Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve seen a lot of furniture adverts of late. All furniture stores, it seems, without exception, are in the middle of a sale. As far as I can see, it’s not really a sale if it comprises the majority of the time the store is open. They just have intermittent periods of very expensive dealing. I mean, if you can turn a profit selling all your products at £1000 less than the RRP, then all that proves is that your regular prices are extortionate and should be looked into by the Office of Fair Trading.

The other thing all furniture adverts do is to read the prices as, say, “seven nine nine”. Seven Nine Nine is not a number. Seven hundred and ninety nine is a number (although even then it should have a unit, of course). If you think it’s too long then call it eight hundred. If that sounds like too much, call it “less than eight hundred”, or actually lower the price instead of just reading it in a confusing way. Car adverts do this as well, but car prices are generally four digits or more, so it’s more understandable that they would.

Furniture adverts, as well, are one of the worst offenders for the multiple-discounts thing. For example, at the moment threre is an advert running for furniture promising 50% off everything, and a further 10% off everything! Apart from to con people into thinking it means 60% off when in fact it means 55% off, it’s a terrible way to speak.

If you dig two holes next to each other and then remove the separating wall, you haven’t got two holes, you have one big one. Similarly, it is impossible to have two or three discounts on the same thing, and crossing out numbers does not prove otherwise. You have one big discount and you’re just trying to confuse people.

I don’t really understand why some “genres” of advert are always the same; tourist board adverts for countries, for example, adverts for firms of ambulance-chasing solicitors, and adverts for cosmetics, or nappies. They’re all the same. Surely there’s a market sector out there who would respond to something else, and if you do it you’ll get 100% of that sector.

But nobody ever even tries it. It’s very disappointing.

While I attempt to find the old “Who Are You?” chatlog, please enjoy this one. The backstory is: This guy added me to his contact list and I don’t know who he is:

Andrew: Hello
mostafa: hello
Andrew: So, who are you, then?
mostafa: im fin tinks
Andrew: Hello, Fin tinks.
Andrew: How do you know me?
mostafa: maroko
Andrew: What?
Andrew: What is “maroko”?
mostafa: im morocon
Andrew: Right.
mostafa: and you?
Andrew: Am I well known in Morocco, then?
Andrew: I’m English.
mostafa: do youspeek frensh?
Andrew: Very little.
mostafa: ke fais tu?
Andrew: Did you just ask who does me?
mostafa: ok

Every time I come home from the pub (or indeed, almost anywhere else), I’m confronted with the same sign. It’s on one of those little concrete jobbies that the H-for-hospital milestones generally are, and it sits proudly outside a dark green building roughly the same size and shape as my bedroom.

I know for a fact what is inside this building, because the building was built around it, several days after it was erected. It is a complex-looking, very well sealed pipe system which is, I discovered when I finally saw it in daylight rather than the sodium-glare of streetlights, a shocking shade of sulphuric yellow.

The sign outside it says “CAUTION: CATHODIC PROTECTION”, and goes on to explain that “cathodic protection wires exist to this structure”.

Now, I have done a four year physics degree. I have an A grade in A-level physics and an A* in GCSE physics. I know what a cathode is.

I have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell that sign is attempting to warn me about. That, to me, is something of a failing in a sign — it has failed to signify anything. What, then, is it for? Why does it exist? And what is cathodic protection?

Is it just an earth point? Is that what it means, and if so, why doesn’t it just say so?

It appears now that anti-terror laws will apply toanimal rights extremists . Hooray!

And do you want to know why I say “hooray”? It’s because animal rights extremists are terrorists. They use bombs and the threat of more bombs to come to try and get their way, and they’re not a government. What more proof do you want?

Quite a lot, according to a senior official quoted in the Times today. He says, and I quote, “Let’s keep this in perspective — I would still rather meet an animal rights campaigner in Oxford Street than a suicide bomber. That is the difference between extremism and terrorism”. The senior official quoted in the Times today is an idiot.

You can’t distinguish between two things (least of all two names for the same thing) on the basis of personal preference. Hell, I would rather meet a suicide bomber than an animal rights extremist in a dark alley, because the suicide bomber would be unlikely to blow himself up in a dark alley with just one person, and generally if I was in a dark alley I’d have my leather jacket on and I would worry that an animal rights extremist might stab me for that. Granted it wouldn’t be easy, because I’d have my leather jacket on, but even the intention worries me.

Animal rights extremists, it should be noted, are also idiots. The thing they fail to realise is that animal testing has to be done. I’m not talking morally, or practically, but legally. By law, animal testing has to be done on many new products, and if you succeed in stopping it being done in the UK it will simply have to be done somewhere else, and probably somewhere with fewer regulations on what you’re allowed to do. In the wide view, animals will suffer more and you’ll have killed people to accomplish this. Well done, you.

