They’re still going on about that bloody goal-that-wasn’t-allowed in the England match against Germany. No one seems able to accept we lost because we were crap! Oh, and that the Germans were brilliant.
What makes me laugh is that the system they are proposing is not exactly simple. I mean, let’s face it. All you need is a camera at the side of the goal and some bloke up in the stands with video playback and wireless connection to the referee to say “yes, it was in” or “no, it wasn’t”.
From The Stone Age To This
But no. The solution to years of insisting that the referee guessing is better than using any form of technology is about to be replaced with something at the other end of the spectrum – one which it would appear is likely to need several dedicated satellites, and which will be required to bounce signals off Jupiter and Saturn to give an answer. One possible system even has a microchip in the ball – what a pointlessly stupid complication that would be!
I also love the suggestion that the FA has been pushing for this for years. I stand to be corrected, and I am probably getting so-called “football experts” mixed up with the FA, but the clowns who pass as commentators on the British media have always seemed to be opposed – as have many of the managers being touted as prospective England managers. If the FA was heavily in favour, these comedians would have been, too.
Personally, I have always thought that whether the ball actually crossed the line or not is far more important than whether people think it did. I have been in favour of goal line technology for at least 20 years – a camera at the side of the posts, if nothing else. I also believe the same technology should be used for deciding throw-ins and goal kicks/corners (and the cheats who falsely claim them or who dive penalised accordingly).
But then again, I was always in favour of Sky and its dramatic transformation of the game through live broadcasting and massive injections of cash. The dinosaurs who deride this would have us back to muddy pitches, flat caps, and wellington boots if they had their way.
A few weeks ago, this new Mickey Mouse coalition government was all excited about its brilliant new idea of asking the public which laws it thinks need changing. Anyone with half a brain – and as you will see, this precludes about 90% of the British public – would realise immediately that this is going to lead to some of the most idiotic suggestions imaginable. Not so the LibCons – it is clear that they thought they were going to get some brilliant ideas from it.
As a brief aside, when I was stuck in the rat race – and when Teamworking® was insidiously damaging British industry without anyone having the brains to realise it – the company I was working for had a Suggestion Scheme. As the manager of one of the departments the suggestions came from and related to, I was on the committee which evaluated them.
The company I worked for was in pharmaceuticals, and one of the products it made consisted of small beads of drug substance in hard gelatin capsules. The beads were made separately, and were notorious for becoming statically charged once dry. The charge was so severe that you could easily get 50-100kg of the things stuck in a hopper and refusing to fall vertically downwards under the force of gravity (as a further aside, it had to be one of the most idiotic formulations ever devised. But that’s another story).
Anyway, back to the static charging. Some clown suggested that we should put a sheet of Bounce in with the beads to reduce the charge! The fact that this adds ingredients – which in the pharmaceutical industry is a definite non-starter – was something he was genuinely incapable of understanding.
And so it is with The Law. According to the Mail, the suggestions people have come up with include:
Make prostitution and drugs legal
End the ban on marrying a horse
Repeal Murder and its Related Laws
Repeal ‘extreme pornography’ law
Reduce child benefits for the third and subsequent children
Abolish the law which enables you to shoot and kill a Welshman within the city walls of Chester
Abolish the Dangerous Cartoons Act
Repeal the Smoking Ban
Bring back the death penalty
Repeal all immigration laws
Decriminalise magic mushrooms
Scrap the Human Rights Act
Castrate paedophiles
Bring back hanging [there’s a surprise]
Repeal the Official Secrets Act
Removal all speed limits on motorways
Repeal the 20 per cent VAT rate
Remove IVF from the NHS
Remove religion as a criterion for selection to state schools
Repeal the Hunting Ban [Tory voters, eh?]
Democratically elect a head of state
Stop Road Tax
Loosen regulations on hand baggage at UK Airports
Abolish the House of Lords
Scrap motorcycle helmet law
And you can bet your life that these are the more sensible ones.
There was even a call for murder to be allowed with the justification that there were ‘only’ 500 homicides a year and the cash savings on crime fighting could be used to keep jobs in the public sector…
See what I mean? Mind you, Minnie Mouse (aka Nick Clegg) is still upbeat:
The ‘best suggestions’ will form part of the Freedom Bill to be published in the autumn.
