Category: Uncategorized

So it looks like the old ID card chestnut is back in the fire again. This time the big justification is “identity theft”, but, as with terrorism, immigration, and organised crime before, the home office fail to explain how the new card will actually solve the problem.

In fact, won’t ID cards actually make it easier for someone to perpetuate identity theft? Once the system is introduced, instead of having to go to the trouble of obtaining all sorts of personal information in order to fake someone’s identity, your identity thieving needs will be fulfilled by one simple card, which, once forged, will enable you to do all sorts of things like open bank accounts, obtain credit cards, and so on.

Interesting to note, also, that they aren’t even bothering to pretend any more that the cards will in some way be voluntary–Blunketts was always banging on about “Entitlement Cards”, but somehow they’ve now become “a secure compulsory national identity cards scheme”. No surprises there, I suppose.

(El Reg has some very interesting points to make about this here).

To the UCL Bloomsbury theatre, on Friday night, for some rather entertaining comedy, compered by the unexpectedly funny Simon Amstell (he off of Popworld), and featuring various funny people (including the excellent Rob Rouse, and the actor Kevin Eldon).

To the UCL Bloomsbury theatre, on Saturday night, to retrieve Sal’s purse, which she appears to have left on the bar the previous night. Unfortunately, she didn’t realise she’d even lost it until we reached Vauxhall station, on our way to drinks in Clapham, on Saturday afternoon, and I therefore had to dash back to check the flat in Camden, before we established that, yes, it was indeed still at the venue, and, yes, it did indeed still contain all her credit cards, her driving license, various other bits of non essential plastic and thirty five quid. Fringe benefit of attending a charidee gig, I suppose.

I had hoped to catch some of the FA Cup Final on Saturday, but in the end, despite originally leaving the house at 3, just as it kicked off, the three trips across central London that I ended up making meant that I didn’t arrive at the pub we were heading for in Clapham until some twenty minutes after the end of the game (this despite extra time and penalties). Oh well, doesn’t sound like I missed much anyway.

…for events taking place at the end of next month, I expect the Glastonbury tickets will be on their way out soon. Frankly, I’m not at all surprised about this. When I got my glasto ticket, I immediately applied for one of these pointless pieces of plastic, and said card arrived some weeks ago. As far as my experience goes, I can’t see any possible way that anyone could get around the system–can you?

– Complete online form on Citizen Card website, providing details of a solicitor to act as a referee.
– Receive email welcoming me to the Citizen Card scheme, asking me to EMAIL a photo of myself for the card and a scan of my signature.
– Receive card three weeks later.
– Referee is not called at any point (and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have seen the photo or signature anyway).

As I said, flawless.

“There’s no way fraudsters will get through the system” – official festival website.

“No Cameras or Recorders”, it says in large black print on the tickets for next month’s U2 gig that I collected from the post depot this morning.*

Well that scuppers my plans to join in with my own wind instrument-based solo to “With Or Without You”. I’m not sure I want to go anymore, frankly.

* Oh, so our friendly neighbourhood postman can manage to attempt to deliver items requiring a signature at 7:30 am on a Saturday morning, banging on the door and waking me up a bit but not enough for me to get up and actually answer the door, but he can’t manage to do the same on a week day when it might actually be useful…

Well, I suppose this had to happen eventually, and you can’t really blame him for wanting to further his career (and presumably taking the big cheque he was offered), but it does present something of a quandary for my morning listening: the XFM breakfast show is always terrible whenever they have someone else in the chair, but do I follow O’Connell to Virgin, where he’ll no doubt have to play lots of terrible chart music, or do I stay put for a more indie, but perhaps ultimately less entertaining, morning listening experience?

Ok, so it seems there is a minor flaw in my theory that if I don’t pay attention to Everton they do better, as our late return from Turkey prevented me from finding out about the shambles taking place over at Highbury until I arrived back at work. Still, surely the exception that proves the rule: they did manage to complete their unlikely qualification for the Champions League while I was away, after all.

Turkey, by the way, was lovely. A bit like Croatia, but with bartering. Sal went there backpacking for two weeks with a couple of friends, but as I lacked the holiday allowance or desire to join her for most of this, I travelled out for the end of their trip to join them for a few days at an all-inclusive resort at the bottom of the country.

Somewhat stupidly, I had chosen to fly into an airport some 250km away, but rather less stupidly I decided to pre-arrange a surprisingly reasonably priced transfer off some company I found on the Interwebs. And so it was that, given that no one else is stupid enough to fly in to an airport so far away from their destination, I travelled the three hours from the airport to the resort in my own private 15 seater minibus. I feel uncomfortable enough catching taxis at the best of times, but this was just ridiculous.

Barely 5 minutes out of the airport, we slowed to a crawl in the backed-up traffic. It didn’t take long to see the reason for the delay, as we spotted a police car, a group of onlookers, a cameraman, two bashed up cars, and a chap with a bucket of sand repairing the road. I looked around for the seatbelts in my minibus. There weren’t any.

