WhyNotSmile

On Feeling Sad For No Reason

2012-01-01T13:40:00.000Z

As Allie at Hyperbole and a Half says, it is disappointing to feel sad for no reason. But this is the state in which I find myself again, so I might as well write about it.

Possibly the most disappointing aspect of feeling sad for no reason is that one always has memories of the days when one did not feel sad, when one got out of bed wanting to do things, and it is disappointing to feel rising terror every time anyone suggests doing Big things, such as leaving the house.

I have long suspected that I was designed to hibernate for most of January and February. Some year I may try this. I can re-appear in March, with the daffodils and snowdrops and so on.

2012: A Preview

2012-01-01T13:16:00.000Z

Now here at WhyNotSmile, we're not into New Year's Resolutions, because we have neither willpower not sticking power, and see no need to introduce one more inevitable disappointment into life.

But there is no harm in breaking with one's own traditions once in a while, so here goes.

This year I will:

Be prepared. It seems to me that there are few crises which cannot be improved (however slightly) by enduring them at home with a cup of tea. Therefore, wherever I am this year, I shall always have enough money on me to get a bus home, and there will always be tea bags and milk in my house.

Be organised. I need to stop using Facebook as a reminder system, however successful it may be. There is a point in everyone's life at which one must take responsibility for one's own daily schedule, and it is possible that this point has been passed. I will figure out how to use the calendar thing on my phone, and stick to it.

Blog more. I have quite a number of half-finished posts. I will try to finish at least some of them by the end of the year.

Apart from this, I will do everything exactly the same as I have always done it.

2011: A Review

2011-12-31T19:30:00.000Z

So, 2011. Turned out to be quite the year, here at WhyNotSmile. It started inauspiciously enough, with an extended stay at the parents', due to the Water Crisis in Belfast. Nice and cosy, I was, as I sat there all clean and with full access to basic sanitation, watching the news to see how many people I knew in the queues. Good times.

Rapidly, however, world affairs took over, and it is thus that 2011 will go on record as the year I stopped understanding the news. I've been losing my grip on it for several years now, what with the financial thing that I understood none of, but this year, finally, the Arab Spring tipped me over the edge (I still don't know if 'Spring' refers to the season, or to the sudden rising up of the people in the manner of a tightly-coiled length of pliable metal, or to the refreshment offered by a newfound democracy, such as is found by a lonely wanderer who happens upon a small steam).

Then they promised the end of the world, and when THAT didn't happen, well, there we all were with our empty diaries and no milk in the fridge.

Of course, giving up on international affairs has left me with nothing but my own so-called life. Or, in summary, has left me with nothing.

Sister Smile got engaged in June, and was married just before Christmas, but I'm not allowed to speak of her here. I assume the same goes for Brother-in-law Smile, which is a shame, as he could have been worth having on the radar.

In more interesting developments, however, I am pleased to introduce Boyfriend Smile to my dear readers, and to report that, as I specifically requested, he made the application for a first date in writing, and, as all was correct with the spelling and grammar, I had, of course, to accept. He hasn't written a word since then, probably due to sheer terror.

It was also a year in which various things happened which were utterly tragic, in the actual sense of the word (not in the wearing-a-tweed-jacket-and-thinking-it's-cool sense). A respected, good and gentle friend is in heaven too soon, a family devastated. Other friends stopped work at Christmas, not knowing if they have jobs to return to in the new year; those they work to help don't know if anyone will be there for them in 2012.

And depression has come calling at my door again. I tried not answering, but it freaking leaned on the bell until it was easier to give in, stick the kettle on, and crack open a packet of French Fancies.

Happy new year, y'all.

On Why I Am Not Married

2011-12-03T21:40:00.001Z

In a worrying move, Claire-who-is-married-to-Creideamh has declared me to be a wise woman, and has asked (via Facebook) for an opinion on a thing. So here goes.

The article in question is http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/27/kate-bolick-women-marriage-relationships. It's quite long, so I'll summarise it for you. The basic point (i.e. the title) is that "marriage is a declining option for women"; it is a little hard to establish from the article exactly why the author believes this to be the case, but her reasons seem to boil down to the following:

Us 'post-boomers' "value emotional fulfilment above all else", rather than needing to get married so we'd have help with the lambing
Men today are useless fecks who either don't earn enough to impress us, aren't smart enough to impress us, or are to geeky to tolerate; in any case, they don't like to commit and we no longer need them to pro-create, so why would anyone bother?
Couples nowadays are way too couple-y (I'm not quite sure how this supports the actual argument, but it made for an interesting tangent)

Now, my opinions were invited, and my opinions shall be provided.

First of all, let me say that I do not view marriage as a non-option; indeed, it is very much an option, and if only it were as simple as ticking a box on a survey, then married I would be. I speak, of course, as someone who is apparently chronically incapable of attracting anyone of the opposite sex, and from time to time I have given some thought as to why this might be.

The main reason (and one which is, I suspect, 99% of the problem) is that I am chronically incapable of flirting. I just cannot do it. Perhaps this stems from my utter lack of self-esteem which leads to me believing, at heart, that there is no conceivable reason why the other side would be flirting with me; whatever the reason, anyone who wishes to be considered as a marriage prospect would do considerably better to state the fact clearly and outright (perhaps in a letter, because face to face I might throw up) and to directly request my own opinion on the matter. If I am interested (and provided the letter is grammatically reasonable and the spelling is good), then off we shall go; if not, I shall politely decline and it will never be spoken of again. This seems to me a much better course of action than me pretending to be all 'damsel in distress' or him making corny comments about how my dad must be a thief because he stole all the stars from the sky and put them in my eyes. Seriously.

But there may be some truth in what Kate Bolick says (let's be nice to her; she has an unfortunate surname). I have, I suppose, no particular need to get married, in terms of my survival. I earn enough money to get by, I'm quite handy with a hammer, and frankly, I see no need to enhance my house by having someone playing an XBox in it.

On the other hand, I would very much like to have children; I like them, I think I might be an ok parent, and it would a change from spending most evenings watching re-runs of the X Factor. For this, I would need a man.

Fundamentally, however, I think she may be closest to the mark with the point about couples being too couple-y. I don't want a lot of what is often held up as the ideal of marriage - the nuclear family, mum, dad, 2 kids and a spaniel, living in a nice home in an area with good schools, hosting pleasant dinner parties and always having the latest TV.

I don't aspire to much of that - if it happens, it happens, but it doesn't represent the things I value. If I marry, I want it to make a difference not just to me, but to the people around me as well. I want to marry someone who makes me be a better person; who enhances who I am and who is a better person for having married me. I want him to value me, but I also want him to value the things that matter to me - my friends, my community, my interests - and I want to do the same for him. I want us to love each other for who we are, and to push each other to be the best we can be. It might sound ridiculous, but I want the part of the world I spend my time in to be a better place because I've married the man that I have. I don't want to be in a marriage which only looks inward, to how we can get more stuff or impress our friends; I want to be in a marriage which also looks outward to bless other people, and which ultimately looks upward to God.

But I like to think that that's something that I get, in some measure, from all my close relationships - my friends inspire me to see things differently, to be creative, to hang in there when things are tough, and to do lots of other day to day things that make my life better - and I hope I sometimes inspire them in similar ways. If I marry, I want my husband to become a part of my community, and I want to become a part of his - I don't want being in a couple to pull me away from people who matter to me.

I don't know whether this is in any way part of the wider issue raised in the article, that marriage (particularly marriage for life) is declining; maybe it is that women everywhere have rid themselves of the need for a man, and are getting along just fine, thank you very much.

After all, it is not unheard of for me to not think in exactly the same way as other people.

An Open Letter To Northern Ireland Water

2011-11-20T22:44:00.001Z

Dear Northern Ireland Water,

I noticed that you seem to be running a radio advert at the moment, in which you take the opportunity to tell us how bad it is to not have water, and to have burst pipes, and all manner of other Water-Related Bad Things which can happen when it gets cold outside. I assume this is costing you a tidy sum, so I'm sure you will appreciate some feedback on how it's going.

Here's the thing.

We KNOW all about having no water, because last year you fecking left most of us without it for the best part of a week (and in many cases, you allowed the demonstration to go on for even longer). We therefore KNOW that having no water is a Bad Thing, and that it means you can't flush the toilet or make a cup of tea, because we practiced having no water last year, and we practiced really really hard.

So, I have an idea. Rather than spending lots of money telling us how bad it is to have no water, how about you spend the money in ensuring that this year we actually do have water?

Just a suggestion.

Thank you kindly,
WhyNotSmile
(who admittedly did not go without water at all last year, due to staying with the parents, who had water throughout, but who nonetheless heard one or two people mentioning the inconvenience on Facebook, and the news, and on the phone and things)

Young Apprentice 2011: Weeks 3 & 4

2011-11-20T15:02:00.001Z

I didn't say anything about Week 3, because, to be honest, it mostly went disappointingly quite well. Apart from Lewis leaving his mobile phone on in a meeting, being told to turn it off, and then still leaving it on and getting hysterical because he didn't know how to turn it off. And also Sir Harry of Posh being generally very posh indeed. They had to sell flowers, a task which James was terrified off, since flowers are for girls and he's a proper man and therefore couldn't be expected to touch them. But apart from one of the arrangements for a wedding or some other important function Lord Sugar had laid on (he needs to stop going round lying on things, heh heh) being a bit on the small side, they generally did fairly well for a bunch of 16 year olds who've never done flower arranging before.

So that was disappointing.

A girl called Hannah got fired. It is possible she had been specially drafted in for the firing, as I'm pretty sure she hadn't appeared up till then.

Onto week 4, and they were summonsed to a museum because (wait for it) the task is all about old people (specifically, the over-50s), and museums are full of old things, like people over 50. Glorious. A few weeks ago we had casual racism; now we're targetting the elderly (and not even elderly, since they're only over 50).

It's the one where they see some naff inventions and then flog them at a trade show; in this case, a trade show for people who are over 50. Which is weird. I didn't know those existed. Did you know those existed?

Haya gets put in charge of her team (Sir Harry of Posh, Lewis and a blonde girl) because she spends lots o' time wiv 'er gran; James gets put in charge of the other lot (the other Harry, Gbemi, girl with red hair and the other blonde girl) because he says so.

As ever, the inventions are a heap of toot: an electric pie maker, a posh shopping trolley, a bird box camera, a really really sucky vacuum cleaner, a cushion which you can sit on AND put behind your head, and an inflatable thing you can bath your dog in. Like a paddling pool, but smaller and therefore less useful.

James' strategy is to be really really really enthusiastic about everything they're shown, even if it's a device to recycle human bones into a handy drinks dispenser. Lewis, on the other hand, goes down the route of burbling incoherently at the shopping trolley guy while Haya tries to figure out if she can bump him off before Nick's eyebrows entirely leave his face and go into orbit.

So Haya and co end up flogging the pie maker and the bird box camera, and James' lot have the shopping trolley and the vacuum cleaner.

Their sales techniques leave a bit to be desired - Haya nabs an old woman and starts yelling "Let me introduce you to our pie maker!" (what? "Old woman - meet Pie Maker; Pie Maker, meet old woman"?) while Lewis hollers "Don't be shy, come and try some pie!". So the old people spend the morning eating the pies and not buying the pie maker, because why would you bother making yourself a pie when Lewis is going to stand there all day making them for you? Their pricing is insane - they upped the price of the pie maker, because Haya thinks people should pay more for it. Also, old people have a serious sense of entitlement when it comes to a discount, and that is exactly what Haya is not offering.

James, meanwhile, tries to talk another old woman into buying a shopping trolley for £125; when she politely mutters that she'll "come back later", James screams "You better not be lying!". Poor not-posh Harry gets a lecture from an old lady on his sales technique, who thinks, basically, that he'd sell more if they were a bit cheaper, which you can't really argue with.

Sir Harry of Posh and the other blonde girl, meanwhile, are just randomly making up prices, and not even the same ones. Sir Harry threatens customers that he'll put the price up later in the day; meanwhile blonde girl next to him is practically paying people to take them.

What senior citizens do not seem interested in, at all, is what the birds in their bird boxes are up to, so Sir Harry and blonde girl decide that instead of selling the bird box cameras directly, they'll flog them to the other traders and let them worry about getting money for them. It's genius. And it works. Mainly because he lies like mad about how well they sold in the first place.

Back in the boardroom, James' lot win, and they get to go and see a guy doing magic on the London Eye. Haya and co go off to Cafe Losers, where they drink tea and look miserable. Especially Posh Harry, who has probably never been anywhere so working class in his life. Back to the boardroom, where they argue a bit about the relative merits of cushions and bird box cameras, and Haya brings back Lewis and the blonde girl.

Haya says she brought Lewis back in because he talked bubbles; Lewis then chips in to disagree, not with being brought back in, but with her reason for bringing him back. As he points out, he didn't sell anything, so he should have been brought back in for that. Eventually, though, they talk him round and he agrees that the talking bubbles thing was also true, so he talks about that for a while. Unsurprisingly, he gets fired. I think the nation agrees that it's for the best.

We love Lewis, though.

Some Things I Found On The Internet

2011-11-06T17:03:00.001Z

Here are some things I found on the internet this week.

kimjongillookingatthings is a blog which shows Kim Jong-Il looking at things. Actual genius.

Hyperbole and a Half is a blog you should all subscribe to. NOW. Go on. I'll wait. This particular post is all about depression, and is way better than anything else you will ever read on the subject. Way better. Also, on a vaguely similar note, this is very good.

I've recently discovered Relevant Magazine, which is a Christian magazine, but actually, like, quite good. This week I liked this article, which is all about being a member of the local church, and sticking it out, and how people inevitably suck. You should read it.

And I think that is all the things I found on the internet this week.

Young Apprentice 2011: Week 2

2011-11-06T16:48:00.002Z

The Apprentice is starting to stretch our credulity to breaking point. First, we're all pretending that Lewis is not just Rhys Rosser one year on, that Gbemi isn't Edna without gloves, and that James is not, in fact, the result of throwing Ben-who-didnt-go-to-Sandhurst, Stuart Baggs and Jedi Jim into a blender and then accidentally reanimating the whole darned mess. And second, we're meant to believe that when the two teams come up with completely, entirely new, never-before-thought-of inventions, that Lord Sugar has a Big Machine out back that can make them overnight.

Anyway, this week's task was babies; specifically, passing them round the group and looking terrified (apart fromm Gbemi, who has a 9 year old sister and therefore is, like, a baby expert), and then inventing something to do with them that hasn't been done before and that people might buy. Then it's the usual design it - make it - make a box to put it in - pitch it to retailers thing.

Lewis ends up in charge of the boys, if such a thing as being 'in charge' of this lot is really possible. James and Sir Harry of Posh immediately start sniping and yelling and taking credit for every invention known to man. Somehow, in the middle of this, someone (James or Sir Harry of Posh, according to each of them respectively, or someone else entirely, according to the rest of the planet) decides that what the world needs is a hippo-bottle-storage-insulaty-standy-upy thing. It's basically a softish hippo, which the baby can play with, and then you rip its head off (the hippo's, not the baby's) and there's a bottle of milk in there, staying warm or cold or whatever temperature you put it in at, and the baby is all happy because even though its hippo is dead, it has a bottle.

Surprisingly, the boys have trouble settling on a unique selling point for this... unique... device, with Sir Harry of Posh thinking it's all about the hippo being familiar to the baby, and the rest of them thinking that maybe it's quite handy that it keeps the milk warm. Not that it matters, because when they get to the pitches, wee Lewis is so nervous he can hardly get a word out, but then reliable Harry steps up for the final one and does very well.

Chez girls, Gbemi is in charge because of having a sister and all, and one of the generic blonde girls is all "Ooooh, design, how innovative that would be", and eventually they come up with a sort of sling thing that you put on your arm when you're holding a baby, and it supports the baby's head. Which is not totally awful, but sounds a wee bit like a cushion.

Anyway, their big drama comes when they have to take photos for the box, and one of the generic blonde girls (possibly the same one as earlier, possibly not) casts a black mother and a white baby. Chaos and hysterics ensue. Because we all know that NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO PICK UP A BABY THAT'S NOT THE SAME EXACT COLOUR AS THEM.

At the pitches (which Gbemi insists on doing, thus adding further fuel to the "Edna in non-disguise (apart from not wearing gloves)" fire), the retailers' concerns are more basic. "What does it do?" asks one of them, after several minutes of Gbemi telling them it's both washable AND handable, oh yes. Mercifully, Gbemi lets the previously-unseen Haya do the final pitch, and she does it well.

In the boardroom, Nick and Karrrrren do that thing where they read out the results in the order that makes you think the team that has lost has actually won, and LO! the girls are victorious, and go off to Dance with Diversity, which they would have been a good tag line for their box image.

In Cafe Sombre, the boys are disconsolate, and I feel sorry for wee Lewis, because I quite like him. They all blame each other, of course, so we needn't dwell on that, and then it's back to the boardroom to bicker there, and now Lewis has to choose his 2 fall guys.

He opts for Sir Harry of Posh, and Ben-who-seems-nice-but-hasn't-been-seen-much-but-is-now-wearing-a-bright-pink-shirt-presumably-in-a-bid-for-attention. Unfortunately for Ben, this is the moment he chooses to open his mouth, and even more unfortunately, what he says when accused of not doing a lot is "I have a relaxed approach to working". The nation facepalms.

So Ben gets fired, for not doing much, which seems unfair as he seems quite pleasant and possibly reasonably competent. On the other hand, he wouldn't be great viewing, and basically that's our only requirement.

Young Apprentice 2011: Week 1

2011-10-25T00:00:00.001+01:00

I know I said I mightn't do this, but I'm here on the basis that:

1. I watched it so I might as well jot down some thoughts
2. I've only watched it once, and I didn't take notes, so it might not be accurate
and
3. You're not to assume I'll do this every week.

Are we all on board with that?

Great. So we have the usual intros to the various forms of obnoxious that we'll come to know and love, and then it's off to the board room to meet Lord Sugar. I can't tell you how much security is brought back to my life with the sight of him sitting there, grinning, with Nick and Karren on his flanks. Then he tries to be cool and down wiv da kidz, and fails, but since none of these kidz are down wiv da rest ov da kidz, it's fine.

First crisis is the two Harrys, because How Will We Tell Them Apart? Lord Sugar comes up with a master plan - let's call one of them Harry H, and the other Harry M. "So 'oo wants ta be 'Arry H?" he asks, jocularly. The one whose surname starts with H solemnly sticks up his hand, and the first decision of the day is made.

The task is to make frozen treats, by which, it transpires, we mean ice cream and stuff.

On the boys' team, the Northern Irish one (James, possibly) stamps all over everyone, and then they all refuse to lead. They suggest and then bicker over a range of crappy team names, before landing on something which I've since put out of my mind. James wants to make frozen yogurt and dress as pirates and then call it Shiver Me Timbers, which is actually not bad.

The girls are all hysterical; I assume they choose a name and a leader, but in all honesty it was too high-pitched for me to hear. They're making ice cream and calling it something stupid like "taste and thin" because everyone nowadays is obese but they also want to eat ice cream.

Next, they have to make the stuff. The boys leave a tap open in their big ice cream mixy bowl, and milk goes everywhere. The girls demonstrate their incompetence at maths and then don't buy enough bananas (although they do get them for £2.50 instead of £3. Mad skillz).

Somehow, they all make ice cream and frozen yogurt and stuff, and some of it is fit for consumption, and some is not entirely rancid.

Day 2, and they're on the beach. One of the boys freaks out because their ice cream stand says "Shiverrr Me Timbers", with 3 'r's, and he's worried people will think they can't spell. They can sell ice cream, though, mainly because they only charge a quarter of what normal people would charge.

Not so the girls, who have hiked prices up and are even charging for the cones. Their approach is to lure in small children, as if they want an ice cream, make it anyway, add all the toppings, and then chase the parents until they can rip all their money out of their hands.

Mind you, it works, because they win, and get to go zorbing, whereas the boys are off to Le Cafe De Sadness, where they all try to claim credit for everything.

A small chap called Mahamed gets fired, and his eyes go really really really small.

Next week: something to do with babies, I think

Technical Plans

2011-10-23T14:03:00.003+01:00

Also, I'm currently trying to work out if I can live blog The Apprentice to save time. So far, no joy.

An Offer To Tourists

2011-10-23T14:02:00.000+01:00

Now here at WhyNotSmile, we are not Big Fans of corporate greed, bankers getting large bonuses, and capitalism in general (although we admit to having very little understanding of any of them; since our understanding is roughly as much as our influence, this is not a problem). The latest way to demonstrate this angst, is, apparently, to go and camp outside churches, because apparently sometimes stocks and shares are traded in the vicinity, and also because they don't let you camp in actual banks, and also the vicar might make you tea or something.

So, because of this, St Paul's Cathedral has had to close (although there is some debate as to whether it had to close, or just chose to close). Now, I think this is a little unfair, since the people of St Paul's have by all accounts been Quite Nice to the protestors (who have apprently also been Quite Nice) and are not generally Big Fans of corporate greed themselves. On the other hand, they are claiming to be losing £16000 - £20000 per day.

This makes me wonder a little. They charge £14.50 admission at St Paul's. That strikes me as quite a lot, although I imagine they have quite big heating bills and so on so it's probably just about covering the costs of running the place. I don't know.

However, WhyNotSmile has decided to make you all a special offer, if you are a tourist who wanted to visit St Paul's but now cannot. If you come to my church, you can see round for only a tenner, PLUS we will make you tea (I say 'we', I mean whoever's about, which may not be anyone - if it's the caretaker, you should probably slip him a fiver, cos it's not really part of his job to show random tourists around. Also, I haven't actually told anyone in the church about this, so they might look a bit surprised when you arrive).

I think we can offer at least as much as St Paul's, particularly if you have a reasonable imagination. I checked their website to see what they have. Attractions include:

"Climb the dome" to the "Whispering Gallery". At the back of the church, up the stairs, there's a wee room where we store boxes of random stuff, some books, and an old keyboard. Climb the stairs, go into the wee room, and then discover that if you stand at one side of the room and whisper, people at the other side can hear you (please note: this only really works if you stand against the long wall so you're only whispering across the width of the room).
"A touchscreen multimedia tour". As long as you bring your iPad so you can browse the photos on the website while you walk around.
"Explore the crypt". Yeah, ok, we don't have a crypt. We have a bouncy castle though.
"Travel back in time in an immersive video experience". Viewings of "Ben Hur" on the screen at the front every 2 hours.
"Treat yourself to afternoon tea". If no one's around, there's a kettle in the kitchen; it takes a while to boil, and you may have to jiggle it a bit, but what do you think this is? Also, I'd bring your own tea bags because all the ones we have are under lock and key in case someone from one of the other organisations nicks them. There's a Co-op across the road though.

Now, admittedly, we don't have a gift shop, but WyseByse across the road is good value and has a wide range of items for all ages.

Also, we're quite nice*.

And we do not have £16,000 per day; indeed, an extra £16,000 per year would be a significant increase in our income. And also, we do all manner of things in the community which are sometimes helpful for the sorts of people who are not bankers or corporate giants and who therefore could make quite good use of part of the £16,000 in ways which would not at all fund the corporate machine.

Advance booking is advised; guide dogs only.

*mostly. Some of us also offer opportunities for you to practice forgiveness.

Anticipation

2011-10-18T21:48:00.000+01:00

So. Junior Apprentice is back. Only this year we seem to be calling it "Young Apprentice". Trust me, I just saved you a LOT of googling, with that last fact there. Now, I can't promise that I'll be able to bring you a weekly review, because, frankly, I'm so busy right now it's STUPID (on the plus side, I may actually earn enough this year to pay tax - my life is just a series of victories, n'est ce pas?), but there's no harm in taking a quick look at the candidates. Not all of them, because I want to go to bed. But the ones we'll be wanting to punch by this time next week.

Namely.

Harry Hitchens:

"I aim high. I don’t aim low ever, what are you ever going to gain from that? I aim high and I get there because of that determination, because I’m pretty ruthless in how I get there."

What do I gain from aiming low? A quiet life, Harry, that's what. And achieved ambitions. And a haunting sense of unfulfilment, of course.

Moving on.

Harry Maxwell. Apart from the obvious CHAOS which will ensue from having 2 people with the same name (remember that Christopher Farrell and Chris-quite-cute-but-boring-voice from a couple of series ago, and how we never knew which was which? Yeah. That.), this Harry is a polo and water sports enthusiast, and has already started 3 successful businesses. I'll need a lie down just watching this guy.

Hayley Forrester wears wellies and "passionately disagrees with people claiming benefits when they could be working". Sometimes simultaneously. Also, she sells eggs. That's what that girl Emma did last year, innit?

Lizzie Magee is a rounders champion. I was not aware that was a thing.

Zara Brownless "used to be a baby model and won a sock design competition when she was seven years old". She says:

Dreamers dream; people who achieve wake up, get out there and start doing stuff to make their dreams happen.

You know what that quote needs? Ponies.

On Liking Cake

2011-10-02T15:31:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite parts of teaching Sunday School is the bit where we ask them what they want to pray for this week. The suggestions generally range from 'my granda is sick' through 'I have a test tomorrow' to 'I like cake'.

This always gets me wondering: at what point in life does it become unacceptable to announce in a prayer meeting that you like cake? For I can guarantee that if I did this at the church prayer meeting, I'd get 'looks'. What is the point at which we think we have to be all grown up and serious? And also, why?

It's almost as if we think it actually matters to God how we pray. As if we think we can, in any way, approach the Creator of the universe as anything other than ridiculous creatures who should, by rights, be flicked away to stop us cluttering the place up with our crappiness. As if we think He'll only hear us if we say it all proper, instead of just coming and enjoying being overawed by the fact that we're there at all.

I think God likes it when we come and tell Him that we like cake, or that we don't like cake, or that we saw a cloud shaped like a chicken today. I think He maybe likes that better than when we pretend that we are proper serious creatures who can only bring 'worthy' things and when we are a little bit proud that we have managed to learn about another worthy thing. I don't think He minds us praying about serious things either, of course, but mostly I think He just likes when we pray about things that delight us, and things that matter to us, and things that are in our hearts and on our minds, whether those are serious or not.

I wonder if God has more fun being at the church picnic where people are chatting and having fun and talking about how their week was and what's happening in the week ahead and whether they should plant the spring bulbs yet or wait till after the first frost and probably not being very spiritual at all, than He does at the Bible studies where we're so focussed on finding out more information about Him that we forget how crazy it is that we can know anything about Him at all, so instead of just laughing and appreciating what we have we get all earnest and furrow our brows and look up things in Greek dictionaries.

Sometimes when I watch people in churches squabbling about stuff, I'm amazed by how much both sides seem to think the stuff in question matters. I mean, sometimes it does, and sometimes difficult issues need to be debated. But, when people fall out over the time of the prayer meeting or the colour of the carpet or the length of the hymns or the content of the hymns or the age of the hymns or anything to do with the freaking hymns for Pete's sake, I picture them as small children squabbling over who drew the nicest picture for mummy, when neither of them is exactly Monet and in any case mummy's just happy they drew her pictures at all, and that they were on paper and not on the wall, and also that it kept them quiet for an hour so she could put the dinner on and mop the kitchen floor, and I think I've lost the thread of this analogy now.

But the point is that when we think there's a 'right way' and a 'wrong way' of doing things, we start to deny how great God is and how not great we are, and we start to make it all about who is the most 'correct', as if any of us is capable of coming close to the goodness of God, and then we get all arrogant and that is Not A Good Thing.

Now THAT is foresight

2011-09-30T12:34:00.001+01:00

So, apparently, ancient Chinese Feng Shui says that in a year in which October has 5 Mondays, Saturdays and Sundays, if I post this information to my Facebook wall, I will become rich.

Those ancient Chinese knew the future.

An Open Letter To The Tesco Self-scan Machine

2011-09-21T22:41:00.000+01:00

Dear Tesco Self-scan Machine,

people who know me will tell you that I am a person of modest ambitions, who does not expect a lot from life, so it may surprise you to learn that I am writing to you to suggest that you raise your expectations. Specifically, you seem to have a very narrow mind with regards to things that might be expected to appear in your bagging area. Bags, for instance, are something that you should probably start to expect. The clue, you see, is in the name: bagging area. In order to bag things, one must sometimes put bags in the bagging area; and while I appreciate that in general you can be confused when non-bought items appear in there, I think that saying my Bag for Life is 'unexpected' is a little extreme. 'Undesirable' might be a better way to express yourself.

Furthermore, I am concerned that you run the risk of being "the machine that cried wolf" when you get all over-excited by the presence of a plastic bag. If you do all your screaming at that, what options are left when I lob a horse in there? Eh? Or a cello? I just think you need to make sure you leave yourself a bit of leeway, because you don't know what a day will bring forth.

That is all.

With best regards,
WhyNotSmile

Things That Make Me Want To Eat My Own Head

2011-08-31T12:45:00.000+01:00

Heck, it's been a while. Sorry. Busy summer and all that.

Anyway, I'm here about the Haribo advert. Never in the field of my own history have I so much appreciated the licence fee, and freedom from advertising. I'm not linking to it, because it makes me want to claw my own ears off, but you'll know the one I mean.

If you're thinking, "yeah, I hate that wee girl screaming 'sign the fession!'", then count yourself lucky, for that's not the one I mean.

This one has a family of 4 at a shop in the middle of nowhere, singing the most banal song you can imagine, out of tune, while grinning like banshees and leaping like the lords from a Christmas song. It's what you'd get if you took a bad X-Factor audition, a sanitary towel advert, and one of those photos of happy families that you get in Christian magazines, blended them, and then added an overdose of hyperstimulant. The whole, is, inexplicably, much worse than the sum of its hideous parts.

It marginally improves if, after the line that goes "Squidgy squidgy baby!" you yell "Bodyformed for yoooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!", but only a little bit, so I wouldn't do it in public or anything.

Like I say, Google it if you want to know what it's like to find yourself uncontrollably ripping your ears from your head. Otherwise, don't. But in any case, can we all stop buying Haribo until they get this abomination off our screens? Thanks.

In happier news, I enjoyed this story, although it contains some impolite language, which I ask you to censor by mentally replacing it with the word 'puppy'.

The Apprentice Series 7: The Final

2011-07-24T20:22:00.000+01:00

Never in the field of human history has it been so clear from so early on who was so going to win The Apprentice. Or so we thought, until that week when Helen screwed up the whole 'flogging tat' thing, and blew the field wide open. I feel I have inappropriately mixed some metaphors there, so let's move on.

Well, we've come so far, and we've reached so high, we've looked each day and task in the eye, and now... well, now it's the final. The remaining candidates, for those who have saved the space in their brains for actual useful information, are Jim, Helen, Lovely Tom, and Susan. Of course, here at WhyNotSmile, we're rooting for Lovely Tom, although we would like to marry him, so we don't want him to be too busy. We are not fond of Susan. Other than this, we do not mind.

Not 2 minutes after we left them at the end of last week, the phone rings in the house, and Lovely Tom answers, and is told they have 48 hours to get their business plans together. Now, you and I would have put the phone down, pretended it was a wrong number, and then sneaked off to get the upper hand, but Lovely Tom is not the mercenary type, so he tells the others, and they all start scribbling numbers in little charts, and saying how great their business ideas are.

48 hours later, they're all snazzed up and off to some hotel/posh place somewhere with their little folders under their arms. Ridiculously, they still seem to be acting as if they're in teams, with Lovely Tom and Helen in one car, and Jim and Susan in the other. They hand the folders over to Nick and Karrrren, and then go and sit in the foyer. Susan is talking like mad, and I imagine they all want to hit her. Helen is cool, calm and collected, so equally irritating. Jim and Lovely Tom seem to be sweating like mad, and trying not to throw up. We like them.

We meet the 4 people who're going to interrogate them about their business plans. There's Nasty Claude, who, as one commentator pointed out, is so evil that if you cut him, he'd bleed spiders. There's lovely Margaret Mountford, she of the raised eyebrow. There's someone called Mike, who has something to do with "the free magazine industry", and someone called Matthew, who looks about 12. I'll probably get those two mixed up.

So, how do they all get on?

Jim
Margaret is astounded at the length of Jim's application form, and at the percentage of it that's almost entirely crap, which is quite high. Jim talks entirely in cliches, which annoys Margaret a lot. She asks him to describe himself without using cliches, and he says he's "exactly what it says on the tin". *facepalm*
Jim's business idea is a bit weird. It's all got something to do with going into schools and encouraging children to be entrepenurial. He thinks it's amazing, brilliant, impactful and unique. He hasn't actually asked anyone else for an opinion yet, because that would take too much time and effort; but he thinks it's class, which is the main thing.
Nasty Claude thinks Jim is making stuff up, because he's not earning as much as Nasty Claude thinks he should be, which is a strange argument.

