(Monday) Moan 68

 

IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

I was watching a programme about building houses the other day – The House That £100k Built  – in which presenter Kieran Long and his ally, architect Piers Taylor, are on hand to help/advise/guide those poor ordinary individuals who have decided, for one reason or another, to spend their hard-earned money on building their own houses.

 

Nothing wrong with the concept at all.  I haven’t seen the other programmes in the series and may well do so now that my appetite has been whetted.  But what struck me most about the episode that I saw was how, once again, it was clear that those ‘in the know’ about a subject had what can only be described as a narrow, missionary-like zeal for their view of the world and what constitutes the ‘right’ way to do things.  Long and Taylor were appalled at the plans of Ruth and Tony, two Shropshire farmers who were building their own house.  They wanted a break from the ramshackle nature of the farm buildings in which they had lived and worked throughout their lives.   Long and Taylor, on the other hand, wanted them to embrace that very ramshackle and rural look so that their house ‘fitted in’.  They couldn’t understand why the farmers did not want to use rusty, ‘wriggly tin’, such as can be seen on any farm in the country.  In what I though was a compelling and unanswerable response, Ruth said that rusty, wriggly tin was fine if she wanted to live in a barn, but she wanted to live in a house. 

 

Long (journalist of architecture, critic and teacher) wanted Ruth to understand what he meant by architecture that fitted into its surroundings, so he took her to Dungeness, where he waxed lyrical about the “amazing landscape” and the way that a weathered grey wood box fitted in.

 

Oh really?  ‘Amazing’ – well yes, I suppose so, but I’d find it hard to get as excited about it as Long managed to do.  And whether or not ‘fitting in’ with such a landscape was as good an idea as trying to improve it is something that wasn’t considered.

 

Sometimes it seems to me that there are multiple parallel worlds in which ‘experts’ live alongside the rest of us, where what makes sense in their worlds makes no sense in ours.  Which of them is the ‘real’ world is, of course, a matter for debate. 

 

 

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

In New York at the weekend a street graffiti artist tried to sell his work for $60 a time to the unsuspecting public.  The public’s response was muted, to say the least.  Eight paintings sold, four of them to someone who just wanted to cover the wall of his new flat, and some of them at half price.

 

Ha ha!  The reporters delighted in letting New Yorkers know that they had been too dim to realise that they were being offered works by the most famous of all graffiti artists – Banksy no less.  If only they had realised then they could have bought these nondescript spray-art pictures and made a fortune by selling them to collectors and experts who valued them at $20,000 each.

 

Or looking at it another way, the public gave its verdict on the intrinsic value of such vandal-like street paintings and the experts who would rush to snap up anything by Banksy were made to look like fools just waiting to be parted from their money.  Could it be that there really is no real merit in these works and it is all just hype, or can you really see the Emperor’s new clothes?

 

 

GET ME A PICTURE!

It seems that no TV news item can now be presented unless it includes some illustrative video footage.  Apparently, the viewing public will lose interest or not be able to follow what is going on if it is just someone speaking to them - although isn’t that how radio does it?

 

Anyway, the BBC decided that it would include a short item on the publication last week of the new Immigration Bill.  Now it seems to me that for any video footage to be useful it ought to be possible for someone watching it with the sound muted to be able to make a good guess as to the subject being covered.  In this case it looked as though the show’s producers had given up on this and decided to use 30 seconds of people walking the streets, only in order not to cause any kind of offence we were shown only the lower halves of the people doing the walking. 

 

How ridiculous.

 

 

NOT ALL TECHNOLOGY IMPROVES YOUR EXPERIENCE

I’m all for using new technology when there is a point to it – where it improves your experience of whatever it is you are doing.  However, there are cases where using new technology does not necessarily do this, or where the way it is used needs to be considered very carefully.

 

For my first example of what I mean I give you the humble act of using a public toilet.  Most of us will have experienced the frustration of waving our hands around wildly trying to get the water to flow from a sensor activated tap or the air from a sensor activated hand-dryer.  What fun it is to see someone else struggling with these contraptions, especially if the one you are using has worked as it should.

 

And I can see the merit of a sensor activated flush mechanism for a toilet.  However, the placement of such sensors should be such that they do not operate if the user simply shifts slightly on the seat.

 

The anxiety of that inadvertent flush is not something I’d wish to repeat!

 

Monday Moan 49

Anyone got more money than sense?

A not-overly impressive picture appears one day on a wall. It is proclaimed as a work by ‘Banksy’ – the most well-publicised graffiti-merchant (sorry, street-artist) around. It is unsigned. Then it disappears, together with the wall on which is was painted, before re-appearing some time later at an auction, where it was expected to be sold for something in the region of £1 million.

