BAD ANALOGY KLAXON!

I remember once on a night out in Torquay 2 people I was with got thrown out of the pub for acting like total arseholes. They were so shit-faced that they thought if they just swapped T-shirts then the bouncers would be utterly fooled as to their identities and let them back in. It didn’t work, because the bouncers weren’t stupid.

We’re not stupid either. This weekend, Rupert Murdoch is trying to re-launch the disgraced News of the World, but he’s calling it the Sun on Sunday. He registered the domain name for the Sun on Sunday IN THE VERY SAME WEEK that he closed the News of the World, which I think shows how contrite he really was about the hacking and corruption endemic at the NOTW.

Let’s put all the pressure on him that we can to let him know we won’t be fooled: http://avaaz.posterous.com/news-of-the-world-is-back

Why modern men are happy to hoover*

These days, I’m totally happy to do the hoovering in my house [1], but until 5 or 6 years ago I, like most blokes, assiduously avoided going near a vacuum cleaner. Why?  Before you go any further, it’s got nothing to do with increased levels of sensitivity, the erosion of patriarchal society, changing gender roles or similar bollocks.  Okay, it’s tangentially bollock-related, but not much.

The reason is this: almost overnight, vacuum cleaners have quadrupled in awesomeness – and the way they’re advertised and therefore how your average bloke thinks of them has undergone a bit of a revolution too.

Let’s begin our ramblings back in the 60s. Hoovers were so girly that if a bloke even looked at one for too long he instantly contracted a bad case of oestregen and instantly sprouted a pair of moobs. I mean, look:

   

Hmm. Fluffy.

Before the turn of the century, no-one but a big girl’s blouse would go near a vaccum cleaner unless he absolutely had to (for example, if it was broken, because as soon as something in a house needs fixing it becomes a high-level tech task on a par with repairing the Large Hadron Collider which only us blokes can conceivably tackle with any realistic hope of success).

This didn’t help matters, either:

(Rest in peace, Freddy).

Anyways, vacuum cleaners were clearly domestic items designed to do boring, uninteresting jobs around the house and be ignored the rest of the time: like blenders, or, in the 50s and 60s unfortunately, housewives.

And then things changed…

Suddenly, in 2000 and something, vacuum cleaners began to look like they were designed in TRON by Buck Rogers for deployment against invading fleets of cylon centurions. They featured deeply impressive sounding things like ‘dual cyclone technology’ that almost literally oozed testosterone. They’re so hardcore that, in the testing phase, they repeatedly have the shit kicked out of them in a kind of vacuum cleaner Fight Club before they’re judged worthy to suck up dust from your fireside rug. There’s one called the ‘Dyson DC34 Animal’ (grrr) which doesn’t so much look like the handheld vacuum it actually is as much as a space-age sidearm which Han Solo could use to blow the shit out of a division of imperial stormtroopers before heading home to get Princess Leia up the duff.

Good with cat hair and probably, at a stretch and with the right ammo, daleks or cybermen.

Tellingly, they’ve even grown balls: http://www.dyson.co.uk/technology/balltechnology.asp.

The global marketing machine was quick to realise that the selling point of all this kit wasn’t that it was superior at getting dirt out of your rugs but that it was aggressive. These weren’t domestic gadgets anymore, these were power tools.

The trend stuck. Manufacturers adapted the look of their products, even if the internal gubbins remained unchanged. I’ve used a knockoff Dysonesque vacuum cleaner that – I’m not joking – you had to cock the extension pipe thingy like a pump action shotgun to attach or detach the hose. There was no engineering reason for this that I could see, the designer just thought ‘yeah, pump action vaccum cleaner: that’ll appeal to the middle aged male demographic’. And he was right. It was a shit vacuum cleaner, by the way. Classic example of form over function.

As with all marketing, though, it’s a smoke-and-mirrors deal – vacuum cleaners have actually got quieter, smaller, lighter and more unobtrusive over the years. The old Hoover Junior that I grew up with – and, when I left home, inherited -weighed about eight tonnes, emitted a menacing, high-volume roar like a Lancaster bomber taking off, was mostly made of metal and had the impact-resistance of a nuclear submarine: you needed the muscles of a navvy to get a new drivebelt onto it and if you rammed it into a dining chair a little bit too hard it’d knock a leg off it. It had an operational life of about 50 years and it might even still be going: when I moved out of London I left it behind, for all I know it’s still faithfully hoovering the floors of a flat in Tooting. That’s an actual double-hard-bastard hoover.  I wish it well.

Reality aside, there’s your reason: men haven’t changed, it’s just vacuum cleaners that have transmogrified.  We can now trundle one round the house without feeling inadequate.

G

* – obviously the ‘if we can be arsed at all’ caveat still applies

[1] – My wife will rightly and justifiably take issue with this. See note above.

Bad IT Support

“Gareth, it’s not you that does the CD duplication, is it? Because I need to have a set of CDs made of some data that we have to have backed up, probably onto DVD actually, I think there’s five or six different ones need doing, and… [proceeds to spend a minute painstakingly describing requirements] so we were hoping you could help with that.”

