Day Jar View

One of my pet hates, especially in today’s world of instant access to spell checkers and websites devoted to grammatical correctness (is that a word?), is the seeming increase in the use of the greengrocer’s apostrophe.

It’s one thing to see a scrawled sign on my way to work every day that says “lunch’s”, but quite another when one of the world’s largest companies, Dell Computers, makes a similar faux pas on its offers home page.

I don’t know what’s worse; that Dell don’t have a single person in their organisation who has spotted it, or has and then hasn’t reported it, or that the probable thousands who have seen it since haven’t contacted them to flag it immediately?

Of course I am included in that bunch. And at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I don’t want to be the one who tells them – I can imagine it wouldn’t be warmly received and I don’t want to be “one of those”.

So, instead, I will post up their mistake for everyone here to see and everyone else to potentially stumble across in year’s to come (geddit?).

Whilst I was away on a boozy weekend with some mates down South, apparently my daughter started going forwards when crawling, rather than just sideways, in circles, and backwards as has been the case so far.

I was a bit miffed to have missed it, but on my return on Sunday night she duly performed her new moves on the kitchen floor. Quite emotional really, and since then all I’ve done is try to encourage her to take her first steps – just for me!

I was amazed the other morning. Radio Five carried one of their usual tabloidy phone-ins, and the topic was the Olympics, and the Brits’ success.

Instead of blanket celebration, there were a number of callers who simply couldn’t bring themselves to bask in the reflected glory. Instead they came out with all sorts of crap about how the sports we had won medals in were “for the rich” or “elitist”.

Ask our current crop of athletes whether they have any money, and I think most people would be surprised what a struggle it is for most of their lives when they are training. It’s only when they achieve success (and even then, only in the blue ribbon sports) that they can make some decent money.

Only a Brit would look at our medal table position (currently 3rd) and say it was a bad thing.

I’m a firm believer in there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothing.
However, this week I’m wondering whether whoever said that is still around to witness the deluge. It hasn’t stopped for a week.

As Brits, I think we are all guilty of remembering the bad more than the good when it comes to the weather; but I don’t think anyone would disagree that it has, as it’s known in metereological circles, been “pissing it down” for what seems like forever.

Our holiday in West Wales might well require waders all round at this rate.

I was wondering whether a single “Hundreds and Thousands” would be called a “One”, or a “Hundred and Thousandth”?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprinkles

I’ve succumbed.

After approximately 20 years of a 32″ inch waist (or, at least, buying 32″ trousers), I have finally given in and bought my first pairs of 34″ jeans.

I tried on the 32″s first of all, and even brought a pair home, but I couldn’t hide the fact that the muffin top was on full display.

Once I’d made the decision to upscale, I actually felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, if not my waist.

I look forward to a future filled with exuberant knee bends, improved circulation around my nether regions, and a permanent move away from that spray-on look.

Watching the opening ceremony of the Games this pm, I was struck by how perfunctory and banal clapping can sometimes be. Especially if, like the poor maidens standing in a circle around the stadium, you have to do it on pain of death (possibly) for 2 hours or more.

However, yesterday my beautiful baby girl started to clap her hands, aged nearly 9 months. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. That silly gesture that has always made me wonder what it is all about, suddenly became something magical. And that’s the beauty of being a Father I guess.

Not just so that you can appreciate clapping, but that it makes you see wonder and beauty and joy in the little things, all over again.

This isn’t going to be some polemic on the outrageous cost of oil, and how dare the government take 60% of the cost of a litre of petrol in tax, and than have the sheer audacity to charge us VAT too! It isn’t going to be one of those.

In fact, I actually think petrol is still too cheap. There, I said it.

And before you say anything, I do drive; and it isn’t some feeble 1 litre Getz that does 300 mpg, which I only use on warm days when the traffic is light and the wind is behind me in order to conserve fuel. I drive a 3 litre diesel estate, which goes like the proverbial off a shovel, as well as fitting the missus and my daughter in the back (not the boot I hasten to add).

The reason I think petrol is still too cheap is that it is only in the past few months that my nearest petrol station has started charging me more for my petrol than my corner shop does for my milk.

I pay 55p per half litre for milk, which equates to £1.10 per litre, and I pay around £1.30 for diesel.

I don’t remember ever seeing anyone protesting about the price of milk, except those on the receiving end of our reluctance to pay a proper price for it: the farmers. Why not? £1.10 is more than 30p per litre higher than petrol was at the height of the fuel protests in September 2000.

Now, I’m no scientist, but I don’t think you get milk from the ground; I think it comes from a cow. And cows produce it with little or no engineering, other than a bit of grass-grinding with their teeth, and presumably some amazing alchemy work in their four stomachs. Sounds pretty cheap to me.

Oil, however, comes out of the ground, and it takes an amazing amount of time, money and effort to get it out. And it isn’t going to be replaced, at least not in our lifetime. Of course, over millions of years it will gradually be replaced by rotting vegetation and sedimentary activity, but we are gulping it down too fast for that. Milk, on the other hand, is limited only by the number of cows and the amount of grass around, assuming the government doesn’t build on all of it.

So here’s my suggestion. Unless you know where an untapped oilfield is, and you know how to get the black stuff out of the ground, and you can afford to develop the site, pump it out, distribute it, process it into the various fuel grades, and then distribute it again, I would keep my mouth shut about the price of it if I were you. Or by all means moan, but then please spend an equal amount of time working out what we are going to replace it with.

And in the meantime, think about organising a milk protest and see how far you get. Count me in!

In 1992, NASA decided that the old adage of “Better, Faster, Cheaper – pick any two”, would no longer apply to them. With admirable chutzpah, of course underpinned by comfortable funding from Congress, they embarked on a series of missions with predictably mixed results.

For example, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission (cost $125 million) failed because the contractor, Lockheed Martin, failed to convert imperial units to metric units. I’m no engineer, but I think in anyone’s language this can only be descibed as “piss-poor”.

At the peak of the Apollo project, NASA’s budget was around 4% of US GDP. Every piece of hardware was so over-engineered that I seem to remember that out of a million components in the Apollo spacecraft, only a handful failed. Can you imagine if today’s cars were engineered to that degree?

This can hardly have been a surprise to those with an engineering background or, indeed, any experience of managing projects of any size. The fact is that most clichés have at least some basis in fact, and trying to do something better on less money is bound to end in tears.

I was reminded of Better, Faster, Cheaper this morning, when I woke up to blanket coverage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony day, that kicks off the 2008 Games in Beijing.

It has been said that the Chinese have spent around $40bn on the Games, the majority of that on new construction projects, including the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.

In the course of this massive project, over the past seven years the authorities have displaced thousands of people living in the shadow of the main buildings in shanty towns – ostensibly to clean up the city for all the visitors.

In addition, people have been told how to behave in public, there are stories abound of internet censorship for foreign journalists staying in the city, and a generally over-zealous attitude from the police has been reported.

So it may be Faster, and it may even be Cheaper if the Chinese recoup in revenues and overseas goodwill from the sanitised view of their country that will be presented to us. But is it Better?

Can it be said that the Chinese population will benefit from the Games to even some of the extent that, say, the inhabitant of the East End will surely benefit from the 2012 Games in London? Would any of our lot willingly give up their house for the good of the Games?

The Games is supposed to be about fair play, competition, inclusiveness and the celebration of the coming together of nations from all over the world. But it is hard to ignore the oppressive cloak of smog hanging over the city, that in some way represents the way in which the Chinese have gone about putting on these games, and the subservient way in which leaders of the free world have stepped around the human-rights issues that China has conveniently swept under the carpet for this event.

All that said – I am a big fan of the Olympic Games, despite the problems that invariably arise when the focus is put so sharply on the host country every four years. I can’t wait for the weightlifting, which for me offers the purest form of effort and performance over the 3 weeks – the characters are great, the exaltations when the bar is held aloft inspiring.

On a selfish note, one good thing that may come out of this competition is that it will finally persuade me back into the gym after 6 years of getting steadily softer around my middle. Three weeks of exposure to the finest specimens on earth (women pole vaulters especially), will both titillate, enthral and instil guilt – how many things on TV can you say that about?

I have a number of tenants in rental properties, one of whom I met for the first time yesterday as he had moved in this week. I went round at 2.45pm, and he was still in bed. After talking with another tenant for a while, he surfaced, and then told me that he had nothing to get up for, so he was staying up late and staying in bed all hours.

I couldn’t help but get nervous about the fact that he has moved in, but seems to have no idea (or care in the world) that the job centre probably closes at 4pm, and to which a visit might enable him to earn some money: ergo, pay his rent.

I let it go, but will be keeping on top of this one. Kids today eh?