Susan
When asked to summarise her business plan succinctly, Susan jabbers out that she wants to scale up her market stall to global levels and make lots and lots of money and sell skincare to all manner of people and have a really nice time making all this money and making people all happy because they have nice skin and they love that they bought her products. It is the very opposite of succint. It seems that she thinks 'succinct' means 'really really fast'.
Margaret gets all interrogatory about how Susan paid her workers in cash, and therefore didn't pay any tax. Oooooohhh, sneaky.
The essential problem with Susan's business plan is that she seems to think that if one market stall can sell £1000 of stuff in a day, then by having 7 market stalls she could sell £7000 of stuff in a day, or with 178 market stalls, she could sell £178,000 of stuff in a day.
Matthew asks Susan about whether it's ok to just lump a load of chemicals into a bottle and then flog it to unsuspecting passers by. Did the man not see the fast food task?

Helen
Helen's business plan is largely to have a nationwide chain of people to book your dental appointments and wait for your Tesco delivery to arrive. She somehow gets into a row with Matthew over whether a dentist does or does not text one to remind one that one is due a checkup; then she admits that she doesn't really know anyone who could book you a dental appointment anyway.
Mike takes a different approach, and asks Helen to tell him a joke. Man, they are testing ALL the key business skills in this one. Eventually she comes up with "A fish swims into a wall, and says 'dam'", and makes it sound even less funny than it actually is, which is pretty darn unfunny.

Lovely Tom
Tom's first interviewer is Nasty Claude, who opens with "Would it be fair to say that your career is floundering at the moment?". "Umm" says Lovely Tom. Nasty Claude also points out that every number in Lovely Tom's business plan is wrong, and that he hasn't said anything about his costs. I think this is unfair. You hit one wrong button in Excel, and it fecks up the rest of the document. We all know that. Shut up, Nasty Claude.
Lovely Tom's business plan is to do with chairs. He's going to visit employers and check whether their employees need to use his chair, and if they do, then he will sell it to them. The chair stops you from getting a sore back; Lovely Tom has a way of knowing who will get a sore back, and he can sell them the chair in advance. Mike complains that 100% of the business plan doesn't use the word 'chair'. I don't care, Mike, and your grammar in that sentence was appalling. Leave Lovely Tom alone.
He has a very awkward conversation with Matthew, during which he utters the phrase "I'm not surprised at all that you have a very nice wife". We hear more about Lovely Tom's previous invention, which is a curved nail file, and I want one. Lovely Tom is accused of not being a 'starter-finisher', because he got bored of nail files and started to think up other ideas. On the way out, Lovely Tom falls over a chair.
Lovely Tom is also the first person EVER to break the First Rule Of The Interviews, and to not come out crowing about how well it went and how they loved him.

The next day, the 4 interviewy people go back to the board room and sneer about the contestants, while said contestants wait outside, all convinced they're going to win. Snigger.

They're not keen on Helen; they'd all employ her tomorrow, but it is generally agreed that she cannot be left to her own devices for more than several seconds at a time. They also agree that trying to get Jim to be specific is like trying to "nail custard to the ceiling", a harder task than Nick's "nailing jelly to a wall" from a few weeks ago; Nick describes Jim's business plan as "one long seduction letter" to Lord Sugar, an image which makes the nation feel a little nauseous.

Everyone loves Lovely Tom, of course, but there's a worry that he lost interest in nail files before he had fully exhausted the (presumbaly) extensive (and, to my mind, unimaginable) possibilities offered thereby. And they all think Susan's ridiculous.

So the four candidates get hauled back in to the boardroom. We begin by questioning Susan's ridiculous figures, because they are absolutely ridiculous. We turn to Helen, and look disappointed at how pants her idea is, and that it's not to do with bakeries, since she works in a bakery. Over to Lovely Tom, and Lord Sugar is virtually apoplectic at the very idea that he should give a flying fiddle about the health and safety of his employees. This does not demonstrate that Lovely Tom's idea is bad; it merely demonstrates that Lord Sugar is not very nice. I'm not sure I want Lovely Tom to work with him. And onto Jim and his letter of seduction; Jim admits that initially he was going to set up the business as a non-profit, and when pressed, calls Lord Sugar "Sugar". Seductive.

Time to start firing people, and Jim gets the boot first, for being a smarmy, cliched, annoying git. Then there's a bit of teasing of Helen, before the Finger is pointed at Susan, for being a bit dim.

OOOOOHHHHH, Lovely Tom is still there! Lovely Tom might win! Go Lovely Tom!

At this point, however, Helen chucks in a grenade in the form of a SECOND business plan. oooh. She wants to set up a chain of bakeries. It's not a stunning plan, because let's be honest, there are a few bakeries out there already. Lovely Tom points out that if she's had all these great ideas, she should have done them already; Helen lobs back that if she'd had a business for 5 years, she wouldn't have to be in the boardroom asking Lord Sugar for money, because she'd have made a success of it. It's a bit of a low punch, but Lovely Tom takes it in his stride, and Helen is suddenly standing on thin ice. Then Lord Sugar asks Lovely Tom how he got Walmart to sell his nail files, and Lovely Tom tells a story about creating a little parcel and hand delivering it to the buyer, and Helen's face is falling and falling, and I'm getting more excited, and Lord Sugar waffles a bit more, and then he announces that LOVELY TOM HAS WON and I rejoice and my mobile starts going nuts with congratulations texts, and I am very happy indeed.

But also, you have to wonder how it happened that the person who has lost more tasks than everyone else in the history of the programme EVER has managed to actually win the series, and you have to think that maybe they need to look at the tasks they set next time.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 11

2011-07-14T22:14:00.000+01:00

Normally, this being the penultimate week, we'd be watching the interviews, and that seems to be what the candidates expect too, because when they're summoned by The Telephone Voice to the City, they rush off to snazz themselves up and put on suits and stuff. Jim even has a waistcoat for the occasion. All of which is of no use, because what they're actually doing is setting up fast food chains.

They have some ridiculous time limit, like 2 days, to invent, brand and set up a fast food restaurant. The teams are left alone, for once, so Helen is in charge of Tom (they barely even debate who should be PM), and Jim is refereeing Natasher and Susan. You'd think the team with 3 would have quite an advantage, but then Natasher reveals that she has a "BA Onz" degree in this sort of thing, so technically they're at a disadvantage.

Helen (who seems extremely tense and worried throughout the task) and Tom actually make quite a good team; mainly because they're both fairly competent and organised. They decide to go with a British-themed 'Pie and Mash' as their menu; they make it all feminine by having mini pies. We'll summarise their efforts now, because they're so good that nothing really goes wrong at all; in fact, the only thing the editors had to work with was when they decided to name their pies after famous British people, and include Christopher Columbas (he's Italian, I think, but I couldn't honestly swear to it). We see this relatively minor error from all angles, repeatedly, and I think we can tell from an early stage who's going to win. Anyway, they call their place 'My Py' after Lovely Tom mis-reads something, and it's all red, white and blue. At one point they debate whether Byron wrote at the same time as Shakespeare and was a vegetarian.

Mercifully, what Helen and Lovely Tom have in competence, the other three lack in every conceivable aspect of business acumen. They decide to have a Mexican restaurant, because that way Susan gets to perpetuate some racial stereotypes, and have cheery sombreros everywhere. Jim thinks Natasher's degree will come in handy, because her BA Onz was in hospitality; unfortunately she didn't ever really like the cooky bit of it, and refuses to have anything to do with that side of it. Since they have a cook, it's hard to see exactly what the problem is, but in and case, she and Susan get sent off to think about branding. They wander the streets of London going 'ariba, ariba' and pretending they're wearing sombreros.

Jim is doing market research, by going to a Mexican restaurant and asking what they don't sell, so he can do something different. It's an intersting strategy. Figure out what no one else will touch with a barge pole, and embrace it wholeheartedly.

Still, it's more useful than Susan and Natasher, who hate each other and everything each other says. They're trying to come up with a name:

"Lots of them have names that start with el. What's el?"
"I dunno".

They phone Jim, who suggests 'Caracas', after "those wee Mexican shaky things". Or the capital of Venzuela, alternatively. Your choice. They love it, add an apostrophe, and "Caraca's" is born. Which is much like calling your Hungarian restaurant "Pari's", but also thinking that a "paris" is some kind of Hungarian folk dance. And then branding it using strawberries, or, to fit in with the Mexican theme, peppers. That was Natasher's idea, which Susan hates (quite reasonably, and also because she hates everything Natasher says). Susan is the Mexican food expert, so they go with her idea of sombreros instead. Her expert credentials, incidentally, are that she eats more Mexican food than the other two.

The next morning, they see their restaurants for the first time, and meet their chefs and waiters and so on. They have a few hours to practice. Helen's lot do all manner of rehearsals of pies, customer service, removing foil trays and so on. Over at Caraca's, the chef is having a wobbly, because no one has a clue what's going on. Jim comes in and says that what they need to do is to heat up all the food and then serve it to customers. When the doors are thrown open, My Py greet them with a cheery "Hi! Have you eaten 100% British before?"; at Caraca's, there are nails and a hammer on the floor. Jim is creating a box of nachos which looks like someone sneezed on it, while Susan whirls around yelling that there aren't enough chairs.

The queue grows and grows, and people are giving up and leaving. This is probably for the best, because the food, when it comes, is stone cold and vile. Say what you want about Lovely Tom, but the man can heat a pie and put it in a box. And look quite fetching in a red hat.

After the test run, Susan is hysterical. She goes to Jim and says he needs to stop serving cold food. Jim asks for the solution. "Heat it up" she says. They've got a pile of customer feedback forms, which are making for depressing reading: "Food was cold", "Friendly but slow", "crazy waitress".

At My Py, it's like reading the report card of the school swot: "Loved the food", "Great idea". The only thing that went wrong was that the cardboard box was a bit hard to eat out of, so they swap it for a plastic one, and that solves that.

Susan has a solution to Caraca's woes, which involves a diagram and some arrows, and keeping the food in the oven for a bit longer.

Lunchtime, and Lord Shugagh swings by with some industry experts. I really, really want Ronald McDonald and Colonel Saunders to walk in, but unfortunately it's a crowd of people in suits who know all there is to know about vegetable oil. Natasher successfully convinces Lord Shugagh to add nachos to his order of "fah-heee-taaas" (can he not pronounce any non-English word?); they are still taking a year and a day to fulfil orders, though, but at least the food seems to be edible, and with the sombreros and all, they all agree that it's obvious that the place sells Mexican. The team are grilled on their business plan, which (as quickly becomes painfully apparent) did not exist until that moment. Jim says that if he has 60 customers in 2 hours, spending £7 each, then he's making £4800 in a lunchtime, which is impressive. He gets out of it by accusing Lord Shugagh of not paying his bill, and everyone laughs awkwardly.

Over at My Py, it's going quite well, although the wee plastic boxes are a bit too small to fit the pies in. Still, they serve it all quickly, and hot, and without incident, and when it comes to the business plan, the only problem is that Lovely Tom keeps distracting Helen as she's explaining profit margins and percentages.

They go back to the boardroom, and we talk about the Caracas = capital of Venezuela thing; Karren dobs them in and points out that they all thought it was a made up word. Lovely Tom talks about how they had a 'dummy dummy run' before the dummy run before the actual run, and all of them had gone really well.

The industry experts were rating them on all manner of things, and then they got the score by working out the average. Caraca's had an average of 4 out of 10, which is a bit wick; My Py got 7 out of 10, and LOVELY TOM IS IN THE FINAL! They don't get a treat, because that would be Just Too Much, but they go back to the house with Lovely Tom looking stunned.

In Cafe Ooops, Jim says he was like Mother Theresa trying to keep control of Natasher and Susan; they all defiantly state that they're not going home, and then it's back to the boardroom.

It's not an epic boardroom battle; they start by looking sadly at Helen and Tom's Business Plan, and then try to pretend that they had all those figures in their heads, and anyway IT WAS ALL JIM'S FAULT!!!! Karren sticks the boot in and says that they were just generally not very good. Natasher's contribution seemed to have been to try to distract customers so that they wouldn't notice how long they'd had to wait; while we're talking to her, we turn to the matter of her degree, and I kind of wish we'd shut up about it. Unfortunately, it seems to be some kind of fixation.

They go out, they come in.

Susan and Natasher both think Jim should be fired because he has a scary dark side; they may have a point, but Natasher plays it up a bit too much and comes over like someone who's just read Dan Brown and felt he had a case worth hearing. Back to Natasher's degree, and she says again that she didn't really like the cooky part of it, and it shouldn't be all contextualised, and she didn't "claim" (she does the little finger wavy things) to have any expertise at all. Lord Shugagh goes on about his degree in First Aid, a skill which may have been handy a little earlier in the day, for the patrons of Caraca's. I think he's making up the First Aid degree, because it's not on Wikipedia, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, Natasher get fired, innit, and Jim and Susan join Helen and Lovely Tom for the final.

The final, incidentally, is this Sunday, and sees the return of Mount Margaretford for the interviewy bit.

Stay tuned, because it looks hysterical.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 10

2011-07-14T21:05:00.000+01:00

Right, we have to ratchet the reporting up a gear, because we're now 2 weeks behind and the final's on Sunday.

Last week we spent a lot of time disliking Melody, and that's where we pick up again today. They're all hauled off to a big warehouse, where Lord Shugagh, with a tear in his eye, talks about how he started out in business by buying a truckload of toot and flogging it to unsuspecting passers-by; and lo! that's this week's task. Each team gets a pallet-load containing £250 worth of the kind of plastic tack you find on market stalls up and down the country, and they have to sell it, and then come back and buy more. It's all about selling what smells, or something. I may have got that wrong.

The teams are Helen, Lovely Tom and Melody (boooooo), against Natasher (innit?), Susan and Jim. Susan is appalled by the quality of the goods. Snob. She also thinks this is right up her street, as she does every week; Natasher (yeah?) slaps her down for the millionth week in a row, and wins the right to lead. Melody appoints herself in charge of Helen and Lovely Tom.

Jim has a great morning touting umbrellas to people who don't really need them, on the basis that it might rain, some time in the distant future, and until then you can use the umbrella to point at things. Natasher is selling nodding dogs to small unsuspecting children ('of appalling taste' says Nick). Susan, for some reason, is stuck in traffic outside Buckingham Palace (whining and moaning about why can't the horses go faster); eventually she arrives in Knightsbridge or somewhere, where she attempts and fails to sell a pile of duvets door-to-door. She gets very upset that no one's home. It's so unfair.

Melody and Helen, meanwhile, decide that they're going to sell their stuff to shops, because why wouldn't you add in a middle man wherever you can? Especially if you go into a pound shop and try to sell him £25 watches. Idiots. They also go into a hardware shop and try to sell duvets and towels. It's so ridiculous, it's not even funny.

Thankfully, they have previously dumped Lovely Tom and a box of nodding bulldogs off at a tourist spot, where he gets outwitted by 5 year-olds and continues to be extremely lovely. He sells all the dogs very quickly, and I'm quite proud.

Natasher and Jim have a fight about what they should re-invest in; they phone Susan to ask, but she's out for the count in the back of a cab.

Melody and Helen, for some reason, have become even more fixated on selling their stuff to shops, and finally find a guy who'll resell the duvets for them; if they can get another 30 by tomorrow, he'll buy those as well. Despite the fact that they're now making about 20p on each one, they think this is great.

Now, the point of the task, you will recall, is to figure out what sells, and buy a ton more to sell tomorrow. Susan, however, lives on another planet, and spends half the team's takings on random tacky-looking bracelets. They would be doomed, except that Melody is also on another planet, and is buying random electrical tat. Lovely Tom is in despair; all he wanted were some more nodding bulldogs, and he would've been happy, but no: he's being given travel kettles and alarm-clock-photo-frames. Clearly the notion of figuring out what sells and buying more of that seems to have been entirely abandoned. Heh. Never mind, I'm sure Lord Shugagh won't be too fussed.

The next morning, and a shock on Team Melody, as Helen stages a coup and offers to take over as project manager. They snark a bit, with Lovely Tom sitting in the middle thinking 'feck', and in the end nothing changes. Off to a shopping centre, and the random electrical stuff is not popular. It's a shame they didn't get a day to try out their stalls and see what would sell. Helen's in a random square trying to press gang passers-by into buying bike lights.

At Shepherd's Bush, Jim is already flogging nodding dogs like there's no tomorrow; he's also offering hugs and kisses, and Nick's coming round to him. While this goes on, Susan and Natasher are fighting it out at Portabello Road market. The two of them seem incapable of coming within earshot of each other (and with these two, earshot is quite a distance) without screaming at each other, exchanging snide glances, and slagging each other off to the camera. Natasher is being particularly obnoxious, but somehow I find Susan more irritating.

In all of this, it's tempting to forget that Helen has promised to sell 30 duvet covers to a random bloke for about 20p each. She phones a duvet cover wholesaler, but it's closed for the day, so she heads off to another one which is 2 hours' drive away. After a 4 hour round trip, she phones the duvet-sellerman, who has already gone home for the day. Bummer, huh?

Jim is trying to get Natasher to re-invest, since that's the point of the task; she refuses because they already have plenty of stuff to sell (please note that their end-of-the-day-total includes any stock they still have, so it doesn't matter if they have stuff left over). Also, Jim is now running out of things to sell. Eventually, Natasher agrees to let him buy some more umbrellas. He does this, but not in time to sell them, which kind of sucks.

They all head back to the boardroom, and it's a bit hard to be sure who has done better. Helen spent a lot of time trying to acquire duvets; whereas Susan and Natasher spent much of the day trying to strangle each other. In the boardroom, Helen says Melody was an awful team leader, and had no strategy. Lord Shugagh says the strategy should have been to flog the crap they were given, which makes it sound less complex. Natasher gets in bother for not re-investing in new stock; she says something about 'going heavy' on day 1, and Lord Shugagh nearly rips her head off, and then fines her £100 for being so impudent.

Melody & Co have assets of £728, which is ok; Natasher's lot have (after fines) £751. Feck. They still won. But, Lord Shugagh is not happy, and they are NOT getting a treat because they were useless. What with a coup earlier, and now this, it may be the most dramatic episode EVER. Back in the house, Natasher tells Susan that she was really annoying all day. I imagine she was, somehow.

Helen is in Cafe Dreadful for the first time, but it's ok, because Lovely Tom's a regular and can show her where to get napkins and stuff. Melody brings up the coup incident, and says how much it demoralised her. She's almost sobbing. I still don't feel at all sorry for her. I'm beginning to like myself less, and I blame Melody.

Back in the boardroom, and we can only hope that somehow Lovely Tom stays and Melody gets the boot. This is most likely to be accomplished by Lovely Tom not saying a lot. We start with Helen's attempted coup; she says she wanted to take over so they could go to retailers and get big orders. Melody is all like "ha ha, you're so stupid, that's not what we were meant to do", and then Karren points out that Melody wanted to do it as well. Lovely Tom says he asked for more nodding dogs, and Melody says she didn't want him to have more nodding dogs, and he says he felt all let down. He calls the duvet thing a "fool's errand". Oooooh, Tom, I love you.

Lovely Tom is doing ok until he somehow ends up taking responsibility for the duvet fiasco, which had nothing at all to do with him. STOP TALKING, LOVELY TOM! Helen and Melody do some yelling about the closing times of wholesale duvet cover suppliers; Melody then declares that she should be fired herself, and I can only agree.

They go out; they come back in. I'm all nervous for Lovely Tom, but Karren seems to be standing up for him, so I like her a lot. Melody gets all intense, and shouty, and full of herself, and I wish she'd shut up. She looks all huffy when she shuts up, though. I think I just wish she'd go away. She says that when she was 13, she set up "one of the most successful democratic bodies in the world". What, she founded America? Also, she was on the Queen's speech one year. Yippee skip.

Helen pretty much sits there being very cool and calm and a little bit scary. She reels off some actual experience, which is actually relevant and might be useful. She's safe. I suspect she's been put up to the duvet thing by the producers, to try to throw us off the scent, because surely she has to win.

We turn to Lovely Tom, who's right up Lord Shugagh's alley, apparently. I desperately hope Lovely Tom doesn't say much. He does, though. But he also points out that Melody runs a business which is all about talking, and I like that. Melody is outraged, of course, which is even better.

Finally, and to the rapturous applause of the nation, Melody gets fired. And I rejoice.

Lovely Tom almost faints with relief, and Helen's in a bit of a sulk with him because he was mean about her in the boardroom. I don't think Helen really 'gets' the boardroom.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 9

2011-07-10T19:09:00.000+01:00

So, after last week's trip to Paris, we're back in Blighty, and still really hoping to get rid of Melody (well, I am. Hoping to get rid of Melody. Not back from Paris. Never was in Paris. Well I WAS, but not since you've known me. Do you see?). It's a Sunday afternoon, and they're all lounging around in the house when Lord Shugagh turns up on the doorstep. Mean Melody is wrapped in a towel.

The task is thus: they are to create a new biscuit and then flog it to supermarkets. It's a bit like the dog food thing, but without the relief of the advertising part. So, teams: Helen, Natasher (yeah?) and Jim in one; Susan, Zoe, Mean Melody and Lovely Tom in the other. They appoint leaders: Helen sells food, so that's quite relevant, so she gets chosen. Susan thinks this is right up her street, because SHE ALWAYS DOES. Every week. Every. single. freaking. week. But Zoe works in the food industry, and slaps her down to take the lead. "That's SO unfair, Zoe" says Susan, for about the millionth time this series.

Anyway, they start drawing pictures of biscuits. Melody wants to do Valentine's Day biscuits, which is a bit crap when it's not Valentine's Day. She gets sent off to the biscuit factory with Lovely Tom, mainly, I suspect, to get rid of her. Jim has also been packed off from his team.

Lovely Tom wants to make an emergency biscuit, called an Emercrunchie. The best that can be said about this is that he's very cute the way he says it. They spend a while at the factory, watching a Welsh guy making biscuits and playing with ingredients.

Helen's lot are making a biscuit for children; Jim puts fizzy poppy stuff on a his and nearly chokes Karren. Lovely Tom comes up with the idea of having a biscuit inside a biscuit; Mean Melody thinks that's a bit complex. Meanwhile, she is trying to make popcorn out of a pile of squished Corn Flakes, marshmallows and biscuit mixture.

Cut to London, and ooooooh, Susan says she can't stand Zoe. This should be good.

Jim takes a tray of biscuits to some children, and then steals all their ideas. They suggest that he makes star-shaped flapjacks called Special Stars, so that's what they do. In fairness, these are the best ideas we've seen all series, and since the kids are only small, nicking their suggestions is probably quite an astute move. He phones Helen and Natasher, who are drinking coffee and doing feck all, and tells them about the star thing. They like it, but they need a tag line. The biscuits are going to be for after school. So they need a tag line that suggests that these are biscuits which you would give your child after school, like in the afternoon, between the hours of 2-4pm, roughly. That sort of time. "Any time is treat time!" they yell, and, despite some resistance from Natasher (who, rather sensibly, points out that "after school" is quite a specific time), that's what they go with. *sigh* Now Jim just has to make a truckload of the things.

Lovely Tom and Mean Melody go into their focus group with more plates of biscuits. They hate the emergency biscuit, but - and here's the critical bit - Lovely Tom REALISES this, and moves on. To something else. He actually listens to a focus group. They love his biscuit-in-a-biscuit thing, though. Mean Melody tries out her popcorn biscuits, and calls them 'popsquits', which is just as dreadful a name as one could imagine. On the other hand, they like her heart biscuit. Probably because they're so relieved that it doesn't sound like something you'd catch on holiday. Of course, by the time she phones Zoe, Melody is claiming "They didn't like any other biscuit shape, apart from the heart". That's because the ONLY OTHER SHAPE you showed them was 'crumbling landmine'. Lovely Tom explains his biscuit-in-a-biscuit idea, and Melody stands there going "I don't like that", as if anyone cares what she thinks.

Helen and Natasher are at the designer, trying to explain how "Any time is treat time" goes with "After school". Natasher is "opening up time".

Susan and Zoe are thinking up names, and come up with Bix-Mix, which is actually not too bad. The biscuit looks quite good too - it's a digestive with a buttercream bit in the middle, and half is covered in chocolate. The idea is that you can snap it in half. The designer comes up with a box that looks quite nice and classy, I think.

The ones who were at the factory are now on their way home, and Melody is spending the journey coming up with what may be the worst idea of the series so far. They're discussing tomorrow's pitch, see. "I think we should do a role play. We'd be silly not to". She forces Lovely Tom to rehearse it. He takes the piss A LOT, and we hope he is humouring her.

The next morning, the biscuits arrive. Bix Mix looks quite good, although it snaps in half so that one person gets all the chocolate, and the other person gets no chocolate at all. Foolish would be the person who tried to give me the non-chocolate half. The star things look quite good too.

Into the pitches. Mean Melody thinks Bix Mix needs to be aimed at someone, but Zoe thinks anyone should be allowed to eat them. We barely get time to ponder this, however, before being hauled into the pitch and being made to sit through the Role Play. Yes. Yes. Yes, they actually do it, and it is the most cringe-inducing piece of television I think I have ever seen. Seriously, go and Google it. We'll be here (I tried to get it on YouTube, but the only version I could find had added swearing, so I decided it was Inappropriate). It ends with Melody saying "Where was this made? In Heaven?", which leads into Zoe saying "No, actually, it was made here in the UK". It is dreadful. It is mind-bogglingly awful.

Special Stars, in comparison, seems lovely and clean and wonderful, even though they're basically saying that children can have treats at any time. Natasher tries to explain the time-bending thing again. And fails, again.

Lovely Tom is stuck in a car with Melody, going to Asda. Melody decides they need a target market. When they get to Asda, she tells Zoe this. Zoe disagrees, and they have a screaming row in the midde of the supermarket. The role play happens again, this time with Zoe and Melody in the main roles, as best friends. We know they are more likely to stuff the Bix Mix down each other's throats or clobber each other with the boxes than they are to 'snap and share'. The Asda people think the biscuit is a bit gross, so Susan tells them about its unique selling point, which is that it can be snapped. Kit Kat, anyone?

Jim and co go in with their Special Stars, and get asked about how they would launch them. Jim starts waffling about TV advertising, and how it'll be endorsed by Harry Potter and all sorts of other things, and he promises that they'll spend millions on advertising. I think this is quite clever - if it's all fictional anyway, you may as well pretend whatever you want - but Karren is nervous.

To the boardroom, but not before Zoe moans about Melody a bit more.

In front of Lord Shugagh, Melody actually tries to defend the role play thing. It does not work. We all have a laugh about Jim's advertising promise; we can only hope that that's next week's task.

The results are in. Bix Mix has bombed; no orders at all. Special Stars, on the other hand, received an order for 800,000 units, which is worth about £1,500,000. I rather feel they should deduct the £30 million they were planning to spend on advertising, but they don't.

Jim, Helen and Natasher get sent off for afternoon tea, which is a bit of a crap treat at this stage of the game. The others go to Cafe StareAtEachOtherAndSnarkABit, where they all stare at each other and snark a bit. Lovely Tom seems to be in bother, because nobody liked the biscuit he made. I think this is unfair on Lovely Tom, because he tried very hard, and because I love Lovely Tom. Back in the boardroom, Lovely Tom says that he didn't know that he was making a luxury biscuit.

Anyway, we quickly descend into Zoe and Melody yelling at each other. Zoe has the most boring voice in the world, and Melody (who, as someone fabulously pointed out, looks like Jimmy Carr) over-enunciates everything, so it's a very weird argument. They both just yell whatever comes into their heads, which doesn't help, as the stuff that comes into their heads is not of that high a quality to begin with.

Zoe brings Lovely Tom and Mean Melody back in. I want Mean Melody to go. Please please please. Lovely Tom is accused of not knowing that £1.99 is a premium biscuit price. I do not think that knowing how much biscuits cost is a key part of being a successful business person. Zoe yells a bit, and Lovely Tom says "umm, err, umm" in reply. Melody finally decides she's had enough of no one talking about how great she is, and butts in with how great she is. Lovely Tom points out that the focus group didn't like her ideas, and she says that 10 people do not represent the biscuit-buying public. She was not saying this last week, when 4 people in a Metro station represented all of France.

Eventually, Zoe gets fired for not going to the factory, even though Helen didn't go to the factory either. Outside, Melody stalks off with her nose in the air, and Lovely Tom gives Zoe a very awkward-looking, but extremely endearing hug. In the taxi back to the house, Melody goes on about how awful Zoe was, and Lovely Tom looks like he wants to chuck her out the window.

Over on You're Fired, we learn that Zoe has had Cancer twice, and then she gets presented with a copy of 'Coffin Dodger' as her firing present. Which is a little unfortunate.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 8

2011-07-04T18:13:00.000+01:00

I know, I know, I'm now 2 weeks behind, and you're all hanging in there, waiting, patiently, but getting a little bit less patient. Don't think it's because I don't love you all (I do), or that I've gone off The Apprentice (I haven't) or even that it's not been worth mentioning (very much the opposite). No, I've just been quite busy, and then yesterday I got sick, and now it's Monday again and we'll have to do at least one episode or it'll be so far gone that you've never speak to me again.

Now, I have to point out that I've been in bed for most of today, with a Tummy Thing which also made me very very sleepy. Concentration levels are low, and if I nod off in the middle of this, well, it's just because of how sick I am. I will also have to take frequent breaks; best not to ask.

So, a fortnight ago, we had the Foreign Task. You know, the one where they go over to Europe and yell at foreigners in funny accents? Yes, that one. The premise behind this one was that they were selling the 'Best of British' to les magasins de Paris. And, apparently, the Best of British is a teapot on a string and a tangle of pipe cleaners that holds your mobile onto your car vent. Now, given that Lord Shugagh tells us at the start of every episode that he's "not looking for bladdy salespeople", I'm not quite sure what we're meant to make of this task, but let's run with it anyway, because it's a good one.

Melody is immediately obnoxious, because she used to speak 6 languages, and has worked at the highest level, and other things we REALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT. Also 'used to'? But then what happened? Oh, you taught yourself Italian and brought it up to 7? I see. I still don't care.

Everyone else speaks no French, or comedy French (petits pois, says Jim), so this should be good. Team 1 is Lovely Tom, in charge of Leon, Natasher (yeah?) and Melody; Team 2 is Zoe, Helen, Jim and Susan, and they can choose their own leader. Susan, as always, thinks this is right up her street, because sometimes she buys things; she does not, however know ANYTHING about France, at all. Never been there, never spoken to French people, couldn't find the place on a map. So they put her in charge, of course.

I'm scared for Lovely Tom.

Leon and Melody, and Jim and Helen are off on the recce to La France (Leon hoping someone, somewhere in the country will speak English, but mostly looking forward to breakfast). The rest of them stay behind to decide what they're going to take to France to sell. They key here is to know something about France, so Susan starts asking inane questions. "Do the French like their children? Do a lot of people drive in France? Do the French breathe air?".

Susan and Zoe want to sell a booster seat / backback thing, and a beanbag / bed thing (I'd describe these, but you'd be none the wiser). Lovely Tom also likes the booster seat, and a pop-up postcard with cress seeds in it, and the teapot light. They phone ahead to the others in France, to get them to do market research. Melody hates the booster seat, and sneers at lovely Tom, and says they're going to Paris, and not like, Manchester or some dirty place up north, and I REALLY CANNOT STAND HER.

I really do not want Lovely Tom to choose the postcards, because they're going to sell at about 10p each, and they're going to have to sell MILLIONS of them. I want him to choose the booster seat, which has won "over 36 awards" (that'd be 37 then, I'm guessing). He phones Leon and Melody to find out more about La Redoute, which they're pitching to tomorrow, and Melody looks all sceptical. She then takes Leon into a train station and bulldozes about, asking people whether they'd rather buy a lovely teapot-shaped light, or a stupid booster seat. Leon draws pictures of teapots, because he doesn't speak French. Thankfully, when people say they'd much prefer the booster seat, she's able to tell Leon that they think it's a rubbish idea, because he has no clue at all. So she phones Lovely Tom, and says that they all take trains in France, and no one drives there, so they won't buy the booster seat. Jim and Susan, meanwhile, are doing actual market research, and everyone LOVES the booster seat.

Next step: phone around and try to get people to let them across their doorstep with this tat tomorrow. Jim's calling a French woman:

Jim: "Hallo, 'Allo, parlez vous Anglais?"
French lady: "I can try"
Jim (in French accent): "Ah, excellant. We 'ave two products, they are very populair in United Kingdom. We could call tomorrow, demain, at 12 noon."

I mean, I know from experience that the Northern Irish accent doesn't always travel well, but really? populair?

Meanwhile, Melody is using all her French-speaking skills: "Bonjour. Parlez vous Anglais?", and then, when they say 'yes', talks in normal English, like a sane person (but I still don't like her). Leon cannot join in, because he can't speak French, so Melody is doing all the work.

At the end of the day, the ones who stayed in Angleterre arrive with the products in tow. On Team Susie, they see the products, like the products, and then go through the appointments which have been set up for tomorrow, and decide who will do what. Much as I'm not a big fan of Susie, I have to concede that this is sensible.