Inviting people to nominate laws they wanted repealed, Mr Clegg said: ‘What I find especially exciting about this project is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of government’s control.
Real democracy is unspun – it is the raucous, unscripted debates that always throw up the best ideas.
‘So be demanding about your liberty, be insistent about your rights. This is about your freedom and this is your chance to have your say.’
The man is on a different planet. Here we have a society where dumbing down has become one of the biggest obstacles to future development and growth, and he tries to turn Government and Law into a primary school competition for “the best suggestion”.
I haven’t said anything about England in the World Cup for the simple reason that I was certain they wouldn’t get anywhere. To be honest, I’m surprised they even got through the qualifying stages after the showing in their first two matches.
You have to face facts: if you play like England did in the first two – and very important – matches, then add a marginally better third, you have effectively demonstrated your ability in toto. But now the recriminations have started.
England was let down by the players, and only the players. Not the manager, who is one of the best in the world. We have a dilemma, though.
The press has decided that Fabio is to blame (largely because he is a foreigner – they disliked him from the start for that reason, made worse by the fact that he couldn’t speak English). This means that the public will, on the whole, agree (the public is too stupid to have a mind of its own, and has to have one implanted by the media). So on that count, Fabio Capello is history.
Fabio is a hardliner. He stopped the orange hags – sorry, WAGs – going out to steal the limelight. Originally seen as a good decision, it is being questioned now as a bad one (after the Algeria match, pundits on BBC radio were arguing that the WAGs would have taken the focus – and pressure – off the players).
Fabio still cannot speak English fluently, and still has an interpreter handy. The press has repeatedly picked up on that – mainly because they can’t speak English fluently either – for entirelydifferent reasons, though – and so find it hard to understand what he is saying. This was especially evident in the post match interview yesterday, where they were asking him if he would resign.
Britain is inherently racist in spite of being multicultural. The media pundits have been demanding a Harry Redknapp or other good ol’ Brit to take the helm. The press and media forced Sven out – and he was easily the best England manager of all time. Now they’re trying it with Fabio.
If Fabio resigns, he will be getting himself out of a sorry non-football mess that he will probably never be able to resolve, and which will give him ulcers! But in all honesty, the England football team needs him. He is the best – the players just aren’t.
I must admit, I wondered what the bloody noise was when I watched the first World Cup match on TV last week.
Vuvuzela – With Moron Attached
Over the years, I’ve gotten used to silly noises at International football matches on TV. It used to be an artefact of the satellite technology, or the way the microphones were placed when a match was to be broadcast via satellite. Annoying buzzing, humming, or constant whining.
Then, of course, you have to allow for the apparently normal behaviour of people from different cultures. It might seem strange to us, but in other countries it is perfectly acceptable to attend a football match and spend the full 90 minutes banging a drum or blowing a trumpet. Over here, we just ban anything that might get thrown on the pitch or be used to stab someone by some Neanderthal, but in countries like Brazil taking enough equipment to furnish the brass and percussion sections of an orchestra is almost compulsory; and let’s not forget Spain and Italy (well, most of Europe, actually), where you are allowed to take high explosives into the ground and throw them at the players or use them to set fire to the stands.
And so it seems that in South Africa people are born with vuvuzelas for brains.
The BBC spent most of last week egging the locals on to blow the damned things (and do tribal dances, of course) for its kitsch breakfast bulletins. I guess it was cute and very ethnic. But some things can get very old very quickly indeed.
The vuvuzela is one of them.
The noise is completely ruining TV coverage, and it has to rate as one of the most annoying types of noise, because it is constant. It became annoying after about 2 minutes of the opening match, and it has got worse ever since. And it seems that – according to Sky, and other sources – they are looking for ways to cut out the noise of the things. The organisers have refused to ban them in situ according to the arch-instigators at the BBC.
It’s hard to imagine the kind of impaired mentality required to stand there for the whole match blowing the damned things (‘juvenile’ springs to mind). I’m not sure how they work – I’ll be generous and assume that there is a reed or something that generates the sound, but if it turned out that you blow them like trumpets (which requires ten times the effort) then the situation is much worse.
