So Coldplay played Glatsonbury and unfortunately the ground did not open to swallow them up and send them to a special bland circle of hell where they had to listen to their own music over and over again . JK watched about ten minutes on TV and felt a little bit of his soul die, seeing 10,000s of people sway to the beige noodlings of Chris Martin - the audio equivalent of Farrow and Ball's neutral paint range. Simon Cowell's meat puppets are bad enough, but to stand in a field listening to that dirge is beyond comprehension. Give me Camp X-Ray and a long weekend of water-boarding any day.
But your favourite typing ape wants to ignore the news this week which we should probably do on a more regular basis. Ideally we should ignore 90% of everything we read in the media, the tricky part is to work out which bits. Fortunately Melaine Phillips puts her name at the end of her nonsense so that's one care in the community rant off the list. No, JK wants to talk about a uniquely modern plague: 'Human Resources'. Once a company gets to a certain size, it has to employ staff in a department that used to be called 'Personnel', which was obviously an outdated term as it accurately described its function: to find people to work for the company and to keep those working for the company happy enough so they turned up for work more or less on time and didn't steal too much to dent the profits. A simple, straightforward term so naturally you silly monkeys had to change it.
They have a saying: those who can do, those who can't do teach, those who can't teach, teach PE. Those who can't teach PE work in Human Resources. And those who can't work in Human Resources are clinically dead with no detectable brain stem activity and shuffle around as Saturday staff for Currys Digital. Now you might think it's a bit unfair to pick on one group of people for doing their job and it is true that HR workers perform a useful function of stapling CVs together and filing things, which even though it could be performed by a robot would be too expensive and frankly a waste of good automation. They don't cause much harm as long as you don't leave them unsupervised near scissors.
The phrase "Human Resources', introduced to make companies appear more caring, is in fact a deeply stupid and insulting term. People are not resources like mineral reserves or property, they are humans who have traded their time and effort with a company for money. It is all part of a modern management trend which uses token words as a substitute for actual management. For change management read redundancies; consultation means we've made up minds up already . One of the make-work exercises HR love to inflict on staff is the yearly wind-up of appraisals, where managers pretend to listen, staff make up development goals and the detailed work of fiction is filed away for next year, never to be looked at again.
Work, let's face it, for most of us is a pain hence the name 'work', the clue is in the title and we don't need patronising euphemisms like 'Human Resources'; the pay cheque turning up in bank account will do just fine. We're grown ups; we can handle reality and for those times when we can't there's always alcohol.
Tuesday 28 June 2011
Wednesday 22 June 2011
Open Letter
This is an open letter or public appeal if you like on behalf of mobile phone users in the South East of England.
Dear Person in Charge of BT Openzone
FUCK....OFF!!! Seriously, just fuck off! Stop hijacking everyone's wi-fi enabled devices with your stupid service. We're sitting at home, using a laptop and then suddenly BT Openzone blocks out our own wireless connection and directs us to your overpriced piece of crap. Do you find this is a good way to gain customers and win brand loyalty? I mean why stop at just taking over my phone or my laptop, why not kidnap my wife and ransom her in return for changing service providers? Burgle my mother's house when she's away and I can buy back her things in exchange for subscribing to your call minding service.
I realise it must be difficult trying to run a profitable business where you've lost your monopoly on landlines, although of course BT still takes £140 off me a year for the fixed line it installed perhaps twenty years ago. I trust my cables are not just humble fibre optic lines. At that rate, I expect nothing less than gold or platinum, perhaps encased in mahogany. And what great value your wi-fi hijack service is, £6 for 90 minutes or £10 a day, especially when within 100 metres of my flat there are 3 pubs and cafes that all offer free wi-fi. It is a real a mystery why I have passed on your highly competitive rates.
Whoever you are in charge of BT Openzone, I would like to make a simple suggestion: try making a decent product or service that somebody actually wants and then advertise its unique appeal. It is, I admit, a radical idea and not something BT has tried before, but you never know.