Team Lovely Tom laugh at the teapot light, because it looks like a plastic teapot on a string. Yeah, Melody, and YOU made them choose it. They don't show the reaction to the cress postcards. They also don't show them organising their pitches, because they're leaving that till the morning. At which point they discover that Melody is keeping ALL the appointments she made. She's not giving her appontments to ANYONE else. Even though they were all busy doing other things, and she had been sent to Paris to make appointments for everybody. For so many reasons, I want Lovely Tom to punch her in the face, but he doesn't.

There are a few clips of people going to high-end shops to sell pipecleaner mobile supports, and then we see Leon and Melody stuck in traffic. Melody is whining because all the people yesterday said no one drives in France. OH THE IRONY. They go into a shop and sell some teapot lights. Well, Melody does. Leon does not, because he can't speak French. Which is odd, because Melody is speaking English.

Natasher and Lovely Tom are playing Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who will pitch at La Redoute. Please, for the love of Lovely Tom, never let this be mentioned again. Natasher is wearing low-rise jeans, and we can see her tummy button. This is La Redoute! I have heard of them! Natasher, spruce yourself up! Seriously... oh... what's that? Lovely Tom just offered to sell them 10 teapot lights? La Redoute? Isn't that like going to Asda and offering to sell them 3 apples? Yes, yes it is. Awkward. Natasha ups it to 50 units, which is like an entire packet of apples.

Anyway, here come Helen and Susan. Helen has done her research, and has bought from La Redoute before. She does an impressive pitch, slapping down their objections in style, while Susan whitters about and sits on the childs' booster seat to show how comfy it is. I like Helen.

I do not like Melody, who has taught Leon to say 'un... deux... trois' before he lifts the teapot out of the box. So he can't speak French? Well THAT is letting the funky music do the talking. Lovely Tom is having less success, after Mean Melody refused to help him AT ALL and was mean to him, and now he has to make appointments all by himself. He phones up a place, and, when they don't speak English, he gets in a panic and asks to speak to the Postcard Manager. But at least he says it in French. Really, really, poor French, but French, nonetheless. Natasher (innit) tries next, and is no better. This is not good.

Good news, though: Leon and Melody are stuck in another traffic jam (irony upon irony!), and decide that since they're going to be late for their appointment, they'll pretend they made it for Lovely Tom and Natasher, so they phone them up and tell them to get on with it. I really dislike Melody. Then they get there, and Natasher (innit, still wearing jeans), tells the guy to take a seat (in his own office), and then the guy growls at them because the teapot is an idea, not a concept. In other news, Melody lets Leon have a go at selling lights, because she's nice like that.

And so to the boardroom. We revisit Susan's stupid questions, and Helen sniggers at her. Then we move to Team Lovely Tom, and Melody is horrible and irritating again. She brings up the market research that she lied about. Lord Shugagh calls the Champs Elysees the 'Champs Elysees'. Like, literally. We skirt past the Rock, Paper, Scissors incident, thankfully.

On sales, Team Lovely Tom have sold about £11,000 worth, while Team Susie have sold about £14,000. Or maybe that was in Euro. I'm not sure. La Redoute, however, bought about a million booster seats, which is over £200,000. Let's hope they REALLY, REALLY liked the postcards. Um, no. Nor did they like the teapots. Ooops. So Lovely Tom has lost by, like, £200,000, and has at least achieved a boardroom record.

Team Susie get sent off to learn to fly. I think Lovely Tom would have liked to learn to fly, and I am a little bit sad. But mostly I'm kind of worried, for Lovely Tom. What we need is some way to turn this all into Melody's fault, since it was, really. But Melody is not having that. She points to her market research, but she does not mention that she lied. Lovely Tom has also not sold anything, so at least it is clear that he's not a bladdy salesperson. He has that in his favour.

Back in the boardroom, Lovely Tom points out that Melody and Leon were feck useless at market research, and Nick backs him up that they didn't do what they were told. Melody yacks a bit. With every word, I like her less and less. We are well into negative numbers with how much I like Melody. Leon tries to defend his uselessness by saying he couldn't help at all because he couldn't speak French, and Melody was speaking in French the whole time, and he didn't notice that actually she was speaking in English.

Melody spends some more time subtracting from how much I like her.

Lovely Tom brings Leon and Melody back in. Please let it be Melody who goes. Please please please please please. Or Leon. Or Nick. Or Lord Shugagh or the lady who answers the phone or Karren, but please not Lovely Tom. But also if someone could punch Melody in the face, I would also be quite happy. I dislike how she makes me want to punch her. We go through her awards, which include "Woman of the Future". Oh help, oh please, oh for the love of Lovely Tom and all that is lovely, let this not be the future of women.

Unfortunately, Lord Shugagh seems to like Melody for being all obnoxious. I hate this. I really really hate this. I don't want Lovely Tom to work with Lord Shugagh. I do not want Lovely Tom to go over to the dark side, I want him all for myself. I want Lord Shugagh to take Melody and go and be evil somewhere far away from me and Lovely Tom, who will frolick through meadows with the sun on our backs.

Then the Rock, Paper, Scissors comes up again, and I imagine my dream may be realised. But then, curveball from Lord Shugagh, and Leon gets the boot for doing nothing at all, which is both reasonable and a relief. This is a little bit sad, but at least we have a bit more of Lovely Tom to look forward to before he comes to find me.

At the house, Melody boasts about how Lord Shugagh read out all of her awards, and said how great they were, at which point they all start talking about how great Helen is.

The Apprentice Series 7: Episode 7

2011-06-26T23:32:00.000+01:00

I'm a bit behind, I know. I can only apologise. It's been a good (i.e. bad) couple of weeks with our friends the apprentices though, so do stay tuned.

So, week 7, and they're off to Fleet Street, but not before a shot of Leon putting on his socks, which are The Same As Mine! How exciting. They're from Next, in case you're interested.

Apparently The Big Thing at the moment is free premium magazines ('Freemiums'); personally I have never encountered these (you tend not to, when you never really leave the house), but it seems they're big in London and other Important Places. The idea is that you produce a magazine and then people pay you to advertise in it. So that's what they have to do this week.

Jim is put in charge of his lot (Zoe, Glenn and Susan), and Natasher (yeah?) is put in charge of her lot (Leon, Lovely Tom, Melody, and Helen). They go to see a bloke who tells them that it's a good idea to have stuff in on time and to produce stuff people will actually read. Glorious.

They have to start by identifying target markets. Natasher (yeah?) is quick to decide that (yeah) a lads' mag is the way forward, innit, although the rest of them don't really like it, and the team consists of Lovely Tom, Leon, Melody and Helen. I've seen more laddish WI flower arranging demonstrations. They have a brainstorming session, with Lovely Tom on whiteboard duty. He writes down their ideas: "fashion", "boobs", "women" and "nacked girls" [sic]. Bless. They're all a bit worried that classy advertisers might not want to tout their wares opposite pictures of nacked girls, apart from Natasher (yeah, innit?) who screams that "porn sells". Heh. Yeah. Sells more porn mags; and I heard that Mercedes-Benz are thinking of edging into that market.

Lovely Tom hauls the tone out of the gutter, suggesting that they focus on business and entrepeneurs. "Does that translate into boring?" says Natasher. No. No, Natasher, it does not.

Team Jim opt for the over-60s market, which they know absolutely nothing about, at all, in any way. Fortunately, they find a focus group they can ignore. They go to a bowling club, and patronise a roomful of people who hate every single one of their ideas. Mainly this is because their ideas are crap. One guy says he reads The Economist; Susan asks if it would be good to have puzzles in there to aid his memory. Susan annoys me. Their ideas for names are also universally dreadful: they seem to be confusing the magazine with a cheap margarine. Vitalife. Joy. Radiance. Eternal. The old people suggest 'Zimmer'.

Lovely Tom and Helen go to see a rugby team, who want their mag to be tasteful, and businessy, and classy, and to not involve boobs or nacked women at all. Natasher's having none of it. Helen suggests calling it 'Covered', and Lovely Tom agrees, and it's actually not at all bad.

Susan and Glenn are stunned at how their ideas for names are all very cliched, so they phone Jim and come up with some even worse ones. Pension Mention. The Old Boot. Golden Oldie. For The Old-Looking Young-Hearted. Zoe saves the day with 'Hip Replacement'. Susan hates it, not because it's hideous, but because it's a bit sensitive. They're going to be all satirical, is the thing.

Leon and Natasher (innit) are doing all they can to drag Covered back into the gutter, with an article called "Blow your load", and cover photos of a woman in a bikini, carrying a surf board, and wearing a hard hat and Lovely Tom's glasses and jacket. Over at Hip Replacement, some over-60s are giving each other piggy backs and doing star jumps, because it is clearly so ludicrous that anyone of that age can still stand up. That's where the satire comes from, see. Glenn choses the final image, which is of a lady in a cardigan and a man in a sensible jumper holding on to each other and smiling. Meanwhile, Jim is sucking every last ounce of satire and irony out of the thing, and they end up producing a booklet which would not be out of place in the leaflet rack of a GP Surgery.

Now the mags need some content. 'Cos otherwise they'd just be crap.

Melody and Natasher (yeah?) are out on the streets asking random strangers "How do you blow your load?", and not really getting any answers, because it's not 1991. Jim's lot have come up with a ton of patronising drivel, including an article on how to make a phone call. Do these people really not know anyone over the age of sixty? Given that they are largely in their late 20's or early 30's, one assumes they have parents, or aunts and uncles, or friends of parents, or neighbours in the over-60's bracket. Give my mum a magazine on how to make a phone call, and she'll beat you round the head with it and put the photos on Facebook.

Anyway, now that they've made their mags, they have to sell the advertising space. Covered doesn't look too bad, but Hip Replacement is truly dreadful. Still, Jim's not backing down on the price; he loves his mag, and the advertisers ain't getting in there for free. Or cheap. Or at any kind of reasonable price. This is probably ok, though, since they all hate it anyway. They don't so much despise the idea, as the actual execution. But even the idea is probably ok only when placed next to the execution.

We do get to see some quality negotiation though. Natasher (yeah?) wants to charge £2000 per page. The advertising woman only wants to pay £1500. So they agree that she'll pay £1500. Then Jim goes in, and for some reason she's now prepared to pay £2000 per page, which he accepts without discussion. In the final pitch, he does go for a bit of wheeler-dealer; the guy wants 50% off the price; Jim thinks this is 'bold'; the woman says they should give it to them free; we go back to the 50% idea.

Off to the boardroom for the results, which are largely that neither magazine was great, but that the nacked girls were less terrible than the threat of age-related orthopaedic surgery, so Team Natasher get sent off to go fencing, which I'm not sure is that much of a treat, and Lovely Tom nearly gets killed.

The concensus on Team Crapski is that it was all Jim's fault for not reducing the price, although Susan points out that it was ridiculous to aim for a market as foreign and unknown as senior citizens, and Jim blames Zoe for coming up with a rubbish name. Which is not an argument he was using a couple of weeks ago, after the Every Dog farce.

The back-to-the-boardroom bit is a bit dull, with a lot of shouting at Susan for not being against their terrible idea loudly enough, and Lord Shugagh being all offended at the article about making a phone call, because even Nick the Dinosaur knows how to do that, and look how old he is. Jim describes Susan as Bambi and 'a meek little mouse', and then proceeds to club her round the head with a baseball bat. Not literally, although that would have been worth watching.

Nick seems to hate Jim,and Karren's not that fond of him either. Susan thinks it's all very unfair because she said all sorts of wonderful things and no one seems to remember. So Glenn gets fired for being an engineer, because that's always a good principle to use.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 6

2011-06-16T22:43:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the delay in transmission; I have been doing Important Things like working and going on Outings. But The Apprentice has been rumbling on, and it's time to get up to speed. After last week's dog's dinner, this week's task is a load of rubbish. Heh. Literally. Or should that be litterally? Ha! Aha ha ha ha ha!

Ahem. *stands up and puts on serious voice*

It's a shame we've gone off Jim, because the episode opened with a pants shot; a fortnight ago we would have swooned, but we're past that now. Anyway, it's off to a scrapyard (or 'waste transfer station', as we appear to be calling it these days), because this week's task is to get a ton of junk and then flog it.

Since there's hardly anyone left on Team Logic, we do another shuffle; Helen (has never lost a task) moves to Logic (has never won a task), so it now consists of Jim, Lovely Tom, Melody, Natasha (yeah, innit?) and Helen. Team Mental, or whatever it's called, is made up of Leon, Glenn, Susan, Zoe and Scary Edna. Helen and Zoe take charge, and they all wear hi-vis jackets and big boots, which looks ridiculous.

Now, it has to be said that this is not a straightforward task; you have to look at a pile of junk and figure out if someone might buy any of it. Do you charge the person because you're providing a service and taking it away? Or are you really buying it off them, so you should pay them? Anyway, such questions are beyond the scope of the programme, because otherwise mayhem might not ensue. Suffice to say, it's one of those tasks which is so contrived as to be ludicrous, and any actual resemblance to anything you might ever do in real life is purely accidental, and slightly despised.

First we have to pick team leaders. Chez Mental, Glenn and Leon seem to think they'd be best suited to lifting piles of rubble; Susan is all up for being project manager, then Zoe appoints herself and tells them all to shut up. A La Tragic, Helen's the obvious choice, as she's the only one with any competence at all (apart from Lovely Tom, but no one listens to him, so he can't be in charge).

Glenn and Leon decide to target cafes, because they're well-known as being places which produce a lot of valuable re-sellable waste. Jim and Lovely Tom, meanwhile, drive around the suburbs in a lorry with a megaphone, yelling at people to give them junk. When this, surprisingly, fails, Lovely Tom tries to nick barbecues from people's front gardens.

Natasha, Helen and Melody are at a place that's been refurbished, and there's a ton of crap and some metal. They have to decide how much they're going to charge the guys to take it all away; Helen comes up with the idea of not charging them, which is either very very stupid, or very very clever. Of course, it all sounds good until afterwards, when they think about it. As Natasha says, via interpretive dance, "The horse has left the station"; Melody responds "And now we're going to the next station", as if that explains it. Zoe's lot go in, and fight over how much the stuff weighs, and whether they can sell it, and everything, basically. They quote £150 to take it all away. So Helen gets that job.

Jim and Leon wander round houses asking people if they have any spare radiators lying around, and generally, they don't. They start raiding skips.

Helen and co are at an office, and again they're not charging, because they're getting a load of desks and chairs and stuff that they could probably actually sell. Their strategy is risky, but at least when your quote is £0 you know where you stand. Zoe, Melody and Susan are not so clued in. They debate what to charge, and it becomes apparent that Susie thinks £150 is a better offer than £100, at which point they realise that she thinks they're giving him money for the stuff, and laugh at her. Until, that is, he phones them up later, and says that he doesn't really want to pay them money to give them stuff. And so, Susan is happy again.

Back at the house, Zoe cries, Edna huffs and puffs, and Susan just... is. Glenn and Leon come back, and are all encouraging and promise to fix it, and I fancy them both a little bit, despite them not being Lovely Tom and me not really liking either of them that much before.

And so to the next morning. Team Zoe are in a bit of a panic, but decide to focus on getting as much metal as they can, which is at least an Actual Plan. Helen's lot are sorting through all the stuff they agreed to take yesterday, and have realised that one of the places is up two flights of stairs, which means much running about with heavy things. There's a lot of Chuckle Brothers-esque 'to me, to you', some shots of things falling off lorries, a bit of shouting, and a lot of people looking at a lot of piles of rubble.

Susan strikes some kind of deal for some copper cylinders, which seems quite good, but what would I know? Jim negotiates with a builder to clear a garden; when he goes back to pick it up, the builder has (quite brilliantly) added a couple more skip loads of bricks, and they have a bit of a row. Zoe's team do a great job of clearing a yard, and then try to get the guy to agree to pay them more than they originally stated, which I suppose is a nice try.

Back to the boardroom, and it's a tough one to call, mainly because nobody has the faintest idea what they're trying to do or how they should be doing it. In the interview things they show before the boardroom actually starts, Melody (who is really starting to irritate me) says she was very excited that she got dirty yesterday, while Susan moans about how much she doesn't want to work with Zoe EVER AGAIN.

Everyone in the boardroom is in top form, and there's lots of banter. They all tease Lovely Tom a bit because he hasn't won anything yet, and he smiles very endearingly. Helen admits that not charging for taking stuff away might have been a mistake. Then Zoe says she messed up the contract things and she's very sorry. It's all getting a bit self-flagellating, until Scary Edna steps in and bigs up how great she was at phoning people.

The results are in: Zoe's lot made a profit of £706; Helen and Co made £712. And Lovely Tom has won a task, and we all rejoice. He's so excited, his glasses steam up a little bit. I love lovely Tom. They're all off to a spa, which is actually not an appalling treat. As they float around, Lovely Tom asks endearingly "Is this what all the treats are like?". Bless.

Over at Cafe Disaster, it's all "I gave 110%, I shouldn't be fired, he did nothing, it's not my fault". Etc.

Back to the boardroom, and Zoe gets a pat on the back for having a go and for admitting she fecked it up. Susan thinks it's all very unfair, and Edna claims credit for everything. So the two of them get brought back in, and Glenn and Leon go back to the house. Nick seems to have some kind of grandfatherly affection for Susan, and points out that she actually seems to sometimes have a clue what's going on. She and Zoe start a fight about who closed a deal or set up a phone call, or something. Edna pitches in with how well she did. She also points out how she took over on day two and made really good decisions and set up really good appointments. It's a shame they didn't show us any of that.

So we move on to Edna's CV (we do not appear to be calling it a ray-zoo-may this year), and how great she is at everything. She points out that she has an MBA. This goes down so badly that she panics, and can do nothing but keep repeating it.

After the obligatory run-down of everyone's bad points, the finger is pointed, and Edna is the one who goes. In the taxi, we hear a bit more about the MBA.

Meanwhile, in the other taxi, Susan is lecturing Zoe about how she should have done everything. I imagine Susan goes on a bit. I think I'd want to slap her.

Next time, we're making magazines. Stay tuned, because it's Quite Good. Not the magazines, they're crap, but the episode is good.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 5

2011-06-05T22:50:00.000+01:00

I have a love-hate relationship with the advertising task. On the one hand, it's the task that gave us Pants Man and Octi-Clean, and it has to be respected for that. On the other hand, though, it's probably the most insanely pointless of all the tasks they do. If, after all, there was a genuine market for some new kind of pet food, and no one has noticed it by now, what's to make us believe that this shower of loons will discover it in the course of an hour long brainstorming session? For that is this week's task, as we learn after another listen to Lord Shugagh and his 'you have to have the balls to smell the opportunity' (or whatever it is he says), another view of Tom's blue and pink pants (does he only have one pair, or does he have lots of pairs all the same?), and a shot of Glenn saying "This is gonna be creative, this is my kind of thing" *sigh* It's like they haven't even read last week's WhyNotSmile review, these people.

Vincent is put in charge of Logic (Ellie, Natasher, Jim, Lovely Tom and Melody), and Glenn in charge of Venture (Leon, Helen, Scary Edna, Zoe and Susan). Ellie has a dog, so she's the team expert, with Lovely Tom as deputy because his parents used to have a dog. Vincent wants to call their dog food 'Pal', which is so good it's already been done, on a fairly epic scale. Natasher likes 'Pet-eat', primarily because she thought of it.

Glenn's lot have a weird brainstorming session, which seems to involve people shouting random pet puns and Glenn talking cliches like "no guts, no glory". His lot are making cat food, by the way.

Vincent doesn't like the idea of niche; he wants this dog food to be available to the masses, and if it can also work for your goldfish and lizard, then even better. Because what dog owners want to feed their pooches is a good generic mush. They call it 'Every Dog', which is Lovely Jim's idea, and of which more presently.

Vincent, Natasher and Lovely Jim go to a dog walker group, where the dogs go mental and try to eat them. There's also a vet there, who says that the worst thing you can do is to create a dog food that tries to cater to every dog on the planet. When they call Lovely Tom, he doesn't like the 'Every Dog' thing, because it's crap, but he gets shouted down because that's what happens to Lovely Tom.

Leon is naming cat food, and goes for 'Lucky Fish', which sounds like a bad Japanese translation of something (I think the point is that the fish is lucky because the cat food is so nice that the cat won't eat the fish, but I may be wrong). He goes to a cat lovers' place (with Natasher and Helen) and they explain the idea, and everyone loves it (I've no idea why, presumably because they're mental). Meanwhile, the other half of the team are in a car, and Glenn glances out the window. For a second he goes all creative, like this: Cat's Eyes... Cat Size... Catsize, and so the slimming cat food is born. He wants the tag line to be "See their light", because that can be read as "See their light" or as "See, they are light (after eating our cat food)", and since that contains the most grammatically dreadful error I can imagine, I have to despise it.

Natasher, Jim and Vincent are interviewing dogs. One of them was in Midsommer Murders, but is quite humble about it. His main talent is jumping up and down, so they hire him for their advert. Jim, incidentally, has long since entirely taken over the task.

There's a brief scene in which they're all making dog and cat food, which is both gross and irrelevant to the rest of the task.

Leon and co phone Glenn and co to explain the "Lucky Fish" idea, and Glenn says it's stupid but thankfully he has "Catsize" for them to fall back on, which they universally hate, but they go with it anyway because he forces them to. Leon, Helen and Zoe interview cats; one lady comes in with a sphinx cat, which is bald. Leon says it looks like a chicken, and Zoe starts giggling hysterically. Then Helen starts. The woman takes up her cat and leaves in disgust. Glenn calls to let them know about the "See their Light" thing, and they are almost paralysed with laughter. If Glenn ever had any dignity as Project Manager, it has vamoosed quicker than you can say "Well that's a dumbwit plurp of an attempt at a slogan". It is not, in summary, the most professional way to behave, but it's always funny to watch other people laughing.

Tomorrow they have to do the pitches. The pitchers are Melody (confident, serious, almost too earnest) and Leon (can't really be arsed, spends most of his prep time drawing pictures of cats, and then gets paranoid that Glenn has put him in charge "for strategic reasons"). But before that they have to make their ads. The cat one involves Ruby the cat coming into the room, eating food, and enduring some bad acting. They've hired a voiceover guy to do the talky bit, which is odd, as they want it in a female voice. Natasher is in charge of the dogs, and is talking more, moving more, and generally expending more energy in each minute than she has thus far in the entire series. She also says 'yeah' a lot, especially when she disagrees with helpful things other people say.

And so to the pitches. Melody is confident, serious and almost too earnest, much as we expected. She talks about how they are pushing boundaries and then they show the ad. At one point in the ad, a little dog jumps up and down a bit. The audience almost have convulsions at how funny this is. This is the funniest thing they have ever seen. They cannot imagine ever seeing anything funnier than a little dog jumping up and down. Weirdos. They also point out that dog owners don't like buying generic dog food, because they actually tend to quite like their dogs.

On to Leon, who says: "Heh heh heh. Um yeah, so heh, we came up with this idea, um we put it in pouches, he he he, it's about cats staying on the right side of obesity heh um you will see their light so they will glow afterwards here's the ad".

And to the boardroom. For this task, there's no profit or loss or anything like that, so the winner is decided by Lord Shugagh after talking to the advertising people. They watch the ads again, and again everyone laughs their heads off at the little dog jumping up and down. Glenn describes "Catsize" as a double entendre, which means he's either not very good at the finer points of the English language, or he's very very weird.

So, to sum up, Glenn's lot did quite well with actually having an idea and a theme, but their ad was a bit wick. Vincent and co had a funny advert (what with the hilarious dog jumping and all) but everything else was pants. So Vincent loses again, for the 5th week out of 5. So does Lovely Tom, which is sad. Glenn's lot head off to play tennis with Pat Cash, which is nice but might have been better, say, 20 years ago; while Vince and co head to the Cafe Los Losers, where one imagines both himself and Lovely Tom no longer need to order, but just nod to the bloke behind the counter and mutter "the usual" as they sit themselves sadly down. Again. The concensus seems to be that the problem was the name, which, as we recollect, Jim came up with. That's the one thing they all agree on: it was all Jim's doing. Personally, I think it's a little unfair, but then who am I to muscle in, having done nothing but point and laugh?

Back to the boardroom, and it's all down to Jim again, and everyone agrees, and Lord Shugagh is clearly turning on Jim, because actually Jim is getting a bit smug and annoying, and I don't think he's so lovely any more. Lord Shugagh asks how much of Jim is brains and how much is bollocks; you can see Lovely Tom drawing a pie chart in his head. So now that we've decided that it's all Jim's fault, Vincent brings Ellie and Natasha back in for boardroom part 3.

Natasha's appearance is a little unexpected, as she made an advert that had the nation enthralled, so we know she's safe. She does, however, provide some entertainment by saying things like "Vincent was so far up Jim's arse that he couldn't see the wood for the trees", which makes us all feel a little uneasy. Ellie has been brought in, apparently, solely because she owns a dog. So it's got to be Vincent who goes, no?

Well, no, because Ellie gets fired for not really doing anything. I know of at least one person who yelled at the television at this point, because surely, surely Vince cannot have survived?

But then Vincent gets fired too, which is a double bummer, because not only has he been fired, but Ellie's already away in the taxi, so now he's going to have to walk.

The Apprentice, Series 7: Week 4

2011-05-29T21:30:00.000+01:00

If there's one thing we've learned from previous series, it is surely this: do not, under any circumstances, ever, utter the words "Oh, I know all about this!". Do not claim any kind of expertise in anything that you are about to have to do. You may claim as much expertise as you want in any activity you can dream up that you're not doing at the time, but Do Not Ever relate it In Any Way to the Task In Hand. Or do, but know that you are dooming yourself.

And so to week 4, which is hawking beauty products and services to random people in Birmingham. Susan's face lights up, and she squeals "I work in the beauty industry!". We could forgive this as a slip of the tongue, except that she repeats it approximately 748 times in the next 40 minutes.

But I get ahead of myself. They get the Phone Call at some kind of stupid o'clock, telling them to go to the British Museum. A brief shot of Tom in his pants (which would be lovely, but they're blue and pink), and then lots of idle speculation about what's at the British Museum. After some deliberation they come up with "dinosaurs and stuff". In any case, this week's link between location and task is so unbelievably tenuous that it'd be more worrying if they DID guess it. The point is that there's a statue there of Aphrodite, and she's the goddess of beauty, and the task is to do with beauty, or something.

Because of Zoe doing feck all so far, she gets put in charge of one of the teams, and Felicity gets put in charge of the other one. I have no idea who's in which team any more, by the way. I have, however, established that Zoe is the one with the most boring voice in the world, and Natasha is not. But the point is that Susan "actually worked in the beauty industry and OMG this is just the most perfect thing, like EVER, and did you know I actually had a skincare business?! This is what I am so actually fabulous at!" DOOM. DOOM. DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM.

The first thing they have to do is figure out where they should have their little stalls. Natasha lived in Birmingham for 2 years, and Melody is also 'very familiar' with it, so maybe the weight of doom has shifted away from Susan and onto team Flick. They opt for the shopping centre, even though the treatment room is miles away from where the stall would be; Tom the Lovely Inventor points this out, and Felicity tells him to shut up and stop being awkward. Zoe's lot opt for the out-of-town option.

Now they get to meet people who have invented new ways of parting fools from their money, and they get to choose which ones they'll try to flog to the unsuspecting folk of Birmingham. There's a fake tan thing, a chocolate face mask, and some sea shells that you rub all over your victim's back. Susan is almost off her seat with excitement, because she gets to tell EVEN MORE PEOPLE that "OMG I actually worked in the beauty industry and I actually had a skincare company!!!!1!!".

Leon, meanwhile, is taking the more sensible approach. "I can't do this. I have a girlfriend".

Over Chez Flick, no one is being listened to, most of all Lovely Tom, who has worked out profit-per-second for all the thingies (and let's face it, the numbers side of things is probably more in Lovely Tom's domain than any other part of the beauty task, no offence to him, I still think he's lovely), and Felicity basically slaps him down for too much thinking. I think this makes Lovely Tom a little bit sad, but at least he got to do things with numbers, so it wasn't a complete waste.

Felicity's team end up with the shell massage thing, and fake fringes. Team Hysteria get the spray tan and some sort of foot / nail varnish thing. They do some rehearsing, during which Leon only agrees to spray tan Gavin after Susan and Helen have assured him that "It doesn't make you gay". Susan's going a bit mental and yelling "OMG we could actually sell, like millions of products, because I know ALL ABOUT the beauty industry and I am an expert and I could sell a million in, like, 30 seconds." and they buy a truckload of little bottles of gak.

Off to Birmingham, with some practicing of fake accents, and Tom working out all kinds of numbers, just for the heck of it. Felicity and co set up in the shopping centre, where Natasha tries to press-gang a woman into buying a £25 fake fringe by saying "It's kind of like a pet hamster, innit?". Leon offers to get a girl naked and spray her.

Ellie, Lovely Tom and Melody are at a bit of a loose end, because the rest of their team are failing to generate any interest in having any of their treatments. They're flogging a cartload of bottles of stuff, like, not that they make any money on that. So Felicity does the obvious thing and brings Lovely Tom onto the sales floor. If anyone could look more unlikely to convince anyone to buy a fake fringe, I have not seen them.

Meanwhile, Susan is horrified. "Everyone here is so poor!" she moans, poor wee thing. They're not buying anywhere near as much stuff as she, who you may recollect is a Beauty Expert, commanded that they would. Unreasonable peasants.

Leon, however, has come out of his "I can't do this, I have a girlfriend" shell, and developed a thing whereby he grabs passing girls by their fingers and whirls them round till they buy his fake tan. It seems to be working. Even Karren is on the verge of stripping down to paper underwear and letting him Do His Thing.

Zoe yells at Susan, but in the most boring, whiny way possible, because Susan said they'd sell truckloads of stuff, and they've sold, like 8. Susan yells back that she sells skincare for a living. Eh? Still, at least we know more about Susan's background. Because we were wondering, like.

Felicity's team come up with a strategy whereby they end up giving people free massages; furthermore, we see the Count Dracula side of Lovely Jim as he approaches a young chap in a hood and leers "4 hands are better than 2. I'll do the massage.". Creepy.

Anyway, time to pack up and get back to London, where the nice rich people are.

Lord Shugagh reveals that Susan is in the beauty business, and the nation fall off their seats with shock. Susan gets all defensive, mainly because they all turn on her, like sharks circling their prey. DOOM DOOM DOOM.

So Team ZoeSusan made £203.01, which is a bit wick. DOOM. Team Flick managed to lose £246.28, however, which is really quite spectacular, and Susan is off the hook, and they're off to play with people from Strictly Come Dancing. How did that happen?

In Cafe Del Losers, Tom's fed up, because he's now lost every single task. So has Vincent, who has determined that he needs to be Project Manager, in order to haul the whole thing back from the brink. Good luck with that one, Vince. Felicity is all for sharing the blame equally, which I think might not be the best strategy.

Back in the boardroom, and Lovely Tom puts his hand up every time he wants to say something, which is even more endearing.

Felicity has a hard time finding 2 people to bring back into the boardroom. She chooses Ellie and then there's a loooooooong pause, during which you can see her thinking (2?! I have to bring 2 of them in? When did they change THAT rule?) and then opts for Natasha. Back in, Lord Shugagh asks Ellie why she's there. "Because I wanna be your business partner" she says, before realising that he means why is she back in the boardroom. Awkward.

Anyway, after a lot of moaning and whinging and general bickering, Felicity gets fired, for not being able to make a decision without taking a lie down afterwards.

Ellie and Natasha don't say goodbye to her, which seems a bit mean. I'm not sure I like them much. Still, it's not like they ever claimed to be nice.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 3

2011-05-22T21:06:00.001+01:00

Week 3 brings one of my favourite tasks from every series: Discount Buying for Idiots. This year, the unlucky recipient of whatever toot the teams trawl home is The Savoy, which has recently been redecorated and needed an excuse to tell the nation.

We start off with a reminder of last week's car crash, followed by the usual phone call and the clearly-not-10-minutes-like-they-say-it-is gallop around the house to get ready. One of the girls can't find her underwear.

With 2 boys gone, the teams have to be rearranged, and the team names come into play. I shall ignore them, though, because they're stupid. Leon, Lovely Jim and Glenn swap places with Natasha, Ellie, Melody and Zoe. Who? Where did Natasha and Zoe come from? I have no idea which of them is which, and shall henceforth refer to them both as Zotasha, for the sake of clarity, and because I don't really care.

So The Savoy have spent £200 million on the repaint, but can only spare, like, 20 quid for the rest of the stuff they need. The list includes ice, top hats, a cloche (a what? A cloche. What's that? You're about to find out), signage and tea.

Susan (easily amused) is in charge of her team, because she negotiates all the time, and paid off her mum's mortgage while doing her A-Levels and also a degree, or something. On the other team, Gavin literally wants to put his name forward, literally straight away. Vincent would also be up for it if it wasn't for Gavin being such an obvious choice. So they opt for Gavin.

