Published on
March 30, 2006 in
London.
There is a protest today in my road. A group of local people are objecting to plans by T-Mobile to put a mobile phone transmitter in the park at the top of the road. I won’t be going. I don’t like mobile phone masts, I’d rather there weren’t any, but since nearly everyone who objects to the masts also uses a mobile phone it seems like the most blatant hypocrisy for them to complain about being able to see them. I have visions of these campaigners marching up and down and then going home to complain to their phone operators about poor coverage.
It would be better if campaign groups like Mast Sanity would campaign against the use of mobile phones, but they don’t because they know it would be unpopular. I don’t have a mobile. Well, I do have one but it’s so old that it only works when it’s plugged in so it’s really just a phone.
There are several reasons why I don’t like mobile phones. The first is that they encourage people to be rude. Once that phone rings the owner almost always goes into a kind of selfish bubble in which everyone around them ceases to exist. I have witnessed people having all sorts of conversations that they wouldn’t have with a real person in public. It also makes me very sad to see a couple walking down the road, one of them chatting away on their phone to someone with whom they demonstrably would much rather be.
The second reason is that they encourage people to be disorganised. The adoption of ‘approximeeting’ seems to have made it much more acceptable to keep other people waiting. It is as if by constantly keeping their victim updated on their progress the latecomer can disguise the fact that the meeting simply wasn’t sufficiently important to justify allowing enough time to travel to it.
The last reason I dislike these phones is the way in which people see them as status symbols. I realised when I first saw an advert which asked “Are you ashamed of your mobile?” that I would never again buy a mobile phone. The fact that the people who sell these phones can shamelessly tell their customers that something they sold them last year is actually crap reflects very badly both on the salesmen and the saps who fall for this nonsense.
There is, in fact, only one thing I like about mobile phones and that is the German name for them. “I’ll call you on your Handy” they say. “Handy” is short for “Handy-phone”. Nice.
Published on
March 24, 2006 in
Media.
According to some dim witted BBC writer:
…the French language… used to be the lingua franca for most EU business.
No shit, Sherlock.
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Chirac upset by English address
Published on
March 11, 2006 in
Politics.
“March 11 is a date I will never forget,” a passenger at Atocha told the Associated Press news agency.
“More than anything I remember the silence that engulfed the city after the massacre”, Javier Hervas said.
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Madrid remembers terror victims
I was in Madrid when the bombs went off. I was there for the coverage of the elections, it was supposed to be a nice quiet trip. My hotel was at the top of Atocha, the street that runs down to the Station. As you can imagine, I don’t remember any silence; it was mayhem for us. The thing I remember most is the attitude of the Madrilenos to the bombings. We interviewed a lot of people and many of them muttered “bastardos” under their breath; they took it personally. It was such a dignified reaction compared to the reaction I saw from the US after September 11th. People weren’t calling for revenge, they just wanted to know who those bastards who bombed them were.
Maybe it would have been the same if I’d been in New York after the twin towers collapsed, it’s hard to know. The consequences of these two bombings were certainly in keeping with my initial impressions. The march in Madrid that followed the Atocha attacks was full of grief and an amazing positive, defiant attitude. I was so proud to be there. The atmosphere after the elections was incredibly hopeful and positive. The consequences of the New York attack have been ugly and seem so futile now. Revenge, repression, I can’t think of one good thing that has happened as a result apart from possibly more Americans know more about Islam than they did before. That, like many of the outcomes, would have seemed like a good thing to the hijackers. In Spain they have a new cool government. In America they have less freedom than they have had for a long time, a lot of parents have lost their children to brutal wars, an incompetent government has been able to wrap itself in the patriotic flag to avoid the blame for its mismanagement and the country is universally unpopular around the world. At the risk of sounding like a vicar, maybe there’s a lesson in this for how we deal with catastrophes in our own lives.
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