Highlights: Switzerland vs. Ukraine
Below are the key highlights from last night’s Switzerland vs. Ukraine match, for those who missed it.
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Mark Lawrenson
Another somewhat lacklustre performance by England yesterday afternoon against Ecuador, but three wins and a draw mean that we’re only three wins away from winning the World Cup.
The highlight of the game from the commentary side was Mark Lawrenson’s hysterical background laughter when Motson pointed out that a replay of Beckham looking somewhat ill in the middle of the pitch was edited highlights. (Beckham had earlier been seen throwing up on the pitch.)
The most annoying thing about the commentary is Lawrenson’s indecision as to whether he’s a northerner or a southerner. When saying Cole, in reference to either Ashley or Joe, his effort is tortuous. It almost sounds like curl. Make your mind up, Mark!
Blog and Wikipedia
I’ve been surprised twice recently by people’s ignorance of what I thought were commonplace words. The words were blog and Wikipedia, not known by two separate people in the work context. I was of the view that both words (or should I say a word and a brand) had received sufficient news coverage of late to be close to ubiquitous.
Scabs
The human body often astounds me. I recently slipped while helping someone put a sofa-bed in his van (see post below), creating a nasty wound on my inner elbow. It’s around four inches by 1.5 inches, in that awkward place that makes it difficult to heal due to the flexing skin.
Anyway, healing it is doing. It’s fascinating to see the scab that formed within 24 hours of the accident reduce in size, as the surrounding skin regenerates around it. It’s now down to around 2" by 1", and I still feel the blood pumping harder to that area, feeding it back to full fitness. If someone could keep still for long enough, it would be fascinating to see time-lapse photography showing how a wound heals over time.
Lambeth Council’s bulky rubbish collection anathema
Statistics are sometimes produced detailing the average number of times an individual interacts with government per year. Recently, I have single-handedly increased this figure by a significant amount, although my statistics may not be used in future reports, as outliers may be removed.
My ‘conversation’ has been with my local council, Lambeth. They have a bulky rubbish collection scheme, whereby Council Tax payers (of which I am one) can get up to eight specified bulky items removed from outside their property, four times per year. We needed to discard some belongings, so I decided to invoke this service.
On their first visit, they took the bed and mattress, which I’d left outside our railings, but didn’t bother with the two sofas and broken TV that were sat inside the railings. While they specify a day of collection, their policy is ‘any time between 6.30am and 6.30pm’, and the lady I spoke to in order to arrange the collection clearly told me to put my belongings ‘in your front garden’ the night before, as the collectors can arrive very early.
Despite phone calls every other day to Lambeth Council (I leave a day in between calls to confirm that their promise to come back the following day is indeed pure hokum), I am still left with a broken TV adorning the front of our house. The sofas only disappeared because a guy walking past on Sunday liked the look of them, and came back with his van to pick them up.
I was promised this morning that the TV would be taken away today. I’m not holding my breath.
Whom is the sex offenders’ register for?
The sex offenders’ register has been in and out of the news for some time now. Recently, John Reid made the vote-winning decision to make the register publicly available, which is dangerous. I’m not sure what benefit this has to the general public. The fact that a 16-year-old who is found guilty of having sex with someone one year his or her junior is given the same status as Jonathan King makes the single-tiered nature of the register nonsensical.
And which crimes should have an associated register and which should not? Should there be a murderers register? A rapists register? A burglars register? If its purpose is to flag people who put the general public at risk, then this suggests that the government has failed in its rehabilitation of these people, an element of the sentence that is sadly overlooked.
Also, alas, the British public is not sufficiently competent to use the data appropriately. A household in Scotland recently suffered untold abuse because it was found to contain a paediatrician.
On a related point, the BBC punctuates the register such: the sex offender’s register. I think this implies that it is a register for the sex offender. I would argue that it is a register of sex offenders, so the apostrophe should succeed the S. Or else it has become sufficiently prevalent a term not to warrant an apostrophe at all.
GNER
This weekend, I’m venturing up to Halifax to see my Mum, and hopefully to see my Dad. A couple of years ago, I would have hopped into my VW Beetle Cabriolet and enjoyed the beautiful evening with the top down all the way. Alas, I no longer have a car, so I opted for the train, the only reasonable alternative.
