A DSA alert, concerning a THINK! and ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) campaign warning of the dangers of drink-driving over the Christmas period.
You can read the full press release here.
Category - General
This came through on the newsfeeds. Apparently, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in New Zealand has – for some unfathomable reason – decided to teach dogs how to drive a vehicle. I won’t call it a “car”, because it isn’t.
Apparently, it’s a publicity stunt aimed at showing dog owners thinking of abandoning their pets how intelligent they are. This doesn’t even go half way to explaining why it is therefore necessary to teach them to drive.
To the lesser mind, the suggestion that dogs are “intelligent” enough to drive naturally implies that they could also compete with humans on the professional sports front, become airline pilots, and become eligible to vote. Perhaps in New Zealand, but anywhere else…?
It’s a monumental waste of (New Zealand) money.
Since I wrote about Alcopal a few months ago, I must admit that I haven’t kept my eye on its website (although this blog still gets a lot of hits via the search engines).
However, today I received a press release from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) listing its weekly adjudications, and Alcopal was one of them. It seems that the purveyors of Alcopal have been busy re-writing their claims on their website, because the ones that have been ruled against definitely weren’t there when the story first broke in the summer.
It seems that gobbledegook has become the order of the day, and the site was now advertising the following:
Be CAREFUL if you’re considering DRINKING then DRIVING Going out to celebrate or just having a good time? ‘Be Careful’ if you’re driving. Always take ALCO-PAL with you … Take the recommended dose and it could make all the difference if you’re breathalyzed [sic] ALCO-PAL helps to reduce the alcohol breath you expel from your lungs. Alcopal effectively reduces and prevents the absorbtion [sic] of alcohol from the inner lining of the stomach and intestine into the systemic flow (blood stream). This helps in reducing the burden on the liver and kidneys. Please note if you are way over the recommended alcohol limit this product will not help you.
How contradictory can you get? They actually state that it won’t help you if you’re over the limit, and yet they state that it can drop your breath-alcohol level to within-limit if it is outside! Of course, I explained why it didn’t work in my previous article.
The ASA has upheld the complaint from RoSPA and told Alcopal that they must not advertise this again. Note what ASA says in their ruling:
…while the ad included the text “Please note if you are way over the recommended alcohol limit this product will not help you”, its overall impression was that the product could help consumers bypass the law and that drinking and driving was therefore acceptable. We considered the text “Please note if you are way over the recommended alcohol limit this product will not help you” was likely to be interpreted as suggesting the product could help consumers who were over the legal limit for driving, provided they were not “way over”. We considered that text, combined with the other claims, encouraged consumers to drink and drive and thereby incited them to break the law. We also noted the ad suggested the effects of drinking alcohol could be masked. For those reasons, we concluded that the ad was irresponsible.
The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 1.3 (Responsible advertising), 1.10 (Legality) and 4.6 (Harm and offence).
You can view the full ruling here.
…Kate goes and gets pregnant! (That’s the Duchess of Cambridge – Prince William’s wife – to my non-UK visitors).
Now we’re going to have to endure 9 months of BBC boot-licking on this subject, which kicked off well this morning with the entire breakfast show dedicated to interviewing people who just said “it’s wonderful news”. And reporters standing pointlessly in the cold outside the bloody hospital. And on the radio, the same nauseous gush from women who “are pregnant just like Kate”.
A warning to the BBC and Daily Mail: if you overdo it you will start turning the public off the Royals. Even the most loyal of Daily Mail readers is only going to put up with blanket coverage for so long, and that’s saying something.
I wonder if there’ll be a “souvenir pull-out” in any of the weekend papers? Jeez. Then there will be all those commemorative plates and coins in the back pages.
I think I’ll emigrate.
The Daily Mail has lost its primary source of news now that the floods are receding and the rain has moved away. So what can it do next?
Answer: predict the coldest winter for 100 years.
They carefully avoid any direct mention of precisely who it is who is providing this information. Second-rate journos haven’t yet moved into meteorology as a side line as far as I know, so this smacks of the usual suspects providing wild guesses for the Mail’s editors to wet themselves over.
