And yes, Ian Dury is definitely on my Great Lyricists list.
I was watching a repeat of "Location, Location, Location" in a rare idle moment this week. It was from a completely different era when property prices were booming and everything was sunny and optimistic with the economy. About 18 months ago I think.
Anyway, the couple involved were totally obnoxious, smug and annoying and I was about to switch off when I had a thought that instantly made it the most enjoyable TV show I'd seen for some time.
Basically, you need to watch the program with the benefit of hindsight. We now know that the smug and obnoxious couple are about to make the worst decision of their lives and buy a house at the top of a market that will almost instantly fall away beneath their feet. By the end I was cheering them on to take the plunge and I almost cried with joy when they did buy the house. Wonder how smug they are now that it is worth about 30% less than they paid. They are probably still pretty obnoxious though
Yes, it's probably wrong for me to gain enjoyment from bad things happening to bad people but if we're to keep smiling through the Credit Crunch we need to make the best of the situation.
For example:-
* Hundreds of Estate Agents are getting sacked and the rest are fighting each other for the few remaining scraps of business. Hurray !
* Those crashing bores who go on about how much the price of their houses have increased have shut the heck up. Funny how they don't prattle on about how much money they have lost recently.
* I love see to the faces of the 4x4 drivers at the petrol station when they see that they have spend over £100 on filling up.
* Lots of braying City Boys have been sent packing from their Financial Institutions with no transferable skills and a £500-a-day cocaine habit.
* Less traffic on the roads as people start to think about whether they need to use the car for all their journeys.
* I can usually get a seat at Starbucks these days
You are welcome to provide your own examples, and remember Schadefreude is fun and costs nothing and so is the perfect way to take your mind off how the heck you are going to pay the mortgage this month.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Words without Music - the Opposite of Karaoke
The Guardian ran a series on "Great Lyricists" last week. Every day a hastily-printed badly-spelled 12-page supplement would honour a word-heavy songwriter.
The series led off with Bob Dylan. Big groan from Stan. Dylan is the single most over-rated lyricist bar none. I enjoy his melodies but his words are drug-addled drool worshipped by a certain sort of person who lived in the 1960s and still wants to live there.
I thought Germaine Greer would have been odds-on to be a fan, but I was delighted to see in her Guardian column that she is anything but.
She also makes sense when she says "To present the words without the music is to emasculate them." This is very much true with Morrissey as she describes (Morrissey without Johnny Marr's guitar ?? Perish the thought). It is even more true (if you allow that something than be more true than something else) for Chuck D whose sparse words are lessened without the full-force wall-of-sound from Public Enemy.
I was amused to see Alex Turner from The Arctic Monkeys on the list after a whole 2 albums (1 slightly disappointing). He wrote lyrics for one fine album - that hardly makes him a "Great Lyricist". Oh well, the Guardian has to sell papers somehow. I did giggle like a naughty schoolboy over the line I hadn't heard properly before - "Was it a Mecca Dobber or a betting pencil?". The boy shows promise certainly.
Of course Lennon & McCartney would have charged way too much for the copyright, as would Jagger & Richards, so they were never going to make the list. It's like those cheapo "Best of the Sixties" albums that don't include the Beatles or the Stones and so the title is breaching the Trade Descriptions Act 1968.
The full Guardian list was as follows :-
(1) Bob Dylan
(2) Bruce Springsteen
(3) Morrissey
(4) Joni Mitchell
(5) Chuck D
(6) Patti Smith
(7) Alex Turner
(8) Leonard Cohen
Anyone else worth including ? Joe Jackson ? Amy Winehouse ? Dolly Parton ?
The series led off with Bob Dylan. Big groan from Stan. Dylan is the single most over-rated lyricist bar none. I enjoy his melodies but his words are drug-addled drool worshipped by a certain sort of person who lived in the 1960s and still wants to live there.
I thought Germaine Greer would have been odds-on to be a fan, but I was delighted to see in her Guardian column that she is anything but.
She also makes sense when she says "To present the words without the music is to emasculate them." This is very much true with Morrissey as she describes (Morrissey without Johnny Marr's guitar ?? Perish the thought). It is even more true (if you allow that something than be more true than something else) for Chuck D whose sparse words are lessened without the full-force wall-of-sound from Public Enemy.
