Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Scientists, whilst not trying to save the world in Copenhagen, have recently been dropping coconuts into the ocean off Bali.

This was an experiment in animal psychology. But rather than what I expected, which was to see how a row of monkeys chained to the sea bed would interact with the coconut shells once they sank, the scientists wanted to find out more about octopuses.

There was general astonishment and surprise when they observed some of the octopuses running away with the coconut shells and building houses out of them much like Spongebob Squarepants and his pineapple.

Apparently the octopuses had demonstrated basic tool use - a hallmark of advanced animals like humans. This was so impressive it was almost on par with tool use by women.

I respect women and octopuses equally as much but you never see a woman getting very excited about tools and I find this very annoying. Octopus? Endearing and trying it’s best with the coconuts. Women - dismissive and uninterested; Doesn’t even want to play on my steering wheel racing game simulator.

Why does it have to be like this? The question I’d like to ask the Australian scientists in Bali is did the coconut manipulating octopuses have willys? Do octopuses even have willys? And if so, what were the female octopuses doing whilst the male ones were playing with their coconut shells? Cooking pasta?

It recently took me 2 weeks to get Joey to visit a headphone shop with me. She did so very reluctantly in the end, and she still isn’t very interested in graphics cards. So on this regard, the octopus does in fact seem to be more evolved. Therefore I have made it my mission to somehow rewire a woman’s head to find technology interesting. When man builds a new space rocket, I want her to be on the NASA mission control webcam faster than you can say Heat Magazine. The answer to my mission seems to be a social one. Therefore I’m probably going to fail it.

It comes as a particular annoyance that woman aren’t interested in tools and technology because these areas are the pinnacle of man’s achievement. Apart from blowing up the world with guns and bombs, it’s what we do best. Our egos want recognition.

Yet tools like space rockets and computers are cast aside by women as pointless novelties. Left to the female population of Earth, tools would simply vanish and infrastructure collapse. Since women are currently earmarked to succeed men in almost every aspect of life, this is of great concern. They need to appreciate spanner use at the very least. Surely the research on octopus behaviour can cast some kind of insight into my concerns about women? Well, unwittingly I have also recently been doing my own research into the subject of females and tools.

I recently bought a new kettle which is shiney and silver and looks like a spaceship, but I made the mistake of throwing out the old kettle which had been making my tea taste of ricin. Despite the fact that this 10 year old Made-In-China wonder was depositing plastics and solvents into my daily cuppa, what I didn’t know at the time was that it had been kindly bestowed on the flat by Joey’s mum. When Joey returned from work to see it sat on top of the dustbin outside, she wasn’t happy. Yes, I should have asked before throwing it away, but this was against all I knew about tools. A broken tool causes frustration and death, therefore should be deposited in bin and replaced with more expensive one. However to a woman it seems that the paramount reason to appreciate the tool is socially orientated. Maybe that’s why they like jewellery so much?

Another difference I’ve observed with my eyes is that it seems a woman can happily use a digital camera until its 10 year old. I haven’t yet been able to keep the same one for over 6 months yet. Although men are absolutely right when it comes to using tools and should always be in charge of the remote control and the decision to purchase a new 60 inch plasma screen, they are absolutely 100% responsible for fucking up the world completely.

In Copenhagen recently, some scientists and politicians got together to try and fix the climate, seemingly forgetting that it doesn’t take 450 politicians and climate scientists to change a lightbulb and replace it with an energy efficient one which takes seven hours to come on and turns your chips green. Unimprovement is done on an individual person by person basis. But oh, never mind. Let’s do it politically.

These men (and possibly some women too, worried about the future of their children) sat at the summit with faces like haunted baboons. The aim was (past tense if you’re reading this tomorrow after the talks fail) to hammer out an agreement over reducing emissions and other such things which cause the world to heat up, like new babies being born. Frankly, I think we’re as fucked as Jordan’s vagina. There is nothing we can do about global warming and there never has been. Its been a steady journey towards our destiny of death ever since mankind discovered how to kill animals with rocks and put Irish twins on TV. Forget Copenhagen, the only ‘green’ movement which is real is that of green land sliding under blue sea.

