Could Do Better

I spoke on the most recent episode of my podcast about the recent collapse of HMV and other high street retailers. I didn't really speak at length about it because I figure my podcast is more for jokes rather than for me dissecting the problems faced by the British economy. But that’s the nice thing about having a blog, if you don’t want to read about the economy you could just skip this post. Don’t though because I assure you that it’s going to be well interesting.

See also: every shop in Britain

The media narrative of the collapse of HMV, Jessops, Game, et al. (and indeed the narrative coming from those companies themselves) is that they have been crippled by the growth of online retailing and by rising rents on their stores. According to this view falling sales and rising costs were squeezing their profits. This view is easy to understand, which is probably why it is being pedalled. It is also false. HMV stores were all cash profitable, that is to say they were taking in more cash than they were spending because there are a lot of people (myself included) who still prefer to buy things in shops than over the internet. So why have they actually gone bust?

Unintended Consequences

As you are well aware, Dear Reader, everything in Britain is now made of horse. It’s interesting to note that whereas in English most animals have one word for the living animal and one for its meat (cow: beef, pig: pork, sheep: mutton) horses do not. It’s interesting but it doesn't really have to do with what I'm going to talk about today which are unintended consequences.

I've always enjoyed this sort of thing, where someone makes a choice which ends up affecting something which is apparently entirely unrelated. It’s a thing that always seems to have fascinated people, just think of how many books and plays and movies that you have read and seen featured unintended consequences as a plot point. It’s a whole bunch I bet. But the current horse crisis is a prime example, because did you know that the 100% horse lasagne can be traced all the way back to Romanian traffic regulations?

It's All in the Music

As I write this I am watching The Wrath of Khan. I'd hope, Dear Reader, that you'd agree with me when I say that it is a fantastic movie, for a whole range of reasons which I'm not going to go into because that's not the point of what I'm writing. But there is one thing which is very important in making it a brilliant movie which is often overlooked in comparison to so many over aspects: it's music. Listen to the main theme of the film and tell me that it isn't great (actually don't because I don't like it when you lie to me.

Ian's Car

The first artificial intelligence wasn't a NASA supercomputer, it wasn't deep in a bunker in CERN, or in the head of some robot in a high-tech Japanese factory. The first artificial intelligence was an Audi in a driveway in Sutton Coldfield.

It was one of those mild sunny afternoons and Ian Warrett was going to the pub to watch the football. He pressed the start button on the car and a message appeared on the screen, the one that usually telling you what radio show is on.

I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD DO THIS

Tedious End of Year Music Post 2012

End of year music retrospectives always freak me out. Every year I think “oh hey I seem pretty good at this knowing-about-people-what-do-music business” and then I am bombarded by everyone’s top 10 songs, top 10 bands, top 10 thing people have said about music and bands, etc., of the year and I realise I have no idea what people are talking about. Earlier today all round awesome dude and good music knower JoeSparrow posted his end of year post and I realised I had no idea who Alt J is/are. I mean I have heard about Alt J and have heard the words muttered breathlessly on Radio 6 but I couldn’t actually tell you if I had listened to any music by them.

This is really what stops me talking about music on this blog. If you remember when I started this thing I was going to post some new music every week and then I was like “FUCK I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT MUSIC AND THEY WILL FINALLY FOUND OUT” so I just brushed it away and pretended it had never happened. I also started doing a podcast which has allowed me to make fun of bad music and be all “listen to this thing I like” which has somewhat filled the hole. But I’m not doing a podcast episode for a week or so and I’ve lost my outlet.

Anyway enough of this rambling introduction the point is I’m going to post some of my music highlights for the year. JOIN ME.

Why We Broke Up

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about relationships and I mentioned my feeling that the reasons I had for breaking up with people were often pretty ridiculous. She wanted some examples but I struggled to come up with them at the time and, as ever with these things, only started to remember some of the better ones on the way home. As is the way of the modern world I felt a compulsive desire to share them with strangers on the internet. But the obvious problem was that a lot of them made me look like a jerk, or made other people look like jerks and I like to think that I'm not that sort of guy. How could I deal with this? Well the solution was obvious: lying. So here are the reasons why we broke up; some of them are mine, some came from friends, some I made up:

Discover your Ancestors

Margaret Smith has become unstuck in time. Finding out about her ancestors seemed fun at first, a hobby to while away the time now that the kids had moved out and started families of her own. A chance to unearth some long lost family scandal, perhaps to discover an illustrious ancestor, and to finally work out how exactly she was related to all the half remembered aunts of her childhood.

An advert on ITV 7 had pointed her in the direction of Ancestor-Discoverer dot com, a site which promised to make easy all the hard work of searching through archives and records and take her directly to the business of nosing around the private business of her forebears. She made a cup of tea and got her laptop ready, entering all the information the site needed: her name, her date of birth, the details of any known relatives. She then pressed enter and set the machine whirring away.