Monday Moan 62

 

GIBBERISH ON THE AIRWAVES

One of the problems with the proliferation of channels available these days is that the airwaves are now full of people who don’t appear to understand what it is that they are saying.  Without wishing to sound like a pedant, the frequent misuse of language is driving me mad.  Listen any day of the week for more than a short while and you will hear something that initially might sound right (as it must have done to the person saying it) but in fact is wrong for one reason or another.

 

For example, last week we had Lindsey German, spokesperson for the Stop the War Coalition telling us that “the honest truth is that …..”, presumably so that we were not confused into thinking that was she was saying was, in  fact, “the dishonest truth”.  

 

Sports commentators seem to be particularly prone to this kind of verbal nonsense. Yesterday we had two of them agreeing that “Columbia and Belgium will be most people’s dark horses for the next World Cup”.  Now call me old-fashioned, but I thought that a ‘dark horse’ was someone unknown or unfancied who came to prominence or to achieve success when nobody expected it.  How can Columbia and Belgium be ‘dark horses’ if they are being tipped by everyone?

 

And later, in a different sports programme, we had the classic misuse of ‘under or over-estimate’.  Apparently, “you cannot under-estimate what it would mean to Arsenal supporters to win this fixture …”.  

 

Well yes, actually, you can. But you shouldn’t.

 

 

 

 

IT’S JUST TOO MUCH EFFORT

The rash of summer music festivals is almost over for 2013 – and the task of clearing up the rubbish left behind by people who cannot be bothered to clear up after themselves will continue for some time to come.  The pictures from the recent Reading Festival were fairly typical.

 

But this is not a problem specific to Festivals, much less to the sorts of people who go to such events.  It’s actually a symptom of the wider malaise affecting society. Look around you and you will see smaller scale examples of the same kind of behaviour wherever you look. 

 

Last week, for example, there were the shopping trolleys left where they were emptied, rather than being returned to the designated collection point; the newspapers left on trains rather than being put in the bins or taken away; the person who emptied their pockets of rubbish whilst standing in a queue for a bus and then walk to the side of the pavement to leave it there, rather than find a rubbish bin, put it in the bin on the bus, or take it home. 

 

And then there was my visit to our local hospital.

 

 

 

There was a water dispenser located in the corner of the waiting room and it was obvious that a number of people had managed to haul themselves up from the chairs, drag themselves the 3 metres or so over to the water, operate the complicated mechanism to extract water from the dispenser, hobble back to their seats and then consume the water they had transported across that great distance.  Equally, it was clear that the physical effort involved in doing all of that had left them exhausted, such that they couldn’t manage the shorter journey over to the rubbish bin to throw away their empty water cups.  No doubt they were conserving their energy for the much longer journeys that would be necessary to get to the consulting rooms and then back to their cars once they had seen the medical staff.  

 

Or perhaps they were just too lazy to get up and dispose of their rubbish.  People sometimes say we live in throwaway society.  Maybe we should call that a throwaway-wherever-you-like-and-expect-someone-else-to-clear-it-up society?

 

 

 

 

SHOCK TRANSFER NEWS?

I fell asleep yesterday evening and woke during the BBC News to see Andre Villas-Boas peering at me from the screen from the Arsenal interview suite.  In a moment of pure panic I thought this was the shock transfer news that Arsenal had been promising all summer – a new manager rather than a new player.  Fortunately, once I had woken properly, my fears were unfounded and Arsene Wenger had not signed AVB after all. 

 

In the most predictable of all the summer’s transfers, AVB was just confirming that Gareth Bale had become the most ludicrously over-priced footballer of all time, with Real Madrid spending £85m on the transfer fee, and paying Bale £300k a week in wages.

 

Tottenham, of course, were committed to the deal the moment they started to buy virtually an entirely new team over the summer – spending around £110m on transfer fees before Bale had been sold.  

 

No doubt most Tottenham supporters will consider this to be money well spent.  After all, they were able to celebrate losing only 1-0 to Arsenal (summer outlay of zero prior to the game) yesterday, rather suffer another of the 5-2 thrashings they had endured in each of the two previous seasons.  A sound £110m investment I reckon.

 

Monday Moan 47

Loons?  What a ridiculous idea

So, Lord Feldman (apparently, Conservative Party Chairman) is supposed to have described Conservative Party activists as ‘mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The comment is alleged to have been made to journalists and concerned the Party’s kamikaze descent into madness over Europe.