Meanwhile, all across London living rooms reverberate to the shout of 'Oh for fuck's sake' as your service wipes the wireless password from our phones, laptops and PDAs. You do at least have brand recognition. However, not all publicity is good publicity - just ask Charlie Sheen.
Yours
A User of Wi-Fi Services who does not like being digitally mugged.
Dear Person in Charge of BT Openzone
FUCK....OFF!!! Seriously, just fuck off! Stop hijacking everyone's wi-fi enabled devices with your stupid service. We're sitting at home, using a laptop and then suddenly BT Openzone blocks out our own wireless connection and directs us to your overpriced piece of crap. Do you find this is a good way to gain customers and win brand loyalty? I mean why stop at just taking over my phone or my laptop, why not kidnap my wife and ransom her in return for changing service providers? Burgle my mother's house when she's away and I can buy back her things in exchange for subscribing to your call minding service.
I realise it must be difficult trying to run a profitable business where you've lost your monopoly on landlines, although of course BT still takes £140 off me a year for the fixed line it installed perhaps twenty years ago. I trust my cables are not just humble fibre optic lines. At that rate, I expect nothing less than gold or platinum, perhaps encased in mahogany. And what great value your wi-fi hijack service is, £6 for 90 minutes or £10 a day, especially when within 100 metres of my flat there are 3 pubs and cafes that all offer free wi-fi. It is a real a mystery why I have passed on your highly competitive rates.
Whoever you are in charge of BT Openzone, I would like to make a simple suggestion: try making a decent product or service that somebody actually wants and then advertise its unique appeal. It is, I admit, a radical idea and not something BT has tried before, but you never know.
Meanwhile, all across London living rooms reverberate to the shout of 'Oh for fuck's sake' as your service wipes the wireless password from our phones, laptops and PDAs. You do at least have brand recognition. However, not all publicity is good publicity - just ask Charlie Sheen.
Yours
A User of Wi-Fi Services who does not like being digitally mugged.
Sunday 19 June 2011
Sick Finance
Three years after the financial doomsday device was activated, JK wonders if you silly primates have learned any lessons and why no one has important has gone to jail. Here's how it works: if you are a young black man mugging people in the street taking say £20 a time, the police will catch you and you will probably go to prison. But if you are rich, white, wearing a suit and the money you steal is in the hundred millions or billions, then you get a bail out from the tax payer and bonuses go back to normal. The amazing power of being rich and white. Don't forget, the financial crisis, was not accident or something that just happened. The crisis was the product of corrupt, amoral, greedy men who changed banking from funding productive enterprises to making insane bets with other people's money and when it all came crashing down, they took tax payers's cash. This is not private enterprise, it is not even socialism for the rich: it is a shakedown, Tony Soprano style.What's worse is we know who the guilty men are and some are still in post.
The really strange thing is that we fell with for this bullshit once, fair enough, but we're falling for it again. It's like going back to a card shark's table, hoping this time he won't fleece you. Worse still, a strange alternate history is being written where it was all the fault of the regulators. Some right wing cranks in the States even claim Bill Clinton is really responsible, as he promote home loans to the poor or subprime as they charmingly called. Baboom! A conjuring trick which distracts the audience from the real villains with as much intellectual depth as the junk paper the banks misold by the billions. Can you think of any area of business that would say it is not our fault we tricked investors, lied to shareholders, overpaid our staff, mislead the regulators and engaged in activities that are fraud in all but name, but none of this is our responsibility - you have to stop us. Imagine if you went to a restaurant that poisoned your food and the chef said I can't help I just hate customers, unless there is someone from the health inspectorate standing next to me, I will put rat poison in the soup. You'll spot the tiny logical flaw in this argument: banks claim markets are self regulating and need light supervision, except for 2008 when they cause more damage than a war, then it's all the government's fault for not stopping them. We win, you lose and fuck you for even questioning our motives or integrity.
