You are allowed to enjoy this…

It seems that a subsidiary role of a shopkeeper is to be ripped off by his staff and/or customers (tick as applicable). Sometimes I feel that they think that we are either too stupid or busy not to realise that they are ripping us off. One does soon realise that this type of crime is more about the power to decieve than to make money, and that the money is a secondary outcome, the con is king. Take for example one Sunday news delivery boy who thought it would be a great wheeze to claim his pay from my wife and then wait until my mother took over the till and then claim his pay AGAIN. Of course, no-one knew this was happening for a while until I sat down and did the accounts and looked at the receipts. Then I noticed there were two lots of payout receipts for the same boy. Did he not realise he was going to get caught? Did he think that we didn’t make records of our payouts? Did he think we were that naive and daft? Obviously so…
So I waited until one Sunday and he duly came in and claimed his pay from my wife. Then I jumped on the till and lo-and-behold he returned again for another payout. I duly pulled him up when I showed him the previous payout receipt and I watched in joy when he ran with speed from the shop. He was so fast I didn’t even have time to fire him.
Anyway, this kid comes back about an hour later and I tell him not to come back into the shop until he’s paid me the money he owes me for the weeks he has claimed two lots of pay. The kid protests: “How can I do that? You’ve fired me! I’ve got no money now.” Great logic, kiddo, you should have thought of that before you decided to steal wholesale from me.
That happened at the beginning of our term at the shop when everyone thought we were too green and believed we could be exploited at every angle. During our first week of trading we had at least four customer claim that they’d “paid with a twenty”. The old routine to claim extra change. Of course, we took their numbers and checked the till at the end of the day and we were never in receipt of their extra change. So fuck off, con man.
Today saw the culmination of a peculiar series of deceptions. One mother of a Sunday deliverer kept claiming that they were missing a particular paper from their round. Of course, you give them the benefit of the doubt the first couple of times and then the routine because that, a routine. So we began double-checking the round in question and today the routine reared its head and my mother said; “No, you can’t have an extra paper because I double-checked the round myself.” So I make up the rounds and my mother and wife have been double-checking. It is a system that works and I have an accuracy rate of 99.9%!
Anyway, this woman takes the round out to their waiting car every week and that’s where the newspaper mysteriously disappears. My mother calls me at home to tell me that this woman is cutting up rough and that she wants to talk to me. Here’s a warning, folks. Never demand to talk to me because I am the line in the sand. Don’t think you can appeal to my better nature because I haven’t got one. This is business and I am a reasonable man, but when I know someone is screwing me for whatever reason my patience becomes wafer thin.
We have a short conversation in which the woman can’t understand why the paper is missing and the inference is that I’ve made a mistake. I point it out that she is inferring that I am lying and I am not pleased. I tell her that the paper was there. Again, she protests her innocence and I really don’t like her brusque, ignorant Norfolk tones. They grate against my sensibilities. The conversation ends thus:
“All I know is that you are losing me money, so I guess we’ll have to call it quits.”
And with that our working relationship is over. I think Donald Trump and Alan Sugar would be proud of me.

Another staple of late 70s/early 80s weekend television has bought the farm. Sadly, Lennie Bennett has gone to the great quiz show in the sky. A part of me would like to think that he’s playing an eternal round of golf with Tarby and Brucie…wait a minute, those guys are still alive!

Jumping the shark, in modern parlance (or in geek circles), relates to an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis and after this event it was deemed that the show went downhill. Every TV series jumps the shark, every exponent of popular culture somehow runs out of creative steam and outlives its welcome in this fashion.
When I was first introduced to the Internet back in 1996, I could instantly see the appeal – though I couldn’t envision the future we have now. Back then, things were slow and it was primarily a service that relied on great wodges of text to read, the very odd picture (though it would take minutes to download thanks to that crappy 33k modem) and very little multimedia.
The thing that instantly struck me was the ability to communicate simply and easily over vast distances. I became addicted to the early chat apps (though this interest soon waned as it grew popular and any attempt to engage with individuals was swamped by saddos cruising for anonymous, no-strings sex) and newsgroups were a great place to discuss music interests and computing problems. It thrilled me that you could self-publish your ideas relatively easily and give yourself a voice – so your hobby and interests could be shared with other like-minded individuals.
That was then. This is now. The Internet has naturally grown in popularity and increased access speeds means that we can access previously impossible multimedia files with ease. The idea of streaming live TV shows or downloading high quality movies in a second was beyond my ken back in 1996. I remember once downloading a three minute music file in WAV format that took something like three hours.
As the popularity has increased, the tools to self-publish on the Internet has increased – for example, this website is created using a content management system called Movable Type. In the old days, I had to code by hand and then it was editing code by FrontPage. So there is no reason why young and old aren’t unleashing their creativity on the World Wide Web. It’s just a matter of finding your niche and investing your time and energy into it. YouTube has been a breeding ground of new talent and you can find all manner of imaginative stuff on there. The same can be said of MySpace and music.
While the likes of Facebook and Bebo has passed me by: it’s hard to have a social network when you aren’t particularly sociable, I understand the appeal to generations young and old and as an effective method of communication. By now, you might have a glimmer as to what I am heading towards with the main thrust of this post.
For a while now, I have silently been observing the Twitter phenomenon and I can now state that: I just don’t get it! To me it seems as if two forms of communication have been spliced together to form a bastard hybrid. Texting and social network: an unholy alliance if they had ever been. No, actually that last bit is wrong because I think I have spotted the flaw in Twitter for me.
You see, Twitter is housed in the wrong delivery system: the world wide web. If Twitter’s home platform was the mobile phone and its currency were the text message, I think I’d understand it more. It would be a quick fire way of building up a network of friends and keeping in touch with all of them: simple. But the Internet version appears to me as a complete waste of time resources and is the web equivalent of standing in Trafalgar Square with a megaphone shouting 10 word statements about your day:
“Had eggs for breakfast!”
“Thinking of having a poo!”
“Don’t you think that twitter is a pile of old ….”
Etc.

