Crosswords

I was about to write something about why I like the Times Crossword, when Lo! They have annoyed me three times in as many days. They have got a new crossword editor - which is news that strikes fear into the hearts of all the readers. And well-justified fear in this case, I am sorry to say. Both the level of accuracy and the general tone have already deteriorated appreciably, and uncouth modern references now pepper the clues and the answers.  

What we all used to like about the Times crossword (the cryptic one. I can't do the straightforward one, it's far too difficult) was that it expected better from its solvers.  The amount of learning needed afforded the right degree of difficulty so that it felt like a worthwhile achievement if one completed the crossword. We had to know a bit of Latin, Greek, Shakespeare, Newtonian physics etc. - but familiarity was not required with common street parlance, nor with who won the Football in 1973. It harked back to a more elegant time when gentlemen knew how to behave and the riff raff were kept firmly out of sight below stairs. Even the drug references were restricted to the hopelessly out of date E for ecstacy. God, no-one round here's taken that stuff for YEARS.

With this new editor they've got, we are subject to things like 'Princess' indicating the letters DI, (come come, man, 'Diana'? Surely Augusta of Saxe-Gotha springs more readily to mind in connection with the title?) and we have had 'sugar' as a clue for 'drat' i.e. referring to inarticulate people's habit of saying "sugar" as an expletive.

In the Times Crossword the compilers are forbidden to use more than 4 anagrams per puzzle. That is quite enough as they are useful for getting you started (they are always quickly solvable) but too many in a puzzle just make it boring and unsatisfying. Let us hope the silly new fellow does not change this rule. 

Checked squares are the ones in both across and down answers. In the Times Crosswords all words must have at least half the letters checked, and although words can have two unchecked letters in succession, they cannot be the first two or last two letters of a word. Other crosswords that disobey these rules are annoying and horrid and I do not do those. However in the Times sometimes nearly ALL the checked letters are vowels which makes me want to punch the editor. Vowels in the checked letters are USELESS. They should try to have at least 85% of the checked letters consonants -  and helpful ones, not T or N.

The clues under the old editor were always properly constructed and you knew you could trust them to be so.  With this new editor the evidence so far is not reassuring.
They recently had a clue which purported to consist of 6! letters. (They put in brackets after each clue, how many letters the answer has. This is supposed to save you from having to drag your weary eyes across to get that information for yourself by looking at the grid.) 6! means 6x5x4x3x2x1 which is 720 and the grid is only 15x15 so here we have more evidence of careless proof-reading.

Last week they made the catastrophic error of printing the wrong grid for the clues.

The Shame of Fleet Street

The first 2 clues were decoy ones that did fit the grid, thus lulling the solvers into wasting several minutes trying to do the next ones. Times staff were unashamed, merely printing next day a tiny-fonted explanation (NB not an apology) in which they blamed their mistake on 'a printing error'. Fie. It was just astonishingly lazy checking of copy if you ask me, and a blunder for which the new editor should have faced both instant dismissal and lifelong social ostracisation.

Disgraceful when you think we are spending £1.20 to get this. I would like them to reinstate the old editor.

"What the...?"  Horrified reader looking at crossword.

UPDATE: 2nd April. This may have been their idea of an April Fool but if so it does them no credit. Yesterday they printed the right Across clues, but the wrong Down clues for the grid. April Fools jokes should be funny and not harm anyone. This was not amusing and it harms i) my pocket and ii) their own future circulation numbers. Since they did not even bother to print one of their tiny-fonted explanations this time I wrote to them 
Dear Sirs,
On Tuesday 1st April you have for the second time in recent days printed the wrong grid for the crossword clues (crossword number 25,749 on this occasion). This is shoddiness taken too far. The new crossword editor should hang his head in shame. I buy the Times mainly for the crossword which used to be of a consistently high standard but the new editor has swiftly lowered that standard. I shall buy the Telegraph instead if you are not careful.

Yours faithfully,

                         pp G-AHLK

and received back the most grovelling apology and a cheque for £45,000,000.

No I didn't.

I received back a feeble mass-circulated email with "the right grid" in an attachment. Actually it was the same grid but with the correct Down clues. Dolts. No assurance was given that they are the slightest bit interested or care a hoot.

