I thought I might do a little analysis, just to pass the time. It isn’t easy to slot some of the headlines into simple categories because some fit into more than one – is a headline about Cheryly and Ashley Cole an X Factor story or a randy footballer story for example? Anyway, this is what they looked like in pie chart form:

All the Express headlines for 2011

All the Star headlines for 2011

The Star’s priorities are clear to see: TV and celebrities, especially Jordan and Peter Andre or Premiership footballers. Three-quarters of their headlines were about celebrities one way or another, assuming Kate & Wills to fall into that category. Only 42 headlines were not concerned with celebrities or with high-profile murders and deaths.

There were a few stories about muslims, scroungers, phone hacking (but only where it involved celebrities or murder victims naturally), and Lottery winners. The nearest it got to news was a handful of stories about the riots, Gaddafi and Bin Laden.

The Express is a bit better inasmuch as it doesn’t obssess about TV shows. Instead it obssesses about health scares and miracle cures, house prices and other personal finance matters, and foreigners. Two-thirds of the headlines fit into those broad categories, with weather, royalty and high-profile murders taking up most of the rest.

Things that may have made the headlines of other papers but did not appear in the Express or Star include:

• Tunisia, Syria or Egypt
• Libya (except about Gaddafi personally)
• Anything else abroad (except for a couple of mentions of the tsunami or how something might affect Brit holidays)
• Berlusconi
• Kim Jong-Il
• Utoya massacre
• Results of local elections, by-elections or Scottish, Welsh and NI elections
• Opinion polls
• PMQs or any other parliamentary proceedings
• VAT increase
• Cuts
• Protests
• National strikes
• Liam Fox
• Phone hacking (except where it impacted celebrities)
• The occupy movement
• Superinjunctions
• Dale Farm (surprisingly)
• Company failures

Those who read ‘proper’ papers, dutifully devouring several of the Sunday editions, and watch QT, Newsnight and all the weekly politics shows would do well to remember that for large chunks of the population this is what counts. Many only skim over the headlines of news anyway, having bought the paper for the sport and human interest stuff.

A bit sobering to consider that all the strategists in all parties and others trapped in the Westminster bubble base their ideas on stuff that a lot of us won’t even know and base their criteria for success on things a lot of us won’t see like PMQ performances, opinion polls and so on.

What was quite shocking really was the almost total absence of anything the slightest bit international. The Express is only really worried about abroad if it gives them a chance to bash the EU or if it will affect holiday destinations or prices.

The question is, does the Express only appeal to people who don’t give a shit about anything unless it might affect their personal pension, house value, health, or monthly budget or does it train its readers to only worry about those things? It has more stories about lighbulbs than parliament during the year.

As for the Star – can a paper that can run 58 X Factor-related headlines in a year and not even mention the PM, Chancellor or any other member of government (or opposition) really call itself a newspaper? Even Harry Potter gets one headline!

And here is the dilemma for political parties which is very topical – how do you write election leaflets that the readership of these papers is going to even look at, let alone pay attention to?

Front Cover

The other day I finished a proof copy of a book called The Return Man by V.M.Zigo. It is due to be published in March and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

It is a book set in a future where a mystery virus has created zombies, but the outbreak has been containe, albeit to a very large area. Basically the entire Western half of the USA has been evacuated leaving it populated only by the undead while the survivors cram in the the Eastern safe states.

One man hid from the evacuation teams and stayed behind to look for his wife with the intention of laying her to rest if she has been infected. In the meantime he takes commissions from people in the safe states to find their loved ones and ‘retturn’ them to a peaceful death.

It is an interesting twist on the whole zombie situation, making a change from the usual flight to safety. My only reservation was that it sounded like a good outline for a film and I couldn’t see how you could really capture the whole spirit of the films on paper, but it turns out you can and this bloke has done it!

The zombies are very much in the Romero tradition of shuffling slow zombies, which is the way I like them.

