You are allowed to enjoy this…

There are numerous jokes and sayings to illustrate the general dopiness of an individual. There’s “if he’s got a brain cell it would die of lonliness” or “if brains were dynamite he wouldn’t have enough to blow his hat off”, etc. Well while our journey is coming to a slow and juddering end with regards to the repair work on the shop, you never know from which crease or crevice the next fly in the ointment is going to appear. Today, the process was derailed by a level of dopiness that bordered on spectacular.

Yesterday, the builders warned that there would be a lot of work with regards to their next bit of work. OK – but they have taken down the partition wall that shielded our shop from the building work. You shrug and assume that they know what they are doing.
This morning we were greeted with a thick layer of grimy dust that impermeated every nook and cranny of the shop. We were back to square one and it was if the car had smashed into the shop all over again, but instead of red brick dust, this was a creamy limey kind of persistant crap, the likes of which I had never seen before.

The dust got into your lungs and rattled in your throat and we quickly opened the doors to alleviate the condition. Lugging bundles of newspapers about was a welcome distraction from the overall feeling of murderous rage I felt towards the builders. No effort had been made to contain the dust and everything was ruined…again. So for the second time, we would have to clean up.
So we made up the newspaper rounds, met the boys at the door and headed off home. An email was sent off to the project co-ordinator and he paid a visit to see the extent of the damage. Cleaners would be dispatched. Life would go on again.

It still doesn’t make me feel any better or get rid of the taste in my mouth and the grumbling ache in my lungs.

You’ve probably wondered what your childhood peers have been upto after school? Have they won on the lottery, developed a cure for cancer, or been up to more salubrious shenanigans? Well I know that one peer is the musical director of the Holyland Experience in the good ol’ USA, which came as a surprise as I didn’t realise that he was particularly inclined to all that religious mumbo-jumbo. But whatever gets you through the night, etc…
Well today I had another update from my past thanks to the reams of newsprint dedicated to a fraud trial going on in that there London today. I knew both of the lads involved from school, though I knew one better than the other, and if someone had said to me at sixteen, “You know so-and-so and whathisface…? They are going to be involved in a £3 million fraud trial by the time they are 38…”, I would have guffawed like a drooling idiot.
Anyway, here are the links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5171213/Buckingham-Palace-policeman-threatened-to-kill-best-friend-over-3m-scam.html
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2380620.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/17/buckingham-palace-fraud
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/royalwatch/news/article_1471383.php/Royal_protection_officer_ran_con
The best line I’ve drawn from these reports is that the fraudster used the excuse that “a spider in his eye had caused an infection” to stall non-payment of debt. I must remember to use that the next time my creditors are after me. (That last line was a cynical attempt at humour – I pay all my debts on time, I might add!)
This story certainly beats that glorious Olympic morning when this guy got his chance at winning gold plucked from his hands after testing positive for drugs. We didn’t get on too well at school, so it really did seem as if god pays debts without money afterall…
Ain’t life strange and wonderful at the same time?
EDIT:
Now the fraud has gone up to £3m…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/5172567/Royal-protection-officer-threatened-to-kill-best-friend-for-exposing-3m-scam.html

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.