It's important to note that the tools available to the teams are business directories, and a map. Apparently they can't just use common sense and Google it, because What Would The World Be Coming To if they did that?

Susan's team start by figuring out what all the things are, phoning round a few places, and finding out how much they cost. Then they split into 2 teams, one headed by Susan and one by Lovely Jim, and head off to buy them. You know, like you would do if you had ever watched the program before, or had any idea about how to go about buying things, or had any ounce of wit AT ALL. Even Nick's impressed.

Meanwhile, Chez Gav, Vincent is phoning a fishmonger to ask about their fillet steak. A FISHmonger. The clue is in the name. They do not mong steaks, you twit, they mong FISH. Otherwise they would be, like, a STEAKmonger or something. And I know you don't see a lot of those, so maybe that's where the problem happened. He also asks the fishmonger where he can buy steak in London. Twit.

Zotasha has a more cunning plan. Rather than figuring out where to buy any of the things, just phone some other hotel and ask them where they buy their stuff. So she phones the Ritz. Which at least gives the rest of the team a giggle, because it's all getting a little serious, what with them not having a clue what half the things on the list are.

Back at Team Slightly Sane, Susan, Leon and Felicity are trying to buy a top hat. The guy tells them it costs £385, and they start trying to negotiate, mainly by sounding all shocked at how expensive it is, and then doing Bambi eyes. Felicity is all for going to a fancy dress shop, and Nick tells a great anecdote about shopping for hats with the King of Tonga.

Lovely Jim, Glenn, Scary Edna and Scary Helen are off to Mayfair to buy fillet steak. I do not know why they go to Mayfair, as that is the final square on the Monopoly board, and we all know that that means it's really expensive. Fortunately, they have Lovely Jim, who talks the guy down to £180 (I don't know what it started at, maybe £5875 or something), and the rest stand in awe. Somehow he then ends up only paying £170.

Team Chaos are still trying to figure out how to say 'cloche', never mind figure out what it is. They decide they've spent enough time in their room with their phone directories, and head to the cars. They've no idea where they're going or what they're trying to get (they seem to have definitions only for ice, fillet steak, and top hats), but they're driving each other nuts and need to be kept apart. Vincent is put in charge of the sub team, which includes both Zotashas and Ellie. Melody, Tom the Lovely Inventor and Gavin are heading off to Mongolia or somewhere to buy 3 light bulbs; Zotasha is trying to negotiate a deal on a sign, and does it like this: "the highest I can offer is £20 (sign man: no way), £40 (sign man: no way), £50, £60" (sign man: no way). Vincent steps in and offers £80, which is finally accepted. That's not negotiating, that's just playing a guessing game to see how much it costs. Zotasha is cross because Vincent didn't let her drive the price down further. It is unclear which bit of 'down' she's not grasped yet.

Susan, Leon and Felicity are looking for top hats in a different posh shop, and doing very badly at even getting the man to negotiate. The shop does not do discounts. The price is the price. They do not discount the price. There is no negotiation on price. After a tense stand off, he gives them a penny off, to the most rapturous celebrations we've seen to date. If ever there was a petty victory, this, surely, is it.

Gavin and co have decided that a cloche is a bell, which it is not. Glenn has found one, and it's one of those metal dome things you put over food when you serve it to someone posh, and it costs £8.50. Gavin and co then move on from the bell idea, and become certain it's a mini greenhouse. Now their only challenge is to figure out why the description describes it as 12" in diameter, and made of stainless steel. This winsome scene is interrupted by Gavin spotting a dry cleaners, and having a whole new brainwave. The dry cleaners is called 'Top Hat Cleaners', and yes, yes he does, he goes in and asks if they do top hats. The scene concludes with Karren standing alone, shaking her head sadly.

Back to the cloche, and there is now a real, and very exciting, possibility that they are about to turn up in the entrance hall of The Savoy with a small metal greenhouse under their arms.

Susan's off to buy some organza silk, and is quoted £109.50 by a woman so scary that she makes Edna look like she paints rainbows and fluffy clouds in the sky for a living. Susan tells her that it's for a very very important client.

"How would that make a difference to me?", asks scary shopkeeper.

Tumbleweed.

Eventually they get it for £100 by paying cash. Susan realises they've ended up in Posh World, where there are no discounts to be had. Bit late, like.

Gavin, however, has picked up the silk for £75, which is about the first good thing that has happened to him all day.

Vincent and the girls are seeking out loo roll. They seem to be having trouble getting 500 rolls, which does not sound like something that would be hard to do. Try a big Tesco. Ellie is negotiating, until Vincent rips the phone out of her hand and achieves nothing extra.

Lovely Jim continues to work his magic, and gets a load of bulbs and A HUG, for £60. We have, of course, no idea whether this is good value for a load of bulbs or not, but he bargained her down from something higher, which is the right way to do it, Zotasha, if you're reading.

The final item is 10kg of chamomile tea. Felicity is so excited that they've found something on the list that they can actually buy, that she fails to get any kind of price until they get there. The woman (who, incidentally, is standing in the middle of the street with the box of tea, not in a shop or anything) quotes them £990. Well. I nearly fell over. Has it been hand-picked by unicorns or something? Seriously. Tesco. Buy a box of Twinings and empty the bags out. Eventually, they get it for £450 or something, from the woman, who is now drinking tea in the middle of the street.

Back to The Savoy, and Susan's lot have 9 out of 10 items, while Gavin's shower of turkeys only have 6 out of 10, and get fined. Somehow they haven't even managed to buy ice. Hint: try some eskimos. They've tons of the stuff, apparently.

And so to the boardroom, where we analyse Susan's team first. They all loved Susan, and she loved how well she organised it all, and how she got a penny off, at which point they realise that that was actually a bit crap. They get hauled over the coals for going to posh places to buy things, instead of the local Cheepy Cheep Stuff. The £990 tea thing comes up, and Lord Shugah is Not Pleased.

Over to Gavin, where they thought he wasn't bad, but they all seemed to think it was a bit disorganised, that bit where they spent 3 hours running round in circles and phoning the Ritz. We laugh at the Top Hat Cleaners thing, and then run through the options for what a cloche might be.

Now for the totals. Susan etc. have 1 fine, and including that have spent £1381.69. Gavin and co have 4 fines, but on cheaper items, so when that gets added in, their total is £1389.20. There's a pause while the nation works out who has won; I shall calculate it for you and can report that Susan's lot have stolen victory by £8, which is not a lot, considering how much better they were at being organised, but which I suppose is more when you consider how rubbish they were at negotiating (tip: don't start with the most expensive shops on the planet). They get sent off to a weird cabaret/porn thing, while the losers go to Cafe Los Disaster and all yell a bit.

I feel sorry for Tom the Lovely Inventor, who hasn't won a task yet. Neither have Gavin or Vincent, but I don't care so much about them.

Boardroom Part II, and they all turn on Vincent for being a smarmy get and not letting anyone else do anything. Zotasha brings up her negotiation on the sign, and how she called the Ritz, both of which would be best never being spoken of again.

Back for Boardroom Part Final, we have Gavin, Vincent and Zotasha (not the sign/Ritz one, the other one, who didn't really do anything much at all). It's a bit tedious, and eventually Gavin gets the Pointy Finger of Doom.

Ah well. Never mind.

The Apprentice Series 7: Episode 2

2011-05-15T23:14:00.000+01:00

A weird thing is happening. I must be hormonal or something, but there are quite a few Apprentice candidates this year who I really think are quite lovely. Lovely Jim and Tom The Lovely Inventor have been previously mentioned. I also have a bit of a thing (although on a vastly-reduced scale) for Leon, Gavin, and possibly Glenn. Anyone with me? Anyone else think this year's boys are a notch up on last year's crew? Or is it just Post-Baggs Relief Syndrome?

Anyway, on to Episode 2, and someone arrives at the door of the snazzy house with a laptop. Tom The Lovely Inventor is dressed (sort of) and ready to receive; he summons everyone to the table, and they fire it up. Lord Shugagh appears on the screen, because this week's task is all about technology, so he's delivering the task explainy thing via technology, see? Technology, incidentally, is something he "knows a bit about", as all 7 owners of the Amstrad E-m@iler will affirm. They have to make new apps, which will be launched on the internet tomorrow. The apps will be free (obviously, like, let's face it), and the team with the most downloads wins.

Girls vs Boys again; in the boys' car, they're making 'app' puns. "APProximately 12 hours to get the app done" says Leon; "Are we fast APProaching where we need to be?" asks Jim; "This is APPsolutely fabulous" quips Leon, to a carful of hysteria. "Did you have an APPle?" says Vincent.

Tumbleweed.

So they need project managers. Leon once used an app, and also wants to show off; Vincent is also up for it, but everyone remembers the APPle thing; Jim wouldn't mind doing it; Alex thinks "there are other people who'd be less crap than me". Edna takes charge of the girls, and starts stomping Susan (easily amused) into the ground.

They each send a few people off to do market research, which we need say nothing more about, as it is of no further relevance to proceedings. Back at the ranch, the boys are coming up with ideas: bubblewrap that you can squeeze and it crackles; temperature in London one year ago today; a traffic light; and then, finally, Glenn comes up with the gem of an idea that they instantly fall in love with: an app that lets you insult your friends in various forms of local slang. Because what the internet needs is more casual racism. Anyway, Lovely Jim comes up with the name 'Slang-a-tang'. They quickly dismiss fears that it's a bit offensive and that it's not very global, because those things won't matter and aren't very interesting to think about.

Over Chez Girls, they're struggling more. Apart from Susan (easily amused), who has a "brilliant idea":

So you've got 2 people next to each other, and you're you and I'm me, and I say, like I ask you a question like "where do you think we are" and I ask my phone, like where we are right now..."

Edna nearly stabs her, and Susan (easily amused) goes into a sulk. Eventually they come up with an app that has no useful purpose, but which makes irritating noises and annoys other people. Any similarity to any team member, alive or dead, is purely coincidental. They suggest some stupid names and then settle on "Ampi App".

The boys are in the recording studio, and seem to have ditched the almost acceptable regional insults in favour of much more blatantly offensive stereotypes, such as the Welsh farmer asking "Has anyone seen my sheep?". They seem to be having fun, though, and are baffling Nick, whose eyebrows are somewhere around the stratosphere.

The girls are in a padded room, arguing, but for the purposes of creating an app which consists of them arguing. They also make some animal noises, and Susan (easily amused) gets all worried.

Tomorrow they have to meet some computery people to try to get them to love their apps. Edna has given extensive thought to who should pitch to the local nerd-fest, and decides it should be her, and not Melody, who has experience of actually doing this kind of thing.

Off they go to meet computer website people, who almost universally lack enthusiasm for both apps. The girls make twits of themselves, and the computer website people wonder a bit why the app makes the sound of a dog while showing a picture of an elephant. The boys take their turn, and Leon puts Vincent in charge of the pitch; Vincent gets about 3 nervous sentences out, falls over, and has to pull in Lovely Jim to salvage it all.

There's some kind of gadget shown on in Earls' Court, and half of each team are there. Thankfully it's not an audience that's easily offended, as the boys are in full costume and touting their racial stereotypes as far as they can. Meanwhile, at a pitch, Lovely Jim is trying to convince some computer people that having an Australian guy in a hat with corks is not stereotyping. Still, they come out convinced it went really really well, so Lovely Jim is still smiling.

Back at Earls' Court, they check up on how the pitches went. In summary, 2 sites recommend the boys' slang, and 1 recommends the elephant dog. You have to assume they were paid a lot of money to ensure they featured any at all, of course.

Still, there's one remaining opportunity, as a gigabyte of software geeks have gathered in a room to learn more. Edna has appointed herself to pitch the girls' app, and makes a complete hash of it, strutting on the stage in elbow-length black lacy gloves, and trying to be all sexy and mysterious. The boys, meanwhile, realise that it you want to tell people how to get your app, being mysterious is not the way to do it; they sledgehammer the audience into downloading the app then and there, in exchange for a doughnut.

Back to the boardroom they go, and Lord Shugagh asks what they all thought of their apps. The boys thought Leon was a good leader, and Slang-a-tang was wow fab groovy; the girls almost universally despised Ampi Apps. And so to download figures. After 6 hours, the boys had about 3000 downloads, and the girls had just under 1000. Not looking good for Edna & Co. But then Nick and Karren weigh in with the final totals; the boys have 3951 downloads, but the girls have rocketed up to 10,667, and dance out the door to perform their group-hug-and-whisper-scream and then to go for dinner at a posh restaurant; all of which goes to prove that if you're going to sell crap, at least do it on a global scale.

At the Cafe Del Doom, with the girls' laughter echoing cruely, the boys sit and look at each other, and it suddenly clicks that maybe it was a bit offensive.

Boardroom Part Deux, and Lord Shugagh points out that, in addition to the casual racism, an app that tells you how to insult your friends in a Geordie accent might not be that relevant in, say, Brazil, or China, or anywhere that doesn't speak English. They blame Lovely Jim for the description being a bit wick (which, and Lovely Jim, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, is true); then they turn on Leon for making a bad decision. Lovely Jim says that Alex didn't do a lot; Alex sneers a bit, and frowns, and blames Lovely Jim for lots of things, but Lovely Jim shouts him down and says Alex has done nothing at all.

And now it gets fabulous. Leon is asked who he's bringing back in. It goes like this:

Leon: Based on sort of the feedback I've been hearing today, I'd like to bring back Alex, and Jim
Lord Shugagh: Alex and Jim
Lovely Jim: Well, it's interesting that he chose myself and Alex. There's actually a few fall guys: Vincent fluffed his speech, and I had to save the day, and I don't fluff speeches; Glenn designed the app, that turned out to be crap. Two tasks in and I've give 100% effort.
Leon: Jim has done a sterling job throughout
Lovely Jim: well then I'm not the person you should be bringing in, if you agree that I've done a sterling job throughout, so you need to change your decision
Leon: So on the basis of maybe Jim's dealing here; I mean, do you want me to change, is that..
Lovely Jim: Change! It's obvious. It's obvious!
Leon: Yeah, right, it's obvious, yeah. Ok. There's a potential here that it could be down to the concept, so.. OK... I'm going to bring in Glenn
Glenn: You want to bring me back? I don't think you should
Leon: Listen, Glenn, I know...
Lovely Jim: I strongly agree
Glenn: I don't think you should. What do you think Jim?
Lovely Jim: The PM's made a decision, I highlighted who I thought made flaws and made mistakes, and he's chosen you Glenn
Glenn: I think it should be Tom

Way to go Jim! I love you more by the minute!

Long story short, Leon brings Alex and Glenn back in. Leon faffs about and doesn't really say a lot, while Glenn hammers him into the ground. Alex wakes up and tries to get a few kicks in, but basically manages to stick his foot straight in his mouth. It looks like Leon is doomed, but at the last minute it's Alex who gets the chop, for not doing anything of any substance, and because last week he spent the whole time cutting bread. And I say "Yay!" because he's a bit of a slimer and nods his head too much.

Incidentally, neither Slang-a-tang nor Ampi Apps is still available on iTunes. I checked.

Next week is the "Buying tons of tat as cheap as possible task".

The Apprentice Series 7: Episode 1

2011-05-15T21:54:00.000+01:00

Week 1, and they're at it again: talking the talk, 'best of breed', 'one of a kind', 'Lord Shugagh won't ever find anyone as awesome as me', as they drag their little suitcases around the streets of London. This year, we're reminded, they're not going to land a job at the end of it; instead Lord Shugagh intends to use the process to whittle them down to the least incompetent, and then give that person a quarter of a million quid to start a business with him.

Step 1: pep talk with Lord Shugagh, where Tom The Inventor actually TAKES NOTES in a little notebook. As if he's not going to remember "Get out onto the streets and make twits of yourselves while ostensibly attempting to prove your business acumen." *sigh* Although we do learn that Lord Shugagh is not "The Patron Saint of Bladdy Losers", and I admit that that may have been worth jotting down.

Anyway, the point is, they're being given £250 to buy fruit, make it worth more, and then flog it. Boys vs girls, as ever, and (after the bit where they shriek about how nice the house is) we have to endure the team naming. "I thought 'Galvanised'", says Scary Helen, "for obvious reasons... And, um... 'Platinum'". They end up going with 'Venture'. Over with the boys, what we need is for Mr Realistic Guy (Alex) to come up with "Shower of Loons", but instead they come up with the opposite: "Ability" and "Logic". "Logic" wins, and it's on to choosing Project Managers.

Scary Melody appoints herself, after a bit of a scrap with Scary Helen. Melody has been taught by a number of well-known business minds, such as the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Over with the boys, Edward is well up for leading it, and seems to be determined to use the day to prove he's not an accountant.

The girls (who all kind of look the same, to be honest, so forgive me if I get the names wrong) decide the best approach is to not spend all the money. They quickly choose to make fruit salads and vegetable pasta.The boys decide to make soup, on the basis that it can't kill anybody. There's a lot of cheering and back-slapping, and then an awkward silence when one of them (Glenn?) asks whether anyone knows how to make soup. No. Nobody knows how to make soup. Nobody appears to have the sense to use their iPhones to phone their mum and ask, either, or to Google "How to make soup", or to go to a freaking charity shop and buy a freaking cookbook with one of their 250 FREAKING POUNDS; fortunately, Edward The Non-Accountant stills the panic with an approach which may work - "just spend our 250 quid on produce, mash it up as quick as possible and sell it all". Not for him the working out of margins or the costing of ingredients; the boys will "roll with the punches".

Into the market to buy fruit and veg (Edward: "Is that an orange?" Vincent: "I dunno"), and a lot of talk about how they have to get moving. The boys buy millions of oranges to make orange juice, and leave Jim with £40 to spend on the ingredients for soup. He does a blinding bit of negotiation with a woman who doesn't have anything to sell him; he is also a little bit lovely, and you may hear me speak of him again. Anyway, this is better than the girls' approach to negotiation, which is to smile a lot and be irritatingly cheerful.

Now they have their ingredients, they have to start cooking. Edward is refusing to plan anything at all, which bodes well for entertainment purposes. The girls are fairly mundane; they don't really have enough stuff, but they manage to distribute it without incident into little pots that they'll flog for some rip-off price to the general public. The boys are, again, "rolling with the punches"; Leon starts juicing the million oranges, argues with Edward, breaks the machines, argues with Edward again, and ends up ensuring that they have to squeeze 1,400 oranges by hand. Karren Brady has a little smirk at them, and Edward gets a bit confused about why they're not selling anything yet.

Meanwhile, back at Team Venture, Scary Edna, Scary Ellie and one of the other girls are making vegetable pasta which looks like it's been dredged up from the bottom of a river. They're not making it with any kind of urgency or haste, and end up missing the lunchtime rush and trying to flog it as something for people to take home for dinner.

Tom The Lovely Inventor is juggling oranges to advertise the boys' tomato soup, and Lovely Jim is looking lovely in an orange apron. Some of the boys go off to sleeze round office workers and convince them to buy orange juice; much to Karren's disappointment, it seems to work.

The girls have finally got round to turning up at their stall, where Ellie makes a sign advertising "vegatable pasta", and then danders round trying to encourage people to do her a favour and buy a tub of the stuff. Helen is at the opposite end of the enthusiasm scale ("Hello! Would you like to buy some pasta?!", in a voice normally reserved for student evangelists at the CU mission week), but has no success either.

Selling is over, and it's back to the boardroom, with the boys congratulating themselves on how well they rolled with the punches. I sense impending doom, because I have the insight of a very insightful person who has a crystal ball and is feeling especially insightful that day. They do the sum-up thing with Lord Shugagh: the boys didn't really like Edward, and the girls thought Melody was lovely and wonderful. Edward has a weird way of talking. He apparently 'hand-picked' Jim, because Jim was clearly a 'soup man'. Other quotes include:

"My strategy, different. Very different. Bottom up not top down, because I didn't know how many I was gonna sell. Didn't wanna speculate. Didn't know what I was gonna sell it for. Didn't wanna speculate."

"When I was producing, that was production."

Lord Shugagh: "You were trained at one of the top accountancy firms, I believe"
Edward: "Don't fit the mould"

Lord Shugah is in serious danger of erupting, but unfortunately we move on to the girls. Melody is all pleased with herself because she came up with the team name, and also she was team leader.

On to the figures, and the boys made £432.13 with the soup and juice. The girls only made £37.28 on the river sludge, but made £555.05 from the fruit salad, and are off to a champagne reception in the fancy house, where they all get patronised by Melody, and Susan "easily amused" Ma does a bit of snarking behind her back.

Over at Cafe Loser, the cups have been upgraded to those big posh ones, with saucers and teaspoons, and the boys sit around sadly and wonder how they could have made more orange juice.

Back in the boardroom, we return to Edward's strategy of not really having a plan, and it is generally agreed that having a plan would have been good, and that maybe if Edward had done something other than try to prove he's not an accountant, it might all have been ok. Edward says it would have been better if he had made more money, which is also generally agreed upon. They all blame Leon for breaking the juicers; Karren seems particularly put out by this, and accuses him of "mishandling the equipment", which makes me snigger slightly.

We establish that Alex spent all day cutting bread and cleaning things, and he develops a kind of scowl and nervous tic. Anyway, Edward's bringing Leon and Gavin back in, and the others are sent back to the house. Tom The Lovely Inventor apologises to Lord Shugah on his way out, which I find rather endearing.

Back in, it's obvious that Gavin's only there because Edward doesn't like him; Leon appears to be on shaky ground, but ultimately has committed no crime other than being incapable of using an orange juicer, and Edward's gone. Which is good, because he's kind of weird and also he tries to keep himself in by saying "Not only am I the youngest in the team, I'm also the shortest".

Heh. Stuart Baggs was younger and shorter. That's all I'm saying.

The Apprentice Series 7: Week 1, part a

2011-05-11T19:37:00.002+01:00

Please note that WhyNotSmile is currently very busy, and therefore last night's Apprentice review will not appear today, even though there is another episode tonight. I may review them both together. I may not. It depends.

However, last night was a worthwhile episode, and there is much to say about it.

A Thing I Like A Lot

2011-05-10T16:39:00.000+01:00

When I first met transfarmer, she was, like, 19 or something, and didn't know how to get the bus to Dublin, and got her mum to phone me to help her.

Now she's all grown up and writing awesome stuff like this:
http://transfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/its-about-youth-work-again-im-sorry/trackback/

I like it a lot.

The Apprentice Series 7: Meet The Candidates

2011-05-05T22:48:00.000+01:00

You know if you have a business, and it's going quite well, right? So you need to hire a new person, yeah? How would you go about that? Recruitment agency? Ask around a few friends to see if they know anyone? Scrutinise the CVs of several dozen hopefuls, and choose the one with the most appropriate skills for the job? Or throw open the doors to any dingbat who seeks fame and fortune, and bring in the cameras to watch?

Yeah. So apparently this year, the winner doesn't get a job with Lord Shugagh; they get £250,000 to sod off and leave him alone. Well, at least someone's learned something from the first 6 series. Thankfully, just the one person, though. It appears that the candidates haven't wasted their precious time in any kind of introspection, learning from the mistakes of Baggs & co, or developing basic social skills; instead they've been brushing up on their business jargon, giving 200% to buying cheap suits, and waking themselves up every morning with the mantra 'you are a success. Today, you will do great things. Even more wonderful than the things you did yesterday. You can only go up. The sky is, truly, your limit'.

And so, without further ado, we introduce the 16 Wonders of the Business World, who will be gracing our screens with their brilliance for the next couple of months.

Alex Bitrez Cabrel
Describes himself as 'Mr Realistic Guy', a previously unseen character in the unfolding drama in Shugagh Towers, and does not make mistakes. He says he loves being unpopular, and he says it in a voice that sounds like the little kid lying under the swing saying "I meant to fall off".
Prognosis: Meh. Massive feck up in week 3, and he's gone.

Jim Eastwood
The Northern Irish one. And yet, surprisingly, quite watchable. He claims to be "too good to be true", "more than anyone will ever need" and "too sweet to be wholesome". I'm thinking James from 2 series' ago; the one who peed himself in the boardroom and was so astounded to reach the interview stage that he basically sat there and gawped.
Prognosis: The kind of affable chap who'll fly under the radar for a good bit, before a spectacular attempt at project management proves him to be as capable of running a business as a frog is of performing a saxaphone recital of Beethoven's Fifth.

Melody Hossaini
Melody describes herself as "more than average", much like approximately 50% of us. She was once kidnapped, and has worked with the Dalai Lama.
Prognosis: Too competent to be interesting.

Edna Agbarha
Edna is a psychologist, who likes to 'unravel things' and speaks with weird hand gestures.
Prognosis: Smacked round the head with a banana in week 1, by Helen (of whom more presently), limps along for a few more weeks, until we all get bored of mocking the hand gestures, and is then sacrificed to keep someone more entertaining in.

Susan Ma
Describes herself as easily amused.
Prognosis: none.

Ellie Reed
A girl who describes herself as 'nice', and knows quite a lot about the things she doesn't like (dole dossers, people who don't give a million percent, etc.), Ellie is the one you don't want to get stuck next to at a dinner party. She says she admits to mistakes, though, which is a new thing for The Apprentice.
Prognosis: One of those ones who goes out around week 4, and no one really notices.

Leon Doyle
Kind of looks like an oil painting, and once fell out of a tree; Leon is a fast food marketing entrepeneur, which doesnt sound to me like an actual Thing. Seems to be a mixture of Rupert Everett and someone that you can't quite put your finger on. He hates 'gimicky salesmen who believe they can sell ice to Eskimos', because "they probably can't", and also, "why would Eskimos buy ice?" Because, like, they've got ice all around them, so they could just go and get that for free, and not have to buy it. Also, he COULD beat everyone else to a pulp if he wanted to, but he doesn't really want to.
Prognosis: I'm either going to love him or hate him. I cannot yet tell.

Felicity Jackson
A soap fan and actress who looks a little like Lorraine from two series' ago. Felicity likes to turn negatives into positives, and gives 110%, which is more than 100% and not as much as 200%, because she reserves 200% for things that make all the money for her.
Prognosis: Coming soon to a Channel 5 talk show near you. Most likely to cry in the boardroom.

Helen Louise Milligan
Absolutely terrifying woman, who changed career from 'law' to 'waitress' and will make you believe that that was an excellent thing to do. I cannot emphasise enough how scary she is. Money is the most important thing to her, and she hates people who don't work 24/7. At least Debra Barr was sometimes funny.
Prognosis: May force the quarter of a million quid from the wounded, dying Lord Shugagh's clenched fist, take out Nick and Karren with a couple of swift stilletto swipes, and run, screaming, across the table and into the first stage of her plan for world domination.

Natasha Scribbins
Describes herself as being like a switch. She knows when to turn it up, and when to turn it down. When she's not modelling her life on a Bucks Fizz song, she manipulates people.
Prognosis: The one who lasts waaaaaaay longer than she should.

Vincent Disneur
A fine example of what professional make up artists can do. In the interview, sports a beige moustache that a 14-year-old boy would be proud of; in the official photo he's upgraded to flicked-out hair, a valiant-but-not-quite-there try at (presumably) a sexy sneer, and darkened facial hair. He descibes himself as 'best of breed' and claims he's been "shortlisted as sales personality of the year". Which breed, and by whom, we are, respectively, not told.
"I'm not easily intimidated," he claims, before pausing slightly, going a bit quieter, looking at the floor, and repeating "um... not easily intimidated".
Prognosis: An early scapegoat, we won't get to see as much of him as we might like. Ultimately, this is probably a good thing.

Edward Hunter
A definite candidate for the new Pantsman, I can almost guarantee you that Edward Hunter will, if he gets that far, make a massive, hilarious error of judgement in The One Where They Have To Make An Advert, causing a diplomatic crisis and forcing the BBC to broadcast an apology. Aged 14, he subcontracted his paper round to the local 10-year-olds; he claims his first job was as a gardener, aged 12. Presumably this means he earned his pocket money by mowing the lawn. He accidentally fell into finance, and now wants out.
Prognosis: The irritating one who's not cringeable enough to care about keeping him in, but not incompetent enough to be fired.

Tom Pellereau
A geek who loves starting companies, Tom says that if a team goes bad, it's the leader's fault.
Prognosis: the team will go bad, and he'll be gone. Probably in week 1.

Zoe Beresford
The most interesting thing about her is that when she was 12, she fell off a horse.
Prognosis: Another early sacrifice.

Gavin Winstanley
You know those motivational books that tell you that you need to build your self-confidence by standing in front of a mirror and reciting "I am an intelligent person, with interesting things to say" for 5 minutes every morning? Gavin Winstanley talks like that. He may be this year's Alex Epstein.
Prognosis: May self-combust in week 1, or, by a twist of fluke, be on the winning team for several weeks, until he dies a glorious, monumental Apprentice death.

Glenn Ward
Despite looking like a jellied eel seller, got a 1st at uni. Took apart a computer, and rebuilt it, aged 8. "Pretty great".
Prognosis: Will go down in a blaze of unglory.

-----------------------------------------------

And there you have it, folks. The Apprentice returns to our screens next Tuesday & Wednesday at 9pm, on BBC1. If I don't speak to you before then, see you some time next week, once I've had a chance to watch both episodes.

Fart

2011-05-03T19:06:00.002+01:00

Ok, apparently The Apprentice doesn't start till next week. Still, this give me more time to get excited, and also possibly to share my thoughts on the candidates.

Dum de dum de dum de dum de, dum de dum de DUM!

2011-05-03T13:27:00.000+01:00

As you may or may not know, but you do now, The Apprentice is back. Tonight AND tomorrow night. I can barely contain my excitement. Be assured that I will attempt to provide commentary, but be warned that it may not be as verbose as last year. I'm busy this year, see.

In the meantime, your homework for this evening is to brush up on the candidates. Me, I'm already scared of Zoe.

How The Lent Thing Went

2011-04-24T22:30:00.000+01:00

So you'll remember that this week I was doing a Lent Thing, in which I was choosing to see good in people and not bad. The masses have been clamouring to know how it went (mainly they seem to have been led by espero), so here is how it went.

Now, in all honesty, it was an easier than average week, as all social things were Off For Easter, so I basically worked like mad and didn't really talk to anyone, apart from some work people, who didn't annoy me. And I also talked to Sister Smile, but I'm not allowed to talk about her on the blog. And it's not that the people I generally socialise with annoy me, but I have a word limit of approximately 50 per day, and once that's exceeded I get narked fairly quickly.

However, there were a couple of people I was quite annoyed with (I won't say who, because some of you might know them, and then my annoyance will turn into A Situation), but I wasn't actually talking to them, so I privately seethed a bit and then mostly forgot about it. So I think we can say it went well, but that it wasn't exactly a challenge, and therefore we shall continue it until such times as it becomes an actual Issue.

I think the core of the issue is that I don't really generally get annoyed with people any more, having realised that my main responsibility in life is to ensure that I am doing the best I can to love them, and there is nothing they can do to stop me (mwah ha ha).

So since there was nothing much to report about my week, we shall instead consider some things that happened to me today.

Firstly, in church we had an Easter Egg hunt, which was fun, but mainly for the children. At the end they each got 2 chocolate eggs, and were told to keep one and give the other to someone they love. One of the younger boys gave his to me, which made me feel all loved and not so much a waste of space, so that was nice.

Then in Sunday School, we were talking about the Easter story, and for reasons I won't go into, we had Bible Class in with us as well as Sunday School, giving an age range of 4-14. Which became an issue when one of the children asked "How come God was Jesus' father and also Joseph was Jesus' father?". My immediate response was along the lines of God being Jesus' actual father who made Mary pregnant and Joseph being married to Jesus' mother, but thankfully (and unexpectedly) I caught onto the potential dangers of this line of thought before any of it came out of my mouth, and thus I avoided giving a full-blown sex education lesson to the assembled group.

Now I'm at the parents' for a few days, which is nice. There's talk of building a fence to replace the one my dad and I made about 15 years ago, so that may be tomorrow's task.

A Lent Thing

2011-04-18T10:03:00.000+01:00

According to Blogger, you can now view WhyNotSmile in 5 different ways. I don't know how. But that's 5 times as much WhyNotSmile, which can only be a good thing.

Anyway, to get back to the point. Many moons ago, I had a year out, in which I did this. We had a saying (it may have been the motto, or we may have made it up; also, I may not remember it entirely accurately) which said "Encourage good wherever you find it; if you can't find it, look harder".

Now this is a Good Plan for many reasons. For instance, it's Biblical. We should encourage good things, because those are from God, and therefore... well... good. And also, it enables us to get along with people who would otherwise annoy the feck out of us. Everyone has some merits, however deeply buried, and it is always nice to focus on those and not on the things that make us want to stab them in the face.

Over time, one finds that the person one previously suspected of being an arrogant, irritating fecker of a waste of space, actually has some redeeming features, and if one can encourage those, one tends to get on a lot better with the person, which is helpful if one is stuck with them in a confined space, such as an office.

Also, when one focusses on someone's good points, the other person begins to trust one more, which means that when you say "You know, you're really quite irritating when you do that", they tend to listen more and sometimes even try to stop doing it.

