Gift Vouchers

I found a £10 gift voucher at they back of a draw. Yippee! Oh, hang on... It's for Woolworths. Bugger! Oh well, that's off to the tin with the Pesetas and Deutschmarks.

Giving people gift vouchers as presents is a bit of an odd activity. Why give someone a voucher to be spent in one shop when you could get cash and spend it in any shop in the whole country? I suppose there is a certain embarrassment factor in giving money as a gift - at least to an adult. I can remember as a child that a £5 note in a birthday card was a top present (I suppose they were worth more then). I also received the odd voucher - for the likes John Menzies or HMV. These were fine because I liked to buy books and records, but it involved a parental trip into town to choose anything and, quite often, I would have to stump up some of my own cash as the voucher wouldn't cover what I wanted.

I suppose the advantage of gift vouchers for adults means that it will be just that: a gift, something special and personal that the household budget wouldn't justify. I think that's why I like Amazon vouchers. They sell loads of things I like that I'd love to buy but always feel rather guilty about paying for when fixing a broken light fitting or replacing a worn out chair seem to be much higher priorities. The other thing is that I don't have to make a special journey to buy things off Amazon; I just choose online and then have a couple of days' happy expectation as to what the postman might bring - followed by a couple of days annoyance that they have used one of those couriers that couldn't tell there arse from their elbow.

Quite why the Woolies voucher was missed, I don't know. There was a Woolworth branch on my way to work for over ten years and they did sell things I'd like to buy - like CDs, videos and... sewing stuff? I remember when my wife started working for IBM, they had an introduction pack for overseas workers and described how things worked in the Greater Glasgow area. They listed local shops and the sort of things they sold; Woolworths was described as a shop where you can buy "all those nerdy household things".

I can't think where I buy "nerdy things" from these days. It's certainly not Woolies.

Speed Cameras

Speed cameras (or is it now Safety Cameras?) have been much in the news lately. There are various reports that the government is to scrap them. In fact they are cutting funding for them - the final decision lies with the local authorities but it will, often, amount to the same thing.

I'm a bit in two minds about this. On the one hand, I abhor wanton speeding. It's selfish, anti-social and largely pointless on all but the clearest of motorways. Also, having never received a speeding ticket, I'm rather smug about it. On the other hand, I always have the suspicion that the speed enforcement is designed to catch the easiest targets - not the most dangerous. The road I live on is a case in point: it has a national speed limit (60 mph) for the full length and, for much of it, it's pretty much impossible to break the speed limit. This doesn't, in itself, make it safe and there have been a number of fatalities and many more serious accidents. This should make it a prime target for safety enforcement and I do see the police camera van parked up on a regular basis. However, this is to monitor motorway traffic from a bridge where, as far as I can tell, there have been no accidents in the last few years - let alone fatal ones.

In fact, when the cameras were first introduced I was very much in favour of them. This is because they were used to catch people who jumped red lights. This is a mindlessly dangerous activity and the cameras cut this behaviour overnight; job done. After this, they were increasingly used for speed enforcement. At first this looked reasonable enough but increasingly they were placed out of sight and in areas where speed limits were not always clearly posted. Their success was then announced: not in terms of how many accidents they had prevented but how many people had been caught by them. If excessive speed was causing accidents then surely a successful camera should catch no-one. Increasingly they were viewed not as safety devices but as a mere money making scam.

I can't see scrapping cameras having any positive benefit. It's not as if the money will be spent more wisely elsewhere. The money will simply be gone. However, I do think there can be a better approach to road safety. Far too often I see road layouts that are badly designed, with poor road markings and road signs that are illegible or hidden behind foliage. On my own road, there are at least three places in which the road markings will place vehicles on a head-on collision course without warning. I'm very wary of this but those unfamiliar with the road can be quite easily caught out - and many are. All it would take is a little road paint to prevent this. A very cheap and simple solution that would bring down the road traffic accident statistics. This doesn't even need any form of police enforcement. The Japanese have a phrase for this: Poka-yoke - literally "mistake avoidance".

In theory, drivers should never be in a position of breaking a speed limit at an accident black spot. The cameras should not be used to catch speeders, so much, as the chronically inobservant.