One day we’ll realise this, and short of murdering half the world’s population and changing human nature so the reward circuitry in our brains don’t respond to achievements of any sort, we could relax in certainty that we’re going to die. Even if we keep recycling toilet paper we’d still have to deal with the big thermal event WHEN it happens. Nature has a way of sorting itself out eventually, and if the removal of humanity from the face of the earth is required to balance the scales once again then it will happen, and there is nothing Ed Miliband or his brother can do about it.

The reason these talks (involving 192 countries) are so fucking useless is because of politics. Or more specifically, it is very hard to get China to agree with you.

Equally, I have been wondering about bankers and why the rich ones have decided to leave the country and live in Hong Kong. It’s something to do with the government taxing them at 50% and now their bonuses too. So the bankers go and live somewhere else. It’s simple, until you start looking at why the government wanted to tax their bonuses in the first place.

Without getting into too much financial detail, it’s because they’re fucking bastards.

But they do contribute a lot of tax. At least they did… before they left the country to avoid it. Now, you may then ask - what is the point of taxing their bonuses if they can do even more damage to the country by simply ignoring the new rules and buying a ranch in Switzerland?

My conclusion is that if any meaningful change is to happen with broken banks and the crap climate, the world needs one leader, one country, and one rule for every single business and person alive today.

If Tesco suddenly began eating babies, and the British Government decided this was not allowed, and passed a law preventing it from eating babies, what is the point of this when China allows super markets to eat babies perfectly well?

Likewise, if the world feels a bit hot and has had enough carbon dioxide for one century, what is the point of the UK closing down what few factories it has left, if China’s expansion and reliance on coal power continues at their political insistence? Of course, that’s broad-stroke stuff. Wait until you see what demons lurk in the details of the politics.

The world has come to a critical point. We’re culturally, economically and climatically fucked. The world needs uniting politically and economically into one place yet culturally it needs splitting up into tiny diverse chunks.

For example I’d like to see the internet banned. This is because when I make a music video I have to compete with just about every other person in the world who has ever made a music video. This is making it impossible for anyone to have an original voice any more, or to achieve proper recognition for their achievements. Likewise, to rise to the top of your career you’ll probably have to beat a whole country’s worth of competitors, all linked together by Twitter.

Divide it all up. Being back smaller communities like in The Village, who think the neighbouring town is far away, with a wood full of monsters in between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Bring back a sense of joint identity amongst people you have real connections with, not superficial ones on Facebook. Let’s not be afraid to put our necks on the line in our own little way - so what if someone else, somewhere in America has come up with the same idea as you for a business? You’re no longer competing with anyone but the people you see around you. Wouldn’t that be more satisfying than boring office jobs, constant failure and thermal heat death?

And maybe one day after global warming has finally got on with it, we can all get on wooden ships and discover strange new places. Like Birmingham.

Somehow, the Octopus’s new home inside it’s coconut shell seems all the more appealing.

For the last 6 months a man called Dave has been trying to organise a communal party in my flat.

On his Facebook group and A4 poster ads stuck around the lift entrance, he calls for the community to come together like they did when our grandparents were young.

Spare a thought for those people now they’re in their 80’s. Most of them now live alone and are largely ignored.

Anyway, Dave got his way at Halloween, with 4 friends and his wife turning up in the court yard. To give him credit, he did a good job with the lights and costumes. I am sure poor Dave was not oblivious to a hundred warmly lit faces peering out toward his socially embarrassing fail of a party, but the fact that 50% of the residents chose to stay in the warmth of their own living rooms rather than socialise in the cold of the court yard cannot be understated. The other 50% visited the dark piss swept landscape of Manchester for a knees up, where danger lurks on every corner, where there are shadowy Albanians selling fluffy bunny ears and there are roving knife equipped teenagers stabbing you for no reason at all.

