Morts Musings

It was all over the news yesterday; President Obama has said he will attend the Copenhagen Climate Change summit next month, and the announcement has, not surprisingly, been hailed as a positive move by the media in general.

As always though the devil is well and truly in the details. We certainly need the US, along with China, to sign up to any deal that is reached for it to actually have any meaning; without the participation of the world’s two most polluting nations any climate change agreement that is reached is just so much hot air, as we saw with Kyoto.
As of yet China’s president, Hu Jintao, hasn’t made any committment one way or the other as to whether he’ll attend Copenhagen, so even with Obama’s attendance at this stage there are no guarentees that anything substantive or meaningful will come out of Copenhagen. Still, at least one of the big two polluters appears to be prepared to start taking action, undoubtedly a step forward in the battle to mitigate the impact of climate change before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, although Obama seems genuinely committed to taking action on the issue, how much he’ll be able to achieve is another question entirely. Generally Americans are far less concerned about the threat of climate change than he is. Currently the US has a Climate Bill in front of Congress, which aims for a 20% reduction in US CO₂ emissions by 2020. However it’s taking 2005 as it’s base level, whereas Europe and many other countrys are setting their reduction targets based on 1990 emisson levels. Even then it’s looking like Obama’s going to have to reduce his preposed target from 20% in order to get the necessary support to pass the bill through Congress; hence why he’ll only be pledging a 17% cut, by 2020, when he attends Copenhagen.
It also has to be noted that currently he’s only planning to attend the summit for one day, before heading off to Oslo to accept his Nobel Prize, and won’t be returning to Copenhagen for the crucial final days of the summit, when any agreement will be hammered out.

Overall it has to be seen as a positive step, that a US President is finally engaging in the fight to tackle the effects of Climate Change, but it also has to be remembered that he ultimately serves his electorate, and so, even if Obama is on-board with the struggle to reduce the effects of climate change it’s quite clear that his hands will, to an extent, be tied until he’s able to convince more of the US population that climate change is everybody’s problem!

Apparently, the iconic British brand, M&S, has opened a branch in Marbella. Presumably the aim is to be able to provide British ex-pats, & tourists, with all their familiar home comforts, & on the face of it that might not be such a bad basis for opening a store. After all Brits make up about a quarter of all foreign tourists to visit Spain.

However, I really have to wonder about the timing of the move. Ok, it looks like the economic slump may be coming to an end but even so it seems to me like quite a risky move. In the fairness M&S have said that opening the store is a “toe in the water”, to test the Spanish market, but is now really the time for such experiments? On one hand, the recent low prices in the Spanish property market have to be a good reason to make such a move now, you would think it’s certainly got to decrease the start up costs, and if Spanish property does start regaining its value, as some are suggesting is the case, then picking a store up now may even be a shrewd investment!
Still, if M&S’s target audience for the new store is Brits abroad, (it seems like a fair guess) then the timing starts to look a little more questionable to me. Britain’s slow recovery from recession means that many Brits are still going to be watching the pennies and avoiding foreign holidays, a factor likely to be exacerbated by the current poor Pound:Euro exchange rate, & reflected by the 15% drop in British visitors which Spain has experienced over the past year. What makes the move stranger is that this isn’t the first time that M&S have opened stores in Spain, the previous venture ended in the sale of the nine stores when they failed to make a profit. Still, the thinkers at M&S have no doubt considered all of this, and are presumably willing to accept a loss in the short term.

I suppose a big question is whether they’ll extend their recent move to stock non-M&S branded goods to the new store? Are we to be treated to M&S Marbella car hire? lol

So it’s coming up to that time of year again, I know it must be; the infuriating Xmas ads have appeared everywhere, and last week my local high street turned on its Christmas lights, and there was me thinking it was still November.
I’m sorry I know a lot of people love various aspects of the festive season, but really it just doesn’t do it for me, and I think to a large extent my objections are fueled by how commercial it’s all become, and how the marketing monkeys have constructed this idea that you’re abnormal unless you’re spending lots of money on gifts, food & booze.

It’s still over a month to Christmas and the frenzy is already well underway, if it only affacted those who wanted to buy into it I wouldn’t mind at all, but I swear that the population’s stress levels rise noticably during the weeks leading up to the festival. It’s palpable any time you’re out in the street, stressed people running around the shops desperately looking for all those Xmas “essentials” which find their way on to the Christmas shopping list. It seems totally perverse to me, and not at all in the spirit either of a holiday, or of the festival itself- I strongly suspect that JC would be turning in his grave if he could see what’s become of the celebration of his birth!
Even though I wouldn’t label myself as a Christian I still find the way that the marketing men have completely twisted Xmas to serve their purposes to be utterly cynical and distasteful! What’s worse is that they’ve so suceeded in subverting the spirit of the holiday that those who choose not to “buy the hype” get labeled as “scrooges” by those around them. Bah Humbug indeed!