Faith School Menace?

Richard Dawkins has been in the news lately as he has made a documentary arguing for the ending of faith schools. I watched it yesterday and he actually makes a fair point. However, I wish he would stick to the science books. He is one of the best science writers I have ever come across and his first book, The Selfish Gene, is not only a fantastic introduction to evolutionary biology but also a fantastic example of how to present a technical subject to a general audience - I'd strongly recommend anyone to read it. Unfortunately, he seems to be better known these days as "God basher in chief".

My own beliefs have always been rather sceptical. For the most part I went to a non-denominational school but I was taken to church on a Sunday and encouraged to attend Sunday school. I never really believed in God as such. I would go along with things; I found the stories about Jesus, Noah, Moses and so on entertaining enough, but for me they were always just stories - possibly with an important moral message (The Good Samaritan, for example) but stories none the less. The young priest was quite entertaining as well. He would do magic tricks to entertain the kids and tended to get into various scrapes with the older priests. He rather reminded me of Dougal from Father Ted - at least he would have been like that if he had suffered from some sort of horrendous head injury.

When I left home, I left religion - more or less. I would go along to services with friends for the want of anything better to do and occasionally volunteer for good deeds. In fact, the voluntary and charitable works are what really makes religion worthwhile and I have great admiration for the likes of The Salvation Army for that kind of practical application of belief. It's just that I can't be bothered with grovelling to deities in cold buildings. I think by 1998 I would describe myself as an atheist although I think a more philosophically honest description would be agnostic. I had no real belief left in any form of God; although living in Glasgow may have made my mind up about that one. I didn't have any passionate dislike of religion or religious people but I just could find no thread of logic in any form of belief. It was also at this time that I really started reading up on philosophy.

I never did philosophy at school. It wasn't that sort of school. I don't think logic and reasoning would have gone down well with the kind of Neanderthal I dealt with on a daily basis. However, I always had a sense that some people were talking utter bollocks without ever being able to put my finger on it. I think, in fairness, I probably had read a lot of philosophy over the years but it just took the form of cheap Sci-Fi paperbacks. Reading up on critical thinking and logic, and more importantly logical fallacies, does stretch one's mind and shows clearly why politicians, hellfire preachers and snake oil salesmen are really talking utter nonsense. In time, I started to delve into this strange world of rational discourse and the intriguing (if sometimes impenetrable) world of Kant, Locke, Descartes, Nietzsche, Popper and Russell.

In the last few years there has been a fairly vocal movement of notable writers who have been dubbed the "New Atheists". Some of the books of writers like Hitchens, Harris and Dennett have been entertaining; and sometimes intriguing. However, it was Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion that I was really looking forward to and, I have to say, it was the one book I was really disappointed with. It's not that it was complete rubbish (although I felt a philosophically astute proof reader would not have gone amiss) but I just felt that it was a verbose version of Bertrand Russell's essay Why I am not a Christian. A much better expansion of this had been done by Ludovic Kennedy a few years earlier with All in the Mind: A Farewell to God. However, the book was a best seller and a number of people have told me what a revelation it was (oh, the irony). I can only assume that they had never read another book on the subject and, when I have asked, it turns out to be the case.

So Dawkins seems to have headed away from his science writing and now spends his time getting cross about religion. Faith School Menace? was buried away on More4 but I think he has maybe mellowed slightly in his tone and the arguments he made that Faith Schools are a bad idea were fairly coherent; at least until slightly closer inspection. These kinds of documentary are always going to be rather one sided and I did think he went for the low hanging fruit by turning up at a Belfast primary. Having said that, the footage of him interviewing children at the Muslim school was revealing although I do wonder how much selective editing went on.

Whilst I would agree with him that crap science teaching is crap science teaching, the crux of his objections seem to be that children are incredibly gullible and if they are told to believe something at a very young age they will be lumbered with it for life - rather reminiscent of St. Francis Xavier's "Give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man". Now given that he has a low opinion of the academic credentials of religion I would expect him to be a little sceptical of that. It's just that up until the age of seven I was told to believe in all sorts of things: God, Father Christmas, The Tooth Fairy, unspeakable beasties that would lurk in the woods and the fact that any coin found lying on the pavement had been in dog poo. These things were told to me by responsible adults and I was able to see past them one by one. Maybe I could see the original logic behind them but I could clearly see them as the myths and stories that they were.