So what is the answer. Don't bother looking to our current leadership for policies. David Cameron and George Osborne believe a free market is giving large corporations and financial interests tax breaks, like the disgraceful tax dodge Osbourne gave multinationals in February this year which allows them to bring money from tax havens avoiding UK tax. Free enterprise is their minds means a free for all for powerful, dominant interests and witness the results - financial meltdown, stagnant growth, rising inequality and social polarisation. It's not surprising that two men who have never worked for money or run a business don't get it (minding shop for your multi-millionaire dad does not count George). They fail to appreciate what a free market really should mean - free from distortion, monopoly practise, tax dodging and special influence. The banks are the most powerful lobby group and have taken over the debate so that what is the good for the City is also apparently good for Britain, when the exact opposite if often true - our world already is starting to resemble a ghastly cartoon of capitalism from a Soviet poster. Our living standards are not rising, by most indicators we are going backwards. But the top 1%, or even 0.5% of the population is doing very well. We are not in this together, Dave, and spare us the cod philosophy of sacrifice and collective effort, it's like listening to a public school boy stoner on a beach in Kerala waxing lyrical about the nobility of Indian poverty. Empty, empty phrases spouted by a man who has floated upwards on a cushion of money.
The rotten core of this problem is over mighty finance who need to go back to being boring bean counters. Banks are inherently fragile and unstable business, which is why they spend so much money persuading you about how solid they are - big offices, smart suits, all the theatre of respectability. To control this risk, you don't want alpha males anywhere near the keys to the safe, because they will bet it all on roulette, whilst snorting gargantuan mounds of cocaine and hiring bevies of women who charge more by the hour than most people earn in a week. No one gets richer in this process apart from bankers, Porsche dealers and high class madams.
When Bob Diamond of Barclays said it was time to stop banker bashing and Goldman Sachs Senior Vampire Blankfein claimed he was doing God's work, the really frightening thing is these men believed what they said. No lessons learned, no remorse, no shame, but it's time to banish these ghouls back to the shadows where they belong. Of course they have to believe this garbage, because otherwise when they look in the mirror they would see a monster, who has sucked wealth off the productive economy and entire life would have been better if he had never existed at all. Keep saying that mantra guys, it might keep your conscience at bay for a while, but JK wonders in the middle of the night, when they wake up all alone, do they have a moment of realisation - the alcoholic's moment of sobriety. When Adair Turner said much of this financial activity was socially useless, he was being too kind. Socially useless is more akin to an ill-advised business venture that goes nowhere - the sort of pointless hat shops you see last about 6 months in posh parts of town where Fennella has persuaded Daddykins to front the money - whereas the banks behaviour was socially toxic, closer to sowing landmines in a children's playground. JK wants to you ask yourself a simple question, if all the these overpaid, egomaniacs had done something else for a living, where would we be now....Oh that's' right, about £150 billion better off and counting. Turns out the biggest damage to Western civilisation was not Al Qaida's 9/11, it was nerds in suits.
So apologies if this week is a little light on laughs, sometimes pure rage is the only correct response. The genie of finance must go back into the bottle or else things will get really nasty. Banker bashing is only words and name calling now, but what if the 99% of the population decided to settle scores with these crooks. There's so many more of us than them, they should start practising their sorry faces. Or else.
For more information, you must watch this film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film)
The really strange thing is that we fell with for this bullshit once, fair enough, but we're falling for it again. It's like going back to a card shark's table, hoping this time he won't fleece you. Worse still, a strange alternate history is being written where it was all the fault of the regulators. Some right wing cranks in the States even claim Bill Clinton is really responsible, as he promote home loans to the poor or subprime as they charmingly called. Baboom! A conjuring trick which distracts the audience from the real villains with as much intellectual depth as the junk paper the banks misold by the billions. Can you think of any area of business that would say it is not our fault we tricked investors, lied to shareholders, overpaid our staff, mislead the regulators and engaged in activities that are fraud in all but name, but none of this is our responsibility - you have to stop us. Imagine if you went to a restaurant that poisoned your food and the chef said I can't help I just hate customers, unless there is someone from the health inspectorate standing next to me, I will put rat poison in the soup. You'll spot the tiny logical flaw in this argument: banks claim markets are self regulating and need light supervision, except for 2008 when they cause more damage than a war, then it's all the government's fault for not stopping them. We win, you lose and fuck you for even questioning our motives or integrity.
