Here is a handy guide to understanding the future of the BBC under the Conservatives. A schools pack is available.

Stuart X: It’s like that thing they had to cancel with local-news websites or video or something last year, because it was so good that commercial operations couldn’t compete.
Stuart X: WHY THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT THAT?
Stuart X: We’re forced by law to pay for something that’s made deliberately worse.
John X: Don’t worry, not for much longer!
Stuart X: They’re going to stop charging?!??!!???!!?
John X: Entirely!
Stuart X: And it won’t turn out to be just another shitty ITV??!?!?!!?!?!
John X: No no, you misunderstand.
John X: Imagine it like this:
John X: Imagine I’m a bread shop.
John X: And I sell bread for 80p a loaf.
John X: Okay?
Stuart X: Following you so far.
John X: So if you want some bread, currently you have to pay me 80p.
John X: Well, what’s going to happen under the nice Mr Cameron is my bread shop is going to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
John X: So you won’t have to pay 80p for bread ever again!
Stuart X: But where will I get bread?
John X: There’s no bread.
Stuart X: I don’t understand! I LIKE BREAD!
John X: Be quiet.
Stuart X: The only other stuff I can put marmalade on is made by Ian’s Tasty Vittles down the road, and it’s made of dogshit.
John X: I said be quiet.
Stuart X: And I have to stop eating every three bites so I can throw up.
John X: Can somebody call the police?

Family Guy enjoys being offensive. It does it with glee. As creator Seth McFarlane likes to say, they’re an “equal opportunity offender”. I’m struggling to think of a subject they haven’t made wildly inappropriate jokes about. Racial stereotypes, paedophilia, infanticide, rape, degenerative disorders, disabilities, the Holocaust… A large part of the point of watching the programme is gasping in shock with your hands clasped to your mouth, unsure if you’re stifling a cry of horror or a laugh.

There have been other programmes that have taken this “no taboos” rule to more effective and more shocking places, such as the astonishing Wonder Showzen, and Drawn Together. But these were on cable. Family Guy is on at primetime on Sunday nights on Fox. Having been cancelled twice by the network, it’s proven itself fairly invincible, and with McFarlane’s new contract breaking all records they know they’re not going anywhere. And to embrace this the most recent episodes having been pushing things further and further, including as many digs at Fox as they can cram in. Last Sunday’s was particularly shocking. At least, I thought so at first.

(continue reading…)

A few decades back something went horribly wrong in the UK. At a certain point, as a nation, we reversed the order of priority between customer and service provider. And nothing reveals this contempt demonstrated to consumers better than the provision of ketchup.

Now we all know that the way things should work is the volume of ketchup available being inversely proportional to the poshness of the establishment. Cheap and cheerful cafes should have a big bottle of the stuff available on the table. Then as you get more posh the amount drops down. A reasonably nice pub chain will, for instance, give you a ramekin dish filled with red sauce. Go from chain to restaurant and now the ramekin is only leant to you momentarily, for you to teaspoon as much onto your plate as you feel you can get away with. (I’ve declared no shame at this point, and will gladly empty it out – they’ve got more.) Next rung is they maintain complete control of the ketchup distribution, titrating a single millilitre of it onto your plate for you. Then above that requesting ketchup results in your being asked to leave.

That’s all how we expect it to be in the lunatic version of society we should concede to accept. This is not something the UK is capable of adhering to. Because in the UK ketchup is a rare commodity, brought in by vast merchant ships from distant lands, traded for gold and precious jewels. It is an exotic elixir so rare and unusual that it must be reserved as an offering to the gods, or for visiting kings of neighbouring empires. We must preserve our precious ketchup resources, and we must ensure that no customer is able to dip their chips in more than half a teaspoon’s worth, distributed in tiny plastic sachets that can only be opened using teeth.

Which is strange, because when you go into supermarkets they seem to sell enormous containers of it for insignificant amounts of money. This is indeed quite a mystery.