All the usual elements are there but with some extra depth and background. The hero is not a typical survivalist, but a surgeon who has had to teach himself how to survive in that environment and how to hunt. Thanks to satellite connections he is able to communicate with a relative out East who hooks him up with clients and provides a link to what is happening outside. The descriptions of how society has reacted and coped is not overdone but is enough to make you think seriously about how the world would adapt – not well, with the far right taking control of the remaining states.

Doctor Marco gets persuaded to take on a mission to find a specific corpse in California and on the quest he hooks up with a Chinese soldier sent from outside and here is another twist as the soldier’s Chinese cultural attitudes towards the dead make him more ready to kill live people than to re-kill corpses.

All of this means that there is a proper story arc with an objective more complex than just trying to avoid being over-run, and it is written in a decent, direct style without being trashy, and there are some spectacular set pieces in it. To go into too much detail would constitute major spoilers, but I will say that there is a sequence on a stalled train and a another where the hero wants to break into a prison crammed full of thousands of ex-con zombies who have been trapped there in order to find one specific ex-person.

All through the book, while enjoying it immensely, I could not stop myself wishing there was a film of it too so I was quite pleased to see that a company has already taken out an option on the film rights. Even so, I’m glad to have read the book because it contain a lot that a film would understandably miss out.

Best of all, the book comes to proper resolution that is satisfying enough while still leaving lots of scope for a sequel, which I will be first in the queue for when it comes out.

These films are what I think of as the ‘new’ Bond films. The Connery/Lazenby ones are the classics, the Moore ones can be a bit annoying now but I remember them fondly as the ones being released while I was a teenager (at least the earlier ones). It was a bit of a shock then, an an increasingly common shock these days, to realise just how old some of these ‘new’ Bond films are now – The Living Daylights is 25 years old!

Anyway, watching them all retrospectively (and, for some bizarre reason, in reverse order) rather than as seeing them as they came out I was having a completely different reaction to them. While the Dalton films underwhelmed me a bit at the time I now think they may be my favourite films and that Dalton was an outstanding James Bond.

I think it is because the plots were just a bit more restrained and plausible – no megalomaniac hell-bent on world domination from his secret lair. There were still some touches of trademark Bond silliness, like the cello ride across the Austrian border, but mostly they were quite sensible – maybe why they were not received so well?

The other thing I realised was that Carey Lowell just has to be the best Bond girl ever. She must have a picture in the attic as well, because she still looks great now at 50. Mind you, Halle Berry runs her a close second.

I realised that, for all those reasons and more, Licence to Kill is a serious contender for my favourite James Bond film. Am I alone in this?

By contrast Nestlé have made a formal announcement with a target for completion by the end of this year. I know from recent experience that it can take a year to plan such a move (actually it can easily take a lot more than that) so this is going to happen. They must already be drawing up plans, starting staff consultations and ordering 18 miles of CAT-5 cables. So what does all this mean for the local economy of Crawley, or should that now be Crawlé?It would be easy to get swept away in a wave of hyperbole, in fact the Crawley News might already have done that. Their story talks about the company “bringing 1000 jobs to the town” though other sources like the Croydon papers, the BBC and Nestlé’s press release all refer to the move of 840 office-based staff.

Will that mean more jobs for local residents? In the short term it may not. With a move of only 22 miles between two locations joined by a straight road and an even straighter railway line in a time of recession I reckon most Croydon-based staff will make the move. Quite a few might even live here or in places closer to here than to Croydon, and for them it will be an easy choice.

Those living in Croydon have a slightly harder choice but I think they will make the move. During relocations a proportion of staff take the opportunity to take redundancy, especially if they are near retirement. With such a short move that might not even be on the table for them. My company moved a site of 200 people from London to Crawley the other year and quite a lot of them did move even though it was nowhere near as convenient. Some of them faced an extra hour or more travelling. From Croydon it is only about 15 minutes by train to Gatwick with dozens of rush hour trains.