In fact this was famously put in the bible thus:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. - 1 Corinthians 13:11

The Fly Catcher

Flies really get on my tits and, living in the country, we do get more than our fair share of them. The easy solution is to use one of those spay cans of insecticide. I don't particularly trust them and, as we have an aquarium in our dining room, I can't use them anywhere near the fish. I have tried using fly paper but it's not actually very effective at catching flies; for the most part it usually ends up stuck to my hair as I forget that it's there. That leaves more "natural" means.

For a start, I do tend to leave spiders to their own devices. It may not win me any awards in the good housekeeping guides but a decent little web in the corner of the room is quite efficient at mopping up the flying beasties. The best thing I ever had was a pitcher plant which was very effective. The flies were actively drawn to the thing and once they were in there was no way out. Unfortunately, when we were on holiday I forgot to leave enough water in the plant pot and it died. We also had a Venus fly trap for a while but small people kept setting it off by dropping bits of sausage in and it died as well. As you can see, I have the horticultural skills of Agent Orange.

Anyway, I have discovered a new and surprisingly effective way of getting rid of the little buggers and it involves this happy chappy:

It's one of those rarities: a domestic appliance that is made in the UK; and I discovered that its one main selling point is highly effective against flies - it sucks harder than a Guy Ritchie movie. I was changing the fittings the other day when I noticed that the two flies that had been bothering me had suddenly disappeared. So, I fitted the crevice tool to the pipe and stood in wait like some sort of Jedi Knight. As soon as the flies were within sucking distance, just a swift flick of the wrist was enough to make the annoying bastards disappear. I did get a spider at one point by accident but I'm sure it will have a plentiful food supply inside the Henry.

Now, I wonder if it works on midges?

Lee-dull NOT Lid-ell

Pedantry is a very odd thing. Why do some people get so upset about misappropriated apostrophes? I know my brother-in-law does and I suspect my sister takes him down to the local green market for the sole purpose of winding him up. Similar is the split infinitive. It's not "To boldly go" but "To go boldly". However, I don't care and, as I recall Bill Bryson once pointed out, there is no reason whatsoever to actually have a rule on infinitives in English. Pedantry is silly and stupid. So why have I been so infuriated about hearing a radio advert for Lidl which pronounced it Lid-ell NOT Lee-dull.

I think the reason why is that I have been told, in no uncertain terms, what the correct pronunciation is; and if I have to pronounce it correctly then I don't see why anyone else should be allowed to get away with it. There, I told you that pedantry was silly. I first came across the shop when I was staying in the Kirchheim area of Heidelberg. To be honest, I preferred the Aldi across the road even if the car park was filled with tasteless station wagons from the nearby US airbase. At first, I assumed that it was an acronym for something but, as I later discovered, it was originally a fruit wholesaler bought by a Herr Schwartz and he re-used the Lidl name when opening his first supermarket. Schwartz Markt would have meant the "Black Market" so I can understand why they felt a change of nomenclature was in order. Anyway, I was told that this was pronounced Lee-dull.

From the radio advert it sounds like they have given up trying to educate the Brits as to the proper name; although we are happy enough to take a near enough approximation of other foreign language names - Audi and Renault spring to mind. Others have changed. Adverts for Knorr products used to make a point of pronouncing the K but I'm sure the last time I heard an advert it sounded closer to gnaw; which was unfortunate.

I suppose it's swings and roundabouts. I don't think I've ever heard a non-Scot manage Kirkcudbright, Milngavie or Strathaven without tutoring; although why Greenock should be such a problem remains a mystery.

The Man in the High Castle

I've read quite a few Philip K Dick books over the years. They have proven popular with Hollywood as well with Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and Paycheck amongst films adapted from his novels and short stories. Most of his books are loose Sci Fi tales dealing with the fragile nature of reality; usually they end up messing with your head. However, The Man in the High Castle is an exception as it is an alternate history novel; in this case it imagines what America would have been like if the Axis powers had won the Second World War.

