Apathy Sketchpad

As part of NTL’s free cable package we currently receive a channel called CNX, which stands for “Toonami”. This is, essentially, the animated fighting championship channel. We can now watch a variety of Japanese cartoons which would make Quentin Tarantino go and have a little lie down.

My favourite is, I think, Teen Titans. The show features five teenagers who also happen to be B-list superheroes. (I’ve only heard on one, and he’s Robin.) It’s like the Tiny Toons equivalent of Justice League, and I like it simply because it’s so delightfully silly. The theme music is also hilariously bad, inkeeping with the Toonami Total Quality Rule, which states that any programme with good theme music is bad, and vice versa.

For example, this is a verse of lyrics from the theme tune to Ultimate Muscle:

Fighters join the operation,
From different planets and different nations,
There’s an intergalactic federation,
To monitor the situation.
Catch each and every confrontation,
Only broadcast on this station!

The actual cartoon is almost exactly like WWE, only more realistic. It features talking walruses, wrestlers who are chesspieces, and at least two ancient fighting clans. As in all anime, the secondary characters fall over if anyone says anything slightly surprising, but this one is made unique because it is full of arse jokes. I think the name Ultimate Muscle is in fact a poor translation of ‘gluteus maximus’. It is also the only cartoon I have ever seen use the word flatulence in its theme music.

But despite this, there are even better theme songs on Toonami, one of the best, I think, being Dragonball. The original Dragonball series hasn’t been shown in the UK before, although Dragonballs Z and GT were both reasonably popular. When you see the programme it becomes very obvious why noone bothered to show it before. It has very amusing theme music; just look at this section of the lyrics:

Dragonball!
Friends working together!
A boy and a girl on a struggle for truth!
Dragonball!
So come on our journey!
The fun and excitement are waiting for you!

Of course, I can’t be certain the original lyrics had exclamation marks after every line, but I expect they did. There is quite a lot of background to Dragonball. What little of this I have been able to discern is that every two years twelve Dragonballs (whatever exactly they are) appear on the planet somewhere. Then Goku and his friend have a year to find them or else the world will be destroyed. Unfortunately, the cartoon appears to be set in the year when there aren’t any Dragonballs on the entire planet, so instead Goku is being trained in martial arts by the Great Master Stringfellow so he can enter a competition and battle the smelliest man in the world. (That isn’t his real name of course, but it should be.) We first see the Master watching a female workout video a little too intently, and then he demands to be brought an attractive woman before training will commence. By the end of the second episode we had seen her almost take her top off, heard a lot of sleazy saxophone music whenever she appeared, and been shown a sequence in which Goku watches his friend urinate onto a frog. It is without a doubt the most perverted show on television, if only because it seems to be aimed at children (children being the only people with enough free time and free brain space to learn all the mythological crap that goes along with these programmes).

The very best piece of theme music on the channel is that of Star Wars: Clone Wars, on the grounds that it was written by John Williams who is respected and doesn’t write lyrics with the word ‘flatulence’ in them. Therefore, Clone Wars has to be the very worst cartoon. Samurai Jack gave it a run for its money (by failing entirely to make any sense at all), but Clone Wars took the title by the simple means of only being three minutes long, and most of that being a recap of the last episode.

I am locked in a long and bitter battle against myself. The origins of the feud are hazy, but I can recall some of it. You see, though I am typing this by moving my fingers in a fairly precise way to strike what often turn out to be the correct keys, this action comes so naturally to me that I can do it all just be wanting to. Other actions, such as getting out of bed, are less natural. I firmly believe that had mankind invented the comfortable bed before the reasonably secure house we would have never survived in the wild. We would have been wiped out by pumas, or some other scarily large cat.

