Slogger's Revue Bar
The sort of exclusive place where intelligent Slog fans can behave badly and get a bit pissed
the dog's bollocks
Our younger Norfolk Tiggy is emerging as a bright young lady who, while having 'front' as something of a hardcase, is in fact very sensitive and easily scared. Think the lion in Over the Rainbow, and you're about there. Any unexplained loud noise sends her scurrying for an open cupboard door, or under the nearest bed. And while she can bark for England when the postman arrives, if Bob the postie says hello, Tiggs makes for the woodshed at a rate of knots. Like most of our dogs, she has a wide variety of nicknames. I think all dog-lovers do this: they corrupt a name or notice behaviours, and then add new bits to the old name until the puppy itself is completely confused as to her identity. I call Tiggy 'Tiggs' mainly. Tiggy is short for her 'real' name Tiggywinkle,but as in her early days she ate as often (and as much) as possible then urinated everywhere, she soon became Piggytinkle. These days I call her Wyatt, because if you pick her up when she doesn't want that, she goes "Earp!" Over her first eighteen months, Tiggy's developed her own little canine Esperanto. So far it consists of 'Earparoo' (hurry up with the food), 'Arooearparoo' (time for a walk) and 'yupyupearp' (what on earth are you doing). Dead silence on being called - as with all terriers - means 'there are small things here in the woodshed, and if you imagine I'm coming in while this is going on, you must be a very deluded person indeed'. She's never going to recite a sonnet, but she makes herself understood using these sounds....and a good deal of impatient wriggling when required. Foxglove (her breeding name) became Foxie, and then Fox. Then my younger daughter identified her as a cool dude, and so she became Doodle, then Foxiedoodle. She was also outstandingly pretty when a puppy, and I fell into calling her foxie-doodle-pretty-girl, to which 'dum-dum' is occasionally added. This is the sort of stuff that makes dog-haters vomit and neutrals wince. But dogs understand the point, and that's all that matters. Two close friedns of ours lost their dog Jack some months back. What I mean is he died, rather than they mislaid him. It would've been hard to mislay Jack: he was very big and very loud. He was also a vegetarian, although that's not really important. Losing the only dog you have to sudden illness is an appalling experience - especially when the hound is in the prime of life. So our chums have been bereft since. But last week, my wife introduced them to a canine website called many tears rescue. Many Tears is the sort of site that could do a lot for all the Labour MPs who won't be owned by the Party whips any more after next April/May/March/June etc etc. It takes dogs that have been abused, or just unfortunate enough to be born unwanted - and matches them to suitable homes. What it mainly does is tear at your heart-strings until you either wave a white flag in surrender, or die of sorrow. Put my other half and our chums in front of a laptop showing the dogs in need at Many Tears, and the whole evening will be lost in a farrago of oohs and aaahs and cuuuooote and so forth. The mind boggles at what these people could do for Tommy McAvoy and James Purnell. Gordon would be more of a challenge, but they'll take anything on. Perhaps this might be the picture they'd use:
This shot of the Trouser Snake has all the required ingredients for foster parents everywhere. Copy runs as follows: 'A lone dog by nature, Gordo the Scottish Labradoodle is woefully lacking in socialisation, but would suit patient owners without other distractions. With time he could easily become a loyal family member able to undertake quite complex tasks such as savaging the morning papers and biting visitors. He has never been wrong about anything, and is unique in his obsessive desire to mark his territory while at the same time never actually being there. ' Unpleasant political satire aside, Many Tears deserves a visit from everyone with a place in their heart for dogs who wound up being for Christmas rather than forever.
See what I mean?
