HAVE NO FEARS, WE’VE GOT STORIES FOR YEARS [309]

This is how I unintentionally used “The Simpsons” to increase my brain power.

It is January 1998, and the Video Home System (VHS) is still at large, the first DVD player having only gone on sale in the UK six months earlier. I am a great fan of “The Simpsons,” then in only its ninth season, which is airing twice a week on BBC Two. We didn’t yet pay to have Sky One, but blank VHS cassettes were still widely available and absurdly cheap. I could just record the show when it aired, and watch it whenever I like. People streaming “The Simpsons” on Disney+ take note: this is how things used to be.

Much has already been made about how “The Simpsons” was one of the first TV shows for which recording the episodes was the only way you could take in all of the jokes, with background signs and sights gags often worked on as much as the main plot by the show’s writing staff. Its thick animated lines would not lose detail when recording onto a VHS cassette, which only achieved pictures of 230 lines of resolution in Long Play mode, as I worked to stretch six hours of recording, and sixteen “Simpsons” episodes, onto an E-180 tape.

However, being a British “Simpsons” fan also means there are jokes I am not likely to get. The 1990 episode “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8^th Commandment” – the one where Homer steals cable television, and Lisa refuses to watch – the sound of a TV show is heard: “We would get there quicker if I borrowed Dad’s car.” “I don’t know, Davey…” If the Christian animated series “Davey and Goliath” had ever aired on British television by that point, I would never know, and it must have been on some satellite station we could not see.

This was where online resources, such as they were at the time, proved valuable. Before the World Wide Web made the internet more accessible, message boards allowed people to communicate in text form. One such Usenet newsgroup, alt.tv.simpsons, formed just after regular “Simpsons” episodes began in 1990, began compiling crowd-sourced reference and episode guides into HTML format at The Simpsons Archive (www.simpsonsarchive.com, running since 1994).  With far fewer competing web pages than now, and with Google not being founded later in 1998 – the search engine of choice, Yahoo!, was a curated guide with a search engine attached - you really needed a website that could prove it was authoritative and comprehensive

“The Simpsons” eventually became abasis for making web searches. Anything I didn’t “get” could be looked up, meaning I might laugh if I saw the reference again, like the reference to the 1986 charity event Hands Across America in “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes,” or the real-life existence of all the baseball players in “Homer at the Bat”. Naturally, if something in the next article proved interesting, you may want to find out more or, when films like “Psycho,” “Citizen Kane” or “A Clockwork Orange” are quoted often, you find the original films to watch on their own.

This established the pattern I use for recalling facts – one piece of information will remind me of a reference made to a similar fact, or word, or number, picked up elsewhere, building into a web. Mnemonics and learning by rote don’t really work with me, although remembering having tried to learn something may make it easier to remember what I was trying to recall. If all else fails, I can look it up again, because I know where to look.

Now, practically everything is available at once, including every episode of “The Simpsons,” a show I made more of an effort to watch when it was more scarce than twenty years ago, both in appearances on TV and in number of episodes, and which has now referenced so much that people think it is predicting the future when history repeats itself. Perhaps it will end when there is nothing left that isn’t worth knowing.

BUT I DO KNOW ONE AND ONE IS TWO [308]

There seems little point in posing a maths question if the intention is to trip someone up, especially if you create doubt over whether a right answer is possible. 

I had previously seen the following example spread widely in 2019, and it has reappeared many times since: 8 ÷ 2(2x2) = ?

 

But this one has also appeared: 5 + 6 x 4 = ?

 

There is one very clear reason why the answer to the first question is 1, but this same reason is why the answer to the second could be either 44 or 29.

 

BODMAS has been taught in British schools since the 1920s, prescribing how you should solve maths problems: Brackets, Orders, Divide, Multiply, Addition, Subtraction. Known as PEDMAS in the United States because of the alternative use of parentheses and exponents as mathematical terms, these abbreviations were created in the hope of becoming acronyms ingrained in the heads of schoolchildren – I think they eventually got there.

 

When I originally saw 8 ÷ 2(2x2), I knew the answer could only be 1, because brackets were used: 8 ÷ 2(2x2) = 8 ÷ 2(4) = 8 ÷ 8 = 1.

 

However, 5 + 6 x 4 could be answered linearly or using BODMAS, creating two different answers:

 

Linear: 5 + 6 x 4 = 11 x 4 = 44

 

BODMAS: 5 + 6 x 4 = 5 + 24 = 29

 

This is usually the end of it, but I realised it was never really explained at school why this rule even exists, and it is down to how much each mathematical operator changes the eventual answer. Multiplication and division are simply adding or subtracting one number many times, so it would make sense to act upon those first, but you should always simplify by answering brackets first – writing 5 + 6 x 4 as 5 + (6 x 4) also makes clearer what is meant to be happening. 

