Show some respect

It’s coming up to Christmas, a time of year that always gets me thinking and puzzling about superstition. We are often told it is right to respect other’s beliefs but this is a position that baffles me, even frightens me.

I never know how to tell which beliefs are supposed to be respected and which scorned. I have a hint that it’s to do with how deeply held the belief is. For example you’re not supposed to disabuse children of their belief in Santa Clause until they’re old enough to realise they’ve been lied to and can happily replace Santa with the Tooth Fairy, all the while being indoctrinated with Jesus, or whichever mythical being is the flavour of their culture.

My working definition of “belief” is the acceptance of the truth of a proposition in the absence of supporting evidence. I think the superstitious, the religious, atheists and scientists alike can recognise this definition although it will evoke different emotional responses.

To me, “believing” something is merely dignifying ignorance. To spread belief is to spread ignorance. Spreading ignorance is an evil and corrupting thing to do.

There has been so much fuss about Catholic priests sexually abusing children. Why does the world stay silent on the insidious child abuse they commit every day – attempting to deprive children of their reasoning power and win their commitment to superstition?

Why are we supposed to respect this evil? The doctrine of respects is just another tool put in place by the custodians of superstition, whose power would be eroded if only people would ask a few simple questions. Like “why?”

23 Scrabble Tips

I’ve been playing Scrabble a lot on Facebook and I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learnt in the hope of getting some better games!

1. Don’t play a short word if you can play a long word for a similar score. The more letters you play, the more chance of getting some good ones. And the more open the board, the better for both of you. Defensive play closes it up for both players. (Thanks to Chris Wilding for this tip. It’s improved my game no end.)
2. Don’t play the first word you see. There is always a better choice.
3. You get roughly 12 to 14 turns in a game. Good players score upwards of 450 in  a game. You need to score an average of 34 per turn to do that. Bear that in mind when deciding if the word you’ve found is good enough.
4. Look for the high scoring squares and the high scoring letters and try to play the latter on the former.
5. Look out for opportunities to play on two double word scores at once so you multiply the score by 4. The chances are few but the best chance is usually on the second player’s first turn. (Getting two triple word scores at once is the Scrabble player’s holy grail. I have done it four times and it’s made my day every time! It’s the only way you can hope to score over 200 on a single play.)
6. Practice on “correspondence” games. Facebook Scrabble allows you to play games with a week between moves. You can have as much thinking time as you like without feeling pressured to make your move.
7. If you’re playing a quick game (Facebook Scrabble has an option for a maximum of 2 mins between turns), you can pile the pressure on your opponent by playing rapidly. If you know the word you’re going to play and play it immediately it’s your turn, you get the advantage of thinking during your opponent’s time and denying him the chance to do the same. Facebook Scrabble allows you to have the letters pre-placed on the board so all you have to do is click “play”. Looking at this another way, if you think during your opponent’s time and he doesn’t bother, you get twice as much time as he does – and that’s a pretty good advantage.
8. Now you’re thinking during the other guy’s time, try to have two good words lined up in different parts of the board so your opponent’s play won’t spoil your plan.
9. Don’t be scared of (or annoyed by) opponents using anagram generators. Bring ’em on! Anagrams alone do not make a Scrabble player.
10. When someone plays a useful word against you, make a note and remember to use it yourself. One of my favourites in SOUARIS. I have played that three times since I discovered it.
11. Learn the two-letter words. Facebook Scrabble helpfully lists them.
12. Don’t just learn them as a list. Get to know their component letters. It saves a lot of wasted effort when, for example, you know there is no two-letter word with a V in it and there is only one with a C. As important as knowing what exists, is knowing what doesn’t exist; e.g. you can play WO or WE but not WA, WI, WU or WY. I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to play WA only to realise I’ve wasted a whole lot of thinking time.
13. Learn which two-letter words extend to three letters and how. E.g. ZO extends to AZO, DZO, ZOA, ZOO and ZOS. This is helpful in building your own words and in knowing when you’ve made an opening for your opponent.
14. Don’t be shy! Some very rude words are also very useful. Scrabble players don’t care and won’t be insulted. In fact, they tend not to even see the words as such, just the letters that make them up. I am certainly not alone in having a large “Scrabble vocabulary” of words I know exist in the official Scrabble dictionary but whose meaning I neither know nor care. And yes, I don’t like that when I think about it… so I try not to think about it.
15. Try to balance the vowels and consonants remaining in your rack. Often easier said than done but worth thinking about when you have a choice of words to play.
16. Keep an eye on which letters remain in the bag. Facebook Scrabble has a tab that does this for you.
17. Never bother with trying to swap a couple of letters to get the one you want. The odds are invariably against you – and will the lost turn be made up for by scoring double next time?
18. On the other hand, if you have a rack full of difficult letters, cut your losses early and swap the lot (having checked what’s still in the bag). The longer you hold on and hope, the worse your overall score will suffer.
19. Got a seven letter word and nowhere to put it? Never mind. The better you get at spotting seven letter words, the more this happens. If you let it distract you, you’ll mess up the next moves.
20. If you have a J, K, Q, X or Z near the end of the game, the rule about trying to place them on good squares goes out of the window. Just get rid of them as soon as you can, even at the price of better scores. A Q in your hand at the end costs you 30. 10 for the points you failed to score with it, 10 deducted from your score and 10 to the other guy.
21. At the end of the game, if you have a handful of letters, it is often better to use them all even for a poor score. When working it out, remember that whoever is left with letters will be penalised double their value. Look at your opponent’s tiles and work out what he is likely to do and who will be left with what. (Once there are no tiles left in the bag, the Tiles tab shows you exactly what’s in your opponent’s rack.)
22. Getting thrashed? Don’t resign. Keep playing and learn from what the better player does. (OK, maybe luckier player – but let’s assume better for the sake of this tip.)
23. Don’t waste blanks or Ss on a paltry few extra points. They can get you out of a scrape and blanks in particular are your best chance of getting a seven letter word. Hang on to them until you can really make them count.

