Something amazing has just happened....

..Leeds United have won a league game!!!!!!!!








After last night's 2-1 victory at Hull, Leeds have now gone from 23rd place in the league table to..........24th.

Oh, and good to see Dean Windass was true to his word - Bwahahahahahahaha!

I'm off to buy a lottery ticket before this good feeling goes away!

Return of the Rugby

Friday nights are back! Last night saw what, for me at least, was the unofficial start of the new Rugby League season.






With the change to summer rugby, with the season starting in February (Rugby League does unusual things like that), the pre-season campaigns are already underway.
Most clubs so far have run a few friendly games, but mainly involving the academy players. Last night however, Leeds' first team took on their Huddersfield counterparts at Headingley.

The game was a joint testimonial game (Rugby League does funny things like that) for Paul Reilly, who was celebrating 10 years service at Huddersfield, and Keith Senior, who wasn't celebrating 10 years service at Leeds.

Senior had instead been awarded a 'four month' testimonial (Rugby League does funny things like that) "for services to the game". To date he is the only player to have played in every year of Super League, is the Super League top appearance and try scorer and has been a Great Britain regular. His testimonial was fully deserved.

Over the testimonial period, the players essentially try and raise as much money as possible and a nice little kitty. Some donate the money to charity, others use it as a way of funding a career away from the game. They'll usually hold a dinner event, golf day, release a special edition shirt and hold their own benefit game - hence my attendance at Headingley yesterday.

In essence, a testimonial game is an opportunity for the marketing men to dress up a pre-season kick about as something much more important. Aside from the extra fanfare before and after, they're pretty run-of-the-mill.

Anyway, Leeds won 50-0. They scored some cracking tries (especially given it's pre-season) and on this form, will challenge anyone, expect it's Leeds we're talking about, so the form will probably last until the last two months of the season.

The Super League season kicks off proper next week, with Huddersfield playing St Helens in Round 3 (Rugby League does funny things like that). At least I'll have something to update The One Pointer with.

Uninformed Technology

The Times have been carrying a few pieces this weekend about how our roads are very dangerous places to be.






In the UK, we all vehicles have to display a small disc in the corner of the windscreen which, for cars, can cost anything between £50 (discounting exempt cars) and £215 a year depending on how much your vehicle harms the local wildlife.

But last year, almost 2.2million people, twice as many as two years ago, didn't bother to purchase the said disc. Now ordinarily, that wouldn't be that big a deal. The only people that would be harmed is HM tax man, and we've got no sympathy for him.
But when it comes to car tax, it becomes a bit more serious. The problem with that is that the tax disc is the primary, ney, only method of proving that a vehicle is insured and has undergone an MOT where necessary, meaning that if there's 2million vehicles that aren't registered and taxed on the DVLA database, then there's probably more than 2million uninsured drivers on our roads as well.

That's bad news for the likes of you and me, who are thought to pay an extra £30 on our premiums to cover for claims involving uninsured motorists and it's even worse news if you're rear-ended by one of the aforementioned group.

But why the increase? Simply, there are less traffic police officers on our highways and byways. Less officers means less chance of getting caught and goes some way to explaining recent rises in drink driving incidents convictions as well. Reduce the chance of getting caught and you immediately reduce the risk.
The Government defends this by saying that technology is able to reduce the workload of traffic officers, and by 'technology', they mean speed cameras, and that this allows them to be deployed elsewhere.

They perhaps haven't realised the pit-falls of such a scheme. Such technology relies on information. Every legally registered car is on a database in Swansea.
So lets say you are photographed by a so-called "safety camera". The camera takes a photograph of your motor and it's unique ID number. Some bloke then comes along, empties the camera film and punches that number into a super-secret computer. The computer then gleefully spits out your name, address and various other nuggets of information about you and your car. The £60 fine is sent out to you - job done.

But take your unregistered cars. Type that number into the same super-secret computer and it'll knock it straight back. The offender gets then gets away with not only driving an illegal vehicle, but also the traffic offence.

