Bakers and Breaks

The all-new, improved, Great British Bake-Off began its seventh series last night having moved from the BBC to Channel 4. One new judge, two new presenters and otherwise exactly the same as before - twelve pleasant and normal people demonstrating their skills and not one of whom whooped, high-fived or had an emotional backstory causing tears and sympathetic hugs while the cameras gloated - and some splendid cakes to be admired. Same tent, same setting, same awful weather raging outside and identical format.

Except, that being on commercial television, there were ad breaks. C4 decided to keep the content roughly as before and so had to stretch running time by fifteen minutes. I can't recall this being done for anything else; we are used to brilliant shows running for nearly thirty minutes on radio moving to TV and being butchered to less than 24 minutes of content (example: Harry Hill who used the time on radio to develop wonderful running gags that vanished when he transferred to the box).

Advertisers must have thought that this was a great way to show off their products. But in the Commuter household the response was what it always is - the moment the programme ident appears at the bottom of the screen to signify the end of a segment, the remote control is raised and the mute button pressed. Even then some ads were painful to watch - literally. Ebay had a sequence in which the screen changed background colour repeatedly; glimpsed from the corner of the eye this made a stroboscopic effect akin to glimpsing the sun through the trees whilst moving at high speed. Yuck. Presumably nobody connected with Ebay bothers to watch. This "viewer" moved his head further to one side and thereby ignored everything happening on the screen until his more tolerant wife nudged him to restore the sound.

Watching ads without the sound, other than those with genuinely irritating flashing screens, is a slightly surreal experience. "There's that bloke with the beard" you say¹ "I wonder what he's on about? If I had a beard would I get more offers of work? Oh look, here's a very sincere and twinkly-eyed man in a nice sweater leaning forward ever so slightly to share his wisdom, or something. What can he be on about? and how many ever-so-slightly less sincere and twinkly-eyed actors did they audition before deciding he was the right man for the knitware?² Ah, a young person in a white coat pointing at something. Fascinating, really fascinating.  Oh, there's a car. Driven on utterly empty city streets. By a young man with a beard. Who ever would have expected that, certainly never seen that before in an ad, what fantastic imagination these creative chaps have, I do hope they get loads of awards. And there's that comedian I used to like, but am now rather sick of, poncing about on a cruise ship and pretending to be just another paying passenger, that must get him a BAFTA or my name's not Merridew Withers"³

It is vitally important to keep the sound off. Nothing these people say is of the slightest interest given that it is all written by admen. It is equally important to indulge in these speculations because it drives away the message that the ad is trying to implant in your brain and puts your own thoughts in there instead, and I want to keep it that way.

We seem to have wandered off the GBBO but there isn't much more to say about it. I fear that the subject of advertisements, their rotting effect on the brain and the need to combat them with constant cynicism and derision is one that will remain with us.

Footnotes
1. Alright, I say it
2. Or does he have to supply his own jumper? Is there a clothing allowance for this or does his agent negotiate it all as part of the fee? These are the sort of questions that some sort of hard-hitting documentary ought to be addressing.
3. No it's not.

How dumb is TripAdvisor (again)?

I've written about them before and may, sadly, have to do so again because I see no improvement. Before I deliver this morning's little blast of invective, here are some facts to mull over:

• Fact. Every review I have put on to the aforesaid website has been of somewhere in the UK or in relatively close parts of Europe
• Fact. Every journey upon which I have embarked in the past eight years has been facilitated [Nice choice of pretentious words: Ed] by car, coach or by train. I began submitting reviews to TA in April 2014.
• Fact. TA have never bothered to ask me how I reached those places subject to my expert analysis and therefore has no right to reach any conclusions about the mode of transport.

Good. Now we have established the foundations, we can build the structure. Consider this email that arrived still hot and steaming into my in-tray this morning:

The answers to their questions are as follows:

• How was your flight? There was no flight, dumbo and why do you assume I flew in the first place?
• Can you help again by sharing advice on flights you've taken? Delighted to. Based partly on my experiences in the past but mainly on what I learn from others today, flying is horrible, airports treat passengers in a disgusting and shamelessly commercial way, the security (100ml of a fluid good, 101ml some sort of risk) is a joke and the way that people can be casually bumped off flights they have paid for well in advance something that should be outlawed. My advice, which I gladly share with anyone idiotic enough to wish to fly, is Just Say No.
• Where will you fly next? Up to Heaven to meet my maker and his pals [Or her pals. Can't be too careful these days: Ed] when the Glorious Day Of Judgement sounds, followed by the long Glorious Evening Of Hanging About On Some Clouds and the even longer Glorious Night Of Watching Celestial TV Because There's Nothing Else To Do Up Here.

