Deadbeat Dads & Data Protection
You know the types - father a child, leave the mother with the infant and clear off. They don't contribute to the upbringing of the child emotionally, intellectually or financially.
Tackling the latter is the role of the the CSA, an organisation which feckless fathers and monetarily-strapped mothers alike don't have a good word to say about.
Imagine then the trumpeting this morning on Radio 4 (yes, the 'dream team' of John Humphries and James Naughty ride again!) that the CSA where now going to ask the mothers for permission to name and shame the ex-partner on a website of non-paying Parents.
Now, I fail to see what good this will actually acheive.
ASBO's where touted as a way of combatting the teen-terrors running amok on housing estates; They became badges of honour, as if being the subect of an ASBO was an award rather than a conviction.
There is a cynical line of thought that good 'ol Dad will treat such a move with the same attitude.
Likewise, who is it meant to inform? Given the parlous pecunary state of some single mothers, having an internet connection and spending time casually browsing the CSA's Most Wanted list (sponsored by Mothercare) isn't exactly priority number one.
But even more suprising is that, at it's most fundemental level, asking Party A if it's OK to publish an image and name of Party B, without explicit consent of Party B, smacks of breaching the Data Protection Act - and this being a course of action promoted by a Governmental Agency!
The Emperors new Clothes
Let me start by setting out my stall.
I like cars.
I like speed, driving, racing, car design, engine noise, engineering and so on.
I dislike being told that I've got to pay for road charging and fuel price hikes.
I also dislike the rabid bleating of the ecomentalists telling us all that unless we abandon the combustion engine and live on a kibutz and join the Gaurdian-reading, sandal-wearing, nut cutlet-munching beardy-weardies, we're going to kill the polar bears and flood Kent.
Given this, it is perhaps hardly surprising that, on a list of the top ten people I'd least like to be stranded on a desert island with, George Monbiot occupies positions 1 through 7, closely followed by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
He's published reams of text essentially berating us for our car driving habits - yet I have to wonder how many trees died in order for him to have a platform for his unique brand of anti-car bile.
He's engaged in a radio debate with Jeremy Clarkson (whom I regard with a certain degree of hero worship, its true) where George reverted to simplistic name-calling when Jeremy displayed an uncharacteristic level of knowledge and reasonableness on the "green" issues.
So imagine my barely contained glee when it was reported in the motoring supplement of The Sunday Times this week (3rd June 2007) that the ecomentalists Golden Boy has bought a diesel powered Renault clio.
That's right.
Not a "green" car in the mould of a Toyota Prius or Honda Insight/Civic IMA, but a smog-belching shopping basket beloved of the French peasantry.
But this in and of itself was not what amused me.
No, what pushed me into paroxysms of near-Edenic joy was his rationale for buying the car.
"I spoke at the Hay literary festival the other day and we worked out that the only way to get there without spending an entire day travelling was to take the car. I'd much rather do without one but until there are improvements in public transport sometimes you are forced to compromise, especially in a remote area. What we need in Wales are better rail links."
So here is a man who wants us to abandon our cars, but has taken the conscious decision to move to an area poorly served by public transport (on nothing more than a desire for his wifes desire for their daughter to speak welsh - how very quaint and fiercely elitist).
A man who uses a wood-burning stove - I'm sorry George, but there is no way on this Earth that this, despite your bleating that it's from a sustainable source, produces less pollutants than a clean-burning gas solution.
A man who appears to be advocating a huge rail building project, ostensibly for the greater good of the region, but ultimately to satisfy his own desire for "green cred" despite the amount of destruction and pollution that would result from the contruction of aforementioned rail network.
And his reason for buying the car?
It was simply quicker and more convenient.
How quickly you abandon your vaunted princples, Mr Monbiot.
Because public transport couldn't fit in with your personal schedule, you wouldn't use it.
Perhaps now you see why the majority use their cars.
I have a 12 mile commute to work and to use public transport costs in excess of £7 a day, and takes almost two hours just to get there.
Conversely, the car takes thirty-five minutes, costs me (averages based on annual costs) maybe £1 in fuel, £2 in car park costs, 50p in road tax and £1.74 insurance. I get to make my journey without additonal stops, in comfort, at a time I choose.
Does this make me the spawn of the Devil?
George Monbiot has previously spouted enough vitriol to try and convince you that I, and probably you too, are.
I feel even more joyous in light of Monbiots latest tome (304 pages, in your choice of soft or hardback).
He apparently calculates that Coach travel is the most environmentally sound in terms of CO2 per person per kilometre.