It is with all this in mind that I say: bring your own ketchup to the Hillside Cottage in Cheddar Gorge.

(continue reading…)

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of text messaging. To me it’s a tool. It’s a way of arranging to meet, or letting someone know you’ll be late. Or sending a pithy, clever insult. And it’s brilliant for that. Phoning someone to say something that can be taken care of in a maximum of two exchanges of 160 characters isn’t necessary. The text message takes care of it, quickly and efficiently.

However, if your conversation requires more than that, then it’s a bane. Having to try to orchestrate a complicated dialogue in minimal chunks is infuriating, and even more so because to do it you’re holding a device capable of telephoning someone. So telephone someone.

Perhaps an even larger issue with the text message is the apparent requirement to reply instantly. I don’t want to turn into some ghastly confused broadsheet columnist (wait, yes I do, that’s exactly the job I want – well, let’s assume I don’t want the ghastly part) who complains about how modern technology is driving us apart, because is it bollocks. It’s uniting us in incredible ways. But I do take issue with the immediacy of communication it’s engendered. If you need to get hold of me immediately, call me. The loud ringing sound will get my attention, and if I answer you’ll get my responses right away. If I don’t answer, you can assume I’m not able to, or don’t want to. For some reason we accept that an email may take a few hours to be responded to. But a text message, perhaps because of its relative informality, combined with its arriving on a device that follows us around (which of course is increasingly the case for email too), seems to come with a weight of responsibility. And one that arrives unsolicited. I don’t like that. While I find myself unable to remember how existence worked when phones were tied to the walls (despite living the first 20 years of my life in such a state – what did we do when we were going to be late for stuff?), I do remember that we weren’t commanded to instantly reply to everyone.

(continue reading…)

BBC News is on fire today!

First of all, a story about pi being calculated to 2.7 trillion digits is accompanied by this caption:

“Pi is an irrational number, meaning its digits go on forever.”

Um, not quite. I think you’ll find an irrational number is one that starts crying because the wallpaper’s the wrong colour, or something.

And then follow the headline, “Archbishop urges population cap” and you get this story about a group of MPs arguing for, I guess, culling, that at no point mentions the Archbishop. It’s a bold headline choice, suggesting the Archbishop wants to shut down our borders to all those Johnny foreigners. He might want to ask them about that, since it’s now their 7th most read story.

Presumably they’re getting a bit confused with a story from last October when the former moron Archbishop George Carey declared his delightful views on immigration. He explained that the reason the BNP were gaining popularity was because of our “open door policy” to immigrants. Never mind that the BNP’s popularity has waned in the last few years (I mean, why let that trouble your ghastly views?), but to suggest that the BNP might be becoming more popular because there’s too many foreigners coming into the country… Um, maybe someone can see the irony here? “If the mainstream parties begin listening to the voters,” he said, “the BNP can be consigned again to the fringes.” That’s right George. If the mainstream parties adopt the policies of the BNP, then we’ll not need the BNP at all!

UPDATE: They’ve now updated the linking headline to read, “Carey in immigrant ‘values’ call”. But haven’t thought to update the article to mention Carey at all. Is everyone at the BBC drunk today?

So in summary, they got absolutely every prediction incorrect, but it did eventually snow.

Yesterday morning the prediction was that Bath would receive an epic dumping of snow. By mid-afternoon this was stepped up to the South West being put on full alert for the most dangerous snow in living memory, with the highest ranking Met Office warning issued (a warning, we were told, they issued before last year’s floods in the Midlands, that rendered thousands homeless). It was going to disrupt power. It was going to close every road. Then about three hours later we had the cough-cough-oh retractions of this, but still with enough grim warnings of snow that we should still worry, and it would all kick off around 8pm. (This was originally 3pm, then 6pm.) At around 8pm we were told the slightly minimized apocalypse would now be occurring at midnight. But it was going to be at least 10cm. At least.