Left to right: Casio SL-310UC, Canon LC-83M, HP 35s

 

However, while BODMAS confirms that multiplication should be done before addition, dividing does not need to be done before multiplying, or subtraction before addition, so trying to create an acronym creates a misnomer as well. Calculators that implement BODMAS are programmed to multiply or divide, whichever comes first in the equation, followed by adding or subtracting, again whichever comes first.

 

But you can even get a different answer based on the calculator you use. I tried this with a Casio SL-310UC, a basic calculator, and the answer produced was 44, because it calculated each segment of the question as you go: pressing the multiply button after entering 6 produced the answer “11” on screen, before entering 4 and pressing the equals button. 

 

Meanwhile, the Canon LC-83M, a 1980s slide rule calculator, only produces an answer when you press the equals button, down to the “Algebraic Operating System” displayed on the case. BODMAS is built into the calculator, guaranteeing the answer of 29 in this case.

 

To make things extra complicated, the HP 35s, a sophisticated programming scientific calculator, can produce both answers. In Reverse Polish Notation, you enter your numbers first, then enter what you want to do with them, building numbers in a stack – this relies upon the user to remember BODMAS to multiply the 6 and 4 first, instead of starting with the 5 and adding the 6. Changing the HP 35s to the standard Algebraic function used by the other two calculators, BODMAS now automatically applies, producing the answer 29.

 

With calculators now mostly bought for use in schools, adherence to BODMAS is expected, along with the ability to enter equations exactly as they appear on the page. Knowing what you are entering is more important than knowing how the calculator processes it – most instruction manuals therefore add a disclaimer confirming the manufacturer does not take responsibility for any answer generated.

MADE TO MAKE YOUR MOUTH WATER [307]

I recently added YouTube Premium to my list of subscriptions. Google has been testing a cheaper version of this package in some European and Scandinavian countries, foregoing music streaming and offline downloads for its major appeal: watching videos without advertising. Predicting this will be a success that will later be extended to the UK, I decided to take the month’s free trial, knowing that, at £11.99 per month until further notice, it will become my most expensive subscription, more than Netflix, “The New York Times” and Microsoft Office 365.

What I had not expected was how calm I would feel. I no felt tense when an advertisement appeared between a cut, or in the middle of a sentence, and I no longer needed a trigger finger ready to skip past ads. Subscribing proved to be a release.

 

Television streaming services offer similar upgrades as carrots to the user. ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial television channel, allows viewers to pay £3.99 per month to remove ads from its online service – Channel 4 charges a similar amount. Services offering content at a premium in the US, like HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock, will offer a cheaper service if you are prepared to accept advertising, while Tubi makes it as clear as possible why you can access them for free.

 

But for me, the placing of the ads was what mattered more than their presence. In the UK, rules governing the number of minutes for ad spots per hour, and the number of ad breaks per hour, are extended to online streaming services, but because YouTube is still mostly thought of as social media to some extent, only the content of ads played on it are governed, not their frequency. With YouTube coming from a country that abolished all limits on television advertising, except around children’s programming, in 1984, interruptions as frequent as I experienced is more likely to be tolerated in the US than in the UK and Europe, perhaps explaining why the cheaper Premium trial is happening in this part of the world.

 

This may be where the problem I had with the placement of advertising, and the relief I feel upon its removal, remains as my problem: as much as I view it as a kind of public access television, YouTube is not offered as this, despite the professional nature of much of the content uploaded by people who make their living by it. They will reap the benefits of ads that were not skipped by viewers, ads that cannot be skipped, and by YouTube extending “mid-roll” advertising to any video longer than eight minutes. I know money has to be made, as proved by the proliferation of sponsorships within the videos themselves, regardless of any ads outside of them, I just wished the following passage from Ofcom’s code on advertising placement could be taken into account, especially when I make another video for them: “Television broadcasters must ensure that the integrity of the programme is not prejudiced, having regard to the nature and duration of the programme, and where natural breaks occur.” 

THAT LEAVES EIGHT HOURS FOR FUN [306]

The Trial (1962, dir. Orson Welles)

These are the thoughts of someone who never switches off.

Work has been pressured lately, making me less creative. My approach to the growing piles of work has always been head first, and even as I can realistically only do so much, I am resigned to feeling like I am running out of time. With priorities chopping and changing, planning your day is an aspiration, not an expectation – you find yourself asking for help more than you feel you should.

Taking your work home is worse. I recently had a literal nightmare about facing the prospect of creating dummy files on our company database for new recruits to train on the following week – having that nightmare helped finish the job. Dipping back into work after you are meant to have finished, to tidy both your to-do list and your mind for next time, is too easy if you have the ability to access work from home.

