The Slow Torture of the Brighton Keypad Parking System

The other day I went to the Brighton festival where parking is a problem … Normally I park at the top of the hill and walk down but as I was doubling up between venues for the Fringe I made the brave attempt to actually park in the town centre.  I had printed out maps and plotted my route carefully to circumnavigate Brighton’s complicated one way systems in order to find a car park.  So I parked the car temporarily and as I was driving round the block to the car park I thought … I know I’d park on a meter – there’s only a couple of hours before the meters switch off.

Now there was a time when parking on a meter required a large volume of small change constantly on hand but today we have technology to make it even more painful.  For now we have posts and a number you should ring to enter a reference number… except of course this is only easy if you have already set up an account.  But if you aren’t local you have to set up your account from scratch using only a telephone keypad using 9 numbers to enter 24 letters and a 16 digit card number and security code and expiry date and generate your own pin while you’re at it and, of course, enter a 5 digit location reference number.  Could it be more painful?

They really want us to walk but … the problem is going on public transport I just couldn’t get there on time so I had to suffer keypad code torture.  To make it worse my pen ran out so I had to get out the car to get the number off the post and then get back in to prevent someone seeing me entre my card number…

…and then just when you think you’ve done it all correctly a voice says “Thank you.  Parking for 2 hours [it’s 6 the meter turns off at 8] costs the same as parking over night until 9am tomorrow morning.  If you are happy with this press 2”.  So now you have to press 2 or circumnavigate the entire keypad menu again …so you are forced to give them more money than you need to in order to avoid more keypad torture.  Then again who knows how much money it should actually cost because whereas meters used to show you how many hours you get for how many £ the post tells you nothing at all… it just bills you immdiately.

Today we have sacking of May

Today we have sacking of May.
Yesterday, we had EU negotiating.
And tomorrow morning,
We shall have how to do Brexit after firing her.
But to-day, today we have the sacking of May.
Knives glisten like the cufflinks of the 1922 Committee,
And today we have the sacking of May.

There is nothing to fear but Quora its self...

As the years go on I grow to hate the internet more and more.  My current pet hate at the moment is Quora … a website for answering questions but what it really does is echo back to your email questions that will prey on your subconscious fears.

At the moment it is absolutely obsessed with bombarding me with questions and answers about job interviews and job application processes.  These threads disgorge such pearls of wisdom as … that if you haven’t got a job that your full time job is looking for a job.  Except of course it isn’t.  You don’t have a job if you don’t have a job.  It's a hobby...

It is one of life’s mysteries how when you do have a job people offer you jobs that you don’t want because they are worse than the job you have got but when you don’t have a job people don’t offer you the jobs that are worse than the job you used to have.  I know why this is and yet I never really understand it or want to but Quora constantly reminds me like my own personal unmotivator.

All of the people who comment on the site assiduously miss the heresy that the job market is broken as more and more employers lay the risks of the business onto employees rather than shareholders resulting in the absurd situation of people who have jobs having to reapply for their own jobs because it is easier to make people redundant than admit some people are bad at their jobs or that some jobs are pointless… Once people had jobs ... now they have the full time job of applying for jobs as a job.

All of these depressing/negative thoughts that I usually shunt to the back of my mind because they are unproductive Quora seems to prey on so I have finally taken action … It is time to end Quora and what it represents  – an industry of fear.  The industry of everyone telling everyone else how to get a job because there aren’t enough real jobs to go round...  Someone has to take a stand … Someone has to put a line in the sand … Someone has to end it!

Today I have closed my Quora account.  Prey on somebody else’s paranoia Quora!

Can you believe what Tutankhamun looks like today?!

Can you believe what Tutankhamun looks like today?!

Like many I remember him as the world famous boy king who moved the capital of Egypt from Akhetaten back to the city of Thebes but shortly after that Tutankhamun seemed to completely vanish from public life with little or no explanation.  

It turns out that immediately after breaking his leg in a racing accident the then boy King quickly contracted malaria - an infection from which he never fully recovered.  Soon he stopped going out the house as much.  After his wounds healed badly he developed a club foot and was soon unable to walk without the aid of a stick.  Following these misfortunes the once gregarious King became extremely self concious about being seen in public and his health began a downward spiral. 

