Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Future products, I think, have a habit of revealing the true flaws in the previous product.

For example looking at the new Ford Street Ka reveals that many people who bought the plain old Ka thought they could do without a roof in sunny England, and complained that the interior just wasn’t quite plasticy enough.

Likewise, that NASA plan to replace the Shuttle with a metal bucket on a parachute reveals that NASA thought the Shuttle was a real shitter that kept exploding and killing people.

Also the fact that my year old £1000 Macbook Pro has started to creak reveals that many people have experienced this and that is why Apple have decided to make the new one out of one big laser cut block of aluminium with no joins, for £1700.

This is why they are rich.

Things are slightly different on the internet. When a website is replaced by a newer model, it’s usually replaced by a different website altogether. Whoever achieves this will turn from a slumdog into a billionaire over night.

On the internet there is a nasty little class system at work too.

MySpace and Facebook are prime examples. When MySpace became full of ‘my first komputa’ chavs we all moved to Facebook. When all the Facebook applications turned into spam and viruses which started attacking us we all moved to Twitter to be around more respectable company, such as Stephen Fry.

The problem with Twitter though, is for the first time in the history of the internet it’s actually a step backwards.

The principle is right but the website itself is far too basic, and for once in the case of Twitter, “keep it simple stupid” is not the answer.

An example - you follow lots of interesting people, let’s say just 7 of them. However if just one person per day has a case of verbal diarrhea and spews out 10 messages in the space of a couple of hours this pushes all your other interesting friends off the page every single day.

And for some reason I never feel compelled to look at more than one pages worth of Twittering.

Meanwhile on Facebook, the problem seems to be that nobody really tweets enough, because you’re all scared of what people might think (you bunch of complete cowards).

People don’t seem to be honest, or frank, or blunt, or to be quite frank and blunt - have much to say at all, with a few exceptions. It’s all become a bit safe, it’s all become a bit of a peacock show of fluff, a bit of a bluff. Photos from an uneventful night out are made to look like a 1980’s cocktail party at Elton John’s pent house.

I enjoy reading those notes or blogs from friends who risk their neck and don’t really censor themselves, especially when they have a unique style and a theme or use photos to head up their note. A spammy ‘25 things’ note is just not quite the same.

Beyond the obvious ‘look-at-me’ value from the uploader and the obvious ‘voyeurism’ from the viewer, there doesn’t seem to be much incentive to keep using Facebook, especially as we all have mobiles, email accounts and - mouths.

The reality of Facebook’s day to day ramblings are nothing like the 18th century era Marie Antoinette orgy that people like to portray them as.

As Stephen Fry would say, “It’s all become a bit low rent”.

In fact the sensible people have vanished altogether to conduct their lives in private, and Facebook is dying on it’s arse. Which is a shame really because it’s uniquely addicting, potential ego boosting and occasionally speak-your-mind joyously entertaining.

The fact is though, that Facebook, and MySpace before it, and Friend’s Reunited before that (pah!) all made absolute billionaires out of their creators.

For anybody that joined Facebook only not to really use it, or to leave later on, here is a customer waiting for a replacement.

For the millions who have flocked to the company of Stephen Fry on the not-quite-the-full-deal Twitter, there is an opportunity in waiting for some lucky inventor.

There is a slumdog out there somewhere ready to step up with their idea for the future of social networking, the customer base is huge - the whole of the world wide Internet.

I have a feeling that this time it won’t be a revolution, but an evolution of what went before.

It’s simple really. Forget stupid pokes. What would you really miss if these websites disappeared today?

What do I miss about MySpace?
The ‘my website’ feel of the customised page and the music orientated design. I didn’t miss the tatty customisations by chavs and the bad technical side.

What do I miss about Facebook?
It’s become something of a jack of all trades, master of none, witness the awful pop up MSN style chat, but it does still have it’s uses. Organising events and a spam-free friend-messaging emailer for one, and a good way to get your blogs and photos noticed, another. I won’t miss the fact that it’s now ever so out of fashion and slightly naff, and the abject failure of the open ‘apps’ side, which was once so promising. Facebook, in the last 6 months, has not played to it’s strengths.