In summary, it’s the letters that score, not the words. Get the right letters in the right places and your score will improve. Hang on for appealing or clever words and your less clever opponent will walk all over you.

Looking forward to meeting some of you over a hot virtual board.

Meanwhile, Waitrose makes a slightly misguided stand

Bless them , Waitrose are trying hard to defend our language. A few months back they changed the signs on their basket-only checkouts to read “Ten items or fewer”. I made the mistake of congratulating the cashier of their usage and she apologised. “I know, I know, people keep telling me, it should be ‘ten items or less’.” Nooo… I didn’t know where to start sorting that out, I tried but she just looked confused,

England’s smoking ban has had me in a consistent state of annoyance for the last 18 months. Not for the ban itself – it’s lovely to be able to go to a pub or restaurant and come away not stinking – but for the signs that have appeared in every shop window: “It is against the law to smoke in these premises”.

This evening I noticed that Waitrose has tried to correct this with “It is against the law to smoke on these premises”. They clearly understand that a “premise” is a piece of land and it is impossible to smoke in a premise unless you dig a hole. So well done Waitrose. Sort of. Still not right, because the law bans smoking in public buildings, not on land in general. I am sure Waitrose’s premises extend beyond their building. They should say what they mean: “It is against the law to smoke in this building”.

Sainsbury’s Celebrates Mediocrity

I want to know how it’s possible that the Sainsbury’s poster

Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference: The Best in Everyday Foods

got through what I imagine is a lengthy approval process, from designer through copywriter, agency execs, and typesetter to ad buyers and marketing execs and finally to the repro team and printers without ever passing through a single person who knows what “everyday” means.

Just in case you are a marketing executive, let me advise.”Everyday” means “mediocre, average, mundane, boring, a bit pants”.

“Every day” (with a space) means “daily” but still would not make sense in the context above. “The Best in Food for Every Day” is the closest I can get to the presumed intent of the advertisers.

The only meaning I can ascribe to the advert as it appears on giant posters is “Come to Sainsbury’s for the least worst food”. It would be hilarious were it not so sad.

Cautionary Tale

Having a blog is a useful thing sometimes. I just heard from my daughter’s good friend and Proper Big Banch, Sarah, who had been reading my blog and reminded me to cancel my direct debit for that missing mobile phone (blog passim). Thanks Sarah. Just for you, here’s a poem.

The Cautionary Tale of Cedric Mouse and Simon Louse

I sliced and diced and added spice
And in a trice, I’d served with rice,
A dish with which I could entice
My sweet shy Cedric into vice.
That shyster ate it, called it “nice”,
Not once or twice, he said it thrice.
In my mind’s eye I saw us spliced
And then he left, as cool as ice.

I thought tonight would end with kisses
But al I’ve got is dirty dishes.

Our lives are cursed by fly-by-nights
Who view us girls as their birthrights,
But quite my worst was Simon Price
Whose Merc turned out to be his wife’s.
Some men are mice, some men are lice,
So girls, I urge, take my advice
(I’ll try to make my words concise),
Steer clear of men, they’re just not nice.

