Dom Davis (The Blog)

So let’s give you an idea of what it’s like to live with my brain and show you what I have to deal with on an almost constant basis. This morning, as I disembarked from the train at Norwich station I thought to myself “Thursday!”, as one does when gearing oneself up for the working day ahead.

This thought rolled around for a while before dislodging some random factoid regarding the naming of the week days and was replaced with “Thor’s Day”, that is, the day named after the Norse god Thor. For some reason this factoid irritated me. “Why”, I thought to myself, “why does Thor get a day?”

At this point a flood of tangential thoughts ensued. Half remembered details of Norse mythology were marshalled in defence of the name; the fact that other gods, such as Freya were also given days; and simply that the week days were named long ago which means their roots had lost much of their meaning, and is also evident in the degradation in pronunciation and spelling. What stood out for me in this cacophony of internal monolog was that Thor had a big hammer. This quickly joined forces with the notion that he was probably over compensating for something and simply added to my ire over his having a day named after him; logic and evidence be damned.

From there is was but a short hop to deciding that I too should have a day. After all, I am the third most important person I know (after Willow and The Zozo) and, since there are 7 days in every week I should easily get a look in. Me, being me, voiced my concern over Thor having his own day, his overcompensating the hammer and my demands for my own day on Facebook. It was here that I first named the day and saw it written down: Domsday.

Upon seeing Domsday I was instantly reminded of “doomsday” and, noting how Thursday was in fact a derivation of Thor’s Day I wondered if my own day might similarly suffer from a deviation from the initial spelling. Could it not be, I surmised, that Doomsday was derived from Dom’s Day and that I already had a day?

Further examination of this postulation had me thinking that not for me some common or garden, run-of-the-mill weekday that was simply churned out once every 7 days with more significance placed upon things happening on the day than the day itself. No, I had the most important of days: I had the last day. After my day there are no more days. Ever.

This addendum to my train of though, and initial complaint was posted as a comment to my Facebook status. In order that I might drive home the victory that I had achieved of one of the more senior Norse gods I felt it necessary to end the missive, in capital letters: IN YOUR FACE, THOR!

While my initial irritation was not with her, and while I did not explicitly state it, it should also be noted that my train of thought also bested Freya, another god. Having, as I had, gained the better of two gods, albeit rather old ones who, in the case of Thor at least, are not really actively worshiped any more, in the space of time it took me to disembark the train, negotiate the ticket barrier and exit the station, I was able to replace the annoyance I had felt with a feeling of jubilation and triumph which placed a smile in my face and a spring in my step.

And so it is that I headed to work, completely and happily oblivious to the fact that my daydreaming and bizarre thought processes had caused me to forget to send my usual morning text to The Zozo wishing her a good day and expressing my love for her, usually via the shorthand notation of x’s for kisses. This failure of memory on my part allowed me to unwittingly clutch defeat from the jaws of victory without even knowing it.

As such the moral of the story is this: do not take on the gods, no matter how old or minor in today’s pantheon, you will lose. #LFMF

There exists, on the internetwebs, various pages claiming that the banana is the atheists worst nightmare. The claim goes that the banana

1. Is shaped for human hand.
2. Has non-slip surface.
3. Has outward indicators of inward content:
   • Green-too early.
   • Yellow-just right.
   • Black-too late.
4. Has a tab for removal of wrapper.
5. Is perforated on wrapper.
6. Bio-degradable wrapper.
7. Is shaped for human mouth.
8. Has a point at top for ease of entry.
9. Is pleasing to taste buds.
10. Is curved towards the face to make eating process easy.

I’m note even going to lower myself to providing the counter arguments for this, plenty of people have done that. Instead I present to you: the baby. The baby was clearly not designed by anyone intelligent:

1. They come out so large it makes childbirth a protracted and traumatic experience.
2. They require feeding every 3 hours, despite the mother needing more than 3 hours sleep.
3. They are incontinent.
4. Their limited vocabulary makes it hard to work out what they want.
5. Unlike most other animals they are born immobile and helpless.
6. They are unable to effectively regulate their body temperature.

If there was intelligent design they’d come flying out with no trauma, would only require 3 meals a day, wouldn’t soil themselves and would be able to indicate what was bothering them. If they were too hot cold they’d be able to manipulate a blanket to adjust their body temperature. if they were designed it was by an idiot… or a sadist

One of the big features of the iPhone 4S is Siri, the voice enabled personal assistant. Siri understands natural language, so the marketing goes, and you can use it to perform a number of functions on the iPhone. Sounds great, and from the videos and reports I’ve seen it works great too. So what about in practice with my voice?