The powers that be are determined to tackle the problem and have announced 'new technology' to catch out the offenders, so lets simplify this:
They have information that is flawed...... which means that the technology doesn't work..... so they bring in new technology..... but the new technology relies on information..... but the information is...... Oh I give up!

Don't Panic!

Shocking news this week. If you're not aware, the trial of the would be 21'st July bombers (I refuse to use that stupid americanised 21/7 term) is going on this week.






They're the people who allegedly attempted to set of explosions on London's tube and bus networks, only to see their devices fail.

Anyway, it emerges today that the sight of seeing a raving lunatic trying to detonate a bomb on a packed commuter train is enough to "cause panic".

I know, I was shocked too. People panicing in a dangerous situation. Whatever next?

Not under my (sun)roof

The local Leeds rag, the Yorkshire Evening Post, is famous for taking the side of the city's half-wits and attention seekers and on today's front page, it's standard fare.



The local media have been sympathising with this family who it's claimed have been "forced" to live in a Ford Mondeo.

It's the term "forced" though that is not only emotive, but completely innaccurate. The family have been on the council accomodation list with Leeds City Council and have gone through the system like many thousand others.

So by being in such a system, it's hard to see why they have ended up living in a car, parked up on whatever side-street they can find.

The problem is that they have been offered a home on Broadlea Hill in Bramley, but refused the property. Bramley is one of the areas focused on as part of the new "Respect" initiative and the Broadlea estate isn't exactly the most pleasent area of the city. Whenever there's a story on the local news about ASBOS's, anti-social behaviour and deprived inner-city areas, then you can guarantee that the reporters first words will be "Hi, I'm on the Broadlea estate in Bramley." It's hardly down-town Baghdad by any stretch of the imagination, it's a just typical inner-city council estate.

The family claimed that the home was "uninhabitable" and that "gangs of yobs roamed the streets".
In other words, it's a Leeds council estate.

Quite what this family were thinking they'd get one can only guess. When you are on the Leeds City Council housing lists, you aren't going to end up with a detached house in a leafy part of Bramhope or Calverley. Yes the house might have been in one of Leeds' most deprived areas, but that's a seperate issue and one which is far more important that your choice of home.

Leeds City Council, like all councils, have a finate amount of properties. If you reject one address, it's unreasonable to expect the housing department to have a range of homes on tap to offer you.

The sad fact about all of this is that this family have managed to create sympathy to their cause. They've been offered a house and turned their noses up at it. With council house waiting lists as long as they are, it's only right that they've been put to the back of the queue.

Welcome Back! Normal service has been resumed

What must be the longest Christmas break in history has just ended and I'm finally allowed back into college to start trying to learn something again.



After fighting though what seemed like three of the most pointless traffic jams this morning, I'm sat here and it's reassuring to know that not much has changed at Leeds Trinity & All Saints.

So far, the computer I'm typing this post on now has crashed twice in the space of 23 minutes, is struggling to open two windows in Internet Explorer and has made me reset my password because the IT geeks don't trust me to remember a seven character word for anything more than 28 days.

The timetables have been cocked up again, there are already a number of tutors that appear to be 'missing in action' whilst other lectures have been moved but nobody seems to know to where and when.

It's all in a days work at Leeds Trinity & All Saints.

Let's take a look at these charts

The Official UK Music Charts have undergone a lot of change in the past few years and it finally appears that those dinosaurs at the British Phonographic Industry have realised that the way to embrace the Internet is not to try and sue everyone that attempts to use it.

Music downloads had been much vilified by the BPI and copyright lawyers, who soon set after the likes of Napster and are currently going after Kazaa, and Russian site 'allofmp3'.
But in 2003, legal downloads started to take off. To date, Apple's iTunes music store have sold over 2billion tracks and currently holds the vast majority of the UK legal download market.