Cut to a few years later and soon Tutankhamun started suffering from full on agoraphobia and he now rarely leaves his apartment in the Valley of the Kings.  Friends also worry that he has become anorexic.  He hardly eats anything at all.  Sources say he is now remarkably gaunt looking and frequently bandaged.  His illnesses have had a devastating effect on all his relationships

King Tutankhamun and and his wife Ankhesenamun are now estranged- a fact Ankhesenamun declines to talk about despite considerable media interest.  It is believed the divorce settlement is one of the largest in legal history and may contain a gagging clause...

…But whatever the truth of their relationship what is known is that it came under considerable strain after he fell from his chariot in a road accident and started to require full time home nursing. 

After being deposed as Pharaoh Tutankhamun made several attempts to revive his career as an all powerful potentate but he has never managed to recapture his glory days. 

It is sad for his friends to see that he is now reduced to touring and exhibiting his possessions and extensive jewellery collections in an attempt to raise the much needed revenue he requires to pay former Queen Ankhesenamun her considerable alimony.

  

Time will tell if King Tutankhamun can ever recover his fortunes and make it to the top table of unelected autocrats again… as fans ourselves we certainly hope he can and wish him all the best.

George Monbiot literally talks bullshit

The other day I switched on the Today program to remember why I don't listen to it anymore.  George Monbiot and a lady I'd never heard of were talking about the loss of carbon sinks to our agricultural industry and global warming.

No one will be shocked to learn that George's plan for the future involved us all turning vegan but what disturbed me more was their view of agriculture as simply a series of carbon sinks with which to offset global warming.

We can reduce CO2 in the atmosphere if we stop cows farting is a rejection of agriculture as a natural part of the carbon cycle.  Of course if it was all trees and bogs this would capture more carbon but clearly humans stopped being hunter gatherer societies some time ago because if we hadn't we'd still be living in caves.  Of course heavily pesticided land is not going to capture as much carbon as land farmed using traditional organic rotational methods ... but it seems to me wrong to see it as the job of the farming industry to put right the pollution created by the industrial burning of fossil fuels for well over 150 years.  It's as though none of these people have even heard of the carbon cycle...

...whereby the CO2 naturally produced by the cows eating grass is supposed to return to the earth in dung.  No we need to control the very small amounts of methane that are given out in cow farts etc...

There may be some truth in this but trying to merge together the effects of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel output with that of CO2 emissions from intensive farming methods is like blaming coastal erosion equally on both the sea and on children who take pebbles home from a beach holiday.  Yes, the children have an effect but they're hardly the primary cause... although doubtless the environmentalists will argue that everything is connected.

Naturally both commentators on Today - who both seemed to be on the same side ...what happened to "impartiality"? - seemed to think that meat was somehow uneconomic and that we should all eat less of it.  It is true the higher up the food chain you go the more energy is lost along the way but you have to eat of cereal to get the same energy as you'd find in a stake...

Well, maybe there are alternatives but I tried and quorn is a bit boring after a while.  As for giving up cheese - Yes, I know it shortens my lifespan but booze will have to go first...

Still what amazes me more than these environmentalists theories of how everybody should eat ... is their sheer confidence that everybody else will adopt their policies meekly.  It doesn't seem to occur to them either that part of human evolutionary progress could be down to the fact that our nature allows us to be both herbivore and omnivore...  I'm probably a bigot to say it but animal herbivores with the possible exception of horses don't seem to be very bright.  Okay that's probably a eugenic argument for meat eating but ...

...being told that it's all down to cows and we must stop eating meat because it creates CO2 is a bit depressing... particularly when you suspect that the interlocutor's primary objection is not damage to the enviroment as much as the morality of killing anything with a central nervous system.  Anyway apparently to save the planet we must now all change our diets...  And no one is immune to these new political machinations to control everybody's diets ...including the cows themselves who must now - according to wikipedia - only be fed the right kind of food that will prevent them producing the wrong type of farts...

"There are some controllable ways to reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. Improving the digestion of bovine will decrease the bovine's tendency to belch and release digestive gases through the anus, which emit methane into the atmosphere. One way is to grind the cattle feed to make it finer which leads the cow to take less time and energy to digest it, and as a result, less methane is produced in the process. Scientists have introduced garlic into cattle's diets; garlic inhibits the microorganisms in the intestines from producing methane"

...it can only be a matter of time before human farts are subject to a similar level of micromanagement.  Soon people who do a silent but violent one will be lectured severly not about the antisocial aspects of not popping to the bathroom but about how they are damaging the environment.  And about time too...