It also helps a lot with the Biblical command to "love one another", which is, in many circles, deemed to be Of Note.

So this week, as my Lent thing (which we're finally getting round to starting; don't judge me, at least I'm trying (encourage good, see?)), I hereby proclaim that I shall make an extra special effort to do this all week, and to look for good things all over the place, and not snark over much about bad things; and also, I shall not just stay in the house so I don't have to see people, because that would be cheating.

If you would like to join me, please feel free to leave comments about how great I am.

Thanks.

What I've Been Wondering

2011-03-31T13:30:00.000+01:00

Here's a question which has been troubling me. It's about the census (which we know I'm a big fan of). Every household has to fill in a form, yes? Otherwise you get fined £1000 (in theory). But how do they know whether you've filled in all the people?

Like, what was to stop me from just listing myself and not adding Sister Smile? I didn't obviously, because that would be Lying On A Form, and I Do Not Do That, out of Principle. But I could have done that. Sister Smile would not have cared (she thought the form was voluntary anyway). Would that mean that as far as the government is concerned, she had vanished? Would they notice? What if I had a pet and added them? I could make up information for them. Would anyone notice that a new person had appeared?

I think what confuses me is that I have never really understood why the government doesn't know who lives where. I mean, quite a number of government departments send me letters, about things like tax, and my car, and rates. Any they gave me my birth certificate. Twice, in fact, because I lost the original one.

I suspect it is all some sort of thing whereby people are not happy with the government knowing this information, because that would involve joining the dots from one agency to another, and that would be very Big Brother and so on. Anyway, if they did that, I would not have got to fill in the Census form, so I'm not saying I mind. I'm just saying.

On How I Would Like The Way Things Work To Be Different

2011-03-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

It is fashionable these days, in Evangelical circles at least, to point out at every opportunity that "I'm a Christian, I don't 'do' religion". It's one of those provocative things that's meant to make the listener say "Oh! You shock me! Please explain all about this as I have been stunned into curiosity.". In practice, of course, most people don't really give a fiddler's fart, as they mostly have other things on their mind than you.

Anyway. My point is that I quite liked it in the Olden Days, when it was all about religion, and rules and so on. You know where you are with the Ten Commandments. I am reasonably confident I have never committed adultery, and, quite frankly, my neighbour can keep his ass. Mine's nicer anyway. I do not have the time or inclination to make graven images, as my craft projects largely revolve around my friends' babies, and they tend not to like statues of Baal.

Religion is something I can manage quite well, thank you very much, and I shall take my gold star and go to the top of the class. But then you go and bring all this grace and love stuff into it, and I fall flat on my face.

The whole "not into religion" thing is all about how being a Christian is about being forgiven and learning about God's grace, and loving other people, and this is Not A Good Thing if, like me, you are profoundly unsociable and spent much of your first 20 years desiring nothing more than to be left alone. This is not a good start in the loving people thing, as sitting in the corner with an Enid Blyton book doesn't help anybody. Trust me, I've tried. On the other hand, I suppose when you're starting from the viewpoint that other people are largely to be endured, you at least skip the part where you can only love the nice ones.

My point is this: that sometimes we have to learn to love people, even when we think they are highest order wazzocks (I am so pleased to get to use that word), and Christians can be a useful source of practice material. Actually, I'm not sure that was my point.

Hyperbole and a Half: This is Why I'll Never be an Adult

2011-03-24T13:25:00.000Z

Thanks to Small Corner for the find. I love this. This is how I work.

Hyperbole and a Half: This is Why I'll Never be an Adult

Two Confessions

2011-03-23T22:47:00.001Z

My recent lack of posting does not mean that I don't love you all any more; nor have I run out of things to say. I've just been very very busy. Also, every time I think of things to post, they are very lengthy and complex, and I don't get round to it.

However, I have 2 confessions. The first is that I have realised that I like people better if they have pets. This is not to say I dislike people who don't have pets, and that you can't make it up to me in other ways, of course.

The second is that I filled in my census form already. I know it's too early by several days, but I just couldn't resist any longer. Naturally, I have not yet filled in the questions about visitors on census night, or the ones which could change between now and then, so I just have to make sure I don't change my religious affiliation or the number of rooms in my house over the next few days. But still, it was a bit rash.

Think Of This As A Tweet

2011-03-02T16:33:00.000Z

I write to warn you all not to read Virtual Methodist's latest book. Someone told me that they had heard someone say they'd heard on the grapevine that it is a repository of Heresy and Poor Doctrine(TM) and for this reason I am coming out now to condemn the book, the author, and all who read it.

It does not matter that I have not read this book; I know enough from the two sentences I heard to know that it is not of the Spirit, but is, in fact, a paving stone on the road to hell, and must be condemned by all Right-Thinking(TM) Christians(TM). One need not allow for context, or the fraily of the grapevine when one comes across such blindingly obvious falsehood; when souls are at stake, knee-jerks are fine.

It does not matter that I am not being Very Nice when I condemn Virtual Methodist to hell for this, because Correct Doctrine is more important than Love. As Jesus famously said,

By this shall all men know that thou art my disciples, if thou hast dottedest all the i's and crossedest all the t's, and thou hast written them in big books and banged other people over the head with them

Nor does it matter that Virtual Methodist hasn't even written a book, because with all this publicity, when he does, it'll go viral, so he won't mind.

When Quirinius Was Governor of Syria...

2011-02-19T15:37:00.000Z

I get very excited about the census. I know there is no reason, of any kind, to view this as the Highlight of the Year, but I may well do (I'm keeping an open mind, obviously, but just saying that on present form, I can't see me eating my words come December). For our Foreign Readers, the UKCensus takes place every 10 years, and the next one will be on 27th March 2011 - you can see a handy countdown timer here, and if I could only figure out how, I'd have it permanently on the blog. Well, for the next 1 month, 1 week, 0 days, hours and 41 minutes.

Apparently the forms come out in March; you can answer online from 4th March, but I won't do that, because it takes your answers and uses them to weed out the questions you don't have to answer, and then you don't get to see those questions, read them, and choose to ignore them.

Here are the things I like about the Census:

1. The epic scale. I like the thought that, at a specific moment, the nation are all doing the same thing: filling in a form. Now, I know they're not really, but I like to think that everyone does the thing properly and completes it at midnight on the day in question, as I shall.

2. The people who whine about Invasion of Privacy. I find it very endearing that they think anyone really cares whether they cycle to work or get the bus. I think this is because I'm the exact opposite: the Census is roughly the most interested anyone is in me, ever. It's like someone cares enough to ask. I love it.

3. The campaigns. There's always some kind of campaign to try to get people to put something or other on the Census. Last time, it was trying to get people to declare themselves as Jedis, so that it would have to be included on the form this time around. I believe they succeeded. One can only imagine the embarrassment in 100 years' time, when this goes online and people look it up to discover that their great-grandparents ticked the 'Jedi' box. It'll be the 22nd Century equivalent of your dad trying to be cool.
This year it's The Atheists, who want to get all atheists to tick that they have no religion. Since this involves reading the question which says 'What is your religion?' and then ticking 'none', I have a feeling they may be reasonably successful, and atheists everywhere can glow a little more brightly.

You may well hear more of this.

more About Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T23:02:00.002Z

I may have found my soul mate:

The WhyNotSmile Guide to Valentine's Day, Part 2

2011-02-14T12:43:00.000Z

Having failed, yet again, to find any reason whatever to celebrate Valentine's Day this year, I have decided to fall back on the next best thing: spoiling it for everyone else. My logic is thus: I need to take care of myself and do things I like, and misery loves company.

I have figured out how best to ensure that I set up Valentine's Day in such a way that I cannot lose, and instead make everyone else feel bad.

For those who display their cards, chocolates, flowers etc all over Facebook, I can be cross with them for rubbing my nose in it and kicking me when I'm down. They are insensitive and lack compassion.

For those who do not make a Big Thing out of Valentine's Day, but instead keep it low key, for fear of offending their single friends, they are patronising and childish. Imagine assuming I'm so fragile that I cannot cope with seeing their insipid displays of what-they-call affection! Ha! Do they not know I'm bigger than that?

I'm pleased with myself for managing to achieve the Moral High Ground in all situations. Now, if anyone needs me, I'll be sitting in a pile of self-pity, sobbing and eating chocolate.

On Explosions In Small Corners

2011-02-05T12:30:00.000Z

Small Corner is in France, and whilea recent video production seems to suggest that she hasn't yet understood that French is a separate language and not just English spoken in an accent while wearing a beret, she has written splendidly on the Gospel and whether it is meant to be dynamite, and so on. You should go and read it NOW, unless you are not interested in That Sort Of Thing, in which case, you do not have to.

Things I Dislike But Feel I Ought To Like: QI

2011-01-30T22:39:00.000Z

I have to confess, I don't really like Stephen Fry. Not on a personal level; I'm sure he's charming. I mean on TV. And I don't really 'get' QI, though I feel I ought to love it. Someone once said that Stephen Fry is the kind of person that stupid people think smart people should be like, and I rather agree with that. I'm sure he's very clever and all, and he did a very interesting podcast some time back about Oscar Wilde, which I enjoyed, but the fact remains that I always feel I should find QI a lot more entertaining, amusing and stimulating than I do, and I wish I liked it more.

On What You Would Hear If You Hacked My Phone

2011-01-29T12:20:00.000Z

So apparently phone hacking is all the rage now. In a spirit of public-mindedness, I decided to save you all the effort, and publish details of all the people who've phoned me this week.

I don't remember much before Tuesday, so we'll start there.

Tuesday, at around 2pm
For reasons I now forget, Alex ended up answering this one. Apparently it was an Indian bloke, who wanted to sell me laptop insurance or something. They seemed to speak for quite some time, but the conversation terminated with Alex saying "It's ok, I'm a software developer".

Wednesday, at around 1.45pm
The daughter of the elderly lady across the road, to say her mother had called her because she'd got her tv stuck on the menu again, and could I go over and put it on ITV? And also, did I have a boyfriend yet?

Thursday, at about 2.30pm
My mother. My mother has a better idea of my schedule than I do, so if she phones during the day, I know I'm supposed to be Out Someplace in the evening. She called to see what I was doing, which was working, mostly.

And that's been it, so far. If anything else happens, I'll let you know.

The WhyNotSmile Guide To The Offside Rule

2011-01-24T15:51:00.000Z

There was a whole big thing at the weekend there about how men think that women do not understand the offside rule in football. Thankfully, WhyNotSmile has done her research, and can now reveal how it works.

Apparently the thing is best understood if you imagine three women in a shop. Woman 1 sees shoes behind the counter, and would like to buy them, but there is someone (Woman 2) in front of her in the queue who also wants to buy them. She cannot push in front of Woman 1, because that would be rude, and anyway, for reasons we cannot begin to imagine, neither of them has any money, but has joined the queue regardless. So woman 3 is at the back of the shop and throws her purse to woman 1, who can now bunk in front of Woman 2 and buy the shoes. But they are all offside, because they should be on the football pitch and not in a shop.

And this is how the offside rule works.

On It Being Blue Monday Again

2011-01-24T11:16:00.000Z

So according to The Guardian, today is Blue Monday. Now I know we all thought it was last week, but that was according to the Daily Mail, and my friend Claire, and Virtual Methodist. But this week it is according to both The Guardian and Wikipedia.

This raises an interesting source of distress, as I had not previously considered the possibility that Claire could ever be wrong about things, so I'm trying to adjust my worldview to encompass that, and, frankly, it disturbs me. It's like finding out they lied about atoms.

Anyway, WhyNotSmile is not one to pass up another opportunity for misery, of course, but I haven't worked myself into quite the same frenzy as last week, so today is passing in a sort of melancholy. I'm all alone, as The Sister is at Mommy and Daddy Smile's, since she's teaching Down That Way this week, so it's just me all alone for a few days. Which is sad.

On The Rights And Wrongs Of School Assemblies

2011-01-18T09:00:00.000Z

So The Atheists want school assemblies to be made illegal (warning: link to Daily Mail. WhyNotSmile accepts no responsibility for anything that might happen while you're there, but advises you not to start reading the comments), on the basis that they infringe children's human rights. It is hard to know what to think about this, so I have compiled a Helpful List of pros and cons:

Reasons to Ban School Assemblies
1) If you were to design something guaranteed to turn a child away from all things religious, you could do little better than your average school assembly. School assemblies are generally run by either the teachers (in which case you often have the ridiculous sight of atheists ssshushing small children so they can hear other atheists talking about God), or the local vicar (generally consisting of over-stretched stories with "that's just like Jesus!" shoe-horned onto the end); you get the odd quite good one where someone with both social skills and an enthusiasm for spreading The Word is put in charge, and of course you get some excellent ones, but in my experience these are few and far between.

Reasons to Keep School Assemblies
1) It is always wise to disagree with anything the National Secular Society says, just on principle. Anything which annoys Richard Dawkins is also a good bet.

2) It is useful to ensure that children are accustomed to being bored, as it will prepare them well for a life in the office. I am firmly of the opinion that everyone's lives would be a lot easier if children were better at entertaining themselves quietly; school assemblies are good places to practice this.

3) The world would be poorer if no one knew the words and tunes to 'Morning Has Broken', 'One More Step Around The World I Go' and 'Fight The Good Fight'. Actually, no.

So with 2 votes to 1, we see that school assemblies should be kept.

The WhyNotSmile Guide To Blue Monday, And Other Depressing Times

2011-01-17T13:24:00.000Z

Good Afternoon, and Happy New Year. Sorry for not posting, been busy and so on and so forth.

So today may or may not be Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year (currently the score stands at 3 for (This Morning, Virtual Methodist and my friend Claire; it is possible that these sources are connected), 1 against (Wikipedia)). This is the day on which we all feel very miserable, due to having bankrupted ourselves at Christmas, not being paid for a few weeks yet, it's Monday, we're all getting divorced, and it's dark outside.

I have no idea whether it's Blue Monday or not, but I do know that I feel feck miserable today. It is unlikely that this is due to my impending divorce, and more probable that it has a connection with my doctor thinking that 2 weeks ago was 'a good time' to reduce my anti-depressants. I'm not entirely clear that I follow her logic, but she's very nice, so I went along with it, and hey, I can always go back and get them upped again. Once all the people with swine flu get out of the surgery, of course, cos I don't want to catch that. And also I like to get a bit of attention at the doctor's, and she might not have so much time if she has 300 whining people who woke up this morning and sneezed twice to deal with.

So anyway. Virtual Methodist is feeling good, and we're happy about that. Also, on Facebook the concensus seems to be that we're all enjoying the blue skies and sunshine.

Historically, the week of Blue Monday has not been a good one for WhyNotSmile. Three years ago this week was the big Thing With The Boss That Led To 5 Weeks Off With Stress. Two years ago was the Broken Arm. Last year passed uneventfully, as far as I remember, so this either means the effect is wearing off, or I'm Due. Hard to say.

But it's not like I need a special day on which to be miserable, for WhyNotSmile can be depressed on any day of the year, for no particular reason, and in great force.

So here are my tips for coping with depression:

1) Enjoy the little things. Like your new Christmas jammies, which have been through their first wash by now, and therefore can be worn with confidence that this is the size they'll stay, and they can be washed again without losing all their colour, so it's ok to wear them as much as you want. I hate that initial 'new jammies' thing, where you're enjoying them, but you have the worry that Something Bad will happen in the wash, so you don't want to wear them too much because then you'll have to wash them, and then you might never be able to wear them again.

2) Do little things. There is no point in attempting to restructure your entire life in January. The initial enthusiasm will fall away, and you'll be back to square one, but with less energy, and shattered dreams. Save the big things for an indeterminate day in the future. Instead, concentrate on the little things. People always need hugs. Give hugs.

3) Exercise. They always say you should exercise when you feel miserable. I'm sure it's great. Give it a go, and let me know what happens, kk?

4) Remember that sad is deep people's version of happy. Anyone can be happy. But it takes a great intelligence to see the misery in everything.

5) Likewise, valleys. We can all enjoy being on the mountaintop, much beloved by Christian musicians through the eras. But coping with valleys is something else. Sometimes we can even learn things from God when we're not in the middle of another hyper praise song, waving arms in the air, and yelling 'Amen'. At least, I think that's true. I read it on the internet, so it must be.

New Year's Honours List 2010

2010-12-31T11:31:00.000Z

So another year, another New Year's Honours List without my name on it. Does anyone know how they decide these things?

Do they start with a list of categories, and then fill them with people? 'Cos if they do, there are some mighty odd categories. "Services to cricket". "Services to helping small children cross roads". "Services to the distribution of milk". But there's no "Services to snarky blogging", so you can't have one, WhyNotSmile. We don't care how much you did, how much you made us laugh, how much effort you put in to watching The Apprentice and then being sarcastic about it, that award is not on our list so you get NOTHING, although we may, at some point in the future, re-examine our extensive constitution and give due thought to recommending for consideration the addition of a category into which there is a small chance you will fall. This is what we might call the "Virtual Methodist" approach to giving awards.

Or do they start with people who deserve awards and then make up categories for them? Like you do for small children. "Oh, that is the most... umm... colourful picture I have seen today! What's it meant to be?"

Anyway, for a while now I've been meaning to compile a list of blogs I've started following, and decided I might as well kill two birds with one stone and post it as my New Year's Honours List. I've left out all the 'Big Blogs' I follow, like Cake Wrecks and It's Lovely, I'll Take It, because we all know they're hilarious.

Services To Ulster Scots
This has to go to "1690 and all thon", a splendid foray into all things Pratestant, and chief organiser of the campaign to get Ballyhalbert made into the 2015 City of Culture. Even though Ballyhalbert is right next to Ballysmile, and Ballysmile is better. But still. We'd get passing trade.

Services to Unpronounceable Blog Names
Not actually a new blog, but Zoomtard has moved over to what, in my head, I pronounce as Cream Tea, although it's some sort of Irish name and I should probably not be displaying my ignorance. Anyway, I'm giving him an award so he can't get cross about it.

Services To Maths
I very much like New Math, which uses equations to explain how life works.

Services to Pretty Pictures
In much the same sort of vein, Information is Beautiful is a very splendid way of showing how things are.

Services to Funniness
Bresker is always good for a laugh. Also he sent me a link to a thing, but I haven't listened to it yet. But thanks.

Services to Always Being Quite Interesting
A friend recommended Tcsoko, which is another one I can't pronounce (in my head: Tea - Costco), and which is quite good.

So there you have it, and if your name's not there, it's not because I don't love you, it's just because I did this quite quickly and mainly wanted to mention blogs that aren't in my blog roll (must update that), and possibly also because you didn't give me an award.

The Apprentice 2010: The Final

2010-12-26T15:31:00.000Z

I'm doing this from memory, as I'm at home and The Parents are insisting on watching the weather, as The Sister has to go to The Boyfriend's this afternoon. So I can't have The Apprentice on the background, in case we miss something.

Anyway, this week was The Final, with Stella and Chris, and it was so obvious that Stella would win that the main entertainment was always going to be seeing how many ways they could try to make it look like Chris was doing better in the task, and in having Mel back.

We started off, of course, with Sports Personality of the Year, which seemed to over-run so interminably, that had The Apprentice come on and they announced that we were all just going to watch Chris watching paint dry for the episode, we'd have been over-excited. In the event, we start with our finalists getting up and answering the phone, Stella chirping excitedly and Chris looking ravishing in his dressing gown. I'll say this for him, he can carry off nightwear.

The task itself is to come up with a new alcoholic beverage, and make it and market it and so on. It's The Germinator Redux, basically. Splendid. In time-honoured fashion, the previous contestants are brought back, although, interestingly, not all of them. No sign of Baggs, Laura, Dan, Raleigh, Joy or Sandeesh, but we do have Mel (yaaay!), Paloma, Joanna, Jamie, Liz, Christopher, Alex (yay!) and Shibby. We begin by picking teams. Chris has a sudden upturn of fortune, and gets first pick. He opts for Jamie. Stella's first choice is Joanna.

We end up with: Chris in charge of Jamie, Liz, Alex (? Alex? You choose Alex over... well, over Paloma and Shibby... ok then) and Shibby; Stella in charge of Joanna, Christopher, Melissa, and Paloma (nice quiet team that, then). Thankfully, we've ditched that Apollo/Synergy nonsense.

They have 3 days or something.

Day 1: Decide what they're making. Well, you'd think, at least. They begin with a bit of "let's all forget about being mean to each other in the boardroom" and then launch into talking alcohol. Alex thinks mojitos are where it's at. For dear sakes, Alex, even I've heard of mojitos, they can't be that on-trend. Liz suggests adding gooseberry, but Alex points out that pomegranate is the fruit de jour. Right. Stella's off to do market research - you know, that bit where they talk to people who think their idea's resoundingly dreadful, and then they take all the negative points and cram them together to get the final product? Yeah, that bit.

Chris wants to call his drink something British, like 'crumpets'. He also doesn't want it to be a weird colour. It's important you remember this point, as we'll be revisiting it presently. Stella's going for some kind of bourbon, and they decide it should be blue, for the following non-reasons:

1) Then they can call it "summink like "Blue Bourbon", know 'ot ah meeen?"
2) "Blue means you're happy, dunnit?" according to Joanna. "No, it means sad" say the others. "Oh, yeah, blue's like gay innit" corrects Joanna.

Oh holy goose, they're visiting marketing professionals, who are all too man to carry a brightly coloured drink, so that knocks the blue on the head. Chris has a great idea for a frosted bottle with a clear drink inside (again, please note, a clear drink). He thinks if they add three fruits to it (we seem to have abandoned deciding between gooseberry and pomegranate), then they could call it 'cubed'. You know what, that's not great, but it's actually not appalling. But then they talk to a man in a liquor shop, and he doesn't like the idea of it.

In a fit of inspiration, Stella comes up with "Urbon" as her drink name, knocking back Joanna's idea of "Young Heritage"; Chris has dumped Cubed and come up instead with Trinity. Alex suggests Trio. That's a chocolate biscuit. They want to call it whatever Italian is for '3', but no one can count above 2. They're dangerously close to being right back to "OctiClean".

Meanwhile, the drinks have to be made. Mel and Christopher sup shots thoughtfully. Liz and Shibby try out the pomegranate stuff, and it's fairly foul, so they dye it bright pink. Heh. Shame Chris is, at that moment, naming the stuff "Prism", owing to its purity and clarity and how a nice clear prism would look really cool on the shelf. They tell Chris about it being pink, and he's so annoyed that the edges of his mouth go up a little bit. He's all worried he's going to lose because of this, but I don't think he need worry - there are plenty more things going against him.

They design their bottles (Prism = something you could take out a gladiator with; Urbon = one of those bottles you get really, really, really extra-virgin olive oil in), and then have to get clearance from the ad people so they can start filming in the morning. The rules of alcohol advertising are essentially that you're not allowed to make it look like the drink is in any way associated with fun, sex, having a good time, or anything other than complete and utter sodding misery. But don't worry, these people used an octopus to fail to sell a cleaning product, so I imagine we'll be thinking outside of all societal norms. Oh, wait, no... Chris is basically planning on showing a guy using Prism to get a girl paralytic and then have his mediocre way with her. Back to the drawing board then.

Next morning, it all gets more cheery when the samples arrive. They don't look dreadful, so everyone's relieved.

Day 2's task is to shoot adverts. Chris manages to get landed with an actor who is absolutely incapable of getting ice into a glass without also scattering it all over South East England, and ends up spending most of the day trying to film that, leaving himself having to film the remaining 90% of the advert in half an hour. It is supposed to consist of 3 people walking into a room, looking happy, but since he has hired the worst actors in the world, it turns out more like 3 reject Blue Peter presenters escaping some kind of Ritalin-antidote trial.

Stella's lot are equally bad, and have even less raw material to work from. The script is this:
2 girls in a bar, with Christopher Farrell slouching on the end of it
2 guys come in
Guy (to girls): What would you like to drink?
Girl: We'll have Urbons please
Guy (to the barman): 4 Urbons please.
If this is how pulling works, I think I've realised why I'm single.

It remains only to write and practice their pitches. Stella gets Paloma to help, and Paloma comes up with a lot of marketing nonsense. During the run-through, the girls realise they haven't had a good squabble in a while, and start making up for lost time. Christopher sits there looking like he'd rather be in Afghanistan, to get a bit of peace. Chris delivers his pitch to his team, who are beyond looking interested. Jamie takes him aside and has a wee word, so Chris ends up looking like a man who's not very good at pitching trying to look like he's good at pitching.

The Industry Experts arrive, and then Lord Shugagh appears. Chris comes on stage with some more escapees from the anti-Ritalin thing and then quickly slows the pace when he opens his mouth. He talks a bit, we have a snark at the advert, and we're done. The Industry Experts are worried about the weapon potential of a pointy-pointy bottle with alocohol in, but Chris isn't that bothered since children aren't likely to get their hands on it. Yeah, 'cos all the bar fights I've ever seen involved 5-year-olds.

Next door, more manic dancing, and then Stella appears and sounds like she knows what she's talking about. We watch the advert, and I almost want a glass. There's some discussion about whether the drink is for men or women, and then about whether people who live in the country will want to drink something called something that sounds like Urban. Stella says if she wins she'll move to the country and drink Urbon there, which puts the final straw in the coffin.

Back to the boardroom, where everyone thinks their project manager was wonderful fab brilliant; Alex would hire every single person in the room if only he had a successful business and wasn't a completely unemployed communications manager. Something of a change of tune for someone who, not 6 weeks ago, was well up for seeing both their skinny asses fired forthwith. Stella and Chris both get in trouble for sending other people to make the actual product, since taste is the main point of the whole endeavour, even though from this point onwards no one mentions how it tastes ever again. Shibby points out that you drink with your eyes, or something.

Everyone out, quick chat with Nick and Karren, back in and STELLA WINS!

Yay.

So that's that, and no doubt we'll do it all again next year.

Weather-related Questions

2010-12-23T10:20:00.001Z

Here's a thing I don't understand. Let's say the forecast for today has minimum temperature -10 and maximum -5. Then tomorrow the forecast has minimum -3 and maximum -1 (it doesn't, by the way, before you all get the sun screen out). How does that work? What happens at midnight? How does it go from -5 to -3 in the blink of an eye?

Also, how come, if today's minimum temperature is -5, it is currently -10?

Crisis Resolved

2010-12-22T14:21:00.000Z

So I did a bit of blasting with a hairdryer, fiddling with pipes etc., and then went outside and tipped a kettle of boiling water over the pipe. It make alarming crackling noises, which was probably the ice melting, and then the sink began to drain freely. Phew.

Thanks to Wesley and 1690 an' all thon for the advice.

So now I have to try to stop it from icing up again. Here are my plans:
1. Stop the dripping tap. Now, I can't actually stop it dripping, but I figure if I catch the drips in the washing up bowl and then tip them all down at once, that'll be ok - it's just when they're little drips they freeze more easily.

2. Construct some kind of lagging device to keep the outside pipe warm.

You see, what I'm worried about is if I go home for Christmas and then it ices up and the washing basin overflows all over the floor. I'm trying to think up some kind of device which would catch the drips and then periodically tip them all out into the sink, but I can't.

The Latest Domestic Crisis

2010-12-22T10:45:00.000Z

You'll remember the Q&B Saga. We all thought it was finished, but the snow has revealed otherwise. Technically, it's not entirely their fault, but they started it.

When they were planning the kitchen, the process involved moving the sink a little to the left. This seemed fine, but when it came to be executed, the washing machine ended up covering the stopcock thing that you use to turn the water off. "Meh." I thought, "It's not like I'd know what to do with it anyway".

Fast forward a couple of years, and the tap starts dripping. At first, it's quite a small drip, and then gradually, it gets bigger, until, two years later, it's really Quite Something. I have a washer, but I can't change it until the water is switched off at the mains, and I can't do that because the stopcock is behind the washing machine (this is where the thing about whose fault it all is gets a little fuzzy, as it may be merely opportune that I can blame them for hiding a stopcock I don't know how to use anyway).

Then it snows and gets very cold. So the drips are quite small, which means that they freeze quite easily; there are also quite a lot of them, and therefore they eventually club together and block the pipe out of the sink. So, to summarise, the outlet pipe from the sink is frozen and the sink won't drain.

I'm on my own, as The Sister got laser eyes in yesterday and had to stay at The Boyfriend's overnight to make up for it. There is a reasonable chance that it makes no difference whether she's here or not, of course.

Also, the bathroom light switch has stopped working. I think the spring has broken. It's stuck at off, which means I have to pee in the dark, but at least it's better on account of The Planet and so on.

So I need someone who could come and unblock the pipe and change the washer in the tap and fix the light, but as it's only 3 sleeps till Christmas, I can't be bothered thinking about it. Also I have lots of work to finish before then.

So my main question is whether there is any danger in leaving the pipe frozen. I suppose the difficulty is that it may have burst, and then thaw when I'm not here, but since I think it's frozen outside, that may not be a problem. Also, it's not like it's a mains pipe, so there'd only be the water that's actually in it. It wouldn't flood the whole house.

And all of this leaves out the question of whether there's enough anti-freeze in the car. It was done in January, and I'm told it should last 2 years, so I think it's ok.

The Apprentice 2010: The Interview Week

2010-12-19T15:42:00.000Z

I'm the sort of person who gets asked for help by people trying to fill in job applications. I'm not sure why, as it's something I'm resoundingly hopeless at (I have this awful fear of accidentally telling lies and then ending up out of my depth in a job, and therefore refuse to put down anything beyond "I'm fairly smart and quite like reading"). I'm also, I think, not that great at interviews, although I have, several times, been offered a job on the strength of the 15 minutes of blushing, sweating and stammering which filled the time until I could flee. I sometimes worry about the job offers I receive. Most of the time, I wouldn't employ me, based on my interview performance.

Anyway, this is all by way of introduction to this week's episode, for herein we see our 5 remaining candidates (Jo, Jamie, Stella, Chris and Hairbaggs) being forced to sweat it out and tell the actual truth about their abilities (so far, in order, we have seen the ability to flog 10000 packets of honk-flavoured crisps to a single German guy, an impressive knowledge of facts about mass-murderers, being Quite Good at taking charge of a team of boys, lots of mediocre, and a not-entirely-dreadful Terminator impersonation).

We start off with shots of them all in bed (different beds, it's not Big Brother), and a quick glimpse of Hairbaggs' tootsies. They're all getting nervous, but the cars will be here in half an hour to take them to Viglen, or Vigilen, or Vilgen, or something. They all have a good laugh at Jamie's tie, and off we go. While they're in the cars, we hear more about why they should all get the job, and the music switches, appropriately, to something a bit more doom-and-gloom.

They reach Viglen and stand half way up the stairs, awaiting Lord Shugagh's arrival in the elevator (I think the elevator must be like the one in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which can go anywhere, because no matter where they are, he always seems to arrive by elevator), while Nick and Karren watch from above.

The 4 people who have been charged with whittling us down from 5 to 2 are Claude (Grumpy Cop), Alan (Bad Cop), Bordan (not a cop) and the Blessed Margaret Mountford. Please pause for a small bow of the head.

Obviously the one we've been waiting to see is Hairbaggs (and I think it's fair to say that the producers are as keen on a train wreck as the next person, given that they let him get this far), but the others throw up a few gems as well.

Jamie
Sitting in front of Mount Margaretford, Jamie dares to smirk slightly. She flicks through his CV and starts reading extracts:

"The question asked 'What's the most interesting thing about you?' and you put 'I owned a porche and a house and a big load of stuff* before the age of 25, and I have a third nipple'..." (Jamie laughs) "...and then two pages further on 'What's the worst lie you've ever told?' - 'That I have a third nipple'." By the end, she's distinctly snarling, and yet Jamie goes on smirking.
Margaret: " Is that supposed to be funny? Think of a word that applies to that"
Jamie (suddenly serious): "Stupid"
Margaret: "Puerile"

(* slight paraphrase)

He tells the sob story about how his parents didn't push him, and that's why he got pants grades at GCSE.
Bordan interrogates him about his playing fast-and-lose with the definition of 'selling', since he hasn't actually 'sold' things as such for quite some time. Jamie blames it all on his ass of a business partner and also the recession, and Cyprus.

Stella
Stella's not going down without a fight, and immediately disagrees with Alan, who wonders why she's having a change of career. Claude calls her a 'very very good PA' and she nearly decks him. And... that's about it.

Joanna
Bordan starts by asking what job Joanna thinks she's applying for. "Do you mean, wot duz Lord Shugah do in this Vig-i-len?" "Viglen" "Oh, yeah, Viglen". She stammers something about selling computers to schools, and other than that doesn't have the faintest idea, much like the rest of us.
Claude's a bit cross with her for letting her cleaning business be enough to 'get by', instead of being a megalomaniac big corporation, and she looks like she might cry.