I have recently mentioned Exacta’s annual guess. This one – whoever it is from – is totally different. And we know it isn’t the Met Office, because they stopped doing long range forecasts after getting it totally wrong every time (the Met Office has trouble telling you what the weather is doing right now sometimes).
Also remember that the Mail forecast the same last year and got it totally and utterly wrong – so wrong, it was like calling heads and getting tails.
I love the part in the Mail story about water “blowing upwards”. Big deal. It does that when it’s windy.
I saw on the local news just now that shop owners in Chilwell and Beeston are worried that their businesses will collapse if Nottingham City Council closes two major roads.
Hilariously (and I mean in the circus clown sense), the Council has not informed traders of its plans, and these traders are worried that moves are afoot to close High Road and Chilwell Road in Beeston “for several months”.
During evening rush hour, it is already absolute chaos on the ring road as a result of University Boulevard being down to a single lane. All it takes is some dickhead breaking down or rear-ending another car and traffic comes to a complete standstill as there is nowhere else for it to go.
As I reported a few days ago – after the incompetent NET workers “overran” and caused total gridlock during morning rush hour – both NET and Nottingham City Council would be guilty of criminal incompetence if such a crime existed. Apparently, the loss to local businesses that day was in excess of £2,000,000! And numerous roads are already closed – many for “up to 12 months” – with others being shut all the time. There are restrictions and temporary lights everywhere, and not just from the tram works – the imbeciles in the City Council have also allowed unrestricted gas main and electricity service maintenance work to go ahead simultaneously with all this.
To make matters worse, the contractors involved in utilities road works now seem to favour 3-way and 4-way control, with the extended waits and increased queues this creates. And in some places the gas main work has been ongoing for 3 months or more (notably, on Westdale Lane and Cavendish Road in Carlton, with no end in site). The Council is apparently making no effort to get these idiot contractors to finish the work and get out of everyone’s way once and for all.
They’ve tried to blame the recent rain – well, in the case of the gas mains, if they’d have done their bloody jobs properly in the first place they wouldn’t be having to work in water-filled holes because they’d have packed up and moved on months ago. And I’m sure that NET and the Council have heard of weather forecasts, so it’s just a shame that they’re simply to stupid to adjust their work around heavy rain and so choose to create gridlock instead.
When you consider all of this, it is no wonder that Beeston and Chilwell traders are worried about what the Council intends to do. Total road closures in that area are absolutely likely with these idiots calling the shots. They don’t give a damn about road users or businesses – all they want is for their beloved tram extension to get built.
We’re in recession. Even if we’re technically out of recession (by about 0.0001% of growth), businesses are still closing by the shed load every day. Those traders in Chilwell and Beeston can’t afford to lose customers, otherwise it is absolutely guaranteed that they will go bankrupt. And Nottingham City Council is the only thing they can rely on.
God help them!
According to the BBC News, the Council says “disruption is inevitable”, but they are “trying to keep it to a minimum.” You can see the effects of this “minimum” every night – University Boulevard could easily have been kept as two-lanes, and the NET work could easily have been done faster and more competently. As things stand, absolutely nothing is being done to expedite the work (they weren’t working today, for example), and events like those last week are never far from the surface.
The BBC article interviewed Cllr Jane Urquhart. She looked like a terrified amateur being interviewed, and performed like one as well (all breathless and fast-talking):
We’re gong to maintain the maximum possible access… we’re continuing to have the discussions and work with our County Council highways colleagues and the tram project team…
I’m getting flashbacks again. That is bureaucratic bullshit. So far, they’ve done everything BUT maintain “maximum possible access”.In fact, much of the disruption looks almost deliberate – particularly when you consider the ridiculously long planned duration of it, and the total chaos every single night (and that’s no exaggeration). The Council should be TELLING their highways “colleagues” and the people they have EMPLOYED to build the tram what to do – not letting THEM call the shots and prattling on about “teams”.
As I’ve said before, the tram is a monumental and pointless waste of money. It isn’t green, and it isn’t pretty. The extra carbon emissions created by the traffic jams (especially the £2m cock-up last week) during construction will take decades to be offset – and that’s even assuming that there is any positive impact on emissions from the tram once it begins operating, which is unlikely (except in Council justification documents).
If there was ever such a thing as criminal incompetence, the entire staff of both Nottingham City Council and NET (the idiots who run Nottingham’s tram) would be guilty of it.