The bottom line in this case is that any anti-terror laws must, by definition, apply to animal rights extremists because they so clearly are terrorists. It would be impossible to write such a law that excluded them without explicitly stating “unless their aim is to prevent animal testing”, in which case that would be an incredibly stupid law and should never be passed, because it so blatantly condones animal rights extremism.

What part of this do people have difficulty with, exactly? Is it just that animal rights extremists don’t generally fit people’s preconception of what a terrorist should look like? Or is it a sort of contra-vocation fallacy, where they assume that extremists and terrorists must be different because we use different words to describe them?

I don’t know. I don’t care, frankly, as long as people stop blowing each other up.

Please stop blowing each other up.

The Earth’s rotation is slowing down. This means that a day no longer lasts exactly 24 hours. The basic upshot of this is that every so often a “leap second” has to be added in to the day. It works just like changing the clocks back; you just have to adjust the clock (if you can be bothered). Essentially, the last minute of the day has 61 seconds.

Now, the last one of these was in 1998, just before the end of the year. Nobody seemed to pay it any heed. There is another one this year, however. So, for reference, if you start counting at 23:59:50 as per tradition, then the correct countdown this New Year’s Eve goes like this:

“TEN! NINE! EIGHT! SEVEN! SIX! FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWO! ONE! ONE! HOORAY!”

Please explain this to any other guests at whichever new year’s party you attend. We don’t want a repeat of 1998’s debacle.

I like to think I have a good sense of humour. I like to think I’m intelligent. I like to think this qualifies me to read cartoons. I like to think I should be able to look at them and find the point within a few seconds. I can read Dilbert. I can read the Far Side. I can read Penny Arcade, though I ususally chose not to.

Not so, however, the cartoons in the times2 supplement, as supplied by master lunatic Mathew With One T. Martin. Here is an example— Thursday’s, as it goes:

I have several problems with this alleged cartoon. The first is that it makes no apparent designs on any sense at all. It’s gibberish. I still don’t understand why the man’s shirt is over the TV. At first I thought perhaps it was so he couldn’t watch it (perhaps so he didn’t have to pay the increased lisence fee*), but that would be pointless as the TV is unplugged anyway. There is no reason to drape a shirt over a deactivated TV set other than to make the rhyme work.

The rhyme, by the way, does not work. It ust doesn’t. The two words rhyme, don’t get me wrong, but there’s more to maintaining a good metre than simply having the same number of syllables. It is impossible to say the lines out loud and sound natural and poetic at the same time.

Another problem I have with it is that Mathew With One T. clearly has no idea of perspective. Look at the TV stand. There are horizontal and vertical lines in the front faces; we shouldn’t be able to see the sides. Now look at the chair. Somehow, this is seen from a different angle from the TV. The vertical lines in the chair run at 45 degrees to the vertical lines in the TV and in the woman.

Now look at the man’s mouth. Real mouthes do not look like that. Cartoon mouthes do not look like that. Nothing looks like that! Honestly, I can’t work out for sure which bit of his face is supposed to be what, but I think that the cut-out area extending almost to his Mister-Spock-ear is the mouth. But we’re looking down on him. We know that because we can see both arms of the chair and not the front of it. So why can’t we see his tongue or his lower teeth? The only possible reason would be if his head is a sheet of cardboard with a huge comedy mouth cut out of it, which sticks out of his shirt.

I can see that this is a crap drawing. How is it possible that The Times does not emply a single person who can see that? This cartoon lives right in the middle og the back page of the times2. Right below the difficult Su Doku, right to the right of the times2 crossword (the wussy one) and right above Word Watching and the Polygon. It is a page of puzzles, and yet the cartoon is by far the hardest thing to solve.

This is a major newspaper. They sell hundreds of thousands of newspapers every day. Surely they can afford a better cartoonist than Mathew With one T.? I’ll do it, for heaven’s sake! Heck, it would be better if they just left the space blank so you could write your answers to the Polygon in it (although once you find the long word you’ve done it really, and needn’t bother with the rest).

*Note for Americans and other idiots: The TV lisence is payed by all Britons who own a TV and it funds the BBC. America does not have any public service broadcasters funded in this way, so this is often rephrased to “In Britain you need a lisence to own a TV” to give Americans a cheap laugh at the expense of leaving them wholly ignorant about the world outside their own country. All of this is fairly typical of both countries’ respective behaviours.

I want to state, publicly and for the record, that Jack Thompson is a moron. His schemes are idiotic and his debating technique is laughable. However, I am not going to go to the bother of explaining why he’s an idiot, for two important reasons:

1. Every other website in the world has done it for me (although obviously not as well), and,
2. I’d much rather save it for the inevitable court case when he sues me for no reason at all, unless of course his long list of failings includes “all bark and no bite”.