Zombiefied

What a fun day I had yesterday. I should have spotted the symptoms on Wednesday when it took me three attempts to pronounce "propriety" and my temperature seemed to plummet (I ignored the first and assumed the latter was due to the screwed up weather) nevertheless I headed to bed as normal only to wake up around 1am in a state of mild dehydration. My nose and throat were claggy, my head and limbs ached and along with both of these the sound of my own heartbeat was keeping me awake.

I kept losing water quickly and stayed in a semi-doze until it was time to get-up and head to work. So no proper REM sleep, very achy, claggy, and still dehydrated. I think I need a lie-in. Said lie-in lasted until about 4pm. Feeling better with a good night's sleep though still a touch cricky in the neck and a hot sensation up my nose but good enough to venture out.

"Great" I thought until about 10 minutes ago, when my speech started to slip again and my balance started to skew. From typing my reflexes are still keen so driving is fortunately still an option, but I'll have to see what I'm like this afternoon. Anadin's seemed to help last time, but they have a tendency to knock me out so I don't take them if driving.

In better news I noticed I appeared in the print version of the paper again under the awards for the bridge entry and I may be appearing as a commentor in Which? magazine on a point about photography and print ratios. They want to send a professional photographer for a portrait to put next to the entry for "a more human touch" so no doubt it'll be while my nose is streaming and I look like I haven't slept in a week :-)

Interrupted Bliss

I was going to say how much I'm enjoying this Spring Bank break, the weather is keeping people indoors and as such my journey times around the area have been reduced to half or even a third of the normal duration.

That was until Central Networks decided to dig up the middle of Stourport and we get yet another three-way set of traffic lights put up. In this instance they're digging up opposing corners of the little island Bridge Street/York Street and High Street/New Street. As you might expect there's little signage up and yes once again coming from York Street you're faced with a sign telling you the right-hand side is closed that has been carefully positioned before the closed off portion on the left.

No parking cones have been put up on both sides of Bridge Street near the top, but they appear to have been moved out of the parking bays. As you may recall me mentioning before that due to stupidity/carelessness/meh although the road is just wide enough to accommodate three lanes here, anyone passing these bays is technically overtaking. Now have cars parking there and put the first traffic light one car length beyond the bays and you get problems with the larger vehicles encroaching heavily on the wrong side of the road and interfering with the traffic coming down due to the angle they're being forced to turn out due to the roadworks.

So how long is this going to last for? Well the temporary traffic light application form for May doesn't list them, the weekly list ran out on the 25th and they're not on the main Schedule of Works - ah good to see our County Council fully utilising the up-to-the-minute benefits of the interweb.

Hah I've just had my answer a colleague has just mentioned they were taken them down as he came through. Whether this is an evening moratorium or a complete removal I'll see in the morning.

Road tax, fuel duty - Take Deux

Okay assume I'm wrong and this isn't a ruse, don't look surprised I have been wrong on occasion before, listening to the bleating justifications coming from various heads I have to once again conclude that those people elected to represent us (well kind of) are drifting every further from the shores of reality.

The first problem is with all the news talking about retrospective/retroactive tax, talking to friends some seem under the impression that they're going to be getting a bill for that car they had two years ago; they're not. What all that stupidity is about is that this tax won't be applied solely to cars purchased that year, but also to cars bought in the last seven years.

The justifications consist of one rationale - that it will encourage people to buy 'greener' cars and they're right, while at the same time being idiots. If you're looking to buy a car for the first time or upgrading (or just bloody have to) then you will be most likely looking for a low emission type, however if you already own a higher-taxed car you've just been well and truly stuffed.

If you decide to change cars you will probably find that your current vehicle is now worth little more then scrap? So the choice is buy a new car at almost full value or suck up the hike in road tax. Although the first option may be the cheapest in the long term, the current situation in lending means this is out of reach for a lot of people unless they take out loans at an exorbitant rate.

So by raising the tax for older cars the government may well be keeping or putting more high emitting cars on the road, because those who were looking to buy a new one suddenly can't afford to, and those second-hand cars that are sold will see their prices drop and may suddenly become attractive despite the associated high road tax.

Road tax, fuel duty - hmmm?