I cannot get out of bed just by wanting to. I just lie there, telling myself “I am going to be late. This will affect my degree mark and will reduce my salary for the rest of my life. I may end up paying £80,000 pounds over my lifetime for an extra twenty minutes in bed. I will get up in ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Oh, no I won’t. Call it fifteen. Fourteen…”

Awake-me doesn’t approve of this, and has started setting little traps for in-bed-me to try and con him into getting up. First he moved the alarm clock away from the bed, but in-bed-me compensated by reaching over to it and turning it off anyway. Then awake-me decided to put a radio by the bed. The radio is harder to tune-out than an alarm clock and tends to wake me up fairly well over about an hour. In-bed-me very rarely remembered to turn on the radio, so awake-me put a note on the alarm clock to remind him. Now he’s moved the alarm clock so far from the bed that in-bed-me is forced to get out of bed just to hit snooze. (As in any war which does not involve America, there is honour and there are rules. In this case, in-bed-me is not allowed to turn off the alarm completely until I am fully awake, or at least have convinced myself I won’t be getting back into bed.) In-bed-me hasn’t come up with a counter-measure for this yet, and tends to lose interest and get up after about the third time he hits snooze.

So while Awake-me is winning the Battle Of Sloth*, thirsty-me is winning the Cola Wars. Sane-me enjoys the occasional drink of Coca-Cola, and knows the best place to get it is Morrison’s (or Netto). This being quite a way away, he always buys two or three bottles. Thirsty-me drinks them too quickly. Sane-me has tried dividing the cola into several smaller bottles, earmarking each one for a particular day. Thirsty-me, not being as honourable as in-bed-me, drinks them anyway, reasoning that each individual one won’t hurt, so therefore the whole lot can’t either. Sane-me tried getting cans instead of bottles, so that thirsty-me couldn’t just take a swig whenever he wanted. While thirsty-me didn’t drink as often then, he drank more when he did. The cans went only slightly slower than the bottles, and were rather more expensive. Now the Coca-Cola is kept in another room, so thirsty-me can’t reach it without going for a little walk. The Cola Wars seem to be at something of a truce at the moment.

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*I originally called this the Bed War, then the Battle Of The Bed, but then I decided that everyone loves Star Wars puns and gave it its current moniker.

I would like to start by emphasising that every word of this article is true. I have not embellished or exaggerated, because it simply isn’t necessary. I have a stalker, who for the sake of this story we will call ‘Tracy’. (And because it’s her name.) She isn’t a very good stalker, because she only knows my routine for about four hours a week, which are the ones on a Wednesday afternoon when I go to the Ship, but for those few hours it can be pretty scary.

I met her on the 3rd of September this year. She ended up talking to me because she got to me last and therefore had already scared everyone else away. It is a rule in the Pub Code that someone has to talk to the scary person, and a sub-clause of that rule states that the last person isn’t allowed to leave until the criteria for a conversation have been met. They were. After a while I took out my phone to check for messages, which was a mistake, because she took it off me a forcibly exchanged phone numbers with me. (When Tracy goes on the pull, she does it like a tug-of-war — persistance and hard work, and completely at odds with what the other person wants. Oh, and she gets a little outside help from her gravitational field caused by her immense bulk.)

Eventually I escaped her by being called up to sing. I sat back down with some comparatively normal people and ran out the clock. (“Comparatively normal” at the Ship means, say, a freelance viking, mentally ill, or maybe a lesbian. We have all three there on a regular basis.) I didn’t turn my phone on for three days. I justified this to myself using the fact that I had left my charger at home and had to conserve battery power until I could pick it up.

She texted me the following week to see if I was going to the Ship again. I answered non-comittally. She showed up. This was getting to be a problem, because I didn’t want her to become a regular feature. The pub quite literally isn’t big enough for the both of us. She says my text didn’t get through, so I can have a clear conscience that I did actually reply, with all the tangible benefits of blowing her off completely. She showed up anyway. Apparently while I was singing No Regrets she enjoyed it “rather too much”. I dread to think what Lee meant by that.

The week after that (the 17th) I put in National Express for karaoke, and enjoyed every second of singing the phrase “Your arse is the size of a small country” not ten feet away from her. That week, we learned that Tracy cannot take a hint. Remember that; we’ll be coming back to it later. I spent the remainder of the evening sat with my friends discussing even more insulting songs I could sing to see if she can take a less subtle hint (Sixteen Tons, Fat Bottomed Girls, and so on) and amusing ways to tell her to get lost.

For a few weeks after that, we didn’t go to the Ship because Lee and Lizzy had launched their anti-social-life campaign and were desperately trying to stomp out any sociable or otherwise enjoyable evenings out we might have. They were quite successful in the endeavour, as well. I next went to the Ship on my own on the 5th of November. She wasn’t there. I thought perhaps Lee and Lizzy had unwittingly set me free from the Tyranny Of Tracy. I thought wrong. She showed up the next week at least as large as life, probably larger. Before she left that week, she accosted me from behind and kissed me. I’m pretty convinced that is not socially acceptable behaviour. Not when she does it, anyway. (See how I spent your birthday, Caroline?)

It is worth pointing out at this point that the selection of songs available on the karaoke discs is not great. If you sing Elvis Presley or traditional Irish songs you’ll be fine, but otherwise the selection is rather limited. For this reason I have made my own disc, and knowing that Tracy might be there I added the Arrogant Worms’ Stalker Girl to the end. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. This week (the 26th) I put the song in as soon as I saw her. For those of you who don’t know the song, I will reproduce the most relevant parts of the lyrics here, in exchange for which I will link you to the Arrogant Worms’ homepage, so maybe you might buy a CD from them.

She says I touch her in a
Very special way
But I’d never go near her now
Without my pepper spray
And the voices
Inside her head say
Break into my house and
Sleep in my bed
And they also said that
Shaving the cat was OK.

She’s my creepy stalker girl
I’m the centre of her
Whacked out, crazy and delusional world
She follows me everywhere
She’s even got a bag with some
Bits of my hair
Just go away you creepy stalker girl.

Now, I’ve analysed your handwriting
And I’ve got some bad news:
You’re manic-obsessive with
Abandonment issues,
And you think
That all our songs
Are about you and
You’re usually wrong,
Except for now; this song is so about you.
You creepy stalker girl
You creepy stalker girl
You creepy stalker girl

That’s right, the relevant parts of the song are the entire thing except for the first verse, which is about being in a band. Remember how I told you that Tracy cannot take a hint? Good. (One might have thought the phrase “this song is so about you” might have tipped her off, but alas, no.) When I returned she said “Help me!”, so I felt I had to ask what was wrong. I added the word “now” to make it less polite. I didn’t want her liking me any more than was strictly necessary. She pointed across the pub and said “He fancies me.” As well as demonstrating that she has no sense of irony, this was the best news I’d heard all week. I told her she could do worse. She said he wasn’t her type but I stuck to my guns. “What’s wrong with him? He seems like a nice guy.” I had never, in fact, spoken to this man, I was basing this observation entirely on his choice of T-shirt, but I wasn’t going to let that kind of detail throw me off course or else Tracy would have already won. She ignored all common sense, the blindingly obvious, and the unchangable recent past when it suited her to do so. She said “No, I fancy someone else.” It ought to be pretty clear to even the most dim-witted reader who she meant, and it was for exactly this reason I didn’t say “And who’s that, then?” I knew how she felt; I didn’t need to complicate matters by letting her know I knew. “I don’t know if he likes me, though,” she continued. i decided it would be safest if she didn’t try anything she’d regret like asking me out, so I told her I knew how she felt — I had that same problem with a girl at uni and when I asked her out she didn’t like me at all and it was the most embarrassing time of my life. It wasn’t true, exactly, but it was just what I needed her to hear. I got talking to the self-employed viking again, and a while later she nudges me on the shoulder and says partly to me and partly to her friend who presumably had contested she was unreliable, “I’ve never let you down when you’ve texted me and asked me to meet somewhere, have I?” And of course she hadn’t. The fact that I had never, and would never text her unless it was a reply to her and I would certainly never ask to meet her unless I was armed to the teeth and bored with life anyway didn’t seem terribly important to her. She then told him we text each other all the time, and sometimes phone. We have exchanged precisely one text message and exactly zero seconds of phone calls in the entire history of the world. Three possible explanations present themselves:

1. She copied down my number wrongly and got someone who sounds exactly like me instead and hasn’t realised yet. If this is the case, I expect I will be blamed personally for not telling her this during one of our many phone calls she thinks we had.
2. She was lying to seem cooler, or to see if I would play along. I did, in case the next possibility is true:
3. She’s insane.

I like the last one. It has an air of simplicity the other two explanations lack. Occam and his Razor are with me all the way on this one. She’s delusional, just like the Arrogant Worms said she was, and she thinks we have long conversations. The beauty of this theory is that it neatly explains almost everything. If she thinks we have long chats late into the evening, then she has had ample time to get to know me, which explains why she confessed last night to loving me. I asked her not to. Personally I’ve been going to the Ship for over two years and as nice as the people are there, I’m not sure I love any of them. It also explains why my phone never rings when she says she’ll phone me. She’s probably sat at home with a toy phone pretending to ring me. I hope so. That would be an endearingly cute mental image. You know, if she was cute. If there are any further developments, I’ll let you know.

In the past month or two I have seen two different children’s science programmes whilst channel-surfing. (Well, channel-paddling, really, with NTL’s limited choice of free channels). The first was called Eureka! and the second was called That’s Genius!. It wasn’t. I have an instinctive distrust for any programme with an exclamation mark in the title, and these shows did nothing to help that. The variously showcased inventions that were stupid, unworkable, or obviously faked. The latest one was a “hologram-radio”. Having missed the opening stages of this show, I’m not certain of the details, but I think a viewer drew up an elaborate plan for a radio with a projector showing the performers as life-sized holograms. Maybe one day this will be possible, but that day is not today, and it probably isn’t any of the days this decade either. Nonetheless, the people at That’s Genius! had to build one, so they hooked a projector to a DVD-player and made do. The finished hologram-radio had no holograms or radios anywhere near it. The problem, you see, with the hologram-radio is, according to the presenter of the show, that “radio waves carry sound, not pictures”. He didn’t actually add “so therefore television doesn’t exist and if you think you’re watching one, you are probably insane,” but I think for completeness it should have been pointed out.

Better still, though, was the “invisibility cloak” on Eureka!. It was plainly obvious to even a casual cynic that they had simply given him a blue shirt and added a background with a computer. They’d been a little subtle about it — they hadn’t lined up the background with the real background — because Science Shack taught the world that invisibility isn’t possilbe earlier this year.

Science Shack, in contrast to the other two programmes mentioned here, is what science programming should be. It’s fun, entertaining, and you learn things (sometimes). The premise of the show is that a plainly impossible task is given to a group of experts, and they fail to complete it in an ingenious way. Their idea is then tested against ideas by laymen they pulled off the street (or out of schools). It’s like an impossible version of Scrapheap Challenge.

I’ve had this computer for about one and a half years now, and actually, between My Documents and Shared Documents, I have 13 gigabytes of inane rubbish cluttering up my hard disk (including this website). Adam and Lee’s documents folders pad this out to almost 14GB. Some would argue, I’m sure, that this is a reckless waste of space and it would be better employed elsewise. (Elsewise is not a word in the traditional sense, but I like it and I think its meaning is clear enough.) To those people, I say “and just what the hell are you doing snooping round my hard drive anyway?”.