Very few people will find the change in location a real struggle, except financially for those on low wages who would find an extra £50 a month a burden. Even then they might find it cheaper to move if they are renting in Croydon.

There will be some new jobs though. All those cleaners, security guards, and other support staff are probably contracted out and it is possible Nestlé will just enter into new contracts with local firms for the new premises. So initially there will be a slight boost for anybody local looking for lower-paid jobs.

There might be a bit of a boost for local shops, cafes, pubs and other places but nowhere near as much as the negative effect on Croydon. The current building is pretty close to lots of local places that will lose a lot of business but the new building is quite isolated up near the airport. True the staff could jump on a Fastway into town, but mostly they won’t. I work on Manor Royal and very few people from there go into the town centre at lunchtime.

In the longer term it means that anybody looking for a job in accounting, HR, IT and other areas will one more major employer they can apply to, one more chance to ply their trade without having to suffer the commute into London and that has to be good.

I don’t think the benefits will be as large or as quick as the out-and-out optimists or Crawley council’s economic development press releases will imply but it will be a positive impact. And it means that the next time they get involved in child labour controversies or buying milk from Mugabe’s wife the Crawley lefties will have a shorter distance to travel for protests. On the other hand, with so many PR disasters behind them the company may well go on a charm offensive with all sorts of local sponsorships.

The most significant impact could be on traffic around the airport, depending on how many of those 840 (or 1000) people intend to drive to work.

The big question is whether the signs at Gatwick station get changed. As any seasoned commuter knows, the station signs at East Croydon all proudly say “East Croydon – home of Nestlé”. Obviously that will have to change, but will they want to do the same here? Or will they see how it goes first?

I’d be interested to know what the staff think about it all. Are they looking forward to it? Dreading it? One word of comfort for them, it may be that the move to a modern building can offset some of the pain.

The box design for Betta Bilda set No. 3

In one of those strange coincidences I had some thoughts about toy building blocks this morning, specifically Betta Bilda bricks, and then in the afternoon a colleague raised the topic of Lego in a conversation, giving me the opportunity to voice my recently-formed theory about Betta Bilda.During the 60s, when everybody else seemed to have Lego, I was one of the few kids in Basildon locked into the Betta Bilda standard. It was like a fore-runner of the VHS/Betamax battles in a way. I don’t know why I took the road less travelled because I am not one of those people who can remember every detail of their childhoods. Just one more reason why I would be terrible on ‘I Love 1974′.

Anyway, it might have been an my mother’s choice either for economical reasons or because of the Airfix brand name, or it might have been my choice – because of the Airfix brand name. I do remember that I was mad for Airfix model kits so it is likely. What is sure is that once you have a starter kit and a couple of packs of extra bricks you are in the realms of what the economists refer to as ‘sunk cost’ because if you decide to collect a different system of bricks you have wasted what you already have, because Lego and Betta Bilda bricks looked very similar but were not compatible at all.

Lego was the big brand. It had brighter colours, flashier boxes, and even back then it could be used to make more different types of model. Betta Bilda was a lot more austere and, dare I say, nerdier. It was great for building miniature houses, with some very specialised architectural extras allowing you to make quite accurate models, but not really suited to making aeroplanes, spaceships or lorries. Looking at the boxes for the Betta Bilda sets, they all appear to be aimed at aspiring 1960′s town planners.

Some of my schoolfriends teased me about my choice of bricks a bit. In a way I wished I had Lego so that I fitted in with everybody else and could swap bricks like the others did, but secretly I actually preferred my own set because it had things Lego didn’t – like a working drawbridge with little cotton chains to raise and lower it, as well as some other parts which were specially designed for making castles. The drawbridge was actually quite a fragile part, though as far as I recall I never did break it.

