It's the middle of the week...

...and that's about all I have to say!

Burn!

I do like a good bonfire!

Light at the end of the tunnel

The days are finally, properly, getting longer. Not long now til I go to work and come home from work in the light (about a month, actually). Already I am driving home in semi-daylight. If the weather wasn't so bad, I might even get away with side lights. This time next week, if the weather isn't bad, I might even get away with no lights at all!

(You can find out sunrise/sunset times for the entire year ahead from http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.html - you can work out the longitude and latitude by popping your postcode into multimap or something similar...)

And before you know it, it'll be time to get the mower out again...

Hats

I meant to blog about this the other day, but forgot. Or was too pissed at the time, or something. Anyway, on Friday evening there was a programme on the telly featuring some long lost films from the early 1900's. They were discovered in a cellar a few years ago, and have been restored, and they show "normal" life at the turn of the Twentieth Century. They're really quite interesting - there are another two shows in the series, on BBC2 on Fridays - it's called The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon and it's on at 9'0 clock.

There is clearly much that has changed in the last 100 years, but the thing that stands out the most for me is the lost art of hat wearing. Every single person wears a hat. All of them, every man, woman and child. Flat caps, bowler types (derbys I suppose?) and top hats for the men, and a head scarf at the very least on the women. I know fashions come and go, but for something that was so ubiquitous to almost completely disappear (except for baseball caps, unfortunately) seems rather odd. As a great disliker of (pointless) formality, I can only hope that ties go the same way...

Titan...

...they got pictures back from Titan, nearly a billion miles away, in only 67 minutes. And yet we're still impressed by Boots doing our holiday snaps in an hour...

Excellent...

...Horizon is back on tonight. More doom, gloom and science. What a fantastic mix! And after a lovely dinner of turkey drummers too. Perfect.

ugg

I've just drawn a caveman. (There is a reason for this - all will be revealed when I've done the words to go with the picture.) It's a good caveman, too. Although less good once I've scanned him in, coloured him in, and shrunk him in size by quite a considerable amount. And coupled him with a slightly dodgy mammoth.

The best thing of all about my caveman is that, bereft of both artistic talent, or one of those funny little wooden dummy things that artists use to work out how the human (or sub-human) form holds itself, I had to get the girlfriend to pose so I could get the correct "spear-wielding almost-human" shape in my drawing. Little things like which way around the fingers are for example. She does seem oddly keen to distance herself from being a caveman though, for some reason...

Three Nippled Cousin F**ker

There's been a certain amount of controversy this week regarding tonight's showing of "Jerry Springer - The Opera" on BBC2.

Obviously, as a result of this controversy, I had to watch the thing.

The problem is, whenever there is massive controversy about things which the people complaining haven't actually seen, it's a disappointment. My mind flips back 20 years to George Michael and the "I Want Your Sex" video which, frankly, was shit. I seem to recall having to run the video through frame by frame just to actually find what they were moaning about. Or was that Madonna? I don't know. Anyway, the point is that some folk like to complain about things purely because they have heard that they are offensive/pornographic/blasphemic/whatever... but normally they are actually a complete let down.

And so it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch "Jerry Springer - The Opera". In addition to being more complained about than just about anything else ever shown on telly, it is also an opera. And I've never managed to sit through an opera before. But there again, as far as I'm aware, there has never been an opera featuring the words "cunting cunting cunting cunting cunt".

I have to report that, yes, the language was quite strong. Brilliantly so, in fact. And some of the imagery, could, to the more retarded religious freaks who take the imagery out of context, be offensive. More importantly, it was funny, incredibly watchable, the singing (which being an opera-phobic I was concerned about) was brilliant, and perhaps more importantly still, given the fuss, the actual whole thing told a great - and moral - story.

Just a quick reminder...

... make sure you've taken down your Christmas decorations. You'll have bad luck otherwise. And an even more unnecessarily large electricity bill. I shall see later whether or not the Chavsfield illuminations have been dismantled yet.

And another thing. Don't forget that this blog is merely a pimple on the side of an almost but not quite matching website, www.fetid.co.uk which has some funny things on it, and a lovely, though currently quite sparse message board where witty and amusing - or just plain sick, warped and twisted - people are positively encouraged to contribute.

Bit of politics...

Though I would consider myself "of the left" politically, I'm not a terribly militant person. I had little sympathy for the striking firemen, and the activities of our unions in the 1970's and early 80's, I believe, contributed greatly to the decline of this country as a manufacturing centre. Nevertheless... things have swung too far the other way now. Over the years, it seems to me from what I have seen and heard, a lot of businesses have started caring less and less about their employees.

It seems to start with the way that a lot of companies recruit now, particularily in the all encompassing "customer services" field. They hire temps, and if their face fits, they hire them "permanently" - I put permanently in inverted commas because permanency and employment seem to be two mutually exclusive terms these days. Having employed these people themselves after they have already spent a while doing the job, you might think, logically, that the employers have the person that they want. That's how my mind would work. I'd only employ those who worked well, and fitted the job, and so on. Those who I wasn't sure of, maybe I'd keep as temporary staff for a little longer, and then decide.

But no, that's not the way that modern industry works. They take these poor souls on, under the illusion they have a "permanent job", but in reality these "employees" are tied into a probationary period during which time they can be fired for farting in the wrong key without any comeback or redress. And, frankly, that seems to be pretty much what happens.

Now, nobody can blame an employer for wanting shot of shoddy workers. But why is it that staff who were deemed suitable to be offered a job in the first place can so suddenly become yesterday's people and given the old heave ho? What should cause an employee's performance to deteriorate so much over such a short space of time? It can only be one of three reasons - the company is incapable of selecting staff that can actually do the job; the company are failing to support and properly manage the staff they employ; or perhaps... just perhaps... it's because employers still want temporary (or "flexible" as I'm sure that modern human resource managers would say) staff, but don't want to pay fees to agencies...

It'd be very nice to see employment law tightened up a bit. Currently, you cannot claim unfair dismissal if you are sacked within a year of starting a new job. I'd like to see that changed to 6 months; or for any time spent as a temporary worker at the same employer to be taken into account as part of that year. I'd like to see regulation of "probationary periods" so that there is a maximum time span and a written contract setting out what the terms and conditions are of the probationary period, and under precisely what conditions the employee's contract can be terminated. When an employee's contract is terminated in this way, there should be a full written detailed explanation of why this has happened, and, unless there is gross misconduct, some form of parachute payment.

Of course, nicest of all would be if companies remembered how to manage people as people, rather than just a "human resource".

Productivity!

What a great and productive bank holiday weekend. My DIY projects are all actually now finished, and don't appear to be in any danger of falling to pieces. And look good too. We actually remembered to take the enormous number of empty cans and bottles resulting from our Christmas excesses to the supermarket with us for recycling. And to top it off, I managed to break my current creative duck by actually producing a whole new page on my website, come up with some ideas for a few more, and rehash a really really old page which has been offline for a few years now, but was one of my favourites back in the day. I'm just hoping I'll be able to continue the year in the same productive vein...