However, it wasn't until two years later that the BPI decided to step into the 21st century. They started to realise that people weren't interested in buying CD's in HMV or Woolworths and playing them on their Hifi. Instead, they were buying their music in their own front room, listening to it on their iPod and wirelessly transmitting the tracks around their home. And that led to changes in the charts.

First, the idea of a separate 'downloads chart' was toyed with but soon led to confusion and effectively, created two singles charts. So in April 2005, legal downloads were counted for the first time in a single, unified Official UK Singles chart. The results were almost immediate. Gnarls Barkley's single "Crazy" became the first ever track to reach number one based purely on download sales.

The only major stipulation with this system however was that the download could only chart if a physical copy was available in the shops at the same time, or the day following the song's entrance in the charts. That stipulation was removed in January 2007 and now any track, from any era, from any artist - dead or alive, can potentially hit number one.

And now I've eventually got to whatever point I was trying to make, because whilst the system has it's advantages, it's got some pretty big pitfalls as well.

The main bonus is that it more accurately than ever highlights the public's buying and listening habits. The week after the change, Snow Patrol re-entered the charts with 'Chasing Cars', a single that had previously reached number six back in July 2006 whilst rock band 'Koopa' became the first unsigned band in chart history to have a top 40 hit.
Where before, the charts were based on what record companies did to sell and market their music, it was now fuelled by consumers and truly reflected listener habits.

Well, maybe. You see whilst the new system has made the charts more meaningful and up-to-date, it's very much open to abuse.

Just take a look at this week's Official Top 40 and in particular, number 17:

17: Billie - Honey to the Bee

Now under the current system, this is a perfectly legitimate entry. The track reached number three in 1999 and thanks to downloads, has returned.

But this isn't a chart position based on music merits. Instead it's a chart position based on one of many radio station induced campaigns, in this case led by Chris Moyles on BBC Radio 1, to effectively turn the changes into a joke in the pursuit of cheap publicity.

No doubt the campaigns will quickly die off and the lazy marketing men of Britain will look for another bandwagon to jump aboard.
The positives of the new system certainly outweigh the short-term negatives caused by a few idiots and their subservient band of sheep-like listeners.

This woman is richer than you:

Makes you sick doesn't it?







The non-entity Big Brother racism row has dominated much of the news in the last two days, with over 30,000 complaints being made to the media regulator Ofcom - the previous record for complaints was a mere 19,000 for "Jerry Springer: The Opera".

The issue revolves around Jade Goody (above) and Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty and the growing friction between the pair.

The main argument erupted on Wednesday night, with Jade launching an expletive ridden tyraid at Shilpa over the trivial matter of some Oxo cubes. During the argument, Jade told Shilpa to "get back to the slums"whilst fellow inmate Danielle Lloyd asked "why doesn't she just f**k off back home?"
Yesterday, Jade will probably go down as the fastest recorded time for "digging your own grave on national television" after the shows producers called her to explain her "Shilpa Poppadom" remark.

The arguments as to what is and isn't racist will go on for much longer than Big Brother ever will. The comments being made to Shilpa are overtly racist but I don't think the animosity towards the Indian actress is racially motivated.
The problem is that Jade is fearful. Shilpa is an intelligent, successful and attractive woman who has shown that she can act in a dignified manner. Jade, for whatever reason, has seen that as a threat to her.

For Goody, this is the beginning of the end. Big Brother made her and it's about to break her in spectacular style.
Publicist Max Clifford made the point on Sky News yesterday that for anyone to recover from this sort of bad publicity, they would need to be and intelligent thinker and an intelligent speaker - Jade isn't either and I can't wait for the press to tie her in knots at the forthcoming press conference should she be evicted tonight.

She's shown herself up as a culturally ignorant individual who is completely undeserving of the success that has been afforded to her through a low-rent TV show.
The politicians are wading into the argument as well, with Gordon Brown on a mission to convince Indians that we aren't all that bad. What he probably doesn't realise though is that as he speaks, there are thousands of Jade Goody's in our inner city schools and job centres.

Wii'ing in my front room

Yesterday afternoon, after being in the incapable hands of Parcel Farce for 24 hours, the Nintendo Wii finally turned up on our doorstep.