The relevence of all this? Aside from an excuse to wallow in a previously untapped well of nostalgia it reminded me a bit of my relationship with Apple products. When I got my first mp3 player it was the mighty iRiver iHP-120. It didn’t have the cool of the iPod but in my opinion although it didn’t do everything the iPod did, it did its one thing better. The only drawback to not having the market leader mp3 player is the same as it was with building bricks – compatibility. Back then it was the greater availability of Lego sets, now it is the inability to find any decent docks for an mp3 player not made by Apple.

I don’t think the analogy holds up very well, but Betta Bilda seems a bit Linux-y to me. Doing what it does well but not appealing to the masses. A bit nerdy and worthy and overwhelmed by rivals grabbing market share through making people want to conform.

Is that a bit forced? Yeah I think so too, but I didn’t realise until today how much I enjoyed playing with those Betta Bilda bricks and kind of wish I had been nerdier and tried making architecturally accurate models of my house rather than getting seduced by the curved bricks and crennelations of the castle accessories.

From the people who gave you The Machine Girl comes the even crazier Tokyo Gore Police! The makeup and special effects guru behind The Machine Girl, Exte, and Meatball Machine, director Nishimura Yoshihiro remakes his own award-winning 1995 indie short Anatomia Extinction into a gleeful splatter galore bound for cult classic status. Spilling buckets of blood and then some more, Tokyo Gore Police has all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for. Eihi Shiina from Audition stands tall and beautiful in the midst of the sadistic mayhem as the vengeful monster slayer in a very short skirt. Living up to its billing with eye-popping gore, comically over-the-top perversions, and thoroughly entertaining madness, Tokyo Gore Police is a must-watch for fans of gore and extreme cinema.

“all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for”? Tempting. I saw a similar film in HMV the other day, with an equally does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title: Robo-Geisha. It is summarised thus:

Get ready for the most unashamedly over-the-top and deliriously inventive cinematic experience of your life, as the Japanese masters of movie mayhem achieve a brand new level of jaw-dropping craziness. To help them achieve their goal of taking over the world, a megalomaniac Japanese businessman and his son recruit a vicious gang of Geisha assassins. These include two feisty sisters with an amazing range of surgically added weapons. But when one of these Robo-Geishas refuses to kill an innocent group of ex-employees, its butt-blades versus wig napalm and machine breasts against killer-cleaver socks as the assassins take on the Geisha’s in one of the most mind-bending movie battles of all time. Throw in the buildings that bleed, the Giant Castle Robot and the Breast Milk From Hell, and you have a wonderfully insane Kamikaze movie that will have you laughing out loud!

Apparently the film also features “rectal missiles of mass destruction”.

They sound like films to make Battle Royale seem like a Disney film in comparison. No idea if they are good, bad or so-bad-they-are-good, but I think I will have to find out some time this year. The whole genre is fertile ground for anybody looking for hardcore band names though.

But I wasn’t really paying much attention.I don’t know why, but I just never really got going this year. Life was a bit of a soap opera, with Frankie living here for most of it, Jayne going into hospital for a couple of weeks amongst other things. I have felt like I was treading water for the whole year, but I’ve decided to not just regroup over the holidays but to re-boot. With any luck 2012 will be better.

I’d love to list my favourite films of the year like everybody else, but I only saw a few 2011 films – Green Hornet, Thor, Adjustment Bureau and Paul – plus my favourite, and the only one I saw in the cinema, Horrible Bosses.

Its the same with TV. Most of what I watched was ongoing stuff like Only Connect, University Challenge, QI, Buzzcocks and similar. I did enjoy Death in Paradise and Black Mirror, but the biggest laughs I got all year were while watching Mongrels. Had a lot of fun watching Terra Nova with Jayne and ridiculing it.

As far as music is concerned, I enjoyed quite a lot of new stuff but what I enjoyed most were new releases by old favourites like Yes, Gang of Four, Human League, Paul Simon and Primus. A few newer (to me) artists did catch my ear though: Metronomy, Lykke Li, Beardyman, Emmy the Great and Mastodon who I had managed to avoid hearing previously. I don’t think I could name a single from 2011 except for Friday of course. The charts don’t seem to matter any more.

