that 64.8% of votes cast were not for New Labour.
  • When taking turnout into account, only 22% of voters voted for Labour. The others either voted for another party, or didn’t vote at all. So now we have Labour winning with less than a quarter of the electorate voting for them.
  • Broadly, the proportion of the UK population that is eligible to vote is two thirds (very broadly: 60 million population, 40 million electorate). Applying this 2:3 ratio to the portion of the electorate that voted Labour means that just under 15% of the population voted for them. Yes, the current (or, technically, the soon to be formed) government was put in power by less than 15% of the population of the country, all of which have to live under its governance and law.

I’d therefore hardly call Labour’s win “the will of the people”, so don’t bleat on about it. The will of the people is apparently absolutely irrelevant when deciding who’s going to run the country.

Observe the charts below. Both show the same data, but in different ways. They both show the percentage of the votes each party received plotted against the percentage of Commons seats they won with that vote, the number of seats won is of course what counts at the end of the day.

Donut!

Donut!

Bar chart!

Bar chart!

Exactly how can a system be fair when it can allow a party to gain 24.7% extra seats with only 2.9% extra votes over the next most popular party? How the fuck does that work? I’m not saying that the Tories deserved to win, indeed their proportion of seats is very close to their proportion of the vote, so the system obviously works in their case, but look at the Liberal Democrats: 22% of votes were cast for them, yet they only get 9.6% of the seats. Their votes-to-seat ratio (in terms of percentage) is 2.29, yet Labour’s is 0.63, which means that the Libdems apparently had to work 3.7 times harder to win seats than Labour did.

Seriously, don’t talk to me about “democracy” and “winning fair and square”. There’s nothing democratic, fair or square about this whatsoever. As I’ve said before, don’t ask me to come up with a foolproof alternative, because I don’t have one and as I’m not a politician it’s frankly not my job to do so. But that doesn’t mean that I, as a voter, am not allowed to voice my great dissatisfaction with this so called “democracy”. Indeed, if the UK was a tin-pot sandy country in the Middle East, George Bush would have probably come and enacted regime change by now since the makeup of the government most certainly does NOT reflect the will of the people.

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Is there any hope left for Rover?

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BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Is there any hope left for Rover? – what’s wrong with this picture:

The collapse of Rover can also be attributed to Joe Public. Instead of blaming politicians and management, if you had been bothered about maintaining British manufacturing you would have all bought British, instead of buying cheaper foreign imports!
DW, Chicago USA (UK Expat)

Answers on a postcard please, send directly to the MINISTRY OF EX-PAT HYPOCRISY. Also:

I don’t see the directors of MG Rover rushing to put up their own money to save the business, so why should the government bale them out? I suspect that the directors will come out of this far richer than when they started.
Mark J, Stafford, UK

Uh, they put up £45,000,000. Are you living under a rock or something? Keep the fuck up.

This is perhaps more to the point:

As a truck driver, I waited 2 hours to get unloaded at Longbridge. Nobody wanted to know. They wonder why they’re losing their jobs!
Adrian Brackley, Cheshire

Part of the reason why Rover is such a dog is because it’s never really recovered from being crippled by the unions and their selfish, shortsighted jobsworth members in the 1970s and 1980s. The workers were perfectly willing to screw over Rover at the drop of a hat whenever it suited them. Well I’m sorry, but what goes around comes around. I’m sure Longbridge will be turned into a nice callcentre where you can all be retrained into doing something you’ll absolutely hate.

Don’t get me wrong, I regret the demise of Rover, I really do, but I feel sorry for the company rather than its workforce. I’m not saying they deserve to lose their jobs, but I am saying that they did nothing to help avoid this inevitable situation over the past 30 years.

Rover simply cannot continue to make shit old cars that nobody wants. It’s all very well to lay the blame for underinvestment in research and development and BMW’s door, but they cannot be held entirely responsible. After all, for a long time most of Rover’s output was based on Hondas, since Honda own (or at least, did own) 20% of Rover. Why is it that the same blame isn’t at least in part sent their way?

At the end of the day, Rover is a private company, in business, whether it’s got heritage or not. Would the government be bailing my company out if it was about to go under? I don’t think so. I’m sorry, but it’s a dog eat dog world in business, and if you make shit products that nobody wants then you can’t expect your meal tickets to continue to arrive ad infinitum. Let’s see your fucking unions argue with that.