It's not technically mine though. It's actually my brothers but seeing as he wasn't around, he borrowed my MasterCard to buy it and that the package had my name on the box, it was only right that I had a quick go.

The Wii is Nintendo's £180 answer to the XBOX 360 and the soon to come Playstation 3, the so-called 'next-gen' consoles which claim to be High-Definition (even though the XBOX lacks a HDMI port and therefore won't work with the majority of HD TV's and the Playstation doesn't appear to be working at all).

Nintendo on the other hand have stayed away from the Hi-Def gimmicks, realising that not that many of us have Hi-Def anyway.

Instead, they've gone for the 'innovative game play' market and I have to say, they've certainly cracked it.
Take WiiSports for instance. It's a series of sports games that includes tennis, golf, boxing, ten-pin bowling and baseball (pictured above).
Now on your run-of-the-mill Playstation, to hit the ball, you'd just sit still and press an elaborate combination of buttons that you begin to repeat like a robot after just three goes.
On the Wii though, its far more advanced. Instead of a control pad, you have a 'motion sensor remote' which essentially, is your bat. Swing the remote and the Wii picked up on the direction and speed of the swing and in my case, that translates to missing the ball completely and striking out.
The remote also acts as your golf club, tennis racket, bowling arm and even boxing gloves.

All in all, it's brilliant and certainly a long way from the 'coach-potato' gaming geek stereotype. The game play is unrivalled and at almost £300 cheaper than the forthcoming PS3, it's stonking value. Better still, it's make the perfect centrepiece for a beer-fuelled house party.

Will the novelty wear off? Probably but that'd be the same with any console. One thing is for certain though, it's a pretty good distraction from that essay due on Tuesday!

And the 'Hypocrites of the Week' award goes to....

ITV News - and in spectacular fashion.








With nothing better to do, ITV News have decided to sent their intrepid band of "reporters" to the ends of the earth to lecture us all on global warming.

One of them is in Antarctica telling us that all the ice caps are melting, that the polar bears are getting warm and that the sea is rising. Something he continued to tell us about for a good 10 minutes.

Then they cut to a bloke in some remote coastal village in Papua New Guinea. He tried to convince us that the villagers here would be the first "environmental refugees" (no, I don't know what that's supposed to mean either).

But it was the way he said it. He was a typical ITN mellow-dramatic, sharp peaks in voice type of reporter who was making sure we know who to blame.
"These people will become the first 'environmental refugees and they know which people to blame - it's YOU!
"Not me on the other hand, who flew 11,000 miles in a 747 just to tell you that and will fly another 11,000 miles back to London where a car will pick me up from the airport, but YOU!"

OK, he didn't say that last bit but I doubt he spotted the irony in what he was saying anyway.

Hopefully we'll have some proper news today. Maybe then ITN will stop acting like a set of complete muppets. I doubt it though.

They're early this year

The annual British Airways event is about to take place yet again this, except it's happening a little earlier this year.





Normally, this annual event takes plave in the summer, the height of the holiday period and the busiest time for the UK's ariports, but the 2007 extravagansa is taking place in this winter.

I am, of course, reffering the the annual British Airways staff strike.

Every year it seems, BA staff decide that it'd be a good idea to walk away from whatever job they do. We've had check-in staff striking over various issues, baggage handlers refusing to, well, handle baggage and mass walkouts in protest at BA's decision to change food supplier.
This time, it's the cabin crew's turn to stand outside Heathrow with placards and banners.

You've got to question though, what is it about BA and employee relations? Why is it that these strikes are so commonplace? It can't be a co-incidence surely?

Enjoy your flight everybody.

(Oh, and perhaps I should disregard the BA price in my little experiment the other day?)

Planes, Trains and stupid politicians

Airlines are taking a bit of a battering lately in the fight on global warming and yet another politician has thrown in his two-penneth.



