In
the Trashcan!
This was a favourite series of mine in Maggie. It was fun to write, more so
than most articles, as it demanded a fair bit of thought from both parties.
Briefly, 'Trashcan' is based on the BBC television series "Room 101", where
a guest discusses specific irritations that they would like consigned to the
inner darkness of Room 101. The enjoyable twist is in the fact that they
have to convince the regular presenter to do this. They can take a
sympathetic or opposing devil's advocate view, and it is no means certain
that all the choices will make it into Room 101.
Our 'In the trashcan' version ran on an occasional basis in Maggie, so I
figured it was time for a revival. Our first guest for the Alive version is
the chippy fanatic gwEm, who kindly volunteered his opinions for what he
considered to be suitable Trashcan candidates. What follows will show how he
got on!
Go for it Gareth!
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Tourists (especially in London!)
==================================
Let me tell you about tourists! You're late for work, it's pissing down with
rain, and you dont have any underground tickets... Eventually you're at the
front of the queue for the ticket machine? but who is there, but a group of
some kind of tourists.
"Say what button do you press?"
"Is Notting Hill in zone 1?"
"Will a daily travel card work tomorrow?"
"Does this thing take card?"
In frustration you'd love to reach across and press the buttons for them,
but you think better of it, as probably you'll then have to give them
directions to some random attraction, or explain the night bus system.
Later on the street, you're walking in crowds of people trying to get to
where you want to go. But what's this? For no reason an idiot tourist in
front of you stops suddenly without any kind of warning! You trip over their
100s of bags and receive no kind of apology from that bloody tourist! (They
didn't even notice you!)
Tourists should either learn some city etiquette or go.... In the trashcan!
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I hear what you're saying, but at the same time, you've lost 5000 sympathy
points for coming across all London-centric and whingeing! This is from
someone who lives in a town which sometimes asks the question "What's a
tourist?" I get the impression that these people, who are approaching this
new environment in a benign frame of mind, are in conflict with the
Londoner's basic human right to be as rude as possible!
"Gee, hi there cute English person, can you show me the way to (insert name
of attraction here)" (It's usually Americans, isn't it!)
Which gets a swift response;
"Do you get some sort of sick pleasure from this?! You're always on my case!
Were you a Nazi death camp guard in a former life or what?!?" (C)
K.Livingstone, Mayor of London.
Let's face it, it's not just a tourist thing is it? Anyone who can be
described as "out of town" in any way, automatically triggers off a tourette
syndrome sweary attack from the locals. It's as if anyone born outside of
the M25 ring is regarded as a lower form of life?
But yes, I do sympathise, I'm sure it's the same at other touristic hot-
spots. You just have to watch the massed coach parties tramping through
Stratford upon Avon for example, "And on your left, it's Anne Hathaway's
cottage, quick march!" (The horror!) And of course they all assume that
you're there solely for their pleasure and convenience.
Then again, we're all stinking hypocrites. Can you really truthfully say
that you have never reversed roles, that is, been a tourist in another
country? I'm sure you have, even those people who think that they are too
young and street credible to do such a quintessentially middle-aged thing.
This goes for backpackers and gap-year takers too, who think of themselves
as a superior form of traveller. At heart you are still another form of
tourist pollution. So we ought to stand this question on its head, are all
those Greek and Spanish and Turkish locals really so thrilled to have a load
of lovely pissed-up vomiting Brits in their midst?
I think not. The tourist to local relationship anywhere, is based on
grudging tolerance of the former by sheer economic necessity on the part of
the latter. This rule not only applies to the poorer parts of the world, it
is increasingly valid here too! Unless you want to rebuild all that
polluting heavy industry that once made us "The workshop of the world"?!
So I'm sorry, tourists are staying out of the trashbin. You get to take home
with you a copy of this charming song (Hands over a copy of "England Swings
like a Pendulum do..")
(The studio audience starts chanting "Bobbies on Bicycles two by two!")
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!!!!RARE COLLECTORS ITEM!!!! at Ebay auctions
===============================================
What exactly is so rare, for example, about a 520STFM or a Commodore C64?
Thousands of them were produced, and it surely does not warrant being called
a rare collectors item, and the many exclamation marks do not change that
fact.
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I don't think that William Gibson's cyberpunk future ever had a place for a
giant car boot sale in the ether, which is what Ebay essentially is. And
like all car boot sales, it attracts its share of shady characters,
hucksters, and wild-eyed dreamers.
It's not surprising you get claims of scarcity for some rather non-scarce
items. The amount of wishful thinking that Ebay generates would fill the
cubic capacity of seventeen football stadiums, or something. It's not even
common items pretending to be rare that attract the worst forms of
speculation. There was a good example of something actually rare and
desirable in the Atari world in the hands of hopeful idiots.