|
life in the wrong lane
A fellow-campaigner against ISP silo-management contacted me the other day about Twitter. “I believe there is a phone-number” he said. The comment put me in mind of that Leonardo de Caprio movie The Beach: a legendary place where the surfer-bums can live on fruit and fish forever, the drugs are free, and the waves forty feet high 24/7. ISP ‘service’ has become like one of these myths now – almost supernatural places and things like El Dorado and Shangi-la. People keep on searching through billions of bison hoping one day to find that The White Buffalo really does exist; yet always, there is nothing but a White Elephant called The Help Forum. A Help Forum is a place on the site of an internet ‘service’ provider where people with war wounds go to discuss how they got their Packet, and what a disgrace it is there are no disabled pensions or prosthetic limbs available. “I know” they all say to each other, “have you tried making your own bandages?” “No” one replies, “But I hear cricket bats strapped to the thigh work quite well as a makeshift leg”. My Twitter account froze three weeks ago, and no amount of comment threading, ranting, begging and threatening has evoked any response from the Twitter owners. However, I posted the comment ‘What the f*ck are we all doing in here?’ once in Orange’s Online Old Soldiers’ Home. The response from fellow hobblers was startling, split fifty-fifty between ‘Saying this only makes it worse for the rest of us’ and ‘Because we’re all mad and have no alternative’. The whole scam beggars belief. What started in the physical world with Call Centres manned by truculent robots has been perfected in the virtual space by the likes of Google, Car Phone Warehouse (CPW) and the late unlamented Setanta Sports. This last had a rule where not only was it impossible to email or phone them to complain or cancel, they would accept only registered letters of complaint by post. CPW has a bold statement from founder Charles Dunstone offering (if all else fails) the chance to email him direct. When I did so, the message came back ‘user unkown’. And how. I mailed the Press Office to tell them. Nothing. I mailed Dunstone direct via a black-market email address (hundreds of websites now offer to find real phone numbers and emails for you). Still nothing. Googlemail has a number of software glitches on it. A well-known one is its habit of – without warning – telling you there’s that old black magic ‘bad syntax’ in your mailing list. The message is so recriminatory as to suggest this might really mean 'bad anthrax'. It can be solved by going out of gmail and returning via another route….when you know how. There’s no way you can tell Gmail about this: you simply have to return to its online Help Forum, aka The Chateau D’If. There – incredibly – are postings about the problem going back to 2006. They all say ‘Yeh, right – go back out and come in again’. But this service is being provided by other users. Brass neck or what? It’s pretty clear that this is way beyond incompetence. Your average mainstream ISP simply doesn’t care about the customer: in classic Orwellian style, their sites have ‘We wanna hear from you!’ plastered all over every page, but no details about how to do so. Microsoft does this as much as any provider on the Net: but for some of its software problems (and they are myriad) you will have to trawl through twenty plus Help pages until – eventually – the company offers the exhausted user a minute square of space in which to define the problem. As often as not, it evokes a reply as incomprehensible as it is unhelpful….or simply refers one back to a Help suggestion already tried and found wanting. Such online silo-gargoyles don’t care about user problems because they don’t have to. Like retail banks, the consumer truism has become “There’s no point in switching, because they’re all as bad as each other”. Various factors are in their favour: the continuing exponential growth in email accounts worldwide, their total control of the switchgear, and above all the fact that they make the rules, free of regulatory interference: woe betide anyone who complains in a concerted manner, as accusations of internet abuse and threats of blacklisting will surely follow. Believe me – I’ve been there. Last year, I discussed the problem with a senior Shadow Cabinet member at length. It was, he agreed, iniquitous. There were a million easy votes to be garnered, I insisted, by simply making it an offence for any online supplier to make complaint processes either difficult or hard to find. He agreed, and promised the problem would be addressed in due course. But a Government backbencher with knowledge of the area scoffs at the idea. “The Government and GCHQ need ISPs more than they need the Government” he asserted, “and anyway, for an online service provider it is just too easy to cover tracks, put in token gestures and deny everything later. Like the bigger global banks, they are beyond the law”. But we must not despair. For somewhere – at the back of a long-forgotten cave in the Himalayas known only to Yetis and climate-change scientists – there is a door to the Underworld. It is called, I am told in awed tones, The Service Entrance. There is a magic key kept secret but safe among an obscure Buddhist colony. And one day I will go there, copy the key, find the door, and go down into the bowels of the Earth. And there I shall discover the Golden Hotline of legend. The one you pick up, and ask to speak to Larry Page or Sergey Brin, Charlie Dunstone or Andy Bechtolsheim. It is out there. I know it is. And so the search continues.
|
in the media Lost in translation As an ex-adman, I can tell you that the world is full of clients who think spending large fees on getting excellent translations is a waste of money. Like most globalists, they're convinced that the folks in the Dubai office speak American really, they just affect a burble when you're there to assert their independence. So what happens in many cases is that the junior assistant brand manager who speaks a Swiss-American hybrid in a Dutch accent not only gets the translation job: they also try to make their mark by being just a bit too creative. (Most clients, you see, would prefer to do the ads themselves anyway; and from what I can see around right now, these days they probably achieve their ambition most of the time). In China a decade ago, this led to the KFC line 'finger-lickin' good' being translated as 'Mmm...eat your fingers!' In the same country 'You're in The Pepsi Generation' morphed into 'Drink Pepsi and meet your Ancestors'. The problem is English as Second Language - or ESL. The guys at Gaviscon clearly think ESL will suffice for translation purposes - and have therefore produced a classic of it's kind. The storyboard is below....
|