Somehow we made it safely, despite the cavalier attitude the Turkish take to road markings and their decidedly vague attitude to the concept of “lanes”. The driver managed not to hit any of the many people just wandering around at the side of the road, and he even somehow managed to remain on the windy mountain road just outside Oludeniz despite the fact that he was clearly watching the para gliders over the bay to the right, even as he turned the wheel to the left.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I wasn’t really there long enough to see the real Turkey, and at any rate we spent most of our time in our closeted all-inclusive world. (But, hey, they let you pour your own beer: why would we leave?)

We did escape a couple of times, though, if only so Sal could exercise her bartering technique at the market stalls that permeate tourist Turkey. She certainly drives a harder bargain than me; I just fold at the earliest opportunity. Somehow, though, that didn’t matter, because I didn’t really see a great deal that I wanted to buy: somehow the stalls all seem to sell the same products and be staffed by chaps who’ve been taught the same routines–“alright mate”, they would say, in a faux Landarn accent, “what part of London you from? Sarf Landan?” Still, at least that was better than the chap we met in the Grand Bazzar in Istanbul who decided that a winning sales strategy for promoting the fake aftershave and dodgy T-Shirts on his stall would be to refer to me as “skinny man”. For some reason, we chose not to purchase anything from him. Can’t think why.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours of my bank holiday Monday sorting out a few of the things on the site that I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

You probably won’t notice most of the changes (mostly it was backend/RSS stuff), but should notice that the archive is, finally, a proper one with dates and everything (scroll down, on the right).

I have, undoubtedly, broken something. Please let me know if you find out what it is…

I really should take my own advice: when I don’t pay attention to Everton, they win. When I watch/care, they lose. Before this Saturday I’d seen them play twice in London (losing 3-0 to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, and losing 2-0 to Fulham at Loftus Road), so the omens for Fulham vs Everton at Craven Cottage on Saturday afternoon weren’t good. Still, given that we’re currently sitting happily in fourth place, and Fulham weren’t even certain of staying in the Premiership next season before the game, I expected at least to see us put up some kind of fight. I should have known better, though, and so it was that I spent a couple of hours sitting directly behind one of the goals listening to shouts of “Champions League? You’re having a larf!” from several thousand people sitting behind me ringing in my ears.

Still, this gave me a chance to reflect at length on the moronic thought processes of the average football fan. (Of course, it makes perfect sense that a bloke sitting in the stand at one end of the pitch is better placed to call an offside decision than the bloke running up and down on the line a few feet away from the incident…)

Many of the comments from the home supporters concentrated on Everton’s propensity for playing the long ball game: a valid point, admittedly, but surely you’re stretching that point slightly if you sarcastically shout “Go on, hoof it up the field” at our goalkeeper as he’s about to take a goal kick: what did you expect Nigel Martyn to do, Mr Generic Fulham Supporter: dribble it up to the other end of the pitch and score a goal?

Of course I’m sure that there’s no element of jealously involved in the fact that a team with similarly meagre resources has somehow managed to end the season so much higher up the table than a certain west London team flirting with relegation: a comment like “Everton’s football is, as I expected it to be, absolutely atrocious…” is just a simple unbiased value judgement.

Obviously.

My contribution to the team might not have extended much beyond insisting on a selection of incorrect answers–I could offer only a small handful of correct ones, and one of those was about Star Trek (hangs head in shame)–but it would be remiss of me not to mention our unprecedented success at the Hemingford Arms pub quiz last night: at one point in the quiz someone actually wondered out loud if we could bear to put our names to the piece of paper on which we had scribbled what we believed to be a series of entirely incorrect answers. At the end, though, as the quiz lady read through the names of the teams in order, with ours nowhere to be heard, it emerged that Ken Hom’s Hot Worms (my other contribution to our achievement; don’t ask…) had somehow triumphed with a quite remarkable score of 33, some 6 points more than the second-placed team. I still can’t quite believe it.

Oh, and the evening also yielded the following haiku:

Floppy-haired actor,
off Game On, film with Kidman.
Not winning the quiz.

You now, it’s terrible, really: Sal goes away for a few days and I can’t help myself but go shopping and spend lots of money. Ostensibly heading to Tottenham Court Road on Saturday afternoon to help someone else with a laptop purchase, I ended up returning with a lovely shiny new 60GB iPod photo, which is currently sync-ing the better part of my record collection as I type.

It wasn’t exactly an impulse buy, as I’d been thinking about picking one up for a while, given that my old MP3 player is looking rather dated these days–and I’ve long since filled up it up. But now I have 60 lovely gigabytes to fill, an amount that seems just as huge as my old player’s 20GB did four years ago. Then again, I should be ok for a while: my record collection, according to iTunes, now runs to 6311 songs, which is somewhere around 25GB and would take the best part of 18.5 days to listen to. But considering it took me over 10 years to amass a record collection that fills barely half of the tiny little box I’ve just bought, I should be ok for a while.

You’ve got to love the 21st Century: not only does today’s technology allow me to indulge my inner obsessive-compulsive hoarder on a grand scale, but it also offers a wonderful contemporary equivalent of alphabetising your CD collection: sorting out the track and album titles, downloading album artwork, and categorising everything by genre…

Hmm… Looks like I may be some time.