a shell game of power?

All our regular get-togethers are starting up again for the new year.

Monday it's the Mill on the Exe for the Stammtisch and by Thursday I'm supposed to have read 'The Wind-Up Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi in time for our pub discussion.

I got diverted along the way by an Xmas present book - The Power, by Naomi Alderman. I've obviously told enough people about the dystopian Book Club so I'm now being given relevant gifts.

Having recently read and talked about Vox for the same book club, it was interesting to flip from a crazy male domination story (electric shock word counters for women) to an equally unbalanced female domination one - also based around electricity.

In The Power there's a skeinful of new properties available to women which leads to subjugation of men. It plays out through three or four principal characters whose paths intersect.

I somehow preferred the story-telling in The Power to that of Vox. There seemed to be more to the premise, although the latter part of the novel became something like an Indiana Jones movie with jungle incidents and vicious female warriors.

It was easier to see what the author was trying to portray in The Power, and there was an initially subtle ramping of the effect from early discovery to later chapters of bleak realisation.

And no mistaking that the matriarchal power game wasn't so different from the more often written patriarchal one.

If I'm honest, I found some of the novel's middle section a bit heavy going. A new religion, a gangster hierarchy - it made the moves but somehow didn't develop them.

That's not to say there wasn't plenty to play with. I wondered if there was a quiet hint of Mikoto Misaka style Manga too, with the drug called Glitter although no certain scientific use of railgun ;-) Personally I thought a few further references could have added to the second half of the story telling and from an already female empowered source.

The author's overt humoiur was left for a few cheeky elements, when the book flipped into a meta-novel at the start and end. "Surely you'd be better submitting this as a woman?" suggested the female voice of the pretend agent to the (pretend) male voice of the author.

Even the shell games had shell games.

Next up will be my reading of the Wind-Up Girl. Here's that vintage Dresden Dolls track about a *ahem* coin operated boy.

I'm sorry Theresa, I can't do that.

New year and a chance to again reflect upon how Bladerunner we've become.

We have the concrete, the flashing lights albeit less neon and more LED based. Intelligent bus stops that know the next transit. Adverts with built in quick-codes. Those weird ones that project through tube train windows.

Artificial intelligence and virtual reality - more embedded than made to look human. Alexa is closer to HAL 3000.

My visiting friend from Los Angeles was slightly surprised at the commonplace use of contactless cards in the UK. As he put it: "In America we have Apple Pay but hardly anyone uses it."

There's still that awkward question about those that govern. I'm reading another one of those dystopian novels about people having things done to them by the ruling class. That seems to be a slippery problem although modern politicos have a solution.

Make politics appear so useless that no-one pays any attention.

On many levels the original principal Brexit negotiator did so, wasting around 18 months on dismal schemes. Then the mono-focused may-bot head-girl juddered back to fritter the remaining time, such that by Monday we will all teeter on an abyss, recklessly squandering the UK's future.

There's no big view to help us see what is happening.

Over the water, they've shut down chunks of the government (again) whilst a madman holds the workers hostage attempting to hissy-fit money for wall construction which he can award to his buddies.

In Bladerunner the replicants were man-made with their own serial numbers and ordinarily deployed for subservient tasks.

Curiously our 2019 fore-runners have been bootstrapped through talent-free privilege mixed with ambiguous money. It's a whole different proposition.

scrobbled

I restarted my last.fm feed around March 2018 after several years where it wasn't really connected to anything.

It is much simpler having one statistics collector for music plays across all the platforms and last.fm with the audioscrobbler seems to do a reasonable job of sweeping up iTunes, Spotify and most of the other sources I use. I can see my top artists, albums and so-on.

I'll look at this in more detail on another occasion. I suspect that repeat use of some playlists skews the figures, along with that time I played every version of every track on The Beatles White Album.

The restart illustrates a progressive drop in the quantity of tunes played. I shall need to investigate what's happened.