So clearly comfort was not an issue. But why wasn’t the allure of building bridges with a set of complete strangers at Halloween whilst dressed as a witch not so appealing to 100% of the residents in The Linx?

Well, in the olden days of our grandmothers, they lived on terraced streets.

Now we live inside contemporary art installations or battery cells which power local government offices like a hamster wheel.

Purely by design, there is no chance community spirit is coming to The Linx. I once walked up 4 flights of stairs to avoid someone in a lift.

Stepping into the silver metal box must have seemed like being in a David Bowie space rocket inspired music video for our grandparents. For us, it is a 5 second conversation initiation machine. Our grandparents, when not cheering on spitfires, did not have to shout ‘hey up’ at their neighbour only for two giant steel doors to separate them moments later. So now I have taken to bring completely silent in the lift. It is a far cry from when I visited my friend at the top of a tower block in Crewe populated almost entirely by people over 90.

He did, I admit, live on the 10th floor, which gave us more time to talk, but there was a genuine warmth of conversation and a genuine pleasure in interacting with an old person who smelt of piss. There wasn’t the same self conscious ’shall i say anything…nah’ feeling you get in a modern apartment lift. You’d simply mention the weather and feel happy. But now most people in The Linx lift of doom are pretty morose anyway, like they’ve just come home from work. If I rode the lift up and down 7 times completely naked I doubt it would elicit much of a reaction from somebody if they’d just been numbed by slowly reading emails and Facebook for 8 hours solid.

But things are getting a bit dicey in the Western World. The collapsed economy combined with the fact that I keep dropping the hard drive which stores the last 10 years of my life has taken the fun out of everyday life.

We need some way of bringing back some semblance of being human. Because at the moment, I feel like a set of fingers and a big arse with a seat welded to it. Soon I might even feel completely at one with the wheels on my office chair and start taking it for rides down the street, or adopt it like a dog and fling it around on a lead.

Dave has clearly been driven mad as well. He prints his self important Facebook posters with a reference number in red ink at the bottom. Why? So he can track his operation like a communications department would coordinate the election of an US president?

In the olden days we also used to have a relationship with the postman. And I don’t just mean in terms of next door’s MILF sucking his cock. If you had that impression from ‘relationship’ than I’m afraid you’ve been using the internet too much. There is nothing wrong with having a relationship with the postman.

Unfortunately my postman changes so often, the last time I answered the door I shuck my head from side to side and went ‘bububububububa’.

For a few days we also had a postman who looked like Bin Laden delivering small bombs. He scared me so much I once refused to let him in when he appeared on the video intercom like an impromptu News24 statement from Al Qaeda, despite the fact he had the reassuring Royal Mail crown behind him on his van, it looked more like an Afghan flag with crossed swords.  There was something about his demeanour that made it almost certain that he would one day run into an airport terminal on fire.

Our grandparents didn’t have to put up with frightening characters like this, with a whole news story driven backstory attached to their faces like the imaginings of a rambling paranoid schizophrenic xenophobe.

When the milk bottles were delivered by a Pakistani, they didn’t have to worry that he was part of a terrorist cell in East Germany. They said hello and began a conversation about the weather. Then over the next 30 years the Pakistani milkman had a family who were subject to constant racial abuse and the innocence faded from his immigration experience.

And now Muslims are being tarnished with the brush used to paint the backdrop to the Al Qaeda videos.  Ironically, any sense of patriotism to the UK is being tarnished with a brush held by Nick Griffin. When the US were attacked on 9/11 they salvaged the scrap metal from the twin towers and built a warship called USS New York from it. When the UK was attacked with bombs on the London transport network, we shot a Mexican electrician.

None of this makes sense. And with the disintegration of the state comes the breakup of Coronation Street.