*Expectant look*

“Yes that’s right it’s not me.”

Sending complex data to a web service using C#

Well, this little problem just sent me mental for 2-3 hours.

Super injunctions

I’d have more sympathy for those who take out a super injunction, only to have it splashed across the tabloids, if they didn’t seem ( in my opinion, please note this is not a factual assertion) to only be:

• Minted, AND:

1. Douchebag celebs, OR
2. Douchebag corporations

Has any normal person ever taken out a super injunction for any reason other than to cover up an alleged misdeed? They only ever seem to have been alleged to have been shagging around, or alleged to have been dumping toxic waste somewhere.

Is anyone, anywhere, aware of a superinjunction (yes, I know, they’re secret) which was granted to, say, a struggling charity or embattled individual bravely fighting off some attempt at libel or slander by, I dunno, an evil Bond-style villain?

PS – please note that I’m writing all future blog posts and tweets as if I was a scriptwriter for Have I Got News For You. Allegedly. This is what it’s fucking come to, apparently.

My thought on Barclay’s Bank and their billions of avoided tax…

Fine, they offset their profits this year against their losses in the past. It’s legal. We know.

But consider this. If I was out of work for a year I would make no money. I would expend my savings in order to live day to day, and indeed I would be bailed out by the welfare state. Can’t remember if Barclay’s were or not.

Then next year I get a job. W00t! Then when my pay packet comes I tell HMRC ‘I’m not paying all my tax this year ‘cos I made a loss last year’.

They’d be all over me like white on rice.

G

IT lesson relearned today…

Requirements. Get all of them before you even lift a finger, otherwise you’ll end up having your time wasted.

I know this. God knows why I forgot it this week. Gah!

Details are too quotidian to bother with, just gah!

G

Getting back in the habit…

No, I’m not planning anything inappropriate with a nun…

I used to blog quite frequently, a long time ago. Let’s see if I can start again. My problem is I’m rarely in front of an actual computer much any more, leastways not one that someone isn’t paying me to use for work reasons. I’ve got swype on my phone now, though, which does make it nearly as quick to type as a keyboard, so maybe I’ll be arsed this time.

Anyshit, today the Met announced that they’re reopening the media phone tapping investigation, which is excellent news for anyone who would like to see Rupert Murdoch embarrassed. Kito the baby giraffe at Paignton Zoo died, which is very sad. And finally, I was fuck off busy at work. This promises to continue tomorrow.

G

That IFS report

The big news of the moment is, of course, that some arsehole tried to put a cat in a bin. However, leaving such weighty issues aside, I’d like to rant about the coalition again.

An IFS report (commissioned by End Child Poverty) has revealed the totally unexpected and surprising news that the June budget hits the poorest hardest.

I’m simply surprised that we expected anything else. The Tories are an elite party: essentially they’re parasites – when they can, they get in, attack the welfare state, redistribute money & power from the poorer to the richer, privatise anything they can & generally try as hard as possible to roll the clock back to 1820 when the oiks knew their place. The Lib Dems are simply convenient cover for this process – in many ways a coalition is a better result for Cameron et al than a straight up win.

So this report isn’t news to them any more than it is to anyone with a brain. They’re doing exactly what they want to be doing, & would be doing anyway irrespective of the economy. The welfare state, public bodies & working class families would be in for it anyway: there would simply be a different excuse.

If you object to this, make a noise! Write to your MP, sign petitions, blog & tweet your disapproval, start a facebook group: anything! The British public has never had it so good in terms of the number of ways to make our displeasure felt. Let’s use them & let the government know what we expect of them.

G

100 days of the coalition

This is a short blog from the bog, and hence contains nothing but opinion, assertion & a good bit of ire.

So they’ve had about three months, & in that short time there doesn’t seem to be many people they haven’t pissed off. Here’s an incomplete, non-alphabetical list:

Economists: they don’t appear to listen to economists, or perhaps they simply regard eminent economic theorists as chaps who were studying to be money-grubbing bankers but weren’t quite good enough & therefore never left Uni. In any case, they proceed wholesale with cuts & deficit slashing in the face of most of the guys who write the textbooks about economics. Because…not sure. They haven’t explained it, instead choosing to go with soundbites designed to appeal to the terminally gullible.

Film makers: despite the fact that the UK film council was raking it in for the UK, that had to go. Again, not sure why.

Steelworkers: because when we’re struggling to come out of recession is JUST THE TIME to cancel loans designed to build businesses. Cocks.

Mums: because who needs a good school building, or a playground.

Old people: will be expected to keep warm this winter by recalling their memories of Luftwaffe firebombs, apparently: winter fuel payments are to be cut.

Anyone who buys stuff: with that 20% VAT hike that apparently isn’t such a bad thing by Nick Clegg after all.

Anyone who sells stuff: for the same reason.

I’m sure there’s more. Anyway, back to work – before that gets cut too.

G