This was an actual ST-Book, yes the very limited run ST laptop derivative,
which I don't ever remember seeing any on sale in the wild? A former pile
'em high reseller who was well known in the UK scene had one on sale for the
sum of 1500 ukp! Yes, this was their starting bid, and no, they didn't add
on an extra zero by mistake!
That sort of money would make even a serious collector blink. If Gas(teiner)
Computers were serious about getting shot of it, they could lower their
starting price considerably, and have a chance of starting a bidding war,
and actually getting a final bid something near what they were after. But
this 1500 ukp starting price seems to act as a deterrent. It's as if they
don't want to sell it really? But you can be sure it will be re-listed week
after week.
This form of rigid unbending almost anal fixation with maintaining a higher
fixed price level, no matter how badly it shifts, is the undoing of a lot of
the "Look rare C64" crowd. They don't have a clue about their target market,
or the real value of an old computer available in such large quantities it
could be recycled for building material. Instead, there is this form of
ratlike cunning displayed by stupid people that actually fools no-one,
hoping to make pounds off someone even more clueless than them! I'm sorry
guys, but all the suckers, even the ones born every minute, are too busy
chasing up fake lottery wins and "Confidential Business Proposals" from West
Africa to have any time or cash left over for you!
These should really go in the bin, to stop annoying the sensible Ebay users!
SEEN ON EBAY! - Rare Throckmorton & Bennett galvanised steel dustbin, model
GR/005. Manufactured in 1968 as part of a limited run for the Brighton and
Hove District Council. This is in pristine condition, and can be
distinguished from the commonly seen model GR/007 by the ribbed sides and
3/4 height mounted baroque style carrying handles. Starting bid at 1000.00
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Buses!
========
I can hardly wait for the Czuba 'I sent it' email anymore. So I want to put
all the CT60 accelerator boards into the trash can, just because I don't
have one... Nah, just kiddin' ;)
But something that can definitely go in the trashcan is buses. I hate those
things. Firstly, their adherence to timetables is so lax, that I almost
think of them as some kind of vague guideline. Secondly, when they do come,
the stern drivers refuse to let you on unless you have exactly the correct
change, even if its past midnight, pouring with rain, and the next bus is 30
minutes away. However he will let on any other passanger waving at him what
looks as if it might once have been a season-ticket, with a cursory check
lasting less than a second.
If you are lucky enough to get on the bus, there's certain to be no spare
seat, and if there is, it will be next to someone with an unusual smell.
Buses sucks, and they should go straight in the trash can!
As you guess, I just had a bad experience ;)
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Now I'm not sure if we can get anything as big as a bus in the trashcan?
Still, let's take a closer look, see what we can do.
Buses, at least as we in the UK experience them, are a bit of a relic in
some ways. The typical local bus service seems to hark back to a bygone and
unlamented era of public service, given with a snarl. The underlying
contempt for customers is openly expressed with no attempt to conceal it
behind a hypocritical smile and trite greeting. In fact, this contempt is
carefully explained in slow and precisely spoken sentences, with special
audio and visual aids for the deaf and blind.
The driver would rather be back in the depot, doing the crossword over a
leisurely brew. In fact he would rather be anywhere than where he is, in the
driving seat. On a bus service, you will still hear a phrase, once very
common in general use, but less so now, "It's more than my job's worth!"
This is loosely translated into "I *could* go out of my way to help, but I
really don't give a fuck, so tough!"
You will find the Fawlty Towers service ethos alive and well here. This goes
something like "If it wasn't for the feckin' customers, this would be a
brilliant job!"
Next, buses tend to have a bit of an unfortunate reputation as a weirdo
magnet. So yes, you will get on, and find that the sole unoccupied seat has
that strangely smelling person of indeterminate status on the evolutionary
scale sitting next to you. He will hear voices in his head which are
transmissions from the invading Klingon army in low earth orbit. They will
be in league with the CIA to arrange a (nearly) bloodless takeover,
naturally.
Also at certain times of the day, they are infested with school children,
which is lovely, if you treasure and store up precious memories of
behavioural fetidness, that is.
The Third-worldness of bus travel in certain parts of of the country,
especially Liverpool, is emphasised by the unsupervised upper deck being
made vandal-proof through removing the upholstered seating and replacing it
with bare benches. In fact, I'm being harsh on the Third World, as most of
the people there are basically nice, and have had a poor lot in life, and
wouldn't needlessly damage stuff provided for them just for a laugh.