But I mentioned the BBC and its childish efforts to get the South African locals to behave in stereotypical ways before the first match, last week. The organisers are also surely at fault for coming up with a stereotypical, and highly annoying, gimmick to show up their country.
EDIT 16/06/2010: A reader has contacted me with this advice – it seems the noise of those damned horns is driving everyone mad. He suggests a way of reducing the effect:
Essentially, the idea is to use the equaliser on your audio out device (TV/Amp/PC etc) to cut/reduce the 300hz range.
He also provides a link to a site which discusses the problem (on Samsung TVs) and one to a YouTube video which goes into some technical detail.
I have an LG, and unfortunately it doesn’t have an equaliser as such, but you can mess with the bass and treble to create different profiles, and there are various pre-defined profiles. Based on the reader’s suggestion I have tried it and it does work – it certainly makes the noise less intrusive. The Music profile works best on my LG. If you don’t have equalisation settings, try dropping the bass level right down and bringing the treble up.
While I was on the Mars Rover/NASA/JPL site looking at those dust devil clips, I noticed a Google Ad. It linked to this site (it’s now dead).
For anyone who doesn’t know, 2012 was a film released last year – IMDb summarises the plot as follows:
Dr. Adrian Helmsley, part of a worldwide geophysical team investigating the effect on the earth of radiation from unprecedented solar storms, learns that the earth’s core is heating up. He warns U.S. President Thomas Wilson that the crust of the earth is becoming unstable and that without proper preparations for saving a fraction of the world’s population, the entire race is doomed. Meanwhile, writer Jackson Curtis stumbles on the same information. While the world’s leaders race to build “arks” to escape the impending cataclysm, Curtis struggles to find a way to save his family. Meanwhile, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes of unprecedented strength wreak havoc around the world. Written by Jim Beaver
When the geologist Dr. Adrian Helmsley and his team discover that the core of Earth is heating due to solar radiation, he advises the North American President about his findings. The American Govern collects money from the worldwide leaders to build arks to save them with necessary people to rebuild civilization. Meanwhile, the unsuccessful writer Jackson Curtis discloses that the world is near to end and tries to save his son and his daughter from the tragic end. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Geophysicist Adrian Helmsley officially visits India’s Dr. Satnam Tsurutani, his pretty wife, Aparna, and their son. From thence, he is led to the world’s deepest copper mine, where he finds evidence that the Earth’s crust is heating up faster than expected. He quickly collects evidence, and presents it before the President of the United States. Expecting the news to hit leading media, he is instead stunned when he learns that the powers-that-be have no intention of publicizing this catastrophe, and are intent on saving wealthy families that can shell out a billion Euros per family on four mammoth arks – without realizing that if the Earth is indeed headed for the prophetic self-destruction on 21 December 2012 – how can arks and it’s wealthy inhabitants survive?
As an aside, there are definite similarities to Ben Elton’s storyline in “Stark”. But 2012 also makes reference to the Mayan calendar (which predicts the end of the world on 21 December 2012) and other related stuff. Basically, the film is another Dan Brown/Da Vinci Code type of affair. Pure fiction, but dragging in fact and pseudo-fact.
Back to this link (it’s now dead), though. On its homepage, it says:
For Immediate Release: This is not another “sky is falling” warning like y2k… It’s not some made up event by conspiracy theorist (sic). And it’s certainly not something dreamt up for a Hollywood movie…
“2012 Is Real”
And Mainstream Media Does Not Want You To Know About It…
Why all the capitals, colours, and superfluous punctuation? Well, I guess the type of person most likely to be attracted to this sort of thing understands things better if it looks like it is made out of glitter and raffia glued to big pieces of cardboard. And, incidentally, the Y2K thing never happened because a lot of people worked to make sure it didn’t – if they hadn’t, there would have been problems.
I like the testimonial on the homepage:
“This information is beyond incredible! I was worried that I was going to get another book about 2012 that was hard to understand with the lack of evidence. Instead I received a package that blew my mind away with highly researched material that simply hasn’t been discussed before. James Sayer is the one guy who knows his stuff about the coming events in 2012. Even if you don’t believe in 2012 I still recommend everyone read this…
John Dale
Wiltshire, UK
I hope that’s not his real name. No one could be that stupid, could they? But if his ringing endorsement makes you think there might be something to all of this, the bottom of the homepage says:
You’re just moments from…
The real truth about Goverment Coverups, Swine Flu Pandemics and known natural disasters that are headed our way…and how people with power are not telling you everything they know…
Learning how you can help turn what many believe to be the darkest period in history into the most enlightened. Could universal racial harmony really be achievable?