So what is the answer. Don't bother looking to our current leadership for policies. David Cameron and George Osborne believe a free market is giving large corporations and financial interests tax breaks, like the disgraceful tax dodge Osbourne gave multinationals in February this year which allows them to bring money from tax havens avoiding UK tax. Free enterprise is their minds means a free for all for powerful, dominant interests and witness the results - financial meltdown, stagnant growth, rising inequality and social polarisation. It's not surprising that two men who have never worked for money or run a business don't get it (minding shop for your multi-millionaire dad does not count George). They fail to appreciate what a free market really should mean - free from distortion, monopoly practise, tax dodging and special influence. The banks are the most powerful lobby group and have taken over the debate so that what is the good for the City is also apparently good for Britain, when the exact opposite if often true - our world already is starting to resemble a ghastly cartoon of capitalism from a Soviet poster. Our living standards are not rising, by most indicators we are going backwards. But the top 1%, or even 0.5% of the population is doing very well. We are not in this together, Dave, and spare us the cod philosophy of sacrifice and collective effort, it's like listening to a public school boy stoner on a beach in Kerala waxing lyrical about the nobility of Indian poverty. Empty, empty phrases spouted by a man who has floated upwards on a cushion of money.
The rotten core of this problem is over mighty finance who need to go back to being boring bean counters. Banks are inherently fragile and unstable business, which is why they spend so much money persuading you about how solid they are - big offices, smart suits, all the theatre of respectability. To control this risk, you don't want alpha males anywhere near the keys to the safe, because they will bet it all on roulette, whilst snorting gargantuan mounds of cocaine and hiring bevies of women who charge more by the hour than most people earn in a week. No one gets richer in this process apart from bankers, Porsche dealers and high class madams.
When Bob Diamond of Barclays said it was time to stop banker bashing and Goldman Sachs Senior Vampire Blankfein claimed he was doing God's work, the really frightening thing is these men believed what they said. No lessons learned, no remorse, no shame, but it's time to banish these ghouls back to the shadows where they belong. Of course they have to believe this garbage, because otherwise when they look in the mirror they would see a monster, who has sucked wealth off the productive economy and entire life would have been better if he had never existed at all. Keep saying that mantra guys, it might keep your conscience at bay for a while, but JK wonders in the middle of the night, when they wake up all alone, do they have a moment of realisation - the alcoholic's moment of sobriety. When Adair Turner said much of this financial activity was socially useless, he was being too kind. Socially useless is more akin to an ill-advised business venture that goes nowhere - the sort of pointless hat shops you see last about 6 months in posh parts of town where Fennella has persuaded Daddykins to front the money - whereas the banks behaviour was socially toxic, closer to sowing landmines in a children's playground. JK wants to you ask yourself a simple question, if all the these overpaid, egomaniacs had done something else for a living, where would we be now....Oh that's' right, about £150 billion better off and counting. Turns out the biggest damage to Western civilisation was not Al Qaida's 9/11, it was nerds in suits.
So apologies if this week is a little light on laughs, sometimes pure rage is the only correct response. The genie of finance must go back into the bottle or else things will get really nasty. Banker bashing is only words and name calling now, but what if the 99% of the population decided to settle scores with these crooks. There's so many more of us than them, they should start practising their sorry faces. Or else.
For more information, you must watch this film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(film)
Monday 13 June 2011
Protecting Children
Welcome to overblown media panic, the June edition 2011. Our subject is the sexualisation of children, which I'm sure you will all agree is a bad thing, unless your name is Paul Francis Gadd (Gary Glitter). Apparently much that is wrong with Britain is the attempt by wicked companies and advertisers to turn pre-pubescents into gyrating junior pole dancers. JK does wonder if Stripper Barbie, the Belle de Jour children's pillowcases and My Little Pony Horse Brothel were a step to far. The tricks horses do should be trotting in unison, not dressed in in PVC nurses uniforms.