Yet.....
"Coach travel would be slightly better than the train, but I'll be damned if I'm going to go around the country in the current system. If you've got loads of time and very little money - you're unemployed, say - the coach is the way to go. But if you need to get anywhere that day, it's unusable."
Now, just think about the above statement.
What does it tell you about George Monbiot?
Well, first of all it reinforces that he'll let some of his principles go if it presents a barrier to his schedule and desires -
"I'll be damned if I'm going round the contry in the current system" being the key - I'll be damned if I'll use the coach too, George.
But if I was a committed to the ecomentalist agenda as you would have everyone believe you are, having made a career out of telling everyone how green and virtuous you are, I'd suffer for my princples, rather than toss them aside (or should I mean "recycle"?!?)
Secondly, there is this the more than faint whiff of class snobbery, suggesting that he and his family are considerably better than the rest of us -
"..if you've got loads of time and very little money - you're unemployed, say".
Reduce that down to the basics and he's saying that public transport is for poor people and how could he possibly sully himself by descending to such a distasteful and grubby little concept.
It would therefore appear, that George Monbiot is no different, and certainly no better, than the rest of us car drivers. Just like the majority us, he drives a car out of neccessity to make his life work.
Welcome to the family, George.
So the last week has seen me off work with the Flu.The full-blown Man-Flu.
Everyone says men over-react when they fall sick and that women just get on with life. This may have some truth but, in all fairness, when your head feels like it's being crushed, you can't focus and alternately sweat and shiver along with some lovely biological side-effects, I doubt I'd be contributing much to the economy - apart from a view million virus cells being shared about the communal office space.
So I've been doing a lot of sleeping. This in turn has left me with time to contemplate this very blog.
It's not been going according to plan, with updates being quite sporadic.
Imagine my pleasure then when my last posting on the genetic vagaries predisposing a person to homosexuality seemed to get quite a lot of response.
However, not quite the response I had envisioned. Since Monday (29th) I've had an average of 7 comments a day to it.
Sounds great, until I review the comments and find them all basically saying
"Hi, Great Site. Come have a look at my site "URL SUPPLIED" to buy cheap Viagra/Cialis/Lezatra or other alledged impotency drugs".
Frankly, this is in the same league for annoyance as the infamous "Wine Cellar Seller" episode that plagued me almost a year ago (immortalised in the "Gene Pool" blogs on here. Obviously, I delete these irritants without so much as a second thought yet their very existence begins to pose an interesting snapshot of Society at large.
Wine is one of those things that some of us enjoy and by extension, we all like a drop of alcohol in some shape or form (personal preference dictates single malts or Japanese beer btw, in case you're buying).
I found the odd receipt of such spam comments mildly amusing and it showed spam as something targeting something we might like, albeit if you're in the market for a wine cellar, you're a serious purveyor of fermented grape juice.
But this recent spate is, while ostensibly focusing on a male problem, is basically targeting sex. This increasingly is the bent to which the Internet leans, at least that's the angle we're increasingly being told about.
A few years ago, while on my degree course, we had an interesting lecture on the Internet and the use of the Internet. Video Streaming was a fairly new application, at least to students, but some of our counterparts in the Netherlands wasted no time in finding a novel use for this by putting a hardcore porn DVD onto a massive projection screen, then firing up the web-conference suite and beaming it out to most of the world.
But the Porn industry, the selling of sex has, as a whole, been at the forefront of technological development.
That might seem to be quite far fetched.But what drove the adoption of VHS as a format, despite the technically superior betamax format?
The Porn Industry - it wanted a cheap, easily accessible media to be able to get it's product into the hands of the American male, and then every other man.
What drove the development of e-commerce and the Internet?
Yes, the Internet was a Military development initially (DARPA-NET) but in order for people to accept the costs to get on the internet, you needed a hook, something to make it seem worthwhile. Usenet groups discussing the various settings possible on a Altair 880 or strategies for Dungeons and Dragons just doesn't explain it.
However, being able to sidestep the public moniker of being one of the "dirty mac" brigade yet still be part of it does.
In fact, while big commercial outfits exist today, some of them doing roaring trade over the internet (How many of us have used Amazon, Play.Com, iTunes, done our shopping from an online Supermarket or got hold of something rare from ebay?) there isn't a huge amount of money to be made in retail.
We, the consumer, always want the cheapest deal, so of course cutting out the retail outlet is the logical place to save costs. But you still need vast warehouse space, stocks of inventory, staff, transport etc. Some retailers combine the two - I can order a computer
from PC World online, then drive to the store and pick it up, usually with a discount on the store price.