The fact of the matter is that I am a natural hoarder. I’ve never been one to get rid of anything if I think there’s even the slightest chance I might ever want to see it again and I can find somewhere to put it. And I’m just the same with computer files. Until I have filled all 110 gigabytes of my hard disk, I am not going to delete any of my rubbish unless it really is worthless. As a result, as well as 10GB of music, I have several megabytes of chatlogs, some pointless photos, amusing videos, and a variety of zip files I can’t remember what’s in them. Today, I felt it was time I had a look around.

You see, when you have this much disk space, it would take you, in the normal course of things, about twenty years to fill it, so when you look back on it, most of what’s there you’ve forgotten about. It’s like looking back over an old photo album, but one with sound, video, music, and a bizarre sense of humour. For example, I have a programme to convert text into l33t-speak, the terms and conditions for websites I’d forgotten existed, some random Photoshopped images, a video file of Leonard Nimoy singing “The Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins” (I think he should have sung The Logical Song instead), every Leeds University Physics exam paper for the last three years, Stavros’ letter to the house, and a variety of re-written song lyrics about my friends. I also have the backing track to Don’t Stop Me Now, the vocal track to Gay Bar, and my attempt to mix the two. I have two spoof Matrix videos, something called the Assboat, and a delightful ICQ chatlog from a girl who wanted cybersex. I wasn’t in the mood, so I thought I’d have a little fun. It was a little mean, since I hape to God that English wasn’t her first language, but as I’ve said before, if you’re on ICQ talking to someone chosen at random by a computer, what can you expect? Besides, just look what appeared on my screen without any warning:

Her: hii
Me: hi
Her: how long
Her: cock
Me: wow, you get right to the point, don’t you?
Her: y
Me: i can’t say i measure. (i don’t even know how tall i am)
Her: have sex before
Me: why? does that make it longer? i can’t see how it would.
Her: have or not have
Me: er.. have, please.
Her: how many
Me: well, as many as possible.
Her: virgane
Me: even better.
Her: what do want me to do?
Me: oh, do whatever you want. i’m not naturally domineering.
Her: order me but do like me
Her: u are gay are u
Me: no.
Me: why would you think that?
Her: i siad order me and u did not
Me: that doesn’t mean i’m gay – just uncooperative. hell, i don’t even know who you are. you might be 7 for all i know.
Her: ok bey
Me: bye
Her: fucku
Me: byede bye then

I closed the window here when she didn’t respond.

Her: u have not sex yet still baby
Me: you only gave me two minutes, give me a chance!
Her: talk it now
Me: what?
Her: chance
Me: i’m guessing english isn’t your first language?

She went offline after that. She contacted me again the next day, and we failed to have even more raunchy cybersex. I also have two images on my hard disk simply titled “And You Thought Half-Life Was Clever”. The second is a group of bots standing in a corner on each other’s heads, and the first is this:

[pictures not there yet - Andrew]

Also in that folder is a photo of two men riding the escalator to the gym, entitled “Americans Have No Sense Of Irony”. There is a cartoon of a zombie version of the leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, to which I have appended a Worms-style name and health meter. There are some very amusing webpages I’ve saved for my own limited posterity. There is a Flash drawing of Pinky And The Brain, and a version of myself drawn as a South Park character by another Flash app somewhere. Another Flash app I have in my shared folder is the Saddam Hussein version of The Real Slim Shady. I have a handful of songs my brother recorded, which I will never delete, two videos of the Star Wars Kid*, a video of a man saying “People mostly just call them Squirrel Nuts” for which I have absolutely no context, and a video of a Ferrari crashing. I have eight pages of scanned doodles of Professor Olmsted, and a blurry photo Adam took of me at the Ship sporting a feather boa and looking at least as camp as Olmsted, along with another photo he took of a doner kebab cut (terribly amusingly) into the shape of a penis. I don’t think we’ve been back to that takeaway since. I have the entire contents of Adam’s phonebook. I have a photograph I took of a random experiment in lab because it looked like the Gin and Tonic Laser we’d heard so little about, and a photo of the “Self-Clearing Area” sign that used to be in the Coffee Bar but is now in our living room (where people pay exaclty as much attention to it as they didin the coffee bar). I have videos of people completing Minesweeper pointlessly quickly. In that same folder, there is a version of the Wamdue Project’s King Of My Castle mixed with the background music from Lemmings (you’d be surprised how well that works). I have five versions of Bohemian Rhapsody (from best to worst: Queen, Weird Al, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Rolf Harris, then The Fugees) and the heavy metal version of Eleanor Rigby and a version of I’ll Be There For You that turns into the Wormsong halfway through. I have a scanned copy of Stavros’ sheet of passwords, which gave me ultimate power over his email and webspace. I have the old Bingo sheets we used to disrupt Professor Savage’s lectures. I have a sheet of physics formulae. I have a photo of Adam in a tree with a bottle of Gordon’s Ice trying to ‘retrieve’ a frisbee that was never ours in the first place.