It's all started by a report prepared by the Mothers Union - an interesting organisation that isn't a union and whose Chief Executive, Reg Bailey, is a man. David Cameron is all in favour of the proposals - of course the animated shop dummy would be supportive, a man who resembles a regency painting of a Duke only with less depth of character than the canvas he's painted on. In a desperate attempt to live down his Bullingdon days, Dave will do or say anything to prove he has moral worth. One question has always troubled JK - when those Bullingdon boys were prancing round Oxford in blue velvet tailcoats like braying bell ends, where was a bunch of vicious bike chain-wielding hoodlums when you needed them?
It's all started by a report prepared by the Mothers Union - an interesting organisation that isn't a union and whose Chief Executive, Reg Bailey, is a man. David Cameron is all in favour of the proposals - of course the animated shop dummy would be supportive, a man who resembles a regency painting of a Duke only with less depth of character than the canvas he's painted on. In a desperate attempt to live down his Bullingdon days, Dave will do or say anything to prove he has moral worth. One question has always troubled JK - when those Bullingdon boys were prancing round Oxford in blue velvet tailcoats like braying bell ends, where was a bunch of vicious bike chain-wielding hoodlums when you needed them?
JK digresses, though it's hard to shake an image of Boris Johnson being forced to eat his own bow tie by a group of street toughs...ah we can but dream. So the alleged issue is the destruction of our children's innocence. It all sounds very familiar. Back in the early 1980s, when New York was gripped by gang violence and a crack epidemic, people blamed the breakdown on society on films like Driller Killer. By the same weird logic, as in no logic at all, lad's mags are 'a problem'. Retailers will be encouraged to sell the likes of FHM and Nuts in brown paper covers. It is understandable that their journalism should be treated like waste paper fit for recycling as their writing compromises hitting cut and paste on copy from PR firms pushing some car, watch, suit or stupid gizmo that nobody wants or needs. Maybe a City Boy out of his tree of Columbian talc would buy an exact replica of Doctor No's chair for £4000, but for the rest of us these magazines are mostly adverts interspersed with ladies not wearing very much. The real question however is this: does looking at picture of Holly Willoughby in her underwear lead to end of civilisation?
The answer in case you were in any doubt is no. Lads mags may be puerile and silly, but they are mostly harmless. What's more like most magazines, their circulation is on the wane. The internet, that vast repository of naked ladies, is just too powerful and costs nothing to access. However, JK feels that as usual politicians and campaigners missed the real problem on newspaper stands. If we are concerned about actual harm to impressionable minds, then what about women's magazines that pump an endless stream of unattainable body images into young girls' minds. Technically the body shapes are obtainable if you are a 13 year old boy dressed like a girl or an adult woman who never eats, or if she does, it's half a lettuce leaf (organic naturally) once every alternate Tuesday which she then promptly throws up into her toilet, a crystal skull designed by Damien Hirst. If you want to help your children, then get them playing sport, eating a balanced diet and leave the stick-thin, chain-smoking, coke-tooting, flight-attendant-assaulting, lollipop-head models on the middle shelf along with their alcoholic, anti-Semitic designers.
The answer in case you were in any doubt is no. Lads mags may be puerile and silly, but they are mostly harmless. What's more like most magazines, their circulation is on the wane. The internet, that vast repository of naked ladies, is just too powerful and costs nothing to access. However, JK feels that as usual politicians and campaigners missed the real problem on newspaper stands. If we are concerned about actual harm to impressionable minds, then what about women's magazines that pump an endless stream of unattainable body images into young girls' minds. Technically the body shapes are obtainable if you are a 13 year old boy dressed like a girl or an adult woman who never eats, or if she does, it's half a lettuce leaf (organic naturally) once every alternate Tuesday which she then promptly throws up into her toilet, a crystal skull designed by Damien Hirst. If you want to help your children, then get them playing sport, eating a balanced diet and leave the stick-thin, chain-smoking, coke-tooting, flight-attendant-assaulting, lollipop-head models on the middle shelf along with their alcoholic, anti-Semitic designers.