For non-Conservatives this is a wonderful time, watching them get worked up over a series of issues that have been left bubbling away beneath the surface for many years.  Europe is the best example, of course, with former Ministers lining up on either side of the debate to criticise the way the Party is going.

Of course, the idea that swivel-eyed loons are the exclusive preserve of local Conservative Associations is, clearly, nonsense – according to my research into Jeremy Hunt , Michael Gove and David Mellor.

Some people are beginning to wonder whether the flames of unrest are being fanned by sections of the media more interested in a story than any balanced reporting. For example, the BBC decided to lead its main News programmes yesterday with extensive coverage of the delivery of a letter to 10 Downing Street by a group of 34 Conservative Association chairmen and former chairmen, complaining about same-sex marriage. Rather less prominence was given to the separate letter, signed by more than 100 Conservative activists, calling on the Party’s MPs to back the same-sex legislation.

I suspect Alex Salmond is behind all this.  After all, which Scot wouldn’t vote for independence from the rest of the UK once UKIP becomes the largest party in England?

Heard on the bus ……

Sometimes, just listening to other people can be as entertaining a way of spending time as reading the newspaper or listening to music. 

For example, travelling on a bus in one of our significant seats of learning at the weekend, I had the pleasure of listening to a young lady talking to two others who appeared to be her parents.  I really wasn’t eavesdropping – it was impossible not to hear her.  A loud and, in all honesty, what can only be described as one of the most irritating voices I have ever heard, forced its way into my consciousness when it was describing how the lady in question had failed to be offered a job despite the fact that she had been told she had “interviewed well”.  Nothing to do with her voice, I am sure.

Then displaying all the intelligence that she had, no doubt, brought to bear in her interview, she explained how the interview had taken place in “Bulgaria, that posh bit of London”, and wondered whether if you rode a ‘Boris-bike’ in London you were allowed to use the pavements rather than the roads.

Can’t for the life of me think why she didn’t get the job.

Arsene Wenger – Miracle Man

‘Honest’ Harry Redknapp told the Match of the Day audience last October (see Moan 20) that Arsenal were rubbish, would finish beneath Tottenham, and that it would be a miracle if Arsenal qualified for the Champions League this year.

Well, ‘Honest’ was about as right as he always is.  His prediction that Tottenham would finish above Arsenal was one he has made every year since I can remember – and it was wrong yet again. In fact, it is now so long ago since Arsenal last finished below Tottenham that you have to begin to question whether the law of averages really does exist.  When was it?  1994-95 – the same year that Blackburn Rovers were the champions and Wimbledon finished in the top half of the Premier League.  So long ago.

The debate will continue over whether Arsene Wenger can ever again turn Arsenal into serious title challengers, but in an era when money may become less of a key to success and when Manchester United have to learn to live without Alex Ferguson, you never know.

Can you read between the lines?

One of the simple pleasures of life is to enjoy the countryside and marvel at all that nature conjures up each year.  Our annual trip to enjoy the bluebells in the Ashridge Estate yesterday delivered its usual quota of awe and sheer enjoyment at the marvellous display of colour that these small flowers bring.

However, I am slightly worried that my eyesight is deteriorating.  Some of the footpaths were closed, but try as I might to read between the lines, I could not see anything on the notices about the closures that said that this did not apply to unsupervised children, or to adults who just wanted to take a ‘nice’ photograph of their companion sitting amongst the flowers.

What is it about people that they can blithely ignore rules or requests like these?  Are these the same people who think that the ban on using your mobile phone whilst driving doesn’t apply to them,  or that prohibitions on parking in a disabled bay or on a yellow line are meant for everyone else?  

Selfish and arrogant individuals, all of them. But don’t challenge them, unless you are prepared to be subjected to abuse, verbal or perhaps worse.

Monday Moan 39

 

I know I shouldn’t smile, but ……..

An Aston Martin DBS costs around £180,000, or it did until production was discontinued.

A Vauxhall Corsa costs around £10,000 when new.

Last week an old and rather battered Corsa, fetchingly painted in various shades of pink, managed to run into the side of a sleek, black DBS whilst the latter was standing at a petrol station being refuelled.  The story had its funny side, of course.  The pink Corsa was being driven by a woman with pink hair, for example, and then there was a troubling degree of pleasure at seeing something so valuable damaged by something so cheap and unpretentious (ok, apart from its colouring).

