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Winter wonderland

February 8, 2009 at 4:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged

A blog post by an ex work colleague, and mate, of mine, the expat Canuck Rob Cutforth, on the “overreaction” of the UK media to the recent snowfalls, the heaviest for 18 years so we’re repeatedly told, echoed what many must be thinking. Namely that we should quit whingeing about the snow and enjoy it, and I can’t argue with that.

It’s true that the overreaction to the snow in the Press and broadcast media has been laughable, but that’s as much a reflection of the media making snowmen out of snowflakes as of the British public – nothing sells papers or gets ratings like a good old disaster, with voxpops of good old British pluck [TM] thrown in to leaven the misery. Look beyond the media, though, and you’ll find that Joe and Jane Public are enjoying the snow and having a damn good time on their extra days off – the schools being closed give parents a brill excuse to have a day off down the park. On Thursday I walked into work through Wollaton Park, covered in pristine freshly-fallen snow, and it was like a winter wonderland, with kids and adults-cum-kids having great fun sledging and snowballing, and even surly adolescents dropping their urban cool and frolicking in the snow like innocent 10-year-olds.

I think we should see all this snow as a rare treat. I’ve been in Nottingham for ive years and this is the first time I’ve even seen a flake of the stuff, and before that in Hull the last decent snowfall occurred in 1995 (I think). Snowy winters will become rarer with climate change (unless the Gulf Stream shifts as some scientists warn, in which case we’ll be like Newfoundland whose latitude we share), so let’s enjoy the few we do get. Unlike Canadians and Scandinavians for whom snow and ice are expected occurrences, for us it’s unusual and should be celebrated as a festival. It’s not as if we’ve owt else to celebrate these days…

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Reasons to hate Microsoft (1/many)

October 13, 2008 at 6:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

There are so many valid reasons to loathe Microshite – sorry, the Microsoft Corporation [TM] – that a whole book, nay a whole library, could be written with them. So let’s start small. I’m editing a document in that execrable bloatware Word 2004 on a Mac. Word keeps on capitalising the first letter of text I put in a table cell, so I have to backspace and retype it every time. I look in Autocorrect options and there’s no check box for auto-capitalising table cells. Similarly in Preferences. I learn, not from the pisspoor Help file but from a Scroogle search, that if you right-click on a correction you get a popup with the option labelled “Stop auto-capitalizing of table cells”. Ok, I do that, and it eventually kills this ‘feature’. Time cost? The best part of 20 minutes to kill an unwanted feature.

I’d thought I’d killed all the ‘features’ of this piece of shiteware ages ago. I turned off every single Autocorrect and Autoformat option as I’m capable of proofing my own writing, ta very much Steve Ballmer, I don’t want any ’smart quotes’ with proprietary characters which display mankily online (how often do you see online text that’s been copied from Word with ? characters in place of a ’smart quote’ when you view it in a proper browser?), I don’t want my dates superscripted, and I don’t want my arse scratched. What’s especially irritating about so many of these ‘features’, other than that they’re all on by default, is that you have to kill them in two different places.

Word is an example of ‘inimical software’, software which you have to fight with so that you can do what you want to do, not what it wants you to do, and boy have I done some fighting with this appalling piece of crud over the years. Why do I use it if it’s that bad? Because I’ve no real choice as all my employers have used it and it’s become the de facto WP standard (a striking example of bad driving out good). Yes, there is the very fine Open Office, but compatibility with Word is sometimes iffy as Microshite, unsurprisingly, keeps moving the goalposts to scupper its main competitor. The last edition of Word that was any good was Word for Windows 2, the six installation floppies for which I still have and occasionally think of reinstalling (except Windoze eXtra Pathetic probably wouldn’t run it) – it was a nice piece of tight coding with easily enough features for the most demanding writer. Hell, I wrote two books with it, with indices, TOCs, referencing, the works. Loaded quickly, ran smoothly, did what you wanted it to do. Since then it’s been an increasingly grotesque march to baroque bloatware, such that the software, which is just a word processor after all (remember that DisplayWrite, WordPerfect, and Wordstar all fitted onto 5.25″ floppies?), now requires 00s of megabytes of disk space and serious wodges of RAM.

