Sunday 14 April 2019

Let’s all take the mickey out of husbands

Let’sall take the mickey out of husbands This post is about a short series of photographs which appeared first on the web site Bright Side and which were picked up by the on line edition of the Daily Mail dated 3 April 2019.

In about 1965, the irrepressibly comic Mad Magazine published a cartoon of a television anchorman introducing a funny man on a television variety show. I had forgotten this cartoon for years, but for some reason it came to mind after I looked through the article on Bright Side. I've lost the original cartoon, so this thumbnail on the left is my re-creation of it, and that will have to do.

← Click on the thumbnail for a bigger picture.

Firstly, here are some of the photographs that Bright Side and the Daily Mail on line wanted to show their readers. They depict purported acts of incompetence and stupidity committed by the husbands of some women, who sent Bright Side photographs of the outcomes of the acts.

The captions don’t actually say “See how stupid he is?” but if they did, the phrase would make their purpose clearer. These are not jokes, but sneers.

↘ Click on the thumbnails to see the bigger versions.

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, as Oscar Wilde remarked. What Mr Wilde actually said was, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but the highest form of intelligence.” but what I think these gibes are is the sort of thing Jo Brand comes out with. “Men are rubbish, aren’t they. I wish I had a cake. Cakes are much better than men, because they have eggs in, etc.”

Some of these pictures probably really indicate that the husband was at least momentarily confused for one reason or another, but that does not make him stupid. The car keys left in the fridge looks like a genuine senior moment and so does the pile of dishes all drying one on top of the other on the draining board. The bed unmade on one side probably means that the husband has to be out of bed before six in the morning in order to get into the office fifty miles away by eight thirty. The balloons with the wrong date on might reflect how hard the husband was working on a costing for a five mile river bridge that he has to present after lunch in the hope of winning a half billion dollar contract. On the other hand, the fan drying pots and pans in the dishwasher looks fake to me: a wife seeking to amuse the world by faking evidence, which she then presents to everybody on the planet, not just the neighbours, of how stupid her husband would have to be to do that.

Sneering of that sort has a place, of course. Who doesn’t accept that a camel is a horse designed by committee? The phrase is meant to draw attention to the wisdom of crowds, a curious statistical phenomenon which means that when an estimate is made by a large number of people, it is more accurate than an estimate of the same number made by one person, or a small number of people. I put a note explaining what it is at the end of this web page.

So a comparison in which a piece of work is done better by one agent than by another isn’t necessarily an unworthy and demeaning sneer, but the cheap, demeaning sneering needs to stop. But since, at the moment, it’s legal to sneer at men it has to be legal to sneer at women, even though I dread to think what would happen to you if you sneered at a transvestite, here are a couple of wife sneers to even the score.

↘ Click on the thumbnail to show the sneer.

My wife, incidentally, is really nice and very good at everything she does. The sneering is purely for comparative comedic purposes and does not refer to any actual clumsiness or inferiority.

The photographs under discussion are the copyright of the people who took them and sent them to Bright Side.

The wisdom of crowds refers to the extraordinary seeming (until you do the abstruse mathematics behind it) fact that if you have a large number of guesses at a target number, the average of all the guesses is always a better estimate of the target than the best individual guess. In a “guess the weight of the cake” competition, the average of all the guesses is closer to the actual weight of the cake than the winning, and closest, guess.

Thursday 4 April 2019

A letter to the local Tories

A letter to the local Tories I received a leaflet from the local Tories. On the back was a survey titled Let us know what you think. That's it, on the left there. Click to enlarge.

These are my answers. They didn’t fit on the form so I wrote them as a letter and posted them to Ruth Davidson, leader of the dwindling band of Tories in Scotland. Her office address was included on the form as the address to which replies should be posted, so I have not, so far as I know, breached her privacy by posting to the address given.

I have included the questions as images in this post.

I noticed that the first question is laid out over a picture of a French flag. That detail becomes more obvious when you look at the scanned and colour corrected image. Why the Tories would want a French flag on their survey, I can’t imagine. It’s almost as though you could put a French flag at the top of a document by mistake and not notice.

Dear Ms Davidson

Re. Let us know what you think

Thank you for your leaflet, which invited comment on some local issues. My comments won’t fit on the form so I am writing them on paper.

1. Bringing vibrancy back to Scotland’s High Streets…

It has become common for unsuccessful stores to blame their lack of customers on the internet. What I’ve never seen pointed out is that the goods that Debenham’s or Fraser’s sell are difficult to sell on line (perfumes, clothing, cosmetics etc.) Many small stores, with which the internet stores do not compete, are closing too. Debenham’s and Fraser’s also accept orders on line on their own servers, thus diverting lucrative internet traffic back to themselves. The poor financial performance of those companies is unlikely to be due to competition from on-line sales and much more probably due to a mixture of indifferent management and rising poverty. It is the lack of economic activity, the sheer shortage of money, together with the impact of one half-baked management fad after another, that has brought these venerable, hundred year old firms down. The remedy is the relief of poverty: create some well paid jobs, abolish zero hours contracts, double the basic rate of social security, raise the old age pension to £27,000 p. a., increase Job Seeker’s Allowance so that it becomes enough to live on, abolish benefit sanctions, double the minimum wage and so on, so that people have some money to spend.

If you want more people to go to their local High Street to shop, you could try re-opening the public toilets. The fiction that local cafés and small shops would allow any Tom, Dick and Harry off the street to use their toilets without buying anything in the shop was never going to work, and everybody knew it.

Incidentally, I’m also curious to know why this issue is your top priority. Of all the crises that surround us — hunger, illiteracy, immigration, unemployment, train fares, the list goes on for ever — why does top priority go to a couple of chain stores selling cheap Chinese rubbish and going bankrupt?

2. Many key local services are under pressure…

Definitely GP services in my case. It’s absurd to have to wait two or three weeks for a simple GP appointment. The way to have more doctors is to bring back the full student grant, so that anyone who passes the examinations and the interview can become a doctor without needing to have rich parents.

I also doubt that I am the only person who has been struck by the degree of illiteracy and innumeracy displayed by pupils at local schools. I am astonished by the placatory rubbish that has replaced the teaching of reading, writing and maths in the schools.

3. Which crime and anti-social behaviour…

Motorists parking on the pavement. They’re a damn nuisance.

Bring back policemen on patrol, not driving around in cars where they can’t see or hear anything. Real policemen, not PCSOs.

4. Which one local problem do you most want action on?

Unemployment. I have been looking for a job without success since 2014 and I have applied for well over a thousand. There are no jobs. I wish that the DWP would stop believing its own propaganda. The ‘highest employment on record’ is due to poverty. People at the end of their working lives cannot afford to stop work, an appalling state of affairs.

5. Do I want another referendum on Scottish independence?

No, I don’t want another referendum on Scottish independence. I want Scottish independence. How you imagine Scotland can be economically successful when its capital and income are both leached wholesale by the benefits economy of England is beyond me.

6. Who do I think would make the best First Minister?

Me.

7. How am I most likely to vote at the next election?

Probably SNP.

Regards,
(signed) Ken Johnson BA MSc