But some other things troubled me about the story as well.  First, the DBS owner’s immediate assertion that the vehicle was a write-off, beyond repair.  Oh really?  Look at the picture and see how much damage there is, and then consider whether writing off such a valuable car with that amount of damage might possibly be one reason why your insurance premiums are at an all-time high.

And then there were the comments from Aston Martin, whose spokesman is reported to have said “The DBS is not of the understated elegance of a DB9, nor the youthful agility of the V8 Vantage. It is explosive power in a black tie, and has its own unique character which will equal that of James Bond.'    

I’m guessing this ‘quote’ must have been taken out of context, but even so, what on earth is it supposed to mean?  Don’t these people speak English any more?

 

From our Bavarian correspondent

So, Arsenal came away from Bayern Munich with a 2-0 victory rather than suffering the humiliating loss that many had predicted.  Going out of the competition on the away goals rule seemed particularly harsh, given that they actually won the game against all the odds.

Those odds were high.  Bayern have now played 16 games at home against English opposition in European competitions.  Only one other side has beaten them over 90 minutes (yes, I know this ignores Chelsea’s game last season, but over 90 minutes that was a draw; after extra time that was a draw; then Chelsea prevailed in a penalty shoot-out).  Anyway, which other English side has managed to lower Bayern’s  colours?  None other than Norwich City, who won there in 1993. 

Most of all, I loved the way that the pre-match atmosphere was described on the Bundesliga’s own website -  “The stadium has remained relatively empty [40 minutes before kick-off] – it’s too cold for the fans, who have seemingly opted to stay inside as long as possible whilst they eat their pre-match sausages …….” 

Sausages for the Germans, beefburgers for the British. What do Italian or Spanish fans eat before I game, I wonder?

 

It’s all a matter of priorities

Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce were caught lying about which one of them was driving when a speed camera registered that their car was being driven too fast.  

Toby Hayden battered his girlfriend at a cashpoint after the machine failed to allow him to withdraw any money.  He was drunk. He was serving a suspended sentence for a previous violent crime. He assaulted two police officers who turned up at the scene.

One of these crimes was, essentially, victimless – nobody got hurt, nobody suffered as a result of the illegal action.  The other saw assaults on anybody who happened to be there at the time.

All three of the accused were convicted.  Two of them were sentenced to time in jail. One of them was given a community service order.

Can you guess who received which sentence? 

No doubt my learned friends would be able to explain it all.  It’s all a question of priorities, I suppose.  Perverting the course of justice is just a more serious crime than beating up an innocent person on our streets and then assaulting the police officers who came to investigate. 

Or should we have just a tiny worry bead that the legal system is bonkers?

  

Standards and incompetence

A quiet lunch out in a hotel that advertises itself as "the perfect place to sit back, relax and enjoy the delights that we have to offer" should not feature in the Moan, should it?  Well, I’m afraid it does – and on two counts.

First, doesn’t anybody dress up to go out for a nice meal these days?  I know that nobody bothers with a tie and jacket, even for evening meals in rather nice restaurants.  That battle was lost a long time ago.  But I was still surprised to see that in a large party out for a meal to celebrate one of their number reaching the age of 55, t-shirts outnumbered both polo and rugby shirts amongst the men, and jeans were the unanimous choice of them all.

Second, what kind of an establishment invites you to take your tea and coffee in the lounge before checking that there is actually space in the lounge for you to sit?  Yes, you’re right - an incompetent one.

Monday Moan 33

Righteous indignation – or puffed up nonsense?

OK, I was asking for trouble reading the Daily Mail and I then compounded this error by reading the column by Quentin Letts - parliamentary sketchwriter, theatre critic, freelance writer, anonymous gossip-supplier to the media industry and all round pompous ass.

 

Almost anything written by Letts can be guaranteed to upset a large part of the population – inevitable really, since it will at the same time appeal hugely to most readers of the Daily Mail.  He can be humourous, of course, but he also peddles the kind of stuff you would expect in that paper – bombastic, little-Englander, anti-liberal, anti-socialist, pro-conservative (all with small capital letters), etc.

 

His recent piece bemoaning the defeat for the Conservatives over boundary changes for Parliamentary seats was a classic of its kind – the world is doomed by the actions of Labour and Lib Dem politicians being unfair to the Tories, aided by the Tories themselves not being firm with them.  The very foundations of our democratic way of life are threatened by what has happened.