I woke up this morning to find the city gridlocked. And I mean GRIDLOCKED. Traffic was at a standstill everywhere.
I had a 9am appointment at the Queens Medical Centre following a two-month 
wait for a GP referral slot. I tried to get there, but a journey which would normally have taken 10 minutes had to be aborted after only managing to travel less than 1 mile in 45 minutes. To make matters worse, when I called the NHS – which has to run the City Council and NET a close second for stupidity – I was told they couldn’t access my records without a password (so I couldn’t even tell them I was sorry that I couldn’t get in), and that this should have been provided with my referral letter from my GP. I explained I didn’t get a referral letter, and that the GP had done it directly, and was told that my surgery would be able to provide it. Of course, when I phoned my surgery the only person with access to the password system was stuck in the bloody traffic!
It turned out to be almost entirely the fault of tram works, which had “over run” – a euphemistic description for yet another total and incompetent balls up by NET workers.
This meant that University Boulevard – already down to one lane at the best of times – was closed. And it was topped off by some wanker over-turning their car on what
appears to have been a 30mph road (listening to the traffic reports) near Wilford. All of this was before, during, and after the rush hour.
I tried every possible route to get to the QMC, but gave up in the city centre. The gridlock extended as far south as Bunny on the A60. And the icing on the cake was that all the usual rat runs I know were also snarled up with people trying to bypass the mess – which in itself was made all the more worse by the numerous utilities road works which the idiot council has allowed to take place simultaneously both with each other and the tram works. As I’ve said previously, the tram works already involve numerous semi-permanent or long-term road closures. It took me nearly two hours to get back home again.
While we’re on the subject, I noticed several ambulances stuck also trying to get to A&E and the QMC. I hope anyone who was lying in the back considers suing the council and NET back to the Stone Age. And the police ought to be doing something about it now – it’s gone beyond a joke. It really is becoming a case of criminal stupidity.
I often wonder to myself why it is that so many instructors are dead set against parents or friends teaching people to drive.
Any learner driver has got to attain a certain level of competence in order to pass their driving test. If the parent does a bad job of teaching, the learner simply doesn’t pass the test. However, if the learner does pass, then the parent must have provided at least the bare minimum of tuition in order for them to do so. Where that bare minimum actually comes from is irrelevant. It’s not rocket science working this out.
Indeed, in most cases the parent will have provided a level of worldly wisdom concerning driving that most ADIs would struggle to achieve in the limited amount of time they spend with their typical pupil.
The suggestion that parents are not capable of teaching their kids is laughable. Some might not be – but as I say, the learner usually fails if that is the case. A parent might not know all the buzzwords, or have fancy briefings and lesson plans to pore over, but if they themselves know how to handle a car and other traffic then if they can convey that – however inefficiently compared to SuperADI – to their offspring they are adequate trainers.
When it comes down to it, I would guess that most parents are actually better driving teachers than quite a few ADIs out there. They might not pass Part 2 or 3, of course, but what of that? It’s not the issue.
I actively encourage parents to come out on lessons with me and the pupil so I can show them what to look for. I also explain how what they were taught – and the way they’ve come to do things since then – might not be the best way nowadays, and giving the learner mixed messages just makes it harder for them. These are parents who have chosen not to teach their own kids, but who are going to supervise private practice, so I don’t really want them trying to “teach” because of those mixed messages.
In the past, though, I’ve had quite a few people who have been taught by parents and then sent to me to be “finished off”, and quite honestly none of them have turned out to be homicidal maniacs who can’t even get in the car without stalling it. They’re usually lacking mirror checks (or doing too many) or not very good with roundabouts, say. But nothing to suggest that the parent has done a bad job. And like I say, if they went to test like that they’d just fail.
As recent posts have intimated, though. The biggest problem with new drivers is what their parents didn’t teach them in the sixteen-plus years before their driving test.
Assuming it’s true, I saw this on a forum frequented by student learner drivers:
My instructor was the best, he used to let me drive one handed, with a driving lean, windows wide open, own songs playing loud (not too loud though) through AUX, he used to go buy couple of snacks and drinks. and We used to cruise all over the city on the lessons. He used to tell me race past cyclists, and even at traffic lights he used to let me have a little drag race with the car nex to me. He was probably the best instructor everywhere. So much fun i had with that guy, was the best
He even sold me a Pass Plus certificate for £50 one week after i passed, without doing the course. Which was a bargain for me.
