Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

Little flowers growing in the pond…

Watercress.

Water Forget-Me-Not.

Both of them spread vigorously, although at least the Watercress confines itself to the ponds!

After the England match on Sunday, while the pies are heating up, we stroll out into the garden. Two of my friends started arguing, not over whether Beckham’s wonderful goal made up for the way England had played previously, but over whether my dragonflies are in fact damselflies. So, armed with this photo:

and a couple of iBooks, they spent the next hour or so researching, before claiming that my dragonflies, as described in a previous post are in fact Common Blue Damselflies. I wasn’t happy with the “common” bit (though they are distinctly blue), so they found they were able to commute this to Azure Damselfly.

So I must now issue a humble apology for misleading you. Sorry about that.

Just think – in a mere fortnight, it will all be settled.

There are now enough results to see the final lineup. I’m not giving away any of the results (and it’s not over yet), but with the score currently standing at Eccleston 4, Tennant 3, it’s now known the playoffs look like this:

Round eight: Playing with Time
Father’s Day vs. The Girl in the Fireplace

Round nine: Er… Got References to Previous Episode(s) In It In Some Way
Boom Town v.s Love & Monsters

Round ten: The Finale
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways vs. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday

The extra Tennant episode that remains on the bench is Fear Her, largely because it’s been the worst so far (it will be remembered for just two things: a truely superb materialisation gag, and the “I was a dad” line).

I’m late to this one – it’s been doing the rounds for over a week – but it’s fully deserving of the exposure it’s getting.

The story so far: Vincent Ferrari rings AOL to cancel his account. Knowing of their reputation, he decides to record the experience. Then the masterstroke, he posts it on his blog, insignificant thoughts.

AOL: “I’m just trying to help here”
VF: “I called to cancel the account. Helping me would be cancelling the account.”
AOL: “No it wouldn’t”

There’s a mirror of the recording here.

It gets picked up by blogs and on forums and by the local and national media including CNBC.

AOL issue an apology and sack the employee concerned, presumably the fact that he was rude ( not that they wouldn’t have scapegoated him anyway, but he made it easy for them).

What they fail to acknowledge is that is that it’s not until 3′34″ that “Jonathan” crosses the line. It’s the first 3′34″ that AOL should be ashamed of, when Jonathan is doing his “job”. Their response should have been a change of policy and a major retraining programme for their customer service staff. Or even just putting cancellations through to customer services rather than sales. They disregard the complaint as an atypical one-off glitch in their customer “service”.

All the same, it may do some good for these companies to know that the appaling disregard they have for their customers’ time and intelligence can so quickly gain widespread coverage. Another hooray for the internet!

Half time in Germany v. Sweden. Just time to get another picture, so here are my shamrock. It’s lovely and sunny right now, so they’re wide awake, but they like to sleep at night. They seem to absolutely thrive on our chalky soil.

But I think it’s also time to take some action to maintain the frog-flora balance, here on Little Storping…

So they’re moaning at their advertisers. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve to lose their revenue, just as they’ve lost their ratings. ITV plc has no interest in the viewer.

It’s Thatcher’s fault. It was one of the last acts of her administration to sow the seeds of destruction for the original ITV network.

I remember when the 1990 Broadcasting Act meant we no longer got TV listings in our free paper (they’d been copyrighted so a huge fee could be charged, which the weekly advertising rag couldn’t afford). I was reminded of this when BDS (bastards) shut down the excellent listings service provided free as a service by Andrew Flegg. The service is widely used by interactive websites and various amateur and commercial PVR hardware and software solutions. It’s important because the listings providers are lagging behind the technology and have failed to come up with a standard for driving this forward; the open source community stepped in with XMLTV and Andrew Flegg provides an incredibly flexible delivery service for this. Actually, the greedy BDS were only able to shut down the ITV listings on Flegg’s site, as the BBC (a public service broadcaster!) has actively been promoting listings distribution through backstage. ITV have refused to allow its listings to be distributed through Flegg’s bleb.org.

Who does this hurt? The viewer.

But I don’t care. I can still get all the other channels through bleb.org, so I’m not going to go elsewhere for my ITV listings, as I hardly watched ITV at all. Sometimes I’d see a film or something I fancied watching on ITV, and now I won’t. ITV loses: I don’t watch their adverts even sometimes anymore. ITV closed down the listings because ITV plc sees itself as a money making enterprise first, broadcaster second, hence its whinging about advertisers. It shoots itself in the foot. It’s the attitude that’s seen viewers turning off, and the reason I so rarely watch anymore: it is such a piss poor broadcaster. From the 60s to the 90s ITV produced and broadcast shows that were both popular and good (The Avengers, Spitting Image, even The Bill) and now it produces shows that aren’t even very popular any more, and are definitely crap.

And the rot all set in with The Broadcasting Act 1990, as we saw most of the franchise holding companies swallowed up by ITV plc. They shrugged off the advertising cap that favoured Channel 4 to allow them to make more money and gradually turned Channel 3 into the kind of network whose most prized shows are the likes of Millionaire and I’m a Celebrity…. It’s been a gradual process, so it’s barely been noticable, and the fuss over the 1990 Act died down long ago. But it has come to pass that this country’s first and oldest commercial network is in terminal decline, and if they disappear into insignificance in 2012 in the multi channel post-analogue era no-one but the shareholders will mourn the demise of the culprits at ITV plc.

Here’s today’s non-frog garden post, under the newly created “flora” sub-category.

Gardeners: could your most useful garden tool be your Mac? Why not create an iCal calendar with recurring annual events set to give you reminders to prune, thin, divide or repot your stock? This free tip was brought to you by Little Storping.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the next in our series of non-frog related garden photos.

This bountiful rhubarb is filed under “fruit”, another garden-related sub-category designed to ensure you have access to the posts most relevant to your particular requirements.

I’ve been tasting wines. Quite a lot of wines. I got through to number 28 (although I think the numbering skipped four or five along the way).

I’m not sure I can remember the good ones. I think there was an M&S Gamay (VDP L’Ardeche, £3.50) that I thought would be nice chilled. I liked a Co-op Western Cape Shiraz Rose (good value at £4.50). And the straight from the freezer M&S Darting Estate Eiswein was delicious (£13 for a half bottle).

But though I’m happy to have tasted every wine going, I have a feeling I missed out on a good story about a vegan friend killing a bird because I was too pleased with myself for being able to say ornithological when I was already on number 12.

In response to a comment that the “Garden & Pond” section was too frog orientated, here’s the first in a series of non-frog garden pictures. I took this over the weekend, when three or four of these bright blue dragonflies were hanging out with me.

Meanwhile, frog fans, don’t worry. Frog pictures will continue, and furthermore there is now a frog subcategory for you to follow, so each reader can easily find stories exactly as they wish. Don’t say we villagers of Little Storping aren’t responsive to readers’ views!