Therefore, if  n_Ti  and  n_Te  are the no. of copies sold of the Times and Telegraph respectively today,

here are the new circulation numbers for the "quality newspapers" tomorrow :

The Times :          n_Ti -1

The Telegraph :    n_Te +1

 

               

The Times gets it in the Neck

The Times of London likes to think it is very superior to all other newspapers. However over the years it has allowed this sense of superiority to lull it into lowering its standards to a disgraceful degree, without really noticing. BUT... WE have noticed, and we are not impressed. They are now employing some of the laziest journalists available in Fleet Street. And it is like incest a Hotbed of Nepotism. They are all related to each other, some OPENLY. A few have the decency to try to mask their relationships, but an alert reader can soon discern that they are married to/ carrying on with/ children of other members of staff. It makes us who would like to get £10million a week for writing a few rubbishy column inches but lack any uncles or godparents etc. on the Times' payroll, very annoyed. I buy the paper most days, only because I like their crossword, but I resent every penny they get out of me. It is currently £1 4s 0d per day which is a lot. They never print my letters that I write them either, the ungrateful fools.

Allow me to give a brief resumé of their supposition, which is that you, the reader, are assumed like themselves to
i) hate Christianity and Christians,   Well I don't. I am very devout.
ii) admire the Beatles,   Wrong! I despise Beatles.
iii) have billions of £ at your disposal,   My personal fortune consists of 2/- and the keys to the family chocolate safe (where the chocolate lives. There is usually nothing in it as the safe is not secure since all the teenagers in the district know where the key is.)

iv) are obsessed with your appearance and diet,   I am not. Any fule can see that.
v) know what quinoa and taichi are and what they are for,   Nope. Not got a clue. 
vi) live in London,   183 miles distant here
vii) avidly follow the football and other sports   No thanks, I can not abide sport.
in short, viii) are a halfwit (a rich and overprivileged one) and are related to a member of staff. 
Adhere to these demands and you will enjoy reading The Times. 

Here is a typical day's layout:

Page 1: usually a hideous photograph of a footballer or other sportsman in an unfortunate pose dominates.

Pages 2 and 3: Advertisement. Waste of paper.

Page 4: Boastful list of contents, plus frivolous reports about serious issues. This is to show the readers that Times writers care NOTHING for the suffering of others. In the bottom left hand corner a useless recipe requiring ridiculous exotic ingredients you have never heard of. The recipes have not been tested and do not work.

Pages 5-26: Home news. Never anything interesting. Occasional pictures of baby animals. Articles on topics of interest to me eg maths, science usually hopelessly ill-informed and badly-written, full of elementary blunders such as calling thoracotomies 'thoracectomies'.

I apologise for including this
but I needed to show you how nasty it is.

Pages 27-29: Trite trivial nonsense from column-writers who really ought to know better. We have NO WISH to hear another word, nay not even in a thousand years, about Matthew Parris's llamas or his young man or his estate in rural Spain. Nor do we want to know some rich nepotism-fuelled young puppy's misguided and infantile views about the political landscape thank you very much. The use of inappropriate present tense is seen here increasingly often, which I view as a very alarming development. Extremely unpleasant and vulgar cartoon fills half of page 29 and here is a sample (right):

Page 30: Opinionated opinion from the leader writers. Only read this if you wish to elevate your BP above safe levels. Also Nature Notes which is written by someone's great-uncle and you can tell he hasn't been outside in years, telling us about out of date things which finished weeks ago due to this year's early spring etc. but since they happened later in the year during 1950 or whenever he actually wrote the column we are given false information about the first sightings of wood anemones and the arrival of spring migrants.

Page 31: Letters from readers. Better than the stuff written by their own people. However as mentioned above, my own contributions are always omitted.

Pages 32-38: World news.

Pages 39-50: Business news. I haven't got any shares or gold or anything so I couldn't care less.

Pages 51-52: Obituaries. The best copy found in the obituaries section is provided by readers themselves, when they write in with their own recollections of the deceased. Court circular (v important. One MUST know where Her Majesty will be at all times).