Thursday Thirteen (57): thin men stalk the streets

1. It's the year the Brexit hoax stalls. Yet, despite it all, Jeremy won't get into Downing Street.
2. Newer MPs will have voices against the silver spoons, although establishment roots run deep.
3. The EU becomes more fragile as a result of populist protest votes driven by immigration agendas.
4. Legal action to depose Don the Con commences alongside fresh concerns about his mental health.
5. Resultant certainties will stabilise markets regaining the losses of 2018.
6. The middle east and some parts of Africa will continue to new levels of unchecked violence.
7. China and the USA will continue their trade war alongside undercover military build up in the China seas.
8. Oil prices wobble because of clumsy attempts to reboot the US economy using 19th Century economics.
9. Putin will stir the pot with decoy military posturing whilst achieving far more with cyber warfare. Other state actors will include China and the USA, embedding network hacks into the internet of everything.
10. Facebook's vacuous presence will take a dive, creating a major uptick for Alphabet/Google. Apple will recover its position once analysts factor the 19% YoY non-iPhone growth. Amazon will recover its blip downwards with enough new ideas to drive another S curve jump. Alibaba will start to become a western competitor for Amazon.
11. Sport will continue tribally with big business and betting manipulating outcomes.
12. Smart people will admit to using reddit to filter their twitter feeds.
13. I'll look back on this list in December and wonder why I wrote it.

solar

Our domestic solar panels are finally working. Not on the grand scale of Blackfriars train station, but at least capable of earning a bob or two.

In practice they have been functioning ever since we moved in, but whatever benefits we'd expect to get from them were, instead, flowing to our main electricity supplier.

It turns out that there is copious additional paperwork associated with power generation. I have to get the plant, generation equipment and so on registered, quoting my micro generator certificate number.

The paperwork includes the need to prove that the panels affixed to a less-visible but highly south-facing part of the property were, indeed, ours.

Then there's the reading system deployed. We already have smart meters but the small consumer head unit doesn't work properly.

It can't detect one of the meters. A kind of Zigbee (similar to bluetooth) failing with the wrong codes.

I have a phone number to get it fixed, but it's been a bit like that old Python gas cooker sketch.

Their latest update told me I need to have a meter replaced in order to get the head unit to work. I don't believe them and think it is a simple 'pairing' problem.

The Feed in Tariff rebate amount is between 4.5p and 5.5p per KwH, which compares with about 12-13p per KwH to buy from the electricity supplier. In my naivety I'd assumed that simply having the installation would put my electricity into the system and I'd get a benefit. Not so. Unless I specifically count the electricity generated and tell the electricity board, they just take it and resell it to me anyway. I'm effective paying for my own generated power.

Inevitably, the electricity generation part requires a separate meter so we've a special unit and a big red switch indoors. The electricity company can't read the separate meter remotely on this modern high tech installation. Instead they have given us four date ranges throughout a year to supply readings (by post, perhaps?)

The government, via the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy are stopping the scheme for new entrants in March 2019. We've just squeaked in and get a 20 year feed in agreement.

The whole process raises all kinds of questions.

• How could the government get their estimates of payout so wrong that they had to cancel the scheme? The amount that electricity companies get is around 4 times that originally estimated.
• Why didn't the scheme track wholesale prices? That alone could account for some of the overpayments.
• How could a much heralded Clean Growth Strategy launched in 2012 need to be closed only a few years later? Some would say because of success, but the real reason is because of miscalculations.
• How does this bode for any other schemes to be introduced on this, or other, topics over the next year or two? I hear there may be quite a few deals to peg down.

I didn't specifically apply to get this system. It came with the new property. It's a great idea and was probably fitted far more economically as part of the whole construction programme. If I'd paid separately for it then my quick examination of the official break-even point would be about 20 years, which is (surprise!) the same length as the FiT rebates.

Now I see what they did. Spreadsheet engineering to make the scheme viable.

Happy New Year

Well, the partying has quietened down by the morning.

A chance to let off steam at the end of the year before hitting Control-Alt-Delete to bypass extended memory testing.

As long as there's a photo opportunity somewhere in the mix.

And I suppose a blind faith is required to see in 2019, after the unusual toff rule of 2018.

I don't just mean standing in a giant cocktail glass in the middle of a ballroom, either.

Nor looking at the morning flops still drinking Chianti from a raffia clad bottle.

Sometimes you have to know when it's time to move on to the next venue.

We've got it covered, but I sense we'll need to hide any confusion with a little song.

"Are we downhearted?"

Of course not. There is fun going forward.

year end 2018 - solace in the strangest place.

Symbolic 2018 snowball and cutover to emerging 2019.

Here's the 3min30 rashbre central video summary for 2018.

un-iced disgrace

I see the FTSE 100 continues to head south for the end of 2018. Around as low as at the time of the Brexit vote and 12% down on 2018's start.

Lack of strong and stable leadership has created the worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.

It doesn't get the same headlines because of the never ending Etonian bun-fight, yet everyones' pensions and investments are directly affected and devalued.

Maybe underhand whip tactics of extortion and blackmail will seal the fate of the meaningful (sic) vote?