So one of the reasons I hate Microshite is because they produce shite software. And that, of itself, is reason enough, but more will follow…

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Leaving WML

May 11, 2008 at 5:45 pm · Filed under football ·Tagged , , ,

The post below will be of limited interest to those few of the ‘general public’ who read this, referring as it does to a discussion list for followers of Watford FC. There are general morals to be drawn from the lament, namely:

  • that online communities are a piss-poor 2-D substitute for real, face-to-face communities, and that relating to people via a computer rather than in real life person-to-person leads to an increasing disconnection from them.
  • without the rootedness of physical contact, an online persona can develop which is at odds, sometimes violently, with your real character
  • online fora can evolve into ‘institutional’ forms as they become more popular and ‘established’
  • free speech is well nigh impossible on web and email fora
After some 15 years of mostly uninterrupted membership, I’ve decided to quit the online community of Watford FC fans that is the Watford Mailing List (WML), both for my sake (and physical and mental health) and the list’s. This is a hard decision to make as I’m almost a founder member of the community, having been recruited back in 1993 after posting to an Italian Usenet newsgroup about Il Fenomeno Luther Blissett, at a time when the list membership was in double figures. Calling time on 15 years in WML is like leaving a long-time partner with whom you’ve had great times, and of whom you’ll always have fond memories, but from whom you’ve gradually become estranged, to the point where the mutual attraction has faded to a stuttering ember.

WML is not the place it was in the ‘golden age’, when membership was relatively small, many members knew each other in real life, BSaD was still going as the focal point of the online fan community, and WML operated by evolving social rules. In those days WML rekindled my (and many other’s) dormant support for WFC, encouraged me to go to matches often involving 3 hour or longer drives, and brought me into contact with good folk – Pete F, Craig, Fuzzy, Pete G, John C, Ian L, Kev le Belge, and many more – whom I’d meet for pre- and/or post-match pints, and at matches. WML largely ruled itself because most of us knew and respected each other, and whilst flame wars occasionally erupted these were calmed down by the ‘old hands’ who knew the combatants in person.

Over recent years, though, many of the ‘old guard’ have either left WML, or gone quiet, and nowadays I simply don’t recognise most of the posters – they’re no longer people in the real, social 3-D sense, but 2-D online personas, just names on email headers, for the most part indistinguishable to me, perhaps – probably – through not knowing them face to face. Worryingly, I’ve found myself posting differently in response to unknowns than to those I’ve met, being increasingly combative and indeed verbally aggressive to the former, and markedly more conciliatory to those I know (such as Kev le Belge and John of Wakefield). At times my posting has been akin to the behaviour I learnt in the bearpit of Usenet newsgroups where speech is free and argument red in tooth and claw, and my postings have become more rant and less communication. I’ve found myself using verbal aggression which I’d hesitate to use face to face, even though I’ve tried to stick to the principle that you should never post what you wouldn’t say in person.

How much of this is my fault, and how much is a function of a change in the list and its numbers (currently around 700 members), is hard to say. What I do know is that my anger is increasingly less moderated by personal contact and increasingly damaging to myself and others. As a result I’ve undoubtedly wound up many list members, both those I’ve fought with online – Dr Dave, Simon D, Hi-Ho Silver, Bruno, the Pillocking Pillock, to mention but a few – and those who’ve looked on silently, probably in dismay. I know that many WMLers now see me as a fuming, foamy-mouthed, purple-faced ranter, the sort of bloke that they – and I, for that matter – would move to the other end of the pub to avoid, or indeed to a different pub altogether.

This is not me, though, it’s not how I see myself, and it’s not how those who know me and have shared pre-match pints with me see the real life Fred Riley. In reality I’m an affable, friendly, sociable, slightly introverted bloke who stands his round, avoids barneys, and prefers to listen rather than yak. The portrait that many WMLers would draw of me would be unrecognisable to the real me, akin to Hyde v Jekyll. I’m a softy at heart, a believer and seeker after the quiet life, who avoids stand-up barneys and angry confrontations, not least because, amongst males, that carries a real risk of physical aggro. I’ve not hit anyone in over 30 years, and that’s a record I intend to take to the grave. Like most folk, I want to be regarded and remembered well, not as some Russell Crowe type, and I don’t want to make enemies unnecessarily.

For all these reasons, and also because I’m falling out of love with WFC (the subject of the next post) in part because of my estrangement from WML, I’m leaving the list for the foreseeable future before I really piss someone off whom I might bump into on matchdays.

WML will be marginally better off without me, and for me life will be quieter, calmer and far less stressful than it has been in recent years, when I’ve not only been on the list but have served in the Watford Advisory Group (WAG), the ‘ruling body’ of the list. I’ll miss very much the cameraderie, easy banter and freewheeling spirit of the ‘old days’, but those will never return now that WML has become an institution in its own right, recognised by the football club (some of whose employees are silent members), and with its own ruling body in the form of WAG. Indeed, the need for WAG is the clearest sign that the old easygoing days of free speech and self-regulation have gone, as WAG’s been increasingly called into action to police the list.

My membership of WAG has also led me in disturbing directions, and into disturbingly authoritarian and intolerant positions, which sit uneasily, and are often in blatant contradiction with, my natural libertarianism. The trouble with any email list or web forum is that it’s inherently undemocratic, owned as it is by a single person who can pull the plug at any time, and act as arbitrarily as s/he wishes. Even if, as is the case with WML, the list owner shares his power with an ‘inner council’, you just replace an autarchy with an oligarchy. The larger and more established the list becomes, the more necessary it becomes to police it to try to keep it running smoothly, and, in these litigious days, to forestall any possible libel action over incautious postings. This last has been the main threat to free speech on WML, such that WAG has been (over-)cautious in clamping down on rumours and allegations for fear that the club will take legal action, which may well fall directly on the list owner(s), such that he/they could end up personally liable for comments made by a list member. That is, the list owner could end up losing their home and being bankrupted for an alllegation posted by a list member, a heavy price to pay for free speech, and one which the list owner’s family might well take exception to. Whether this would happen or not, the finite probability that it might makes list owners both cautious and paranoid, and leads them into increasingly strict self-censorship. This is especially crippling on a football fan’s forum, as rumour is the very lifeblood of the fan – take away that, by demanding corroboration if someone’s heard, say, that Joe Bloggs had a training ground bust-up with a fellow team-mate, and you remove most of what fans talk about in pubs. Yet, as clubs like Sheff Wed – who took their own fans to court – and WFC – who sued the local paper, the Watford Observer – have already demonstrated, a libel suit is a real possibility. These days, the only place you can get free speech online is on Usenet, and even then you’d best cover your tracks with a proxy.

My WAG duties therefore made me increasingly uncomfortable because they necessarily made me authoritarian where list policing was concerned, even though I was part of the ‘libertarian wing’ of WAG. They also led WAG members into direct personal confrontation with WML members we were disciplining, the nadir of which was a bitter dispute with the Pillocking Pillock whom we eventually threw off the list, after months of argument, for both on- and off-list anti-social behaviour.

I will try to stay in touch with those whom I’ve become mates with via WML and WAG, and hope to share the occasional pre-match pint with them – they know who they are. I’ll also have to avoid those whom I’m pissed off mightily through my verbal aggression, at least until memory fades to the point where they think “Fred who?”. I’ll miss the gossip and some of the bonkers on- (Wings of a Sparrow) and off-topic (Ian Lay’s goat) threads, but will keep in touch with WFC news via BSaD’s successor, BHappy. However much I’d like to purge WFC from my life – and there have been times, particularly when growing up in Luton, when being an ‘Orn was a positive curse I prayed to be lifted from me – it’ll always be there. Truly, supporting a football club is a born affliction, not a chosen pleasure.

