King of the Mountains

I was browsing in a local shop last week when something grabbed my attention. To whit, a 3ft tall Lego tower crane.

When did these happen? When I was a kid, we got little Lego stuff. I remember what was, at the time, a large mobile crane. It was about 8in long and came with the usual smiling yellow chap as a driver, sensibly attired with a hard hat. I had a fair number of the diggers too, all built to the same scale. This might be where I get my love of anything large and noisy from.

Fast forward about fifteen to twenty years and I came across a pile of low loaders in my local Aldi. In a whimsical mood I decided that £12 wasn’t too bad and bought one. After assembly I was astonished how far these things had moved on. These aren’t toys any more. It’s a pretty decent freelance model of a truck that just happens to be made of Lego.

I know the fashionable thing is to decry the specialist bits now included, usually with a growl of "When I were a lad we had to make our own (insert part here)". But looking at the current crop I really can’t see how you could do as good a job without the oddball bricks.

Yes, I bought the crane. It’s sitting on my desk looking huge. It also looks surprisingly realistic considering the driver has a bright yellow plastic head. The cantilevered design is pretty much spot on, remove any part of it and it’ll sag. Whoever designed it clearly understood how these things work from an engineering viewpoint. It’d be wasted on the average eight year old.

Which leads me to wonder, are they after a different market? The Star Wars and Indiana Jones ranges suggest so. They’re labelled as being suitable for kids who probably weren’t born when the films came out. Is the real target market twentysomethings who grew up with Lego and now have a bit more spending power than they did in their pre-teen years?  The move to ever more detailed and increasingly fragile models suggests so.

At least this is a harmless form of refusing to grow up, as opposed to the toddleresque behaviour exhibited by those who can’t hold their beer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to order a large green tipper before they sell out… 

Inspired by a recent New Scientist piece I thought I’d write something about these intriguing creatures.

They have tentacles, funny eyes, and built in water-jet propulsion. What’s not to like? Added to this, research suggests that they are very intelligent indeed. Their camoflage in particular is incredible.

The cuttlefish can make itself invisible against all natural backgrounds, and will do a fine job when presented with man-made ones too. Witness one test when it was found that they would align themselves to stripes painted on the back of a tank. Horizontal stripes saw them lying flat, vertical saw them raising tentacles to blend in. They can even generate a moving pattern over their skin to distract prey and confuse predators. Of course, there’s always the famous cloud of ink as a last resort.

If you see one in an aquarium it will manage to look deeply thoughtful. While I somehow doubt it is considering the mysteries of the universe (other than where the next meal is) there is a fascination to them. Apparently they will often respond to divers making the "peace" sign by raising a couple of tentacles in a similar manner. While this is an alarm signal rather than a response in kind, it is still somewhat astonishing that a squishy tentacled thing can recognise and respond to humans. These little chaps (and chapesses, although I have no idea how to tell the difference) could well have been the dominant life-form on this planet had evolution taken a slightly different turn.   

Plus the baby ones are adorable. Look at those cute little tentacles! 

I know, I know, I’ve already talked about the clueless rant groups on Facebook. But I’ve just sighted another one that I feel needs mentioning. I won’t name it as I don’t want them screaming at me, but a few pointers that apply to all protests.

Typing ENTIRELY LIKE THIS does not help get your point across. It makes the readers’ eyes hurt and they’re quite likely to walk off. It also makes you look like one of those sad individuals you see bellowing assorted religious works in shopping areas. They’re not terribly convincing and neither is the Caps Lock approach.

Learn to spell. Now, I know some people have genuine problems with dyslexia, but a spelling and grammar check program can be downloaded free of charge. It’s called Openoffice.org and works very well. If your intention is to win people to your cause then you will get further with reasoned, well written, logical arguments than with badly-written hysterical shrieking. Then again I suppose it depends on whether you want easily led tabloid-"educated" followers or intelligent sceptical ones who will question things that make no sense.

Check your facts. If you want a particular individual "off Facebook" then it’s advisable to check whether they are actually on there. Likewise use a modicum of technical knowledge. Calling for "their IP to be banned" is rather meaningless as most internet providers simply hand out IPs at random and will quite probably give you a new one when you reboot your router. You have to pay extra for a static one, as that would enable you to host a website. Banning a particular IP will just annoy the innocent soul who is handed it after a power cut.  

Don’t let the jokers who will inevitably set up fake accounts and join the group wind you up. Sick though they are, it is rather amusing watching the reactions they provoke with what is, at base, a misjudged school-age prank. There seems to be an even split between those that fall for it and demand assorted painful fates for the prankster, and those that realise it to be a joke and start screaming for blood. Neither sort of person reflects well upon the group. 