Chris
Chris has claimed to be a "revered and outstanding Theology scholar", and impresses himself even more because he's not even remotely religious. Margaret pokes a bit, and we establish that he means he's done all right in A-Level RE, and sometimes talks God after a few drinks.
Claude is more concerned that Chris changed courses at university, and that he thinks you have to be a lawyer if you do law, and then he did politics and didn't become a politician, and then become an investment banker and gave it up after 9 months, and is therefore obviously a quitter. It's all a bit ridiculous - how many of us don't know someone who changed course at university once they realised the variations in the number of lectures for different courses, and discovered the student union?

Hairbaggs
Stuart seems to alienate the interviewers as quickly as he did the rest of the nation. On walking into the room and seeing Margaret, his little face lights up. "Margaret!" he exclaims, only to be flattened immediately for his impertinence. Undaunted, he goes on to tell her about a thing he has invented that she can stick to her cat when it goes to Bermuda, or something. She does not look impressed, but he says he'll work 24/7 and give 110%, without irony.
Alan gets straight in there: "You're not very nice, are you?". He then goes on to list all the ways in which Hairbaggs is not very nice, and it is lengthy. Baggs explains how he is a character of integrity, which seems something of a contradiction when he's just admitted falsely announcing to the newspapers that a rival company has gone bust, but then he gives an example: if he's up for promotion, against 3 other people, he'll tell the boss how rubbish the other 3 are. Ah, THAT definition of integrity. Alan's face is like a bulldog's bum chewing a lemon-and-poo-flavoured wasp.
The conversation with Claude cannot be easily summarised, so here it is:

Claude: 'I'm Stuart Baggs the Brand'... what on earth are you talking about?
Baggs: ...er..
Claude: You're a 21 year-old kid, you're not a brand.
Baggs: ...er.. a brand is... err...
Claude: Don't tell me what a brand is. You are not a brand.
Baggs: I think I might be
Claude: Why does someone as successful as you want to work for Lord Sugar?
Baggs: At the moment I'm a big fish in a small pond
Claude: You're not. You're not a big fish. You're not even a fish.

Bordan asks about Baggs' 'fully licenced' telecoms company, which turns out to be a broadband provider. He does have a licence, much in the way I have a TV Licence; i.e. bought from the Post Office. There's a little light-hearted banter about how much they love technology, and then Bordan sticks the knife in again and makes Baggs admit he's been lying.

At some point in the above, I got confused about who was Claude and who was Alan, by the way.

Back to the boardroom, where the interviewers give Lord Shugagh the rundown, while the candidates wait outside and look nervous (if I was the mysterious Hand Who Answers The Phone And Sends Them In, I'd have suggested a game of Pictionary, I think). They all liked Joanna; thought Chris was monotonous; found Jamie a bit dull and full of cliches (we see a snippet of him going on about being a key cog in a wheel, and making no sense whatever); worried about Stella being corporate and good at admin (because those are things you'd run a mile from in business); and had a good slagging off of Stuart's ponciness. Then Bordan reveals the Big Lie About The Telecommunications Company, and that Baggs has nothing Karren couldn't get. Ooooh. Things have turned against the Hairbaggs.

So they all get trekked back in to the boardroom. We talk about Chris' academic record, and his obsession therewith, and then there's a bit more about why he dropped out of law. Oh, shut up about that, nobody cares. Something else about Stella being all corporate. Blah blah blah. Onto Joanna, and a bit more about her not being a megalomaniac and expanding her cleaning business to take over the world. Jamie has another whine about his business partner doing no work. It feels like one of those moments where a small child comes up to you and starts on about how another kid took the lorry off him, and you just can't really bring yourself to wade in and sort it out, but he's only 2 and can't do it himself.

On to Stuart, who admits the process was tough. He then lies again about the licence. AND GETS FIRED! Even more gloriously, Lord Shugagh actually loses it a little bit, and shouts at him.

Two more to go, and, to cut a long story short, it's Joanna and Jamie who get the chop. He's nice to Joanna, who cries, and not quite so nice to Jamie, who's still smirking.

So the final, tonight, is Stella vs Chris, with everyone else back to help. Hurrah! My money's on Stella, but I'm not without hope that Melissa and/or Baggs will somehow clinch it.

A Helpful Guide

2010-12-15T16:49:00.000Z

In case anyone's thinking of giving me sweets for Christmas, I made a list of my favourites:

Small Bars:
1. Dairy Milk
2. Anything FairTrade
3. Galaxy
4. Regular milk chocolate
5. Mint chocolate (After Eights etc.)

Selection Boxes:
1. Cadbury's
2. Mars
3. Nestle

Roses etc.
1. Roses
2. Quality Street
3. Miniature Heros
4. General mixture of chocolates
5. Celebrations

I'm not saying you have to buy me sweets, I'm just saying. And of course, any sweets are appreciated.

Christmas Song!

2010-12-15T12:27:00.000Z

Do you think, if we tried really hard, we could get this to number one for Sunday?

Because I think we should try.

The Apprentice 2010: Week 10

2010-12-14T22:33:00.000Z

This is going to a be a lightning-quick tour of last week's events, because I just haven't had the time. Also, I'm doing this from memory, rather than watching it all again.

So they get hauled to a bus station at the skrake of dawn, and told that this week's task is to organise bus tours of London. Heh. Some of them look like they've never been on a bus in their lives, nor spoken with anyone who's been on a bus, but they smile gamely as the teams are swapped again. On one side we have Liz (the leader), Stella and Stuart, and on the other, Jamie, Chris and Joanna (with either Jamie or Joanna as leader, I forget which). Clearly Lord Shugagh is liking his New Plan to always put his 2 least favourite people on opposing teams, so that he's pretty much guaranteed to be able to fire one of them, and surely we'll be saying farewell to the Baggs or Mediocre Chris tonight, no?

Step 1 is to plan the tours, a process which both teams spend a good 30 seconds on. Liz's lot decide tourists are gagging for a Cockney Tour, while Jamie and co opt for 'Ghosts and Ghouls'. There's some kind of deal to be made with a tourist centre; whichever team gives the better offer gets to sell their tickets through the tourist place, thus guaranteeing more sales, you'd think. Baggs goes in and offers them 25% of the price of all the tickets they sell; they point out that generally it would be around 35%, so they'll wait to see what the other team offers. Chris goes in and basically offers them everything he owns, including various internal organs, and they hastily agree. Just in time, as it happens, since Joanna, on getting wind of the deal, heads straight down there to explain how it was all a mistake and really they didn't mean to offer so much and is there any chance Chris could have at least one kidney back, and Tourist Centre girl laughs at her.

Up to this point, Joanna and Jamie had been busily engaged in the most polite argument I've come across, which went something like:
Joanna: moan moan honk honk moan
Jamie: You're annoying me, shut up
Joanna: Jamie! I have never been spoken to like that by a man, you're scaring me!

Meanwhile Stella swots up on her apples and pears, while Liz and Stuart are researching possible locations for their Cockney tour. Too late, they realise that their chosen area of London is, essentially, a building site. Fortunately, there's a jellied eels seller, with a quaint-looking stall, so, clearly, he's going to be the highlight. Liz asks him to 'up the cockney' a bit, and a customer nearly decks her.

And so to the day of the tours, which can apparently only take place if our Young Hopefuls are dressed like failed extras from an Easyjet ad. Each team splits the responsibilities: 2 people to sell tickets, and 1 to lead the tour. First the ticket sellers: Stuart and Liz on one team, and Joanna and Chris on the other. Joanna and Chris have the advantage that the tourist place are selling for them, but Baggs is not to be outdone, and stands right outside the door telling everyone how crap the other team's tour is, until the tourist centre girl comes out and tells him what he's doing is illegal. He tells her to call the police, which, unfortunately, she does not. Baggs skulks off to tag Joanna instead. Every time she sells a ticket, he runs up to the customer and yells 'Their tour is rubbish, our tour is 4 quid cheaper than theirs and theirs is rubbish and ours is 4 quid cheaper!'. Eventually this leads to a mediocre face-off with Chris, who tells Stuart to f-off. Stuart tells Chris to punch him, which, unfortunately, he does not. That's twice in 2 minutes the nation's hopes have been dashed.

On the buses, things are going equally well. Jamie is leading his lot around places where Sweeny Todd murdered people, describing the deaths in such grisly detail that several people are close to collapsing. He informs them that 'the Thames is the second biggest river in London', but, quite properly, does not follow up with the name of the actual biggest, because no one would want to know that. He also imparts the information that Big Ben is '12 diameters wide', causing a young swotty student-looking type to visibly quiver. However, things take off a bit when he leads the upper deck in a reasonably energetic rendition of 'London's Burning'.

Cut to Stella, who's on a bus with 8 people who are politely, if impassively, observing her singing 'Knees Up Mother Brown'. She manages to get lost on the way to the jellied eel man, miss Downing Street and the Cenotaph, and end up trying to pass off a random piece of graffitti as 'a Banksy, maybe'. To which the woman next to her replies 'no it isn't'.

Back in the boardroom, it's a hard one to call - it looks like Chris-Joanna-Jamie may have had more passengers, but then they've promised Nick's soul to the tourist place and that might cost them. Some too-ing and fro-ing about how Baggs charged too much (£35 a ticket or something insane) and Chris was a bit dim in the tourist place, and eventually it's announced: Chris-Jamie-Joanna have won! Hurrah! Baggs to leave!

And then there's some kind of glitch in the matrix, because when Liz, Stella and Baggs get called back in, something odd happens. Liz and Stella defend themselves in the usual way "I'm dead good, me", and Baggs comes off with some tripe "Hiring me will be a gamble, but I sold yo-yos in school and my parents only ever gave me a tenner and nothing else ever" and somehow, for reasons we will never know, Liz gets fired.

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Yes. Liz.

One can only assume that they figure that since Baggs got this far, they might as well milk it and throw him into the interview round, which happens this week. And you have to admit it'll be unmissable.

The Apprentice 2010: Week 9

2010-12-03T23:33:00.000Z

Apparently I was wrong last week when I said that this week's task was the one where they have to sell miscellaneous tat to unsuspecting members of the public (I was thinking of the one which, last year, brought us Nooral and a skeleton); rather, this is the one where they have to buy miscellaneous tat from unsuspecting members of the public.

They really don't give an ass any more, as evidenced by taking a year and a day to answer the phone (Stella eventually gets down the stairs, wrapped in towelling; Jamie sits up in bad and looks all handsome, and the rest of them swear loudly). In the half an hour which they allegedly have to get ready, they manage to tong hair, moan about being tired, and do the ironing. Off to London's Financial District, where they form an orderly line to await Lord Shugah arising slowly through the floor, like some sort of inverted Angel Gabriel.

The task, as we've said, is to buy all the items on a supplied list as cheaply as possible. They have 10 hours; if they don't get back in time, they get penalised, and if they miss any items they get penalised. The ones who spend the least, win. We're back to girls and boys this week, which mercifully means that either Baggs or Laura has to go; no more jammy being on the winning team - this week, Lord Shugah is on the ball.

Jamie and Liz are in charge. The boys basically explode in a fury of racing around the streets trying to buy anything they can lay their hands on, while the girls stay back at base with their list and their phones and their Yellow Pages, and Plan. Not well, of course ('What's our strategy?' 'I think we need to figure out where we can buy these things'), but enough that they know what they're looking for.

Jamie is desperate to prove he's not a twit, so he tells the boys they're to aim for 70% off, make up whatever stories they want, and 'negotiate their bloody bottoms off'. He then sends Chris and Stuart off for half the things, and goes on the hunt for the other half himself. There's a fabulous moment when he walks into a shop looking for a 'tikka, 22-carat gold', not knowing what it is, and the salesman says 'Yes, that's not a problem... what's a tikka?'. Now THAT, my friends, is a sales technique.

Stuart and Chris are trying to buy a Blue Book, which they suss out really quickly is a rare American magazine, and they start sniffing round bookshops, where the owners do a lot of teeth-sucking and slow shaking of heads because they've never heard of it. Meanwhile, the girls figure out that a Blue Book is actually a taxi driver's manual, and nab one from a taxi driver school for 50 quid by telling the guy in the shop that his mate said he'd look after them. Jamie's having no luck with figuring out what a tikka is, whereas Laura and Stella have Googled it or something and picked one up for £160, having gone into the shop saying 'You have the item and we have the money', which even I know is a crap negotiation technique. Eventually, however, Jamie strikes gold, and wanders into a jeweller's looking sad because he wants a tikka so much and they are trying to charge him so much money, and isn't it so so sad, and lo! he gets it for £135. The jeweller's now homeless and starving, like, but never mind.

Stuart and Chris have evidently taken Jamie's command to 'have a story ready' too seriously, and now that they have worked out what a Blue Book actually is, they go to a bookshop and try to haggle. Chris comes up with some crap about his brother doing a taxi driver exam on Monday but being unable to study for it because Chris borrowed his Blue Book and left it in Nottingham or something... Please consider this for a moment. Consider that this is a regular shop, and 2 guys in suits have walked in, and one is claiming that he borrowed his brother's taxi driver exam books (? What? Why?!) and then managed to leave them in Nottingham (??!?); these 2 guys are accompanied by Karren with 2 arrs, who you'd imagine they would at least recognise as being off the telly, and a camera crew. Presumably he imagines it's some kind of candid camera show or something, because he gives them the first discount ever in the history of Blue Book sales, as long as they give a pound to charity.

The basic gist of happenings is thus:
> the girls are fairly rubbish at negotiating. They hair around Knightsbridge trying to buy truffles from Gordon Ramsey (well, Stella tries, while Laura sits next to her and shreds the Yellow Pages with her laser eye glare, because she thinks it's a stupid idea but doesn't like to say so); they eventually manage to buy 50g of truffles (cost: £2000 per kilo) for £200 and an agreement to come back to the restaurant for dinner some time.
> Jamie is very good at negotiating, but feck useless with common sense; he manages to spend half the afternoon being unable to buy 4 metres of kitchen worktop.
> Stuart and Chris are lying gets, and not even good at it. Trying to buy tartan, they wander into a Scottish shop and Chris spins some complex yarn about needing the tartan cheap because he has to go to a Scottish wedding next week and he wants to take the tartan for his nan's birthday present. What?

There's a last-minute dash back to the boardroom, with Liz almost stabbing a pensioner for not being able to write fast enough, Chris begging embarrassingly ('I have no money and I really need truffles'), Stuart racing up the stairs and almost landing on Jamie's knee, and the girls being late and incurring a fine. In their wake is a collection of robbed, deperate shopkeepers, vaguely hoping that they'll be on tv.

Then it gets interesting: the boys only got 7 out of the 10 items but made it back on time, whereas the girls got all of them but were back late. This means that the girls get a £50 fine, and the boys are charged as if they had bought the 3 missed items at list price plus something I miss. The girls explain their planning technique and their route around the various items, and it's all very P5 project. The boys explain that they ran around with fire in their bellies telling lies.

The girls have spent (including their fine) £1094.40, where the boys have spent (including £500 of fines) £1020.50. Heck, says everyone. Jamie witters on about the kitchen worktop again, and then the boys get sent to Paris, to gad about in berets on the Champs Elysees.

Back to the boardroom for the girls, and bizarrely, they all seem to have turned on Stella who, ok, was wick at negotiating, but no more so than anyone else. Lord Shugah makes some sexist comments about how they'd be better at buying handbags and shoes than computer chips, and then they all turn on Stella again, for being 'too corporate'. Obviously Laura's going, if only Liz has the wit to bring her back in, which she does. Stella comes too, so that they can snark at her some more.

It turns out that Liz and Laura can't stand Stella, which is quite exciting. Also, Laura's 22 and has never had to scream, and reminds everyone that she was a shambles as project manager. Stella and Liz blame each other for the whole truffles fiasco, and then Laura snipes at Stella again.

Obviously Laura goes, although not before Lord Shugah gives Stella a good fright by pretending he's going to fire her. Back at the house, they're all snarking about Stella (mysteriously, the boys are back from their weekend in France). When Liz and Stella come back, Liz complains that Stella was mean about her in the boardroom, and announces that Laura will be missed. They all agree. Gulp.

So there are 3 weeks left. Next week is the final team task, then there are the interviews (please let Stuart get to the interview stage, pleeeeease), and then the final. It is time to begin predicting. Obviously it depends a bit on who's on which team, but I suspect that next week will see the end of Jamie (or maybe Stuart), and that the final could be Liz and Chris. Anyone else?

The Apprentice 2010: Week 8

2010-11-30T22:46:00.000Z

After episodes entitled things like 'Selling to trade', this week's offering is called 'Crisps'. We begin with the review of Sandeesh & Co and the Great Downhill Skiing Disaster-fest, complete with Stuart being an irritating twerp. Jamie answers the phone and is told they're to pack for a 2-day foreign trip, with clothes for all weathers. Stuart reckons Lord Shugah is sending them to a war zone. Ah, yes, the famous 'Illegal Arms Trade' task. Having said that, even if it's not a war zone to begin with, it will be once Laura-the-moan-pants, Jamie-the-whinger and Joanna-the-foghorn get there.

It turns out to be Germany. "I 'ate the Geemins" says Christopher, to kick off the casual racism. They have to flog them crisps, coming up with some decent flavours, making them, and then shipping over to Hamburg to flog them. On team Baggs-MoanPants-Stella-Joanna, it seems they're fighting to be in charge, apart from Baggs, who's knackered from last week. Baggs thinks Stella should be in charge so that if they lose she'll get sacked, showing a reckless disregard for both self-awareness and common sense. On Chris-Christopher-Liz-Jamie, Chris gets put in charge, confident he'll do a good, if monotone, job.

So they need to come up with crisp flavours. Chris & Co are going for traditional German, such as sausage, bratwurst and goulash, in a 'bringing the mountain to Mohammed and also bringing the Hungarian mountain while you're at it' move. Stuart's lot (for he is talking non-stop) realise that there's no point in pretending not to be British, and are going for pot roast flavour, sausage and eggs, and CURRY CURRY CURRY honks Joanna over everyone else.

Joanna, Stuart, Christopher and Jamie go to Hamburg, while the rest stay behind to make crisps. They practice some German on the way: Baggs can count to 20 (which is approximately the number of seconds I give it until Joanna punches him in the face), while Christopher practices chat-up lines on Jamie. Once they get there, it's all 'Guten Tag' and 'Danke schon' from Jamie and Christopher (who ditch each other to fall in love with curry wurst), while Baggs is doing a lot of 'Das ist Wunderbar', 'Cheeps cheeps' and 'Ja, ja'.

Joanna is pleased to find the Germans love curry chips, and then that a survey of one proves they love shepherds' pie and fish & chips, even if, when she says 'would you like to see them flavours in crisps?' he says 'no'. She and Baggs decide sausage is the way forward, so they go to look at some sausages in a sausage place. The man is telling them what the sausages are. 'White sausage' he says, pointing. "I've got one of those" says Baggs, and the nation delicately heaves. Then she phones Stella and honks CURRY CURRY CURRY again. Unfortunately, Stella and Laura have already started making crisps, and are using flavours I don't quite catch. I'm fairly sure one of them is cheese and paprika, and the others sounded like variations on toothpaste and orange juice.

They make a shed-load of these things, so now they have to set up meetings with people who might want to buy them. Christopher and Stuart phone around and speak a lot of English with German accents. It's all very Fallen Madonna Wiz Ze Big Boobies. Stuart decides to call himself 'Herr Baggs', and thinks he must sound stupid to the Germans. Not just the Germans, Hairbags, not just the Germans.

Christopher phones a hotel to make an appointment, and is offered 9am or 1pm; he choses 9am and then gets sidelined by Jamie, who fancies a night on the rip, and changes it to 1pm, allowing Joanna and Hairbags to steal the 9am. Dun-dun-DUN. Having ditched the Baggs, Joanna takes Stella to the appoinment, and some bags of crisps. The beef and something one is liked; the cheese and paprika one 'will increase bar sales'. At this point, Joanna does some kind of magic. She wants him to place an order for 6 months. The guy wants to place an order for 3 months. Joanna splits the difference and suggests 12 months. The guy opts for 6 months. It's like that thing last year when your woman sold all those people-shaped sleeping bags, and the country could only do a collective head-tilt, and slightly frown.

Hairbags and Laura are meeting a chap called Mike Sandwich. Heh. Hairbags has told Laura not to speak too fast; they go in and he says something like 'Ich heise Stuart und das ist mein colleague Laura (*Laura: Gut Tag*)'. Herr Sandwich (there's an image) looks blank and then clicks. "You're speaking in German?". Then Laura says "asimsureyoureawarethemarkethaschangedandweknowthatthehandcookedgourmetnaturalcrispmarketisthenextbigthing" and some other things, and Herr sandwich looks blank again. He's not fond of the crisps, either. Hairbags tells her off afterwards, and she huffs. She doesn't know what else she could have done. Hint: talk at a normal person speed.

Christopher and Jamie hawk door-to-door for a bit, unsuccessfully. For some reason, one guy thinks they're called 'Funny Chips', and also that they're stinkin'. Then they try to flog them to a girl who has no authority to do anything more than butter bagels, and probably can't even buy a bar of soap for the toilets with company money, never mind a truckload of currywurst potato snacks.

Hairbags and Laura are meant to go to a big meeting, but Stella (who's their project manager) gets there before them, and Laura throws the strop of the decade. We're not talking a bit of a huff. We're talking yak yak yak poor me load of bollocks yak yak yak *falls out of the cab and loses a shoe* (ha ha ha ha ha!). She hopes they lose the task, so they can SLAP IT UP STELLA.

Chris and Liz go to the meeting that would have been at 9am except that Christopher changed it, and the guy can't buy anything because he bought so much from Joanna and Stella earlier, but they try grovelling, and that earns them a telling off. To rub salt into the wound, Stella and Joanna then go to the place with the bagel butter girl, speak to the manager instead, and get a big order.

Back to Blighty, and the board room. In they go, and Nick immediately grasses on Hairbags and tells Lord Shugagh that he declared himself knackered. Everyone snickers. Laura gets a telling off for speaking like a rapid-fire machine gun. Jamie's all proud that bagel girl liked the crisps. The orders are in, and Stella's lot have made €19327, while Chris and co have made €17995. Stella, Laura and Joanna get to go shopping with Baggs in tow, which is surely a fate worse than just losing and being booted out; the others can relax in the Cafe Auf Loserness, safe in the knowledge that they're not in the same room as Baggs and Laura.

Back in the boardroom, and the whole 9am-1pm appointment thing rears its head, causing Chris to do his 'glaring' face, and Jamie to try to 'recall it in his brain', and eventually recollecting that 'the early word catches the birm'. Chris introduces us to his 'shocked' monotone. He's bringing Christopher and Jamie back in, because of the appointment fiasco. A bit more monotone from Chris - "I'm not a loser, at the end of the day... Well, obviously I am in terms of the numbers which you have". Christopher is accused of being too nice and working too hard and getting on too well with people, but points out that he went to Germany even though he doesn't particularly like going to Germany. Jamie says how great he is, so Lord Shugagh asks him what his sparks of brilliance have been, and he does some waffling about how skilled he has been in going from being 24 to being 28.

Long and short, they're all a bit wick at this business lark, and Chris has now lost about 28 tasks in a row, and Jamie is getting worse by the week, but Christopher's too nice, so HE'S FIRED.

Next week is the flogging random tat to whoever will buy it task, which is always fabulous.

A Delay In Processing

2010-11-29T16:45:00.001Z

This week's Apprentice round-up has been delayed, due to unforeseen circumstances, including (but not limited to) me having too much work to do, me having to many other things to do and the snow.

The WhyNotSmile Guide To Explaining Santa To Small Children

2010-11-23T21:30:00.000Z

It has come to my attention that parents out there are struggling with one of the basic tasks of parenthood: explaining Santa to children. Now, WhyNotSmile is not a parent, but this need not get in the way of dishing out advice, for I hear that there is nothing parents like more than non-parents explaining how to bring up their offspring.

The first important thing about Santa is to decide on your basic approach. Are you going to go along with it, in which case you will need to get your story straight? Or are you going to be straight with the kiddies and tell them up front that it's all a fantastical tale, albeit built upon the legend of an actual person, dreamt up generations ago to add a sparkle of magic and wonder to childhood, but which has now been consumed almost entirely by the corporate machine with the aim of bleeding parents dry because they have a misplaced sense of guilt at not spending enough time with their children? The latter is the favoured approach of many who do not wish their children to confuse Santa with religion, for reasons which just got a little fuzzier.

If you decide to opt for the latter approach, it's all quite simple: you tell your child there is no Santa, and you get to take credit for all the presents on Christmas morning. However, it is important to beware of the pitfalls: namely, that there is a hefty risk of turning your child into the smug little twerp who tells all the other kids that Santa's not real, and then punches them all in the face. Try to sidestep that if you can. Also, there will still be a lot of Santa in your child's life, and you have to figure out how to explain that, without your child feeling that you're depriving them of the glorious truth and then converting to some kind of fat-red-guy cult as an act of teenage rebellion in 10 years' time.

The former approach, of course, is the road more travelled, and we shall devote the rest of our time to it this evening. There are 2 things you need to get straightened out in your own head: the basic, widely-accepted facts, and the lies you're going to tell to answer the questions your child will dream up.

First, the facts. For those whose memory of what Santa is all about is a little fuzzy, he is a jovial chap who lives in a wooden hut at the North Pole, or Lapland (in all honesty, I'm still not completely clear on whether Lapland is an actual real place. It's a bit like the way I still have to pause for thought when someone asks whether unicorns exist). Anyway, Santa is married to Mrs Claus, although she appears to serve no purpose suitable for small children (can I make a suggestion? I think she should cover the administration of the lists. Can we start that?). Santa has 12 reindeer, who can fly and pull a sled. He is assisted by numerous elves.

For most of the year, Santa and the elves make toys; on Christmas eve, the toys are loaded into his sled, which is then flown around the world by the reindeer, to the homes of children who have been good all year. At each home, Santa climbs down the chimney (although exceptions can be made for homes with no chimney, apartment blocks and the like, as Santa has a magic key which allows him to open front doors all around the world). Once he gets inside, he leaves presents of choice for the children, in stockings which have been carefully placed, generally at the foot of the beds or along the mantlepiece. It is accepted that a small snack will have been left for Santa; this usually consists of a mince pie or shortbread, and a glass of milk or mulled wine, possibly with a carrot for the reindeer.

So much for the basic facts of the matter.

This works well as far as it goes, but once a child reaches the age of around 4, they begin to question the perceived wisdom of the tale, and start to ask awkward questions (or at least, most of them do. I fell for it, hook, line and sinker, until dangerously close to puberty). The trick is to answer these questions confidently. Herein, I provide a range of sample answers; of course, every child is different, and your own may come up with further difficulties - please feel free to leave additional questions in the comments, and I will endeavour to reply.

1. What about the Santa in the shopping centre? Is he the real Santa? Well, yes, if you only ever take your child to one shopping centre. Children do not have a terribly good sense of continuity, so Santas at craft fairs, community groups and so on can be explained away as Santa on an outing. However, if they see him permanently ensconced in several shopping centres, they will become suspicious, at which point you may have to admit that that's not actually the real Santa.

2. Who is he if he's not Santa? He's Santa's helper. Santa employs a range of helpers to go out and about to meet boys and girls in the run up to Christmas, because he's very busy making toys. That's why you have to give him a list of what you want for Christmas - Santa will remember, but his helpers may not be quite so good, and in any case, they need the list to pass on to the elves, who are notoriously forgetful, and would make all the wrong toys otherwise.

3. Will I only get toys if I've been good all year? What about the lizard incident? Santa may be willing to overlook misdemeanours if they happened pre-Halloween. The processing takes a while though, so if you misbehave any time after mid-December, expect a sack of coal on Christmas morning.

4. How do they make enough toys for all the children in the world? Most children do not have the manic consumerist attitude of those in the West, and will be happy with an orange. Think about that, child.

5. How does Santa get round everywhere in the world? There's no point in trying to be over-scientific. It's magic. Also, the time zones mean he actually has 2 days to cover the globe.

6. Why does Santa use the same wrapping paper as Mummy? Because Mummy fecked up. Seriously, don't do this.

7. Why, when you spend most of the year telling me to be wary of strangers, do you force me to be led by 2 elves to sit on the lap of a large scary man, even against my clearly strong objections? Because I've paid £7.50 for this, and they don't do refunds, and I promised Granny a copy of the photo.

8. Isn't mid-December a little late to submit the list? If they've been making toys all year, surely a last-minute rush on Gordon The Gophers could tip the system into chaos. Ummm.... yes. That's why there are so many adverts on TV in the autumn; it is an attempt to brainwash children into wanting whatever the elves have a surfeit of.

9. Why does Santa give the neighbours new bikes every year, when I only get chocolate coins and a packet of colouring pencils? He's annoyed with you for asking stupid questions. Life is unfair. Live with it.

I trust this helps.

The Apprentice 2010: Week 7

2010-11-18T22:03:00.000Z

So this week is the DVD task The what? The DVD task. I don't remember that one. Yes, I think it might be new. Oh. We begin with the usual bum bum BUM bum - bum bum BUMbum - bum-bum-be-dum-dum bum-bum-be-dum-dum, 'tough economic times', 'job interview from hell', 'brightest business prospects', 'steady Eddies', 'cautious Carols' etc etc etc., quick overview of the fiasco thus far, 'bunch of bladdy amateurs', and then a reminder of last week's slow, painful, car crash.

This week, it's Laura who answers the phone and starts the frenzy. They've to go to Pinewood Studios, which Sandeesh thinks is a furniture store, making Laura go all wide-eyed and gasp 'do you think we're making furniture?'. Even I know Pinewood Studios is a place where they make films. Meanwhile Stella asks Chris how many tasks he's won. "Two". Bit mean there, Stella, but we quite like it.

Standing in front of the biggest blue screen in Europe (oooOOOOOOOOooooh), they're told they need to sell the 'big screen experience' to the general public. Basically, what this is, they get a 'background film', and then they go to shopping centres and film people acting like they're in the film, and then mash the two together and flog the people a DVD of themselves in the film. Trust me, it'll become clearer as we continue. Sandeesh and Chris swap places with Joanna and Stella; Stuart is in charge of his team (Laura, Joanna and Stella), and Sandeesh is in charge of her lot (Chris, Christopher, Jamie and Liz). It's hard to see how it could go wrong.

Step 1: decide what the movie will be about. They have 3 movies each - 2 are chosen from an archive, and then they need to make one themselves. Stuart is immediately obnoxious.
Stuart: "We'll take a vote on it. Hands up for waterskiing. Hands up for waterski - LAURA! - HANDS UP FOR WATERSKIING!! - yes or no? - THAT'S HALF UP!"
Laura: "I think police chase".
Stuart: "You think police chase? Well SAY THAT THEN".
Laura: "Ok, police chase".

Over Chez Sandeesh, it's a lot quieter, as they stare at films of people underwater, but without the people.

Having chosen their films from the archive, they now have to each add one of their own. Jamie thinks they should make one of skiing, because that means he gets to go skiing for a while. Never mind that there's a limit to how good a film you're going to be able to make in an indoor ski centre. Also, they're targetting kids, because kids love pretending to ski.

Stuart is targetting the adults, though, because that way he gets to decide they want motor racing, and go to Brands Hatch. Joanna likes the fair. Stella thinks they should think things through, but Stuart can't be arsed, and has to be true to himself. Nick is 'trembling with irritation', but Stuart is pleased that 'every decision has panned out to be right'.

From each team, one lot go off to learn how to make the DVDs and practice belly dancing very, very uncomfortably.

Stuart and Laura go to Brands Hatch, where Laura is immediately sidelined while Stuart tells the nation he has a fancy car - I miss the details, because it's all letters and numbers like C78 and MLP24. Stuart is having to rein in his 'extreme masculinity', but thankfully is only on the planet for 'a certain number of years'. Laura is filming, and Stuart is driving. And driving. And driving. He does about 600 laps, while Laura stands at the side of the track with a camera and chequered flag, and looks very very slightly more narked with each passing hour.

Christopher and Jamie, meanwhile, go skiing in Milton Keynes. To make it more fun for kids, they then dress as penguins, so the film now consists of a bit of normal skiing, and then more normal skiing, but this time with a large velour penguin weaving in and out, and then the penguin falling over and his head coming off.

Laura finally manages to bring Stuart to a halt, whereupon he announces that they really need to aim this experience at kids, rather than adults, which is probably a good thing (because there's a limit to the number of adults who will stand in a shopping centre and pretend to drive a car, and that limit is zero), but a little late in the day.

Liz and Sandeesh do some careful working out of how many DVDs they'll need (eventually going for 110, despite the fact that, even at maximum capacity, they can only burn 88 of them); Stuart says random numbers and then winges about having to make a decision.

For reasons presumably clear in her own head, Sandeesh now decides that all the people who learned how to make the DVDs should teach the others (Jamie and Christopher, who were away skiing at the time) how to make the DVDs, and then the people who originally knew how to make the DVDs should go and sell.

Joanna asks whether £15 is a bit much to pay for a film of your kid pretending to drive a car, but Stuart knows it's just because he's so great and she doesn't share his vision. Any other questions? No? Good.