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We’re all on the way to…Moscow?

May 1, 2008 at 6:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

So last night the Chelski Mafiosi beat Liverpool to get to the final of the Champion’s League (not for champions, not a league) where they’ll play another English team, Merchandising United – sorry, Manchester United – on the 21st May. And where’s the final going to be held? Yep, Moscow. So tens of thousands of fans whose two club grounds are perhaps 100 miles apart will be flying over 1500 miles to Russia. It’s difficult to get your head around quite how barmy this is. The sheer cost to the fans is staggering, though these days to follow the aristocracy of the Premier League you need serious money just to go to league matches so there’ll be plenty of prawn sandwich eaters prepared to shell out thousands to go to the final (bit of a shame about the less affluent fans, but they don’t buy high-margin merchandise so who gives a toss?). Then there’s the travel time – to watch a 90-minute match, perhaps 2 hours if extra time kicks in, fans will be spending at least three days travelling. And of course, in these days of climate change awareness, the ‘carbon footprint’ of the final will be fearful to contemplate – if 10,000 fans from each team travel (maybe the seat allocation is more, maybe less, but that’s a decent estimate) then that’s 20,000 bums on plane seats, so at an average of 200 seats/plane that’s 100 flights of 3000 miles. How much aviation fuel is going to be burnt in them?

Of course, the final venue would have been stitched up well before the ‘league’ kicked off and the stadium owners wll be contractually due a big payday, but you’d think that, when the final teams are barely 2 hours apart by train or 4 by car, some alternative arrangement could come into play. The Russian stadium owners could be paid the profits they’d reasonably expect to make on the day, and the match re-sited to a neutral ground in England, Villa Park being the most obvious venue. Still, as Harry Hill might say, what are the chances of that happening, eh, eh? The whole thing’s more bananas than Fyffes.

Fans face struggle for Moscow visa (Guardian, 1/5/2008)

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It’s New Year’s Eve: take cover!

January 1, 2008 at 2:04 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

A sad story from Italy appeared today, the first day of 2008, in La Repubblica. A guy was celebrating the New Year with his family on the 9th floor of an apartment block in Torre Annunziata, just south of Naples, when a stray bullet came through the window at 11:15pm on Capodanno (New Year’s Eve). He was actually inside the apartment, sitting at the dining table, when he just collapsed on the table stone dead, struck by a celebratory bullet that some testa di cazzo (dickhead) had fired off in the street below. According to the report, gunshot and firework injuries are all too common at New Year’s Eve, but the numbers are staggering: yesterday there were 473 wounded by fireworks and gunshots, some seriously, including a young child of 10 shot in the head and a woman of 41 shot in the torso, both of whom are in critical condition. And that astonishing number is actually a reduction on the previous year, when there were 526 casualties, and that was nearly half of the casualties in 2000 and 2001:

…ai Capodanni del 2000 e del 2001 quando si registrarono, rispettivamente, 3 morti e 952 feriti e 4 morti e oltre mille feriti. Negli anni successivi, fino al San Silvestro del 2006, non ci furono più vittime: 544 feriti nel 2002, 568 nel 2003, 584 nel 2004 e 550 nel 2005″

And we thought Hogmanay street parties had their fair share of casualties, but places like Edinburgh aren’t in the same league as Italy, which surely is a dangerous place to be on Capodanno. You’re not even safe indoors… :(

Proiettili vaganti, un morto. La Repubblica online, 1/1/08

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Ryanair held up by a soft toy

November 28, 2007 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

This made me laugh. According to La Repubblica today [1], a Ryanair flight out of Rome’s Ciampino airport was held up for 2 hours on account of a soft toy, to wit one massive soft crocodile, so large that it stretched out over 3 seats. Quite how the passenger got such a large toy on as ‘hand luggage’ is a mystery only Ciampino security could answer, but when she did and laid it out on seats in the passenger cabin, a flight attendant told her that she couldn’t take such a monstrosity on board, and that it would have to be left on the ground. Quite why isn’t clear from the report – plainly there were free seats to put the croc on, and even in the event of a crash an unsecured soft toy is unlikely to cause any damage to fellow passengers. Neither was it any kind of security threat. Unsurprisingly, the toy’s ‘mistress’ (“padrona”) protested vigorously and refused to budge either herself or the crocodile, which led to the aircraft’s departure being delayed for some 2 hours whilst the plane crew, then customs officers, remonstrated with the passenger, as well as a faction of the other passengers who, not unnaturally, wanted to take off for Milan – amusingly, the report notes that the passengers divided into two factions, pro- and anti-soft toy (I know which side I’d have been on :o )).