Finally, do not tolerate the borderline fascist vigilante types. Many of them are just as disturbing as the people the group is aimed at. Call me strange but I’d rather people weren’t encouraged to wander the streets carrying cricket bats with nails in and attacking anyone they suspect of being their target, as for some strange reason I wouldn’t trust them to find their own elbows let alone correctly identify a person.

I spent Sunday driving a couple of interesting byways, first off the world famous Strata Florida. This lane has a bit of a fierce reputation and I would certainly stress that you don’t do it alone or in a vehicle that you are worried about minor damage to. On my first attempt I ended up with a strange whining noise from an idler bearing which had taken offence to a dunking, after the second I had a concave steering guard. Another of our party managed to leave his front numberplate behind in one of the deeper fords, quite possibly the one that did for my bearing. This was not a case of doing silly things, just occupational hazards of driving off tarmac.

Yet despite this treatment, both cars were happy cruising at a steady 60-ish on the way home. Which I feel says a lot for how strong these vehicles are. Your chances of doing serious damage to the vehicle are slim at most.

As for terrain damage, well, the vast majority of Strata is solid rock. You would need dynamite to do any damage at all to that route. There is more risk of the landscape damaging you than there is of you damaging the landscape, whatever hysterical bobble-hatted individuals might tell you. In the whole day we saw a grand total of two other vehicles to our three, which I feel destroys the claims about hordes of vehicles. Two unconnected groups of three or fewer does not constitute a horde.

At this point you may be wondering what the attraction is. While I will be in danger of resembling the old Fast Show sketch I will do my level best to explain.

It’s the feeling you get that you’ve done things very few others get to do. Looking at a map and realising that there’s no other human life for miles around, driving up things that would cause the average person to scream and hide. A particular favourite of mine on another byway has you turn left and drive up a near-vertical rockface. Where else would you get to do that? The feeling when you hit the tarmac at the end of the day and have to re-adapt to sharing the road with assorted numpties has to be experienced to be believed. Knowing that you’ve just come from a place where they will never go and that you’ll be going back in a few weeks. 

I’ve been wandering ebay a fair bit of late, and have encountered some bizarre trends.

To start with the obvious, those special people who list something by brand, then put "like" and a whole bunch of manufacturers making similar stuff. I’m not even sure it grabs attention. If I want to see something from that manufacturer I’ll search for it, rather than ending up with a set of results stuffed with things I don’t want.

Putting "Rare" in a subject heading doesn’t make it so. However, it might well provoke a bidding war so I can’t say I blame the seller. I do wonder about the individuals who seem happy to pay twice the original price for something that is still readily available new though. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they really don’t care how much over the odds they’ve spent too.

Which leads us neatly onto the other problem. The "Must have it at all costs" bidder. Great news for the sellers, but downright annoying for the rest of the bidders as they will push prices to insane levels in their desperate efforts to be the winning bidder. I really don’t know what drives them. The rest of us, upon seeing an item rise to a silly price, will simply roll our eyes and think that there’ll be another one along before too long. But on planet crazy bidder something kicks in. I would suggest it’s macho posturing, but there seem to be a fair number of women who do this too. A re-awakening of the old fighting spirit that led our ancestors to prod each other with pointy sticks for the last piece of the kill maybe? I’ve even heard of rare occasions where the crazy bidder has been beaten and the winner has received a bile-filled email for having the nerve to outbid the crazed.

Some people just enjoy winding them up by making sure they pay well over the odds, but as that’s against ebay rules and quite possibly illegal I can’t condone it. If it is an attempt to ensure that nobody else bothers to bid on later auctions then it clearly isn’t working. You can’t intimidate the rest of us by showing that you’re willing to throw your money away.

Some of the best luck I’ve had, however, has been with lots where there are one or two rough items with a pile of decent ones. Nobody seems willing to bid on these, despite the fact that quite often all the unappealing items need is a bit of de-rusting. So for the price of a tin of WD40 and an old toothbrush you can become the sole bidder and snap up ludicrously cheap stuff.   

I just had my polling card for the local government elections here. Unfortunately they’ve neglected to mention a few crucial things. For a start, what on earth are we electing people to, and secondly, who is standing?

I have seen no adverts in the local press, no posters around town promising what a candidate would do if elected. Nothing to make me enthused enough to get out and vote for what is most likely a town council election. As these people have essentially no power here I’m not sure that is any great problem.

But saying that makes me feel truly awful. See, people die in some countries for the right to vote in free elections and here I am saying I might not exercise my right to vote. But if the candidates are essentially all the same (as they will be in this election) it really isn’t worth my time.   