Great North Eastern Railways’ price for the London to Leeds return has increased by 37.5% in the last two years, from £60 to £82.50, an annual increase of 17.3%. I saw a news story about concerns over inflation recently, but I wasn’t aware it was this bad. The price of a can of XXXX hasn’t shifted much, however.
It’s fast and smooth though, which I have to say I’m impressed with. And we just passed Emirates Stadium, which certainly looks impressive from the outside.
The Gallup singles chart
Today, I destroyed someone’s world. That someone is Rusty, a friend of Ben’s. Here’s the story.
Rusty is a music aficionado. His musical knowledge seems to be on a par with that of Steve, and indeed that of my wife. While he doesn’t know the surname of Charles, nor that of Eddie, he is confident that Nu Shooz’ I Can’t Wait topped out at Number 3 in August 1986, a fact that I have neither the will nor inclination to challenge.
Tonight, however, I destroyed his world, in claiming that the UK Singles chart was not based on sales for that specific week, but was instead based upon the total sales to date divided by the number of weeks for which the single had been available. This explains why singles don’t drop straight out of the charts; instead they gradually fall down the rankings.
For someone who prides himself on knowing chart facts, this came as a body-blow. The whole foundation of his knowledge came into question. I am struggling to find evidence of the fact, but I firmly believe it to be true. It’s now 12.45am, and I’m getting up at 6am, so the research will have to come later.
Department stores’ apostrophes
Apostrophes in department stores were scarce two years ago before I left the UK. Now, they’re non-existent. If you want men’s clothes, follow the Mens sign; for women’s clothes, follow the arrow to Womens.
Dreadful.
The World Cup, highlights to date
It’s been quite a week of football. England were dismal in the second half against Paraguay, but as Ben said, it was as if Paraguay wanted to lose. And we were less than convincing against Trinidad & Tobago on Thursday, which is when the World Cup started to come alive for me.
Last night, though, saw a cracking game between the US and Italy. The USA dominated the first period, before Italy’s impressive goal from a free-kick against the run of play. The USA’s equaliser came from a bizarre attempted clearance from Italy’s Zaccardo, before Daniele de Rossi’s heinous mid-air elbow in the face of Brian McBride resulted in his sending off. There is no place in football for such mindless acts, and in my view, he should have been ejected from the entire competition there and then.
The other two sending off incidents were not particularly malicious, but the decisions were probably justified, leaving the US facing ten-man Italy with only nine men of their own for the last 45 minutes. It was a cracking game, and the US held on to secure a well-deserved point.
Earlier in the day, Ghana were hugely impressive against the Czech Republic, and more than justified their 2-0 win. It would be great to see them in the last 16.
Roll on Tuesday at 8pm: hopefully England can up their game to get a result out of their match against Sweden, giving them top spot in the group. Whether top spot is the best place for England to be may be determined by the Germany vs. Ecuador match earlier that afternoon. Either way, we have at least two matches left in this World Cup; Italy can’t say the same just yet.
Manchester, ten years on
I was recently reminded by Jon that yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the IRA’s bombing of Manchester, which was my closest brush with terrorism.
It certainly doesn’t seem that long ago. I’d been to visit Jon for the weekend, and we’d popped into the town centre on what I remember to have been a blisteringly hot Saturday, before planning to head back to his place to watch England’s second group match, against Scotland, at 3pm that afternoon.
We saw the van containing the bomb earlier in the day, as the police were widening the cordon. As is often the case with terrorism in the UK, the cordons were seen more as a hindrance than anything, and we skirted round the ever-widening perimeter enjoying a relaxed morning of chat, wandering and browsing. At around 11.15am, we were in an independent record shop; I was browsing through CDs on the ground floor, in racks facing the window. There was a huge bang, and the window in front of me imploded.
There was talk of a gas explosion, but having seen the van earlier in the day, we were confident in our assumption that it was a bomb. Jon knowing Manchester better than I did, we knew that it was serious, as he estimated that the record shop was almost a mile away from the van we’d seen earlier that morning.