I've often wondered how that works. I'm not sure I ever will understand either.
But what I do understand is that Sex sells. Huge profits are made by the myriads of Porn sites that are eager and ready to charge you vast amounts of money to let you look at pictures of scantily (or unclad) girlies.
Sure a government initiative might shut the odd one or two down, but give it 24 hours, another 8 are probably put online.
I'm pretty sure that the only companies truly making money from the internet are such purveyors of porn.
Yes Amazon might report pre-tax profits of $124 million (just a made up figure btw) but on the other end of the supply chain, how many suppliers lost money on their goods or had to absorb costs?
Give me a digital slr, a few students and a cheap domain host with e-commerce abilities, I reckon I could double or even triple my money inside a month.
What I'm saying is this. The shift in the nature of what's on offer in Spam gives an interesting, but disturbing, insight into what Society is focused on. Last year, Wine, an essential ingredient to many a good dinner party or night out. We were consumed by having a good time.
In 2007, it seems Society is hooked on Sex. But where to next?
I don't even want to think about it.
Science is a Two-Edged Sword
This article -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5120004.stm - argues that being homosexual is a result of the womb environment and immune system of a pregnant mother. The reasoning appears to be that, based on a very small sample (944), the more biological brothers you have, the more likely you are to be Gay.
Reducing it down to the bottom line, this is hailed as evidence that being Gay is a genetic condition, that a homosexual has no control over it, simply can't help it - that this was the way they where made.
Andy Forrest, a spokesman for the Gay and Lesbian group Stonewall (of Peter Tatchell fame) lauded this as a wonderful piece of scientific work, showing that he and others can't help themselves, genetically speaking, and should be treated as equal and not discriminated against.
Well, I for one don't encourage discrimation towards anyone, whether they're white, black, brown, red, blue or screaming violet. However, discrimination is different from not liking or approving.
I don't like fruit, but I don't go round bashing people who like a Cox's Pippin or Kumquat.
However, I digress.
Regardless of my orientation and my views on other orientations, there is an interesting naivety in actually conducting the research and the praise heaped upon it by Stonewall. Stonewall campaign and promote Gay and Lesbian rights and preach a message of acceptance and being open about being Gay.
Yet, have they considered that some parents, mothers and fathers, are mortified when their son/daughter announces their preference for the same sex?
Now how is that parent going to feel, in particular the mother, now that Science is apparently saying it's predominantly because of your mother that you have a penchant for Judy Garland records? While I don't want to use inflammatory language, I can almost hear the words being uttered "It's my fault he's Gay."
Obviously, this will help assuage the conscience of some Gay people and allow them to spread the feelings of guilt around a little, and at the same time, displace some homophobic feelings onto the rest of the family too.
Hurrah for Science!
More interesting to my mind is the notion that Stonewall would welcome recognition of being Homosexual as a genetic condition. In this age of testing embryos for things such as Cystic fibrosis and designing out genetic sequences that give rise to such conditions, how long before the very same Science that is being hailed as a saviour to the Gay & Lesbian Cause is vilified by Stonewall for offering tests so you, as a parent, can make an informed decision about the desireability/viability of a embryo, based on likely future orientation?
Double Hurrah for Science!
One step at a time.....
So
TVR are moving factory, with requisite job fears.
It was reported a few months ago that the factory was
down to 2 cars a week and that half the workforce was being laid off temporarily.Then, the news is that they're moving production elsewhere, but still in the UK.
Performance car enthusiasts bemoan the potential demise of TVR, with it's throaty burble, exquisite machined aluminium switches and no-nonsense image.
Of course, this is
not the first UK motoring concern to suffer such a collapse.
Memories of MG Rover are still very fresh, but the problem there appeared to be a long lasting one. A lack of investment, poor quality control, bad image,
products that no-one wanted anymore - all combined to spell death.
What disheartened me about MG Rover (
despite the vitriol I heaped upon the woeful 25/45/ZS nonsense) was they produced
some genuinely interesting ideas sometimes. The
75 Coupe concept used some existing parts, but offered something different. The
X-Power SV muscle car almost made me wet myself with excitement, yet failed to materialise.
The
75 and it's MG-branded counterpart the ZT, where not really bad cars.
They where quiet, refined - quite civilised places to be, even if the 75 Rover version did seem to be trying a little too hard to be a Jaguar. The
V8 versions offered real performance pace in a rear-wheel drive package too.
And yet, the majority of the car-buying public avoided them.
