Reflections

1. A man showing his relatives around London was turned off the London Eye by a security guard after a previous search revealed nothing, because one of the relatives spoke Arabic.

The following day, the security guard was still in employment.

2. Ofcom, which is described as the regulatory body governing UK communications, has insisted that scenes in Tom and Jerry cartoons that show one of the characters smoking, be censored when the films are shown in this country.  

3.  A United Airlines flight out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was delayed because a small boy said something inappropriate, according to a government official speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. “He didn’t want to fly,” the official said.

                                        –(Yahoo News Report)  

 

 

1.  From the BBC News:-  The Home Secretary of this nation while making excuses for a security blunder at Gatwick airport in which a 12-year-old boy without papers was allowed into the departure lounge, despite the high state of security, repeatedly uses the word ‘regretfully’ incorrectly, instead of ‘regrettably’.

2.  Also from the News:-  An elderly woman suffering from an attack of claustrophobia is physically subdued on a flight to Washington DC. The flight is diverted to Boston, accompanied by two fighter jets. The woman is taken off the plane, arrested and charged with ‘interfering with a flight attendant’. The passengers are taken off the plane, their luggage is removed and laid out on the runway, while sniffer dogs are used.

3.  Also on the 40 minutes of TV I watched this evening I saw two trailers for programmes, the main feature of which is that people are embarrassed and humiliated.

 

I sometimes have that rather uncomfortable feeling that old people must experience all the time, of being left behind by everything.  This feeling was brought on by my latest experience of car bits.

One day I will write a blog about my SEAT Toledo.  The car itself is lovely, and generally a joy to drive; it is well-equipped and sporty; it is also poorly built, rattly and showing its age (only three years).  SEAT suffer from a shortage of good service centres and also, I suspect, a feeling that this doesn’t matter.  When I wrote to complain to SEAT about problems I had been having, I was politely told to bugger off by the Customer Services Manager.  Things got so bad that I was taking the car for repairs and service to the nearest good SEAT service centre, which happened to be in Weston-Super-Mare, about 120 miles away.

Anyway, it struck me that in my day things were a lot more simple.  When you opened a bonnet you could identify everything you could see.  I had a Cortina Mk III, and it was possible to keep it going pretty much all the time with the judicious use of chewing gum, a pair of pliers and a couple of matchsticks.  If something did go wrong, it would be something you could get to grips with, like a leaky float or a sticky thermostat.

At one point it developed a rather interesting problem.  When the engine was hot, if you stopped for more than five minutes you couldn’t start again.  (For those who are interested, it turned out to be a leaking valve causing local overheating of the engine in the place where the fuel line went past, causing an air-lock.  It was difficult to track down, but once detected it was quite understandable.)  But before the problem was diagnosed, it proved to be possible to keep the car going when this happened, by the simple expedient of unscrewing the petrol pump, waggling it by hand, and then putting it back on again.  Worked every time.

Nowadays things are different.  Shortly after I bought it, my SEAT developed a problem.  Nowadays cars don’t seem to stop when they have a problem, they just flash at you.  I took it in to the service centre I was using at that time, and they told me it was the Vortex Annunciator.  Well, actually I can only guess at what it was, because they never actually wrote it down. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. Eventually the Vortex Annunciator was replaced, and off I went again.

A little while later and I got flashed at again.  I took the car back, and they informed me that it was the problematic Vortex Annunciator again.  I was ready to pick up the car, when I had a phone call telling me that they had discovered a further fault.  It turned out to be a problem with a component that sounded like something Jean-Luc Picard might pick up in a dodgy deal with the Ferengi to give him a little more torque at high warp speeds.  Again, I only heard the name once, because it was never written down.

Well, recently, three months out of warranty, the engine warning light came on again.  I took it down for a diagnostic to SEAT in Camberley, who now service cars and seem very efficient, unlike some of the other places I have been to.  It turns out that I had a broken Lambda Probe, Bank 1. 

Ok.  I accept that.  I accept that I am hopelessly out of date, a living piece of history.  I remember when the milkman came round on a horse and cart.  We don’t even have milkmen now.  I can’t shake off the feeling that cars shouldn’t have Lambda Probes.

Still, I don’t care.  Once my car is fixed I will forget my age and go out with my newly-throbbing Probe and see if I can hit warp speed up the motorway.  

 

 

Online relationships are a curious phenomenon of the twenty-first century.  The eighteenth-century swain probably found his heart beat faster when the stagecoach delivered a scented, sealed package, but when there is a delay of days between question and response, it is difficult to maintain such a high level of excitement.

Nowadays, with computers and with virtual worlds like Second Life, it is possible to meet, fall in love, get ‘married’ and even have children – all in the virtual world of the computer screen.

And of course, one is in the position of being able to meet a far wider selection of people than would be possible in our normal lives, and speak to them in some depth.

It is strange that among all those people we meet, occasionally, for no obvious reason, suddenly a spark is ignited, and it is followed by a torrent of fire that engulfs us. 

The emotions engendered by online relationships are just as powerful as those we experience in real life.  However, it is possible to know someone for five days, to experience love, consummation and loss in that short time, and to feel them all as poignantly as you would in real life. Sad to say, there is some level that is missing.  Because it’s an undeniable fact that online relationships tend not to last as long as real life ones.  And when we do break up, the emotions that did seem to be bonds of iron become smoke and shadows after a relatively short time.  But despite this, many people do manage to make successfully the transition between online affairs to real relationships.

People can sometimes be very snotty about online relationships, but when you are separated by half the planet’s girth it is sometimes the only possibility.  Sometimes it will work, sometimes, regrettably, it will not.  But in virtual life as well as real life, it is usually better to have loved and lost.

– for Phedre