Apathy Sketchpad

As I type this, The Vault is on. The first round of this is as follows: First, you are given £1000. You are asked ten questions, over three minutes. You can have as many tries as you like at each one, and you can pass them and come back later. If that isn’t enough, you can ask the ‘brokers’, who will sell you answers. The borkers use a contingency basis — i.e. you only pay them if they’re right. You win £100 for each question answered, and a bonus of £5000 if you answer all of them. The player with most money at the end goes to round two. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

The trouble is, the players posses neither the wit nor knowledge to unlock their car doors, much less The Vault. Usually they get the romantic and naïve notion lodged in their feeble brains that they are somehow capable of getting this £5000 bonus, and spend up to £300 on the last few answers. Of course, almost invariably all that happens is that they wast a few hundred pounds. Today, however, a player managed to pass all ten questions, then buy seven answers, and&nbvp;– I swear&nbvp;– won only £200. He was given £1000 for doing nothing. A lettuce would have won £1000. This means, at least in The Vault terms, this man was one fifth as intellegent as a lettuce. Or a fish. Or a brick, a Pot Noodle, or anything else you can thing of that couldn’t say the phrase “deal for £200″.

How is it possible that these people think spending £300 on a £100 prize is a smart thing to do? How is it possible that they continue to ask the same broker who last time spent 15 seconds haggling a £250 price for telling you the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays was, in fact, Tom Sawyer? How is it possible that they think that £200 is a pretty good prize to win on a quiz that gives you £1000 just for turning up? The mind boggles; it really does.

I did a Columnist some time ago berating the ITV daytime show Loose Women for being ill-informed, obnoxious, and irritating, but now it seems I owe them an apology. The host of Loose Women, Kay Adams, was on Question Time last week, and I’m sorry to say that we live in a country where a politician can put forward an argument, only to have it shot down and torn to shreds by the host of a daytime TV show, and then attempt to put it forward again in a subtly different guise. This doesn’t make me like Loose Women any more, you understand, but it does say a lot (and lend Kay some respect).

There is a lot of talk of late of banning smoking in public. People who oppose this ban are wrong*. I will now dismantle any argument you may have heard against the smoking ban:

1. If you ban smoking in public, you have to ban car exhausts

Not bad. However, there are four main flaws with this argument: if your car is modern, efficient and clean, car exhaust fumes are less toxic than cigarette smoke; cars tend to be used in well ventilated areas; car exhausts cannot be selectively aimed at people’s faces; and cars are useful rather than recreational (to the point where society would stand still if they were illegal).

2. It is my right as a human being to smoke

It is my right as a human being not to be given lung cancer by an idiot. My right not to die clearly takes precedence over your right to kill yourself. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Your right to exhale carcinogens ends the exact same place. (I actually stole that soundbite from someone on TV who inexplicably replaced the phrase “the exact same place” with “at my place of work”. Nice soundbite, idiot.)

3. If you don’t like smoke, don’t go to bars where people smoke.

I see. I can, off the top of my head, think of three smoking bars I frequent called “The Oak”, whereas I know of precisely one non-smoking bar (and, for the record, very nice it is, too). I think I should be allowed to socialise without being given a choice of “Arcadia or cancer”.

4. It is part of our culture.

So is Marco from Big Brother.

5. Use the non-smoking area if you don’t like smoke.

Do you know how many pubs and bars have a permanant non-smoking area? I can think of precisely two, and that includes the non-smoking bar I mentioned earlier, and in the other you have to walk through the smoking area to get to the non-smoking area, or indeed the bar. (I can cope with that, but I’ve met the odd heavy asthmatic who couldn’t. I guess it’s excessive to cater to people with such specific disabilities everywhere.)

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Update, 20051027:
A comment on the BBC website states that “having a smoking section in a pub or restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool”. Genius.

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That’s all the invalid arguments I can think of in favour of public smoking for now. I suppose you can submit some in the forum and I can destroy those as well if you’d like.

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*Some people say it’s a matter of opinion, but more informed people know that some opinions (like, say, “Saturday Night Live is a clever and satirical look at modern life and everyone involved is a genius.”) are just wrong. Some things are better than others no matter what their fans think. They’re biased, after all — they’re fans.