Image had a lot to do with it, with price a secondary concern.
The
UK car manufacturing landscape is littered with the carcasses of dead companies.
Wolseley, Triumph, Humber, Austin, Healey, Delfino (apparently reborn).
Then you've got those companies that seem to
barely exist -
Marcos, Ultima, Noble, Westfield, Ginetta, Caterham, Tiger - cottage industry size, but with genuinely engaging products that aren't exactly mainstream.
They sell in fairly small numbers, but continue they do.
I've left out Aston Martin from this list because they're owned by Ford now (American), with a lot of money injected and a certain amount of parts bin raiding has been seen, as well as parts made elsewhere in the world and then shipped back.
Let's just take a
step back for a moment.
I want to take you back to the late 1950's and a little town called
Rochdale. Rochdale had long been a large player in the UK cotton industry with a lot of mills existing in the town and the Northwest in general.
But in the late Fifties, it became home to a small company called Rochdale Motor Bodies - a self
explanatory company name if ever there was one. When GRP became a usuable product, they began to build bodyshells in it and, come the Sixties, the Rochdale GT, Riviera and Olympic came into being.
They used running gear from all over the place - Triumph, Wolesley, BL - all of it fit.
The frame was tubular steel and a GRP bodyshell bonded in places, bolted in others. But by the early Seventies, the owners tired of sourcing parts, and where finding it easier to make money in, of all things, the heating and ventilation business according to the Rochdale Olympic Owners Club History page (
http://www.rochdale-owners-club.co.uk/olympic.htm).
Now, some thirty years on after the demise of that company,
Al Melling is wading into "supercar" territory with the
Hellcat -a
6.0 litre, V10, 700bhp hand-built monster. It's reportedly going to be built in Rochdale at a rate of 4 a month, with a price tag of
£100,000. A deal has been done with Rouche to make far more for the US market.
£100,000 puts you in, and above, some serious company. Porsche Turbo's, RS-Audi's, AMG-Merc's, M-series BMW's.....even Ferrari's and Lamborghini's can be had at those prices.
Exclusivity is certainly on the side of the Hellcat. It looks gorgeous on the exterior. Sounds better than a TVR too from the footage in the media.
But £100,000. For an "unproven" vehicle?
TVR are a known quantity, and even with serious commercial backing from a rich Russian, can't seem to be a viable business.
I can't believe that in 2006, gremlins that once haunted TVR's (electrical, mechanical, build qaulity etc) are still such an issue - so
why aren't TVR's, that cost between £40-60,000, flying out of the showrooms? The
gremlins, it appears, do
still haunt, but in
peoples minds.
You only have to look at the hang-ups people still have over brands such as Skoda, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Hyundai......all have made massive leaps in the qaulity of their product - Hyundai even offer a 5 year warranty. No manufacturer is perfect after all.
This is the
problem facing UK car manufacturers -
Residual Public Image.
Caterhams,Westfields, Marcos, Morgans - they have a certain following - people who, invariably, are comfortable with a spanner perhaps, or just want a weekend/track car.
Most of us don't have that luxury.
We want a car we can use day-in, day-out.A car that can be used, rain or shine, without having to don wet-weather gear.A car with leather, electrics, air conditioning.A car that starts first time, every time, and that doesn't fall apart if you so much as think of looking at it. Which is why the Porsche 911 has such a reputation.You can use it everyday. It is reliable. It is fun. It does have a roof and electrics that work faultlessly. The doors have that reassuring "thunk".
I'm not saying the 911 is perfect.
Some would argue
the engine is in the wrong place and that it's
too clinical.
But as a symbol of a successful "sportscar" that's gone mainstream, and survived as long as it has almost unchanged, takes a certain something.
For years, all Porsche made was the 911 - they just did it with a turbo here, a four-wheel drive system there.
The other smaller UK manufacturers do the same. It's only in the last few years that Porsche have expanded the range, and even then slowly, to include the ugly (but staggeringly fast) Cayenne, the "cheap" Boxster and the "mid-range" Cayman.
And that
leads me back to where we came in -
TVR.
They
make and market 5 different models. T350, Tamora, Tuscan, Tuscan Convertible and the Sagaris.
Perhaps -
and it's only a suggestion here from someone who's knowledge of marketing is a little shakey -
the key to being a successful UK Car maker is to offer a single product, get it right,
get it established and generating money and
then, only then, branch out.
Perhaps Al Melling and his Hellcat can show that that approach still works.