Tory MP Tim Yeo is calling for a complete ban on domestic flights. He believes, that by taxing all flights between UK airports and forcing us onto the train, we'll be saving the environment and the hole in the O-Zone layer will be healed.

The only problem however, is he's talking garbage.

Not about the aircraft CO2 thing, on that he's probably right, but he's wrong on the 'take the train' rubbish.

There's a reason why, in Britain, we don't use trains. It's because they're crowded, late, expensive, unreliable, you need to be a MENSA member to understand the fare structure and they don't work in the autumn when leaves fall on the track.

Planes on the other hand are much more comfortable and in fact, they're cheaper. Don't believe me?

Just as a basic experiment, I've got train and plane fares for a one-way trip from London to Manchester, the sort of trip hundreds if not thousands of business people make on a regular basis. As part of this, I'll need to be in Manchester before 9:00am on March 20th (a date picked completely at random). They say you have to book in advance for the decent train fares, so I'm giving them more than a fare (geddit) chance.

Here's how they each got on:
First let see how the eco-friendly public service train did. National Rail offered me a single ticket from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly, leaving the capital at 6:20 and arriving in Manchester 2 and a half hours later at 8:50 via Virgin trains for the princely sum of £42.00.
Now for the airlines. There's actually a choice of three airlines, all vying for my business, so that should keep the prices competitive.
Firstly, British Airways, our national carrier. They'll offer to take me from London Gatwick and get me to Manchester by 8:10 for the fee of £39.10. That's already better than the train but I think we can do better.
Bmi are next up. This time you leave Heathrow, and land in Lancashire at 8:15 but for more than £10 less than BA - £29 to be exact.
But we're not done. This route has a new kid on the block, low-cost carrier Jet2. There London Gatwick to Manchester service comes in at an amazing £3.99, but before you get excited, that excludes taxes. That makes the £3.99 fare a £24.99 fare, still the cheapest of the three and more than £17 cheaper than the 'good for the environment, public service, publicly subsidised' train service.

And that's the crux of the problem. We're deciding to fly because, at the end of the day, we save money. The logical solution therefore in such case would be to lower your prices, improve your service and become more competitive would it not?

Not if your a minister. Improving services would cost money whilst lowering fares would hit the shareholders of the various private enterprises that have their fingers in the National Rail pie.
So instead of lowering the cost of rail travel to encourage the fliers and even motorists onto the trains, what you do is create a new form of taxation to deter people from taking to the sky's or the motorway network.
Except that doesn't work either so then you have to resort to making stupid statements like this one and quite quickly, you're back to square one.

The only saving grace is that we haven't elected this idiot, not yet anyway.

It's Football, but not as we know it

You don't need me to tell you that David Beckham's move to Los Angeles Galaxy is the biggest sports story of the week.








After being left out of the England squad and finding himself on the fringes of the Real Madrid first team, Golden Balls has decided to bend it in America for the next five years.

Today's newspapers have picked up on the small matter that the former England captain will become the best paid sportsman in the world, with a selection focusing on the fact that he snubbed numerous offers from English and European clubs who, in all honesty, could get nowhere near the financial package that the LA Galaxy and MLS have put together.

In truth, it shows how different sport is in the US compared to elsewhere. In Europe, we're just getting to grips with the fact that sport is now a commodity, sports clubs are businesses with a desire to make profit and that clubs no longer had the social responsibility that we once perceived they had.
It used to be that the owner of the local football club was a sheep-skin wearing, cigar chain smoking local factory owner on an ego trip. Today football clubs are run by a consortium of wealthy businessmen looking to sell tickets to other wealthy businessmen - and we hate it. We hate the fact that a season ticket can cost the equivalent of six months rent, we hate travelling across the country at some unearthly hour because a game has been moved for television coverage and we hate sticking a dish on the side of our house and paying some Australian bloke £50 a month to watch football on TV.