Friday 3 June 2011
The Man
When Lou Reed sang about 'the man', he was talking about a heroin dealer with poor timekeeping - one little discussed benefit of legalisation of drugs is the improvement in punctuality. The other man is JK's subject this week, he can take many guises but the ultimate incarnation is moobed uber git Simon Cowell who insists on displaying his hairy C-cups at every opportunity. You primates should be glad that the police are investigating the malicious article placed on Just Paste It, claiming contest rigging. Protecting the interests of a media mogul should always take precedence over investigating serious crimes against little people, by which I don't mean Snow White's helpers but regular folks without expensive lawyers.
In the sixties, there was a huge cultural rebellion against the man, fuelling one of the greatest artistic and cultural blooms of all time whose effects have changed lives forever. Incidentally if you don't know who or what the man is, then use the same question for working out who is the annoying friend in your social group. If you're unsure, bad luck, it's you. Likewise, if you don't want to fight the man, you either are him, one of his minions or you buy what he's pushing. Of course, not everything the sixties producing was worth keeping, tie dye shirts for example are only acceptable clothing if you and all your friends take a lot of acid or your name is Hugo, your Dad is a hedgie and you're taking a Gap Yah. Yet the music was a force for change, escapism, love, contemplation, a chance for all of us to connect with something other than spreadsheets, car finance and fitted kitchens. Music was magical. Then came Simon Cowell and the juggernaut of X-Factor, crushing all before it.
JK blames the Great British Public because when you were offered a pact with the devil you signed on the dotted line, except in this case the devil doesn't have all the best tunes, he has housewife friendly crooning that sounds worse than the foxes fucking in my garden. (Fox love making must be the most unpleasant sound on the planet, second only to the second Hearsay album. Then again, maybe the foxes like it, the noises I mean, not the album, they might be dumb animals, they're not completely stupid). Perhaps you did not realise that the price of something decent to watch on Saturday night was the destruction of music as an art form, the small print was very small and it was only a talent show. And now look what you've unleashed, a vampire has been invited over the cultural threshold sucking the blood out of music's beating heart, leaving only zombie performers - warbling meat puppet karaoke for the brain dead. The music business has managed to achieve its long term aim of removing the music bit, much like Hollywood has abandoned film making in favour of extended merchandise adverts. At some point, the studio executives are going to reach the bottom of the comic book stack in their offices and start making films again. Thor was that really necessary, seriously, was it the last in the pile under the Green Hornet? Directed by Brannagh....Ken, I hope the fee was worth your soul. Although Pirates of the Caribbean was based on a theme park ride, so we may yet see Big Thunder Mountain in the cinemas. Alternatively execs could cut to the chase and make a film based on MacDonald's Happy Meals about the adventures of a crime fighting piece of reconstituted chicken, called Nugget and his telepathic milkshake sidekick, Strawberry, a pot of sugar and fat that can read minds. Hold that thought, I must email my agent, I feel a film pitch coming on.
There's no point blaming Mr Cowell, you might as well blame a shark for turning up its nose up at a lentil bake. This mess is a collective cluster fuck, caused by our overwhelming desire to all watch the same TV show and talk about it at water coolers at work. In fairness, Brits tend to talk about it in pubs or loitering outside reception having a cigarette, yet the point still stands. You don't have to ring the premium numbers, you don't have to vote for these bland balladeers, you don't have to watch. What about having sex with your partner or for singletons, yourself, it's less degrading. Failing that, rent a film, switch to Michael Macintyre's Roadshow on Catch Up TV if you insist, he's a nice chap and there's lots of comedians on it who have noticed men and women are different. But, if there's any part of you that loves music as an art form, if your skin comes up in goosebumps when you hear a favourite song, if you believe music is more than something playing in hotel lobbies to keep the guests non-violent, it's not too late.
Don't tune in. Don't turn on. Switch Off. Save yourself 40 pence per minute. Save music.
Peace out.
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