The impasse was finally broken by a nun who calmly negotiated with the crew, cops and recalcitrant passenger, and eventually persuaded her to get off the plane with the offending soft toy, after which the aircraft took off.

[1] Ciampino, due ore di retardi per un peluche, La Repubblica online, 27/11/007

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Dog saves plane

August 10, 2007 at 9:28 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Here’s a shaggy dog story from Italy, reported today on the La Repubblica website. A 737 of the Romanian airline Blue Air, due to fly from Fiumicino to Bucharest, was taxiing to the runway when passengers saw a dog racing alongside the aircraft. Surprising enough, but a real shock to one passenger, Stoica Ionut, whose dog it was. He (the man, not the dog) alerted the flight crew immediately, and the aircraft was stopped short of the runway. What appears to have happened is that the dog, a 2 year-old Pomeranian, had been placed in a crate sealed with gaffer tape in the baggage hold, because the airline doesn’t allow animals in the passenger cabin. He’d managed to chew through the tape and escape the crate, then leapt from the baggage compartment onto the runway because some dimwit in the ground crew had left the compartment door open. Had the aircraft taken off with the door open, it wouldn’t have been able to pressurise and could have been in serious trouble – an aircraft a few years back lost cabin pressure in flight, resulting in the crew and passengers falling unconscious, and ended up crashing into a mountainside killing all on board [2].

So it was only through the dog’s escape that the crew found out that the baggage door was open, and what could have been a major tragedy was averted. The dog could well have saved the lives of everyone on the plane by escaping then loyally trying to catch up with its master rather than legging it to freedom. Eat your heart out, Lassie!

[1] Fiumicino, si sfiora la tragedia. La Repubblica online, 10/8/07

[2] Loss of air pressure key to Helios plane crash, New Scientist online, 16/8/05

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No cowbells, please, we’re tourists

August 4, 2006 at 9:29 am · Filed under Uncategorized

From the tail wagging the dog department: a hotelier in the Italian Dolomites, an area of dramatic limestone peaks and pasture, has filed suit against a farmer claiming €56,000 in damages for loss of custom. How so? Because she reckons that the hundreds of cow bells on the farmer’s herd are disturbing her clients peace and quiet and putting them off staying at her hotel. Even though herders in the Alps and Dolomites have been putting bells around cows necks for centuries in order to keep track of the beasts on open pastures, she says that her punters have been complaining about the noise disturbing their sleep.

To resolve the dispute, the farmer has proposed a solution based on a sort-of-similar case, where a parish priest in a nearby Alpine valley was ordered to stop sounding his church bell between 10pm and 7am during the tourist season. In the cowbell case, the farmer has declared himself willing to remove all the bells at sunset and re-attach them at dawn, which really is quite funny when you envisage it, and hasn’t impressed the hotelier who’s spurned the somewhat surreal compromise.

It’s difficult to know what to say about a story like this, other than to shake your head sadly at the crass ignorance and stupidity of some people when they go abroad and expect the locals to bow and scrape to their every tourist whim. I’ve been to the Alps and Dolomites a good few times, and the sound of cows clanking away is as integral to the area as flower-festooned pastures (created and maintained by millennia of animal grazing), dramatic heart-stopping peaks, and cosy mountain rifugi. It can grate at first (do cows get tinnitus, I wonder?) but you very soon get used to it. If homo turisticus gets the hump, the only reasonable thing to say is that this is how people have lived in the area for centuries, and if it gets on your tits then go somewhere else.