Storms in Their Teacups
I find it mildly amusing that the BBC had a video piece on the net the other day about the "discovery" of a "Gospel of Judas", which suggests that Judas Iscariot was not the figure that betrayed Jesus Christ, as the accepted Biblical texts document, but was actually Jesus' favourite disciple and was only doing what Jesus had asked him to do.
Apparently, there is a great hoo-haa about this as it's supposed to be some great earth-shattering and revelatory text.I can already see some jumping up and down, throwing their arms about and touting it as the proof required to disprove the teachings of the accepted Bible.
And yet..........
It's interesting that this "historical text" has been hawked around on the sly for the better part of 20 years, with no one really wanting to buy it. There are at least four different locations where it's supposed to have been found for a start, and it only mentions Jesus, Judas, Satan and the collective term "disciples" - it lacks any meaningful historical proven anchors like naming, oh I don't know, a Roman governor by the name of Pontius Pilate, a Chief Priest Caiphas, a King Herod.......I could go on, but don't see the point.
Also, it's worth to note that even those who promote is readily accept that it was written by a gnostic sect, not one of Jesus' disciples and it was written over a hundred years after the event. Gnostics of course are readily known to not ascribe to a single external spiritual God that requires Jesus as an intermediary, but rather that God exists internally and can be communed with in that regard.
So in short, you have a "Non-Christian" sect (non-christian in that it deviates from the mainstream/fundemantal Christianity norm) being promoted as a revelation for mainstream/fundemental Christian teachings.........in the same way that you can teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
What I find quite telling, more than any of the hysterical bleatings from both lunatic fringes of the discussion and the "coincidental" timing of this "discovery" with the release of The Da Vinci Code film (which a proportion of terminally dumb people are somehow taking as Gospel truth), is that it's suddenly disappeared from the discussion and been overtaken by ministerial impropriety, car manufacturing woes and football.
Clearly then, it must be true given the attention and significance it's received.....*cough*
All Animals are Equal....
But some are, apparently, more equal than others.........
I want to talk about dogs.
Specifically,
Dog Poo.
You know that dreaded moment when you notice an errant browm smear on the carpet by the door at home or worse, in the car.
Perhaps your first warning is that screwing up of your nose and the silent thought "What
IS that smell?" voiced in a
mix of curiosity and revulsion.
It's
horrible.Besides the blight that is casts on pavements, it's
unhygenic, even more so when "found" in playing fields, walking along countrywisde paths, anywhere really.
How many times have you been walking along with someone, spied a
particularly foul looking mound of dog turds, exclaimed "
watch out for the...."...too late.....
splodge...."
Ewugh!"
So in some places, you have signs informing of the requirement to clean up after your dog has deposited a freshly steaming pile of excrement.
Some people are quite good about this, carrying
pooper scoops,
little plastic bags and gloves to tidy up after Rover has relieved himself.
Unfortunately,
one conscientious dog owner I witnessed the other day
hadn't seemed to get the idea totally. The
bag containing Fido's filth was hanging from the pushchair, freely dangling
less than a foot or so from the face of the child occupant.
Secondly,
who's actually going to enforce the "clean up after your dog has defecated" signs?
I see no wardens and there is no way i'm going to go along, scoop it up and then chase after the owner saying "you've left this behind"...
Thirdly,
Horses.
I already have a gripe about horses as they are
allowed to be ridden
on the roads, with
no road tax.
No insurance either by the way. And by children or vastly inexperienced riders. You have to have a
driving license to take to the roads with a 1 ton piece of inanimate metal that you are in control of, so
why not a similar requirement for two tons of dogfood and glue that you are not in control of - it has a mind of it's own, after all......
And those damned equestrians don't sniff out a corner or patch of grass when they decide to take a dump either, oh no.......they
just keep walking along, slowing down traffic, dropping
pound after pound of barely processed steaming horse poo into your path or, if your name is Dave and you drive a Nova SRi, onto your bonnet.
Have you ever tried avoiding this stuff on the road? It's an impossibility.
Woe betide you if you get it up in a wheel arch or in your wheels. it will stay there for weeks, festering gently, letting it's subtle aroma impregnate every part of your car.
Truly a foul thing.Yet
do we instruct those who ride horses to carry a plastic bin bag and a shovel with them and clean up after Mr Ed has depostited a fresh load on the road?
Nope. We make excuses like "It's natural", "it's only a horse" or "I can drive around that".
What a load of dingo's kidneys. Why should horse owners be given dispensation from having to deal with the bio-hazardous materials their equine companions output, while dog owners are sentenced to criminalisation whenever Poochie takes a poop?