Page 53:  Births, Forthcoming Marriages and Deaths announcements. Worth seeing as they sometimes bring information about people one knows. 

Weather Report: Concealed somewhere between pages 2-71. Can rarely be located. Why the hell they can't put it somewhere easier to find, eg. front or back page, I do not know.

Pages 55-71: may be safely used for lighting fires. Believed to contain sports news but I never look.

Back Page: a final Sports image with accompanying drivel, and then... at last! The Crossword!

However you still have the sillily named T2 to look through, which contains copy even more fatuous than that in the main paper. Often has a shockingly extreme close-up of some superannuated actress or unshaven footballer on the front cover. Horrible.

Over-indulged hip young columnists infest the pages within, voicing their offensive thoughts and stating such as definite facts in terms calculated to indicate that we must either concur or earn their scorn. They tell us about fashion, medical and psychological matters, food, feminism, London theatre shows and other stuff we don't want to know. They always use phrases banned under G-AHLK guidelines, eg. the term 'movies', 'like' when they mean 'as though', the construction 'just because...doesn't mean'. For the sort of money these people are paid you'd think the editor might employ ones who can use proper English.

Prof Tanya: Grandmothers write in to ask what to do about their daughters-in-law's poor parenting. Prof Tanya's solution always involves telling her that everyone involved is suffering mental health problems and the whole family needs to go into therapy. Often she advises that 2-yr-olds should be given their own bathrooms, and other impractical suggestions. She NEVER says "You are an interfering old harridan and should get out of your grandchildren's lives," which would be the obvious and sensible riposte.

Television and radio listings. Reviewer's choice recommendations help you to know which programmes to avoid.

Back pages : Sudoku (a pointless but entertaining number puzzle), and a new quick crossword they have brought in which means I have more things to distract me from getting on with the housework. The sudokus are graded by difficulty, and I am so clever that I only do the very difficult ones. It is a sign of their shoddy workmanship that often the sudokus are wrongly labelled and the 'difficult one' is so easy that it is an insult to readers' intelligence. 

Look at these stupid sudokus. 'Gentle Killer', what a daft name. Killers should be deadly. However, see how laughably easy this one is.

At £1.20 we expect better, Editor. Get to it.

An Attack on Radio 4

The bewildering news that Radio 4 have been doing a retrospective on their programme Ramblings prompts me to offer a critique of their broadcasting values.

If you haven't heard of "Ramblings" you aren't going to believe this: Ramblings is a RADIO programme about going for a walk with a group of ramblers. Try to contain your excitement. There is a different ramblers' group each week.

As you can imagine the subject does not lend itself well to radio. Listeners are treated to the sound of a fat old bore puffing up hills telling us about the puddles, distant farmhouses, unidentified birds etc. that she can see and informing us when the sun has come out. Not very useful, since she is somewhere we have never heard of, and the recording took place months previously so the weather information is not even current. Yet, because it is 10 yrs since the first edition of it, or something, they are reprising some of their favourite episodes. Look, Controllers of Radio 4, it didn't work the first time, and it sure as hell aint going to work now it's 10 yrs out of date.

A quick look through the schedules for the last few weeks tells us plenty about the state of despair in which the Radio 4 personnel find themselves, faced as they are with 137hrs 40mins per week to fill. Regular programmes include :

You and Yours 

Consumer Affairs programme. Worthy dull people discuss topics of utter tedium. This week:

• i) Childcare costs. The presenters ponder the choices parents are making: go out to work or stay at home? Largely irrelevant since most people do not HAVE any choice. 
  
• ii) Furniture is one of the biggest areas of customer complaint in the UK. The Furniture Ombudsman explains how to complain effectively. Gosh, thanks!
• iii) Cosmetic surgery: many industry figures believe the new regulatory rules fall short of what's needed to protect consumers. Fancy!
• Finally, you are rewarded with light relief in the form of : "Budgie Round-up"  - Listeners' emails about budgerigars. God help us.

What hope is there for them, with subject matter like that? They ought to call it You and Bores. On daily, ¾ hr at lunchtime.

OK! You can wake up now!