On the other hand, it seems a bit Thatcherite to have a go at the bus
services. You might remember her comment on the subject that anyone over
thirty still using a bus was a loser? That does tend to look a bit
reactionary and self-centered perhaps? Also, bus travel serves a very useful
purpose in stopping the loonies from taking driving tests. Grud knows,
there are enough of them taking over the roads, directly in front of me most
mornings as it is! And of course, they do perform an essential community
service for the transport needs of those people without a car.
So I can't put them in I'm afraid. Now if you had nominated the Eurolines
overnight sleep deprivation and extreme discomfort coaches, especially the
service going to Hamburg in 1996, there would have been no hesitation!
So you get to take home this exclusive DVD with all episodes of this
stunning 70's sitcom, "On the buses". (Audience murmur "I'll get you
Butler!")
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Meaningless Cryptic Spam!
===========================
Sure all spam sucks, but I can somehow see some point in advertising
products, and trying to con the unwary. But a new kind of spam started to
come into my inbox recently. Spam which offers NOTHING AT ALL! just a
seemingly random collection of words like abstract Japanese poetry.
This spam benefits no-one, not even the sender, and just acts to fill my
inbox, waste my time, and reduce the bandwidth of the internet. so I'd like
to put the whole lot in the trashcan! (I mean, I do it anyway, but why not
trash it all before it even comes into existence?)
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Yeah, hate it or loathe it, we can always rely on spam to give us our fix of
dodgy medication in chinese script, iffy loans (US customers only), and
outright scams. But this whole cryptic thing is something new.
Now I've not been following current spam trends that closely. I've got an
outmoded Atari computer as my main means of negotiating the perilous skidpan
that is the current information highway, and for some reason I seem to miss
out on most of this? Maybe it's because I get to delete all the (ahem)
unsolicited advertising material whilst it's still on the server. Or maybe
if I did download something out of sheer curiosity, any trojan contained
within simply wouldn't be able to work! Maybe I should get a current Wintel
with Microsoft's latest offering to get a better handle on this topic?!
But it seems that you've been watching closely, and you're quite right to
alert us complacent Atarians to these new manifestations. I also read up on
these issues from time to time, as a form of gloating at people more up to
date and less fortunate than myself, and it seems that the majority of aware
users now have some sort of spam filter installed.
The whole cryptic spam scene seems to be an attempt to defeat the filter
algorythms. This suffers from the classic hackers dilemma of fixing the
immediate problem, but losing sight of the overall objective. The more
cryptic a message becomes, the more roger irrelavant to the task of
salesmanship it becomes. I even see spammers using some kind of bonkers
random ascii pseudo machine-code in their subject titles. Yeah like your
customer base is going to be aroused to a buying frenzy by a header that
looks as if you might be better off by compiling and running it!?
To be honest, I'm struggling to work out what the underlying logic is behind
these cryptic spams. Is there really a market for unlucky halfwits who have
been 'forced' to use an internet firewall, and they're missing their cheap
viagra so badly, that they are begging for some fiendishly clever lunatic to
bypass these safeguards for them? It's a tacit admission of defeat by the
spammers, an acknowledgment of the hatred and contempt that the public has
for them, but they don't seem to realise it yet!
For the sensible majority, spam is dead in the water, it is deceased. It has
climbed the curtain rail and joined the choir invisibule, but the spammers
refuse to accept the evidence squatting large and Buddha-fashion in front of
their eyes, and go away gracefully, I say in the bin with them all!
(A load of random ascii characters fly into the bin, sucked in by an evil
looking black wind. The studio audience look down into the opened bin, and
cry out in unison "Bloody hell, that looks like the backstage area of a
Dildo Fatwa copy-party!")
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Faux-Kentucky Chicken fast food places!
=========================================
Why should we trash fried chicken places? Mainly because the quality of the
chicken they serve is very poor. But secondly I have an over-saturation of
them in the area of my house, all with names like 'Royal Fried Chicken',
'Tennesse Fried Chicken', and 'Real American Fried Chicken'... The smell is
quite disgusting too. And in the morning, hundreds of chicken bones litter
the streets around.
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Faux-Kentucky Southern Fried chicken joints. Surely a cornerstone of our
nutritional ill-health, and certainly a worthy subject for inclusion in the
trashcan?
Let's start with the fact that they're not even good enough to merit a badge
of excellence from Colonel Sanders himself. And Kentucky Fried Chicken is a
rather baseline eating experience, even if you are a fat vitamin fan. And
whilst we're on the subject of Colonel Sanders, what exactly was he a
Colonel of? Some sort of secret biological warfare unit which mutated
chickens for unknown but undoubtedly hideous ends?
So when you go to a faux-Kentucky fried chicken joint, you're getting an
uninspired second hand copy of something that wasn't all that great in the
first place. And in this case, a double negative does NOT make a positive,
just something twice as bad!