Dolomiti, guerra a mucche e campanacci. La Repubblica Online, 3/8/06.

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Terrorism in the Lebanon

July 31, 2006 at 5:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Here’s a short commentary from the Misteri d’Italia newsletter, written by left-wing Italian journalists, that sums up my feelings on the destruction and death being wrought by the Israeli military on the long-suffering Lebanese people. The last line has it exactly: between the terrorism of Palestinian extremists and that of the Israeli military there is no difference at all.

As for why Israel is doing such smiting, the only thing for sure is that the reasons it’s given up to now for its actions are pretexts [2] that are literally incredible, and one can only suspect that the whole thing was cooked up with the Yanks long before the taking prisoner (soldiers don’t get “kidnapped”) of the two Israeli soldiers in a Hizbollah cross-border raid. This whole thing has the dark dabs of the Yank neocons all over it, no doubt part of yet another grand plan for a “new Middle East” TM hatched in the febrile minds of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al – it’s simply not credible that Israel would have launched such a major operation without explicit approval, if not direction, from the US. Whatever the Machiavellian rationales behind the action, the reality is lots and lots of dead people – that is the reality of realpolitik, for which none of its authors are ever held accountable.

Una tragedia di dimensioni spaventose con centinaia di vittime innocenti, soprattutto civili e soprattutto donne, vecchi e bambini. Ogni giorno in Libano le bombe israeliane si comportano come i kamikaze palestinesi quando esplodono tra la folla. Ma se i secondi sono considerati a tutti gli effetti dei terroristi, le bombe con la stella di David hanno un che di neutro, di fatale, di predestinato, quasi di necessario.

E invece quello di Israele nel Libano, dove gli Hezbollah sono solo un parte minoritaria della popolazione, è vero e proprio terrorismo di Stato. Identico l’effetto delle bombe israeliane sui civili libanesi a quello cui mirano gli uomini bomba palestinesi quando colpiscono i civili israeliani. Identica anche la finalità ultima dei due gesti: terrorizzare per piegare, domare, isolare l’avversario.

Eppure, agli occhi del mondo, il kamikaze palestinese è un terrorista. La bomba israeliana che sfregia, strappa, macella e maciulla no: quello è un atto di guerra necessario, anzi di autodifesa.

Anche se le parole sanno distinguere, le bombe umane o no uccidono allo stesso modo.

Due pesi e due misure servono solo a perpetuare i massacri.

Se finalmente si dicesse la verità a qualcosa servirebbe.

Noi lo diciamo: tra il terrorismo dell’estremismo palestinese e quello dell’esercito israeliano non c’è alcuna differenza. [1]

[1] Misteri d’Italia Newsletter 112, 30/7/06
[2] How can ‘terrorism’ be condemned while war crimes go without rebuke? Guardian, 31/7/06.

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Remember to zip up your rucksack…

May 29, 2006 at 9:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

…before you get on your motorbike. That’s the moral of the story which appeared in La Repubblica’s online edition today, which told of a major traffic hold-up on a motorway near Taranto, in the heel of Italy, caused not by a traffic accident but by “manna piovuta dal cielo” – manna raining from heaven. The rucksack of a motorcyclist had come undone, and from it fell some €20,000 of cash, to the astonishment and delight of motorists. Naturally, despite it being a busy motorway, drivers screeched to a halt and helped themselves to as much of this “manna” as they could before legging it. By the time the cops reached the scene, where the motorcyclist had realised his balls-up and was frantically scrabbling to recover as much of the cash as possible despite the strong wind, only €7,000 could be recovered. The biker himself was removed to the local copshop where he unconvincingly, to the cops anyhow, maintained that he was on his way to buy a car from a local dealer and that the wodge of notes (some £14,000 at today’s exchange rate) was because he had to pay in cash. A bit like the money from heaven scene in the old screwball movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World”.

Motociclista perde lo zainetto volano banconote, strada nel caos. La Repubblica online, 29/5/06

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