But enough about my hard disk. The time has come for me to get some sleep, so I’d thank you if you could hold your excitement until the year 2005, when I will have built up enough new junk to make a new column, by which point I will have forgotten which junk went into this one and therefore repeat this entire thing. Enjoy!

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*The Star Wars Kid, in case you don’t know, is a fairly recent thing that has swept the internet. The basic story is that some kid was messing about with a golf-ball collector (no, I’ve never heard of one either), pretending it was a light-sabre. He videotaped himself doing this, which some would argue was asking for trouble, and therefore he has no right to sue his mates for putting the video on the internet. The video, thanks to one of the few legitimate uses of KaZaA, spread around the web like a wild fire on a hot bun, and soon people started uploading new versions, with light-sabre style effects and sounds. Some of them are very good.

Today was our eighth ‘physics in review’ session this semester. Each session lasts an hour, and they are organised into pairs. We get the questions in one week, and work though a few. Then we have a week to look over the rest and go through the difficult ones in the second session. It doesn’t work that way. No, not at all.

What actually happened was that we would pointedly ignore the question sheet all week and sit in silence for an hour while the tutor went through the remaining questions. Unfortunately, the tutor is so incredibly dull that we almost can’t bring ourselves to listen to a word he says. It isn’t our fault, of course. The university decided to schedule this for 4 to 5 in the afternoon, so by the time we get there we’ve been in lab for six hours and those of us why can be bothered to turn up are too tired, bored, and drained to participate.

It wasn’t always like this. We had more energy at the start of the semester, but, according to the Heisenburg Principle, that was never going to last. (And people say I don’t pay attention in Quantum.) In fact we once paid so much attention that two of us answered a question in two very simple and very different ways, both of which were much simpler and quicker than the one the tutor was doing on the whiteboards. I made the mistake of trying to explain this to him, and discovered a lot more about psychology that physics by doing so. Instead of seeing the very obvious way my method arrived at the answer, he tried to find out how my method was related to his. It wasn’t. He was integrating things, differentiating things, and other quite superfluous mathematical verbs, while I’d used geometry and simple algebra to solve the same exact problem and arrive at the same exact answer.

This is why nobody spoke in today’s session. He went through four questions. The first one I’d solved in five minutes on half a page, whereas his method took two pages and half an hour to complete. I already knew what would happen if I tried to explain my method, so I didn’t. To be honest, I can’t understand for a second how he managed to miss my method, or why anyone would ever want to do it the more complicated way. The second question he went through nobody had even looked at, and ditto for the third. The last question was in fact rather easy. Unfortunately the wording of it was so strange it wasn’t until he explained the answer that we understood the question.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that we still don’t have time to look through the questions. We have other things to do, like labwork, an essay, magnetohydrodynamics homework, and getting a gold medal on Nobody Rides For Free. We can’t waste time on things that aren’t assessed. Even if he tried to report us he couldn’t — he has no idea which one of us is which. We frequently skip sessions and he doesn’t seem to notice.

