Category: Random Wednesday

  • No, you really don’t need to know.

    Big Brother is watching you…

    When you work for a big employer, you’ll get these forms from personnel asking about your background, religion, disabilities, and so on.  My wife recently received one from hers.  I’m sure I’ve had them from mine.  Hell, we’ve had them from the Primary School asking about our kids!  The most recent one came with a well-meaning (but incredibly patronising) booklet giving 10 good reasons why we should provide the answers.  It’s a booklet by Stonewall and it’s available here.

    Bollocks (pardon my French.  Not that I am French, that wasn’t an option we could tick).  The reasons we should give this information all revolve around very noble concepts – provision of services, meeting the needs of the community, that sort of thing.  They go to great lengths to ensure you that They (very deliberate capital there) do not associate any personal information with these answers – in the same breath as asking to verify that the emergency contact information they hold is correct.

    Who are they to decide where I can come from?  I could chose whether I’m British (Scottish), British (Welsh), British (Irish), British (Pakistani) or British (Other).  I couldn’t  just be British or, if I’m going to be picky, British (Yorkshire)?  Fortunately this section had the get-out option: Declined to provide information.  That one.  Tick.

    Disability.  Yes or No.  Cold, hard options.  Either you’re disabled or you’re not.  I consider my crushing inability to let go and enjoy myself at parties a disability but I’m not going to tick “Yes”.  No option to decline the information.  That one gets left blank.

    Religion.  Many choices were provided – Church of England not amongst them as this form comes from a Scottish employer and it’s a Scottish form for Scottish people.  Anglican?  Not there either.  Fine.  Declined to provide information.

    The final question concerned sexual orientation.  Again, Declined to provide information.  They really, really, really don’t need to know that.  What difference would it make?  “Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t tick the box saying you were a transgendered lesbian, so we can’t give you a pay rise.  Not that we know you didn’t tick the box!  We don’t hold that sort of personal information in a way that can be used to identify individuals!”  No offence to transgendered lesbians, each to their own.

    The best part about this form was the way the information was coded.  Each option had a different set of codes.  Let’s say it was 01-12 for Ethnic Origin.  My immediate thought is to put “14” in there – or “A” or “Theta” or anything that’s not in the list.

    Having carefully ticked these boxes, the form was filed.  In the bin.  Underneath the cat litter and nappies.  It might get buried for 5 years and recycled as firelighters, it might not.

    These forms are an annual event so I’ve decided to take a different tack with the next set I get.  I’m going to be a disabled divorced black Catholic lesbian (an unlikely combination on Shetland, I’ll grant you).  Then the year after that I’ll be something else.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Different form, different selection.  If we all do this, we might get Them to realise that we don’t want Them having this information, we don’t need Them to have this information and that this information is, essentially, a meaningless box-ticking exercise.

    Somewhere, someone is playing a game of Bingo with this stuff and they’re just waiting for a British (Other) Disabled Divorced Church of Scotland to come up before they shout “House!”

    As Big Al once said, “Bollocks is the only sensible thing you can say to a System.”

  • Random Wednesday – Storytelling

    The art of telling a story.  Telling your reader (or the audience) enough to keep them happy while maintaining enough mystery to draw them along.  Some people do this well, others less so.  I hope to be in the former category this year with my NaNoWriMo project, “Benton’s Irregulars”.

    There’s some good stuff on TV at the moment, some great storytelling – and some pretty poor as well.

    The Good…

    Being Human.

    Russell Tovey, Lenora Crichlow and Aidan Turne...
    Image via Wikipedia

    On repeat on “Really” at the moment, this story of 3 Bristol housemates (who happen to be a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost) is one of the best series to hit TV in years – the British one, of course.  Not seen the US remake yet.  Anyway.  Before episode 1 is done you know there are 3 types of supernatural creature, you know about the emnity between vampires and werewolves, you know that something big is happening in the background and you’ve had enough laughs and gore to come back for more next week.  The characters are likeable – even the main villain gives you a warm, fuzzy, feeling inside before ripping out your throat.  I’ve seen all 3 seasons of this show, and the pilot episode and if I ever write TV I want it to be this good.

    End of season 1.  Problems resolved, answers received, small teaser for season 2 should funding be made available but no great problem if it isn’t.  Ditto seasons 2 and 3.  If they’d cancelled it at the end of season 2, Id’ve been screaming “You can’t leave it there” at the TV but would soon have got over it.  I did with Firefly (Though how they could cancel Firefly and keep some of the other shite alive is beyond me).

    The Bad…

    Lost.

    7 seasons, no answers.  I gave up.  I promised myself that if someone told me after the final episode “Ah, that all makes sense now.” then I’d invest the time and watch the whole damn thing end to end.  No-one has, so I haven’t.

