In a very bizarre twist, Liverpool City Council have bought a load of robot falcons to scare off pigeons.
More on bbc.co.uk
Even more odd - they're called 'Robops' not quite sure how that relates to their job, their appearance, or even what type of bird they're meant to be.
Esther Rantzen's TV programme That's Life! used to do the odd skit on 'consumer problems', Adrian and Gavin would read our the, increasingly exasperated, letters that the customer had sent and the company's replies with comic pauses and everything was sorted out in the end. One famous case involved British Gas (publicly owned as it was then) whose new computer system had sent out a bill for £0.00 and then threatening cut-off for non-payment. This was entertainingly bizarre, and unusual, and held interest all the way to Doc Cox's witty song, which was no doubt something to the tune of his "I'm a Wanker" song with different words, or "I'm the Gas Man" to the tune of The Beatles "Taxman".
The here point being that up to the early eighties it was rare enough to have protracted trouble with a large company to make it a TV item, they had complaints departments, you could write to them - or telephone if you wished - but more usually they would have a branch in your local high-street. You could pop-in, although not on Wednesday afternoons or Saturdays or Sundays, and if it came to it refuse to leave until they'd sorted it all out.
It was rare to have that much trouble anyway, you bought something, it either worked or it didn't and if it didn't someone would come round to repair it.
Not any more.
Now every purchase over and above the price of a pint comes with labyrinthine 'Terms and Conditions' documents, the ultimate get-out clause (or hundreds of closely-typed clauses). You'll probably find, upon employing a legal professional, that British Gas aren't actually obliged to pump the gas you've bought to you, that iPods aren't actually supposed to play music, or last for much over a couple of months.
When something does go wrong, the merry-go-round starts spinning. The shop you've bought it from is actually a franchise and doesn't deal with returns, or repairs, and you have to call a 'customer services' number. More often than not their first gambit is to pack you back off to the shop - after they've told you to turn it off and on again.
Almost all of the call-centre customer service experience seems to be wilfully designed to stop two things: admission of guilt or responsibility, and not having the company have to act in any way. First-line support is brilliant at this, whilst keeping up a nauseating level of obsequiousness. "Bear with me Mr Smith".
It starts at management level, by deliberately employing people with a limited grasp of English, both abroad and in the UK, who are not able to deviate from the scripts they're given. Intelligent people can use reasoning to solve problems, they can tell when a complaint is reasonable, but they wouldn't want to work in such poor conditions for such low wages. On top of this is the culture of fear, of targets for numbers of calls dealt with, a call passed on to people who can actually deal with the problem is a black mark. Recently I had trouble with a service offered my by mobile phone operator (for a fiver extra a month!), it is a fairly complex system and has it's own dedicated support team. Not that you'd find out by calling the main customer services helpline - it took me over 2 hours of arguing to get put through to the right people. I was continuingly given solutions to different problems with different software. Poor training, whether deliberate or not really does make for some of the worst-spent time of your short life.
The operators lie, and fob you off - the brilliant one for mobile phone companies is "switch it off an back on again". Knowing of course that you're calling on the phone and if it doesn't solve the problem you'll have to call back. Most of the time you'll give up, and they can tick a little tick box.
Despite, of course, your call being recorded "for training and monitoring purposes", quite often a repeat phone call will reveal no trace of the first one you've made. Promises to return calls won't be kept and that person with special responsibility who is 'on leave' will never return. Comet claimed not to have received any of our phone calls or letters when we had a problem with our dishwasher, despite sending an engineer out to fix the problem, although when a Small-Claims Court summons reached them they sent us a cheque. Odd, when they made it clear that they'd never been contacted about the problem, and it wasn't their fault or responsibility anyway.
When your life turns into That's Life! and you spend more time on your mobile to their customer services that your friends, there's something wrong with the culture of service. It's something that our 'respect' obsessed government could sort out, perhaps a start would be plain English service agreements so you could understand just how little service you'd signed up for. And they could start putting items about deformed vegetables on the telly again.
I've got an old ITV Digital Monkeh in my house, he's got one or two dropped stitches and a '98 England shirt on. I had to iron the badge/stripe design on his t-shirt myself - and the shirt wouldn't come off his arms, most undiginified for a young ape.
He's also now got a tiny mini-me sitting on his head. A PG- Tips give away - super.
Here's Monkeh at his indignant best :
linky for feed readers
Twatplates are car number plates where the owners have shuffled around the numbers and letters, perhaps add a bolt here or there, perhaps changed the font... whatever... VIZ's Roger's Profanisaurus christened them Twatplates.
My problem with them is that they defeat the purpose of car number plates, that is unique and easy identification of different vehicles.
My problem with the twatplaters is their sheer arrogance in disregarding the law just so they can have their name on their car. "Here's this law, it's a good law, it's egalitarian, it's for a reason - nah I'll get a number plate that's a little bit like my name and squidge the letters and numbers about so everyone knows who I am."
There's been an explosion of these in recent times, whether due to easier plate-making methods and the people that make them stopping caring - or an exponential rise in number of twats that seem to be around.
The governement and police de-regulated parking controls, meaning that it's now impossible to park without a warden sniffing round for a slight infingement, but these guys have no interest (or instructions, or bonuses) in enforcing other motoring regulations.
It's you've got enough money to get a twatplate and you do, you've got more money than sense. If you haven't and you'd like one, you still have - if you see what I mean.
Twatplates flickr group - shaming twats since 2006
You know on Dragons' Den, where the 'investors' "invest their own money", and the contestants "have to get all the money they asked for, or they leave with nothing". Yeah?