The news has of course been filled with the stories of the road tax hike and fuel duty increase. We've had hauliers petitioning, talking heads discussing what this means for the 'average' person, and ministers defending them; what we haven't had is an official announcement on any of this. I'll repeat that - none of this is official policy. This has caused me to pause for thought and wonder...

Consultant: "Okay the U-turn on the 10p..."
Minister: "Readjustment!"
C: "Sorry, the readjustment of the 10p tax band didn't bring you back as high in the polls as we'd hoped. It seems that people think you don't listen to them..."
M: "I do, see I'm listening to you now"
C: "Of course, but it's what people perceive and at the moment that's the fact you don't listen to them or understand the hassles they're going through. It's time to get them back on our side"
M: "How?"
C: "We'll leak news that you're going to raise road tax and fuel duty."
M: "Are you mad they'll crucify me"
C: "No no this won't be official policy. We'll let the news leak out, everyone will be up in arms, the papers and TV will slap it up as headline news and then... you come out and say it's not going to happen"
M: "They'll call it a U-turn, I can't do that"
C: "Remember it's not official policy. You come out and announce that it was indeed being looked at, but that you've decided that in this current economic climate it wouldn't be the right or fair thing to do. You show that you've listened to and understood the 'people' and everyone thinks what a nice guy you are."
M: "Hmmm I don't know"
C: "And as a bonus everyone will stop grumbling about the current rates of tax and duty because it could have got much worse"
M: "Excellent"

Throw out your food.

Following a bin lorry around I saw it had plastered on its side the statement that "One-third of food we buy is thrown out". Now just accepting the WRAP as given.. oh hell no I can't do that let's delve in

We throw away 6.7 million tonnes of food each year in the UK, when most of this food could have been eaten. (Its not just peelings and bones –its good food).

Contrast this with the BBC's take which gives the figure as 3.3 million,which means that the "not just peelings and bones" makes up 3.4m or to put it another way - the majority.

Researchers found that more than half the good food thrown out, worth £6 billion a year, is bought and simply left unused or untouched.

So although it's "more than half" we should recognise that if the figure approached any other form of target (two-thirds, three-quarters) then that's more likely to be used so we'll take it as exactly half the 3.3m tons or 1.65m tons; so let's guess that value at £3 billion, now...

The study revealed that £1 billion worth of wasted food is still “in date”

So £1bn of the £3bn is presumably 0.55m tons of food. Hey look at that we've dropped from 6.7m tons of food to 0.55m tons of unused food thrown out that could have been eaten. Heck if I assumed that the £6bn figure referred to the "half" of good food and not the whole amount then we're talking 0.275m tons of food.

Now how did they get that monetary figure anyway? Well they don't say, but let's guess that if I bought an 800g loaf of bread for 65p and ended up throwing away 50g of it then that's 4p worth. Except my loaf of bread might have cost £1.35 in which case I've thrown away over 8p worth; same amount of waste, different cost. What if it was part of a BOGOF? I get two 800g loaves for £1.35, but one goes stale and I have to chuck 200g worth away - I've just wasted over 33p worth of food. Well no the part of the loaf I've chucked was free so at the most I've wasted about 17p worth. How has all this been calculated...who knows.

Okay having lightly fisked that let's get back to the proper question - "Why are we throwing food out?" over to that BBC page again

"A third of people are throwing away food that's cooked and left on the plate."

Well yeah if you want to keep it you have to wrap it up, keep it stored, and guess how long it will last for and, worse yet, be expected to eat it before it goes off. Why bother when you can chuck it and if you fancy some again in a few days/weeks time just nip down to the store? You know it's in date, how long it will last and it isn't sitting in your fridge taking up space in the hope that you might be eating it at some time in the future.

Speaking of fridges another WRAP report sums up attitudes nicely with

by simply storing most fresh fruit and vegetables inside the fridge, these foods stay fresh for much longer

Sorry would this be the fridge that's already full of leftover food not to mention everything else that insists that "once opened keep refrigerated" which appears to be increasing. Yep of course we all have American style fridge-freezers the size of double wardrobes that blend well in our 20 foot square kitchens and presumably powered by their own roof-mounted wind turbine. Ah but it's all our own fault because...

part of the reason for the increase in waste was that people were buying more fresh produce, which had a shorter shelf life.