The truth about the Sibylline Books and the end of the world. And how so much faith has been put in texts that turn out to be a fraud…
Discovering the massive “phantom” that’s hiding right behind the sun. Is it Niburu? Planet X? Something else entirely? And how will this change your survival plan?
An multi-pronged survival plan. Will it be Adam and Eve all over again? If so… do you have what it takes to start over for humanity?
The I-Ching Prophecies… Mayan calendars… Hopi Indians teachings… Aztec calendars… On what subjects are they in sync? This might blow your mind!
Unearthing the truth about “The Fifth Age Of Man” and whether 2012 is an ending… or a much needed new beginning for us all.
Realizing “The Age Of Aquarius” isn’t merely a Hippie anthem, but a time in history we’re already in. And how does this coincide with “The Age Of Completion”?
Discovering how you’ll deal with simple things like drinkable water… breathable air… even going to the bathroom in 2012. It may not be pretty… but you’ll have to know this stuff!
If there was an award for how many different – and completely separate – themes you could mix together at once, this guy would win hands down. But it gets better.
2012 Countdown Logo
If you head on past the first page, even more crackpot claims are made – and you find that Christianity is involved in this, too. The author seems to believe every single story he’s ever heard, and has woven them into this unifying theory of his. It becomes clear that he has a series of books and CDs/DVDs – these are apparently worth $259.80.
Go to the third page to sign up, and you discover you are getting a real bargain: only $49.95 – a saving of $20.03 on the normal price of $69.99! Oh yes – this is for instant and unlimited download access to the entire package (you aren’t actually getting the books or CDs/DVDs).
The one thing burning in my mind is this: if 22 December 2012 is going to be the shittiest day on record, and if this guy is expecting to get the keys to the executive washroom in heaven, valhalla, or whatever paradise he thinks is out there, why doesn’t he give this stuff away instead of selling it? I mean, what will be the point of money if we all end up back in the Stone Age?
Well, our new Mickey Mouse “government” has got a few people worried with its proposed plans to cut the deficit.
When you hear “your lives will never be the same again” and “these cuts will hit everyone”, you don’t automatically assume you are listening to an election manifesto, do you? That’s because you aren’t – and you weren’t told any of this before you wasted your vote on getting a joke-government into power.
But the best one has to be what I just heard on a BBC News bulletin. You can read more here – Public To Have A Say On Cuts.
The Treasury is to ask for the public’s views on which functions the government should perform and which could be done by other bodies to save money…
David Cameron said on Monday the country must prepare itself for painful and unavoidable cuts which will affect “our whole way of life”.
The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government has already outlined plans for £6.2bn of cuts this financial year and is preparing for the Budget on 22 June and a departmental spending review in the autumn.
This gives me flashbacks to “brainstorming sessions” and flipcharts when I was in the rat race. Where if you had 100 people, you were assured of having 150 different ideas on a subject (140+ of which were totally ridiculous), and you’d come up with a diluted single idea that you had to pretend everyone agreed with, but they didn’t really.
Labour’s response to this was:
Labour says the government is wrong to focus on cuts not growth.
And this is exactly what I said in an earlier post. Labour is absolutely right – the growth in deficit is an automatic result of going into recession, and the reduction is an automatic result of moving out of recession. So you focus on moving out of it.
Rest assured that in spite of the wording of ministerial rhetoric, you don’t make £6.2bn savings by stopping a handful of ministers having long lunches. You tend to have to get some of the 55 million inhabitants of this country to chip in a few pennies, too.
I find it hilarious that David Cameron should say this – of an MP in a different party to his own (Laws is LibDem):
“The last 24 hours must have been extraordinarily difficult and painful for you.
“You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that, throughout, you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else.
“In your short time at the Treasury, you have made a real difference, setting the government on the right path to tackle the deficit which poses such a risk to our economy.”
