Another Ten Things That Are Just Wrong!!!

I warned you earlier in March! More exclamation marks coming!!! More BOLD CAPS and TEN MORE things that are just so wrong!!!!

Oooops!

1) WIND FARMS: On the face of it, wind farms seem so right. Renewable energy that goes on for ever with a small capital outlay at the beginning to build and site the turbines. So much better than fossil fuels and just as eco-friendly as hydro power, surely? Not so, it seems. I'm not so bothered about how they look or, if you're close to them, how they swish or how many birds might get mashed but I know a lot of people get upset by these downsides. What's really worrying is the ongoing funding to site owners in perpetuity, along with the poor records on efficiency of power production against those costs. The arguments against this spiralling (pun intended) industry are as powerful as a wind turbine isn't, on a still day. Like with CAP, landowners are raking it in. Sure, there are lots of jobs in the UK installing and maintaining the farms but have a look at the suppliers. The top six wind turbine manufacturers that supply the UK market are: Vestas (Denmark) with 12%, Sinovel (China) 9%, Goldwind (China) 9%, Ganesa (Spain) 8%, Enercon (Germany) 8% and GE (USA) 8%...get the picture? The backstories make interesting reading, some of which can be found here . If only that nice Professor, Brian Cox, and his mates could get the fission thing worked out we could all be safely nuclear. In the meantime, it's up to a few latter-day Don Quixotes to tilt at the windmills. I used to think that wind power was right but it looks like I was WRONG!

2) BRITISH MEDIA'S IGNORANCE OF WOMEN'S INTERNATIONAL RUGBY: Who won the Grand Slam in the Six Nations this year? Wales? No...they were fourth. England won by scoring over 160 points and slaughtering everyone else. And Scotland now have two wooden spoons with which to serve the salad of misery, if you include their failure in the men's game. Go to the BBC Sport website (recently revamped and annoyingly yellow) and look for a link to Women's Rugby. Find one? No, neither did I. In fact, search for Six Nations Women and you're more likely to get a picture of Gabby-bleeding-Logan than any entry to a site bearing information on this fantastic victory or the previous grand slam or the one before that...year on year. And of course we all watched the Women's RFU Six Nations live on the telly, didn't we? No...because it wasn't there. Sure, the boys did well, for a new(ish) squad, and it was entertaining fare all round (unless you're from Scotland...again). How about celebrating this fantastic achievement by England's Women? Check it out here . Screw the bloody Olympic Games...England's Women's RFU success is superb, and to ignore it is WRONG!

Those were the days...

3) COST OF POSTAGE STAMPS: What! 50p to send a letter! Just an ordinary letter or card, too. 50p! That's up by a third. It's 60p for "First Class" but it makes not an iota of difference between that and its supposed inferior, second class service anyway. What's going on? It's OK, though. I mean, who sends letters these days anyway? And cards? Well everyone can have a bloody Moonpig thing from me from now on because I'm not giving any more money to what remains of the Royal Mail, a once great British institution slaughtered on the altar of privatisation and profiteering (and a little bit of silliness from the communications workers union here and there). WRONG! (But almost inevitable?)

4) VAT: What a completely bollocks, complicated tax that probably costs more to collect and inspect than it adds to the exchequer. Worse still, the rules are almost unfathomable without a masters in applied mathematics. The loonies charged with making up these rules are quite obviously psychopaths whose mission in life is to make every small businessperson insane or broke (or both). The latest confusion is over the temperature of bread. Really, it is! Food becomes the subject of VAT if one or more of the following stupid circumstances apply: 1) It's brought to you on a plate or served over a counter by some poor sap on the minimum wage. 2) It's food for 'fun', rather than to stay alive. 3) It's 'hot'. So bread, baked on the premises by a baker, comes out of the oven hot, and begins to cool down. At some point in the cooling cycle, a customer asks to buy it. Is it 'hot' enough to attract VAT? Possibly. Cue the bananas situation where the customer and the baker have a conversation for as long it takes for the bread to cool sufficiently to cost 20% less. This rule is so thick it was probably invented by a Belgian technocrat. WRONG!