Life has become to resemble the buildings built to accommodate it.

We each have our own little box and as long as it’s alright, the box next door could be on fire and we wouldn’t care.

Dave is depicted as a looser when in actual fact he’s fighting like Braveheart for what he believes in.

And you haven’t seen the half of the battle yet. Human-kind isn’t going to drown under a sea of concrete, junk and computer screens without a fight.

Or, for that matter, a quick stop and chat about the weather.

The anti-Obama propaganda has started.

Some Americans are guaffing and laughing at the economic stimulus plan. Money towards new cars for scrapping old polluting cars. Cash for Clunkers! Madness! The anti-Obama crowd were saying things like “Yeahaar! Maybe we should have a cash for clucker’s programme and pay people to eat Chicken!”. Then one fat necked Republican news reporter spouted a complaint saying “car dealers can’t cope with demand… its craaaazy out there!!”

Jon Stewart’s Today ran this story with the caption:

Master
……Rebaters

They also ran a quote from a state senator in South Carolina joking that a Gorilla which escaped from a zoo was in fact an ansestor of Michelle Obama.

To lighten an atmosphere poluted by the backwardness of a red neck America which doesn’t believe in evolution but can happily compare a Barack’s wife to a gorillia, Jon Stewart decided to scribble some alternative stimulous plans on a piece of scrap paper on his desk.

“Money for people with really large asses… Cash for Badooka donka!”.

But among the sound of fat asses going badooka donka, the prevailing sound coming out of America post-Obama is the noise of people going about their business at the expense of the world. Change? Obama? Progress? Nah - we like it as it is, say the fat racist part of America.

The dream which Obama stood for… still stands for, is being ignored by the majority of horse fuckers in South Carolina, is being belittled by cowboy politicians and double glazing businessmen.

Of course that the underprivileged suddenly had ‘hope’ got White America worried. The White America which doesn’t speak for the kind of people I know.

None of my friends have ever fucked at horse.

Or sneered at TV ‘news’ reports of cats with their heads stuck in yoghurt pots. “Hahaha look at that stupid fucking animal!”

The only stupid fucking animal I know is human… a cheerleader who wears a tshirt with the slogan Cocks Rock. A prime example of closed minded idiocy. Although that sentence sounds like a prime example of intellectual snobbery. I guess the truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Between the white picket fence, the dodge truck and the beer belly White Trash America knows in it’s heart of hearts that it is wrong.

They rock back and forth, shifting over and over in their sleep (dreaming of horses to fuck), panicking religiously.

There is one aspect I agree with despite the bovine idiocy of religion. The vicar.

A few pennies drop onto his collection plate. He lives in a small house and serves a small (and diminishing) church. Yet he is happy trimming the roses and praying for forgiveness over (amongst other things) Internet porn.

But despite appearances, the vicar and the banker both share something in common. An overwhelming belief in a fantasy which through the sheer number of believers has become reality.

As I saw the news of Barclays £5 billion profit in the depths of an economic crisis, I ran the palm of my hands over my skull in sheer frustration. But it should come as no surprise, because my skull - like the skull of all human kind, is dwarfed even by the size of my toilet seat. The problem is not the system, or the evils of capitalism, or the greed of any one person acting on his own. The problem is the combined achievement of all that’s bad about human nature.

The impulses and dreams which trigger our sense of reward are out of control like a faulty scientific experiment involving monkeys and peanuts.

The lure of money has been enough to send the banking industry insane, like a dribbling mental asylum freak crawling across the floor leaving a smearing trail of raw shit behind it. Everybody responsible for carrying out their day jobs in the financial sector have directly contributed to the perverse rise of the biggest downfall the world has ever seen. It’s time for a wake up call. The banks should all be split up at once, the world over. There should be no loop holes, no haven for ex-investment bankers. If they want to continue their career in banking they do so as a service to the world’s people. As a force for good. Every dime of profit is sent to those in need of a leg up. Governments, community organisers, African villages, infrastructure projects and people who live under 4ft high gaps in railway bridges with cardboard for wallpaper in India. These people have as much right on the money made by the hard work of the financial sector staff, as they do. Because their hard work is over-rewarded by a ratio of 100:1. The financial sector should be happy they have jobs at all, such has been the mass rip off of those who so unwittingly feed their salaries.

A smoky cloak and mirror obscured magic trick - this is what the financial sector has become. It doesn’t serve the people. It serve’s itself on a magic carpet of mathematical nonsense, which makes sense only to those who have engineered the world’s fantasy sector to accept this as the truth of the system. When it comes to the reality of the people, you see it on their credit card bills, on their bank statements, in the lure of the shopping centre, on their loans and in the bank’s marketing strategies.

It’s time to close the book on fantasy, and open a new one about reality.

The reality bible. No God, but happily no investment bankers either.

There was a man in American who believed that God would cure his sick daughter.

Unfortunately, he was so steadfast in this belief that he failed to call the doctor, and she died.

A wake up call swings like a wreaking ball into his belief in the healing power of Our Kind Lord. Or not.

He ended up in court, where the judge sentenced him to 25 years in jail for murder. The man is seen smiling as the verdict is read out, thinking that ‘God is really testing him this year’.

The next day, another man arrived in court accused of downloading 30 songs from the Internet. The music industry lawyers had decided to make an example of him, in the belief that he had committed $14 million worth of damages. The judge ‘took a lenient line’ and decided only to fine the man $700,000. If the verdict stands after his appeal, he will file for bankruptcy. He is accused of downloading songs by the Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day, one of whose albums is called American Idiot.

The guy was listening to the lyrics of American Idiot, while a lawyer filed the case against him on behalf of the multi billion pound music industry he’d so damaged.

Don’t want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America.

And so the previous generation wallows in failure and wilts in the white heat of technology, and the new generation seems pathetically trapped in the wreckage.

False choices abound, from the fleeting moments spent with your girlfriend on holiday watching the blood red sun sink into the cool blue ocean before your morning flight back to nowhereland, and a shadowy existence spent chained to a chair behind a desk, prostituting your brain and your slowly deteriorating fattening body for the financial gain of a few.

False choices, like democratically elected governments who are all the same and who rule between themselves as the decades pass by with not so much a flicker of real change or freedom.

False choices, like the weekends littered with drunks and drinking, pointless shopping unwittingly feeding the machine which traps us here in the first place just for the sake of a moment’s entertainment, for the lack of anything meaningful to do.

False choices, like going to work or staying at home. The false choice of too much Western freedom.

Furrowing my brow I thought… there must be something in each one of us which is waiting to get out and run free, something not exploitable for financial or political gain. Something pure and innocent. Something so incredible that others can only look on and enjoy what we have to offer.

So I watched a film called with Joey about a typical Japanese family, who have two son’s one a young boy aged 11 and an older 18 year old. The father loses his job but doesn’t tell anybody, and pretends to go to work each day. There he meets a friend from school, whom is doing exactly the same. Meanwhile, the young son runs through the compact twisting Tokyo streets and he spots an old keyboard in the junk at the side of the road under a railway bridge. He brings it home and plugs it in but no sound emanates from the speaker-less Roland MIDI synthesiser. Inspired, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand, he goes to take piano lessons whilst his family on one single day collapses around him, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.

4 months later, and the young son is at a music school and performs a sonata in an exam, watched by his parents. He’s a musical genius and the crowd gathers around as the sonata concludes, there is only silence, wet eyes and open mouths.

The little genius then trots off with his dysfunctional family.

I downloaded this film via Bit Torrent.

Come and find me, you stupid fucking American, British, French, Belgian, Swiss, Chinese, African, Argentine Idiots.

You can hear it in the beat they march to
And you can feel the earth shake when they start to dance
You can tell by the way they move you
It’s not murder, it’s an act of faith, baby.

They finally have us by the balls. Monopolies are forming online.

eBay. What alternative do we have to eBay in the UK? A garage sale on a damp Sunday? Not quite as far reaching is it? eBay know this and have suddenly doubled their fees to a massive 10%. That’s on top of the listing fees and PayPal fees.

Last year, eBay fees were around the 2% mark. What has prompted the rise?

Greed.

Sheer ugly greed.

Skype. Pretty big - may well end up taking over from mobile phone companies when Wifi and wireless data become more widespread, making 2G and early generation 3G mobile phone voice networks obsolete.

Who bought Skype a few years ago? eBay.

If this isn’t worrying enough for the competition, I haven’t even mentioned the biggest company of all yet - Google.

Google owns search, but not satisifed with ‘just search’ has broadened it’s horizons with mobile phones, maps, online payment systems and numerous other competition threatening giant projects.

Google maps in particular is pretty much the end for Sat Nav and companies like Tom Tom. Soon every mobile phone will have Google maps on it. “Tom Tom? Who cares?” You might say. Well this is just the small tip of the iceberg.

They even take photos of you through your bedroom window, and copyright it.

I think I’ll listen to some music to relax - this is all a bit stressful. Or maybe I’ll watch a movie.

BANG! I’m a criminal. I just watched that movie and now I’m a criminal. I just downloaded a crap pop song from the 80’s but apparently now I’m violating copyright, not simply listening to music.

It’s a bit like buying a CD and playing your friend a track from it through your HiFi whilst a dark shadowy policeman arrives on your doorstep and hauls away your friend, shouting that he’d broken directive 7162 and would have to have his memory cells purged because he heard a song without paying for it.

When presented with free means of enjoying experiences like movies and music, people will use it. It doesn’t make them shoplifters. It means that the old business model is being beaten by a new business model  - you might call it piracy, but I call it a legitimate way forward to a flat fee all-you-can-eat music & movie feast.

Who owns the music? Well, it seems some kind of completely unnecessary antiquated ’recording industry’ does, and they don’t want us to hear it unless they bankcrupt us first.

I would have nowhere near as deep enjoyment of music or film if I’d had to pay for each and every track and each and every movie.

On 6th April 2009, the EU ordered internet service providers to keep a track record of every website, email and phone call you and I make. With a search warrant, a policeman can access your private data, without so much as consulting you.

The internet is no longer ours.

It’s the property of big business and governments, and before long so will you be.

Joey is reading a magazine called ppaper, and she tells me about an article about Facebook and Google, and the Internet and how it should tie us altogether to be closer, but it goes onto say that it just isn’t happening.

After the latest awful redesign Facebook has now officially become rubbish. The holy water is just not there any more.

Socialising and friendship has become a TV show. There is something not quite real about this brave new world of passive virtual friendships, and I am completely sick of Facebook and Twitter. They should bring people closer together, but Twitter is only popular because it has a few candid celebrities on it.

Why be passive when you can be actively involved in your friendships? Why just sit back and watch like a voyeur would watch a porno?

Most people have no choice. Whilst at work, maybe you have a boring moment and maybe check Facebook for a few seconds. You pet your virtual dog, post something you think is witty, browse some photos of your friends getting drunk in a dark room, then you leave work late and don’t have any time to spend with your real dog or your real friends and family. I don’t like the way this use of technology is going.

The blame doesn’t lie at our door, it’s just the way the world is going. It’s quite scary really, how it’s taken advantage of our nature.

Rather than broadening and enriching our lives, some things are starting to eat away at it. Rather than meeting face to face we’re trapped on the end of a cable, and whilst Joey and I use it as a life line until I go to Taiwan in May, the surprising thing is the much shorter cable between one side of a town and the other splits the neighbourhood, empties the pubs and flats and sucks any debate or social interaction into electronic oblivion.