 

Letts sees a left-wing conspiracy around every corner, including this one.  He puffs and splutters about corruption, cheating and outrage.  He works himself into a lather about the unfairness of it all and how the defeat for the Tories will result in that worst of all nightmares for him and those like him – “the Left will now be in power after 2015 — with all the repercussions for our national sovereignty that could bring.”

 

The poor man looks likely to explode if he’s not careful.  But can you really feel any sympathy for someone who not only uses the phrase ‘bien pensant’ in his article, but who is a repeat offender in this regard, having used the same words at least twice in recent months (1 November 2012 and 28 December 2012).  A good writer will not use words or phrases that cause readers to wonder what he or she is trying to say, either because the words are not commonly used or because their meaning is not always clear.  Letts fails on both grounds. Bad or smug writers, on the other hand, may use words and phrases they believe show how much better educated and clever they are than their readers.

Tony Pulis – the right man for the job

For those who don’t know, Tony Pulis manages Stoke City football club.  He has the demeanour of someone with a major chip on his shoulder. His gripe is that he represents a small club that is struggling to be treated fairly by the world, the football authorities, and specifically by referees. He believes that the rich clubs get favourable treatment and he has a particular issue with Arsenal for some reason.

 

He is, in fact, the perfect man to manage Stoke City.  Gritty, dour, unfashionable, committed to surviving by the principle of the ends justifying the means.  A marriage made in heaven.

 

On Saturday Pulis’s Stoke team faced Arsenal and, as usually happens, they lost.  Every football manager worth his salt can explain in great detail how it is that whenever they lose it was caused by the perpetration of some significant wrong against them. You really can’t be a manager if you don’t have this ability.

 

Arsenal’s winning goal was awarded only after the referee had consulted with a linesman (sorry, ‘referee’s assistant’) who had raised his flag for reasons known only to him, but assumed to be because he thought there had been an Arsenal player offisde.  Pulis started his after-match tv interview by saying “I haven’t got a clue what offside is now”.

 

The Monday Moan is glad to offer some help to him. A player is in an offside position if they are nearer to the opponent’s goal than both the ball and the second-last opponent – including the goalkeeper. You cannot be offside in your own half, if you are level with the second-last opponent or if you are behind the ball. However, being in an offside position is not itself an offence. A player is only penalized for being in an offside position if he is interfering with play, interfering with an opponent or gaining an advantage by being in that position.

 

So, with that tutorial, what happened in the game?  Well Arsenal took a free-kick, at which point the only player who might arguably have been offside was Theo Walcott, their no.14 – although as the picture shows, he is also arguably level with the last Stoke defender. 

 

The ball ended up in the opposite side of the goal to which Walcott was standing – he hadn't moved, he wasn't in the golakepper's line of vision, so clearly he cannot have been interfering with play.

 

All quite simple really – and now Tony Pulis will have no excuse for not knowing what offside is in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wrong, wrong and wrong again

We all make mistakes from time to time, but mostly they are not serious and very few people get to know about them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, some people are not so lucky with their mistakes.

 

The person responsible for the captions on the BBC News on Sunday will be blushing today:-

 

  

 

The Herts Advertiser copywriter who forgot to use spellcheck for the photo caption below probably realises their mistake:-

 

 

However, although I am confident that most people would see the Newcastle supporter’s display (above and on this link) as a mistake, I am not convinced that the fan himself will agree.

 

 

 

Parts in a machine

And finally, not a moan but an observation.  Sitting here and writing this blog I can picture you and other readers at your desks, or on the way to meetings and it suddenly seems very strange to me that I no longer have to do any of this, that I don't have to get up to work each day, and that the good ship ‘Ex-employer’ sails merrily on without my assistance.  It is a sobering thought that we are but replaceable components in machines that can function perfectly well without our being there, no matter how important our efforts and presence might once have seemed.

 

But it is also comforting to realise that the world won't end if you don't get that paper written or that email sent. There is time enjoy yourself and do other things.

 

 

Monday Moan 28

I-paper gets me mad again ....

In Moan 9 I questioned Amol Rajan’s approach to others as being aggressive and unnecessary.  He accused others of various character defects in sweeping assertions, themselves open to serious doubt.  Now, having read the I-paper again, I see he’s still at it – maybe he’s always like this?  Certainly he’s got a 100% record whenever I have read his pieces.