Yes so does everybody! It's been going for about four series now, the rules haven't changed, Sepp Blatter's not in charge, and they weren't complicated to start with. So why does the bloody narrator, BBC Economics Editor Evan Davis, tell us every five minutes?It's because the programme makers think we're stupid. Every time you hear a factual programme on TV recap, they're patronising you.(And on commercial TV - everytime they ask you to phone in with your opinion they're valuing your views at exactly the price of the call.) Despite the brilliant fun to be had with a Nintendo Wii, swinging your arms around, playing tenins, frightening pets and damaging the light fittings, one of the best thing you can do is make Wii Miis.
The idea is that you make a cartoony avatar for yourself, which looks like you (then you use it n the Nintendo games), but the real fun comes from making looke-likiees of celebs. And then being able to pick them up and toss them around.
Blow a whistle and make your mini Bill Oddie line up with Russell Brand. That's not a euphamism, but it's still brill.
Very different from simple pictures of cats on the interweb, lolcats (aka cat macros or kittah) are reaching critical mass.
A lolcat consists of a cat photo, captioned with poor grammar and spelling - normally to indicate the cat's thought process.
First there was 'i made you a cookie, but i eated it', and a number of 'i'm in ur computer upgrading ur RAM', but now it's almost impossible to open Firefox without ceiling cat peering out.
Last December I upgraded my mobile phone, I was seduced by the 'X-Series' on Three as it offered free 'push email' (similar to what a Blackberry does, but cheaper!) and got a Nokia N73. It hasn't worked from that day to this for more than a day without throwing up "-25 connection errors", "Internet Connection Failed" errors and a variety of other failures..
After phoning 3's tech support line in India - I'm guessing - and argueing the difference between the services on their phone (they kept telling me how to set up the phone's dial-up email) for nearly two hours I eventually got a diretc number for Mobile Mail Support.
And then they fobbed me off.
For months.
I eventually got the email address for one of the technicians who seemed to be trying to help. "I'll phone you on Monday".
No phone call.
I emailed. "Sorry, i'll phone tomorrow."
No phone call.
I've given up almost, the service has come back on for a day or two.
Then out of the blue an email suggesting that they "have been going though some of the log files on our relay server and think that I might have found the cause of your problems. It looks like out system is having some issues with processing a certain email in the users inbox."
So an email that I've been sent is the problem? I don't see how, but willingly comply.
So now i get "Account has expired" messages instead.
They don't know what they're doing.
And charity too, of course.
Bit of a grumpy old man rant this one:
I appreciate the need for charity (although if people spent the same time and effort pressurising the government, long term solutions might be found, maybe), and if you're going to raise money and awareness having fun while you're at it is commendable.
The trades description people should be having a close look at the makers of Comic Relief does Fame Academy though. Week after week of actors, DJs and socialites singing fronted by Patrick Kielty is not comedy - unless it's very black and the joke's on us.
Bring back Cliff Richard and The Young Ones, bring back Theophilus P. Wildebeest, bring back Bobby Davro, anything.
If we raise enough money, can we not have it next time?
Nothing's better for making you feel small and insignificant (and you are, you are!) than an astronomical phenomenon.
Last night in Birmingham we were treated to a brilliant cloud-free view of the Total Lunar Eclipse. Just a few problems with light-polution and me having to go to bed stopped me taking fantastic photos like this one. Nothing to do with a) not having the right lenses or b) not being very good at taking photos, oh no.
I'm not talking about people who don't offer you a crisp (although, hang around I might get to them), but the sort of anal idiots that upload their photographs to photo-sharing websites (see the word there, 'sharing') and then get narked if you share the image. Flickr is the most well-known of these, although by some way not the most popular, and it is specifically set up for people to share photos, and post them on other websites.
Flickr's Terms and Conditions say that it "allows and encourages" use of photos on other sites as long as the photo links back to the flickr page. It even includes handy blogging tools that make that simple - although you can turn this off, which makes it more time consuming but still not difficult:
Removing this button makes it more difficult for people to blog your photos, but remember that anyone can copy and blog a public photo. If you'd rather this didn't happen, change your settings to make your photos private.
The internet is a series of tubes, tubes full of kittens. Take photo-sharing site flickr, it's about 20% holiday snaps, 29% 'serious art photography' (some great some awful), 1% serupticiously taken camera-phone pictures of large breated women and a whopping 50% cats!
So much so that there are constant discussions amongst po-faced members about there being "a need for a cat free version of flickr". So much so that there's a cottage industry growing up that blogs pictures of cats from flickr, just picking the cutest and the funniest - and I know because I do it myself.
Dogs don't have the same qualities that make you photograph them, or squeal with delight at grammatically incorrect captions.
LOL!! I IZ IN UR PC BLOGGING ABOUT UR CATZ!!!
BBC NEWS | Politics | Anger at public sector pay offer
Having been subject to a below inflationary pay-rise myself this year (while bosses at my firm picked up huge bonuses) I can fully understand the anger - under 2% for nurses for example. When you take into account the RPI (which includes Mortgages, Council Tax - the main costs in life) is nearer 5% this amounts to a 3% pay cut.
In the days when every penny you get from your employer has to be the result of productivity increases, being more flexible, taking on more responsibility and doing the work of laid-off colleagues, this is just heartbreaking.
Work harder, for less money, for a worse standard of living, with less job security, cor blimey Gordon, we're gonna vote for you, aren't we.
Oh, I forget, we don't get a choice.
There are loads of types of otters, although they mainly vary in size according to breed. All are smashing to watch, like small amphibious monkeys - but watch their teeth (as Terry Nutkins found to his cost).
One of my favourite things about otters is they afford you the opportunity to do otter impressions - 