Electoral Diversion

Last week was so full of dancing I had little time to write. In fact, adding up on my fingers, I find I have danced a total of 16 hours since Tuesday. Time for something different and to give my aching muscles a rest so tonight I went to the Hog’s Back Writers workshop on plotting. We did a mad but fun exercise where we all wrote words, mixed them up in a hat, pulled them out and knitted them into a story. The words were a mixture of incidents, names, abstract nouns, locations, professions and household objects. Mine were

An important election – wristwatch – The Colosseum in Rome – a kennel – hairbrush – Julia – Nigel – milkman – insurance claims assessor – relief – sugar bowl – tranquillity – goodwill – rotary washing line.

Here’s what I made of it….

The returning officer looked at his wristwatch and gulped. He would soon have to announce the results and he knew the whole Colosseum, nay, the whole of Rome would rise in revolt.

He feared the dogs would be loosed from the kennels. He felt about his person for some weapon to defend himself but found only a hairbrush.

He saw the Lady Julia approaching, a look of anger and impatience on her face.

“Do get on with it” she shouted. “The people are waiting. You really are milking it. No wonder they call you The Milkman.”

It was then that he remembered Emperor Nigel’s dirty little secret. That knowledge was his insurance in case they tried to pin the obviously fixed result on him. Any such claim would be assessed but he knew his insurance would keep him safe. At this realisation the relief washed over him. He took another sugar from the bowl and stirred it into his tea, leaned back and sipped it slowly; his mood now one of tranquillity. Make the bastards wait. He owed them no goodwill and if they tried to hang their dirty washing on him, he had a rotary washing line.

Vista Updates Redux

Last week I blogged that since Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft has been sending updates almost every day. It continues almost unabated. I think there have been only two or three nights in the last 17 days when there has been no patch to apply.

This morning I had a look at the log. Since 15th August (well before SP1) there have been 58 separate attempts to apply the same security patch to PowerPoint 2007, It must be a very important security parch for them to try so hard. Especially as I do not own a copy of PP 2007.

The machine came with demo versions of Office 2007 pre-installed. These demos do their best to strong-arm you into buying the package. They are then very difficult to uninstall. I still have the problem that opening a Word 2003 document tells me it is in the wrong version. If I ignore the message and press on, it will eventually agree to open it in Word 2003. No doubt these repeated attempts at security patches are part of the same residual effect.

If products this invasive and disruptive came from any source other the Microsoft, MS would create security patches to defeat them.

What’s all this then? —>

The things down the side of my blog I added to make it pretty are two Wordles and a slug of Japanese.

Wordles are word clouds automatically generated from the text of this blog. One of them from the first page and one from the second. Click on them to go to the site. There are all sorts of options you can choose to make an artistic impression of your words, or someone else’s. You can simply type or paste text into an input form if you don’t want to use a feed.

The kanji are the Japanese words “foolish” and “love”. Whether simply putting them together like that makes “foolish love” I don’t know. But would love to hear from someone who can tell me.

Much better a little ignorance temporarily displayed beside a blog than a lot of ignorance permanently tattooed. I have been reading a Japanese site (in English) about the recent trend for Japanese/Chinese tattoos. No surprise really to find out that more often than not they are hilariously wrong. Apparently there is a Japanese “alphabet” that is widely used, and maybe even believed, by tattooists. It consists of 26 kanji, some of them badly drawn and mostly representing words to do with martial arts. Some idiot (or joker) has decided that these 26 characters equate to English letters. So there are people out there with five kanji down their arms which they believe spell TRACY and which actually says “drop-kick, kung-fu, dojo, deep bow, plank”.

The All-Purpose Excuse

So on Friday night I get a cold call from India. A Three salesperson offers me a mobile contract for £13.50/month for 500 minutes. Sounded good and I agreed. This is the first time in my life I’ve bought from a cold call.

The buying process was painful. Not only did I have to give all the details to the salesperson, I was then transferred to her boss who went through it all again. Then the perennial problem arose of where they should deliver the phone. I wanted it delivered to my office as there is never anyone at home to take delivery. As a security measure (understandable – it’s what we tell our clients to do) they would only deliver to the registered address of my card. They told me not to worry. The courier would put a card through my door and I would be able to arrange different delivery with them.

Monday, the card arrives, as promised.

Tuesday I logged on to the courier’s website, entered my details, located my order, selected the redelivery option… to be told “We cannot deliver to another address. Please contact the sender”.