Money Box Live

Offers an opportunity for listeners to phone in with their money queries interspersed with dreary features on subjects such as 'The Right Mortgage for You', and 'Last-minute Tax Planning'. As stultifying on the airwaves as it looks on paper. Routinely referred to even by Radio 4 staff themselves as Money Box Dead.

On for a full ¾ hour every Wednesday afternoon, week after week after week.

The Archers.

Don't get me started. 50-yr-old soap opera which long ago established a baseline level of banality to which it adheres doggedly, fluctuating only to astound the audience with the inane nature of some of the storylines (eg. Will Granny Archer's shepherd's pie find favour with the grandchildren? Henry is getting a new bed. Helen and Tom or someone choose a venue for their wedding. - the on-going sagas for the current week). The inability of the actors to deliver a consistent Borsetshire accent adds, perhaps, a tinge of interest; it gives the social anthropologists something to complain about, at least. The theme music is extremely irritating and should be banned under the Geneva Convention. 
The Archers is on twice a day every single day except, blessed relief, Saturday. Bumper Edition (rpt) on Sundays.

Loose Ends

Sadly they fill the spot left vacant by the Archers on Saturday, with "Loose Ends", Lord have mercy, which really would be better left out to die. Billed as "an eclectic mix of conversation, music and comedy" (in their dreams) this is actually a  completely futile programme in which vacuous media persons drone away about themselves. A waste of time.

More or Less

Oh spare us do. This is a programme about statistics and as such ought to be really interesting and could be so - but no! All they do is state the obvious, at incredible length, for the whole half hour, and thus leave no time for explaining how to see through the manipulations that can be wrought on our opinions by the deceitful handling of data. The presenters could be exposing all manner of idiotic but fascinating misunderstandings perpetrated by journalists who don't know anything about statistics. They have been given a really promising, golden, subject with potential for useful and entertaining programmes but they work their reverse alchemy on it and render it dust and ashes. Lazy stuff indeed. They sound like a bunch of schoolboys who know nothing about the subject they have been given for their homework and are just trying to fill 2 sides of A4 as demanded by their teacher.

Front Row

This comes on every evening at 7.15, regular as clockwork and all the housewives automatically reach for the off button. It has features such as "discussion with Bob Hoskins about being directed on a film by somebody-or-other about whom we neither know nor care." This might be of slight interest to, say, Bob Hoskins himself, and his mother, if she is a particularly doting parent, which I doubt (have you SEEN Bob Hoskins?) but there really can't be anyone else willing to listen. Thus we have a programme whose content will appeal to 2 people at most, i.e. 0.0000000003% of the population, and such pinpoint niche marketing is inappropriate for national radio.

Adding insult to injury and demonstrating a remarkable lack of percipience, once a week they air 'Pick of the Week', a self-congratulatory resumé in which they unerringly home in on all the programmes you least enjoyed, and make you listen to bits of them again.

Verdict : Radio 4 is failing in its duty. You can't expect people to do the ironing whilst listening to this tosh. We want amusing comedies, news from the Tannery, and articles on fine wine and aeroplanes. We'd like the questions in the quiz programmes to be easier too and on topics we know about.

In accordance with internet tradition in these sorts of cases, here is a picture of a kitten.

Due to the boringness of the radio programme it was listening to, the kitten has fallen asleep.

Floods Outrage

Across the country in recent weeks we have seen floods galore, Firemen and Army deployed, old ladies rescued by burly lifeboat crews, bridges washed away, towns marooned and roads under 6' of water. Look at these beautiful pictures of elsewhere in Somerset:

I feel sorry for the poor people who have been flooded, I really do, but you can't say it hasn't been exciting. I defy anyone not to want to get out to these thrilling scenes in their gumboots and enjoy the drama:

At Porlock however, the conditions have been pathetic - the stream behind our house has not risen more than a couple of inches, and that was only for about one hour. This despite 18 months of solid rain. The roads have been passable throughout and no communities have required assistance. Royalty have not thought fit to visit and we have been ignored by the MPs.  The council is to blame since they have spent the summer squandering our council tax money on clearing ditches, unblocking drains and keeping waterways clear. This is Damn Boring. There has not been a day's schooling lost, not so much as a free hour off vouchsafed to any worker and hardly a puddle has been available for splashing in. Very disappointing and an utter swiz.

