High Street Robbery

I received a Marks and Sparks voucher for my birthday which I put to one side with the intention of spending on works trousers, shirts, underpants or any of those other nerdy things that Marks and Sparks tend to do well (essentially, vaguely decent work-wear that is machine washable). I never got around to spending the thing so I had a look at their website and saw that they did a presentable looking pair of jeans for the £25 that the voucher covered. Noticing that their standard delivery fee was £3.50, I opted to pick the item up from their Falkirk High Street branch: I could call in on my way back to work so I wouldn’t have to make a special journey.

I find that I go high street shopping less and less frequently these days. I think the main reason for this is that I am a man and can’t get over the single bloody awfulness of the whole experience. However, this was a straight in, straight out, no messing about journey just before closing time.To save the misery of finding a parking space I opted to go for the multi-story car park in the Howgate Shopping Centre. After all, it was only ten minutes so how much could it cost? £1.50 – that’s how much it bloody cost or, to put it in perspective, £9 an hour. Now we are constantly told that the high street is struggling to compete with the downturn in the economy combined with competition from the internet and out-of-town shopping centres but if they charge that much for parking I’m not really surprised. I won’t be back in a hurry.

The real killer in all this is that the jeans are horrible. They are made out of some thin, scratchy, non-denim like material and even after giving them a wash they are still unpleasant. So, I’ll have to go back and change them. Bugger!

Thrashing Around

One of the disadvantages of working in IT is the dreaded “On Call” rota. On the surface it is a pretty good deal: a fixed amount of money simply for having a mobile phone through which an systems operator can call to ask for assistance in the middle of the night. If there are no calls then it’s money for nothing. Unfortunately, I seem to get called quite regularly and usually at very inconvenient times of the night which leaves me grumpy and in a particularly foul mood. I’ve noticed that this also transcends into the kind of music I listen to. I recently received an Amazon voucher which I had intended to extend my collection of Jazz CDs with Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Herbie Hancock all lined up on my wish list. As it is, I made the purchase just after being woken up at 03:30 in the morning and, sure enough, a package showed up from Amazon with Anthrax, Metallica and Arch Enemy CDs enclosed.

The first two of these disks were part of my plan to replace odd bits of vinyl with digital copies. The Metallica CD Garage Inc. is a 2 CD affair containing cover versions of some of their favourite tunes. Metallica were one of Thrash Metal’s leading innovators but were always very happy to wear their influences on their sleeve. In fact, given that many of their influences were rather obscure British rock acts from the 1970s they could (and probably did) get away with playing covers of the songs and their American audience thinking they were originals. I first picked up on Metallica on the Tommy Vance show on Radio 1 in the early 1980s. They sounded quite unlike the “big hair” American glam and metal acts at the time: both in terms of the sound (fast staccato riffs, short break-neck guitar solos and machine-gun drumming) and by their lyrical content which was much darker and with a left-leaning political stance. In fact this was much the case for the Thrash sub-genre along with contemporaries such as Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer: “The Big Four” as they were known (although I wouldn’t really describe Slayer as particularly left-leaning).

Garage Inc consists of one disk of covers recorded in 1997 and another of EPs and B-sides which was what I was looking to replace. Some artists can take an old song and bend it into their own style to the point of creating a radically new work of art. Metallica don’t do this and most of the songs are fairly faithful reproductions of the original tracks (many of which I own) and they never quite surpass the originals, although Daimond Head’s Am I Evil, Budgie’s Breadfan and Queen’s Stone Cold Crazy are all worthy of playing in Metallican form. Only Thin Lizzy’s Whisky In The Jar is a step in the wrong direction – maybe a cover version of a cover version doesn’t quite gel?

The Anthrax CD is their Greatest Hit’s compilation, Madhouse. Anthrax were one of the first Thrash Metal bands to get UK chart success. This was partly due to them being signed to a major label unlike independently signed contemporaries such as Metallica. I did have couple of their singles on 7”: I Am The Law and I’m The Man: the latter which shows that this is a band with a sharp sense of humour. I never really bought anything else by them although I liked a couple of their other songs. Madhouse is a pretty decent compilation and as will as other hits such as Indians and Got The Time it also includes some of their pre-mainstream hits and also Bring The Noise – their collaboration with combative US rappers Public Enemy: it shouldn’t work but it really does.
The Arch Enemy CD is something of a suck it and see affair with me. They are originally from Sweden and describe themselves as “Melodic Death Metal” which means that they are not afraid of a bit of a tune in the style of Metallica but their vocalist (I wouldn’t exactly class it as singing) bellows out their lyrics in a Death Growl – a kind of deep, guttural screaming reminiscent of a demonically possessed and rather angry mad man. Unusually, Arch Enemy’s “Death Growler” is a rather attractive German lady called Angela Gossow. Manifesto of Arch Enemy is a compilation album containing a selection of their recordings with Ms Gossow and shows off both the melodic and death elements of the ensemble quite nicely. The vocals sort of work. It’s not my favourite style of “singing” but the lyrics are, for the most part, intelligible and the balance between the ferocious musicality of the band and the angry shouting of the front woman work quite well. I must admit, however, that I can only listen to this in small doses. After two or three tracks she just sounds a little bit upset about something.