Ugh!

5) DOG SHIT: When I was a kid, there was dog shit everywhere. Well, obviously not really everywhere, but almost on every street. It was not considered bad form to let your dog take a dump on the street or in the park and dog-owners rarely allowed their mutt to crap in their own back yard. I mean, you'd have to clear that up yourself instead of letting it fester in the sun and allow bully-boys to rub your face in it (bad memories, there...). These days, if you take your dog outside for a shit, you have to take a little plastic bag with you too and then wipe the mess up, take it home, or put it in a publicly-funded receptacle designed for the purpose. It's not the dog's fault. Most dog-owners now are very responsible and do what is required. But there remain so many that couldn't give a shit about shit. And they are WRONG!

6) WATER (Lack Of): Do you like potatoes and carrots? Do you want to buy these from supermarkets that have had to source them from overseas? If the answer is no, then why don't you lobby DEFRA to allow UK farmers to take just 5% of the water used by energy companies in Britain and thus double their access to abstraction? Forcing our farmers to reduce their output by restricting abstraction is WRONG! 

7) STREAMING SPORT ON COMMERCIALLY DRIVEN TELEVISION: You want to watch a sport event on ITV...well, you don't want to, but sometimes you don't have a choice. Take this week's  FA Cup sixth round replay tie between Sunderland and Everton. OK, my lot were crap and we probably deserved to lose it but isn't it a bit odd that the streaming link keeps getting cut out and you have to re-load, which means you have to watch more adverts for shite that you have no intention of buying before you can go back to the live action? This is a stream that spookily wasn't interrupted on the other things I was streaming at the time (just because I couldn't bear to watch the ignominious defeat unfurling its psychological destruction on the screen). Are they manipulating me with their dastardly technology? If they are, that's WRONG!

Enough, already....

8) TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS: OK, this is really just a continuation of No.6 above. But that doesn't make it any less WRONG! I've tried (and been largely successful) to watch only BBC television for the whole of 2012 so far. On those odd occasions when I've felt the need to tune to a commercial station (in my defence, that'll only be Film 4 then) the bombardment of adverts is insane. If you watch a Film 4 movie - and there are some good ones shown - the production team seem to think that it's a good idea to place the ad-breaks at about 20-25 minutes in the first half of the film and then reduce that gap to around fifteen minutes in the third quarter and then break for an ad in between every fucking sentence of dialogue in the final sequences. My remote control is overworked: Mute / Un-mute / Mute / Un-mute...ad infinitum. I don't want any of these products and/or services. I don't want to see trailers for shit I'll never watch on C4, More 4, E4 or any other '4'. I know I should just go to the movies instead (or rely on my subs to the really lovely and cheap LoveFilm) but it's still WRONG! (but not as wrong as most of these other wrong things)

9) THE DAILY MAIL: On so may levels....this excuse for journalism is WRONG! That's it...if you've read it, you won't need me to explain...and if you have read it and don't agree with me, then you shouldn't be reading my blog, so piss off.

(Un)fair Trade?

10) COFFEE SHOPS: I rarely go to London. Actually, for "rarely", substitute "never" these days. However, I gather that your average coffee there at StarNeros or wherever costs about £3.50. Why? And why is a small coffee called a 'Grande'? Surely that means 'big'. Is that because people don't want to appear cheap by asking for a large thing when everyone knows that it's really a small thing?  I love coffee. I have a 'Krups' machine. It makes better coffee than I can buy anywhere in coffee shops and it costs about 25p a cup and it comes in anything other than 'styrofoam'. High Street coffee shops are complicit in rabid profiteering that is probably based on nothing short of slave labour to produce the beans in what we still assume to be the 'Third World'. WRONG!

TEN MORE THINGS THAT ARE WRONG NEXT MONTH...