(continue reading…)

In case anyone thought I was kidding.

UPDATE! The weatherman on BBC Disappoints West just said, “As for tomorrow, that’s in the laps of the gods.” So there you have it folks.

So after 15 minutes of some very pretty snow about three hours before it was forecast, there’s been nothing. In fact, it’s rained. And then at about 3pm the Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the South West starting at 6pm, Bath to receive 15cm overnight, terrible conditions, all roads and rail to stop.

This is now the revised pattern for snowfall tonight:

It’s actually curling up and around Bath. The previous 6pm blizzard is now showing a forecast for rain.

This is my point. They absolutely, categorically cannot predict the weather. They cannot get it right for three hours in the future. And yet every day they announce what it will be in five days time. It sometimes is, because if you roll a dice you’ll sometimes guess which number it will land on. But they cannot predict it.

Bath was due to be the epicentre for dramatic snowfall. Now we are likely to be rained on.

These forecasters are con-artists, and we should be treating what they do with the same contempt as homeopaths and psychics. And no, if it randomly happens to snow tonight, it won’t change anything. Whatever weather happens to happen, at least one of their rotating forecasts today will have been wildly wrong. They’ve predicted absolute polar opposites (or should I say pole-to-equator opposites) in the last six hours, London receiving four complete 180 flip-flops about whether it would receive any snow, and the South West now apparently safe from what we were warned would be the most dangerous snowfall in decades, er, two hours ago. So can we put an end to this idiocy, and treat those who claim to predict the weather with the same disgust and disdain we we do those who claim to predict the future.

And yes. I’m really bloody pissed off it’s not snowing.

Right, I’ve had enough. There is nothing else in the universe that we would tolerate being as wrong as British weather forecasts.

I recognise the problem. It’s about predicting the events of a literally chaotic system, taking place on a small island surrounded by seas. That makes it incredibly difficult to accurately predict the movement of warm and cold fronts as they swirl in from various directions. It’s so difficult, in fact, that they can’t do it. I don’t blame the weather forecaster for this. I don’t blame anyone for the unpredictability of chaos. (I’m generous like that.) But I DO believe it’s time to stop letting these half-blind soothsayers from getting to pretend it works.

In an age when the terrified BBC can’t put a programme on air before its producers have filled in multiple compliance forms for fear of being caught lying about something, surely the weather forecast should have to have some massive caption running along the bottom of the screen reading: “WARNING: AT BEST THIS IS A WILD GUESS.”

(continue reading…)

Everybody who spends as much time stuck inside their own head as I understands those bizarre compulsions to do things that might not be entirely in line with that which is sensible. The ridiculous idea that fills your mind, either to be acted upon or shaken loose before you get in trouble. I think the most terrible example in recent times was when waiting for the toilet on my flight back from Seattle a few weeks back. I was stood next to the emergency exit door, with that deliciously big handle, and the words written in red with the chunky red arrow, instructing you to rotate it through the full 180 degrees. How incredibly fun it would be to turn a handle so large and appealing, to tug to begin its motion, and then satisfactorily clunk it into place. It would be like turning the lever handle on a giant bank vault, or opening a secret cave in an ancient tomb. I cannot imagine a more fantastic handle to turn. Except this one would of course lead to the deaths of hundreds of people on board, including me, and the plane crashing out of the sky.

(continue reading…)

I’m pondering the approach I will take for a story for Rock, Paper, Shotgun – the small spin-off blog from this site that I allow others to hang around on – about the role sleep plays in gaming. This may sound preposterous, but there are at least two interesting stories to tell, and the subject of game-related dreams is one all gamers can relate to. But I feel an overwhelming urge to write the post as a personal account of my own fears of sleep, making it all about me with slivers of science and theory occasionally sliding in. However, this would raise the ire of those for whom the Important Matter Of Gaming Discussion should not be sullied by personal account.

(continue reading…)