A recent radio poll came to the conclusion that the essential problem with town councils is that they are invariably staffed by retired, comfortably off white men. Leave aside the "white men" part as I personally find the idea that the colour of my skin and my gender make me unable to treat everyone equally highly offensive. The same goes for social background. What I mainly object to is the way in which it is slanted in favour of older people.

If a younger person were to stand they would suddenly hit problems. They would most likely not have the time to spare due to working the usual mad hours, to say nothing of not having the social networks necessary to drum up votes. Before anyone trots out "inexperience", may I point out that the current incumbents usually have very little recent experience of being young, as it in their case it happened while the Beatles were still active. 

The change said radio show proposed was that the post of town councillor become a full salaried job, in the same way as an MP. While this would result in higher tax bills I might suggest that it could well be a solution to widespread apathy, as for a change we would see a genuinely representative selection of candidates. Make it a living wage, no allowances or perks beyond the odd genuinely necessary trip. It’d become a starting point for a political career, rather than the usual one of being drawn into London and slaving for years as an underpaid researcher before making a play for a seat you’d start off locally aged 25 or so representing your local ward. The prospect of sensible money and a chance to make a genuine difference would do wonders for stimulating interest.

The other problem however is with the kind of person usually drawn to stand for these positions. They are often annoying busybodies who nobody in their right mind would give real power. I have seen them destroy voluntary organisations before now as they did not have full control over said organisation, only an open invitation to be present at meetings which they failed to take up. Decades of careful construction and good management were wiped out overnight because of a few egomaniacs. But I digress. The principle that power should not be given to those that seek it is well known. At least their power is very limited, as in my experience they are invariably ignored by those higher up the chain where (unusually in government circles) common sense tends to prevail. Would younger candidates avoid this problem? Possibly. But there would still be the likelihood of ending up with the insufferable over-achieving head boy/girl type. The only way to avoid that would be to expect the electorate to bother to learn about the people they may be voting for and make an informed choice, which seems rather a lot to ask in a country where Big Brother is considered entertainment rather than a method for converting the brain to cream cheese.

Still, look on the bright side. Things aren’t so bad here apart from the complete lack of decent employment and the infestation of the terminally slow. This is unlikely to change. Extremists don’t bother with quiet towns in the middle of nowhere, so we’re unlikely to wake up and find UKIP or another similar group have taken over. All in all, it shouldn’t be so bad. I suppose I probably ought to go and put a cross next to someone sensible though, if only to make sure.          

I’d just finished writing yesterdays’ piece when I noticed the date. The 14th.

At about twenty minutes to midnight on the 14th of April 1912 the largest passenger ship then built collided with an iceberg, through a combination of excessive speed and inexperience in handling a ship of those dimensions. Less than three hours later she was gone, taking with her around 1500 of her passengers and crew.

Leave aside the suspicions voiced by one knowledgable party that the collision was not entirely as seen in the film, as while I suspect said party to be correct I’m not going over the details. What I intend to discuss is why people still remember her now, 96 years on.

The 1997 film, while burdened with a slushy, unbelievable and unnecessary "love story" has played its part. The ship was undoubtedly the real star and those gorgeous interiors were a good deal less wooden than some of the human cast. To the generation that probably took their first date to see the film it’ll always be memorable, even if there are some major chunks of it that don’t make sense.

It is just as likely that the loss of the Titanic is seen as a loss of innocence, the end of an age when people were certain that technological progress could solve all problems and that gentlemanly conduct was guaranteed. But that overlooks one thing. The Lusitania

In 1915 the Cunard liner Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine. She sank in eighteen minutes with scenes just as terrible as those that must have occurred aboard Titanic in her death throes. At the time, rules had been agreed to cover attacks on merchant shipping which required that an attacker give passengers and crew time to abandon ship before sinking it. The lack of any pretence of complying with this rule shown here could be seen as a major part of the end of what might be described as "gentlemanly warfare", which perished along with so many people between 1914 and 1918. From a military history viewpoint this one event had huge consequences, widely suspected as it is of having helped to draw the USA into the war. Yet today only historians and ship enthusiasts are likely to know about her.    

More recent incidents, including those where no loss of life occurred, always have one thing in common. When the TV crews find the most hysterical and over-excited person they can to interview, the phrase "it was just like Titanic" will always come out at least once. I’ve even heard it used by people who were stuck off Dover for a few hours due to adverse weather. Grow up. It was a bit lively, but nobody died. I was out in a Force 8 on the old Brittany Ferries Quiberon and it wasn’t that bad.

