No to ID cards

I think I'm going to sign up to this and I would recommend that you consider it too.

Ring ring, ring ring

At some point in modern times, the volume of mobile phones being purchased meant that the manufacturers had to start providing a way of differentiating one phone from the next, so that people wouldn't get confused as to which phone nearby was actually ringing. This led to the development of ever more intricate ringtones, then ringtone composers on some phones (that fad seems to have faded), then this led eventually polyphonic ringtones and 'real sound' ringtones.

That development led to two things, in my experience.

Firstly, non-musicians have started using the word 'polyphonic', having little idea as to its meaning, other than that it vaguely sounds 'better'.

Secondly, every time a certain someone in my office receives a phonecall, you hear a bizarre Caribbean swingbeat version of Bach's 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring'.

As Jeff Goldblum's put it in his most badly-delivered line: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they never stopped to think whether they should”.

Doss Jobs (part 2)

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that they're offering £24 - £27,000 of Heritage Lottery funds to pay for an audience development officer for the Bat Conservation Trust. Among other things, this person will be "developing and piloting new survey schemes targeted at volunteers from underrepresented groups". I'm reading this to mean that people from minority ethnic backgrounds aren't getting as much bat volunteering action as the rest of us.

If you need an excuse to stop wasting your money on lottery tickets and scratchcards, this is surely it.

And in the future, we'll get the internet

When dial-up internet access became popular, back in the late 90s (you know, when it was all about whether you could make any service other than Compuserve or AOL actually work), I used to hear people saying "yeah, I've got the internet at home".

Being a literal object, I would imagine their houses as these huge server facilities full of massive hard disks so that they could contain all of the internet.

Wash your veg

I was just discussing with a workmate, as we ate unwashed tomatoes, that washing vegetables is pretty important, and removes a surprising amount of pesticides.

Washing also helps to avoid illnesses. See this interesting site

Laugh or cry. I don't know which

There's a strange feeling that you have when you listen to the radio in the morning, as you wake up. You're overhearing information that enters into your consciousness by the back door, and then when you hear the item of news again later, you feel a sense of deja vu. I experience this pretty much daily, since I use my radio alarm clock to wake me up. It's tuned to XFM, so a fair amount of their morning content is quite strange, veering between items for pure humour value (and I do find Christian O'Connell very funny, even if other people don't) and real news.

There are those occasions where there's a news item that's so absurd that you think it could only be an April fool, or that maybe in your half-sleep you completely misunderstood the idea being reported.

Today has yielded just such a gem, with the news that car drivers in the UK will be expected to pay-per-mile that they travel, tracked by satellite. It's as if I went to sleep in a less-than-pleasant modern society last night, then woke up today in some kind of socialist enviro-nightmare. Don't get me wrong, I would say that certain parts of my psyche lean in a socialist direction (the super-rich should be taxed a lot harder than they are to relieve the burden on everyone else - I'm thinking footballers especially). And I also have sympathy with environmental causes, because we all know that something has to be done about global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, etc.

But pay-per-mile is insanely obtrusive. Can you imagine not only the level of individual liberty that would have to be sacrificed with the implementation of this technology, but also the cost of implementing it?

It's like the story about Prince Charles becoming Countryside Tsar from the front page of the Guardian on April 1st this year. At the time, I read that article and, being in a bout of 'flu, assumed that I was hallucinating. As I continued reading, it became clear that it was a joke.

I've now read the story about pay-per-mile several times, and the hallucinations aren't wearing off.