I missed the fifth session, in which a question sheet was given out. Also in that session, the review papers were given out so we could give anonymous feedback on the module. I didn’t realise this until I arrived at the next session. I remembered earlier in the course he told us in previous years people had asked on these forms for the question sheet to be handed out a week early. In his experience, he said, people didn’t look at the sheets so the exercise was pointless. That seemed quite plausible to me. It was obvious to me that this whole pointless exercise was going to be repeated this year, but he went through the motions anyway because as I have mentioned he is blind to the obvious unless it can be explained using calculus somehow.

Needless to say, everyone who showed up asked for the questions in advance again. In the next session he did what he always does; he picked a question, asked if anyone had looked at it, and then picked someone at random to glare at until they admitted they hadn’t. This time he also asked why we wanted the questions in advance if we weren’t going to look at them. He picked me. This was not a good idea, because if he had enough memory to recognise us, he’d have known the following facts:

Having missed the last session I hadn’t got a review sheet and therefore couldn’t possibly have asked for the questions in advance.
Having missed the last session, I hadn’t got the question sheet in order to have looked at it.
Of course there was no way he could have known that given the review sheet I would have written on it “I just want you to know that if you start giving the questions out earlier, I will compensate by starting to ignore them earlier”, but I think the other two points are sufficient. He gave out the next sheet early. He’s stopped doing that again.

Somebody at British Gas is plotting a cruel and bitter revenge on me. They’ve been reading Columnist and plotting their sadistic revenge.

Okay, technically there is a good chance they haven’t read a word of this and aren’t plotting against me at all, but I’m a firm believer in Occam’s Razor, and Occam’s Razor says they have. You should recall three recent Columnists before I tell you what just happened. The first was about British Gas’ awful and stupid advertising campaign and their slightly militant and, I’m almost certain, illegal methods of getting their contract signed (i.e. telling me it wasn’t a contract). I cancelled that contract and have a confirmation letter to prove it. The second two were a couple of stories about how insanely difficult it is to change lightshades, swap lightbulbs, or otherwise tamper with the light fitting in this preposterously high-ceilinged room. (My room is actually slightly taller than it is wide.)

I was coming home today, and noticed that British Gas had once again hired the billboard opposite my window, and used it to convey the arrogant and misleading slogan “nPower customers, [British Gas] could save you money on your electricity”. I was bitching about this to Alex, when I got upstairs and found a package next to my room. From British Gas. Containing Lightbulbs. Bearing the slogan “Why can’t saving money be as easy as changing a lightbulb?”. And a slip of paper saying “Dear customer,” I am not a customer, “Thank you for choosing British Gas to supply your home with electricity”. I didn’t choose them. They came to my door and lied to me. I wonder if I could get away with sending them back if they don’t work. It says I can on the compliment slip, but then it also says I’m a customer of theirs, so who knows?

Well, never mind. I suppose out of all of this, I’ve paid 38p for two energy-saving lightbulbs, and how bad can that be?

If you don’t already have ICQ, I suggest you download it right now. Then, set your status to “Free To Chat”, thus maximising your chances of appearing in the random chat partner list. I’ve been using ICQ again for about a week, and already I have three contacts — a Chinese woman, a German farmhand/engineer, and a chatbot working for a less than exciting looking sex club. You have to admit, “Hi! Need a sex? Want to join a sex club? :-)” is a hell of an opener. I’ll have to try that in clubs.

Perhaps I should invent some misinformation about myself for the user information so that my account attracts the right calibre of guest. Or perhaps I should just empty it so that I can invent a new and bizarre persona for everybody who contacts me.