I remember seeing panels of glass that had fallen from first and second floor windows, shattered on the pavement below, and being thankful that there was no one underneath them. I remember walking in a dazed state around the city, wondering what to do, where to go. I remember the queues for every phone box we passed, people anxious to confirm their safety to loved ones, and me trying to do the same. And I remember Jon helping out a guy who didn’t have enough money for our bus home: the driver didn’t see these as extenuating circumstances.
Having eventually arrived back at Jon’s flat, the England vs. Scotland match didn’t carry any importance to me. I think I watched bits, but couldn’t focus. Football didn’t mean anything.
BBC doesn’t shut the fuck up
I was watching the BBC’s 10pm news this evening, delayed slightly due to coverage of Brazil’s less than impressive 1-0 win over Croatia.
The lead story was that of the police’s apology for the hurt they may have caused in their wrongful arrest of two brothers in east London. (The fact that the police weakened the apology by using the phrase "I apologise for the hurt we may have caused" is an aside.)
I was surprised by the BBC’s decision to air one of the brothers’ claim that the police told him to "shut the fuck up" on entering the property. While after the 9pm watershed, it was certainly a bold, admirable move to make on the primetime news. This is something that I think would be unheard of in the US.
I was equally surprised that the online coverage of the same story did not reference this line, although a full video of the briefing is available. In the past, the BBC’s online offering has been notoriously more bold/controversial than its TV counterpart.
The site often includes swearing in circumstances where it is intrinsic to the article itself. It usually chooses to place such references after the fold (where the bottom of the screen generally cuts the article when you’re at the top of the page), so that they are only read by people genuinely interested in the article, and so that they aren’t automatically pushed to other media (e.g. Ceefax) that are more widely accessible.
In this instance, the reference was important to the story, and warranted airtime. Heartening.
6/5 electrical
I tried to buy something from 24/7 electrical yesterday. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts on my part, the system would not accept my valid postcode. So as advised, I called them up. Their lines are open from 10am–4pm, Monday through Friday. I think they need a re-branding.
Password woes
Yesterday was the first time I logged on to my work computer. I’d been issued with a username (a nice user-friendly numeric string), along with a garbled alpha-numeric password.
Fortunately, I was invited to change my password on first logging on. The strange thing was that instead of being asked to enter a password of my choice (with the standard security considerations like length, avoidance of consecutive characters, capital and lowercase letters), I was invited to choose one of four pre-defined passwords that had been presented to me.
Each was of the form CVCCVCCVC, C being a consonant, V being a vowel, presumably to make them easier to remember (e.g. cat-dog-bat), although each set of three characters is by no means guaranteed to be a word. Y was considered a vowel, giving a nice 13.8 billion possible passwords.
I thought I’d struggle to remember the password, but on day two, I managed to enter the username and password without referring to my notes.
Shipping success
On leaving New York, we had all of our NY belongings packed up and shipped back to the UK. Although the estimated shipping time was 5–6 weeks, the container arrived today, 3.5 weeks after its contents left our New York apartment.
Everything about the shipment has been exemplary, thanks to Rainier at the US end, and Britannia over here. Everything’s arrived in one piece, ahead of schedule, and with courtesy and professionalism throughout.
If you’re looking for shipping companies, you could do a lot worse than either of the above.
If you can’t hear this message, please call
A message came over the tannoy this morning at work saying the following:
Good morning ladies and gentleman. If you are having any difficulty hearing this message, please call on XXX.
A beautiful piece of irony, especially given that there was no more to the message.
Where does all the water go?
Thames Water has been criticised for quite some time now because an estimated one litre in three does not get to our homes due to leakages in its infrastructure. This is often cited as a counter-argument to the imposition of hosepipe bans and the like.
But where does all the leaking water go? Surely it goes back into the system. While there’s an argument for inefficiency in there (the water needs to be re-treated, cleaned etc., thus adding expense to Thames Water and therefore the end user), I’m thinking that fixing the issue would not necessarily help on the water-shortage front.
MS Word: CTRL+SHIFT+Q
I just found out by accident that if you highlight some text in Word, and hit CTRL+SHIFT+Q, it converts said text into Greek.
May be useful, particularly for those budding mathematicians out there…