And so, the doors of the shopping center (where they're selling this experience) are flung open, and Joanna is wearing butterfly wings. Their stand is quite good, though - they have a toy car, so the kids can be filmed driving in the car, pretending to race against the cars in the background, they win, and then they get a chocolate medal. In the back room, Stuart and Stella are in charge of producing videos. Technically, Stella is producing them, and Stuart is in charge of 'quality control'. Stuart is astounded by Stella's organisation (i.e. writing things down), as he keeps everything in his head, presumably where it is safely padded by all his ego.

Back to Sandeesh, who's still explaining to Jamie and Christopher how to make the DVDs, even though it's taking up an hour of what might otherwise be selling time. Jamie whinges a bit. Anyway, it turns out that even when they do open, no one is all that bothered, so maybe it didn't matter. Jamie whinges a bit more.

Stuart, however, is selling so much that he decides to put the price up - the old law of 'supply and demand' has not passed him by. This would be fine, except that they also put the price up for people who have already filmed their DVD, and are just waiting for it to be made. So, they came to the stall, were told it was £10, let their kid film it, got a receipt for £10, came back half an hour later to pick it up, and were told they had to pay £15. I'm fairly sure this is not legal.

Anyhoo, they've made an even more monumental feck-up than that, having managed to produce the DVDs in such a way that several children appear on each one. So you get your DVD of your kid in his little racing car, and then you get home to show it to Granny, and as she watches, some other kid appears, out of the blue. This will not be good for Granny. Thankfully, Stuart solves it by knocking half off the price. I'd be reasonably sure that you can't sell people DVDs of other people's children, even if you sell them cheaper.

At Sandeesh's place, it's all very quiet, even after she's knocked prices down, so Liz takes a sneaky peek at the other team's stand and immediately steals all their ideas. One thing in their favour is that people are actually picking up their DVDs, whereas over with Stuart and Co, there's a large pile of unclaimed ones. Stuart is pretty sure that, if the actual owners don't turn up, 'no one else is going to buy them'. Yes, Stuart, I'd say that's about right. Maybe you should have asked for a deposit? Just saying. Because otherwise you've basically just entertained someone else's kids for free for 10 minutes.

Anyway, trading over, and into the boardroom. How was Stuart as a team leader? *silence* We relive Stuart's driving experience, and then he boasts about his goodwill in charging people the agreed price, rather than forcing them to hand over an arbitrary amount plucked out of the vast, ego-filled space that is Stuart's head. Stella gets all passive-agressive while Stuart basically provides her with the ammunition.

Sandeesh's team think she was quite good, but then there's some wittering about how they didn't get started until an hour after the place opened. Jamie is pleased at how well he fulfilled 'the most crucial role', and with being able to give 'excellent feedback'.

Stuart's lot have made £262.50; Sandeesh and co have made £222.97, and are declared losers. Now, I think this is unfair, since Stuart has just sold films of children to other children's parents, but rules is rules, and off they go to taste champagne. Stuart thinks it tastes like anti-freeze, tacky boy.

In the Cafe De Doom, Jamie reminds everyone how perfect he was, even if everyone else thinks he was a whingy get; Liz is so gutted 'it actually hurts', which seems a bit over the top. Anyway, they all agree that someone has to go home, so at least they've demonstrated a basic comprehension of the rules.

Back to the boardroom to snipe about who was or was not in charge of costing, why they bought too many DVDs, why they dropped their prices instead of just making better DVDs, and whether Jamie was really the most amazing fabulous team member ever ('yes', according to him), and why he had done so much whingeing and depressing everyone else. He overdoes it a bit, and if Sandeesh brings him in, there's a good chance he'll go, but... no. She's bringing in Chris and Liz, which is like entering a marathon and choosing Paula Radcliffe as your opponent, when you could have had WhynotSmile. Well, maybe not quite, but, you know, choosing someone who can clearly run better than you. You enter a marathon, you want the WhyNotSmiles of this world up against you; you go into the Apprentice boardroom, of the presently available options, you want Jamie.

Needless to say, there's the obligatory cursory questioning of what Chris and Liz did wrong, which is basically 'not a whole lot', and then Sandeesh gets fired.

Back in the house, Stella points out that it was a good thing Sandeesh's team made so many mistakes, because otherwise her own team would've been sunk, and then sneaks a little sneer at Stuart.

Next week, we're off to Germany, for sprechen sie Deutsch, sauerkraut, and a bit of casual racism. Can't wait.

15 Songs

2010-11-18T20:22:00.000Z

Virtual Methodist has thrown down the gauntlet and requested us all to declare the first 15 songs that come up on our iPods when we play on shuffle.

Here are mine:
1. Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
2. How Great Is Our God - Worship Ireland
3. Love is Free - Sheryl Crow
4. When I Was Lost - New Irish Choir & Orchestra
5. Town Called malice - The Jam
6. Girls In Their Summer Clothes - Bruce Springsteen
7. My Troubled Soul - from some Christian CD
8. Oh For A Thousand Tongues - New Irish Choir & Orchestra
9. Love is Noise - The Verve
10. Don't Stop Me Now - Queen
11. Ireland's Call
12. Galway Girl - Steve Earle & Sharon Shannon
13. American Pie - Don McLean
14. It Is Well - New Irish Choir & Orchestra
15. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley

So there we have it. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

There is another gauntlet, which has been thrown down on The Facebook, and is something to do with authors. I shall return to it presently.

The Apprentice 2010: Episode 6

2010-11-14T13:23:00.001Z

We have to assume that Stuart Baggs The Brand was not lying when he said that everything he touches turns to 'sold', as the phone which he answered not 2 weeks ago appears to have vanished, ensuring that Lord Shugah has to turn up at the house himself. Half seven, and they're all in their jammies, apart from Stella, who's fully dressed.

There's a good deal of panic as word spreads, and probably for good reason, as Lord Shugagh is in the sitting room playing Cut The Rope on his iPhone, and looking a bit impatient. Stuart Baggs The Brand remains calm, but turns up in socks and shorts.

So, they've to make a marketing campaign for a cleaning project, and they've to appoint team leaders who haven't been in charge yet. Now, Jo owns a cleaning company, so that's going to come back to haunt her; the other team is mercilessly without merit, and therefore might just be ok. Or not. Because Alex has a background in advertising.

If Alex was an apple pie, the apples inside would be orange, apparently.

So Alex gets put in charge of Chris, Sandeesh, Laura and Stuart Baggs The Brand, a team so doomed to fail that I might as well be up front and tell you right now that they lose. But with style, so stay with me.

On the other team, Christopher is put in charge and is bringing the killer instinct of a Royal Marine into his business. Gulp.

They have to think up some colours for the bottle, an advertising campaign, and a general marketing approach.

At Christopher & Co., Stella thinks cleaning makes you all happy and passionate, which sounds naff, but in retrospect might have had more legs than what they ultimately come up with, rather ironically.

Alex & Co come up with 'Swipe' which is ok, and then Chris comes up with 'Germinate', which Alex (rather wisely) hates. Laura and Alex come up with 'Helping Hand', which is so mediocre even Chris laughs at it.

Christopher and Stella head off to the poshest Mother & Toddler group in the country. It's all cupcakes and metallic balloons and nice clean children in co-ordinating outfits. One of the mums comes up with the idea of 'octopus', as she needs more arms. They love it. They absolutely love it. It's The One. It's The Idea. Never mind that it's a bit rubbish.

Stuart Baggs, Sandeesh and Chris are off to a more normal parent and toddler group, although it only appears to have about 3 toys, which is a bit sad. Chris asks what they think of 'Germinator', and they hate it. They love 'Helping Hand' though. Weirdos. They also think the bottle should be yellow.

Alex and Laura are in the supermarket, looking at bottles of cleaning stuff. Laura suggests they could call it 'Blitz', which I think is quite good, but Alex thinks old people might not like it, but are all dead anyway, or something. They end up back on Germinator, because Chris has thought up an advert and Stuart can do a good Terminator impression.

And so to the designers. 'Octo-Kleen' looks quite good, like an actual thing you'd buy. 'Germ-o-nator' looks like something you'd kill rats with, which is weird because it has a picture of a child on the bottle. And also it has to be kept out of reach of children. Which is particularly unfortunate, since their advert involves a child using it.

And so to the recording studio, where Stuart is doing impressions of germs ('influenza is cockney'), while Laura whines that she hasn't been utilised enough, and the sound guy contemplates beating Stuart to death with his headphones.

Meanwhile, Christopher's team are creating the most appalling, creepy, hideous piece of footage ever to come out of the television age. It's so bad, I'm not even going to describe it. This is one of those episodes you just have to watch. To summarize, wife is dismayed at mess of house, husband sits on sofa, she dresses as an octopus and uses Octo-Kleen to clean faster (because she now has so many hands), before joining him on the sofa, for a night of what can only be imagined as pure agony. Nick is appalled.

Chris is directing the Germinator advert. Does anyone know what the adverb for 'mediocre' is? Because it would a useful term to have in one's vocabulary to describe the way Chris does things. Anyway, small boy with toxic chemicals does well, and otherwise it's all quite mediocre.

Finally, they have to pitch to industry experts. Laura knows what she's talking about, and comes up with a decent pitch, which Alex then hands to Sandeesh to do, because yet again, she hasn't really done anything. Laura thinks it's a bit rubbish, because it is, to be honest. She whines some more.

At the agency, there are actual people who actually really know what they're talking about. This should be fun. Sandeesh goes first, with Germ-o-nator. She pitches quite well, in the end. Then they watch the advert. One of the industry people asks how funny they think the ad is, and Chris says he's watched it, like, 20 times, and has peed his pants every time. Stop, Chris. Stop. Now.

Next, Octi-Kleen, where 8 hands are better than 2. Jamie says men don't want a night of fun in a dirty house. Women find it hard to keep up with these demands. So Octi-Kleen is great. They watch the ad and cringe in unison.

Feedback to Lord Shugagh; basically, they all hated them both. They say things like 'travesty' and 'distasteful'.

In the boardroom, we're forced to watch the adverts again. Lord Shugagh points out that they're both basically rubbish. And the advertising people thought they were both basically rubbish. Christopher's team are told that 'technically, they haven't lost', because Lord Shugagh quite likes the octopus. They don't get much of a treat, though, as they're shipped off to a dodgy looking karaoke den to sing 'We Are The Champions' really badly while wearing cowboy hats.

In the losers' cafe, Alex asks for feedback, and they all stare at him and sip more tea (from, and I hadn't noticed this before, polystyrene cups. What kind of cafe is this?). In the boardroom, Alex is all up for 'discussing this further with Lord Sugar', which is good, since Lord Sugar is well up for discussing how crap they were. There's an argument about whether the mums said the bottle should be yellow (they did, but whether the information was passed on is lost to the cutting room floor).

They snipe some more, Sandeesh looks fed up and Laura whines a bit. Alex waffles. Then he says Sandeesh was great, and he's bringing her and Chris back into the boardroom.

Out they go and in they come. Alex is told he didn't manage well, and points out that he manages people all the time, which doesn't help. Chris and Alex yell at each other for a while. It's a weird combination of mediocre and mental.

Sandeesh gets sent back to the house by Lord Sugar, because Alex was stupid to bring her back in. Then Alex gets fired, but 'with regret'. Anyway, Alex doesn't need Lord Shugagh, he says in the taxi home.

Back in the house, Laura is saying "I know everyone's shocked I'm here, which is really obvious, so thanks, but anyway...". It's all very passive agressive.

Time to start making predictions, I think. Currently, my hypothetical money's on Stella or Liz to win, with Jamie and Christopher as outsiders.

Next week they have to sell big screen experiences to the general public; I do not know why, possibly because they haven't sold it to me yet. Someone meticulous gets fired, so I'm thinking Christopher.

The Apprentice 2010: Episode 5

2010-11-07T22:07:00.000Z

I very much apologise for the lateness of this Apprentice update. I've been busy. Working. And tidying. And so on. I will try not to do it again, but to be honest, I wouldn't hold your breath. I'm on my own at home this week, as The Sister is staying at The Boyfriend's Parents' house to mind the animals and provide general security services while they're away. This could speed up the blogging, slow it down, or have no measurable effect - we shall find out soon enough. Also, I'm toying with writing a post on Matters Spiritual, and would like a brief consensus on whether this is allowed. I may ignore the consensus, if I don't like it, of course. Just saying.

Anyway, this week it's Stella who picks up the phone, fully dressed in business suit at 6.30am, or whatever time we're supposed to believe it is. They're to meet Lord Shugagh someplace I don't catch, and bring their overnight bags. They all get excited that maybe the overnight bags mean they're going to Paris or Milan, as they all do every time they're told to bring overnight bags, even though it turns out every time that they're going to Bristol. Or, in this case, Manchester.

Long story short: they have to visit some fashion designers, choose 2 to represent, take the clothes to Manchester, and spend a day there selling them. Stuart Baggs The Brand thinks fashion is like magic beans, but pointless, so since it would clearly be ridiculous, if amusing, to put all the boys on one team, they get mixed up again, so we now have: Synergy (yes, we're still on that, apparently), led by Liz, featuring Joanna, Stella, Jamie and Christopher; and Appollo, led by the terrifying Paloma, and featuring Laura, plus all the people you wouldn't want on your team for the fashion task: Alex, Stuart Baggs The Brand, Sandeesh and Chris. There's a better than average chance of bloodshed this week, I think we can agree.

Paloma wants to suss out the fashionistas on her team, and identifies Laura and Sandeesh. The chaps are more circumspect, but thankfully Alex is a 'retail guru', so we know he's going to be part of a monumental feck-up at least. He was taught retailing by a 'very famous professor of retail'.

On the other team, Jamie admits that his wife buys his clothes, and Nick sneers at him.

As well as being a retail guru, Alex used to work in the Trafford Centre, so is able to pick out the prime promotional area. So now we know what the monumental feck-up will be.

Off to the fashion designers. On the way, Jamie sagely points out that Manchester is a good couple of years behind London, as you can't get into a club there without shoes.

Paloma is talking to a girl with crazy hair and big glasses. She looks like Penny Crayon, and describes her clothes as 'future primitive'. Both teams go to speak with 'Liquorice', but take different approaches: Liz's lot are all big eyes and gasps and 'oh I can't believe how affordable it is'; Paloma, Sandeesh and Chris opt to stare like corpses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the designer wants the first team to sell her things, since they appear to have a pulse. Never mind though; Paloma and co head off to see a place where they sell recycled clothing, consisting of such garments as a dress made of ties, hooded suits, and an outfit which appears to be made entirely from cuffs.

So Liz and co have a vintage line and the sparkly Liquorice stuff; Paloma has some cheap stuff and the recycled gear. Concern is growing over Alex's prime promotional spot, which Paloma has realised is millions of miles from their shop. Stuart thinks the recycled range is more for tramps.

No sense worrying though, as it's Day 2, and the shops need to be set up. Alex dispenses a lot of advice, being a retail guru and all. Paloma gets really narked with him, and they squabble a bit. Particularly irritating is the fact that he points out you can't see the clothes from outside the shop, so it looks empty, and you have to admit he has a point.

Meanwhile, Liz is prancing around in a dress, instead of opening her store.

Chris is sleezing over a woman who tried on the tie dress.

Liz, who has finally raised the shutters, is running around barefoot, but not selling much, so she sticks Stella in the window, where she stands looking awkward and waving. Nick disapproves. Although he thinks it would be ok in Amsterdam.

Alex is leaning in the doorway, being useless at bringing people in to the shop. Every now and then, he whips out a dress and yells 'Do. You. Like. This. Dress?' at passers by. He comes up with a cunning plan of saying Aleesha Dixon's inside, which is vetoed by Sandeesh, because it's a lie. Then he comes up with an actual cunning plan, and they make an advert to be shown in the cafe in the shopping centre. Which is quite clever, and, in my opinion, makes up for the prime promotional spot being 10 minutes' walk away. Cleverer than Paloma, who tells guys in hooded suits that they look 'smokin'. Unbelievably, Chris flogs the tie dress.

At 5 o'clock, Joanna's brain clicks into gear: "Is there anything like a marketing strategy we could put into place?". So they knock off 20%, and Joanna goes outside the shop and starts yelling at people about 'ow nice the cloves all is.

It's hard to tell how it's gone, so off we go to the boardroom to find out. It's all quite tame: a rehashing of the Stella-in-the-window thing, and more on Alex being a retail guru and having worked in the Trafford Centre (doing what? We never find out). Liz's lot have won by £500, and are off to the races.

The other lot head off to the cafe, where it quickly becomes clear that Paloma has Alex in her sights. This is despite the main problem being that they had the wrong product in the recycled clothing, because Paloma and co failed to get the sparkly stuff, because Paloma and co looked like zombies when they went to see it.

Back in the boardroom, and Sandeesh says a full sentence for the first time. That must be her quota of words for the episode used up, as she then reverts to the big eyes. Paloma is bringing Alex back into the boardroom, but everyone else was great, so she decides to short-circuit the entire premise of the show and bring Sandeesh back in too, as she's not a good candidate generally. Which is kind of Lord Shugagh's job, as he points out.

So you think Paloma's safe: Lord Shugagh doesn't seem to like Sandeesh anyway, and Alex is a bit of a muppet, but on the You're Fired show afterwards, they provide an excellent summary of where Paloma went wrong. She has basically taken the two candidates with Bambi eyes, and now proceeds to start clubbing them to death. To summarise, Paloma gets fired for being obnoxious, despite being seated between the two people who can most reasonably be labelled incompetent. Being placed third out of those three is reason enough to be sacked, in my book.

I've kind of gone off Alex a bit again. He has a bit of a creepy laugh.

The Apprentice 2010: Week 4

2010-10-31T22:58:00.000Z

The episode begins with our friend Stuart Baggs The Brand answering the phone, presumably immediately changing it to 'sold'. They have about 30 seconds or so to get up, dressed, and to the Science Museum, where they are introduced to this week's task, which is the one where they take wick inventions and try to flog them to shops.

The teams get swapped round again, but I don't care.

Weirdly, and with cavalier lack of self-awareness, Melissa is gagging to be in charge of her team, but so is Jamie. Mel has all the relevant experience, such as it is, and Jamie has none, so they vote for Jamie, because they're not complete fools. Mel looks all disappointed. On the other team, Chris Bates is put in charge. Yawn.

And so to the inventions, which are truly insane. A helmet thing that allegedly reduces fine lines, and definitely makes you look like you're being melted. A thing that shrieks every time you dare to slouch. An exercise thing made almost entirely from elastic bands. A t-shirt equivalent of suck-your-tummy-in-granny-pants (£50 a pop). A spade with 2 handles, which appears to be the gardening equivalent of chopsticks. A water-saving shower head (actually not insane, but lets Stuart Baggs the Twit do his David Brent impersonation). And finally, a baby grow which changes colour when you blast your baby with a hairdryer.

Both teams want the baby grow, but Stuart Baggs the Brand was obnoxious to the inventor woman, so she chooses the other team, which is Chris Bates'. They end up with:
Jamie's team: spade and shower head
Chris' team: baby grow and t-shirt

Pitch one, and Jamie and Mel are in Debenhams, who don't sell spades or shower heads. Mel thinks they should start though. Really thinks they should start. Really thinks it would be a great idea. Seriously, Debenhams people, just open a spade and shower head department, it will be quicker and easier.

Pitch two, and Chris, Alex and Liz are in Debenhams. The t-shirt is all well and good, but it costs £50, which is a rip off. Liz has more success with the baby grow; Alex insists it will be all over the news and on breakfast tv.

I can't quite understand why I dislike the baby grow (the stated objective is to allow parents to monitor their baby's temperature), but I think my reasons include:
1. You'd need at least 10 of them, and they cost £25 each. Because, let's face it, how many parents are going to sleep well the night they put the baby down in a regular baby grow instead of the magic temperature reading baby grow?
2. You have to be looking at the baby to see whether the baby grow has changed colour. With this restriction, I cannot think of any circumstance in which a thermometer would not be as easy, and more accurate.
3. I distrust clothes that change colour. It does not seem natural.
4. I am not convinced it would survive washing and ironing.

Alex Epstein has gone all encouraging, though, and I like him more.

But now we hit a snag: Jamie wants to pitch tomorrow, but Mel thinks it's because he's too stupid to see how great she would be at doing it. She has a very strong skill set, she says. We have yet to see it, of course.

Anyway, on Day 2 (because 2 meetings with Debenhams seemed to take up all of Day 1), they have an appointment with B&Q, and they can also set up any other meetings they want.

Melissa is pitching to a plumbing wholesaler in Leamington Spa. It is unfortunate that the demonstration thing has picked up an airlock in its travels, and can only manage a dribble of water. Stuart starts biting it. This does not help, and they don't want to buy it. But Mel really wants them to buy it, because she's driven all the way from London, but they don't want to buy it, but Mel really thinks it could do well for them, but they really are not interested... this goes on for a bit.

On the other team, Paloma, Sandeesh and Laura are trying to flog the t-shirt in what appears to be a range of gay sex shops. They do ok initially, but then it all breaks into a screaming match about orders and exclusivity, right on the doorstep of the shop. Nick hovers in the background, one eye on the girls, and one eye on the range of rubber goods in the shop behind him. The upshot of it all is that they give some guy an exclusive deal, only to phone Chris and be told that they can't do that. Well, that solves the row about who gets credit for the deal, then.

Over at B&Q, Jamie, Jo and Christopher are bigging up the shower head, and their own grand ambitions, and how they're all ears. The other half of their team (Stuart, Stella and Mel) are all over the moon because they forced half a dozen shower heads onto a bloke in a shop.

And so to the boardroom, where both teams have actually done quite well, and could, potentially, not make complete prats of themselves. Fortunately, Stella, Mel and Stuart have fecked up by selling the shower too cheap; meanwhile, Laura, Sandeesh and Paloma get a ticking off for the Big Row, which is now known as the Battle of Old Compton Street.

The numbers come next: Apollo (Chris' lot) got £76,518.80 of orders, while Synergy (Jamie & Co) got £122,225.95, or thereabouts. Flip. Gasp. Synergy head off to a spa, while Apollo are off to the Cafe de Doom to stare blankly at each other, and then bicker a bit. Melissa's vocabulary gets all inventive; she claims there was no room for manouverment in her pitches.

In the boardroom, Lord Shugah tells them that Mel, Stella and Stuart only brought in £800, and that is crapski. Stuart blames Melissa, and she turns on him for getting an airlock in the shower thing, and then Karren says that the people in the shop though Melissa was really annoying, which comes as a surprise to Melissa, at least. Stella admits that she didn't know how much the stuff she was selling was meant to cost.

So who's coming back in with Jamie? Please let it be Mel and someone. Please let it be Mel and someone. Please... YES! It's Mel and Stuart Baggs The Brand. They go outside and Melissa sulks. They come back in, and Jamie gets told off for leaning on the table. Melissa complains that Jamie gave her no feedback, and didn't help her learn. Jamie says she's like a firework that goes crazy, and she says she's not like a firework that goes crazy, at least not in her analysization. Melissa is trying to be a poor little lamb, while maintaining her professionality. She has a bag of potential skills. Not actual skills, note. She calls Lord Shugah 'Sir Lord', which I quite like.

Stuart claims he should stay in because:
1) He's 21
2) He'd like some of Lord Shugah's massive resources (snigger)
3) He's really good at selling yo-yos in the playground

A tough choice.

But since Melissa's been so obviously hopeless, she gets firedicated.

We then see the finest Apprentice exit EVER. After a brief pause where we wonder if she's going to stage a sit-in, Melissa storms out, glancing back over her shoulder to say 'Well done for ganging up on me. Horrible people'. She won't accept the standard fake hug from Jamie, and tells him 'I have nothing to say to either of you. Save your skin and come out of my face.' In the taxi, she is more level-headed: 'Karmically, they will be retributed. The universe speaks louder than I do.'

Flicking over to 'You're Fired', because that's bound to be fabulous, we discover that Melissa has, in the year since this was filmed, got rid of the glasses and become a long-ish haired brunette. She looks totally different. You wouldn't recognise her. Which is probably best.

Complicated Things Made Simple

2010-10-31T20:46:00.002Z

Here's a thing which recently struck me as odd. Why does no one ever seem to know when the clocks change? It's the same every year - last Saturday/Sunday in October. It is not complicated.

When I was young, I got the impression that it was something to like 37 days after the sighting of the first unicorn in a forest north of Narnia. I was quite surprised to learn that it's really not that hard.

The WhyNotSmile Guide To Halloween Costumes

2010-10-29T19:25:00.000+01:00

Now WhyNotSmile is not one for parties and dressing up and all of that, but nevertheless is a surprising wealth of opinion when it comes to creating a good costume for Halloween. It feels appropriate to share this now, for many of you will be going to Halloween parties this weekend, and WhyNotSmile does not want you to look like idiots.

So, here are my top tips for a good Halloween costume:

1) Consider the long term. It's all very well to walk in and have everyone gasp in awe at your outfit, but there will come a point in the evening when you wish to participate. A cousin of mine once went to a fancy dress party as a bunch of grapes, by sticking balloons all over herself, which was rather ingenious, but she couldn't sit down all night. You may wish to try your costume beforehand, by performing the following activities: sitting, eating, relieving yourself, and standing within speaking distance of other people.

2) Don't go too obtuse. No matter what your costume, there'll always be someone who can read the wrong sort of thing into it, and you don't want everyone secretly thinking you came as something rude. Better to be obviously a ghost, than have people think you're dressed as poo.

3) It is not good to make your costume, or any part of it, from food.

4) It is best to be unique, but there are certain acceptable duplicates; it is quite ok for a Halloween party to have more than one ghost, witch or Wonderwoman.

5) Home-made costumes are better than bought ones, but there are 2 bands of acceptable effort: lots of effort, and no effort. Basically, the chart of effort vs impressiveness is U-shaped. Lots of effort = attention to detail, secure fastenings and a convicing outfit. No effort = bedsheet ghost. Either is fine, although you won't win best costume for the ghost. What's NOT fine is a half-assed attempt at Daffy Duck.

6) Ensure everything is securely fastened. Do not leave a trail of glitter all over the floor if you ever want to be invited back. Equally, and I cannot emphasise this enough, make sure your costume won't fall off.

7) Know your limitations. It is fine to concoct some kind of costume which allows you to appear to take your head off and spout blood everywhere, but you can really only get away with it twice in one evening, unless guest turnover is quite high. Do not keep repeating your trick all evening, as it will become tedious.

8) Do not go as any of the following: yourself, someone who couldn't be bothered to dress up, a normal person, someone dressed as yourself, or you at work. Those are all stupid.

I trust this helps.

I Am Not Laughing, And I Want To Be Very Clear On That

2010-10-25T19:52:00.001+01:00

I have a dilemma. Long-term readers will know that here at WhyNotSmile, there is a morbid fascination with all things Richard Dawkins. The enthusiasm has waned of late, because there's only so long you can listen to him, let's face it, but it has been piqued again with the news that it's all gone a bit, as we might say, 'tits up' over at richarddawkins.net.

First of all, a few months ago, there was a Whole Big Thing when the website forum got shut down all unexpected-like, and people's accounts got deleted and posts were removed and all sorts of things which you wouldn't have entirely expected from a 'free-thinking oasis'. There were all kinds of outrage, which seemed to surprise The Prof no end, as he had presumably not heard of 'the internet' and didn't know that it's basic raison d'etre is to allow all the twits and psychos of the day to come aboard and spout abuse at anyone who's fool enough to pay attention, and at many who aren't.

Now it has been announced that Dawkins is taking his web guy to court because web guy has been embezzelling funds from the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

So the dilemma is this: on the one hand, since the internet seems not to have picked up on it yet, I have a reasonable chance of getting Quite High On Google if I blog about it, and I could use the publicity. On the other hand, it is bad to steal things and it seems a tad spiteful to take the rip out of it.

...hmmm...

Hang on, he basically called us all terrorists in his book. Sod it. Let the rip-taking commence.

First of all, the story is rather odd. The basic facts are that web guy Josh Timonen was hired in 2007 by Richard Dawkins to build and maintain his website; for this he was paid $278,750 (approximately £177,000) in 3.5 years. The website involved a shop, from which one could buy t-shirts with big 'A's on them, and some DVDs of Dawkins spouting off; the money from this was to go to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (introduced here). Then there was the thing about the forum, which appears to be incidental, and then in May they had a big row and fell out and now Dawkins is trying to sue ole Josh because he has allegedly fiddled the books and slipped 90% of takings into his own pocket. Josh, of course, denies this.

This raises various questions:

1. Why on this earth was Josh being paid £50,000 per year to run what is an embarrasment of a website? I'm not even referring to the content, which comes from Dawkins, and is what it is - you have to work with what you're given, let's face it. I refer to everything else, which gives the site an aura of 'built by a colourblind 12-year-old with little time, patience or skill'.

2. Why did no one notice that they seemed to be selling an awful lot of t-shirts for the $30,000 dollars the site was bringing in? I mean, if you have a heap of t-shirts in the office, and then it disappears, and the bloke who sold them is handing you some magic beans and telling you the site's 'just scraping by', you would think you'd start to wonder.

Naturally, atheists are in a (very earnest) frenzy over it all (see here, for instance), mainly in a gloating kind of way because they'd all fallen out with him over the forum thing, but also in a slightly alarmist 'think of the ammunition the theists will think they have now' kind of way. One commenter was betting that the Vatican are peeing themselves laughing, which I think rather over-estimates the Vatican's interest in Richard Dawkins and his doings. But if you live in a world where everyone believes that every theist believes that every theist is morally superior to every atheist, you can see why they'd be concerned.

In any case, you have to have a certain amount of sympathy for all sides. Dawkins, for clearly not taking enough interest in how things were going, and Josh, for having the stupidity to get caught when he'd only embezzled about half a million dollars. He should take some tips from these guys; say what you like about Christians, but when they go all immoral, they do it in style.

The Apprentice 2010: Week 3

2010-10-24T22:56:00.000+01:00

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm warming slightly to Alex Epstein. I just wanted to get that out of the way before we begin. I would also like to apologise for the lateness of this review. The thing is, we're now slap-bang in the middle of the traditional Apprentice Lull, where we sort of know who's not going to win, but we can't really start to say who might win, and it's still more about weeding out the little sickly ones than anything else.

It begins at 6.30am, with Alex Epstein answering the phone to be informed that they're all being picked up in half an hour. For reasons unexplained, Alex Epstein is already wearing his suit. Does the man not own jammies? It is quite possible he does not. I want to stop thinking about that, but I can't. So he heads off upstairs and wakes up everyone else in a very clear, decisive voice.

They all go to Fortnum and Mason or somewhere, where they're told they are going to be baking buns and stuff. It's sort of like the sausage task again, but with flour instead of sawdust. It's "turning flour inta serious dough", in fact. Lord Shugah attempts to stop the fighting by swapping them all round. I no longer have any clue who's in what team, and also I refuse to use the team names, because they're stupid.

Jamie thinks he'd be great as project manager, and Melissa thinks she'll be great too, and they both really want to do it, so the team vote and put Mel in charge. She promptly spouts some marketing crap, and then falls to pieces. On the other team, Shibby (who last week I was calling Chris, but hey!) is happy to be in charge, which is good because no one else can be arsed.

So far, so good.

Now they have to decide what they'll bake, and then they have to go to some hotels and stuff and get some orders from them. Shibby and co decide quite quickly that they'll make breads and stuff. On the other team, Mel is using her expertise in the food distribution industry:

"In my experience, people buy... It's difficult to say... If I'm thinking about it, and I keep coming back to it... It's a good idea to step out the box slightly, and introduce someink new"

But enough of this, let's go sell something to someone! So half of each team troop off to the hotels to meet the people Lord Shugagh has set up meetings with; the other half go to the industrial bakeries and wear funny hats and exclaim over how much olive oil goes into stuff. The first sales pitch is in a posh-looking hotel, so it would be wise to not look like twits. Just saying.

Mel's lot go in, and it starts like a GCSE English project, in which the main objective is to make sure that everybody says something, whether it makes sense or not. It doesn't, obviously. It is, in fact, utterly witless. The hotel people want some bread rolls, and Melissa begins working out costings, because the middle of a meeting is a good time for that. After about 10 minutes of calculator tapping, the hotel people suggest they go outside and take 2 minutes to work out the cost. Now seriously: packet of baps in Tesco, about a quid for 6 maybe? So about 20p each, ish. But this is wholesale, so, we're maybe talking in the region of 10p each, give or take. They have a list of ingredients, so they can use that to get something more accurate. Add it up, bit of dividing by 1000. It's not that hard. 15 minutes later, they go back in. Mel has her price: £1.82 per roll. Yeah.

So Shibby's lot go in and are charging 6p per roll, which is more like it, and can make as many millions as they want, and come out with an order for 1000 rolls, and 900 other things, such as muffins, croissants and so on. They "absolutely guarantee" the order will be delivered, and we realise they are doomed. They phone the bakers to tell them, and the bakers have a fit, because they don't know how to make croissants, and they're already making other things, and then Sandeesh goes on strike, which appears to make no noticeable difference to production levels.