 

While the phrase “work-life balance” appeared in the 1970s and 80s, its basis as a concept can be traced back to Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a psychologist and engineer who ran an early form of a management consultancy firm with her husband Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Lillian Gilbreth herself is credited for improvements to work buildings and homes like the pedal bin, wall-mounted light switches placed at the entrance of a room, and for pioneering the now-standard layout for kitchens, including the optimal height for work surfaces and appliances, down to the shelves inside refrigerator doors. In short, your work and your home must fit around you because of the work of the Gilbreths.

Gilbreth Inc. was involved in completing time-and-motion studies, but their methods were geared more towards a human approach to solving problems, rather than just how quickly a job can be completed regardless of the psychological cost to the worker, as characterised by earlier time studies by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Gilbreths’ innovations in redesigning machinery and environments to improve efficiency and reduce worker fatigue formed the basis of ergonomics, although their focus on finding the single best way to complete any given tasks is at odds with the more holistic approach taken by quality management today. 

 

But the Gilbreths achieved a work-life balance by mixing them together. They also intentionally had a very large family, as detailed “Cheaper by the Dozen” and “Belles on Their Toes,” two books written by their children, later becoming films, that detailed how their parenting style acted as a test bed for their work.

 

What I have to remember is that your job is not the same as your career, unless your profession matches up with it exactly. The only thing stopping me from describing my profession as being a writer is myself. What I would like to be my job should not be treated as a hobby in the meantime.

AND NOW THE WORDS JUST SLIP AWAY [305]

Is it still possible to ignore something until it goes away? The expectation these days is to react, fight, stand your ground, voice disapproval, and close the other side down.

As someone whose school years were not the best of their life, I believe the bullies did win after all, or at least everyone chose to adopt their tactics. But the bullies receded eventually, perhaps bored or no longer fulfilled, because I ignored them as much as I could. It takes as much effort to say nothing as saying anything at all.

 

But bullying makes news, hectoring makes news, provocation makes news. Anything written on Twitter by Piers Morgan is routinely written up by newspapers, including the one he used to edit, the “Daily Mirror”, legitimising the way he uses it, if not condoning it.

 

This playbook appears to have been used by the television channel GB News, which has generated an immense amount of heat, but very little light, since it launched on Sunday 13^th June. GB News courted pre-launch comparisons with the rabid Fox News Channel, touting items on Andrew Neil’s flagship 8pm show with titles like “Wokewatch” and “Mediawatch.” These were initially addressed by Neil’s programme on the channel’s launch night, talking about how the channel would “lend an ear to some of Britain’s marginalised and overlooked voices” and speak up for “their voice has not been heard in the mainstream media.”

 

Online traffic about the channel, which includes boycotts of advertisers and poking fun at numerous technical errors suffered, is led by controversial statements made by presenters, particularly former talk radio “shock jocks” Nigel Farage and Dan Wootton about the England football team “taking the knee,” the Royal National Lifeboat Institution rescuing refugees at sea, “doomsday scientists” running a “Covid scare campaign” that “terrified the public into supporting lockdowns,” and anything else that speaks to how a culture war is being waged by “woke” people. Eschewing traditional news bulletins for leading with conversation, the subjects discussed are few and repetitive.

 

In itself, GB News is rather boring to talk about, for the extent to which its tumultuous launch and continued existence has been taken apart in numerous news articles and opinion pieces, there is really nothing left to say about it that hasn’t already been said, because everyone has said everything about it from the moment the channel was first announced. The broad narrative of overambition and hubris – its viewing figures are currently in the tens of thousands, below what it needs to prove its viability – also invites comparisons with the launch, collapse and overhaul of TV-am when that launched in 1983, suggesting not only that the crisis at GB News, whose director of programmes at launch has already left, suggests not only that the current problems experienced by the channel were not only expected, but forseen. TV-am eventually became more popular, but only by changing itself almost entirely.

 

Since Sunday 13^th June, I have watched a total of three hours of GB News – one was the opening launch programme, followed by bits of other shows, including a Sunday morning with the deliberately provocative title of “The Political Correction.” The repetition of talking points became boring, and seeing a parade of mid-shots of people talking is visually uninteresting, not helped by having a studio set with black walls and no windows. 

 

So, I ignore the channel, and ignore the discourse surrounding the channel. Its viewing figures confirm I cannot be the only one. I am not interested in what the presenters have to say on the same few topics, especially as its competition, as a politically right-leaning channel, is most national newspapers, talk radio stations, and vast sections of the internet. It can only make noise to attract attention, and can only provoke a reaction by creating heat. I already learned to avoid things like that.

IT’S FAMILIAR, BUT NOT TOO FAMILIAR [304]

It is well known that “podcasting” was a term coined by Ben Hammersley, in an article [link] for “The Guardian” in February 2004. What is less commented on is that said article was precisely about what to call the “new boom in amateur radio” spurred by both the rise of MP3 players and services like Audible, and the fall in the cost of the tools used in audio production. 