In fact, his starting point for the divergence of histories goes back to an attempted assassination of Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933; except in Dick's timeline this is successful leading to a weakened United States and a World War II that ends in 1948 with the partition of the US - the East to Nazi Germany and the West to Japan. In this alternate World the Japanese are authoritarian but honourable, with a penchant for old American memorabilia; whereas the Nazis are as stark raving bonkers as they have ever been portrayed - committing genocide against Africans, draining the Mediterranean and sending rockets to the Moon and Mars. Given that real Nazi scientists did eventually send rockets to the Moon (only with American money) this means the only real Sci-Fi element is draining of the Med.

The book takes the form of examining what daily life for a defeated United States would have been like and, interestingly, this means that most of the main protagonists just get on with life. As an added complication, there is a book within a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a controversial novel portraying what life would have been like if the Allies had won the war. However, this is not strictly our history but one in which Britain was to emerge from the war as the world's only superpower. The only real action involves a Nazi plot to kill The Grasshopper's author, Hawthorne Abendsen - the "Man in the High Castle" of the novel's title. We also discover that this book was written using I Ching. This was probably Dick's way of challenging what reality really is; although it strikes me as being typical of the bonkersness of many of his books.

The alternate history subgenre is quite interesting but it hasn't really had that many decent film treatments - Robert Harris's Fatherland springs to mind as a notable exception. There have also been odd episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who that have dealt with this but it would be interesting to see something more ambitious - maybe a Harry Turtledove adaptation or a screen version of The Difference Engine. Possibly audiences will not buy into the deceit, but it seems odd that filmmakers should shy away from the genre considering the number of superhero adaptations that there have been in recent years.

Bo'ness Hippodrome

When I was growing up, a trip to the cinema was always a magical experience. In the summer, particularly, the local picture house would show various children's matinees so there was a regular supply of films both good and pretty awful to watch. The main thing was that it was dirt cheap - entrance and a cheap ice cream could be had for pocket money. I think the rot started with the introduction of the Cornetto which, at 30p, cost more than the ticket itself. However, going to the cinema remained a cheap day out and, when we moved to the Falkirk area, a night out for two - tickets, an ice cream and a quick drink in the pub before hand - could be had for a perfectly reasonable £10. That ended in 2001 when the Cineworld multiplex finally put the old ABC cinema out of business.

In fairness, I could see the attraction of the shiny new multiplex compared to the old fleapit. In fact, calling Falkirk ABC a fleapit was rather unfair to fleas as they had long decamped to somewhere with more comfortable seats, less sticky smells and a decent sound system. I can remember watching The Green Mile with a friend who struggled to stand up afterwards having suffered from what he described as "paralysis of the buttocks". Nevertheless, one by one the old picture houses closed to be replaced by new, bright, shiny, expensive and utterly soulless multiplexes. Falkirk Council, however, chose to save one for posterity and this week we actually went to see a film at Scotland's oldest working cinema, The Bo'ness Hippodrome.

For those unfamiliar with Central Scotland, Bo'ness is a small town on the Forth just down the road from Grangemouth - although with a less science fiction skyline. It is short for Borrowstounness, although I have never seen it referred to as such (it does, however, appear on the town's road sign in very small letters). The picture house, by rights, should have suffered the same fate of many small town cinemas by being turned into a bingo hall, nightclub or converted into flats but, by chance of fate, it was listed and eventually renovated by the council. I'm all for urban curiosities being preserved - for example, the old blue police boxes in Glasgow - but what is nice about the Hippodrome is that it is a fully functional working cinema showing a mix of contemporary films and old classics. For the summer holiday's this has meant various children's films; and this week it was a mix of The Railway Children and Toy Story 3. I took Raymond to see the latter.