In the America though, it's a whole different ball game. Sport stateside has always been about the dollar. Fans in the UK were in uproar when Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes, proclaiming the death of lower league football and dubbing the new MK Dons "Franchise FC". Stateside, it's common practice. Club, sorry, franchise owners have commonly moved teams across the country looking for the next captive market. Once they've bled that market dry, they'll move to the next town where the mayor is willing to build a state-of-the-art 80,000 all seater stadium.
Even college gridiron is huge. It's unthinkable to think in this country that a clash between Leeds Metropolitan and Preston Polytechnic would attract crowds surpassing those for Manchester United vs Chelsea, but in the US they'd be calling a crisis meeting if that weren't the case.

And that's why Beck's is going to the US. What he'll actually draw from Galaxy for kicking a pig's bladder around a field will be small fry (in a sporting sense anyway). The difference will be made up from exploiting 'Brand Beckham'.
Image rights for a man like Beckham are huge regardless of where you are. Take that image to a nation that lives for celebrity and you've got a massive earning potential. The Beckham's have known that for years. The various pre-season tours to US, the MTV Awards apperance and the Soccer academy have all been efforts to raise his stock in the land of opportunity and LA Galaxy's season ticket sales less than 24 hours after the announcement are testament to that.

There is no denying that the critics will pounce on Beckham for this move. To make the move from one of Real Madrid's 'Galácticos' to a Galaxian in a sport which registers into insignifcance in it's respective country smacks of putting cash before credibility.
But Beckham has realised that his days at the top are numbered. He is making a move to a place where he will be adore just as equally as he was in his days in Manchester and Madrid.

Yes, it may well be a marketing move by the MLS and LA, but that probably says more about the attitude to sport in the US than it does about Beckham.

Well, that was a waste of everyone's time

The Consumer Electronics Show will have packed up and left Las Vegas by the end of today, so what fantastic new inventions will we be seeing in our homes in the next few years?





Errrm, not much actually.

The CES used to be the place where we'd all get a glimpse of the latest technology, the sort of thing we'd never seen before but yet, something we could buy within a few years time in our local Dixons.
We saw the VCR in 1970, Pong made it's debut in 1975, people looked in awe at the CD and camcorder in 1981, gawped at the processing power of the Commodore 64 a year later and applauded the DVD in 1996.

This year though, we haven't seen much, nay anything new.
Just look at one of this year's 'Best in Show': Ford and Microsoft have collaborated to create what they believe is ground-breaking, must have technology that will allow you to select mp3's, reply to text messages or make phone calls just by shouting at your dashboard.
The only problem is that isn't new technology, not in the slightest. Top Gear viewers may remember Jeremy Clarkson venting his frustration at an identical system in a Mercedes CL-65, before sending the German voice-activated sat-nav to Warsaw. In other words, a CES award winner is a technology that has been commercially available for a good few years, just with a minor tweak. You can even go down to your local dealer tomorrow and pick up a Ford Fiesta with bluetooth already fitted.

Then there's the Blu-Ray - HD-DVD battle. This battle has been going on for a while, mainly fuelled by the announcement of the Playstation 3.
The manufacturers were getting wary that people weren't buying either model because they didn't know which version would become the norm (hands up, who bought a Betamax recorder?).
So LG came along and some boffin in their creatives department decided "Why not have both?" and hence, the BH1OO. It's cheaper than a Blu-Ray player, will do twice as much as a Blue-Ray player and so, in theory, it's the one to buy. Debate over, no news story.

The only thing that actually sounds of any interest is the 'One laptop per Child' scheme, basically a £50 laptop designed to make computing accessible to those in third world countries. It's a superb idea, but one that's got lost amongst the gimmicks from the multi-nationals.

And that's been the problem with CES. The whole show hasn't been about inventions, it's about compressing as many stupid ideas into one to give the impression of a new invention. I don't want my PC to control my central heating via a touch-screen panel linked to my XBOX 360. I don't want to transmit videos from the internet via WiFi to watch on my cooker. I would like a stable Microsoft operating system that isn't riddled with security flaws, but that doesn't sound quite as fancy.

If you are going to argue a point, at least know what you are talking about.