The other terms offered by Hammersley, “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia,” are not precise enough, but the portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcasting” nails both the delivery system that made the new media possible, and the closeness of its discipline to traditional media like radio and television. Hammersley is now primarily known as a futurist and “strategic foresight consultant,” obviously having foreseen the need for that kind of role.

 

It has taken me an extraordinarily long time to start listening to podcasts with any amount of regularity. Just like I continue to think of YouTube as an extension of traditional television, podcasting is the same for radio. It does not help that most podcasts are most often speech-based and 30-60 minutes in length, exactly the sort of show already broadcast on radio stations like BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service – indeed, BBC-produced podcasts like “Death in Ice Valley” and “You, Me and the Big C” have been repeated on traditional radio with no material change. 

 

I think my problem has been that “podcast” has felt like another word for “radio,” just as “quadrilogy,” describing something in four parts, has apparently taken place of the word “tetralogy,” which means exactly the same thing. If I felt that my listening needs were already met by radio, I was less likely to need podcasts. 

 

What finally turned me on to podcasts was finding extreme examples of where the content offered was different from regular radio shows. My two regular podcast listens are “CheapShow,” the economy comedy podcast I have talked about previously [link], and now “My Brother, My Brother and Me,” the advice podcast where advice is only given by accident. In their own separate ways, they are structured as traditional radio magazine shows, but their content is completely unencumbered by broadcasting regulations on swearing or subject matter, and conversations can take their natural course because episodes do not need to fit within a radio station’s schedule. 

 

It sounds like it took me too long to discover the blindingly obvious, but my defence is that while a podcast can potentially fit into spaces on British radio, particularly on the BBC, podcasts are more distinctive in their birthplace, the United States, because radio there is more constricted in content – mixed-genre stations died out with the move of mass audiences to television in the 1950s, leaving live DJ-driven music radio, and phone-in talk shows, as the dominant formats through their being easier and cheaper to produce. Outside of National Public Radio, the need to create a form in which more different types of shows could be produced was greater in the United States, and its similarity to radio made it easier to adopt.

 

Having said all of this, I am not planning to launch a podcast despite the low barrier to entry. All I have is a title, “Let’s Find Yes,” and nothing further than that.

I’M SATISFIED I GOT THIS FAR [303]

The British car company Vauxhall has announced that their Ellesmere Port factory, currently building the Astra hatchback, will switch to producing electric vans, securing jobs in the north of England. Its parent company also announced that all new Vauxhall vehicles will be electric-only from 2028, ahead of other brands in the group.

I then remembered the name of the group is “Stellantis”. When I first saw this name, it may as well have said the Tyrrell Corporation, Cyberdyne or Stark Industries, for a name like “Stellantis” sounds like a fictional mega-corporation that has its fingers in everything, one of which just happens to be cars. Basing its headquarters in the Netherlands, where it has no factories, doesn’t help matters.

Stellantis was created in January 2021 when the shareholders of two enormous car companies voted to merge. FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) was originally to have merged with Renault Group, but this stalled due to the potential impact on Nissan, which is partly owned by Renault. FCA then approached Groupe PSA, renamed from PSA Peugeot Citroën in 2017. PSA had bought Vauxhall and Opel in 2016 from General Motors (GM), which had owned them since the 1920s – this happened following the financial crisis in 2008-10, where the bailing out of both GM and Chrysler by the United States government eventually led to both the downsizing of GM, and Fiat’s buyout of Chrysler.

Perhaps it is easier to choose a neutral name. The Latin verb “stello,” meaning to cover with stars or points of light, is meant to evoke the French and Italian roots of the company, its multitude of brands acting like the film studio’s MGM boast of “more stars than there are in heaven” – I guess “antis” is meant to be the transatlantic connection through Chrysler. 

However, this multitude of names begs the question of why so many names are being maintained. GM represents only four brands these days, each pitched to certain buyers – Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC – which share a few platforms to rationalise production among its different models. Brands that either overlapped with each other or had become unfashionable, like Plymouth, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn and Hummer, have all been discarded.

Stellantis is ultimately planning to have only four electric car platforms on which to build multiple ranges of potentially completing vehicles. Before the mergers that created, Vauxhall was in competition with Peugeot as much as with Fiat, just as Citroën may complete with Lancia, let alone Vauxhall cars having been rebadged Opel models for decades. Add into these the extra performance of luxury spin-off brands built up over time, like Chrysler’s Ram and Citroën’s DS, and you start to wonder which of these could become the next Oldsmobile.

As the automotive industry adapts to survive the forced death of petrol and diesel engines, the need for established names to reinvent themselves has accelerated with the rise of new brands more closely associated with electric cars from the start, like Tesla and Polestar. The creation of Stellantis may not be the last consolidation in the industry as a result, but it may remain the one with the most sinister-sounding name.