It always amazes me that online food shops fail to ask me whether I’m a vegetarian, and then go on to offer me meat products even though I’ve sometimes been shopping with them for years and not bought any meat during the entire time.

I suspect that the reason for this is that many of the products in their catalogues will be suitable for vegetarians but not explicitly labelled as such. For example, who in their right mind would label a vegetable “suitable for vegetarians”?

This means that their dumb computers can’t work out that it’s ok to offer vegetarians apples.

I’ve got a solution for this. Include an option that says:

“Please don’t show me:”

• meat
• poultry
• fish
• dairy products
• products that aren’t labelled “suitable for vegetarians or vegans”
• products that aren’t labelled “suitable for vegans”

and so on…

By couching it in terms of “don’t show me”, you can avoid the problem of explicit labelling. Of course you could also extend this to include nut allergies, wheat intolerance, kosher/halal, or anything else.

Come on supermarkets, sort it out.

When I think of Uncle Roy, two things spring immediately to mind - a relaxed smile, and a certain predilection for bad puns.

For most of my life we’ve lived quite a distance apart, so we didn’t meet often, but from childhood onwards I was always pleased when I knew that I was going to see him.

No doubt he had his off days - Deane men have something of a capacity for melancholy, and I expect that Roy was no different - but past the puns, the impression that came through to me was of someone who was interested in the world, and someone who cared - for his family, his friends, and the general state of the planet.

There was one other thing about Roy that made a big impact on me - his love of music. When I say impact, I mean it literally - as he inadvertently had a major influence on my musical taste (and some people might say therefore that he had a lot to answer for).

When my grandparents went to stay in Australia, we inherited their cassette player (stereo - woohoo!!) and Roy started sending Dad tapes that he’d copied. Exactly what came from Roy is a bit blurry now in my mind, but there are some that I remember for sure. Obscured by Clouds, by Pink Floyd and Songs From The Wood, by Jethro Tull, found their way onto our tape player from him, and into my head and heart forever. I’m fairly sure that he introduced me to Talking Heads, Crosby Stills & Nash, Wishbone Ash, Hugh Masekela, Tom Waits, and The Orb, to name but a few. His tastes were eclectic, and I’ve no doubt that they opened my eyes (and ears), which is something for which I’ll forever be grateful.

I’m an atheist, so I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do believe that people live on in a way, in our memories. Roy liked a beer (another thing that we shared, though I didn’t have nearly enough chances to share one with him). So each time I sit back with a beer, or crank up some Jethro Tull (both regular occurrences), I’ll be thinking of him.

I’m not an apologist for bankers, but whenever I hear people on the radio, or read people in the press, blaming all the world’s woes on them, it really gets on my nerves.

Blaming bankers for making too much money is like blaming lions for killing and eating other animals.

Expressing surprise at such behaviour is naive at best, ignorant at worst. It’s like admitting that you have absolutely no idea how the world works, or that you frankly couldn’t be arsed to pay attention to anything that didn’t directly involve you.

Bankers, particularly investment bankers, are part and parcel of the current economic system. They exist because of it, and insofar as they are regulated at all, they are regulated by it.

Most of us, most of the time, are complicit in keeping that system going because we like the good things it does for us, and conveniently forget about the bad things it does to other people. We are as responsible as anyone for the regulation regime, because we’re not prepared to support the kind of people who want to put a tighter regime in place - or accept whatever consequence might come back to affect us.

I’m not saying that the system is good, but unless you’ve been actively campaigning for a different system, it’s terribly complacent to blame other people for the mess we’re in right now.

If you don’t like it, it’s up to you, as much as anyone else, to do something about it.

I’m not saying that you can take on the banks individually, but when the next election comes round, vote for a party that offers a sensible alternative (for whatever value of “sensible” appeals to you).

In the meantime, if you’re lucky enough to have some, move your money into (slightly more) ethical banks, if you can find them. If you’re lucky enough to have substantial savings, invest them in ethical companies.

We need to take collective responsibility for this stuff, and we need to have a sophisticated understanding of how the world works.

It’s not good enough to just look around for easy scapegoats. That’s lazy, and a dangerously simplistic way of looking at the world - and it’s that sort of thing, as much as the behaviour of bankers, that I think is wrong with it.

Whilst proof reading my previous blog post, I was reminded of how much I really don’t like the theme I’m using on this blog!

When I split it off from my main Elegant Chaos site, I grabbed this theme as a quick way of differentiating the two.

I really must get round to replacing it with something better… something… designed?

No doubt there’s a lot that I don’t understand, but a few things seem really weird, with the benefit of hindsight. 

A lot has been made of how earthquake proof these stations were, and yet it seems that it was probably the tsunami that buggered up the backup generators. I’m no seismologist, but even I know that earthquakes and tsunamis tend to go hand in hand when you’re on the coast. So what exactly was the plan? Surely they must have thought about it, so what went wrong?

It also seems quite common for nuclear power stations to contain multiple reactors. Presumably there’s an argument for this, based on minimising the number of sites, and sharing infrastructure. Presumably there’s also a large nimby factor which makes it much more likely that a second reactor gets sighted where there’s already one. That said, isn’t it Pretty Fucking Obvious that the last thing you want to be next to, if you’re trying to battle with a malfunctioning nuclear reactor, is another (possibly malfunctioning) reactor?

Another thing that is puzzling me is that that the reactors apparently shut down automatically in response to the earthquake, and yet this seems to have been a large part of the problem. Presumably it was the automatic shutdown with caused the loss of power to the cooling systems, thus requiring the backup generators which then went wrong or ran out of fuel or whatever actually happened. Yet the failure of the cooling systems seems to have been a relatively slow process. Admittedly it might have been a lot quicker if the reactors hadn’t shut down, but it still seems a bit arse-about-tit to shut them down before knowing what is wrong, thus precipitating the very disaster you are trying to prevent.