 

This time he takes to task those who oppose the legalisation of drugs in the most immoderate of language. A Government spokesman’s response to a Select Committee’s report on drugs policy is dismissed by Rajan as “possibly the stupidest thing said by any public servant this year”.  Not content with that offensive remark he continues that the spokesman’s next words were “belched” by a “historically illiterate and possibly teenage buffoon”. Nice.  The “buffoon’s” crime appears to have been to say that drugs destroy lives and blight communities.  Apparently, according to Rajan, this will “enrage any right thinking person”, since it is “utterly ignorant of the lessons of the past century”.  Rajan considers that the ‘War on drugs’ is “the most disastrous policy error in the history of mankind” and the spokesman’s statement “oozes the kind of base morality common in theocrats”.

 

Rajan is well into his stride now, and next asserts that “it is very, very clear to anyone who can open their eyes”, that whole nation states are dissolving because of “idiotic prohibition” and that any parent who thinks that criminalising drugs helps to protect their children has “absolutely no idea about the society, let alone the world, you live in.”

 

Apparently, we should all take note and our lead from Portugal, where decriminalisation has reduced drug consumption and crime.

I have no idea whether Portugal offers a good model for the future.  But I know that Rajan’s hectoring, dismissive, aggressive, patronising, and insulting form of writing is most definitely not a good model for others to follow when it comes to constructing a persuasive argument. Rather the opposite, since his style will surely, to borrow from his own invective, enrage any right thinking person since it is utterly ignorant of the rules of common courtesy and public behaviour.

Should we really beat ourselves up?

In the same copy of the I-paper as the one mentioned above, Simon Kelner writes a piece on some of the issues arising from the sad death of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who took her own life after being taken in by the Australian radio station pranksters.

Mercifully, Kelner eschews the approach adopted by Amjol Rajan and instead writes a thoughtful article in which he suggests that you and I must take the blame for the suicide because we were all in the joke through our wicked, voyeuristic delight in people being exposed as stupid, cruel or eccentric.  He cites Big Brother as his only evidence for this sweeping assertion.

He then asserts that we are all to blame because of our insatiable appetite for royal news.  Moving swiftly along from this most suspect of statements, he then suggests that the public was culpable rather than the News of the World and its journalists for the whole phone-hacking scandal, because it revels in tales of scandal and misbehaviour, without thinking how those stories are unearthed.

 

Hang on a minute!  Simon Kelner was Editor of The Independent between 1998 and 2011. How typical of a journalist to try to absolve all of his profession and shift the blame elsewhere.  It’s all the public’s fault, and the journalists are merely writing what the public demands. I don’t know about you, but I find this analysis to be lacking in any kind substance - more like a child denying any responsibility for its actions, whatever the evidence there for all to see. 

 

As a member of the public that Kelner accuses, I deny any responsibility. I have never suffered from an insatiable appetite for royal news, I do not crave tittle-tattle about anyone, or demand that the human failings of high-profile people be exposed, and I have never delighted in anyone being exposed as stupid, cruel or eccentric. 

 

No, I want to read the news.  I would happily buy a publication that was able to provide that service free from any of the other things Kelner accuses us of 'forcing' journalists to do. 

Is that too much to ask of a newspaper?  Apparently it is.

  

Arsene Wenger – “I am not embarrassed”

After last week’s defeat by Division 2 Bradford City Arsene Wenger said that he was not embarrassed. 

Oh really?  Well he should have been.  True, it was only the second time his Arsenal side had been knocked out by lower division opposition in any cup competition in his 16 years in charge – a better record than that of any other team in England. But it came on the back of some really disappointing results in other competitions and when Arsenal were already beyond any serious hope of winning the Premier League title with considerably less than half of the season gone.

Yesterday’s 5-2 victory at Reading was probably a truer reflection of his team’s ability, but needs to be repeated if Arsene is to be able to continue to claim not to be embarrassed.

  

Bradley Wiggins  - Sports Personality Of The Year

Congratulations to Bradley – and congratulations also to all the other sporting stars of 2012 – the year that Britain lost its tag as a gallant loser.

 

I don't want to overplay my role in this sporting triumph, but can it really be just a coincidence that in Moan 8 I predicted that Wiggins would win SPOTY unless some Olympian did something exceptional this year?  Is it credible to believe that, having read this, Wiggins did not understand the message I was giving him?  No, much more likely is that he saw the wisdom of those words, recognised the danger, and decided that he would be the one to do something exceptional.  This was the cause of him adding an Olympic title of his own to his victory in the Tour de France, thus building his case for the SPOTY title. 

A true champion - no thanks necessary.