I've been a fan of the Pixar movies since the first Toy Story film came out in 1995. At the time the great attraction was the innovative computer animation; it seems hard to believe that this was once a novelty as it is now the default for any modern animated feature. But the great surprise was that the studio appeared to have spent as much on the script as they had on the computer hardware. I recall one of my workmates at the time saying that it was "Too good for kids". This is rather a strange attitude; do we really want children to watch any old rubbish? I sort of knew what she meant and, whilst it worked well as a children's film, there was enough knowing humour around parenting and consumerism to keep adults entertained without it flying over the heads of a younger audience.

Not every film manages this, and I think it was Jonathan Ross that pointed out that Shark Tale made lots of references to X rated gangster films that children would never have seen (at least one would hope they hadn't) and otherwise we were left with lots of nasty stereotypes about Italian people. The Toy Story series has always avoided this although I felt the latest film was much darker in tone; possibly too dark for younger children and we did have one small child in buckets of tears at one stage - although this is pretty standard for a matinee performance. I still do wonder whether the U certificate was justified.

If you have seen either of the previous Toy Story films, the third instalment has pretty much exactly the same plot with the toys being lost and having to find their way back to their owner. This is the latest 3-D extravaganza but, thankfully for me, the Hippodrome was showing it in 2-D. Aside from that I was pleased to note that they had full digital surround sound so even though the building is antique they can give modern films the full hi-tech treatment (without the 3-D induced nausea). Where this film is different is in examining the harsh end of consumerism and the over-reaching theme of childhood's end, adding a much more melancholy edge to the storytelling. This is where it really is aimed at the adult audience and quite a few of the parents left the film with rather red eyes; in fact one woman had the whole mascara down the cheeks look - I don't know what I looked like but I didn't have the 3-D specs to blame for eye-strain.

Raymond really enjoyed the film; so on that level they are hitting their target audience, but I do wonder whether I would show it to either of our younger children just yet. Anyway, I really liked the Hippodrome and I will have to try this out for an evening show.

To Boldly Go

As I have mentioned previously, the two TV shows I absolutely adored when growing up were Doctor Who and Star Trek. With the former having been reborn on our screens in the last few years it's been easy enough to get my son hooked on it but with Star Trek the original series hasn't been on for a while and the spin off shows are shown sporadically on some of the more obscure digital channels and, given the more soapy aspect of the later series, it's more difficult to jump in part way through. Fortunately, Channel 4 has chosen to show all the Star Trek films late on Saturday nights. With the cunning use of video recording I've managed to get Raymond into the series.

Now, as the King in Alice in Wonderland said, one should begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. However, the first film in the series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was a bit dull and I didn't want to risk boring an eight year old who has no idea who the characters were and how they operate in this fantasy universe. In fact, that is a little unfair; the first film is a very clever story but it is ponderously slow and owes more to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris than the original TV series - a character driven action adventure which was, as Gene Roddenberry first sold it to the studios, a Western set in space.

So I started with The Wrath of Khan, the second film in the series; actually a sequel to an original 1960's episode and much more like the original series. Raymond enjoyed it although I don't know whether he picked up the cultural significance of Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones and Scotty. In fact he didn't even pick up the fact that Scotty was meant to be Scottish. Oops - I always liked the character and, although the accent is a bit cod Caledonian, who is to say that a Scottish accent wouldn't sound like that in the 23rd Century?

We moved on to films 3 and 4, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. The third film gets a bit of stick from some fans; it may suffer a little from mid-trilogy filling but it moves along quite reasonably and fills in a few pages of Star Trek mythology - it also provides the set-up for The Voyage Home which, for totally spurious reasons (no budget), takes place in 1980's San Francisco. This leads to various comic capers including Spock giving a Vulcan pinch to an anti-social bus passenger, Chekov (of all people) being sent to find a "nuclear wessel", and Scotty trying to operate an early PC by saying "hello computer" into a mouse. It's nice to see a franchise like Star Trek take the Mickey out of itself once in a while and The Voyage Home always makes for an enjoyable 90 minutes escapism.

I hadn't seen the 5th Star Trek film The Final Frontier since it was released at the cinema. This was mainly because it was complete pants; I seem to recall that it was called "The Search for God" and involved Spock playing "Row your boat" on a harp. I remembered well. It was pants. The campfire scene was cringe-worthy beyond belief. Apparently it won the Golden Raspberry award for worst film of 1989 so I wasn't alone in this opinion.