Trip Computers

One automotive gadget which I really find to be of use is the trip computer. I’ve had this on a few cars now and have found the average fuel consumption feature to have a big impact on driving style. Essentially, if I can see the mpg figure going down, I know it’s time to watch my speed and keep the occasional boy racer tendencies in check. Whether this makes me a safer driver or not is debatable but it certainly makes me a more efficient one which is just as well considering the cost of fuel these days.

I have always found the fuel consumption figure on my car to be pretty accurate. This doesn’t always seem to be the case and I know that my previous car, a Honda Jazz, would regularly over estimate how many miles I was getting out of a gallon of fuel. Having had a straw poll around the office it seems to be a common occurrence: “it says 45 mpg but it never gets more than 40” is quite a typical response. There is no legislation on the accuracy of trip computers (unlike speedometers which must be within a specific tolerance and never under-reading) but I would expect manufacturers to be able to come up with something fairly close to the truth. Being somewhat of a geek I record both my actual and indicated mpg via the Fuelly website. I’ve plotted both the actual (measured at the pump and on my odometer in blue) and trip computer (in red) over the period of a year:

It’s actually remarkably accurate. In fact the average mpg measured at the pump is 52.4 for that period compared to 51.9 according to the trip computer. The trip computer is, typically, just under 1% pessimistic compared to the actual figure. I think I can live with that. In fact I noticed that one other Fuelly user, “Tezzer”, has done a similar thing but this time with the newer model Yaris:

 This is also pretty spot on but this time gives and average actual figure of 56mpg compared to an indicated 56.7. That’s 1.25% optimistic although I would say that was perfectly acceptable accuracy. Given that somewhat limited sample of two cars it would appear that Toyota are quite capable of designing accurate trip computers. So why did my sample around the office (and also on many internet motoring forums) give the impression that trip computers are wildly optimistic?

I suppose the problem is that most people do not accurately measure their fuel consumption. Aside from the two vehicles I’ve shown very few cars in real world driving conditions actually achieve what the manufacturers claim they are capable of according to the standardised emissions tests. Many people aren’t very happy about this and feel that they have been actively lied to when they found out. However, for most motorists, when asked what sort of mileage they get from their cars, will use some sort of vague “I get x miles out of a tank” or quote some unrealistic figure that they calculated on a long run whilst on holiday. The other answer, of course, is to quote the figure that the trip computer spits back at them. Given that there is no legal requirement to have an accurate mpg figure it must be quite tempting to make the gauge as optimistic as possible.

Lotto!

I had a winning ticket for the National Lottery at the weekend. However, I’m not going to be giving up my job any time soon as it wasn’t the £6,000,000 jackpot prize but a somewhat more modest £38 for getting 4 balls correct. In fact, the ticket was something of an impulse purchase as I needed some coins for the children to throw into a collection bucket at a fireworks display and it was a throw up between a Lucky Dip and a Mars bar. I decided that the 1 in 13,983,815 odds of becoming an instant millionaire was probably going to do me more good than the 250 empty calories in a Mars bar. As it is, the £38 is a pleasant surprise although possibly a somewhat paltry return for the 1 in 1,031 chance of picking 4 correct numbers.

I’ve never really been into gambling. Many years ago I used to do 8 from 10 on the football pools but the entertainment was in trying to predict that weekends scores rather than the thought of winning the jackpot (although that is actually the point of it). One of my uncles is a habitual punter on the horses. He actually has an encyclopaedic knowledge of horse racing and can easily pick out most of the winners on a race card. What always befuddles me is why he then goes and puts his money on a bunch of donkeys because “the odds are good”. If the favourite is odds-on to win it’s usually for a good reason but he will be taken in by betting on “Destined For The Glue Factory” because 100-1 looks enticing. For those unfamiliar with racing odds, 100-1 means that for every £10 staked, you will lose £10.

 When the national lottery started I did buy a few tickets. Partly this was the novelty factor but also because the first ever draw was on the night of my wedding. Several wedding guests bought tickets for us as it seemed fateful that our most important day should result in a moment of fortune. Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t work like that and the tickets merely ended up with the confetti on the floor. The way the lottery was run to begin with annoyed me as they encouraged people to make sure that they had their "special" numbers on every draw as “It could be you.” In fact it was probably going to be one of 13,983,814 other people but that didn’t stop them appealing to a gamblers fallacy.

I lost interest in the lottery very quickly and, although I did administer the works lottery consortium for a while, I didn’t buy any tickets for myself - except for the odd lucky dip when I needed change for something. In fact, I was rather taken with the attitude of one of my colleagues who would buy a ticket on Friday night but not look at it until Monday morning as he would then have the possibility all weekend that he didn’t have to go into work. I suppose this is a sort of Schrödinger’s cat in reverse but £1 for a weekend’s pipe dream isn’t  bad value for money. As for me, I can think of better ways to spend £1 – just not on Mars bars.