Well let’s start with actually using Siri: I can either press and hold the home button on the phone, press and hold the home button on my headphones or hold the unlocked phone to my ear. I then speak my request… which has me running into my first hurdle; I just feel like a complete twonk talking to my phone and saying “Text my wife, say ‘Do we need anything from the shops’”. Nope, I’ll be getting the phone out and typing that thank you very much.

Next up comes how well it actually works. At home last night I started playing with Siri and seeing how well it did things.

“Zoe is my wife”
“Would you like me to add Mrs Zoe Davis as your wife?”
“Yes”
“OK, I’ve added that relationship”
My wife’s contact details are then shown from my address book.

So far so good.

“Text my wife, say ‘testing’”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know who your wife is”

WTF?

“Who is my wife?”
“I do not who who Mrs Zoe Davis is”

???

Repeated fiddling with my contacts and setting my spouse manually didn’t seem to have any effect. Not good. Still, I guess I can just say “Text Zoe”, not as good, but at least it works.

What about reminders? I need to look for my old iPhone 3 so I can box it and get it ready to go to its next home.

“Remind me to find my phone on saturday”
“I’m sorry Dom, I do not have a number for you”

Er….

“New reminder for Saturday”
“Ok, I’m setting up a new reminder for Saturday, what would you like it to say?”
“Find my phone”
“OK, I’ve set that up for 9am on Saturday”
“Change time of reminder to 11am”
“I’m sorry, I can’t change the time of the reminder”

Great…

“what is the stock price for Barclays?”
“The stock price for Berkley closed at £230″
“What’s is the stick price for BAR Clays?”
“The stock price for Barclays PLC is £180.50″

Close, except the stock price is 180.5p, oops.

Voice controls for iPod playback are still there, but I really don’t see the point. Compare and contrast:

*Press and hold button* “Play” *Pause while the command is processed* “Playing”

With

*Click button once* (With headphones)
*Doubleclick home button* *Press play* (With the phone in my hand)

OK, I can tell it to play a specific track, artist or play list but since I can’t pronounce half the artists I listen to how the hell is Siri going to cope?

I can see it being useful for quick reminders (much more so when the API is released and it’s integrated with things like my shopping list program) and possibly while driving… except it needs a 3G signal when on the move and I live in Norfolk.

As a final note, I was going to dictate this using Siri, but sadly it translates my saying Siri as “silly” and I figured the amount of correcting would be too much to bother with. I should also point out the responses are from memory so they may not be quite word perfect.

Excellent news. The scales point more to the 13 than the 14. Well, actually they pointed more to the 14 than the 13 but since the scales are in the gym I don’t want to be standing there in my birthday suit, smile on my face and tackle in the breeze to get an accurate measurement. Instead I have previously weighed my gym kit using the kitchen scales and found it to weigh 2lbs. This allows me to stand there fully clothed and, with the application of a little mental arithmetic, work our my body weight. So it was a conceptual reading rather than the actual reading, but, nevertheless, it would appear the All Kebab No Belgium Bun With Some Cereal In The Morning Because Otherwise We’d Have No Fibre diet is working well.

None of this helps the fact that my socks have taken to slipping down and rucking up under my feet.

Sadly it seems that the #1 search term for finding this blog is for the lyrics of the We Buy Any Car [Dot Com] advert, which I covered here. You’re probably aware that there is a new advert out, and in fact has been for some time now. Meanwhile I have been remiss in my duties to bring to you, my readership, the updated lyrics; mainly, I should point out, because I can’t remember them. I do, however, have the advert on pause right now and we can learn the new lyrics together. They go as such:

[Bored housewife] I just sold my car, quick, quick
[Mixed race geezer] I just sold my car, quick, quick
[Montage of posh idiots] Very / Snappy / Totally / Speedy
[Member of the IRA] I just sold my car, fur [or possibly fair, it's hard to tell] deal
[Two ASBOs] I just sold my car, fair deal
[Another montage] Nice / Price / Cheers / Dears [?]
[Uncool dad in garage] We’ve just sold a car
[Essex family] Risk free. We’ve just sold a car, Risk free
[Doddery old couple] Safely / Soundly
[Improbably couple] Trouble free / ‘Hehe’
[Annoying rapper dude] Enter. Your. Reg. Number. Now. At we buy any car [dot com]

So there you go. It’s also the first time I’ve actually worked out what the annoying rapper was saying as previously I thought it was something like ‘M.C. Eurage Number one, at we buy any car [dot com]‘, which is probably why I didn’t find any rappers under the name of M.C. Eurage.

Now lets watch those search stats rocket.

For various reasons I have a number of accounts with my bank, including two current accounts. One of these is used daily, has money in it and has a large overdraft facility. The other one is used rarely, has very little money in it and has a very small overdraft facility. It’s also tied to to Sony playstation account.

Now, if you recall, Sony had their servers hacked quite conclusively a few months back and handed out customer details for tens of thousands of people. Including, it would seem, me. I say this because I received an automated call from my bank on Friday afternoon regarding suspicious transaction on the card. A quick chat with a customer services person later and we’ve established my card is being fraudulently used.

The good news is that only £10 was actually spent. There were a load if auths for £1, but they’re not going anywhere now. The bank has refunded my money, the card us cancelled and a new one on order. Could have been a lot worse.

The £10 itself was used to buy a mobile phone top up. I like to believe that the mobile company will be able to deactivate the phone it was used on, but I suspect that is wishful thinking. If I were in power the phone would have been identified, located and a cruise missile would be heading towards it at this very moment. Sometimes not having your own intelligence service and military is very annoying.

Girl on the platform may well have smiled, but I fear that advert is more than just a tiny bit of wishful thinking. Even at a quiet station the kind of separation between the two of them and the volume the bloke is singing at means that girl on the platform probably can’t here what is being sung. Her reaction, therefore is probably all coincidence.

One the train pulls out the bloke seems surprised that the girl is no longer on the platform. I think it’s safe to assume that the girl on the platform is waiting for a train and so it’s highly likely she’s going to get on one when it arrives, an action that would leave no girl on the platform. Regardless, trains are resplendent with many windows on both sides which actually allows you to see people getting on and off, or in this case, get up, leg it up the stairs, over the bridge, down the stairs and arrive, without being out of breath, next to the man without being seen or heard.

So girl on the platform may have smiled, but I’m going to guess it’s wind. The resulting song and her appearance next to the man is then the daydream of a man trying to find love while the girl heads off wherever she was going on the train.

So London is burning and Facebook is alight with reports from near the riots, disparagement of the rioters, calls for various forms of more extreme punishment and the odd bit of sympathy for the disaffected underclasses. My views head distinctly to the right in situations like this, but the bottom line is that no amount violence or mollycoddling is going to fix the underlying problem: we, as a nation, drink too much coffee.

Seriously, think back to the height of The Empire. We were the global super power, we ruled half the planet and we drank tea. Now chart the fall in tea drinking, the rise in coffee drinking and see how that correlates to the decline of Great Britain and the rise of Johnny Foreigner.

Look at the emerging economies. Tea drinkers. OK, so the Chinese drink green tea, but that’s probably a good thing. If they drank English Breakfast we’d all be speaking Cantonese. Russians and Americans? Coffee drinkers, one saw a total collapse in it’s government, the other is pawning everything to borrow enough cash to pay its bills.

So pick your short term method of dealing with the rioters and rebuild the Starbucks, Costas, Prets, Eats and Coffee Republics that have been destroyed with tea shops. Do that and, by the turn of next century, Britain will own half the bloody solar system!

The Brollycon system is a regional alert system designed to protect the public from the ever present threat of full scale saturation attacks from either rain, snow or hail. For your own safety please familiarise yourself with the following.

Brollycon 5: No threat of precipitation. Umbrellas and other wet weather gear are not required to be close at hand. Rarely used in the United Kingdom.

Brollycon 4: Possible threat of precipitation. Umbrellas and other wet weather gear close to hand or easily retrievable. The lowest brollycon state of the commuterate to avoid total saturation in the event of surprise attack.

Brollycon 3: Credible threat of precipitation. Brollies and wet weather gear carried to be carried on your person. Depending on the temperature coats may be deployed. Usual brollycon state of the commuterate. Lowest brollycon state of Scotland.

Brollycon 2: Precipitation imminent or light rain. Umbrellas on alert 5, all coats to be deployed, other wet weather gear to be readied for possible saturation attack. Highest alert status. Individuals are allowed to go “brollies free” at their own discretion.

Brollycon 1: Full scale rain. All wet weather gear to be deployed. Unprotected or inadequately protected civilians to seek immediate shelter until precipitation ceases or help arrives. Does not require central authorisation once “brollies free” has been declared.

Current local brollycon status: 2
Personal brollycon status: 1

This weekend The Zozo and I went to Holt which is one of our favourite places to visit in Norfolk. Among other things I wanted to visit one of the antique/second hand shops to go through the selection of Ladybird, Beatrix Potter and Mr Men children’s books they had on sale. We came away with 5 ladybird books including The Three Little Pigs, The Ugly Duckling and Peter Pan.

So far I’ve only read The Three Little Pigs to Nubbin, however the message of “Kill or be killed” contained in the book is quite clear. The death toll at the end of the book is 2 killed by wild animal, one killed by being boiled alive. Both pretty gruesome ways to go. The body count accounts for 75% of the major characters and 37.5% of all characters mentioned in the book.

Tonight I shall probably read The Ugly Duckling, a story that teaches that if you are different you will be bullied and that it’s only going to turn out OK if you come from the right family. And they say it’s video games and films teaching our kids the wrong things!