That last paragraph illustrates why Pass Plus was so devalued, when it really could have (could still) contributed significantly to these issues of young drivers killing themselves so frequently.
Can you imagine an ADI advising a pupil (and an inexperienced driver, at that) “race past” cyclists and “drag race” other cars? How well would you say such an instructor had handled the issue of attitude in such a driver?
When the above poster was challenged over his post (and accused of trolling), he/she replied:
I’m afraid not mate [not trolling], there’s another guy in my local area that does lessons in a car that’s really sporty, lowered, has limo black tints on back, lets you speed, lets you play your own music, and the instructor smokes whilst on lesson, and even gives lessons to 16 year olds!!
Remember that in order to be an ADI you have to be considered “fit and proper”. Go figure.
Well, the temperature dropped below10°C a few times over a couple of days, and a bit of snow fell in the south. And we all know what that means, kiddies…
It’s the Annual Winter Tyre Argument.
This year it seems to have taken a lightly sinister turn – or rather, it has got nasty right from the get go instead of dragging on for about four months, and then getting nasty.
Some of the forums frequently bemoan the dearth of new posters and, in some cases, any posters at all. Their administrators try to explain it away as apathy, or maybe provide some other convoluted explanation which could easily form the plot of another Harry Potter book if J K Rowling ever decided to go back to that series. But what they continually fail to understand is that it is the “characters” (i.e. the regulars) with their “strong views” (i.e. arrogance) who are the main problem. The lurking non-posters even tell them this, yet they still ignore it, probably because it would mean losing one of their few remaining contributors and – in far too many cases – someone they know.
Blatant advertising, for example, will often get a new member banned immediately. But the “regulars” are at it all the time (some of them only ever post anyway when it’s time for a bit of publicity). Heck, the main reason any newly-qualified ADI joins forums and associations is to get their name about, so stopping them from doing it merely because they’re not yet in the clique is just stupid. Let’s face facts here, if a new ADI joins a forum, gets lambasted for asking an “obvious” question or wrist-slapped by the moderators for “advertising”, is it any surprise they don’t participate ever again on that particular forum? (Edit: And another one is doing it now! A playground spat on one site, carried over to snidey remarks on the other. I hope his misguided belief that forum moderators often aren’t the most objective people to appeal to doesn’t come as too much of a disappointment when he finds out).
Back to the Great Winter Tyre Yawn, though. One poster with “strong views” has made their usual absolute statement on another forum about winter tyres – and then continued to push it (the sinister turn I mentioned). Clearly, this is going to rub those who hold a different view the wrong way. and it does – several other people have disagreed with him both on the matter of winter tyres and on his insulting and forceful way of pushing it this year.
That poster has now made himself feel a lot better by dragging the subject – and I mean the part after it got sinister and personal – across to the other forum (the one in its death throes) and into a 2-day old thread which probably wouldn’t have got any more responses. And they wonder why people don’t post anymore when you have these “regulars” using the forums for their own petty purposes.
On the winter tyres topic, as I’ve said before: you don’t have to have winter tyres. In some cases, in some areas, at some times, some people might benefit from them. But that doesn’t mean everyone will.
We’ve managed quite well without them for many years – just as we’ve managed without huge 4x4s, other all-terrain vehicles, and snowploughs across 95% of the population, and that’s in spite of them being available for much of that time.
Trying to persuade people to switch to winter tyres is like trying to persuade an atheist that God exists, or vice versa.
Footnote: The same argument raged last year, and the year before that. Last winter was extremely mild and we had little snow or conditions which would have at least put up a good argument in favour of fitting winter tyres.
Instructors are always going on about teaching people safe driving for life. Maybe they should remember that the average person they teach is probably going to run their tyres almost bald to avoid the cost of new ones, so expecting them to fit winter tyres as an extra each year is unrealistic.
The false sense of security that fitting winter tyres might create among inexperienced drivers as a result of listening to over-enthusiastic converts who already have them on the tuition vehicle is worth considering.