Not like 1976. One of this year’s pleasures was watching all the 1976 TOTP re-runs. Even some of the terrible stuff brough back great memories.

I have read quite a few books, courtesy of Amazon’s Vine programme. Some were proof copies and won’t be published until 2012. The ones I enjoyed most were Employee No. 59 (the one about Google), The Map of Time by Felix Palma, Michael Moore’s sort of autobiography and Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles. I would heartily recommend them to anybody. Having said that, the book I enjoyed reading most this year was Oliver Twist, which isn’t especially new.

With any luck the Kindle will encourage me to read more in 2012.

I feel a bit decadent having two e-book readers, and it might seem a bit excessive, but then I have two cameras, two mp3 players and two computers which are used for different circumstances so why not?

The big question is whether the concept of an e-book is attractive compared to paper copies. I took the Sony away on holiday this year and found it to be fine. Holidays are when these devices come into their own unless you are only likely to get through one book while you are away. I read Oliver Twist, the first Psmith book, an EE ‘Doc’ Smith novel and a Harry Harrison short story, which would have been a bit much to carry.

The technology used in both devices is E Ink which is not backlit like a computer, phone or tablet screen, making it easier on the eyes – important for longer sessions, and better in bright light. I had no trouble reading in the sunshine.

Why not just stick with books? Well, I do like books, but I’ve now reached the point where I don’t have room for many more. I find it hard to throw old ones away to make room for new ones, and I found it just as easy to read electronically.

Why not just use a laptop, tablet or smartphone? Well, the form factor has a lot to do with it. A phone is too small for comfort and a laptop or tablet isn’t really portable enough, plus there is the advantage of the display technology. The Sony Reader fits in a jacket pocket or a cargo pants pocket.

There might be an argument for having one device that does everything, but I’m a bit old-fashioned. I like having a dedicated and seperate camera, mp3 player, phone and book reader, but that’s how I am.

The big question is why I wanted a Kindle when I already had a Sony. The Kindle is obviously the market leader now, but that has never really affected my decisions before. I have had an mp3 player for at least 10 years now but never had an iPod.

In this case the software had a lot to do with the decision. As they did with their mp3 walkman products, Sony have a nice piece of hardware let down by the software. I have started using some open source software called calibre (it is spelled with a small c) instead, but I am still a bit distrustful of how it handles DRM. I am quite happy to continue downloading classics from Project Gutenberg to the Sony but never really trusted it enough to buy anything for it.

The same issue existed with mp3 players for a while, but it soon became easy to purchase DRM-free content, and until then it was still easy to rip your own CDs. With book readers you can’t just rip your paper books onto a computer so unless you want to be limited to out-of-copyright books you can’t avoid DRM.

So, onto a bit of a comparison between the two machines: a Sony Reader PRS-300 and the Kindle 2011 model AKA the 4th generation Kindle.

Sony PRS-300 (left) and 4th Generation Kindle (right)

In terms of size, they are very similar. The Kindle is a little bit wider than the Sony (about 50mm?) and a little bit taller (about 75mm?) but a little slimmer. It is only a few mm thinner, though it looks more because of the more bezeled edges. The Sony is noticeably heavier though, and the Kindle screen is a lot bigger – about 15mm wider and 2cm taller.

The Sony on top of the Kindle

The Sony feels more solid than the Kindle, though neither feels too flimsy. Both have a hard front with a more tactile surface on the back.

In terms of display, both are adequate, but I find the Kindle to be a bit sharper with a better contrast. It just looks that little bit more like paper than the Sony.

Side-by-side with the same text being displayed

The Sony has a standard mini-USB port plus a DC power port. The Kindle just has a (less standard) USB port for charging and data transfer. You can charge the Sony up via the USB port but, in my experience, only from a computer and not from a mains USB charger. I discovered that the hard way on holiday when the battery was running low and the charger sucked the remaining life out of it instead of topping it up.

