Mutts Nutts

Oasis (now Centreparcs) is best summed up as a sort of “Butlins for posh people”. It’s a bit like going for a holiday in a shopping mall, except you’re not allowed to leave until your stay is up… I got an uneasy feeling of being in one of those utopia-dispelled plots such as “The Prisoner”, “The Island”, “The Matrix” or “THX1138″. It’s all very “nice” but something’s not quite right.

We arrived in darkness on a Friday night and immediately the tone of the place was set as we started queuing for what was to be nearly an hour and a half.

It then transpired you couldn’t park anywhere near the rented council house you were about to spend the weekend in.  Cars it seems are an eyesore and are confiscated as soon as you’ve offloaded your luggage.    We’d agreed to this as some friends were going and I had accepted the offer to tag along as I thought, well we’ll meet up for dinner and during the day, we’ll be out walking the lakes.

Oh no.  You’re not actually allowed out of the place during your stay.  You must stick around to sample the er.. “restaurants” and the wonderful indoor creations that reminded me of the Trafford Centre.  It’s a bit like they had a grand vision, but only 50p.  So, a lot like Blackpool then (budget sized Eiffel Tower and a fun fair - not exactly Las Vegas is it?).

By Sunday we could take no more and had to seek out the management and plead for parole.  Seriously - we had to track some geezer down who could open the car park ahead of the normal release date so we get our feckin car and get the hell out of there.   Even then, the only way to get the car back to the hut was to go out of the place and come back in.  We loaded the car in a hurry.  “Chewie get us outa here” I yelled as I hit the pedal marked “Hyperdrive”.   “They let us go” said my wife “it’s the only explanation for the ease of our escape”.

So, next time you’re heading up through the Lakes, and wanting to stop for fuel, if someone says “that’s no service station” take it from me, turn the ship around and lock in the auxiliary power, or be doomed to spend a long weekend in the Stepford Forest.

I bought an SPDIF fibre cable to connect my Squeezebox to my 6.1 amp/decoder. On the box, it says “gold plated connectors for maximum signal transmission”. Thankfully, the “people who make stuff” at JVC are not as stupid as the “people who make packaging” and the ends are not coated in gold. This did prompt me to start looking around at cables though and I found all kinds of utterly, utterly stupid - and I mean off-the-scale “I saw you coming” stupid products. This is one of my favourites -

http://www.cabletower.com/home.html

Just in case you can’t adjust your brain to the incredible levels of gullibility expected from potential customers for this product, yes, they really are suggesting that you can improve the performance of your stereo by holding the speaker cables off the floor on these huge lumps of plastic.

I didn’t think it could get any funnier, but then I found this “review” of some speaker cable.

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue32/anjou.htm

Oh yes - people have invested time and not just a bit of money, but huge great stinking piles of cash into making other people, believe that minute differences in metal compounds make any difference at all to their listening experience. (The fact that the recording studio may have been made out of old Bush tape recorders and some old bell wire, the instruments used cost fifty quid and that your 30+ year old ears cannot tell the bloomin’ difference anyway, never occurs to them: sound recordings, it seems, are handed out of the sky in perfect form by some divine audio being). I really like this bit:-

I was sent a 4-foot single run pair and after a short break-in (Adam suggested that the break-in is minimal, but even so I gave them 48 hours on the Cable Cooker and good two-weeks 24/7 of music prior to the audition) and found the cables to be very, very nice indeed. Fit and finish is second to none. High marks for construction and appearance.

I swear - I’m rolling on the floor by the time I read this bit - break the fecking cables in? What are these people smoking? This is more pretentious than wine tasting. Should we be cleansing the speaker wire pallete with a bit of lift music between tracks or something? Read the rest if you dare - I’ve never seen such a concentration of old cobblers in one place before - it’s like some sort of self reinforcing bullshit feedback loop - the more rubbish they write, the more they all get sucked in.

I’m now just dreaming up ways I can get a slice of this action - it seems there’s a huge seam of rich, utterly gullible twits out there ready to hand over real money, in large amounts if you tell them your new Treacle Bender MKII will enhance their expensive stereo, by means not explainable or without the need to demonstrate the value in objective terms. “$2750 for a meter pair” - all I have to do is learn to say “well you won’t actually *hear* the difference - it’s more the way the sounds will feel after installing our new kryptonite coated speaker reflector sails with solid gold alluvial dampers” with a straight face; closely followed by “This is really a load of horse droppings, but: I Saw You Coming so that’ll be £5678 sir”.

(or “Bejam” as it used to be known). I find it ever so slightly amusing that a shop named after a country where a beer costs £7 might be a cheap place to buy frozen food.

In just the same way that every middle-eastern country not at each other’s throats struck oil and became rich, Iceland struck steam about 30 years ago and became..er.. well maybe not rich, but… warm. So far it’s not made them rich, as it’s a bit difficult to export the stuff in barrels like oil, but they have harnessed it to make electricity, which, while in itself is quite difficult to export over the sorts of distances involved in getting to Europe or America, is one of the key ingredients in making hydrogen - which may well be in demand if everyone starts making hydrogen powered cars. The other ingredient, water, is also available in abundance on the island, with lots of it being stored in great lumps on top of the land mass. They can bottle that and ship it.
So - guilt free hydrogen produced without burning a single fossil may be the thing that makes every Icelander (or at least those with shares in the power company, or maybe Shell, who have opened the first hydrogen fuel station in Reykjavik) into steam magnates.

But hold on there: it can’t be that easy can it? Sure there’s nothing being burned to produce this wonder fuel, and so no CO2 cost. There’s no fission or other dangerous nuclear goings on either - so what’s the catch?

Well you could argue that the Earth cools down a bit faster than it would otherwise have done due to Icelandic man’s opening of artificial holes down to the superheated sea water, but these things tend to be a bit random in nature, and are forever shifting with each new earthquake, and so it’s hard to pin down if it actually made a difference or not. Plus - it literally is just scratching the surface - so I don’t this should be a problem.

Elsewhere in Iceland, I found an air of “base camp” about the place.  It all looked like somewhere you’d live if you were paid a large sum of money to do so, to complete some vast civil engineering project.  The permanent dark in winter, (and daylight in summer) has produced a fantastic sense of humour though.  The Skoda opposite the cathedral in Rekyavik is inspired, and the restaurant prices are a hoot.  It’s getting bigger all the time too - as Europe and America drift apart, Iceland is where they meet, and the crevice is getting wider by one inch every year.

In other less enlightened countries, effluent from nearby industrial processes gathered in a pool the shores of which are encrusted with salt and sulphur would be seen as a “bad thing” - but in Iceland, they wrap it in a leisure centre complete with cafe and charge people to sit in the fetid pool of hot seawater that pours forth from the power station. The call it “The Blue Lagoon”.

One of the presents our one (and a bit) year old daughter got for Christmas was a Veterinary Surgery for “Happy Land” (which is somebody’s idea of what “normal” British life should look like, and it’s a bit scary I can tell you). Amongst the bits and pieces that came with the shop were: the vet himself, a nurse, a land rover and an assortment of patients: 2 dogs, a cat and this bloke on the left. A man with a (presumably) sick parrot.
Hang on a minute - maybe that’s why Happy Land does look slightly grotesque!