This is nonsense. He wasn’t as understanding during the previous expenses row and his contradictory attitude was one of his election manifesto items – the self-styled sheriff was going to clean up this dirty town!
Cameron would not have had this attitude if the Tories weren’t in coalition with the LibDems.
The ridiculous planned cuts to “reduce the deficit” have already got a lot of people up in arms. It has to be one of the worst starts to a new government ever.
Please Note: This applies to the pre-2012/13 Focus model. The latest one doesn’t have the problem based on my own experience.
Request: If anyone actually benefits from this advice, please let me know so I can update the article. I’d like to identify if the problems I had were the same as those being experienced by others.
My last two instructor cars have been Ford Focuses (pre-2012 models), and both have had the same fault:
when idling, car sounds like it is gasping for air
sometimes makes whistling noises when idling (like a fan going fast)
sometimes makes clicking sounds when idling (like a switch operating repeatedly)
revs falling on idle, lights dimming when it happens
sometimes spontaneously stalling if rev count falls too much
with learners, can stall on a bend if they coast – and the power steering stops working (very dangerous)
with me, can stall when braking to a stop at junctions and lights (annoying)
starts up again easily
it might be playing up badly, it’ll stall, but after you restart it it will behave (more or less) until the problem gets bad again
tends to do it most when warmed up – but not always
occasionally, when decelerating, you can feel the loss of power in the background
sometimes when moving off, shudders as if not enough gas is applied
The dealer couldn’t find a fault with the last one (they just plug a laptop into it and if no fault is shown, as far as they’re concerned there isn’t one).
They told me last time that there was definitely no fault, and that learner cars aren’t driven very hard so they clog up and it is necessary to run them at high revs for about 10 seconds (when coming off a motorway, slip it into 2nd, for example) to “blow it out”. They told me there wasn’t a known issue, and they even said that it is normal for cars to fluctuate a little.
Frankly, all of this was utter bollocks. But when my new one started playing up after I’d traded the old one in before the warranty ran out, I tried what they had suggested about “blowing it out” – if anything, it made it worse.
This time, they tried to suggest it was my foot mats under the pedals. They also told me I needed to put high-grade fuel in it! Yeah, I’m definitely going to pay 10p a litre more for 97 RON, when 95 RON is what the car is supposed to run on as a minimum – especially when I am filling up every other day sometimes.
But I looked into it this time. It turns out that there is a huge number of people who have this exact problem with their Focuses. All kinds of suggestions are offered, but it is common that the service centres cannot find anything wrong, when there clearly IS something wrong.
Now, I knew this new car would develop the same fault as the last one from the moment I took delivery. It was gasping and clicking even with just delivery mileage on the clock. And true to form, after about 8k it started to fluctuate noticeably, and by 12k it was stalling sporadically. A couple of weeks ago a pupil who has a habit of coasting (many years driving experience overseas) put the clutch down going round a tight corner and we nearly ended up in railings as the power steering cut out!
Armed with what I’d found, I confronted the local Ford dealer.
To cut a long story short, they replaced the “throttle case” (don’t blame me – I’m not a mechanic, but that’s what the dealer told me) and it has fixed the problem completely. The car now idles constantly.
Don’t be fobbed off. Make a nuisance of yourself if your Focus is playing up.
What is the normal idle speed of a Ford Focus?
Someone found the blog on that term (for a 2010 model). The normal idle is about 750rpm going by the rev counter. I’m sure it has a much more technical and detailed value, but it should be a steady 750 on the internal rev counter based on my own experiences with several Focuses.
If it moves around visibly (or audibly) without touching anything then you have a problem.
Note that certainly on older models, moving the steering wheel, braking, or doing anything which puts an increased load on the engine triggered the engine management system to attempt to compensate and you’d get a small rev counter movement.
My Focus ran out of diesel. Can that cause a problem?
I’ve added this one as of February 2016, after someone found the blog with that question.
Late last year I noticed that my Focus (which is now a diesel) was pulling back when I accelerated (over 40,000 miles on the clock). There were no idling problems like those mentioned above, but I took it to the garage and they replaced the fuel filter. That sorted it out completely.