I don't think I'll bother submitting a review for this last one. I don't want to spoil the destination by having loads of others going there.

AI or AS?

Artificial intelligence may well be the future but they will have to weed out the artificial stupids first. Consider the following email, not the first of its type, received here at Ramblings Towers this morning from a sender claiming to be in Belmont, California.

Want to simplify your multi-location phone administration?  

It asks me in the subject. Yes sure, if I had a multi-location phone administration system no doubt I would be looking to simplify it, but why I would wait until some chancer happens to email me about it is something to be pondered. Anyway, let us move on to the first couple of lines of the epistle.

Hi Thomas,

Because Bristow has multiple locations I wanted to follow up on my last email about your phone system.

There's nobody here called Thomas. And Bristow is a cartoon character about whom I have created an extensive and award-winning¹ website. So what is going on? The program that has generated this spam email has grazed my website, found the first name on it and assumed that this must be a business. It is hard to think that someone writing code to support a mass spam-out to potential business customers could have come up with anything stupider. I assume it is a program, rather than some bored intern trying to flick through a long list of names from a directory or some such, because it would be apparent to any human, even an intern in California, that my website does not relate to a business. And that there is nobody called Thomas referred to in it. And that my real email address is displayed fairly prominently, so they couldn't even get that right.

I don't think I will take up the kind offer to phone them tomorrow, especially as they have not offered to accept the cost of the call. Perhaps if they offered some extra incentives then we might consider which of our many locations (bedroom, study, living room) could successfully leverage² a new phone system. How about an all-expenses paid trip to San Francisco for myself, Mrs. Commuter and Thomas? But if they insist we can leave him behind to look after our many locations.

Footnotes
1.  Bound to get one sooner or later so this is not as inaccurate as some may think
2. You simply have to insert this awful word into any business conversation with an American if you wish to be taken seriously. 

Brian Aldiss

Very sad to note the death yesterday of Brian Aldiss, one of the finest writers of science fiction this country, indeed the world, has seen. When I first began reading SF, back in the 1960s, he was already a star. His Helliconia trilogy is the best extended piece of SF I have read, not just imagining alien civilisations on a planet in a binary star system with immensely long seasons and a complex biochemistry that has adapted to them, but in creating believable and sympathetic characters. And in Report on Probability A he achieved the equivalent of Waiting for Godot - a story in which almost nothing at all happens but which is compelling reading right up to the puzzling end with a single laconic line that makes you question everything that has gone before.

To a generation believing that Star Wars is the epitome of SF, Aldiss may be unknown. But I would take any one of his books against the entire output of Hollywood in this genre any day.

The Limits of Belief

 Words change their meaning all the time in modern English. I found the misuse of one of them in the strapline of a petfood company advertising in the "colour" supplement of my weekend paper. It reads

Royal Canin: Incredible in every detail

 
I have nothing whatsoever to say about the products of this enterprise. My pets comprise an unruly fellowship of eight goldfish who from time to time oblige me by surfacing from the inky depths of the waters on my estate [pond out the back: Ed] to consume some of the foul-smelling stuff I buy once a year to feed them with and I get the little pot from another supplier. But I digress. Consider the statement "incredible in every detail". What do you think they wish us to understand?
Incredible means not credible, unbelievable, outside the realms of possibility. It does not mean (or at any rate, should not mean) wonderful, brilliant, inspiring, boundary-pushing, 'gosh I wish I could do that' although these are perhaps the meanings the admen might hope we would attribute to it. Nor does it mean something that would be ok to post on Instagram and forget about within seconds, even though it seems some do indeed use it in this fashion. If you tell me something and I say "That's incredible", then I mean that I do not accept your statement. Thus;

"Darling, sorry I'm late, there was a traffic jam" is a fair statement.
"Darling, sorry I'm late, the bus hit a tree and it took thirty minutes for a replacement" is also fair.
"Darling, it's so exciting, I was abducted by space aliens, taken to a mothership and forced to drink four vodka martinis before they released me with a message for the leaders of Mankind" is incredible. Not in the sense of "wow, awesome dude" as our American cousins would perhaps have it. Incredible as in lacking any sense of believability, rubbish, a plain lie.

And so we turn back to the petfood vendors with whom we started. Every thing about this company is not believable, according to its publicists. Its claims about the value of its products. Its mission statements. The ingredients. Perhaps even the contents of its annual financial accounts. They have made it plain as can be - incredible in every detail. Not to be trusted or indeed to have any credence put upon them. Could this be their prawn sandwich moment?