I was amused to see Alex Turner from The Arctic Monkeys on the list after a whole 2 albums (1 slightly disappointing). He wrote lyrics for one fine album - that hardly makes him a "Great Lyricist". Oh well, the Guardian has to sell papers somehow. I did giggle like a naughty schoolboy over the line I hadn't heard properly before - "Was it a Mecca Dobber or a betting pencil?". The boy shows promise certainly.
Of course Lennon & McCartney would have charged way too much for the copyright, as would Jagger & Richards, so they were never going to make the list. It's like those cheapo "Best of the Sixties" albums that don't include the Beatles or the Stones and so the title is breaching the Trade Descriptions Act 1968.
The full Guardian list was as follows :-
(1) Bob Dylan
(2) Bruce Springsteen
(3) Morrissey
(4) Joni Mitchell
(5) Chuck D
(6) Patti Smith
(7) Alex Turner
(8) Leonard Cohen
Anyone else worth including ? Joe Jackson ? Amy Winehouse ? Dolly Parton ?
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Selling Out
I'm not sure I have any respect for Ian Usher who has just sold his entire life for just short of £200,000 on Ebay. I am entirely sure that I have no respect for the person that bought it.
I know it's convenient to do all your shopping "under one roof", but isn't this taking things a bit far?
I imagine the purchaser to be someone who has nothing in the world apart from an Internet connection , £200,000 in the bank and a "To Do" list that reads :-
* Buy house
* Buy contents for house
* Buy car
* Buy motorbike and misc. macho sports gear
* Get crappy job selling rugs (even though I don't need the money)
* Get friends
Or maybe it's someone who was told to "get a life" and took it way too literally.
Whatever, someone will be stepping into his shoes (literally) and Mr. Usher will be exiting his house with the clothes on his back, a passport and a (well-stuffed) wallet. Good luck to him and I hope the new life he builds is one he'll want to hang onto.
I know it's convenient to do all your shopping "under one roof", but isn't this taking things a bit far?
I imagine the purchaser to be someone who has nothing in the world apart from an Internet connection , £200,000 in the bank and a "To Do" list that reads :-
* Buy house
* Buy contents for house
* Buy car
* Buy motorbike and misc. macho sports gear
* Get crappy job selling rugs (even though I don't need the money)
* Get friends
Or maybe it's someone who was told to "get a life" and took it way too literally.
Whatever, someone will be stepping into his shoes (literally) and Mr. Usher will be exiting his house with the clothes on his back, a passport and a (well-stuffed) wallet. Good luck to him and I hope the new life he builds is one he'll want to hang onto.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Economics of Stupidity
I love it when the experts get it wrong. It usually means that some self-evident truth maybe isn't that self-evident and maybe isn't even true any more.
Witness the gob-smacking rise in consumer spending recently. There is no good reason for it - the Economy is going to hell in a handcart, fuel prices are up, credit is crunched. Many reasons for it have been proposed by puzzled, slightly embarrassed economists, but none have been terrible satisfying. I believe the following force is at work :-
Slack-jawed, reptilian levels of stupidity.
I like to watch reality cop shows on TV. With the advent of Freeview digital TV and digital recorders I could (and often do) spend too much of my life watching "Police, Stop","Street Wars" "Car Wars" and (my favourite) "Police Interceptors". The reason I mention this is that on one of these shows a guy was stopped by police for speeding at 100mph + on the motorway. His excuse ?
"I was running out of petrol and wanted to get to the services quickly".
I think this is a good metaphor for the current anomalous spending boom. If you are running out of petrol, a sensible person would slow down to conserve fuel (55 mph is the most fuel efficient speed) and then turn-off anything (like the aircon) that might burn fuel. Then they'd drive more carefully than they ever had before, avoiding wasteful harsh acceleration in case they needed to brake wastefully hard.
That's a sensible person - a lot of people it seems would simply floor the accelerator and trust to luck and an ignorance of basic Physics.
In short, Economics assumes rational behaviour by large groups of people. Anyone who attends football matches knows this is something of a long shot. I think it's time for economists to realise that Consumers do not always react to bad economic news by belt-tightening but sometimes by putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU !" and heading for the shops.
Witness the gob-smacking rise in consumer spending recently. There is no good reason for it - the Economy is going to hell in a handcart, fuel prices are up, credit is crunched. Many reasons for it have been proposed by puzzled, slightly embarrassed economists, but none have been terrible satisfying. I believe the following force is at work :-
Slack-jawed, reptilian levels of stupidity.