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Canada catchup

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Not blogged as much as I intended, but then in all reality there’s only so much to blog about when you’re in a ski resort.

We arrived late on Sunday evening after a gruelling 23 hours of travelling (for me, at least, since I had to take a flight down from Manchester to Heathrow; Chris was already at his parents’ house) and went straight to bed. Straight onto the slopes on Monday morning but soon had to abort because my boots were all wrong. I had the same problem two years ago, intense pain in my feet, as if if they were being crushed in a vice. So we took to them to a professional boot fitter in the hotel who did the Canadian equivalent of sucking air over his teeth and muttering “which cowboy did this then?” as he measured my crazily flat feet and then put my boots in a furnace so he could basically change their shape to accomodate my unbelievably crap feet. The pain’s since gone, although it still hurts if I spend a long time on the cat tracks rather than doing downhill turns.

I had a lesson on Wednesday at level 3, which I breezed through and have since graduated to level 4 (of 6), with a lesson at that level tommorow (Sunday). I’ve done some free skiing, but unfortunately not as much as we would normally want because Chris has been rather unwell and has required several trips to the hospital and the dentist. One of his wisdom teeth has caused a problem whereby an infection has taken hold and basically filled one side of his face with pain. He’s now had it removed and is now all doped up on north American-strength painkillers and antibiotics, so no skiing, solid foods, alchohol, driving or pretty much anything else for him :(

The snow‘s been brilliant, especially for the time of year. Apparently, it’s been “the worst year on record” in terms of snow. It didn’t snow from the end of January right up until the night we arrived, apparently, at which point it snowed 10 inches, so that was quite well timed. It’s snowing again now and is set to continue to do so through Monday, which is fantastic considering it is the end of March, and by all rights, Spring. Much better snow than the last time we came, and that was peak season!

We’re going to try and take a trip to Vancouver on Monday to do the city thing that we’re so fond of. We rented a Ford Explorer at the airport after discovering that renting such a car for the whole holiday worked out cheaper than two shuttle services from the airport to Whistler. It also gives us the ability to drive around whilst we’re here too, which has been pretty essential while Chris has been ill. Last full day is on Tuesday and we come home overnight on Wednesday. Horrible jet lag will then ensue so I probably won’t be back on all six cylinders until Monday.

I am taking pictures but they’re going to be pretty much the same as the lot I took when we last came, except this time I have a much better camera.

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Three minute silence

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Grumpier Old Men :: Three minute silence for the tsunami victims – hear bloody here. This bit in particular is brilliant:

We were recently told by our government to observe 2 minutes silence for a Briton that had decided against government advice to go to a country at war to make a fast buck and was then kidnapped and executed after ignoring the advice of local people who warned him not to go to certain places and without military escorts.

Some weeks later another Briton in that country who had lived there half their life helping the poor repressed people of that country for no personal gain was kidnapped and executed but no silence. Why not?

I personally forgot about the three minutes’ silence and carried on working, and to be frank I didn’t notice anybody else stop for it either, whether in the office or outside my window. Buses didn’t “pull over” as the local rag would have me believe, people didn’t jump to a stop on the pavement, the phones kept on ringing and the builders kept on banging annoyingly.

Yes, it’s a terrible tragedy, but please, for the love of God, standing still for three minutes isn’t going to help anyone. It’s tacky, it’s nanny-state, it’s inconvenient and above all it’s extremely unnecessary. I refuse to have that hand-wringing sanctimonious Tessa Jowell telling me how I should feel and how I should mark those allocated feelings.

I’d also like to point out that the oh-so-generous United States’ contribution to the tsunami disaster relief fund amounts to just one and a half days of Iraq war costs. So fuck you Dubyah and your holier-than-thou aren’t-we-everyone’s-friend speeches. Your country is so fucking rich partly due to getting fat off the backs of countries such as India and Indonesia. I present exhibits A and B: Union Carbide and Nike. So yes, get your fucking money and marines over there as soon as possible, and take that fucking halo off your head. That is all.

By the way, Grumpier Old Men is what the Internet was invented for.