I am glad I have met a girlfriend who sees the world as clearly and as logically as I do.

The world may be in trouble, but we’re okay. We are now freed.

Imagine what it would have been like in the first world war as a heroic fighter pilot. Aeroplanes had only been around for 10 years and were made of wood and fabric.

On the training fields, you strap yourself into a wooden ‘bird cage’ and fire up the tiny propellor engine. You’d rattle into the air and observe the battlefield below from high up above. Your observatory man would drop bombs and take survilance photos, then you’d come back to base and have a beer.

Soon the German enemy would get wind of England’s tiny airforce of 33 planes, so the battle was now to be waged in the sky as it was on earth.

For these men, shooting down an enemy plane was nothing personal. These men were just doing their job. The wrecked plane would ignite and fall to the ground in flames, the pilot would be burnt alive, the flames from the engine in front of him engulfing him as he nose-dived. But after taking a kill, our heroes would never get to see the impact of loss on the enemy pilot’s family, the end result was not emotional - it was that of broken wreckage smouldering on the ground. They couldn’t even put a face or a name to men they’d just that moment shot down at close range.

Though one day a top ace of the British Flying Corps got a look into the cockpit of a plane he’d just shot down, the pilot dead from a bullet to the head, but also curiously a small terrier dog slumped dead in the cockpit.

The dog had been up in the plane, a mascot. The British flying ace felt something new - these planes he was shooting contained men just like himself, he was murdering man after man, their lives, the hopes and dreams along with them going down in flames. In situations such as these, there is no such thing as ‘the enemy’.

Even with the politics and technology which allow people to kill a faceless enemy, many times have soldiers looked into the enemy’s eyes as they kill, but rarely do they see the dead man’s family realising for the first time that ‘dad’ won’t becoming home again, or the moment’s in dad’s life which humanise him.

That it took a dead dog to make the fighter pilot realise this shows just how impersonal war can be. But after this, our hero was never the same. His mind got the better of him and his conscious was torn between continuing his successful elegance to his comrades and quitting altogether to get married and start a family featuring two kids and a pet terrier.

Sadly, before he could get his mind straightened out, the fighter pilot did something stupid. In the heat of battle, he swooped down over a wreckage he’d just shot down, he could bare no longer the impersonal nature of war, and flew by as a tribute to the fallen enemy. On the ascent back to the skies his plane was riven with holes from ground based machine gun turrets, and his engine set ablaze. The fighter pilot took out a pistol from a small pouch in the cockpit, and before the fire had chance to engulf him on the way down, he shot himself.

The best way to stop war is to make it personal.

The FIA knew they were breaking their own rules when they introduced the new points system, which was incidentally suggested by one Bernard Ecclestone. A crafty bespectacled genius of the highest order in my opinion.

The FOTA gaggle of united teams is bad news for the powers that be. In fact the battle between the teams and the FIA and commercial rights holders recently spilled out into Chelsea basements, with a leading F1 figure using the News of The World to expose Max Mosley’s weekend leisure persuits. Mosley subsequently hired a private detective and has admitted as much that he knows ‘for certain’ who set him up. The news on the grapevine is that this leading F1 figure will soon be exposed to the tabloids as well and possibly criminal proceedings will follow. But knowing Max, he’s probably waiting for the right moment for the great reveal.

The battle over control of F1 is nothing new, after all it was Bernie and Max themselves who came from the team’s half, and overthrew the FIA equivalent in the 1980’s.

Having done this, they’re better prepared than most to see of this new challenge from the teams.

Their method is to divide and conquer.

First of all, split off the independant teams, whom’s interests have always diverged with that of the big corporate teams and car manufacturers. The independants have been slung a few carrots, namely the budget caps and unlimited technical freedom. The car manufactrers who until recently had money to burn (and they will do so again one day) don’t like the idea of sticking to a £30 budget limit. They spend that on corporate hospitality buffet food and wheel nuts alone.