The Sony comes with a USB cable but not a DC adaptor. The Kindle comes with an extraordinarily long (2-metre) USB cable. The Kindle cable will charge up the machine from a mains adaptor and not suck the battery: that was one of the first things I tested.

When reading I find that the Kindle turns pages faster and starts up faster. The options for changing type size are also better on the Kindle. The Sony only has three sizes that you can toggle between, with quite a frustrating pause before re-rendering. The Kindle has eight font sizes in three different styles, as well as a few extra display options.

The other features which Kindle has that the Sony lacks are the ability to look up words easily and to make notes. Bookmarking is available in both but I have to admit I always found that fiddly on the Sony. The numbered buttons on the Sony are nice. In theory it is quicker than scrolling down, though I kep forgetting about them and scrolling down anyway. The round four-way control on the Sony is a little less fiddly to use as it is much bigger than the square control on the Kindle, but on balance I would rather have the extra couple of centimetres of screen and put up with the smaller button, which is still quite usable.

Selecting a book on the Kindle (not that I have much on there to choose from yet)

Really it just works better for me.

I guess the biggest difference between the two is the connectivity. The Sony has no wifi so you have to transfer books by USB. To do that, you download a book from wherever and import it into your library on your PC and then synch that to the device. I really got my knickers in a twist doing this with the Sony software before I finally gave up and moved to an alternative. Even after that there still remains an issue with the device taking its time to be ready afterwards – like it is redoing its index or something.

With the Kindle there are several options. You can still download a book from Project Gutenberg and then transfer it via USB, or you can have anything purchased from Amazon transferred by wifi either from their website or from the Kindle itself.

I have downloaded a couple of old books from PG which worked fine, and also downloaded from Amazon. I bought a book for Jayne’s machine and downloaded a couple of samples for mine. If I decide I want to read the whole thing I can then buy the rest. All very easy, although I am acutely aware that my purchased books could, in theory, disappear if Amazon disappeared. That is a potential issue with any sort of DRM media and I have decided to trust it for this.

There is a bit of a limitation, in that you are tied to Amazon for purchases, which is a new experience for me. Having never had an Apple product I am not used to being tied to one provider. On the other had there is an advantage – all your purchases are backed up in the cloud. If you ever lose the Kindle or break it or upgrade sometime in the future, all the content can be synched to the new machine.

I think I will keep both machines. Any classics I download will go onto both, but my first choice for actually reading them will be the Kindle, especially on holiday when it means Jayne and I can share a charger. The Sony will be kept because there are some file formats it can handle which the Kindle can’t. It is possible to convert them on your PC or by e-mailing them to Amazon, who will convert them and send them by wifi for free, but the conversion can get a bit scrambled if there is any fancy formatting.

The final verdict: despite the better open source credentials of the Sony the Kindle wins for me.

As for the concept, there is a lot of speculation about whether the paper book’s days are numbered. I don’t know about that, what I do know is that a lot of people now have these machines and you can’t use them without reading books (or newspapers or blogs I suppose) and there is a part of me that likes the idea that there is going to be more reading going  – surely better for you than playing Angry Birds or watching Eastenders on the daily commute.

The rationale for Chavez’s theory is that Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rouseff and Lula Da Silva of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez De Kirchner of Argentina and himself have all had cancer in the last few years. He says that these incidences are “difficult to explain using the law of probabilities”.

Well my first thought was: clustering. Right or wrong, it is always a viable option whenever there is any sort of apparent outbreak of a non-infectious disease.

Then I read a bit further and saw that these leaders all had different types of cancer making a common cause just a little less likly.

Best of all, Chavez says he is not making” rash accusations” but is merely “thinking aloud”.

Not that cost-cutting is the reason. I just think that it would be better for all sorts of reasons. Countries take the medal table very seriously for the Olympics, and I reckon that if the current Paralympic events counted towards that total it would give a lot more prominence to those events. Anyone agree?