But despite the lack of mental strength of some people it’s interesting to see that the first thing they think of is Titanic. Not the Estonia, despite the fact that as a ferry that sank in some of the worst weather seen it would be closer to the reality of what they had just experienced. Nutty conspiracy theories aside, Estonia has never had the same recognition apart from a few news reports and the odd documentary on the investigation. This is odd in many ways, as the sinking occurred during the era of rolling news and footage exists of rescue helicopters plucking survivors from battered rafts which you would expect to jog memories.

In 2012 there will be another upsurge in interest as the centenary is marked. The obvious question is what will happen afterwards. Will we see a surge of interest in 2015 remembering the Lusitania, 2053 remembering the Princess Victoria? I somehow doubt it. For one reason or another Titanic will be thought of long after the others have been forgotten. 

I found a very funny website yesterday, part of which was devoted to cheap ‘n dubious Chinese-made toys. It’s here

What particularly caught my eye was the wonderfully naff "Titanic-Bot"

I really feel there should be an awards ceremony for toys like this. This one should get the bad taste award along with the supreme bizarreness award. I mean, it’s a ship that sank with around 1500 of her passengers and crew, but made in plastic and that can transform into a robot. I suppose it would have made the film somewhat better, as that site notes. Mid-way through one of the annoying soppy bits the ship turns into a 200 foot tall flying robot. It might even spare us that ghastly song.

Even more bizarre, the toy is clockwork. So you can indulge your inner Captain Smith by dodging the terrifying walls of foam in your bath and re-enact the sinking after colliding with a giant knee. Or have it turn into a giant flying robot that carries everyone to safety. Entirely up to you. Again, it would have made for a better film and would only be slightly more inaccurate.

Despite the best efforts of the bobble-hatted and red-socked hordes, there are still a few untarmaced rights of way around that you can drive. Known as Byways Open to All Traffic in the mainstream, barring closures you can drive them legally.

Only the truly daft would try going out on unfamiliar routes solo. So you go with friends. Up to four vehicles is the advisory given by several organisations as longer convoys tend to give the wrong impression. You’ll spend most of the day ambling up and down near-vertical hillsides with these people, so you’ll get pretty close.

The appeal, for those who’ve never tried it, is probably a mix of the challenge and the social side. Handling awkward terrain without damaging the route or your vehicle and ending up with some good war stories. Quite often these will be of the time your mate managed to do a nose-stand on a section that you went straight across.

It’s a bit like the rose-tinted view of childhood in the 1950s really. You spend all day out playing in the hills with your friends and return tired, muddy, and somewhat hungry as despite having packed food you failed completely to eat any of it. It’s probably the most fun you’ll ever have with clothing attached and it means you get to talk in strange slang of axle-twisters, waffles and Jate rings.

All you need is a vehicle, a tow rope, and some friends with another suitable vehicle. What’re you waiting for? 

"He’d had six pints and loads of vodka"

How often have you heard this, or a variation on it, after having had an evening ruined by a shouting drunken idiot? Too often I’m guessing. 

To dismantle the excuse, they’re effectively asking you to forgive their behaviour because they can’t hold their drink. Nobody forced them to drink that much, it was entirely their own choice. So you’re expected to excuse their boorish antics because they lack self control?

Excellent, next time someone complains about my driving too fast I’ll just say "I’d just been listening to a James Bond soundtrack". That should work. I mean, if you can use something you did voluntarily as an excuse for a lack of self control then it’s fine. Mine doesn’t even inconvenience anyone else so I don’t need as much of an excuse. Plus I get to keep my dignity.

I have no problem with drinking. I don’t drink, I don’t mind people who do. What I won’t stand for is the people who use it to mask a lack of social skills. Remove their inhibitions and hey, they can do whatever they want now. If someone reminds them about their antics the next day then that’s fine, it was the booze that made them do it. It’s rather sad really, as if they can’t manage to be themselves without help.

If they wouldn’t do it sober, why on earth are they doing it at all? Are they really such cowards that they need something else to blame for their actions? I can understand the simple mistake made by many teenagers who are suddenly hit by the effects, but when they reach their mid twenties and still can’t make a conscious decision to stop before they turn into loutish idiots you do have to wonder if there’s something lacking between the ears. Conversational skills maybe? I suppose it’s easier to impress people who’ve devolved to their most base instincts with your body than it is to impress sober people with your mind. Personally I prefer the challenge of the latter, if only because the former isn’t really an option for me!

Whatever happened to self control and dignity? The British Gentleman was a cultural icon, now he’s all but dead. In place of the amiable if dim Bertie Wooster we have the idiotic and unpleasant drunken ape-man. Not the best of things to represent us really. Sure, Bertie did occasionally drink to excess but he generally defaulted to stealing police helmets and paddling in fountains. That is at least amusing for the rest of us, as opposed to throwing tantrums like the average three year old which is just embarrassing and annoying.