Sir Frank Williams would rather spend it on flywheel KERS. That’s the first division sorted.

It’s in Bernie’s interest to divide FOTA too. So having spoken to the independant teams, he put it to the FIA that ‘all’ the teams would really like the new points system. Of course the lower spending teams would like it - they’d snatch a few lucky wins early on (before the big spenders like McLaren could fix their crock of a car) and end up winning the drivers championship on 30 points!

The indies have also been thrown the very nice gesture of being allowed to cheat. Whilst the likes of Ferrari and McLaren have rear deffusers as flat as a super model’s bottom, Williams and Brawn have done all sorts of fancy things with their rears. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Toyota is now also an independant team in all but name, having had their budget slashed again (when the economy dived) and again (when Honda pulled out) and again (it was a windy day in Japan). Soon the survival of the team will depend on them making a profit! Who’d have thought it!

Well I am completely on the side of Max and Bernie. I know their plan may be criticised by some as making F1 unstable and giving it a bad press, but I actually love these shenanigans and political games. It adds another dimension to the weekends rather than just the racing stories.

And I am on the side of Max and Bernie because they’re completely right to divide and conquer the manufacturers.

The future of F1 lies with the independant teams, not with the large faceless corporations who cheat their way to championships with their massive budgets. Spending more on a car is the same as having a bigger engine and it’s a crying shame that the most innovative people at Williams, Red Bull (with Newey for art’s sake!) and Brawn GP will at some point this season have their winter inginuiety overtaken by a McLaren leaving a trail of burnt money from it’s rear.

I’d also like to see a relegation / promotion system in place, and you’re not going to have any fresh teams or the drama of relegation whilst the corporations have a money powered strangle hold over this great sport.

This blog is a preview of my new F1 website, starting soon at www.brawnf1blog.com

McLaren - what has gone wrong? The most resourceful F1 team on the grid, with the biggest budget has got it wrong. At least it seems for all the world that way from winter testing.

Testing comparisons are often misleading but I am reliably informed Brawn’s hot times were done with a respectable 50kg of fuel onboard. McLaren, at their best couldn’t get within a second of this. The team spent most of the winter puffing and painting around the track 2 seconds back from the front. That puts them in Force India or Super Aguri territory. Incredible.

That the clear pace setter in such a competitive field was fighting for it’s very survival just last month is even more remarkable. But it’s about time Jenson Button had a car able to portray his talent in a fresh light. Just how good is Jenson Button? This year, thanks to Brawn GP, we may well find out.

With the fuss over McLaren’s disarray and Brawn’s jubilation, it’s easy to forget the other half of the winter story - that of Renault, who found themselves in a McLaren-like position during the first few tests before turning things around very suddenly and that of Red Bull, who’s stunning looking Adrian Newey designed challenger was undoubtedly putting in Brawn style performances earlier in testing. This story is by no means over.

Drivers like Vettel and Alonso clearly have more to add.

Williams & Toyota meanwhile also have potential to surprise although my source at Williams suggests internal politics and leadership issues are effecting the team. Maybe the great Sir Frank Williams does not have the single-handed control over the team’s direction any more, in the same way that Patrick Head cannot dictate the technical side as masterly as he did in more straight-forward eras.

Meanwhile BMW have had a low key winter in many respects, at least in that their pace has neither been bad nor stunningly good. The journalists seem unwilling to notice BMW, or indeed even The Red Barons, whom I suspect will more likely put a damper on the revolution come the Australian Grand Prix next weekend. The Red Barons have a habit of doing that.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that despite a few incredible times from Brawn, the majority of winter testing has been incredibly hard to call.

And it’s not the first time McLaren have sandbagged during the winter, allowing others to steal the limelight to attract sponsors.

So take this revolution with a pinch of salt. Brawn GP - more so than anyone else, need new sponsors!