Next up, these places are a scumbag magnet. They are certainly a hangout for
that most media-hyped of white trash social groups, the "Chav" or "Charver"
(or "Townie"). I remember experiencing such a place in downtown Rochester,
(the teenage single mother capital of Europe,) a couple of years ago, in
the drinking hours of the evening, Every other customer in there was a
clinching argument for some kind of retroactive abortion, or at least better
contraception in the early 1990s period?!
(OFMAG Diskmag official watchdog report:- The complaint about the over-use
of the "Teenage single mother capital of Europe" metaphor has been upheld.
This organisation has listed around 4700 communities within the UK that
could reasonably be identified as such, and we feel that continued useage of
this metaphor is just sheer laziness on the part of the author...)
We've also got to consider what kind of cultural values that these places
are covertly supporting. Just take a closer look at the fact that it is
SOUTHERN fried chicken. As in SOUTH USA fried chicken, or PRO-SLAVERY fried
chicken?!? Should we be celebrating this kind of value system by culinary
means? You could confidently expect a huge uproar if someone started a chain
of "Mein Kampf" Currywurst restaurants (Made with Corporal Adolf's secret
recipe and prepared at blitzkrieg speed!) I don't really see any difference
from that unlikely scenario, and the whole southern fried chicken deal.
To make the whole experience more authentic, why not provide new staff
uniforms? Some flowing white robes, topped off with a pointed hood would do
it, and don't forget the burning cross out front! (Actually, Klan robes
would be quite a good protection against splashing hot fat.. Oh, what am I
saying!!)
Of course these restaurants have to go in the bin! (A satisfying crash
ensues, although there are still some scattered chicken bones lying around
the bin that flew out again..)
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Porno pop-ups!
================
When surfing the web, these guys always seem to appear. We should trash them
all because it makes it 1) Look as if you're surfing for porno stuff if
someone walks by, 2) Clicking them away is an annoyance, 3) They generate
cookies and spyware, and 4) Porn is totally irrelevant to the sites I'm
viewing.
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gwEm, the imperial.ac.uk email address gives away the fact that you
currently reside at one of our fine higher education institutes, does it
not?
I'm guessing then, that you are using their facilities for the majority of
your online needs. I'm going to say that if this is the case, your sys admin
people are a hopeless shower of lamers. This is the second trashbin topic,
that implies they aren't up to the job! After getting a shedload of spam
which we sorted out earlier, you're now telling me that you also suffer from
the curse of porno pop-ups. You might rightly ask what are these people
doing for their salaries, apart from ordering themselves 42 inch plasma
screens and blade servers for their own personal use, and strutting around
in dark shades, Matrix style, all day long?
We have a network at our workplace. It too is connected to the internet. Now
our IT Support people get a lot of stick, sometimes with good reason. But I
will say in mitigation that they do seem to have the whole unwanted
intrusion from the outside world thing well under control. Their internet
access policy has a blocking filter, sometimes seemingly random, but it
keeps those pop-ups away. Also we do have a good spam filter. This is two
guys running a network going between three locations, 150 miles apart. They
also have many other things to do of a typical working day, from making
major system changes, to bailing out a lowly user with a wonky screen or
printer. How come they can manage to keep the nasties away, but the great
and good at your place can't?!
I think you can work out that porno pop-up's aren't going in, but we're
seeking to round-up the IT support staff at your place to go instead!
For the full-on unwanted porno experience, please take these Breakpoint '05
tickets, with a special front-seat pass for the 'Mr Freshness' naked drunk
PeeCee scener competition on the stage! (gwEm nervously eyes up a nearby
shopping trolley which has a drunk Norwegian sprawled in it...)
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Thanks gwEm, you did well. You failed to get tourists, buses, and porno pop-
ups into the trashbin, but you did get rid of !!Rare collectors items!!
Cryptic spams, and pretend Kentucky fried chicken. The thanks of a grateful
Atari scene fly out to you!
Now the rest of you, it's your turn! Do you want to have a go at putting
stuff in the trashcan for future issues, if you think you're hard enough?
The rules are simple, six topics, three of them can be computer related, the
rest more general. I do need a fairly detailed reason why you loathe
something for this to work. One word suggestions won't do it. Also no
outright ranting or abuse, racism etc, but you guys are far too sensible for
that, so I hardly need to tell you :-)
If you are still not sure of the kind of thing that makes a good trashcan
session, then this article makes a pretty good 'user guide'!
One last thing, if you want to do one of these, I need the nominations in
plenty of time before the next issue, so I can sit down for a good long time
to think up some appropriately witty responses.
Anyway, good luck!
CiH and gwEm,for Alive Mag, Various '05.
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