Nobody knows for certain that it was painted by ‘Banksy’. Nobody knows who ‘owned’ it. Nobody knows who took it.  The auction was organised after it was ‘agreed’ that it would be sold to an American bidder for £900,000 unless a higher bid was made.  The cry went up (from the auction house amongst others) for Britain to get its act together and pay the money needed to keep the painting in this country.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I can’t help feeling that the world has gone mad.  This just seems crazy on so many levels. It’s not fantastic art. It seems like a con in so many ways. The BBC and other media have done their best to drum up interest – why?  And when did vandalising by spray-painting graffiti in a public place, where perpetrators would be fined if they could be identified, turn into street-art, where the perpetrators would be lauded as artistic royalty?

But, in the spirit of the day, I am prepared to get my spray can out and produce a rather mundane, clichéd picture on a wall near you for a mere fraction of the amount being fleeced for this ‘Banksy’ from people who should know better.  I’m not a greedy man, so shall we say £100,000?

Saving 'your’ money?

My local Council has produced a glossy handout for every household in its area asking residents to “Stop throwing your money away”.  Like many others, I am sure, I was intrigued to read on and find out how I could save some money.

Unfortunately, the headline appears to have only a tenuous link to any money-saving possibility for residents.

It seems that ‘our area’ (unidentified) has been found to be one of the lowest performing in all of the district in terms of recycling.  This, incidentally, despite the evidence of overflowing recycling boxes on our pavements on each collection day.  OK, must be all the other roads in the district that are under-performing.

The story continues; the Council collects the recycled items and sells them. This money helps to pay for the collection of the material. Material that could be recycled but is instead just thrown away is sent to landfill – which costs the Council money. So, anyone not recycling is throwing money away.  

It’s a long-winded explanation that, in the end, offers no real incentive to residents to recycle more items beyond an implied suggestion that if more waste could be sold then perhaps our Council Taxes might be lower.  Implied is the word – no direct link, no promise that money saved will not be spent on something of no benefit to the mass of residents.

If you want people to change their behaviour then some kind of incentive would help.  But if that is too difficult to administer then at least be a little more honest in your communications with residents.  And maybe recognise that low levels of recyclable materials left out for collection may not mean that we don’t care. It may be that we care so much we have already changed our buying habits and no longer purchase things that need to be recycled – like newspapers (read online instead), or fruit and vegetables in unnecessary packaging (choosing fresh produce and placing in reusable bags or single paper bags rather than polystyrene or cardboard cartons wrapped in plastic).

  

Hard to know who most deserves our scorn?

Once again the media is full of stories about politicians who appear to be forever on the lookout for opportunities to line their pockets whilst already being paid large amounts of public money to do their jobs.  This time it’s a Tory MP, two Labour Lords and an Ulster Unionist Lord, but in truth the party labels mean nothing here. It’s a behavioural thing that crosses party lines.

It’s too early to say whether what these people have done wrong is really serious or not – the full details have not been revealed.  All of them are protesting their innocence, saying that they believe what they have done is within the rules.  There will be an investigation at the end of which they will discover whether or not they are right and have been unfairly cast as villains, or they are wrong and must face the consequences.

What we do know, of course, is that the ‘evidence’ of their wrongdoings has been provided by the very media that set each of them up in sting operations designed to catch them out by offering them inducements.  The BBC, the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph each set out to create stories, rather than uncover existing stories.  So there’s a fine line being walked by them as well as the politicians.  At least two of the ‘victims’ of the stings are claiming that the day after the interviews that appear to show them breaching lobbying rules, they contacted the people who were trying to sting them to say that they had reconsidered their positions and now no longer wanted to pursue their discussions.  We shall see if this is true, but if it is then we have, of course, been given a doctored version of events rather than the full picture.

It’s a tricky one:-

(a)  do we accept the view of The Independent that this is “a welcome reminder of the value of an unfettered media”; or

(b)  do we see this as another example of the media creating and manipulating the news, rather than reporting events that are happening independently of their own promptings?

Julian Assange – is he still here?

The news that Julian Assange is still here in the UK came as something of a surprise to me – out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. 

Now we hear that Ricardo Patino, an Ecuadorean Minister, is to visit Assange in London soon and that he has offered (offered rather than asked for?) a meeting with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary.

Had I given it any thought I might have imagined that he had been spirited away by the authorities once the press furore had quietened down after the initial excitement of him giving press conferences from the safety of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. But of course, that will not happen, and whenever he is moved or chooses to move we will be subjected to wall-to-wall coverage of everything that follows, whether he manages to escape to his Ecuadorean bolt-hole or he is arrested and sent to Sweden to face sexual offences charges.

Bet you can’t wait.......