Better days: this was our house in Sussex in the best flood we ever had; 3'1" deep in the kitchen. Great for me as I was a child at the time but our parents were not pleased.

Heroic Priests

During the recent events at Kiev the Priests of the Eastern Orthodox Church have been showing everyone how being a priest ought to be done. They are operating at peak excellence and it is inspiring for us all. Even the Times, which hates Christians, has been printing pictures which elicit admiration for the priests and which do a lot to strengthen the faith of many of us. These men are real shepherds and bravely stand among their flock as priests should. Look at this one here:

The soldier is pointing a gun straight at his head but he just stands there like Gentle Jesus. This is v helpful not just for his congregation there but for us who see the picture as well and I thank the Lord for it. In the picture you can see the soldier looking at the photographer and thinking 'Damn, I'd better not. This wouldn't look good. Else I would.'

Here's how we like our priests - tough as hell and holding a cross.

Dispensing strength and consolation

Meanwhile our Archbishop (Welby) has announced that he thinks the govt. cuts in welfare are the reason the Food Banks are in greater demand than they used to be. Well well. He has said there will be a £10,000 enquiry about it. £10,000 to find out what he already knows. What does he think it's going to discover? That the increased need is brought about because President Putin has been sticking pins into a voodoo doll of England? That the gay weddings are causing it?

Bags of rice are a Food Bank staple and cost 40p (8/-) for  1kg (2lb 3¼oz) if you buy the Value brand. Hence Archbishop Welby's £10,000 enquiry junket money could have bought 25,000 bags of rice providing 176,250 portions - and that is assuming a 5oz portion which is generous enough for my teenagers who have very inefficient metabolisms and eat accordingly. That's 176,250 meals foregone, just to check whether Vladimir Putin has been doing voodoo on us. Not money well spent.

At the Porlock Tannery Food Bank the greed for free food has caused resort to underhand and deceitful activity as may be seen by the following. This voucher was issued in good faith to one penniless hungry teenager:

He tried to hoodwink the authorities into trebling the amount and when it was therefore refused others got hold of it and in attempting to re-designate it defaced it, multiple times, rendering it invalid - See below : 

Result: no lemon ice cream for anyone. I get to eat it all myself. It is very delicious and if anyone would like the recipe please leave me a message.

Report from the Frontiers of Modern Creative Endeavour

Art News (Bad):

In our house this installation would be called "Who's left all these stupid balls all over the place", or
"Come here this instant you wretched children and put your confounded toys away"
In the Hayward Gallery it glories in the title "Work No 1636".

The spirit of the defunct Exmore Group lives on as its principles are being upheld by an artist, Martin Creed, who is described as 'a self-deprecating 47 year old', and well he might self-deprecate as he was the perpetrator of that absurd Light Going On and Off which inexplicably won a prize once. He calls his, er... antics... 'Work No 1', 'Work No 2' etc. and they are all as irritating as hell. A room with 39 metronomes all at different speeds; a piano with instructions to play interminable chromatic scales; a doorstop that lets the door only open 45 degrees; and a tiresome car that keeps suddenly sounding its horn. You get the idea. Other stuff includes a piece of paper crumpled into a ball, which he has kept since 1995 (Work No 88), and a room half full of balloons... He must drive his wife, or mother or whatever he's got, to distraction. A lot of these are being shown at The Hayward Gallery (£11 plus booking fee) if you would like to see them. Which I doubt. And I warn you - according to the newspaper there is some quite unpleasant rude stuff as well. Not recommended.

Photography News (Good):

This is similar to the famous picture by Steve McCurry of an Afghan girl.

It is of another Afghan refugee girl but this one has been deliberately covered in mud; I suppose it's meant to make her look sweet, but it is unnatural. I mean, what mother whose child was about to be photographed wouldn't wipe it clean first? And if the child is an orphan so we are supposed to think oh poor little thing with no mummy to clean its face, they have got it wrong. It is VERY ANNOYING to have mud on your nose and that child would have rubbed it off straight away, even if it didn't care about the rest of its face being muddy. It just does not look realistic. She's got beautiful eyes though. I'll wash her dear little face for her, if she likes.