There you go you should stop buying all this fresh produce and buy stuff injected with five kinds of preservatives. Of course it got mentioned on TV the fact that some are slavishly following the dates and "use within" markers on the packets without bothering to check if the food is still okay.

But still we can do better indeed as Zoe from London says

"I'd urge anyone who has some outside space to try composting."

Kudos to Zoe for not making it 'I'd urge anyone to try composting' which introduces another question 'What is the waste distribution per capita across the country?'.

So the conclusion appears to be - we don't know how to either store or cook food properly and may have nowhere to recycle the true left-overs. The first requires education in food (which appears to be starting) and the second is food-pickups that are already being trialled in various areas. So what was the point of the media attention on this report again?

Staff don't understand what they're selling

That's the headline in the latest Which? Magazine that looked at electrical stores selling digital boxes and DVD players. They sent staff out to buy a DVD recorder that could record Freeview programmes while using another digital box to watch a different channel. This should have been an easy task just buy a DVD recorder with a digital tuner.

They tried eight branches each of Comet, Currys/Currys.digital, and John Lewis, all the branches of John Lewis offered the right equipment as did all Currys.digital. However at various Currys and Comets they were offered DVD recorders with analogue tuners, or HDD recorders that wouldn't play or record DVDs.

Asking for a High-Definition player did better (possibly because they're newer and more expensive) with everyone offering a Blu-Ray player over the now defunct HD-DVD models, however at one branch of Currys.digital they were offered a £300 standard definition DVD recorder.

Am I surprised? Well if you've been reading my entries for a while you'll know the answer, remember most of these stores are selling HD televisions that are being displayed without being fed an HD-source. I bet they haven't even heard of FreeSat yet or think it's something to do with Sky.

Washed out weekend

Ah Spring Bank Holiday, so of course it started raining on Sunday and stopped somewhere in the middle of Monday evening. Highly annoying as I'd planned on heading up to Hartlebury Castle accompanied by the Bratii to see the Sir William Gascoigne’s Fellowship's recreation of 15th Century life.

They came over anyway and I entertained them, off-loading the two PS2 Lego Star Wars games onto Major in the process for a tenner. I'd noticed the Complete Saga for PS3 had dropped to £25 on Amazon and browsing around saw Woolies also had it at the same price so I ventured into Kiddy on Saturday to have a look for that and some other odds and ends I had to get while there anyway. Indeed Woolworths had the game in stock at £25, I chuntered over to the nearby Game store (of whom I possess a loyalty card) and found it there priced at £35. Locating a manager-type I held up the game for him to see -
"Woolworths are doing this for £24.99" I stated
He looked at me with a blank expression as if waiting for the punchline
"So can you do it for the same price?" I continued
"No" he said bluntly and with what seemed faint surprise that I'd even asked
"Okay", I said "I'll get it from there then" and then walked out and back across to Woolies where I picked it up.

Across to WHSmith's book store to see if the W40k Blood Angels Omnibus was out yet, yes Dan I'm a complete saddo :-) Anyway it wasn't and checking it isn't until the 2nd June, I'd got the dates muddled. While standing there I accidentally overheard someone reading the synopsis for Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere then looking at American Gods and commenting to her companion on how she'd been introduced to his writing, I headed over to WHSmith's fairly decent comic collection for a shufti and as she passed me to go upstairs I pointed out the Sandman collection to her which, it turned out, she didn't know existed. Ah it's good to turn the young (well young compared to me) to literature they might not even have thought to look at.

Back home I seeded the back lawn again with a multi-purpose granule thing. I'd done the same two weeks ago and it had turned the moss and weeds (i.e. the majority of the lawn) black while at the same time pushing through grass quite quickly. Anyway I'm going to try and keep up the dosing until it's reasonable then redo it every month or so to keep it that way so this time I seeded it with a slightly denser spread and ran out just as I got to the end of the main lawn and before I got to the auxiliary strip. Couldn't be arsed to go get some more that day 'It'll wait until Sunday' I thought; hah!

Spent some of Sunday doing a different kind of weeding, spam in my email. I seem to be getting a disproportionate amount in French and the filters don't seem to be catching it. Then tiring of that I spend a lazy time with some books and my new Lego Star Wars which is better in some ways then the PS2 versions, but worse in others. I'll knock out a review when I get chance.