I like to watch reality cop shows on TV. With the advent of Freeview digital TV and digital recorders I could (and often do) spend too much of my life watching "Police, Stop","Street Wars" "Car Wars" and (my favourite) "Police Interceptors". The reason I mention this is that on one of these shows a guy was stopped by police for speeding at 100mph + on the motorway. His excuse ?
"I was running out of petrol and wanted to get to the services quickly".
I think this is a good metaphor for the current anomalous spending boom. If you are running out of petrol, a sensible person would slow down to conserve fuel (55 mph is the most fuel efficient speed) and then turn-off anything (like the aircon) that might burn fuel. Then they'd drive more carefully than they ever had before, avoiding wasteful harsh acceleration in case they needed to brake wastefully hard.
That's a sensible person - a lot of people it seems would simply floor the accelerator and trust to luck and an ignorance of basic Physics.
In short, Economics assumes rational behaviour by large groups of people. Anyone who attends football matches knows this is something of a long shot. I think it's time for economists to realise that Consumers do not always react to bad economic news by belt-tightening but sometimes by putting their fingers in their ears and shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU !" and heading for the shops.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Stan Confesses
Here's my entire crime sheet:-
One evening in 2005, I was returning from my week's work in Stoke to my house in Glasgow. The M6 was quiet, the evening was pleasant and I was singing a happy song while my Big Stupid Spanish Diesel (BSSD) ate up the miles between the Lake District and the Scottish border.
As it happens it was eating up the miles a spot too quickly, and by the time I had seen the "safety camera " van on the bridge ahead, they already had a good picture of my blushing face coming towards them at 89 miles per hour.
I didn't put up a fuss and accepted three penalty points on my previously unblemished license, and paid a £60 fine. Even though the road was clear, the weather was fine and my car can safely do a lot more than 89 mph, the fact that I couldn't react to a camera van in time shows that I would have had problems reacting to a road hazard in time. So, it's a fair cop, guv and if you can't do the Time, don't do the Crime.
The £60 is long forgotten and the three points have now expired. However, I had to put details of this shameful incident on my Magistrate application form. It was mentioned at the interview, and one of the panel had a go at me about it, presumably to see if she could provoke a reaction.
Last week I sent off my Criminal Records Bureau form - it came back to me a few days later. Why ? Because I hadn't included this one (totally spent) conviction. I was angry at the time, but it's probably a good introduction to my new work, where the seemingly innocuous slips in administration can lead to important consequences. It's a world where people can escape what seems like justice because the speed gun had not been calibrated recently, or where a piece of legal paper was not served within the number of days specified. I'll try to be more careful in future and not assume that anything is in anyway "trivial" where the law is concerned.
One thought on Speeding - is the time fast approaching when only the very rich will be able to afford the fuel needed to get their cars above the speed limit ?
One evening in 2005, I was returning from my week's work in Stoke to my house in Glasgow. The M6 was quiet, the evening was pleasant and I was singing a happy song while my Big Stupid Spanish Diesel (BSSD) ate up the miles between the Lake District and the Scottish border.
As it happens it was eating up the miles a spot too quickly, and by the time I had seen the "safety camera " van on the bridge ahead, they already had a good picture of my blushing face coming towards them at 89 miles per hour.
I didn't put up a fuss and accepted three penalty points on my previously unblemished license, and paid a £60 fine. Even though the road was clear, the weather was fine and my car can safely do a lot more than 89 mph, the fact that I couldn't react to a camera van in time shows that I would have had problems reacting to a road hazard in time. So, it's a fair cop, guv and if you can't do the Time, don't do the Crime.
The £60 is long forgotten and the three points have now expired. However, I had to put details of this shameful incident on my Magistrate application form. It was mentioned at the interview, and one of the panel had a go at me about it, presumably to see if she could provoke a reaction.
Last week I sent off my Criminal Records Bureau form - it came back to me a few days later. Why ? Because I hadn't included this one (totally spent) conviction. I was angry at the time, but it's probably a good introduction to my new work, where the seemingly innocuous slips in administration can lead to important consequences. It's a world where people can escape what seems like justice because the speed gun had not been calibrated recently, or where a piece of legal paper was not served within the number of days specified. I'll try to be more careful in future and not assume that anything is in anyway "trivial" where the law is concerned.
One thought on Speeding - is the time fast approaching when only the very rich will be able to afford the fuel needed to get their cars above the speed limit ?
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