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JFK

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Watched JFK on DVD last night. An utterly splendid film with very high information compression, meaning you really have to pay attention to it throughout the whole 3 hours otherwise you WILL miss something. I didn’t know very much at all about Kennedy’s assassination up until now, I knew the basic story of course, including the fact that there was “a conspiracy theory”, but I didn’t know much beyond that. Personally I’m with Jim Garrison, and while I may not have been with him at the time (as I, along with the American public, probably wouldn’t have believed the US government to be capable of such things), I’ve had the benefit of seeing another 40 years of history pass by and witnessed numerous further acts of corruption, nest feathering and underhandness.

It was, of course, all about the war industry. Kennedy was a democrat radical, not exactly left wing, but certainly way too left wing for a lot of peoples’ liking. Kennedy was going to end the cold war with the Soviet Union and he wasn’t going to go to war in Vietnam, and of course this was all very bad news for those in the defence industry. The contemporary anti-communist witch-hunt was incidental, although it did not help Kennedy with his polices at the time. The links cannot be proven of course, but doesn’t that sound rather familiar considering what happened in the middle east last year? It’s the same thing every time – the economy of the United States more or less depends on there being a war in the world at any one time, whether US forces are actively involved or not. If there isn’t a war, they create one, otherwise they go into recession. They’re now even recreating the anti-communist witch-hunts, except now it’s with the largely unquantifiable foe known as “terrorism” – essentially an unrestricted meal ticket with no expiry date for the defence industry. It’s utterly sickening.

So now, 40 years on, what used to be an outrageous slur on the US government is more or less accepted as the way things are by the jaded and cynical publics of the world, and if Garrison thought that it was corrupt then, just think how he would feel if he knew what was to come: Nixon (whose corruption brought the country to the brink of crisis), arming the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and General Pinochet; right through to September 11th. Yes, I’m sorry, but I’m with the conspiracy theorists on that one, so many things just don’t make sense or sit right with me, but that’s another discussion for another day.

In summary, excellent film. An important part of United States history revealed, whether it can be proven or not. If you’re interested in United States history from that sort of time period, the film Nixon pretty much follows on from it as far as the timeline goes, although obviously it covers a different subject. Thirteen Days covers the Cuban Missile Crisis, which of course took place a year before Kennedy was killed. Kevin Costner stars in both JFK and Thirteen Days, but plays different characters in each.

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New Labour parable

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I nicked this off someone on the Internet, who nicked it off someone else, who in turn nicked it off some other person, and none of us have any idea who wrote it, so I won’t even bother with any credits beyond “I didn’t write this”.

The Original Version

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The New Labour Version

It starts out the same, but when winter comes, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. The BBC, ITV, CNN and all the rest of the News Reporters show up and provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to film of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

The entire country is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (The National Association for the Advancement of Green Bugs) shows up on Newsnight and charges the ant with “Green Bias” and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the frog appears on Trisha with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the Evening News and tell a concerned Trevor MacDonald that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly while the Conservative were in power.

Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with David Frost that the Ant has gotten rich off the “back of the grasshopper”, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the Ant to make him pay his “fair share”.

Finally the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act. RETROACTIVE to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of high court judges that are appointed from a list of single-parent welfare mothers who can only hear cases on Thursday afternoon between 1:30 and 3:00 PM when there are no talk shows scheduled.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ants food while the government house he’s in – which just happens to be the ant’s old house – crumbles around him since he doesn know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ants food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of cretins announcing that a new era of “Fairness” has dawned in the UK.

It’d be funnier if it wasn’t so dangerously similar to reality.

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Lift Culture

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Lifts these days play a very important part in my life. Before I moved to Manchester I rarely used to get into lifts due to various childhood nightmares that I won’t go into here. But since moving I’ve been forced to confront those fears and now I use lifts both at home and at work. In total I reckon I get into a lift around ten times a day, and as a result of this I’ve become something of a lift expert, not so much technically, but certainly in terms of etiquette, common misconceptions and culture.

For instance, there is a tale that if you’re midway up a building, and you call a lift, and one lift is on the top floor and the other on the ground floor, the lift from the top floor will come and get you as it requires less power to drop a lift than it does to lift it. Not true. Lifts are counterbalanced by a gigantic flat weight which runs up and down the lift shaft. When the lift is at the bottom, the weight is at the top, and vice versa. It therefore requires no more power to drop the lift as it does to bring it up, as if the motor’s dropping the lift it is at the same time lifting the weight. It makes no difference.