What do I miss about Twitter?
Nothing yet, but when it’s gone due to being a bit rubbish, I’ll miss having a first hand insight into the world of famous people and being able to follow (without the many annoying distractions on Facebook) those friend’s candid enough to reveal something interesting, the moment it occurs. It’s also a good way to get a feel on the news, on opinions, on the pulse of the world’s people. As a collective text it (regrettably) makes news agencies and journalists redundant, or at the least turns huge news organisations into ‘just web editors’ collecting together 2nd hand news from Twitterers. However if it kills the tabloids and ITV I’ll be more than happy. Bad quality journalists without an interesting voice of their own when there is pressure placed on the market, will be the first to die off. However at the other end of the scale I hope professionals, like at the BBC in most cases, make it into the next decade alive.

Now some suggestions:

Imagine a searchable text generated by people, like Twitter but based on locations. When the US Airways plane crashed in the Hudson, you could use a Google Map’s style interface to view what people were muttering as they looked out of their windows (of nearby flats, not the plane, ahem). Similarly, a radar of famous / interesting people would be handy, because this is pretty much what all the success of Twitter is based on - and don’t let the Open Source tech nuts tell you differently. If they had their way instead of a map we’d all be searching for secret code words prefaced with hashes on some kind of black and white terminal screen.

I think the next generation website has to take some cues from video games as well. A class system could be in place where people could rise up it based on how much they say and how interesting it is. The higher class you are the more you’re noticed in the community. Community leaders would emerge and get due recognition. This would be a motivation for people to be more candid, and to stop simply looking on mutely.

Many of my closest friends are on Facebook - but because they’re not techno nerds like me - they never really say anything or use it.

Something needs to happen to motivate them to get more involved. The same person might happily play a casual game on the Wii but never write a blog. Current ways of blogging and surfing websites are not interesting enough to bring these technocasual people on board, which is a shame because they’re usually some of the most interesting ones, who actually have lives to lead

The final aspect which must be present is that the website is primarly a communication tool. Facebook has gone some way to replacing email for casual social chat, and even some business communication. This is a huge feat. It’s not effected by the same spam which blights email, when you get a message on Facebook you know exactly where it came from.

So the new website must:

Have a sense of community but with a class ladder, leaders and followers. Video game style.
Be more locally based but expandable via a location based search to gauge moods and news first hand
It must pander to people’s egos in some way.
It must have a voyeurism aspect.
It’s got to be a communication tool, a casual means of expressing oneself in the company of friends.
It must contain multimedia like photos and videos.
It mustn’t go to far and be the jack of all trades. YouTube does video, I hear

These are the key aspects, and in my next blog I’ll try and put them into a fully formed idea for a social networking website of the future.

PS

Congratulations for reading this far. You must really really really had wanted to get to something more interesting. Well… tough!

I have just booked a flight to Hong Kong to see my girlfriend and I’ve realised that being 29 gives you a good sense of how time is accelerating.

It seems like only yesterday that I was in my early 20’s. Applying that same logic to the future means I’ll be 40 in a blink of an eye!

In the grand scale of things we human beings pop in and out of existence like little electrical particles, so I better make the most of my fizz whilst I still have it.

Too often the most important things in life like girlfriends, wives and work have to be compromised for them to fit together unless you’re polygamous.

Rather than go for just 2 weeks to see Joey in Taiwan, I’ve decided to take a working holiday and do what I do already but instead of the raining sky and the old desk, I’ll have my girlfriend for company, with the warm pacific breeze and a view of a river.

In Hong Kong I’ll buy up all the shops and sell them all on eBay, and if they let me back in to get my flight back to England I’ll do it all again for the benefit of Mr eBay UK.

I also want to ride on a scooter through the mountain roads.

Instead of walking through traffic to Tesco after a days work in front of the computer screen, I’ll be able to pad around bare foot on sandy beaches with the one I love, after a days work in front of a computer screen.

It may be enough to make me leave England forever, although I will miss my oven, mum and sister.

And Mini Eggs.

The good thing about this new global world tied together with the internet, cheap flights and elastic bands like a ragged ball of wool that a kitten might throw down the stairs, is that when you go on holiday you can take your laptop with you and work your little socks off in the same place as you ended the 2 week holiday in.

The bad thing about our ragged ball of wool world is that you become torn between two homes, which even when connected with dancing multicoloured lines of thread, the fact remains that they’re very very far apart indeed.

Choosing one becomes impossible.

It’s a far cry from when our grandparents used to move around the corner when they got too old.

I guess at 29, my time has come to move around the word before moving around the corner.

U2 – No Line On The Horizon

The album starts with a faint horn in the background, before the wails of guitars come in. The song is:

1. No Line on The Horizon. This is about Bono. He’s looks out at a huge vista, hazy white plains top and bottom blended into one, like being lost at sea in the fog. The song is about Bono checking his bank statements.

2. Magnificant. This is also about Bono. The songs starts like a bulldozer hoisting up huge wedges of concrete, this song begins with the sound of powerful metalic reverberations, with a humming bass line before the machine gun fire of Larry Mullen Jr’s drums rips through the junk yard ambience, paving the way for the crisp yearning voice of Bono, cooing ‘Magnificant, Magnificant… I was born, I was born…’. This is about when Bono gets out of bed in the morning and looks in the mirror. ‘Only love, only love… can leave such a mark’.

3. Moment of Surrender. This song is about Bono. The song begins with a haunting pipe organ against the backdrop of African style drums. It’s about a weekend Bono had last year, where he bought a round of drinks in a pub, which he refers to as the fabled ‘moment of surrender’. “I was punching in the numbers, on an ATM machine” he mourns.

4. Unknown caller. This is about Bono. From an opening which sounds like the barking of dogs over an echoing chime of a guitar outside in the summers breeze, before Bono sings ’sunshine, sunshine’, this is about a nice sunny day Bono had last year, which was interrupted by a Skype call on his Apple Mac, which caused his computer to crash. “Force quit, and move to trash”, suggests Edge’s backing vocals, in reply to Bono’s wail of “Speed dial, no signal at all”. Helpfully edge continues, “Restart and reboot, you’re free to go. Password, enter here, you know your username so put it in…sush now..” After that Bono went back outside with a cider.

5. I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight. This is about Bono’s wife. “Every beauty has to go out with an idiot”, he sings. “The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear”.

6. Get On Your Boots begins with a rapid fire tumble of drums before Bono remembers seeing a really hot East African woman at a funfair during a trip to raise funds for AIDS. As Bono revealed on the Jonathan Ross show last week, Get On Your Boots is East African slang for putting on a condom. Bono spent a lot of time around the funfair, and when he met her, he fucked her behind the ghost train. This is what the song is about.

7. Stand Up Comedy. This is about Bono. “Stand up, this is comedy”, sings Bono. This song is quite self explanatory really.

8. Fez / Being Born. Fez is an instrumental about Bono and features Bono singing “let me here the sound” (a line from Get On Your Boots) over and over again. It’s a recording of the funfair where he met the sexy African lady, and that’s what he shouted to her behind the ghost train as she screamed with delight. Being Born is also about Bono. “6AM, African sun… lights… flash past”, pretty self explanatory really: this is about his journey back from the funfair in the morning.

9. White As Snow. This is about Bono, and is very haunting. It’s about when he visited Birmingham. He drove up from London, singing “Where I came from there were no hills at all”…”The land was flat, the highways straight and wide.” Him and Edge would drive up but get stuck in traffic jams. “My brother and I would drive for hours like years instead of days. Our walls are every passing stranger, every face we cannot know”. They got there eventually, but the shops were closed.

10. Breathe. This is probably my favourite song on the album about Bono.

“16th of June, Chinese stocks are going up
And I’m coming down with some new Asian virus
Ju Ju man, Ju Ju man
Doc says you’re fine, or dying
Please!
Nine-oh-nine, St. John Divine on the line, my pulse is fine
But I’m running down the road like loose electricity
While the band in my head plays a striptease”

This is about going mad.

11. Cedars of Lebanon. This is about trees. The Cedars of Lebanon are a species native to the coast of Lebanon, the Mediterranean lapping against the beautiful shore. Unfortunately the trees are now all shot to pieces. A sad Bono recalls, “This shitty world, sometimes produces a rose”.

He’s speaking about a young kid, with bright blue eyes, playing with friends amongst the cedars near the beach.

Now it’s just a wasteland.

Next week, Automatic for The People analysed in detail.

This will be my last blog about ‘what the hell is going on in modern life’, because I’m getting fed up of the negativity.

Here we fucking go again.

First of all, Alfie.

He’s a 13 year old kid who’s become a father, after his 15 year old ‘girlfriend’ gave birth. Alfie could be a grandfather at 26 at this rate, not to mention the fact that Great Grandmother would be barely out of her 30’s if this carried on through the generations, which I think it clearly will because nobody concerned has a fucking clue what they’re doing.

Up pops Max Clifford, the very comic book definition of a pigs swilling muck muncher, rocking his head back and forth at the trof of dirt. He plasters Alfie all over The Sun, under the guise of ‘helping them out, because he felt sorry for them’.

Either Max Clifford has an awful lot of guilt to bury, or he is lying about not taking a fee from a 13 year old dad and a dying cancer patient.

Anyway, up he pops and everybody makes noises of shocked indignation at the state of the nation and what kind of ignorance and poor sex education can lead to a baby having a baby barely older than he is. Alfie’s mum must feel like she’s had twins. Or maybe that’s the ploy all along. In order to get more benefits, she needed another kid, but nowadays the chav’s are so lazy they can’t even be bothered to get pregnant any more, so get their kids to do it for them, just like they carry the spliff upstairs.

I don’t think the problem is sex education, despite a lot of hang wringing from fluffy liberal women in their 40’s and 50’s. It’s a bit patronising to kids, really, to suggest that unless they’re taught about how to put a condom on a banana during nursery school, they’ll end up a dad at 13.

All the government will end up doing is pour yet more money down the drain, patronise and misunderstand the real problems.

No, the problem is emotional and cultural. If you bring your kid up in a pig sty, you’ll end up with a pig (or maybe several). If you’re kid is emotionally damaged from an awful upbringing and a corrosively nasty group of playground chums, you’ll end up with someone who doesn’t really give a feck about sex, at whatever age, whatever the consequences.

Whilst most of us had barely learnt to wank, Alfie is sitting in his lounge smoking a fag while his girlfriend changes nappies.

Decisions are emotionally driven. Always.

If you wanted yet more proof of the emotional bankruptcy effecting the world at the moment, just look at the outpouring of grief towards Jade Goody.

Following on from Scott James Ramnant here:
http://www.netsplit.com/2009/02/26/drabble-contest-the-siege/

And my good friend Andy here:
http://blog.zrmt.com/2009/02/26/drabble/

Is my short story of exactly 100 WORDS…

It wondered hither and dither

Stalking around the network like a dark shadowy hyena


The virus reaches base


Rachel reacts in horror as the life support systems shut down one by one


In the bio dome steam whips into the outer atmosphere in a frenzied coordinated collapse


John is crushed by a closing door, his lumpen amputated arm falling hopelessly to the floor

Bill shouts across the control centre floor to a hysterical Rachel


“Run Rachel, through the airlock to the escape pod!!”


“But…” says Rachel. “What about you!?”


“I’m staying” sighed Bill. “I’m too fat to fit in it”.

Things have been very hectic recently, with almost my entire existence given over to my girlfriends.

Both girlfriends are productive persuits, full of all the joys and frustrations that life’s rich tapestry can bring.

With Joey now in the Pacific Prison of her home country, I have been spending a lot of time with my other one, the iPhone. I won’t give too much away but needless to say we’ve made love on many occasions and produced a baby. Thus sometime in the next few weeks marks the release of my iPhone game to iTunes and the Apple App Store. Happy times*

(*It has been a fucking nightmare)

So what can you expect?

I won’t give too much away but to say that it’s a twist on Lemmings, with the classic gameplay of Lemmings, featuring levels a bit like in Lemmings, and controls like in Lemmings but for the iPhone.

Rather than go into the details here I’ve decided to setup an iPhone game publishing ‘name’, which possibly could be Nanopunk, with it’s own website detailing the process of making an iPhone game from start to finish.

The website isn’t finished yet though and as you can see from the screenshot above neither is half the game, but I’ll make some predictions.

The iPhone games market will be huge in the coming years, as people move from casual gaming on laptops and PCs to their mobile phones, which are now at a level to properly do software justice.

Why? On the iPhone and Google’s Android, games can be downloaded in seconds over the air straight to the phone. This is the business model of the future.

It’s happening with the XBox and Playstation 3 as well, but the mobile game market is less mature and has historically been graphically underpowered until now, and the opportunities are bigger, and for now the novelty factor is higher.

Unlike the Sony Ericsson’s and Motorola’s of the past, the ‘new generation’ mobile like the iPhone are more akin to a tiny laptop than a mobile phone, but retain the sleek and personal touch of something which fits into your pocket like an electronic status symbol.

Yes the Sony PSP has been around for a while but it’s a separate entity, something you don’t always bring with you, and it lacks the social aspects of being a phone. It’s also completely closed off to the ingenious indie micro studios and but for a few, is dominated by the unoriginal, bloated and heavily marketed wares of large companies, which only hardcore game addicts enjoy, i.e. young men and teenagers.

Highstreet stores such as HMV, if they’re not already, will become waddling dodos.

With the iPhone, exposure is no longer determined by how big your marketing department is or how many retail and distribution connections you have.

If you have a quality game, with original ideas and appeal, it will get it’s 15 seconds of fame with the massive iPhone blog readerships around the web, on places like www.toucharcade.com which have huge followings.

If your game is viral or has an ‘X-Factor’ it has the potential to spread around like wildfire and if you’re lucky it will end up making millions. Others have already done the same, with what is essentially just a pet-project knocked up over a few months in their flat.

Exciting and revolutionary times in the mobile world, then… for now.

View a video of the prototype here (the finished version will work in landscape view)

News just in, newspapers have found a new way to boost profits.

Cancer stories.

Here for example is a list of things the Daily Mail thinks will give you a horrible slow death by cancer:

Red wine

White wine

Facebook

Going to the doctors

The Menopause

Driving in your car

Not being rich

Big Brother

Being Irish

Soup

Not having enough sex when you’re old

Being human

Being a cocaine sniffing dog

Having coffee instead of tea

Caffeine

Mouth wash

Eating quickly

Being beaten up

Not cutting off your foreskin

Irish sausages

Talcum powder

Mobile phones

Being a big baby girl

Vitamins

And that’s just a brief selection of the stories published in the last 3 weeks. I can also add to that a few of the old chestnuts which are now embedded in the national psyche, such as eating red meat, drinking a mere smidgon of alcohol, wireless internet and not checking your bollocks enough. I used to love feeling my balls and now I don’t dare.

So thank you, the Daily Mail.

The clue to the pointlessness of all these studies is in the titles. Anyone who thinks that eating fewer sausages and chatting less on their mobile will make them live longer, will also have to avoid pretty much doing anything for the rest of their lives, in the vain hope they might somehow end up dying from starvation rather than cancer.

The positive advice is even more ridiculous. They say that owning a dog boots your immune system but I fail to see the link. Maybe if you share ice-cream with it? One article bangs on about the virtue of exercise in beating cancer, and then another page of cheap toilet paper grade bullshit goes onto to say that exercise is useless unless you also get 7 hours of sleep afterwards. Apparently, possibly as a result of all this bullshit, if you have migraines you’re less likely to get cancer, and if you drink tea you’ll be as fit as a fiddle. That’s ignoring the story they published the next day, about drinking coffee, because apparently it’s caffeine that gives you cancer but they failed to draw the link between tea and caffeine.

I don’t know what’s more worrying, the fact that scientists have to produce these studies in order to win funding and to draw attention to their work, or the fact that the newspapers, supposedly the voice of the public, are full of complete drivel designed to give everybody nightmares.

The ’scientists’, funded by cancer charities no less, should be doing a better job on their maths. Their studies usually quote a percentage increase in cancer risk, for any given activity which they mistakably deem hazardous. Apparently, we’ve all got a 25% chance of eventually dying of cancer, so if wine increases your risk by 160% and you add up all the other stuff like soup, sausages, foreskins and facebook I’ve calculated that you have a 10,000% risk of dying from cancer.

The good news is that if you avoid all those things on the list you’ll be 10,000% less likely of dying from cancer and will instead die from mental illness.

So my advice is to avoid drinking soup or wine, to avoid being a big baby girl and to give the mouth wash and talcum powder a miss before going to bed early, and most of all to avoid reading the fucking newspapers.

Back when I was a student, I had a credit card.

Making sure to pay off the 50p I spent on it each month, I never wasted any money on interest. To me, wasting money on interest was a repulsive idea. Why should a student give parts of his loan meant for education, to the mega rich banking industry?

In 2003 my card only had a £500 limit so even if I wanted to buy a helicopter, I couldn’t.

Alas, that shiny £200 TV though was one temptation too many and the bank knew it, like a magician playing a card trick with me.

Slowly I began to use it more and more, but not in the way you might think.

I made around £600 a month in profit from buying and selling items on eBay, and the card’s spending power was essential for buying bargains to sell for a profit.

But the fact remains that I was a student with £8,000 worth of student loans to pay off, yet unasked HSBC automatically increased my credit limit on the card to £4000.

Maybe they wanted to support my eBay business, but I doubt it.

That, as we now know, is how they make their huge profits: to get people into debt and make a profit off the extortionate interest rates, which are well above the base lending rate. It should be illegal but it isn’t. Basically, it has now fucked up the world.

Back when the base rate of interest was a huge 6%, during boom time (it was high to prevent inflation) credit cards were charging up to 28%. That’s how much customers were being ripped off…its still not illegal though, it’s called the Financial Services Industry.

Now the interest rate is close to zero, they’re still creaming it off. I get charged around 18% APR.

Later, shortly after finishing university I had a job with a modest salary, I couldn’t afford to pay off a £4000 credit card bill let alone the interest on top of that, but the banks know that people spend what they have available to them. My debt hovered around a manageable £1000, but they still kept upped the limit to £7000 like a carrot. Why?

I had letters through the post offering me personal loans and mortgages. I, a student!

Shortly afterwards as my pay and prospects rose so did my spending power, and the bank knew that by spying on my statements.

And so they got their loot, they stole from me over the years, roughly to the tune of £3000 in interest over 7 years, but it gets worse…

The credit card was always a useful tool and an indispensible asset to my eBay business, which was doing well but this regular outgoing and incoming effected my daily balance so I never knew what the true cost of living was. It had the effect of hiding from me the truth. How much I spent on food, how much on bills, how much on direct debits per month during the boom times - I had only a very vague idea and my estimate was much lower than it actually was.

Soon the bank had increased my credit limit to £8500, without even consulting me. They knew I had no chance of paying off such a rediculous sum of money, the interest on which would be roughly £400 a month, and yet they were prepared to let me spend that much. They had other tricks up their sleeves as well, which were written in the reams of small print which nobody reads.

Article 48.9: Credit card cash withdrawals in German zoos: I have £200 of cash costing me £7 a month in interest for 2 years sat at the bottom of my credit card balance, untouchable. I had expected to pay it off the next month, when I paid £1000 off my balance, but no it ‘remains until my full balance is paid off’, which isn’t much good to me because there’s now 5 grand sitting on top of it like an elephant.

Well, as all of us have now discovered, what the banks have done amounts to a genocide on our livlihoods, a noose on our dreams, a choke on our long term prospects.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been careful with your money or not, we all have to suffer the consequences of the global economic collapse.

Someone you know has probably lost their job this week. If not, then they will.

Slowly, like a magic trick unfolding, like an impossible knot forming in a rope, somehow - I still don’t know how, I had a £5000 debt on my credit card and nothing left to sell, even though I had a decent wage and had made a profit of between £50 and £700 on 90% of my eBay sales. I had worked hard for this.

And now the economy as a whole has well and truly crunched, I can’t even buy and sell my way out of it. It’s as well I still have my job as a web designer.

I know it sounds rediculous, I know it sounds stupid that anyone can build up a debt like this on a credit card over 2 years, but I’m not alone it seems.

It’s not as if the weight or urgency of the debt is crippling me or endagering my lifestyle, but that’s exactly how the banks get you to use the credit card in the first place. Slowly but surely, they’ll catch you like small fish in a huge trawler net, and your money becomes theirs. Credit cards are a con trick, an imaginary loan, which have ruined the world economy.

Rather than being in a minority, I find I’m in a huge majority. Nearly everyone of my generation has some kind of massive debt around their neck.

The plan is to give the banks yet more money so that they start lending money to each other again.

I fail to see how this helps us.

When society as a whole is bankrupt, how does it help to give the thieves who took it all in the first place yet more of the public’s money, in the form of a bail out by the tax payer?

Why isn’t the common good being used to pay off the debts of me and you? Why is it being pumped into a failing, faulty and corrupt system, which will fail again and lead to another period of economic woe?

To make matters worse, even in this crippling recession the banks are still creaming it off. It would help for them to pass down the government help, they haven’t. It would help for them to charge a more reasonable rate of credit card interest, to help me pay off my debt. But they’re determined to get as much profit as possible from my woes.

What’s also astonishing is that they now have the benefit of hindsight in seeing the damage they’ve done not only to themselves but to the entire world by pursuing this strategy, yet they don’t change.

As for us, mere citizens, we got a token 2.5% cut in VAT which amounted to absolutely fuck all but had the physcological effect of making us spend our ways even further into debt, at Christmas.

That’s the idiotic Gormless Brown’s idea of ‘kick starting the UK economy’.

The fact remains, that the banks have taken advantage of basic human nature and used it against us for their short term gains. It’s greed of the highest order, psychopathic behaviour from an essential institution, once trusted and valued.

It should never have been allowed to happen.

PS

I often wonder why our pound dropped from being worth 2 dollars in the pound, and 1.4 euros, in the space of just a few months. Now I know the terrible answer:

UK consumer debt as a percentage of GDP: 110%

The next highest in Europe is France at 70% 

In short - we’re fucked.

As a collective nation, we owe more on our credit cards than we actually earn and export in entirety. I am not sure how we’ll pay it off, and it’s only going to get worse until the banks are lynched in riots.

While I can honestly say that listening to Morrissey’s new album whilst browsing Poundland yesterday was one of the most depressing experiences of my entire life he really does come up with some powerful and moving music.

In fact, I have decided that there is nowhere else on Earth where you can get such blunt social commentary and mastery of language than in good old England.

It’s wonderful. Even when I was in Spain, because I am too lazy to speak a word of Spanish I began to yearn to hear an English voice. Sometimes whilst I’m out and about in Manchester city centre I yearn for that as well.

Well, it may not seem like it but in Manchester we’re on the cutting edge, we were the first industrialised city and you can see why the British have such incredible artistry and language.

It’s the need to express the utter pain of being on that bastard sharp edge all the time.

The daily grind at the office (it used to be the daily grind at the factory but they’ve all gone to China now).

The bleak unforgiving grey sky.

The merciless banks and corporations who take take take take take.

Well the irony is we’ll be the first when it comes to the next wave of modern life as well - complete and utter social & economic meltdown.

I admit that at the moment certain things are quite peachy in good old Manchester. I have a Taiwanese girlfriend who lives in Taiwan, my friend has a Polish girlfriend who lives in Berlin, and my boss has a Portuguese girlfriend who lives in Cheshire. But Manchester as a whole, rather than reflecting a nicely balanced multicultural melting pot, is starting to look like the Manchester of the future.

In the future England will be a bankrupt island floating ineptly in the North Sea like an oil spill, overflowing with criminal imports feasting off what’s left of our cities like diseased rats.

If that sounds a little pessimistic, and you’re probably wondering what triggered this rant off, then listen to this:

My girlfriend, a skilled marketing strategist, 29 from Taiwan, highly paid and from a well off family in beautiful Pacific breeze blessed country side, wants to come and work in England but our government doesn’t want her.

But Ramavich the Romanian rapist, 46 with no desernable charm or intelligence, can simply walk in through the front door, EU passport in hand, knife in the other, and carry on with his criminalistic urges until eventually someone notices and sends him to a nice comfortable jail cell at our expense.

Then he’ll be let out again and begin hanging around Piccadilly Gardens dragging his victims backwards through the snow whilst picking their pockets.

I struggle to make sense of the fact that whilst there are millions of low skilled immigrants staring at us with their glum uncaring eyes over the counter at Subway, my beautiful Joey isn’t allowed in due to a ‘points’ system.

I struggle to come to terms with the idea that whilst there are millions of jobless English people sitting at home watching the lottery draw, our major construction projects are done by Italian companies who employ cheap Russian farm dwellers that send all the worthless pounds we give them back to their families in Kazakhstan.

Anybody, from anywhere, from any culture, can see that this approach to immigration is a bit fucked up.

But there is a small light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s very ironic indeed.

Our currency has now dropped to such a pathetic level against the Taiwanese dollar, that the wage Joey quoted on her visa application is now worth a third more in pounds than before, which qualifies her for those extra 2 points required for the fabled working visa.

So it looks like I may get to see my girlfriend again.

Thank you, Gordon Brown.

For the latest on the fire see my Twitter at
http://twitter.com/commanderspike

My girlfriend Joey and I have a joke, where we speak to each other in cat language: “Meow, meow, meow?” making sure to include some body language and a change in tone of voice every now and again, carrying meaning in the otherwise repetitive use of ‘meow’. It’s based on a YouTube cartoon called featuring a cat called Detective Mittens, who is - yes you’ve guessed it - a detective cat with a detective style hat.

Well tonight I am a rubbish detective too.

A few hours ago my friend and I were trying to install Leopard on my Mac Mini, and as we did so he discussed his latest projects, the setting up of a free clinic for children in India, and the fact he was going to blog about it, photo document it and publise it through the internet in general. A good idea I thought, seen as those his blog is pretty popular and new tools like Twitter are becoming better known. Twitter was recently discussed on the Jonathan Ross show by Stephen Fry of all people. Both celebrities can be followed on Twitter, and as I watched their feed of messages this evening, Russell Brand also began using it for the first time.

It’s like Facebook status updates and photos without all the other rubbish.

Well, irony upon irony: within an hour of the huge fire breaking out in Manchester city centre that evening at least two other people were talking about it on Twitter, locally. One, a radio producer for Key 103, the other an IT professional living nearby. Both locals. I meanwhile was posting my first ever Tweets with my photos from the fire.

Prior to that, Andy and I were lucky enough to catch things quite early on. (See Andy’s blog here)

Bidding goodbye after getting the Mac up and running, we smelled burning out in my apartment’s courtyard and smoke in the air. Thinking my building was on fire, I craned my neck upwards but with not seeing any flames, I went back inside again. It was 1am. Andy called me a few minutes later to say that he’d found huge billows of smoke hanging over the city centre. I came out, camera in hand, and we walked to the site of the fire on Great Ancoats street, which was lined with hoses, fire engines and policemen.

When I got back to Twitter about it, my flat mate James, a professional broadcast journalist for the BBC on North West Tonight, had returned from his night shift and asked if he could borrow the photos for tomorrow’s news bulletin. He’d seen the update on my Facebook status, which linked to my Twitter feed.

All this new technology, whilst often quite mundane, has interesting implications for the news agencies, who may find themselves outnumbered (if not out skilled) by a load of roaming amateurs twittering into their iPhones. I am not sure I like this brave new world of news, for not everybody is a journalist or a detective. Most of us are Detective Mittens, just typing stuff into Google or snapping away with our pocket cameras without a thought toward quality or authenticity.

So, after my rediculously amateurish journalism exploits had ceased for the night, I began to turn my attention to amateur detective work.

From the numbers of the buildings on the opposite side of the road, Andy had deduced that the site on fire opposite was number 57 Great Ancoats Street.

A little Googling by Detective Mittens revealed that the site was home to a huge construction project, from a construction group named BSC.

BSC have been leaving a spectacular mess of unfinished sites around the city centre. Once destined to be huge residential towers, these ambitious projects have been cursed from start to incompletion.

At first we thought the tower on fire was BSC’s Sarah Tower, and although I am now not really sure whether the site on fire is that of the Sarah Tower or the more generically named Ancoats Street Tower (pretty sure that’s the one as the Sarah Tower is near the canal), you could reasonably suggest that BSC is one hell of a cow boy builder.

According to a further article offered up by Google, all of BSC’s Manchester projects are on hold due to the credit crunch. Previously they have constantly flouted health and safety laws, to the extent that a Polish workman actually DIED on site at the Sarah Tower. Other sites had live unfused electrical lines coming straight out of the ground supply into onsite tools and equipment.

Hmmm - the plot thickens. In fact the city council is very worried about one site in particular, because it’s in danger of falling down.

The fire at 57 Great Ancoats Street tonight may help that to happen sooner than the council think.

As for the cause? You decide…