What should be a time to relax, spend some time with those who matter, and maybe, if it is one’s want, to consider matters spiritual, is completely overshadowed by an orgy of spending & stress; No wonder most people need a break by the time it rolls round to December 25th!

The last couple of years I’ve completely opted out of the whole thing, and I have to say they’ve been a couple of the best Christmasses I’ve ever had! Yes, I did get some nice bits and pieces of food & drink in for while the shops were closed, but nothing excessive, and certainly nothing that required the amount of effort which people all over the country seem to spend on preparing the perfect Christmas dinner!
I gave Xmas shopping a miss too, rather than guessing at what my niece and nephew might be into currently, (and possibly for as far in the future as the next 5 minutes,) I decided to give them some cash each. The marketing idiots would have me labelled as “not making an effort”, but actually I look on it as giving the kids the opportunity to buy something they actually want. Yes, it does also save me the pain of running around over-crowded shops trying to find something which they might like, but frankly that just makes it a win-win situation as far as I’m concerned.
Come the day itself I got up when I wanted to, some time around lunch time, and spent most of the day slobbing around in my dressing gown with the house to myself, eating and drinking nice things, as & when I felt like it, & watching whatever TV I wanted to.
Honestly, it was heaven!

This year’s different, I’ve been severely guilt tripped by the folks, and although my immediate reaction to such guilt tripping is to be thoroughly bloody minded, I may actually cave and make the pilgramage to London to catch up with the family; Nothing puts me in a relaxed festive mood more than negotiating London’s public transport network at its busiest time of the year!
Of course that means thinking about what to get various elder family members, & on this I have as little clue as I do when it comes to my niece and nephew. The difference, I suppose, is that with adults you can give them ethical gifts; at worst they’ll be too polite to complain, and best case is that the gift actually makes them feel good, which is probably better than me buying them something I think they might like.
Dunno, will have to have a think, but the charity idea strikes me as a pretty good fall back if I can’t think of anything which would be genuinely useful to them.

I saw this piece in the Telegraph and thought it was such an innovative idea that it deserved a mention. It’s clear as the internet, and general tech, revolution continues that mobile phones are set to play an increasingly important part in peoples lives. The net is alive with talk about increased mobile access, and it seems these days that most big companies & organisations either have a mobile site or are furiously trying to get one up and running, lest they loose out to more forward thinking competitors.

''Press 2 if the dog ate your homework...'' Yes, now mobile phones can even provide pay-as-you-go English lessons!

However the move to offer English lessons, via mobile phone, to a whole nation has to get cudos for its originality & ambition, and it’s just what the Bangladeshi organisation BBC Janala aims to do. By getting the Bangladeshi Govt on board, as well as the country’s six major mobile networks, BBC Janala has been able to offer hundreds of 3 minute English lessons for only 4p each; Very cheap you might think, and probably not too expensive even by Bangladeshi standards, although one must bear in mind that the average Bangladeshi has to live on less than £2 a day.

The initiative is particularly significant because, while English remains a major international language of business, over the last few decades the quality of English teaching in the country has dropped noticably, which, along with the school systems high drop out rate, has lead to lower English fluency overall.
It would certainly appear that the service is being well received so far; it’s about two weeks since it launched and already it’s had over half a million calls, as well as ~1000 people signing up to the web site each day! So far things seem to be running smoothly, the only potential problem with the scheme that I can think of is people with pay as you go phones running out of credit half way through a lesson!

I saw the clip featured below and thought that it was so awesome that it deserved to be shared! Don’t get me wrong it’s not Damien Walters awesome, but if you’ve not seen it then it might be worth a minute of your life to take a look.
The clip shows a couple of kite surfers taking advantage of the gales, which the UK experienced last weekend, to jump over Worthing Pier! No, really, I’m not kidding, apparently one of them managed to get 70 feet in the air!
Anyway, take a look for yourself:

The internet is of course full of lies, and I’ve seen a fair few comments claiming that this vid is a fake, however, judging by the fact that news sites, including the BBC, have reported the stunt, I’m inclined to think it’s real. Obviously you’ll have to decide for yourselves though.