This was taken by Muhammed Muheisen, and the girl's name is Laiba Hazrat and she's 6, Lord be merciful unto her, living in Pakistan. I definitely recommend Muhammed Muheisen's excellent photographs which are pictures such as God's own angels take in Paradise.

Fashion News

Here are some things it said in the Times this week, regarding ladies' clothing:

Their text is in purple, because that seems appropriate.
 

1) You can still wear monochrome chevrons and be very much 'of the moment'. Oh thank GOD. They inject a subtle fizz to your workaday office wear, whilst also giving a tougher edge to loud florals.
 

2) The Cigarette Pant is still the trouser shape of choice on the FROW. Good news for FROWs everywhere. My teenagers tell me FROW means fat raunchy older woman. ARE there such things? I think probably not, so Tant pis, Cigarette pant. The joy of the cigarette pant is, apparently, that it is long enough to tuck into an ankle boot.
 

3) For those who have never worn the boyfriend, know this: nothing rocks a black tux jacket and a stonking pair of heeled sandals in a French, insouciant manner more convincingly than a boyfriend-style. A little detective work reveals that wearing the boyfriend means having on some too-big jeans that are all scruffy. This season's ones are sprinkled with paint which gives the impression that you've just been re-decorating the kitchen. Not a look I can imagine any real Frenchwoman sporting in public so the fashion editor has got it wrong here.
 

4) Tweed bouclé, a pair of slacks or some sensible kitten heels are not going to cut it. You will need to spice pastel knitwear up with some geometric patterns, PVC skirting or tonal shade layering. Yep. Sorry, Ladies.

5) The disastrous news that Nike Air Maxes in liquid gold or silver have already sold out at net-a-porter is tempered by silver brogues and rose-gold slip-ons doing roaring trade elsewhere. These add much-needed bling, and humour, by all accounts. Dear me.

6) If you plan to step out in head-to-toe "Angry Flowers" (what?)  you must first operate the Paleo Diet in order to pull off such an ensemble.

Now tell me : how demented do they think women are?  

I haven't got any dress sense and always look frightful, but, with advice like that (above), can you blame me? Here's me, looking like my grandmother :
A shocking wardrobe - where are the monochrome chevrons? The pastel bouclé? The painty jeans? There are no angry flowers, and the footwear (not shown) is disappointingly humourless - black, lacking kitten-heels, and without so much as a spot of metallic detailing.   0/10; but 10/10 for the hat, which is good - very good. Hey, hang on - there are some geometric patterns on the fingerless mittens I had on. Thus am I vindicated.

As for the men... beware, chaps. This is what they want you to wear :

Quiz question: There are a number of reasons why nobody in their right mind would wear this thing. Place the reasons in descending order of significance.
a) All views to your left obscured by silly frame
b) Doorways are impassable
c) You can't sit down
d) That shade of blue shrieks of last season
e) Everyone thinks you're an idiot


 
Another quiz question: This picture shows a splendid dandy fellow in a smart suit and looking jolly nice. Again, a superb hat. And, "we are loving that cane", say the fashion correspondents. Sapeurs like this enhance life for all who behold them.

However even here we can see 3 sartorial blunders - which proves what a minefield getting dressed can be. They are only minor, but can you name them?

Finally, here's that nice Fr Georg in his soutane. Soutanes are dignified, plain, and flattering to even the plump priest. Fr O'Hanrahan himself - a shocking size - looks ok in his. I also approve of the outfits those Afghan terrorists wear. One often sees them in the paper and they are most elegant.


Quiz answers:
1) Reasons for not wearing that picture frame outfit: a), b) and c) are all equally the most significant reasons. The function of clothes is to keep you i) warm and ii) decent. They should not interfere with your day to day functions such as seeing things to your left, sitting down, and getting through doorways. Next in the line of significance is e) - that everyone will think you're an idiot. No-one wants people to think that about themselves. Reason d) is of no consequence whatsoever. Do not be dictated to by the fashion journalists.
2) Blunders made by our dandy friend are :  i) a gentleman does not wear a hat indoors, ii) his tie is awry, and iii) those trouser legs are a bit short so he needs to get his mother to let down the hems.