Who knows.

smashed or spooged?

We'd arranged to meet at the usual pretty little village pub, which is right near the end of the Central Line.

"What are they building outside?" I asked.

"What, those cones by the Tescos?" said someone.

"What Tescos?" I replied.

"That's not building work. It's from the ram raid" said someone else.

"Ram raid?"

"They took the cashpoint machine with a digger."

"What? Breaking Bad hits Essex?"

"They did it around by us as well - at the Co-op," said someone else, "It's a thing now."

"...and it's been left like it here since October."

dawn

This time it's dawn on a motorway. Part of the grand scheme, this is a stopover en-route.

Contrary to other trips, I'm not doing this in a one-er.

An overnight pause can be quite refreshing. Especially when the new dawn is accompanied by still empty roads.

placing the past

I started out quite good at this. Guessing the correct time sequence from a series of events.

But it does get tricky. Sometimes events are close together.

Other times they are impossibly out of sequence with expectations. Like the patenting of the typewriter.

A simple, fun game after the festive food.

party perfect revisited

Survivors of rashbre central's previous seasonal festivities will know that there's a certain point when the silly hats and party games make an appearance.

Not the tv-gaming variety, but analogue games involving old wrapping paper, sticky tape, fruit and the like. For the convenience of others, here's a few sure fire winners, which can be played at everything from amateur through to full Pro standard.

Required items: Wrapping paper, sticky tape, magazines, newspapers, highlighter pen, pins

1) Guess the name : Yes - simply providing the guests with paper hats or pin on labels which they can't see with the name of a sleb (celebrity) on it. They have to guess with the Yes/No answers. Classed as an icebreaker. Marilyn Monroe, Ed Sheeran, Frankenstein, Albert Einstein, A.footballer, Jason Bourne, 007, Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Ariana Granda. You get the idea.
2) Dress the person : Kinetic Game, two teams: 2-5 minutes. Select someone to be dressed using either old wrapping paper or a couple of recent magazines or newspapers.
3) Kipper racing : multiple teams. needs a long clear indoor space. cut or tear a largish fish shape from a sheet of wrapping paper or anything similar to hand. Add detail such as a hole for the eye, maybe a dorsal fin. Lie them flat on the floor and give other team members further sheets of paper/magazines to use to create air currents to propel the fish from a start line to a distant improvised finishing line.
4) Tell a tale : Pre select some groups of 7 unusual words from a magazine or newspaper article. Hand them to each team and and ask each team member in turn to tell a story using the seven words. Other teams have to try to guess the words.
(Example words from random article : luckier; heterosexual; chevrolet; banana; promoted; quitter; eggs. and from another page: emissions; cruise; leisurely; overcome; scoop; howling; endurance...you get the idea.)
5) Pass the orange : Why wait until after the dinner has finished to play this game? goes great with coffee.
6) Pictionary: drawing fast pictures based upon words. The boxed set is best for this one.
7) GrEEn GlaSS dOOr : The person in charge suggests playing this and that everyone else can try to be selected to go through the green glass door by suggesting appropriate pairs of things. Things that get in are a pOOl but no water; glaSS but no picture; MiRRor but no reflection (ie the first thing needs a double letter in it.. Play till last person gets it)
8) GGD variants : Play GGD (7) where instead of double letters, each sentence said by the next person has to start with a vowel "...and blah blah bla; ...or blah blah blah ...obviously" and another variant vowel/then consonant and another variant is start with next letter of alphabet.
9) Alphabet Game : Choose topic (Animals, Cars, Candy Bars, Popstars, Drinks). Start at A and round robin through to Z.
10) Stirring the Mush : Announce you are stirring the mush and (eg stand up, sit down, scratch your ear etc). Then start stirring the mush by any hand/body gesture you like. The invite someone to copy. the trick is thay have to do what you did BEFORE you started stirring the mush (eg scratch ear etc). Tell them whether they have passed or not then select next 'victim'. Repeat until all have worked it out.
11) Erect-a-pup : More newspaper for this two in -oner. Part one. Teams. who can make the longest tube in 2 minutes from rolled up paper? Sounds easy. Just watch what happens. Part Two. Now, in another three minutes make a model life sized puppy out of tubes of newspaper. Warning that some puppies will have 3, 5 legs at the end of this.

I think that's enough to get started. No animals harmed in the testing of these entertainments. You'll have to email me for the (ahem) rules of the frying pan and wooden spoon game...and don't forget charades!

*this post first appeared in 2008 and although it has had minor changes, I have left in the technorati tags.

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