The sixth film was a much better affair; although the last with all the original characters. The Undiscovered Country is the first film that heavily weighs into the Trek mythology; the central theme being a suspicious truce between the Federation and Klingons with individuals on both sides determined to undermine the whole venture. I suppose this could be seen as an allegory of the end of the Cold War but the heavy political themes didn't get into the way of a cracking action adventure and also featured a guest performance from David Bowie's wife - spacemen all around.

As a rather nice coincidence, LoveFilm have finally got round to shipping the original series DVDs to us. These had been on our wish list for almost a year so I had nearly given up on them but it turns out that rather than the original episodes, these have been enhanced with CGI effects to paper over the ropier 1960's effects. Normally I would be annoyed by this sort of thing. When George Lucas re-released the Star Wars films he added new scenes and characters to the originals using CGI; and next to the prosthetics, puppetry and models of the originals they looked awful. The original effects in Star Wars were great and it didn't need this kind of tampering. However, with Star Trek, the new effects are subtle. For example they have done new framing shots of the Enterprise orbiting an alien planet but it still looks believable as a 1960's series. They also have the advantage that the show was filmed in colour rather than the low resolution black and white videotape that Doctor Who used at the time.

It is the characters that really made the original Trek such a joy and it is interesting to see how they develop. Spock, in particular, is more inhuman than alien in the early episodes but Leonard Nimoy soon develops a sense of whimsy that makes his character a mirror on his human companions and also builds a fantastic love-hate relationship with the more emotional Dr "Bones" McCoy. However, the one character that still really fascinates me is Janice Rand, played by Grace Lee Whitney. Rand was only in the first series but did have small appearances in the films. However, it wasn't the attraction between her and Kirk that intrigued me but that amazing blonde beehive. How did they manage it? It's not that I haven't seen beehives before but she actually manages to have long hair with it. Quiet what engineering achievement went on there, I don't know, but I'm sure Mr Scott would have been impressed.

We have just watched Generations which, whilst not one of the better films, is a nice introduction to Jean-Luc Picard - one of the most rounded characters the franchise has produced and next Saturday we should have First Contact which, to my mind, was the best of the Trek films - at least until last years "reboot". I'm now just wondering whether to give some of the other spin-off series another try.

Blogger Stats

I started out writing this blog for my own amusement but, as it is available on a very public place in the form of the Internet, I am always curious as to who else actually reads this guff. There are comments sections, but I find that most comments sections in blogs are rarely used except for high profile individuals and those in major publications (the Guardian newspaper's blogs can attract thousands of replies - but then it has one of the largest readerships of any online publisher). The Blogger site allows for emails to be sent to the author and I've received some of those. One was asking me if they could use an 20 year old photo taken at Anfield in a fanzine, and I received a couple of replies to the Guide Dog posting (and yes, it is a talking dog but it wasn't the CO-OP).


However, recently Blogger have added a statistics facility to their software which shows how many people have accessed the various blogs and which countries they come from. This has only been running for the past month so I have no idea how many people have viewed the older posts prior to this time and I would expect that a few of the hits will be from search engine bots. Nevertheless, there are some patterns emerging. As you would expect, most of the views are from English speaking countries with the UK having most, followed by the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

There is one exception to this Anglophone audience and it has me a little perplexed. For one day last week I received 11 hits on a post entitled "The Big Bang" from China. This post was about the last episode of the latest series of Doctor Who. As far as I am aware, this television show is not aired in China so what were all these people expecting to see? Did they think it was about the pioneering work of Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble? I can see how that might have happened. Possibly they thought it was some decadent western pornography that had slipped past web censorship software? The odd thing is that the contents of that post would be largely unintelligible to anyone who hadn't seen the TV show and, whilst I can see how one person may have clicked on the posting believing it to be something else, why would 11 people do that all in one day? Perhaps I said something that really tickled the Chinese funny bone? Maybe we will never know.

And for the record; the most hits I have received for a single posting is when I suggested doing something unspeakable to an octopus.