I know that it isn’t recommended by some garages that you run your tank too low, as deposits which fall the bottom can get into the fuel system. I guess that’s why there is a fuel filter in the first place. So running out of fuel is the best way of sucking all that rubbish into the system (or on to the fuel filter).
I am not a mechanic, and I’m only surmising based on my fuel filter obviously being gunged up, but if you ran out of fuel and are now experiencing problems with idling or acceleration, maybe you should have your fuel filter checked.
Someone should do a proper scientific study, but there seems to be a correlation between hot summer weather and the incidence of “food poisoning”. Because you can be bloody sure that as soon as it gets hot, people start looking for reasons not to have the lesson they booked as recently as last week.
I don’t mind too much, because it’s only a handful, and the last month or so I’ve not had a moment free or slots to spare for anyone wanting a lesson.
So, having acquired a free afternoon and evening, I came home and turned on the TV. Now, even with several hundred channels through the Sky dish, it is impressive that there can be almost nothing of interest shown on any of them for such long periods of time. And this afternoon is no exception.
After much channel-hopping, I caught the end of “Adolf Hitler – My Part In His Downfall” (one of Spike Milligan’s autobiography books, turned into a film). It occurred to me after only a couple of minutes how badly I would have coped with the Second World War or anything to do with the British Army anytime before the 60s. It reminded me of another war film that drove me nuts - “The Password Is Courage”; oh yes, and “The Great Escape”. And “Bridge On The River Kwai”. Come to think of it, all British war films (or films about the British during the war).
All the British ever seemed to do was sing bloody 30s and 40s songs and whistle idiotic tunes, and behave in obscenely stereoptypical ways straight out of Enid Blyton books. It would have driven me insane (assuming the reality was even close to the way the films portray it).
Just caught the end of BBC Breakfast News this morning, and they hadJeffrey Archer on. It’s very funny how previous political losers – like Archer, William Hague, and so on – have miraculously been given a voice. It’s just a shame that they don’t have the skill to use it – although the idiots who gave them the opportunity in the first place (the electorate) are probably too stupid to pick up on what crap they are being fed.
Over the last few days, these has-beens have repeatedly been chirruping “we must do something about the deficit, we must do something about the deficit” . They then talk about how many billions of £s the deficit is (£160 billion for 2009). This is carefully worded to suggest that under a Tory government it was zero.
Firstly, the deficit has increased due to the recession . In 2006 and 2007 it was around £30 billion. In 2008 it jumped to £7 billion (and that was the year that I noticed the recesion affecting me). In 2009 it hit £160 billion.
Secondly, the national debt (as a percentage of GDP) was at around 45% when Labour came into power. Over the next 5 years it fell to its lowest of around 30% in 2002, and then it was annually 30% (2003), 33% (2004), 35% (2005), 35% (2006), 36% (2007) – but it next jumped to 45% in 2008 and then to 60% in 2009… in the recession .
So basically, the Labour government controlled the debt extremely well until the recession hit. The idiots who voted didn’t take this into account (probably because they didn’t know or understand).
Thirdly, Germany’s national debt is running at 60% of GDP. The USA’s national debt has been running at 60% since 1988! The Japanese national debt has been around 60% since 1980, and since 1990 it has rocketed up to 180%.
So here we can see that the likes of Jeffrey Archer and William Hague – who think thay can talk the talk, but who can’t walk the walk – have ample headroom to mislead the public. The only problem is that the public can’t think the think, and are taken in. But then, these were the idiots who voted for this new government.
The market economy depends on there being a debt. In fact, after a recession an increased debt is likely to fuel recovery. And during a recession, an increasing debt is unavoidable… if things are being managed properly.
With this new coalition, we have a mish-mash government with mish-mashed policies which NONE of the people who voted for Tory or LibDem actually wanted. If the LibDem voters wanted the Tories in, they would have voted Tory! The only reason they have all voted in hindsight that they approve of the deal is that it is the only chance in hell they have of getting anywhere near government.
So after all the bluster about non-elected Prime Ministers, we have what is effectively a non-elected government. This isn’t what people voted for.
Someone should do a proper scientific study, but there seems to be a correlation between hot summer weather and the incidence of “food poisoning”. Because you can be bloody sure that as soon as it gets hot, people start looking for reasons not to have the lesson they booked as recently as last week.