There are those, of course, who think you should just be yourself, but I disagree for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t use ICQ to make friends. I use it for a laugh. I expect the same of the other people, in particular those who click random chat partner. Once someone even clicked random chat partner instead of technical support, and asked me to try and help them register on some Canadian cake website. Really. If you ask the internet to provide you with someone random to talk to, the chances are you aren’t looking for a serious relationship. Secondly, it becomes much more difficult for a psychopath on the internet to track me down and kill me if they think I’m a cybernetic hedgehog living in a hole under a freeway in Michigan.

As of today, though, I haven’t had anyone contact me yet that I haven’t rather liked (except for the chatbot, of course). I’m hoping to have a cretin talk to me eventually so that I can annoy it.

According to the advertising campaign, there are so many ways to customise a Mini that it is a mini adventure. In fact, it is a full-scale epic film trilogy compared to the number of ways to customise a Fiat Punto. Considering the number of Puntos that are around*, there is very little variation between them. They come in two shapes and a range of colours. I recently saw one at university in black. To make this clear, it had a badge on the back (where one might normally see a “GSi” or similar badge) saying simply ‘Black’. Now if someone asks what car you drive and you only know the colour it’s okay — you also know the model!

But my favourite customisation is the one driving around Leeds recently which I call the Giant Seagull Paint Job. I took a photo for you:

[Photos not uploaded yet - Andrew]

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*Though there are more Micras, particularly if you include the ones which have melted slightly in the microwave — called the Ford Ka.

There is a law in this country, I seem to remember, which states that you cannot claim your product is “the best”. Carlsberg had to add the word ‘probably’ to their slogan (but then, Carlsberg is demonstrably not the best lager in the world), so why can everyone else get away with it?

A special dispensation is given, for some reason which I will never understand, to banks. Banks are allowed to compare their interest rates etc. with the competition in their adverts. Of course, it doesn’t work, because they all offer special introductory rates and compare them to the competition’s standard rates, but it’s legal, at least. What I didn’t know was that this dispensation apparently extends to razers. It seems a little random, but Wilkinson Sword claim that “nothing shaves closer or smoother”* and Gilette go right out and claim to offer “the best a man can get”. Naturally, they don’t offer any numbers to back up these claims, but there are a number of good reasons why not.

The first reason is that the advertising standards agency might notice something was amiss if they started having dancing bank employees holding big cards with popular razer names down one side and whisker lengths down the other. The second reason, and probably the clincher, is that men have been trained to ignore statistics in adverts. If men listened to statistics in adverts, cars would have their horsepower and weights listed instead of advertising them by their weird key-cards or some intangible (read: imaginary) quality like “va-va-voom”. If men listened to statistics in adverts, you’d see slogans like “New Lynx: 83% of women think it’s sexy”. But, for better or worse, we have been trained to ignore all statistics, partly by Guinness’ “98% of all statistics are made up” adverts (I might have got the figure wrong, but I hardly see that it would matter), but mostly by adverts for women’s cosmetics.

Personally, I think these adverts are pathetic. If I ever tell a girl “I like your hair.” and she says “Thanks — I took out colour insurance on it this morning” or “Thankyou. It’s 72% more radiant” I think I’ll go talk to a man. I can’t for one second believe that there is a person on this planet sat at home thinking “63%, wow. I wonder how that compares to L’Oreal”, or “Never. That looks like 32% more shine at best”. Despite this, though, there are almost no cosmetics adverts without at least one statistic and a section of alleged science, usually involving at least one pseudoscientific buzzword they’ve made up and trademarked so noone else can use it. The thing is, though, that all of this results in no useful information being conveyed in the entire advert. As a result, all the girls I know on science degrees get their cosmetics from Lush, who use ingredients with names like ‘honey’, ‘vodka’, or ‘fruit’. You know where you are with those.

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Technically, the claim is “two million men know nothing shaves closer or smoother”, which could mean one of several things:1. Two million men are wrong
2. You’d get a closer shave using no razer at all.Personally, I’d like to know how two million men know that. Have two million men conducted an intensive double-blind trial of different razers? (And if so, why?)