But it was a cold call. How do I know how to contact them?

So I phoned the courier and was answered by a machine that guided me through the same menu, told me to contact the sender and hung up on me.

Back to the website to find an email address and write to them requesting Three’s contact details.

A hour or so later I get an emailed reply. “We are sorry we cannot deliver to a different address. Please contact the sender”. Grrr. Starting to get annoyed now.

I reply. “I will if you tell me how”.

The answer comes back “The sender was Three”.

My reply this time may have just a hint of sarcasm.

Another email arrives apologising that they cannot divulge Three’s contact details as this would contravene the Data Protection Act. OMG! The modern all-purpose excuse. And utter drivel. The DPA protects data on individuals; it does not cover company information and if it did, it would still be ridiculous to apply it in this case.

I reply yet again to point out the error of their ways. This time their reply uses the phrase “respectfully suggest”. LOL. Nothing respectful in that. At least their explanation this time has a ring of truth;they do not deal with Three directly and do not have the contact details. They respectfully suggest I contact the person who sold me the phone.

Yes, well, I would, I calmly explain, if I could. I am just asking them for the contact details for entertainment. I have nothing better to do. I told them to return the phone as undeliverable.

I wonder if this will be the end of it or if I will have to struggle to stop the direct debit. We will see.

Update 1: Went to the bank to see if Three had taken any money. They hadn’t. The bank clerk advised me to cancel the direct debit. “Easier to do it now than claim the money back” she advised me. I should have listened. Next day Three took the first charge. Still no sign of the phone, of course. I cancelled the direct debit immediately. A day too late. Can I be bothered to do anything about the £13.50?

Update 2: Next bill arrives from Three. No acknowledgement of non-receipt of phone. New bill is for £15. Huh? Tied in for 18 months and they’re free to increase the price? I don’t think so. Pretty sure that’s an illegal contract.

Update 3: Letter from Three advising me it in my interest to pay up.

Update 4: Three’s letter almost immediately followed by a letter and phone message from debt collection agency.HAppy Christmas to you too, you bastards.  This is getting laughable. Half a mind to let them take me to court and embarrass themselves.

Which reminds me .I haven’t heard anything from ATOL about compensation for our lost Freedom Flights fares. With 200,000 people to deal with I’m not surprised and I’ve deliberately not been chasing as I expect that will involve hours of listening to hold music, but I think I ought to start chasing sometime soon.

Update 1: Finally heard from ATOL. A phone call just before Christmas at last acknowledging our claim and telling me I needed to send one more document. Whch I did – unacknowledged of course. Unabl to give me any hint of when the money might be sent out.

Went out with the Ladies Who Lunch today. Got lost (again) on the way to the pub. Had overcooked pigeon breast with black pudding and delicious scallops. Sent back a beer for tasting wrong. They denied there was anything wrong with it but took it back anyway. Finished with sticky toffee pudding and clotted cream – which was actually creme fraiche – so I sent that back too. Hmm.. something wrong with every course. Am I just getting old and grumpy that I complain about these things? I actually thoroughly enjoyed myself. The scallops and the company made up for the beer, pigeon and lack of cream. My only regret is that I didn’t eat a bit more of the sticky toffee pudding before I sent it back.

A good thing about the company of old-timers is that they don’t mind if you complain. The Greek and I went with a bunch of young friends for a farewell meal just before she went to Taiwan. The waiter asked in that irrepressibly cheerful way “Is everything OK” and the Greek and I chorused in unison “the fish is overcooked”. The youngsters and the waiter looked mortified with embarrassment and the waiter scuttled off never to be seen again. Apparently “fine, thank you” is the only acceptable answer.

That’s why you should never greet anyone over 45 with “how are you?” because the chances are they will tell you.

Bum Moves

Back to Bordon tonight to dance with my youngest mother. For once the intermediate class wasn’t too hard and we had a lot of fun. The chap who teaches is a rotund fellow with an Eastenders accent who punctuates his sentences with “awright?”. He looks like he’s walked out of a 1940s movie. He’s even in black and white. He wears black and white dance shoes, black trousers and black braces over a white shirt. It does make a change to see a male dance teacher who looks the part instead of jeans and t-shirt. He’s also a lot of fun. He has a talent for taking the mickey out of his students without causing offence. Tonight I was the butt of the jokes – and for good reason. The routine we were learning finished with the man going down on one knee, spinning the girl around and sitting her on the other knee. Well I knelt on the wrong knee and sat my girl on the floor. We laughed so much it was difficult to dance.