Back to Mel, who's trying to sell stuff to a coffee shop. She puts Alex Epstein on maths, because she's crap at it and he's a nerd. The bloke wants to know what size the muffins are, which seems to be a question pitched a little above their capabilities, but Alex does some quick adding up, or possibly says a random number, and the day is saved.

Shibby's off to another meeting, with a restaurant who want baguettes and buns and stuff. The thing is, they want lots of them, so Shibby goes into a huff, because it's so unreasonable of them to want so much stuff when he can't make it and is not Superman. Also, there appears to be no point in being polite about it, even in front of customers.

At Mel's bakery, things are going with military precision, because Christopher is in charge, and has a Plan. At Shibby's place, Sandeesh is still in a wibbly, and they don't appear to have heard of the hotel order that they flipped out over earlier, so they haven't even started making rolls, never mind 1000 of them. Still, in the car going home, Shibby and Paloma and Laura talk about how Sandeesh doesn't do anything.

Next morning, Shibby's lot have to deliver the 1000 rolls they haven't made, so they throw 16 of them in a box and head over. Sean the chef freaks out, and Shibby fails to help the situation by laughing in his face. Now, the thing to do here is to jump back in the car and leg it (I'm not saying that is the Right(TM) thing or the moral thing; merely that if one's primary objective is to win a crappy job in a dodgy computer firm on a tv show, then this is the thing most likely to forward that objective); Shibby, however, ends up giving the bloke £130.

Meanwhile, Mel is delivering her muffins, which are judged to be not classy enough, so that's a bummer, but the bloke likes the bread and at least they have some huge muffins to sell on the streets.

Onto the flogging stuff at markets, and it's the usual story: Chris inexplicably dressed as an oven, Sandeesh standing round hoping the muffins magically sell themselves, and a lot of 'sell, sell, sell'. There is a glorious moment when Melissa thinks someone is French, and says (according to the subtitles) "You to buy the product and I search the toilet for you". The other highlight is when Alex Epstein tells Melissa to stop being so obnoxious (but he says it nicer than that, which I think is why I've warmed to him), and they end up having a big row which he attempts to win by reciting his GCSE results.

So they sell all their stuff, or most of their stuff, and it's off to the boardroom. To cut to the chase, Shibby's lot have lost, and he declares later "Even if we didn't pay that compensation to the hotel, we still would have lost". Ah yes. An excellent point, and well made. If you had been less crap, you still would have lost. You were 2 levels of crap below winning. Excellent.

Mel's lot go off to some belly dancing, which gets a bit uncomfortable. Shibby's lot go to the loser's cafe, which is selling Mel's muffins. They all blame Shibby, which is not unreasonable.

Back in the boardroom ("I've heard about bread winners, I'm looking at six bread losers"), bit of a telling off from Karren, "Sixteen bladdy rolls out of a thousand!", blah blah blah, Shibby's bringing Paloma and Sandeesh back in. Paloma's going to eat him alive, you can tell; Sandeesh goes along with it, and Shibby's fired. Part of his defence is that he was so busy selling muffins that he didn't even have time to break wind, so it's probably fair enough.

Next week looks like things may pick up a bit, as it seems to involve drying a baby with a hairdryer.

I've also discovered an excellent video summary of the episode:

The Apprentice 2010 - Episode 2

2010-10-15T21:18:00.000+01:00

So this week they're taken to Heathrow and told they're not going anywhere ha ha ha. Shugaghmeistah hasn't bothered to turn up, as he has 'pressing business' to attend to (I'm guessing his wife's made him do the ironing again, heh), but he's on a big tv in the departures lounge, and things get going regardless. We get some big news to kick things off - Raleigh ('It was SHAMEful') has gone home because his brother's been injured in Afghanistan. Which is not really funny, and he's all right now, so let's move on, with a slight sense of regret, because Raleigh had comedy potential.

Anyway, Stella gets put in charge of the boys, who all start to dribble. This week is the design one, where they have to think up a new thing that hasn't been thought up yet, and make it and flog it. It is, in other words, the week which has previously given us the cardboard camping crap thing and the exercise-and-read-and-stretch-and-do-dishes crap thing, and much else. The reason they're at Heathrow is, rather disappointingly, not because they have to design a new plane ('wings are like, really naff, it should have, like wheels on really long legs so it can just go on the roads but it can go over houses and in the sea and stuff'), but because they have to design a new thing for the beach. Now, a team of 7 People Who Knew What They Were Talking About would struggle, I imagine, to come up with anything truly innovative for the beach in one afternoon, so we should be in for a treat.

Laura gets put in charge of Apollo (I missed the reason, but I think she remembered one time when her teacher liked her drawing of a sandcastle, or something), and then the girls start screaming at each other. And I mean SCREAMING. Laura barely gets a word in edgeways, and they continue this for about a day and a half, managing somehow to design the most crappy piece of crap in the history of the show. But we'll come back to that in a moment.

The boys, meanwhile, are drooling over Stella, who's reading the riot act. Then, sensibly, they get down to business. First up with a Cunning Plan is Chris The Surgeon, who wants to make a big hand thing that you can use to put sunscreen on your back. You know, that job that those of us with friends and family get them to do. The next biggest problem you face on the beach is trying to keep your drinks cold, so it is eventually decided that they'll make a thing to keep your drinks cool. But, obviously, this is The Apprentice, so it can't just be a thing that keeps your drinks cool; it has to be a thing that keeps your drinks cool, and you can lie on, and you can keep the baby in, and makes you look really cool; it does not, of course, need to do any of these things well. And they call it the Cuuli, with umlauts above the 'u's to look like smiley faces. They ask a bloke what he thinks of the name, and he thinks it's pants, so that settles it - the Cuuli is 'more, like, for women'.

Still, it's better than what the girls come up with. Now, in fairness, they only devoted about 3 minutes of actual thinking time to it, when they got bored of shouting at each other, so we shouldn't judge them too harshly. On the other hand, 3 of them did actual market research, which consisted of playing beach volleyball with 2 random people who laughed at all their ideas, because they were rubbish: for instance, the 'foot glove' to 'protect your feet from the warm sand'. Yeah, they should have done that. They could have called it 'The Sock'. But what they actually come up with is the Book-eazee (no idea how they spell it), a device to make reading on the beach easier.

Now, I am more of a nerd than anyone you know, and I will buy anything at all that I can find pertaining to reading, but the Book-eazee will not be on my Christmas list, because this is how it works:
1. Find beach
2. Open box and remove 8 separate parts of Book-eazee
3. Construct Book-eazee by randomly attaching 8 identical rods in a particular, but unspecified, order
4. You have now formed an arch, which you should stick in the sand
5. Attach plastic sheet thing, and place book in polypocket
6. Get brick or something to prop up the whole device which is now sagging under the weight of the book
7. Read first page
8. Remove book from polypocket, turn page, and put back in polypocket
Repeat step 8 for every other page.

To improve things further, they then get a big box of sand and haul it around to the 'hawking to retailers' bit, because the main thing that will confuse people about this is how you put it in the sand. You wonder what positive things any of the retailers will find to say about it, but then a very nice lady says she likes the name, so that's good. On the other hand, one of them says that 'the main difficulty' she see's with this is that it would blow over really easily in the wind, which is like looking at a plane that's crashed in your garden and wondering how you'll ever fix the topiary.

Meanwhile, the boys spend some time taking photos of Stella in a bikini; they use the excuse that she's lying on the Cuuli, which they need to take photos of. She's wearing the bikini because they made her, by the way. Onto their presentation, and we have Chris (the surgeon one) demonstrating and Chris (the 'really funny, anything but mediocre' one) reading from a Ladybird book in monotone. 'This is Chris. Chris is at the beach. Chris looks cool. Chris wants to phone his wife. His phone is in his Cuuli.' Stella had earlier tried to stop him doing the pitch, because of how crap he was at it, but he threw a very quiet, mediocre strop and called her management style 'piss-poor'.

Alex Epstein (for some reason, we seem to have surnames for everyone apart from the 2 Chrises and the other bloke whose first name hasn't even been mentioned yet) also chips in, with something about the Cuuli allowing parents to keep their baby's food at an optimum temperature, or their baby at optimum temperature, or something; he's so earnest that I just can't listen. Incidentally, I forgot to say last week that Alex Epstein is an 'Unemployed Head of Communications'. Really? Is that a thing? Is it like being a 'very athletic corpse' or something?

On to the boardroom, where the girls scream at each other some more. Eventually someone gets them to shut up, and Nick and Karren read out the figures: the boys sold 100 Cuulis, and the girls sold nothing at all, so they all start screaming again. The boys go to play golf, where Alex Epstein is very awkward, and the rest of them high-five and jump about and generally lower the tone. The girls have a change of screaming venue, where they yap and yap and yap and yap and yap at each other and blame each other for everything.

Then they go back to the boardroom and scream some more, and get told off by Karren for being a disgrace to women, and business, and book reading devices. Laura has to decide who she'll bring back into the boardroom; evenutally she decides she'll bring Joanna (who has managed the impressive feat of being the loudest and screamiest of all) and Shandeesh (who doesn't seem to have spoken yet), and then swaps Shandeesh for Joy, without any real reason. They sit outside and sulk in blessed silence and then come in, and, to cut a lot of screaming short, Joy gets fired for not doing anything, proving once again that being an average, not obnoxious person gets you nowhere on this show. They skip the customary insincere hug-and-mutter-'allthebestkeepintouch', and Laura and Joanna skip back to the house, hand in hand, where they are greeted by everyone but Chris, who seems to be sulking that they came back, or something.

A loud episode, and frankly I think Joy got off lightly, and am starting to doubt whether my eardrums will survive.

Still, next week is making buns. Please, please tell me they split the girls into individual teams or something.

The Apprentice 2010 - Episode 1

2010-10-07T18:35:00.000+01:00

We have many reasons to be thankful to The Apprentice, but surely the greatest is that they take 16(? sometimes it seems like a lot more) egotistical, self-aggrandising twits, and remove them from the job market for several months each year. Then they put them on tv so we can all point and laugh.

The first few episodes, of course, are about giving us a broad overview of what we can expect once things really kick off. Now it is clear that, in many ways, what we can expect is much of the same, and yet, with every passing minute, we see new methods for executing the same old idiocy. Not initially, naturally, because we start with the usual string of twits saying things like 'I'm the whole package', 'I'm the best', 'I'm just totally unique'. There are some variations on the theme, as you would expect: we're treated to a guy with a posh accent and the eyes of the dead gravely telling us that he's hilarious; another proclaims himself to be 'Stuart Baggs - the brand' and says that 'everything I touch turns to sold'; a third warns 'My first word wasn't mummy - it was money'; Alex Epstein (a chap who talks like he's reading the news and looks like he's just seen a wasp land on your head) sticks with the obvious, basically saying 'I'm mental, me'. Charmed, I'm sure.

Not that Lord Shugah helps, as he brings them into the boardroom and bigs up the metaphors... 'You have to sink or swim, and I don't do lifejackets'. He also declares 'You all look good on paper. But then so does fish and chips'. I've no idea what he's getting at here, since fish and chips are also good when you lift them out of the paper and eat them, but it makes everyone shift slightly in their seats.

And so, into teams, boys and girls, and off you go. The task is to make and sell sausages, starting RIGHT NOW. So they all head off, with Nick and Karren-with-two-arrs in tow, to bicker about team names and who'll be project manager. The girls start by briefly considering 'Winning Women', before ditching it in case, like, boys join the team some week. After some discussion, they plump for 'Apollo', because it went to the moon and they're shooting for the stars, or something. A blonde girl talks about how she knows loads and is brill, and says she doesn't want to project manage, and eventually Joanne says she'll do it, at which point blonde girl basically takes over again and starts wittering about costs.

The boys, meanwhile, are listing Christian nightclubs: "we could be called 'Fusion'"; "I like 'Synergy'" (I can't be sure, but I think both those options were mooted and rejected by the Junior Apprentices earlier in the year). I think they eventually go for 'Synergy', but I wouldn't swear to it. Dan becomes project leader, and quickly sets out his stall: 'I'm going to lead, and you lot will do all the work'. I seem to be able to see further up Dan's nostrils than would be considered normal; I also cannot decide who or what he looks like: I think it's some kind of root vegetable with the facial features of a Muppet. A mupnip, if you will.

Anyway, off to Smithfield market, where they try out their bargaining skills and buy loads of meat. They have different strategies: the girls (after speaking with, and actually, in a departure from The Apprentice norms, listening to a butcher) decide to make gourmet sausages, with flavours like 'lamb and mint'; the boys buy a load of sawdust and mix it in with the legal minimum amount of meat which is required to be allowed to call a sausage a sausage. Or, as StuartBaggsTheBrand says, 'we're pushing crap'.

And so to the sausage factory, where it's a mixture of The Generation Game, The Weakest Link, and Lord of the Flies - on the boys' side at least. Dan The Mupnip (in blue shower cap) is yelling and swearing, and the rest of the boys are making tubes of sawdust, badly. The girls fare a little better, and two of them even have the nous to do some sums to figure out what they need to charge for their sausages to make money. Blond girl, though, is already fecking me off by calling them 'sauce-aaaah-jis' (rhymes with 'badges', but more drawn out). One of the girls is called Paloma.

Onwards and upwards, and off to market. StuartBaggsTheBrand (in jaunty blue boater) starts pinning down passers-by and jamming sausage down their throats, yelling 'finest locally produced sausages!' (what happened to 'pushing crap', huh?), and annoying Jamie The Sensible, but, admittedly, selling stuff.

The girls are finding that trade is slower, I'm guessing partly because they didn't bother making any samples, and partly because at least half of them are still wearing the boiler suits they wore in the sausage factory. After a time, they take the hint from Nick's eyebrows, and fire up the griddle so people can try before they buy.

For reasons I miss, both teams also decide to start hawking their wares in the general localle as well. The girls go to pubs; in one, they meet a chap called Dan (I think), who is interested enough to come back to the stall to see for himself, and then gets caught up in a row between Joanne and blonde girl, over who gets to 'close the sale'. Girls. Please.

The boys are marvellous; one of them tries to flog the sausages to a florist; Mupnip Dan goes door-to-door, knocking and then shouting through the letter box 'Want to buy some sausages?'. As Dara O'thingie says in the 'Point and laugh at the person who got fired' show afterwards, it is quite probable that there is no product one would be less likely to buy door-to-door than sausages; even magic beans would be more appealing. They then head off to local offices, because office workers are quite likely to buy raw sausages in the middle of the day, ho yes they are. Oh, no they're not, apparently.

Back in the boardroom, and after some squabbling girls and then Lord Shugah telling Dan to sit up straight (guess who's getting fired now), the girls are pronounced winners by £15 (presumably it would have been more if they'd taken into account people who will sue because they ate the crud the boys sold them, and died painfully).

The boys are off to the Losers' Cafe, to be told again by Dan how great he is; the girls go and shriek at the marvellous house they'll be staying in.

Boardroom Mark II doesn't take place till the next morning, and the boys are all feeling rather buoyant. StuartBaggsTheBrand hasn't even bothered to pack, so confident is he that he's not going home today. Presumably the plan is, if the Shugahmeister fires him, he'll throttle him with the sausages and take over immediately, because, based on his performance thus far, he's going home today.

The boardroom is great. Alex is basically an arse, and shows it. Raleigh (? - the ginger one) talks sense, but in a voice that makes you want to slap him in the face with a wet fish; rather delightfully, however, he talks about Dan's bullying and arsing about and then declares, in a suddenly grown-up, serious voice, that 'It was SHAMEful'. I tell you, if we ever need to declare war, we have our voiceover man RIGHT THERE. However, Jamie The Sensible describes StuartBaggsTheBrand as 'cringeable', and the nation is united once more.

Boardroom Mark III is Dan, Alex and StuartBaggsTheBrand. It goes like this:
Dan: I was brave, I said I'd lead the team
SBTB: Yeah, but you sold... like... (types on imaginary calculator, the tube, the STUPID STUPID FECK TUBE)... nothing
Dan: I was brave, I said I'd lead the team
*shot of Alex, looking like he's seen a wasp on Nick's head*
SBTB: Yeah, but you sold (whips out imaginary calculator)...
Sugahmeistah: Shut up StuartBaggsTheBrand
(repeat for 20 minutes)

Shugahmeistah: why shouldn't I sack you?

SBTB (probably now wishing he'd packed): If you hire me and I feck it all up, I'll give you a refund. I'm unique. I'm 21 (umm... note... pretty sure that's not THAT unusual). I'm a grafter. I'm the whole package. I'm not a cliche (probably he'll also give 110% and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. I'm guessing).

Alex: fires off some soundbites and watches the wasp

Dan gets fired, thankfully. I mean, they're all three of them absolute twits, but on balance, Alex and StuartBaggsTheBrand offer better viewing, which is essentially all I'm asking.

Another tremendous Tesco offer

2010-10-05T21:33:00.000+01:00

You remember that thing a while back about the Bran Flakes in Tesco? Where it was cheaper to buy more of them than less of them?

Today's offer:

I did spend some time trying to figure out whether the two prices refered to 2 different types of bread, or something, but I couldn't see that they did.

That being said, I didn't spend too long, as I'd already been hanging about trying to take the photo.

Things That Really Irk Me: Jeopardy!

2010-10-02T16:50:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I've featured anything from my list of things that drive me nuts (you may note that this category has been renamed, in the interests of family-friendliness), and so it is high time to continue the series.

Today's topic: Jeopardy! Before we go further, I must admit that I've never actually watched a full episode of this, but since it's the format that I loathe, rather than the implementation, I believe that my concerns remain valid nonetheless.

For those not familiar with the format of the show, it is basically a question-and-answers game with a twist; namely that it's an answers-and-questions game. In other words, the contestant is given the answer, and have to state the question.

Now, in some hands, this is comic gold: Mock the Week, for instance, do an excellent round based on the same principle. A sample from last week:
The answer is: 7 years
Suggested questions:
How old is the world, according to Sarah Palin?
How long does it take the idiot in front of you to use the self-checkout?
How many years good luck would you get if you broke Jeremy Clarkson's face?

Excellent stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

But in actual Jeopardy, the answer is more like*:
"The Father of Our Country; he didn't really chop down a cherry tree"
and the question is "Who is George Washington?"

The thing is, if someone said 'Who is George Washington?', you would never answer 'The Father of Our Country; he didn't really chop down a cherry tree', unless you were a pompous twit. You would say 'He was the first President of America', or 'He was a well-known American', or 'I don't know', depending on your level of knowledge. Of course, if you were further pressed, with the question 'Did he chop down a cherry tree?', you might reply 'no', or 'yes', or 'I can't say', but the point is that you wouldn't dispense that information simply in response to the question 'Who is George Washington?'.

It is also no more challenging to do it this way round than the other way round. It's not as if the presenter says 'The Father of Our Country; he didn't really chop down a cherry tree' and then the contestant has to perform a feat of mental gymnastics to turn 'George Washington' into 'Who is George Washington?'. They might as well make them answer the question while hopping, or looking at the ceiling, or wearing red shoes, for all the difference it makes.

If they want to jazz up the traditional 'question-answer' format, they need to think wider. For instance, dispense the various parts of the clue one at a time, and for every part that gets dispensed, release a wild boar into the studio, so the quicker the answer, the less chance of a gory death. Or make them answer while eating marshmallows. Or while whistling the theme tune to Jonny Briggs.

Or anything, really, that actually makes a measurable difference to how easy it is to answer the question.

* I stole this from Wikipedia, by the way

Yowzah

2010-09-28T16:50:00.002+01:00

YISSSSSSSSSSSS! It's back. It. is back.

Facebook Is Down: What Do I Do?

2010-09-23T22:05:00.001+01:00

So Facebook's down. What to do, WHAT TO DO?

Well, blog about it, obviously. And keep clicking to see if it's back yet. Even if that makes the servers fall over, when 500 million people all try to log in at once. And think about it a bit. And think about your farm which will have dead crops because it can't be harvested. And think about doing some work instead. And then click it a bit more in case it comes back. And try it on your iPhone/iPod/mobile device. And then type 'Facebook is down' into Google, to make sure it's down for everyone else. Go onto www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com to check that it's really down, and crash that as well. And then click some more.

And breathe.

On The Pope's Visit So Far

2010-09-17T13:29:00.000+01:00

The thing about the Pope's visit is that it always had the potential to be like your first weekend back home after starting university, when you bring your cool new friend home to meet your parents. The two of you are sitting on the bus (do students get buses nowadays? Or are they above all that, with their laptops and iPads and crippling debts?), and you're all excited about her meeting your parents and them seeing what awesome, progressive, out-of-this-world person you've managed to chum up with, because this friend is, like, the most brilliant person ever, and is soooo funny, and can juggle 4 oranges, and knows all the cords for Bohemian Rhapsody, and there was that night that you were sitting in the common room playing pool and then these guys came in and it was, like, sooooo funny, and you were all up till midnight and had this great chat about Plato and Aristotle; and then, in a flash of doom, you realise that none of that is going to make up for the fact that she's going to leave wet towels on the bed.

You suddenly realise that this new friend is so unexpectedly cool because she is precisely the kind of person your parents have spent 18 years steering you away from (although my parents never did this, on the basis that weird/bad/scary friends were better than no friends at all (no offense intended to those I was friends with at school (or at least, most of you. Others of you, my parents were right about))). You realise, in short, that your parents are going to hate your new friend, and she is going to hate your parents, and they are going to think you're wasting your time at university, and be A Bit Disappointed, and that makes you sad.

So anyway, the Pope's visit could have gone that way. It was all well and good inviting him over (it's about time we had a bit of pomp and style, it'll fill up the tv schedules, and the souvenir sales will boost the economy); but I think in all honesty the organisers have spent the past couple of weeks in a state of dread, what with the creeping realisation that quite a lot of people are still a bit out of sorts with that whole child abuse thing, and the gay thing, and the women thing, and that maybe this could all go hideously wrong and the Queen would get cross and ban him from the country, or Richard Dawkins would get to be on TV some more.

Thus far, however, things appear to be going according to plan, with Benny receiving a reasonable welcome in Scotland (having been greeted by Her Majesticness with the words "It was a very small car you arrived in, wasn't it? Very tight squeeze?" If only she had added "When you go down to London, we'll get Philip to drive us in the Rolls", my week would have been made), and a reasonable amount of protesting and so on.

My particular favourite comment so far was made by the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, who, musing on Ian Paisley's contribution to the occasion, commented that "Bascially, if Ian Paisley didn't come, I wouldn't have thought the visit was worthwhile."

Other commentators have chipped in with their tuppenceworth, including our good friends, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre:

and the esteemed Professor Billy McWilliams, who, much like myself, was in 2 minds as to whether to protest*, and then decided not to.

* Technically, I never had any intention of protesting, because that would have involved going to Scotland, and protesting, and also being interested enough to be Against the whole thing, and also choosing to be on the side of Richard Dawkins.

In Which We Decide Whether We Are Fans Of The Pope's Visit, Or Not

2010-09-10T21:48:00.000+01:00

So the Pope is coming in a few days time, and the nation is split in 3 - the 'fors', the 'againsts', and the 'mehs', the latter being by far the largest group. The Masses are organised, the list of Things You May Bring To The Mass compiled, the shelves stocked with tat (won't someone please buy me a popener?), and the Saints-to-be are waiting expectantly in their graves. Or Purgatory, if that turns out to be true.

It only remains for WhyNotSmile to decide which camp to join, and to set the tone for any coverage which may or may not happen here on the blog.

Clearly we're not going to decide to be 'meh'. We will plump for one side or the other, perhaps at random, but vociferously and enthusiastically. To remove some of the randomness, we will attempt a cost-benefit analysis of the visit, and use this to determine whether we're big fans of the 'Vicar of Christ', 'Servant of the Servants of God' and 'Patriarch of the West' (those are all titles for the Pope, by the way; we haven't suddenly changed topics), or strongly opposed to the arrival of 'The Antichrist'.

Costs
Apparently this whole thing is costing British taxpayers somewhere between £8 million and £12 million (between them all, obviously, not each, although based on some of the reactions, you'd wonder). It's quite hard to get an actual figure, but as far as I can tell, it works out at about 50p each. It amounts, in other words, to a couple of Curly Wurlys.
Now, for the purposes of this analysis, we are going to assume that WhyNotSmile is a taxpayer (ha), so the question becomes, do the benefits of the Papal visit outweigh the joy of 2 Curly Wurlys? Because Curly Wurlys are extremely nice, and I don't want to deprive myself without good cause.

So what do I get for my Curly Wurlys?

Benefits
1. Some waving from the popemobile. Probably quite a lot of waving, although not waving at me.
2. The joy of new tat. We have previously discussed the vast contribution made by the Catholic Church to the global supply of religious tat, and the visit of the Pope does not disappoint in this respect. If you did not check out the link above, please do so now. It's ok. We'll wait.
3. It really, really fecks off Richard Dawkins. It's not hard to feck off Dicky D., of course, but the Pope's visit is a source of particularly pleasing shows of frenzy, and for this we are truly thankful. This point alone is worth at least one and a half of the Curly Wurlys.
4. Something on TV that isn't Friends. Because, believe it or not, we're still watching Friends, here at Smile Towers. Even though we have the box set, and we can watch that without adverts, we are still paying £140 per year to watch it on tv, with adverts. But next week we can watch the Pope instead. Not that we will, I'm guessing.

So I think, on balance, that we are going to opt for being Big Fans of the Pope's visit, and we will discuss it further as events unfold.

How To Create A Website With Changing & Fading Background Images

2010-09-09T18:19:00.002+01:00

So a client asked me to create a website which used changing & fading background images, and I said that sounded fine and I would check out how it worked, and then I looked it up on t'internet, and no one seemed to know how to do it. Which surprised me because I'm sure I've seen it done, but maybe they used Flash or something.

So, not be be defeated (even when I read a thing that said it can't be done), I set myself to it, and now it works, which is rather marvellous. I gave myself a small round of applause. Then I figured that I should share it, because some people might want to do it but then give up when they read that it's awkward to do.

And so I present:

How To Create A Website With Changing & Fading Background Images
As ever, I deny all responsibility for this going wrong, if you try it and it does.

What we are trying to do: the website should have a background image which fills the screen. When the user scrolls, the background should remain fixed in place and the page content should scroll. Every now and then, the background image should fade into another one. This is to be achieved using HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP, as required.

Caveats: this is basically not going to work on IE6, because it just doesn't like these things. For IE6, just use a fixed background. The fading effect will be ignored. Anything below IE6, you probably have no chance.

The problems: having a rotating background image is not hard. It just involves some css and javascript. Fixing it in place is also fine. The problem arises when you want to fade the background, because you can't do that without fading all the child elements... in other words, your page content will fade too. So, we have to have 2 layers, one with the fading background, and one with the content. But also, you can't fade one image into another if they're both in the background. And also as well, sometimes the extra layer gets in the way and all your content moves to after the image.

But do not despair, for it can all be fixed, and here's how:

Step 1: The HTML
The basic idea is that we set 3 layers. The top one is the page content, which moves when we scroll. The middle one is the background image. The lowest layer is the new image, which we fade to. When the fade is complete, the middle layer gets this new image as well, and the background then gets the next one. And so on.
Thus we have (I've done the opening pointy brackets the wrong way round, otherwise your browser won't show it):

>body>

>div id="opacity-background">

>div id="opacity-layer">

>/div>

>div id="mainBody"> Your main page content (header, navigation etc.) goes here

>/div>

>/body>

'opacity-background' and 'opacity-layer' will handle the images. If you have an existing site, you can just put a 'mainBody' wrapper round the current content, and then add these 2 divs above it.

Step 2: The CSS
Your CSS should contain the following:

body {

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

position: relative;

}

#opacity-background {

margin-top: 0;

width: 1700px;

height: 1100px;

z-index: 0;

position: fixed;

background-image: url(../img/backgrounds/background1.jpg);

background-position: top left;

background-repeat: no-repeat;

background-attachment: fixed;

}

#opacity-layer {

margin-top: 0;

width: 1700px;

height: 1100px;

z-index: 0;

position: fixed;

background-image: url(../img/backgrounds/background1.jpg);

background-position: top left;

background-repeat: no-repeat;

background-attachment: fixed;

}

#mainBody {

position: absolute;

margin-top: 0;

z-index: 1;

}

Obviously the width and height of the image should be set to whatever size your image is. And also the background-image url for opacity-background should be set to your own value. Put this somewhere in your CSS file.

The Javascript
And finally, the javascript. I used mootools for the fading effect, but you could code it yourself. I considered this, because I was scared that I wouldn't understand mootools, but actually it's very very easy. You just get the code (we will come to this presently) and then put it in a file and link to it.

So, let's assume you have a folder called 'scripts', which your javascript files (if you have any) are in. So you go get mootools, which will give you a file called mootools.js, and you put it in 'scripts', and the in the head section of your page you put (again, I have swapped the pointy opening brackets so that this shows up in your browser):

>script language="javascript" src="./scripts/scmootools.js"> >/script>

so that's it all linked in and everything. You don't have to have a folder called scripts. You can just put it in the same place as your head file.

Now you need to add your own bit of javascript. I guess you could put this in an external file as well, but I didn't (I apologise that this is all jumbled up - the line breaks have not, as we say, propagated).

>script type="text/javascript">

   var bgImages = new Array();
   bgImages[0] = '../img/backgrounds/background1.jpg';
   bgImages[1] = '../img/backgrounds/background2.jpg';
   bgImages[2] = '../img/backgrounds/background3.jpg';
   bgImages[3] = '../img/backgrounds/background4.jpg';
   var inc=-1;

   function backgroundChange() {
    inc++;
    if (inc==4) inc=0;
    // Set background to new image
    var bgDiv = $('opacity-background');
    bgDiv.setStyle('background-image','url(' + bgImages[inc] + ')');
    // Set up fade
    var m = $('opacity-layer');
    var fx = new Fx.Tween(m,{
        duration: 1500,
        onComplete: function(){
                // After fade, show new image on this layer
                m.setStyle('background-image','url(' + bgImages[inc] + ')');
                m.fade('in');
       }
    });
    // Fade out current background
    fx.start('opacity',1,0);
   }

   // Navigation sliders and fade effects
   window.addEvent('domready', function(){
    // Add fade effect to all items in navigation menu
    var menuLinks = $$('a').filter(
                           function(item, index){
                            if(item.className == 'toplevelLink') return true; // Top level links
                            if(item.className == 'loneLink') return true; // Top level links
                            if(item.className == 'menu_sub') return true; // Submenu links
                            return false;
                           });
    menuLinks.each(
     function(el,index){
      // Set up morph
      var original = el.getStyle('color');
      var morph = new Fx.Morph(el, { 'duration':'500', link:'cancel'});
      // Attach event handlers
      el.addEvents(
       {
        'mouseenter' : function() { morph.start({'color':'#999999'})},
        'mouseleave' : function() { morph.start({'color':original})}
       }
      );
     }
    );
    // Get top level menus; hide submenus
    $$('a[class=toplevelLink]').each(
     function(el,index){
      // Sliding menus
      var submenu = el.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('ul')[0]; // get sub menu
      var submenuSlide = new Fx.Slide(submenu); // turn submenu into slider
      if(submenu.className != 'this') { // hide submenu for now, unless a page from it is currently shown
       submenuSlide.hide();
      }
      // Attach event handlers
      el.addEvents(
       {'click': function(e){
                     var submenu = el.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('ul')[0]; // get sub menu
                     var submenuSlide = new Fx.Slide(submenu); // turn submenu into slider
                     var thisid = el.id;
                     // Close all other submenus
                     var otherMenus = $$('a').filter(
                           function(item, index){
                            if(item.className != 'toplevelLink') return false;
                            if(item.id != thisid) return true; // Other menus
                            return false;
                           });
                     otherMenus.each(
                             function(el,index){
                               // Set up slide on submenu
                               var slide = new Fx.Slide(el.parentNode.getElementsByTagName('ul')[0]);
                               slide.hide();
                           });
                     // Show or hide this menu, as appropriate
                     submenuSlide.toggle();
                     e.stop();
                 }
       }
      );
     }
    );
    backgroundChange();
   });
   window.addEvent('load', function(){
    var pic = new Array();
    for(var ii=0; ii
     pic[ii]= new Image(100,25);
     pic[ii].src=bgImages[ii];
    }
    setInterval('backgroundChange()', 5000);
   });
>/script>

So in the head section of your page, after the bit where you put the link to mootools, put the following:

You can play around with this a bit. Make sure the paths to the images are right.

Basically that's all there is to it.

Appendix: How to get Mootools
I'm always scared of new things, because I'm always certain they won't work, but mooTools is very easy and lets you add lots of nice effects to your site. It doesn't come with a lot in the way of examples, but it's not hard to figure out.

To get mooTools (it's free, by the way), go to http://mootools.net/download and click one of the links in the first section (I went for the uncompressed one, but as long as you can uncompress them, the others are fine). That gets you mootools.js.