An appropriate logo purloined from the Skidnee website.
But then you’d have to also shout out replies that other people have shouted at you in order to validate their comments. So what Twitter does is create this completely one-sided, disjointed dialogue to no-one in particular. I’ve looked at Twitter threads and they work better when it is a monologue: with one person giving a single commentary, but when that person starts replying to other commentators it becomes like an experimental cut-and-paste beat poem syncopated by @ symbols. You cannot follow the narrative thread without jumping back and forth between twitter streams and soon enough you become lost pretty quickly.
Then there’s the whole stalker aspect that is a bit freaky. Gone are the idea of subscribers replaced by followers. Look so-and-so has so many people “following” him. I don’t know, it seems silly but that just doesn’t sit well with me. Does anyone really want to be followed, virtual or otherwise?
It wasn’t so long ago that comedian Dom Joly sent up mobile phone culture with his oversized handset and the echoing cry of “I’m on the train!” or “I’m in the library!”…well that’s Twitter that is. Except the mobile phone has been replaced by the Internet. Bereft of creativity and the craft of creating blog entries or getting your personality onto the page, the Twitter entry is just an exclaimation of the now. A pointless cry in the wildnerness. So when Stephen Fry was twittering about being stuck in the lift, he might as well had a giant mobile phone held to ear and been bellowing: “I’m stuck in the lift!”
So if you have any sense of craft or interest in using the Internet for creative purposes say no to Twitter. And like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Friendsreunited, it’s influence will slowly wane.

Not sure if this is genius or seriously messed-up…US Military bunnies kill Al-Quaeda camels, sounds like a great idea for an animated series. Let’s really confuse everyone and call it “Cat Shit One”. Only in Japan…only in Japan…

Hoffmann-Gill standing erect and proud in front of his mount.
“Time to smash the TV to bits?” asks leading professional milk float driver, Daniel Hoffmann-Gill after reading my astoundingly perceptive review of the new series of “The Apprentice”
Ohhh don’t worry, I am reserving that particular pleasure for the moment you appear on Celebrity Skating on Ice or whatever it is called. 🙂

OK, by now you should all know exactly what “The Apprentice” TV show is all about. It is the TV equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion or a lioness bringing down a sickly wildebeeste on the plains of the Serengeti. And so we watch a group of hapless, boasting cocks and cockettes parade around in front of us trying to win the approval of the UK’s leading Nookie Bear impressionist (that will get us a few hundred hits from Google – and this time around I seriously believe Surallen has had cosmetic surgery in order to enhance his overall Nookieness. His hair now looks as if it is the cross between the type of fluff you find on the top of the head of an Action Man and the short and curlies located on your scrotum. Mind you, his face does look like a talking ballbag too – but that takes me back to my old illustration for this show where I superimposed a ballbag on the head of the great man. Ho ho – ain’t I a wit?)
Anyway, the producers got their special selection filter out working again. Got the mouthy asian bird – check. The ugly ginger bird – check. The pushy baby faced bloke – check. But this time around there are a few new stereotypes to include, like the Islamic fundamentalist bloke who’ll have everyone running in the opposite direction when they do the task that involves hijacking a plane (I made that up in bad taste, you know) and the whiny American bird who is obviously going to come a cropper during the mid-phase of the show during a big showdown.
The first task involved them cleaning and they chose to clean cars. Of course, you can approach cleaning in two ways: as volume sales or in terms of securing a large contract. With volume sales, it is head down bang, bang, bang – knock it out kind of stuff. The guys did that with the shoeshine business, but also had a car cleaning contract to fulfill. Both the male and female team fell with the contract work because they weren’t consistent and couldn’t work at speed. It’s cleaning frigging cars, ferchristsake. So we all know that they are inept.
Anyway, I lost consciousness for a while and the boys lucked out and won due to the girls blowing too much cash on supplies. A schoolboy error and when it come down to the boardroom, the wrong person got dumped. Moaning Mona should have been given the bullet just for arguing with her potential employer. But Sugar blew it once again purely to keep her in for future entertaining confrontational appeal. Ho, ho.
So it is the same old stuff and there is a law of diminishing returns, but for the first time the UK series has overtaken the entertainment appeal of the US counterpart. For years, Donald Trump has literally trumped on Sugar with a superior programme, by putting on extravagent challenges, amazing rewards and acting like a big fucking millionaire, whereas Sugar always felt more like a desperate manager of Dixons than some Mr Big Know-It-All business bloke.
But this time around Trump is doing ANOTHER celebrity edition (Piers Morgan won last year’s series) and the celebrities are shit and Dennis Rodman dominates the proceedings by acting like an eight-foot baby who has run headfirst into a barbed-wire fence. The show has been limping along and there’s no real tension, no real action and no real excitement, all be it for Rodman getting drunk, disappearing and trying to beat up his team mates.
So at least Sugar is providing a pure “Apprentice” experience. But who is going to win? It’s too early to say. I’d like to see the little baby-faced bloke win – you know, the one who has the funny walk/run. It is a comedy walk that he’s nicked directly from Shane Ritchie from the recent “Minder” remake on Channel 5. Yeah, he’ll do – though it really is too early to tell. Might be the ginger bird? Who knows!

This somehow seems to make sense: