Fiendish Games

As publicity stunts go, this is one of the more surreal ones. A cash machine operator is offering Cockney rhyming slang as one of the languages on its ATMs in the east London area.

“I need some money for fags so I am just popping out to get some sausage”

Some of the supposed slang terms mentioned in the Associated Press article repeated below look a bit tenuous, If I said I was just popping outside to get some sausage, would you have a clue what I was talking about?

Given that most ATMs these days advise users to report anything suspicious I can’t say I blame the user who got in a right old two and eight when she whipped her card out of the machine when it started spouting gibberish at her.

You'd better get ready to use your loaf if you want to get your hands on some bread.
Over the next three months a cluster of East London ATMs will be offering customers the chance to withdraw cash using written prompts in Cockney rhyming slang, the area's colorful and often impenetrable dialect.

ATMs run by a company called Bank Machine offer a language option allowing customers to enter their "Huckleberry Finn" instead of their PIN, and rather worryingly informs them that the machine is reading their "bladder of lard" at a prompt about examining their card.

The origins of Cockney rhyming slang are obscure. It is thought to have been used by market traders who needed a way of communicating without tipping off their customers.

It works by replacing a word with a short rhyming phrase. For example: "Money" becomes "bread and honey," which in turn is shortened to "bread." Similarly, "head" becomes "loaf of bread," and then just simply "loaf."

Few use the slang with any regularity now although most Britons know a few common phrases, such as "trouble and strife" for wife and "apples and pears" for stairs.

Gabriella Alexander, who made a withdrawal from an ATM, near Spitalfields Market, said the stunt was fun. But she added that that withdrawing "sausage and mash" — or cash — "made me a little uneasy."
Slaney Wright, a 32-year-old charity worker, attempted to withdraw money from the ATM but visibly tensed up when she realized the machine was talking to her in Cockney slang. She immediately canceled the transaction and ripped the card out of the machine.

"It looks like someone's been messing with it," she said.

Yes, well, at least rhyming slang calls a PIN a PIN and not the tautologous "PIN number".

I have been given an interesting but problematical assignment at work. Essentially it is a Microsoft versus Google piece, focusing on which companies benefit if one or the other prevails.


In some respects this is a straight forward Windows versus Linux post, inspired by Google's long anticipated move into the operating system arena which it finally announced last month.

Now, there are a lot of companies that have software products that work on Windows but not Linux; I am guessing Sage (the accounting company), Adobe, McAfee and doubtless many others, but these are just guesses.

However, if Google does usurp Microsoft from the desktop it is not going to happen overnight and so surely all of these companies wedded to Windows will have time to bring out Google Chrome versions of their software?

What about if, by some miracle, Microsoft's Bing search engine manages to mount a serious challenge to Google. Who, apart from MS and Google will be affected?

No idea, guv. So, if any passing geeks have any thoughts on this, let me know. I am also interested in the contest in the hand held devices market as well. I know Nokia recently got in to bed with MS despite being part of the consortium behind the Symbian operating sytem; are there any other likely winners and losers?

I've also got to do an article on covered warrants, about which I know nothing. So, no change there, then.

The Fiendish family is over halfway through its summer holiday and it has finally dawned on me that with lots of time spent busy doing nothing, now is a good opportunity to catch up with the blogging style of thing.

So, where are we?
We're in France, on the Atlantic coast, in a region called the Vendee. There is probably meant to be an accent over one of the final two letters of the Vendee but I truly can't be arsed to find out if that is the case and, if so, how to do an accented letter in the Linux version of Open Office.

We are staying near a town called St. Hilaire de-Riez and if you really want to narrow it down further, maybe because you are thinking of launching a ninja attack on the family, our nearest beach is La Pege – definitely an accent in there, too – and the camp site we are staying at is called Club Sol A Go-Go. If it was in Wales it would be called Club Solagogogogh. Possibly.

Now, when I mentioned we are staying at a camp site, you might have got the idea that we are outdoors types who like nothing better than erecting a tent, brewing cups of tea on a Calor gas stove and yomping through woods with knapsacks on our back.

Wrong.

We are staying in what might loosely be termed a caravan but Jim Rockford – he of the Rockford files – would recognise it as a trailer. I suppose I had better update that reference for the benefit of any younger readers who may have strayed across this blog; think Joy and Darnell (aka Crab-Man, aka Benouit Assou-Ekotto, left back for Tottenham Hotspur FC).

Two bedrooms. One double bed, the other with a single bed and two bunk beds.

Shower room and toilet.

The main room is a kitchen-diner affair. Sink, oven, hob, electric fan, table, L-shaped settee (no accent necessary on 'settee' according to my spell checker), gas fire, fridge, freezer, wine rack (naturellement) UK and continental plug sockets and a surprisingly large amount of cupboard space.

Outside there is a deck with a table and umbrella, chairs, loungers and a gas barbecue thingy.

No TV, music playing device or Internet connection. TV, music and Internet can all be enjoyed in the camp bar (ooh, get you duckie – no, not that sort of camp bar).

We booked through a company called Eurocamp because (a) they are solid, reliable operators and (b) I am a shareholder in the parent company (Holidaybreak) and so get a 10% discount. Hurrah!

The preparation
The preparation was virtually all done by Mrs. Fiendish, some of it virtually (go to the Eurocamp web site and have a virtual look around the trailers). The conceit I allow myself is that it makes more sense to have one person doing all the packing, sorting out the tickets, the passports and what not, because it avoids confusion. The truth, as we all know, is that I am a lazy sod.

So, Mrs. Fiendish chose the camp. Excellent! That means she gets blamed by our restless teenaged boys (we brought number 2 and 3 sons, and left number 1 son behind) when they inevitably pronounce the camp as “gay” (this still seems to be in common parlance as a general all-purpose pejorative term, analagous to the term “naff” that I overused in the eighties).

Mrs. Fiendish did the packing, so she gets to beat herself up when she forgets to pack the hair straightener, or the map of France or the charger for the mobile phone.

Mrs. Fiendish also gets to do the driving because as a relatively new driver of just two years experience, she does not trust me in a right hand drive on French roads, and she especially does not trust me in her Lexus GS 300, which has a top speed of 148 mph and the acceleration of a whippet. Nor is it practical to take my Toyota Yaris (did someone mention role reversal?) as it lacks the luggage space of the Lexus.

Mrs. F. gets to look after the tickets, the passports and just about everything else. My meagre contribution was to get pounds changed into euros and choose some games to take with us (St. Petersburg, San Juan, Settlers of Catan, Coloretto, Land Unter and En Garde [the card game], since you asked). Now that we are here I am also expected to dust off my “O” level French (failed) to converse with the locals.

I did very well yesterday in a supermarket queue. “Apres vous, c'est fermez,” (place your own circumflexes and accents) said the cashier, and when some punter came and stood behind me, I said: “Apres moi, c'est fermez,” to which he responded, “Do what, guv'nor?”

Actually, there was one more thing I had to do and that was sort out the routes. We had to be at the ferry port by 9:30pm and Mrs. F. had said we'd be leaving about 7pm. At various times in the previous week she had told me we were sailing from either Plymouth or Portsmouth. So I was a bit concerned when I sat down at the PC at about 5:30 to plan out our routes to find that the AA said it would take about 4 hours to get to Plymouth which meant we had to leave right that minute. Zut alors! Whatever that means. Merde, even.

Luckily, we were going to Portsmouth, not Plymouth, a mere 150 minutes away.

Well, to hell with Google Maps, that damn company is taking over the world. I am sticking to the good old Automobile Association (aka the AA) and its route planner. I printed off a route to Portsmouth and it did the job nicely, thank you very much.

Eurocamp provides a route planning service on its web site to help customers navigate from the French ferry port (Caen) to the camp, but it does so inside a panel which makes it a bugger to print from Opera or that other browser that nicked most of Opera's best ideas).

Never mind, Michelin do a route planner for the continent. Amazing, really; when I hear the name Michelin I think restaurants, not tyres.

So, we were sorted, ready to roll (on and roll off).

Ferry cross the Manche
Not much to say about the ferry. The overpriced chips were at least well cooked and they had a few video games to keep the kids amused.

We had booked a cabin so went to sleep about midnight, and set our phone alarms for 5:15am, 15 mins before we were due to dock.

About 4:30am classical music started blaring out of the loudspeakers in our cabin and there was nothing we could do to switch them off. In our confused state it took us a while to realise this was the ferry company's way of ensuring we did not oversleep.

After about 15 minutes, we actually started getting into the music. Then it stopped.

The sensible thing at this point would have been for me to have got up and got two cups of coffee – no, make that three cups of coffee; one for me, and two for Mrs. Fiendish.

I knew from our last ferry crossing, when we had this mad idea of driving from Poole at 5am in order to get home in time to go to work, that Mrs. F. needs a good 8 hours sleep, some coffee and maybe some food inside her in order to stay awake at the wheel. On that occasion (driving from Poole) we made it as far as junction 23 (we lived just off junction 25 at the time) of the M25 before capitulating and stopping off at a service station. For about 15 miles, maybe 30, of that journey Mrs. F. had been repeatedly dozing off at the wheel while doing 70 mph, with me periodically poking her in the ribs. Madness. Of course, we never made it home in time to go to work. We took the morning off.

Any road up, as my old Granddad (that spelling looks a bit Welsh but the spellchecker insists – it also insists that spell-checker be hyphenated) used to say, we rolled off the ferry and started following the Michelin route planner.

These things are normally pretty good - “at the next roundabout take the third exit marked Rue d'Gestures” that sort of thing – and we even got used to the third exit being a left turn, as it is when you drive on the right, but they become a bit tricky when you go off piste.

We got piste off round about Rennes, a large city on our route which we ought to have bypassed. However, Mrs. F. started doing her dozing off party trick. It was Sunday, circa 8:30am and not a lot of places open selling coffee. Thank God for McDonalds, eh?

We parked in the car park and I got out to inspect the petit dejeuner menu. I might as well not have bothered, they don't do it at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. Coffee and muffins, that's your lot.

Only drive through (or “drive thru” as our dipthong averse transatlantic cousins have it) was available, so I got back in the car, and we drove up to the speaker-cum-microphone order point, acutely aware that pointing and body language does not translate well through an audio only communication device.

This seemed to have occurred to Johnny Servingchap (Jean Chapdeserving?) as well. I don't know what the French is “For fuck sake come round to the window you ignorant foreign peasants” is, but it could well have been what he said.

So, we poodled round to the window to be greeted by a perfectly charming spotty youth of around 21 ans (years). Probably the manager.

“Deux cafes au lait, deux Cokes et quatre briochee something or other, s'il vous plait,” quoth I.

“No briochee, monsieur. I am sorry. Only pain chocolat,” responded the Big Mac man.

“Bon. Or possibly bonne. Non, bon, je pense. We'll have quatre of them, por favor.”

They tasted like toe fungus, as it happens, but it was a small victory. Supercharged with what was actually quite decent coffee (are you reading this, Starbucks? Your days as a purveyor of overpriced shite coffee are numbered) Mrs. F. was as alert as a falcon on the wing.

Unfortunately, we could not get back on the road we had exited by retracing our route, which meant we had to busk our way through Rennes. Not literally, you understand. I wasn't standing on street corners singing “Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London,” to bewildered passers by at 9:00am on a Sunday morning in a regional French town. No, by busking, I mean we had to navigate by the seat of our pants.

We got lost.

Of course.

So, time for the last resort of all true men: look at the map.

Tricky chap, Johnny Map, when he only covers the area you are travelling to and not the area in which you are lost. It was jolly nice of those Eurocamp fellas to provide us with a free map but we – and when I say “we”, I mean, of course, Mrs. Fiendish, had not bothered to check that the map covered all the route from Caen to St. Hilaire de Riez. So,we had our Bonnie Tyler moment: Lost In France.

The following night we had another Bonnie Tyler moment when someone absolutely slaughtered “Forever's Gonna Start Tonight” (or whatever it is called) at the karaoke evening.

Anyway, Mrs. F. duly castigated herself for not being able to think of everything, and I consoled her with the patronising comment that it was still pretty efficient of her to think of 10,001 things, but she is such a perfectionist, except when it comes to choosing a husband.

As it turned out, you don't even need to have failed French “O” level to work out that Peripherique means ring road, so we headed for the ring road and recommenced our journey.

We made it as far as Nantes (have I got these town names the right way round? If not, you are probably wondering why I am heading north and not west) when the next ring road bowled us a googly (told you those bastards are taking over the world – look it up, non-cricket fans; it's roughly analagous to a “curve ball”).

We had to exit at junction 23 or similar. Yet, here we were, heading in the right direction, but the next junction was 33 and the one after that was 34, so, naturally wee turned around and headed in the other direction, not realising that after junction 35 came junction 18, then 19 and so on. Heaven knows why they did it that way, probably an EU regulation or something.

By now we were on the complementary map which is how I came to realise that we had been headed in the right direction after all, so we turned around (bright eyes) again. Every now and then I fall apart etc.

The Michelin guide suggested we should have been there by about midday. What with the coffee break and the two diversions, we were pretty happy to be a mere 10 miles from our destination by 1:30pm. Of course, the last 10 miles took almost an hour, as it was down twisty unnamed roads and I had, in any case, left it too late to switch from the map to the very specific and totally accurate instructions from the holiday company on how to navigate the last 10 miles of the journey.

The important thing was that we had made it with the best part of the day – the afternoon sun – still ahead of us. Nobody had died. That was to take place – almost – later on in the holiday when number 2 son and number 3 son got involved in a knife fight with each other.

Dramatic stuff, eh?

Just found out that NBC has cancelled "My Name Is Earl", as it was down to a mere six million views per epidode from its peak of 10m+.

Though I think the series had plateaued in terms of innovation and character development, it was still a masterful ensemble piece and I will miss it, especially the character of Randy, superbly portrayed by Ethan Suplee.

Apparently the producers tried to get the series picked up by another network but it would have required them shaving $1m from each episode's budget, which would have meant cutting back on the staff. While it is enjoyable to see the cast of characters move in and out of the action (as per The Simpsons) I could cheerfully have lost all of the characters except Earl, Randy, Joy and Crab-Man if it meant the series was saved.

Yes, I know this means sacrificing the pulchritudinous Cataliina but she is a bit of a two dimensional (ahem! Not physically, obviously) character. I'd rather feature Ralph Mariano, the third member of the criminal gang which Earl and Randy used to be in.


Ralph

Oh well, perhaps there will be a film, though it's unlikely, given the cult status (rather than nationwide popularity) of the series. Then again, if Hollywood can finance what seems like a dozen Silent Bob movies, many of which featured Jason Lee (Earl), it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it would contemplate an Earl film.

Keeping with the theme of feeling and being bloody old, here are a couple of random comments I heard recently from young things that really made me feel my age.

"Oh and my mate ended up snogging some 40-year old bloke," she said, with evident horror.

"The TUC? Which union is that again?"

"When was Thriller released? OK. I wasn't born then, but I remember being really scared when I first saw it."

Expect more of these to be added as time goes (quickly) by.