John Walker's Electronic House

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.

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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.”

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The one thing Russell T Davies can write is sentimentality. And that’s no small compliment. The word is more often used detrimentally, a way to dismiss something: oh, it was too sentimental. But done well, and consistently when he wrote it was, it can carry an episode just above the mire. There’s a reason why just seeing Rose is a big deal – he wrote his heart out on the Rose storyline, and it still carries an impact now. And while Catherine Tate’s success in Doctor Who was to somehow not be hateful (which offered her a surprising amount of grace), it was only in Wilf that RTD managed to repeat the success of Rose as completely. So despite a story that went beyond all known limits of bullshit, Davies’ final episode managed not to be that bad.

And thank goodness there was the sentimentality, because good grief it didn’t have a plot to carry it. While it at least made coherent sense (in the same way a ball rolling down a hill makes coherent sense – it’s going to keep rolling then eventually stop) it didn’t make any narrative sense. So the Master turned the whole world into himself, but then that’s undone with the magic time gauntlet, never mind eh? In fact, the Master’s attack of all humanity wasn’t to make any clever changes to humans, but simply to illustrate that the Deus Ex Machina Gate works. Donna had her memories come back and was immune to the Master so she could, um, stumble about a bit and then forget? The Timelords are back, but oh, no they’re not. And so on.

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It’s been a funny year for albums. Well, from my perspective at least. Which is a weird perspective, and I blame Spotify. I’ve not had the sense to pay attention to what’s making waves for years, but I’ve still been vaguely aware of who’s around, a bit of what’s happening. Mostly through friends’ recommending stuff. But that seems to have dried up this year too – maybe the John Walker Music barriers broke and bothered everyone around me too much. In fact, I think all the best music tips I’ve had this year have been from Tifaux writer Dan Miller via his Twitter feed. But I’m mostly blaming Spotify and its links at the top to try other stuff, letting me hop around without remembering where I’ve been. And I’m blaming the always-excellent 3WK Underground Radio, which as ever I treat like a great friend whom I constantly forget to call. But whenever we do hang out it’s so inspirational I scribble notes throughout. Names of bands to check out, which now of course means typing their name into Spotify, then YouTube.

When I look through the lists letting us know what’s best of 2009 rather than react in either agreement or disgust, instead my response is one of: “Who?” I’ve completely lost touch. And I really don’t yet get The Animal Collective. Which leaves me in the the street, looking through the window unsure if I want to be inside. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved lots of songs this year. Loads have stood out.

So rather than albums, this year for me it’s been songs. Here are some songs, not in any useful order, but all great. Remind me of anything I’ve forgotten.

Math The Band – Tour de Friends

I’m so delighted I discovered Math The Band this year. They remind me of bands discovered at Moles’ Purr night years ago, impossibly perfect shouted excitement over the top of Casio tunes and madcap drums. In fact, I can’t think of a band I’m more keen to see live. Everything on Don’t Worry is great, but my favourite is Tour De Friends. There’s no video for it, so I was going to put a pictureless video of it. But there’s a live version that while distorted is too fantastic not to use. So here it is.

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For a while I’ve been saying the same joke as I walk through airport security. At the point where we’re all required to take our shoes off, thanks to the failed explosive attempt by shoe bomber Richard Reid, I like to say, “If I were a terrorist, I’d hide my bomb in my underpants. That would make security more interesting.” How we’ve all laughed.

Thanks Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. You totally stole my joke.

Well, I can’t tell you how honoured I am that people ask me to say how unutterably shit each episode of Doctor Who proves to be. So here goes:

Wow, how unutterably shit. Russell T Davies is now only one episode away from his oh-so necessary death, before he gloriously regenerates into Steven Moffat this Spring. It seems he intends to go out in a giant celebration of everything that has made him one of the most tiresome and incapable writers. The End Of Time Part 1 was bad in ways previously unexplored by science.

Interestingly though, this penultimate RTD episode isn’t bad in the ways his smug ghastliness normally manifests. Instead he even seems to be bad at being bad. We can normally rely on Davies for some vile preachy speeches, a sanctimonious scene that comments on the errs of our ways, and of course a loud-speaker-bellowed declaration of quite how relaxed and nonchalant everyone is about someone being gay. But in this episode he manages to be terrible at even these.

It seems like good form to sum up the plot at this point in the piece. I’m not sure that this is possible. It appeared to be the work of a seven-year-old. But here goes: “So the Doctor is being naughty right but he visits the Ood in this giant white castle place and they tell him that the Master is coming back and that Bernard Cribbins is sad and so he flies back to Earth but the Master comes back because his wife hasn’t washed her mouth for three years but then she throws this potion right and then the Master goes mad but he gets magic powers and can shoot electricity from his hands what turns into explosions and he can FLY and everything and then there’s these old people who sexually assault the Doctor and there’s burgers cos I like burgers and then the Doctor tells him off but there’s this cross black man and his girlfriend daughter who has this gate from outer space and there’s these green aliens in disguise as humans and then the Master and the gate do this thing and then everyone in the whole world apart from Catherine Tate and the Doctor and Bernard Cribbins turn into the Master and then it ends.”

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Opening with a terrifying clatter of the microphone, the matter not under discussion this week is: Is it the end of the great British pub? More immediately discussed is the tragedy of the Lost Rum Doings. Inevitably going down in legend, an entire episode of Rum Doings was lost to the cruel twist of Audacity’s crashing, causing us to immediately begin another to replace it.

And you know what – thank goodness. Because the result is the most positive episode of Rum Doings that will likely ever exist. It’s a celebration of things that we like.

John likes the banality and idiocy of Eggheads. While Nick likes well cooked chips. (John rather stupidly refers to Golden Wonder potatoes as “Golden Delicious” – please forgive him this.) Then there’s crazy golf, fontanelles, warm coffee shops, hypno-running, Chicago, Radio 3, how Rum Doings saves lives, chicken, leaves of privet hedges, the Brandenburg Concerto, and others.

Oh, and email us! Tell us why you listen, and whether you’re one of our non-gamer listeners. Or leave a comment below. We need to know. For science. And if you’re a female cellist of course.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

As ever, we depend on you to promote this. Please, take the time to retweet it, tell friends, or post about it on forums, that sort of thing. And please actually do that. You, we mean. Yes, you, because you never bother, and it would be so little effort.

The success of Rage Against The Machine being at number one this Christmas is interesting not because it’s one in the eye for whichever baddie you want to pick – X Factor, Simon Cowell, dreary mums – but rather for the power it displays.

I’ve never seen X Factor, nor have any idea what the winner – Joe I understand – sounds like when he sings. I’ve also no idea about the song he’s covering, which I read was originally sung by Miley Cyrus. (Which is about as ageing fact as you could ask for – I lost track of pop music before the song being covered was released.) It might be brilliant. I’m fairly sure it isn’t. But I don’t really have an opinion either way on whether a very drawn out karaoke contest merits so much attention – people seem to enjoy it a great deal, I’d rather wedge spikes into my face. I choose not to watch it (and to ignore most people’s Twitters on a Saturday evening), and thus it doesn’t get a chance to offend me. Not watching would seem a far more effective statement than messing with its Christmas No. 1 spot.

I also don’t care what song is at number one at Christmas. In fact, it’s only by this recent fuss that I’ve learned that X Factor winners have been Christmas number one for the previous four years. But as Cowell pointed out during the last week, before that it was Mr Blobby and Bob The Builder as much as it was anything more musical. The only interest I take in the seasonal chart is finding it amusing when greedy copyright whore Cliff Richard fails to get anywhere with his sanctimonious drivel.

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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.

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