That was a technical example, which is different to actual etiquette, or in a number of cases, personal preference. For instance, I *hate* sharing lifts with people I don’t know. I’m a very territorial person anyway, so to be sealed in a small windowless box with someone for a period of time, no matter how brief, is quite intolerable. Luckily it doesn’t happen that often; at home I leave and get home at different times to everyone else in the building and at work the building’s not full yet so the (three) lifts are usually uncontended.

If sharing a lift with someone isn’t annoying enough, it only makes it worse when people do any of the following:

  • People who press already illuminated lift buttons. The lift’s control system already knows that the lift must stop at that floor, and has indicated so by illuminating the button. Yet people get in and press it again – why? Do they think it will get there EXTRA FAST if they press it more than once?
  • The same applies when calling a lift. If the button is illuminated, then the lift has been called. Sighing and pressing the button again, as if to suggest that the lift has somehow “forgotten” to stop at the floor and needs reminding.
  • This one’s great: Some, not many, but some people think that if you HOLD DOWN the button of the floor you want to go to, the lift won’t stop anywhere else until it gets there. Riiiiiiiiight.
  • Recursive door holders: God I hate these people. I *never* hold doors for people (see above re. sharing lifts), and as annoying as people might find this, I do it for a reason other than personal space. There’s nothing worse than when the doors are about to close and someone jumps in before they do so. The doors open and go through their cycle again, except now someone else is coming, so the person who jumps in presses the door open button and the doors reluctantly open again. That person then does the SAME THING for another person who’s lagging behind, and so it goes on. By this time the lifts at home are squealing because they’ve got some sort of fucking alarm that goes off if the lift remains open on a floor for more than an arbitrarily short amount of time.
  • People who live/work on the first floor yet insist on taking the lift to the ground floor. You’re coming down from 7th, usually in a hurry, and there’s some fucking idiot on the 1st floor who’s been waiting outside the lift for 5 minutes and is all huffy and sighing as a result who has to stop the lift ONE FLOOR from its final destination when they could have saved themselves and me a whole load of time just by WALKING DOWN ONE FLIGHT OF FUCKING STAIRS. When I build Stuii Towers, I will remove the lift buttons for the first floor and replace it with a key switch, giving the keys to disabled people, etc.
  • “My wife/mate/mum’s just coming” – people who’ve managed to get into a lift with you, but are holding the doors open for someone who’s fucking about in the boot of the car, or talking to someone in the lobby, or SOMETHING that indicates that they’re clearly not really interested in the fact that you’re being held up by them and their companion. This one time at home I entered the lift in the basement and these two horrible children ran in after me and kept their fingers on the door open button waiting for their blasted mother to get her Harvey Nichols bags out of the boot of her car. After a minute and a half or so of this, I asked the children (very nicely) if they would mind taking the next lift, to which they retorted with shouts of “NO!” and frowns and scowls on their faces. Incensed, but unwilling to argue with them, I pressed EVERY SINGLE BUTTON in the lift, all nine floors, then get out and walked up the stairs. I didn’t wait around to see what happened, but you can be sure that the mother would have gone mad, assuming that her kids had been playing around with the lift again and that they would have to stop at EVERY SINGLE FLOOR until they got to their floor. The best part about it was that I knew for a fact that they lived on the 8th (top) floor. I can just imagine the kids: “But Mummy it was this man, he pressed all the buttons!” – “YEAH, RIGHT” *whack*. I’m so evil.
  • People who leave a cloud of cigarette smoke in the lift. Enough said. Exactly how antisocial do you need to get before you start to give a shit about anyone else but you?
  • People who get in the lift when it’s going in the wrong direction. This frequently happens at home on the ground floor. The lift will be on its way to the basement, with one of its passengers stopping at ground. The lift is, therefore, “going down”. Someone on the ground floor has pressed the “up” button, so when the lift arrives at the ground floor to drop of its passenger, the person waiting assumes that the lift’s arriving for them (despite the fact that there was no light or chime). They get in, and promptly find themselves in the basement. Cue the inevitable huffing and puffing from them, and smirking from me.

I could go on and on, but I really need to do some work now. If you’re a regular lift user I’m sure you’ll have a laugh at this and perhaps pass it around your office.

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