    Doctor Who.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan.  I know enough Whovian trivia to keep my kids entertained for days and my wife in her well-practiced “Oh, for goodness sake” shrug.  But the last couple of series have fallen foul of having a far-too-complex metaplot.  The standalone episodes (The Doctor’s Wife, for example) still shine.  The episode with James Corden and the Cybermen exceeded my expectations.  But the arc-story took far too much space.  Bring back the old format – standalone stories, 3 or 4-parters, longer episodes.  That’s me harking back to the halcyon days of my youth when Tom Baker was The Doctor.  He still is.

    The Not Sure Yet

    The Fades

    Spoiler Alert if you’ve not seen the show yet.

    I like it when the BBC try their hand at SF/Fantasy/Horror.  I really do.  I admire their tenacity.  Not everything is going to be a Being Human or a Doctor Who.  Unfortunately, when they fail it’s going to be expensive and set the cause back years.  Just look at last year’s “Outcasts.”  My goodness that was appalling.

    Anyway.  The Fades. End of episode 1 you know you’ve got a special kid, you’ve got ghosts that hang around (the eponymous Fades) and you’ve got Angelics (though they’re not explained, which is fair enough as it’s only episode 1).  You’ve also got birds dropping out of the sky, sometimes en-masse.  Moving on you’ve got the special kids getting more special, the Fades killing and eating people to bring themselves back from the dead and you’ve got internal continuity issues.  The Fades have killed quite a few folk now (end of Ep 5) but the ghosts of these deceased haven’t shown up.  Maybe they’ll explain it – if you’re killed for food that’s it, you don’t get a ghost – more likely they’ve forgotten and the ghost F/X are expensive.  Did I make a cuppa and miss the bit where they explained the birds?  And there’s no media circus.  All these missing people, earth tremors, a high profile murder investigation and not one TV crew have shown up.

    They’ve got 1 episode to sort this out.  1 episode to wrap everything up in a suitably conclusive manner.  I reckon they’re pinning their hopes on a season 2 and they’re going to sort out nothing.  I hope I’m wrong.

    Anyway.  I know what I’m aiming for – beyond the obvious 50,000 words in November.  I’ve got a plan.  I’ve got some truly dreadful jokes.  And I hope I can hit more Being Human than Lost.

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  • 10 Things you Didn’t Know About Me.

    Tagged by the wonderful @SunnivaAnne following on from her blog post, so here goes.  10 things you (probably didn’t know about me).

    er.

    Actually, this is pretty hard.  I mean, there’s a lot of personal stuff you don’t want to have on the Internet, information that could well be used for nefarious purposes.  But anyway, here goes.

    1. I played my first roleplaying game at age 10.  Red box Dungeons and Dragons one school lunchtime with a trainee teacher and 3 other kids.  That hobby has stuck with me since though I won’t touch the current incarnation of Dungeons and Dragons with a 10′ pole.
    2. I’m English through and through but I look good in a kilt.  I’ve only worn one once and I didn’t have the beard when I wore a kilt but I reckon I’d look even better now.  If anyone has any kilt-wearing opportunities for me, let me know.
    3. I’ll come back to 3.
    4. If I had a time machine, the first thing I’d do would be to catch up on all the concerts I’ve missed in my life.  Queen playing Wembley in 1986, Huey Lewis & The News, Genesis, Mark Knopfler, Mike Oldfield and others in Edinburgh while I was at University.  I had a terrible habit of seeing posters around – “Hey, Genesis are at the Playhouse!  When?  Yesterday.  Bugger.”  I have seen some of the big bands I wanted to, but Queen is one I’ll never get the chance to now.  The new line-up doesn’t work for me.
    5. I like some really bad movies.  LXG, Time Bandits, Sky Captain, Wild Wild West, the list is very long indeed.  Reminds me.  Must get hold of Return of the Killer Tomatoes for the kids.
    6. See #3.
    7. I would have been over-qualified for James May’s Grade 1 Orchestra, having reached grade 3 in piano.  But that was a very long time ago and if you put me in front of a piano now I’d just about manage a C Major scale.
    8. A long time ago, I sang with Sir Harry Seacombe.  There were a lot of us, it wasn’t just me.  I wanted to take my Goon Show LP along to get him to sign it but mum didn’t think it was a good idea to take it to school.
    9. I don’t like the Harry Potter films.  Didn’t like the first one, haven’t really paid much attention to the rest.  The books were good – got far too long around the middle few but the last one was about right – and Stephen Fry’s audiobooks are excellent for long journeys, but they miss far too much out of the films.
    10. I am undecided about spots.
    Now I’m supposed to tag a few more people on this.
    • MyDaddyCooks
    • dadcooking2nite
    • wheniwasakid
    All 3 excellent twitter types.  Should be interesting…