Stupid people can be funny sometimes, but it's even funnier when stupid people think they are clever.






This evening I had the pleasure of enduring one such idiot, who seemed to think that he could lecture me on the European Convention of Human Rights.

Having studied the said convention as part of my Media Law & Regulation assignments, so I like to think I know the basics at least. Anyway, those of you from far-off lands and America will have no idea of what human rights are, so let me explain.

It's basically eighteen 'articles' which include:

• The right to life.
  
• Freedom from torture, inhuman and degrading treatment.
• Freedom from forced labour or slavery.
• The right to Liberty and to a Fair trial.
• Freedom from facing retrospective crimes or penalties.
• A Right to Privacy.
• Freedom of conscience.
• Freedom of expression.
• Freedom of assembly.
• The right to marriage and family.
• Freedom from discrimination.

Now this particular baffoon was intent on convincing me that by refusing to allow him to use our private toilet facilities, I was "infringing his human rights".
Initially I couldn't be bothered arguing with him. I'm a firm believer in the phrase "Never argue with an idiot, he'll only drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience." At that point I was prepared to ignore him and dismiss him as one of these stuck-up pillocks who feels he has a right to talk to retail staff through his nose, but he kept pushing me for an answer, so I gave him it:

"Well no to be honest sir, I don't agree with you. I cannot see how me refusing to allow you to use our private toilet facilites on the grounds that it presents a security risk infringes one of the eighteen articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, unless perhaps if you could convince a judge that urination as an act of expression."

At that he seemed quite taken aback that what he must have seen in his eyes as a "shop-serving minimum wage monkey" knew so much more than him about one of the most complex and controversial legal statutes in history.
Anyway he retired, tail firmly between his legs.

Only not quite, he then returned a few minutes later to shout across the store, "I've just gone against your wall, how do you like that?!"

Nice to see that I am still part of a civilised society. Perhaps he'd be quite dissapointed to know that every evening he's out-done by the tramp who shits in our skip.

Do we still care?

Does anyone in the UK still care about the Eurovision Song Contest?









OK, so Terry Wogan probably does after presenting the show for the past 312 years but apart from that, it's hard to find anyone who gives Eurovision the time of day.

Well Morrissey is apparently a fan as well and not only that, he doesn't like the fact that the UK doesn't win it anymore.

We had a fairly good spell in the late 90's. The UK won the thing in 1997 and came second in 1998, the first time that telephone votes from the public were used.

But since then we couldn't care less, partly because the UK song's points totals have barely scraped into double figures apart from 2003 when we got the dreaded 'nul points'.

But it looks like a case of Morrissey to the rescue. The former Smiths frontman wants to write the next UK entry after Daz Sampson's chav-fest last year came fifth from bottom. He believes that the problem isn't with an anti-UK attitude on the continent or an uncanny knack for countries in the Eastern block to vote for each other, but with the standard of music.

Regardless of what is actually the problem, I can't understand why artists don't avoid this poisoned chalice like the plague.
The chances of a UK entry winning are slim to the point of non-existent and when our entry does land back at Heathrow without the silverware, we'll all be demanding answers, heralding the death of British music and actually pretending to care - and it'll all be your fault.

Anyway, the chances of Morrissey reading this are pretty small and the chances of him taking on board what I say even smaller so Morrissey, if you do take on this thankless task, wake us up when you're finished.

Missing Prisoners

News is out today that our esteemed leaders have absolutely no idea how many prisoners have escaped from prison.






Apparently, around 700 inmates have gone AWOL in the past year but they have no idea who those 700 are or where they've ended up. And as daft as it sounds, there's no electronic record available to log lost lags but never fear, one is on the way (no doubt one which will develop thousands of bugs, be as secure as an open prison and will be outsourced to a tin-pot IT firm)

Perhaps there's even more irony given another high-profile escape this week.

One Small Step for Man

When you were a kid and used to dream about technology in the future, what did you think of?










The Flying car would have to be up there, robots that do menial tasks would be on anybody's list and surely and maybe even hover shoes?

Well today we are one step closer to the latter at least. Boffins at Electrolux haven't quite come up with hover shoes, but they have gone one 'o' further with their 'Hoover shoes'.

Long story short, they're shoes that vacuum the floor as you walk.

Feel free to insert sexist jokes in the comment's box ;-)

Bargain Hunt

Retail figures have been released in their droves recently and they aren't making good reading.








Aside from a surge in Boxing Day, footfall in UK shopping malls have fallen by about 7%, with entertainment stores barring the brunt of the drop. Woolworths and HMV are shaking whilst Music Zone have called in the administrators.
Elsewhere, sales at Next have also fallen although I've no sympathy with them. Any store that calls it's staff in during the early hours on Boxing Day just so that it can open it's doors at 5:00am to appease senseless sales shoppers deserves all the misfortune they get.
Across the board though, Internet shopping has boomed, which will probably explain why Music Zone might end up going the same way as Beanos in London.

I can't say I'm surprised though. This sort of thing was going to happen anyway because of the rises in cost of living, utilities, blah de blah, but some of it will be down to the sales themselves.

January sales have always been over-rated. The gormless and the ignorant lap them up but for the rest of us, feelings are fairly indifferent.
Sales are the perfect way for shops to get rid of the junk they don't want. Whether it's last seasons clothes or discontinued electronics, you'll see red sale stickers adorning it throughout January. Disappointingly, that £2000 plasma TV you've had your eye on since November will still have the same price tag on it after you found out that Santa couldn't fit it down your chimney.

Then of course, there's the buy-ins. These are items of cheap tat that the retailer buys in a few months before January for absolute peanuts from a supplier that wants rid of them. Throughout that time, they stick a massively marked up price tag on it. Come Boxing Day, people stand in amazement as that "£55 t-shirt" (wink wink) gets reduced to £5.50, not realising that the profit margin is still more than healthy enough for the companies shareholders.

An hour long browse around Leeds should just that. Only moderately busy shops but clothes racks full of tat.

Thankfully, they'll all be over soon.

The Worst TV Advert in the World?

Happy New Year folks! It's January 2007 and amongst other things, that means it's time for the January sales.






January sales tend now tend to take place in December rather than January, as over-eager company directors decide that they need to get the mad rush in as of Boxing Day to make their end-of-year figures look slightly better.

The net result is that on from 5:30pm on Christmas Eve (the time that all large shops must be closed by on Sunday) we're bombarded with adverts from furniture warehouses about their "Biggest sale ever starting Boxing Day 9:00am"

But the adverts are often terrible, this year being no exception. DFS are infamous for crap adverts but this years prize goes to 'Land of Leather'.

Using Chesney Hawk's "The One and Only" in any commercial is effectively signing your own death warrant to start with. The only situation that song actually ever works is a 3:00am in the Student's Union. Any other time is just unforgivable. I'm sure there's probably some old English law somewhere that says that if you find someone with that track on their iPod, you are legally allow to perforate their ear-drums.

If that wasn't bad enough, the voice over is just despicable.
In Britain, you could quite easily come up with a list of the most irritating celebrities on TV. You would then lock that list in a safe somewhere to prevent any advertising exec from thinking of using them on your commercial. Keith Chegwin would be on there, Jodie Marsh would be there somewhere as would Nikki from Big Brother but number one with the bullet would be former children's TV presenter Timmy Mallet.

Timmy Mallet personified everything that was wrong with TV in the early 90's with his programme "Wacaday". He was, quite frankly, an idiot.
Today he makes his living doing student gigs around the country, selling pink mallets to drunken freshers for £15 a hit. So on that basis, there is absolutely no way on earth that you would ever consider this fool for a TV commercial, unless of course you are Land of Leather.

So not only have you got a terrible song to your advert, it's accompanied by the most detestable man ever to grace British television.
For this reason alone, Land of Leather's January sale should be boycotted post-haste.