An Open Letter To amazon.wherever

Dear Amazon,

As you well know, I have purchased a host of wonderful items from your online store over many, many years. It would be fair to say that your chronic lack of shipping charges, coupled with your competitive pricing, occasional spectacular offers and excellent pre-order service, have not only made my life a good deal easier, but also prevented me parting needlessly with a most numerous number of shiny pound coins. Certainly while I was in the UK I would not have dared describing you with anything other than the most gushing of terminologies.

Alas, I am woe to report that this honeymoon period of so many happy years is now well and truly over. In these last few months I have found myself wrestling time and again with your shipping policies, and this is not the naked mud-wrestling with Jeri Ryan I would incalculably prefer to have in mind. Instead it's more the case of wrestling with a enraged bear that's just been given an enema made entirely out of bees.

Why yes, actually, I would like to see Jeri Ryan wrestle a bear. Is there some reason I shouldn't ?

It is true that you cannot be held responsible for the nonsensical "region encoding" which afflicts DVDs and blu-rays. Although this repressive policy of restricting what information one has access to depending on where one lives is nothing short of censorship by another name, it's not your fault. It's also true that you ship region 2 DVD's from the UK to Puerto Rico at considerably lower prices than you ship region 1's from the United States (despite Puerto Rico being a US territory, and therefore subject to the same domestic shipping prices as the States themselves).

Screw statehood. It's obvious that Puerto Rico should join the U.K.

For this you should be both praised and scolded. It is right and proper that I can effectively bypass the insanity of region encoding in an entirely legal way for minimum cost (the only penalty being that it apparently takes two weeks for the aircraft to cost the Atlantic - I suggest you might want to upgrade your Zeppelin to one of these new-fangled aeroplanes). Kudos for that. But this doesn't make it any the less baffling that it is cheaper to ship an American show from Britain than from the United States.

They also cope well with volcanic ash

Such weirdness is a forgiveable part of a complex automated world-spanning business empire. What is less so are your policies on what can be shipped to where. While you don't have any problems with wrapping up a DVD and whisking it - very slowly - across the Atlantic, apparently video game discs are allergic to airship travel. I expect it brings them out in a nasty rash. Fortunately it seems your .com division has some means of protection, but can charge 3x the shipping price compared to the U.K. for the privilege.

Of course, shipping anything electronic at all to Puerto Rico would be unthinkable. I'm sure you wouldn't want the natives getting ideas above their station. After all, who needs electricity in the tropics ? Everyone knows we spend all our time drinking rum out of coconuts with little umbrellas in. So of course I couldn't possibly need a pair of extremely small, lightweight and easy to pack headphones. Didn't stop you shipping me a rather hefty laptop cooling pad for some reason though.

Electricity ? No, it's powered by rice and beans.

The most bizarre aspect of all this concerns your flagship product, the Kindle. Given that you must inevitably bow to publisher's wishes, it is just about comprehendable that you cannot release electronic versions of books to a worldwide audience at the same time. Understandable yes, forgiveable no. This is taking all of the benefits of internet globalisation and feeding them to the Rancor. Which in my view is totally mammoth. You will pay the price for your lack of vision (although Emperor Palpatine probably wasn't thinking about lost revenue from book sales when he said this).

Admittedly, no-one with a pet Rancor will care much about shipping policies

But, as I said, this is at least understandable. What isn't is the fact that this applies not only to modern books but also to classics which are available for free in other countries. They say that you should never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to stupidity, and this is surely a classic example. There is no motive, rhyme or reason to restrict a free product, and simultaneously point out in big clear freakin' letters that you can easily find this content for free elsewhere.

So, thank you amazon. For the largest internet retailer your shipping policies are remarkably anti-globalisation, and it certainly nice to see someone leading the charge to ensure everyone is treated differently based on wherever they happen to live. For the life of me I just can't think how that isn't an example of racism and bigotry, but of course that is illegal so I must be wrong. Good luck with that one.

Lots of love from

Me

XXX

P.S. Not that this will stop me buying stuff from you. Except in those cases where you refuse to take my money, as you often do.

P.P.S. Given my years and years of customer loyalty, it'd be nice if you'd approved my amazon store card. How exactly did you come to the conclusion that I have no credit history ?

P.P.P.S. I'm going to think about Jeri Ryan now, and possibly a bear. Maybe some bees too. Bzzzz !

The Ambassador and the Apocalypse

The usual response to whenever I complain about living on a small, desolate island thousands of miles from home is to retort "Yes, but at least you're living on a tropical island paradise." To which my mental response has always been, "Oh REALLY. Is THAT what you think ?". Well, finally I've captured photographic proof that this simply isn't true ! Not unless your idea of "tropical island paradise" includes a sky which, every afternoon, appears to be about to vent the very wrath of heaven upon the world, probably accompanied by something suitably eighties.

ZOOL !

In only slightly less dramatic news, my office has now acquired this rather fine reptilian resident. I suspect he's after the ants, from which there seems to be no escape. I'm currently waging a war against them at home anyway (the current score is several thousand to me, a few nasty bites to them). They've taken it upon themselves to form trails entirely at random in ranks hundreds strong. I tried blocking their trails with masking tape, I tried brutally slaughtering them with ant killer, hell I even tried flaming them with a gas lighter - nothing works.

Which makes it all the more worrying that now, not content to vainly try and steal my food, they also appear to be trying to steal my research, the bastards. It's not as if I even eat in my office or anything.  I can't block their trails with masking tape, because they don't have any. They just turned up one morning on my desk, randomly milling about. I certainly can't spray them all with ant killer, because that would soak all my papers. And I definitely can't burn them, because that would also burn down the office and would be silly.

Get away from my food you BITCH !

In yet more dramatic news, my earlier proclamations against Goldenye may have been a tad... premature. I mentioned that even if we wanted to, we couldn't afford the electric bills to flood the dish. In a bizarre twist, this has become supremely ironic. Owing to the apocalyptic storm shown above, the area underneath the dish is now a lake that's probably about 2 metres deep. Ordinarily we'd just turn on a pump and wave bye-bye to mosquito heaven, but the transfer from Cornell has thrown up an unexpected bureaucratic wrangle. Apparently, someone needs to stay by the pump overnight when this happens... but we can't pay them overtime anymore. Whoops.

Last but not least, this week saw the visit of His Excellency Sir Nigel Elton Sheinwald of Harrow, British Ambassador to the United States of America. No, seriously, that's his full title (although he probably leaves out the "of Harrow" bit). Apparently he was accompanied by his wife and a protocol officer. Unfortunately I didn't get to ask if she's fluent in over 6 million forms of communications because they turned up while I was at lunch, and went galavanting up to the platform without me. Nor did anyone take up my suggestion that we find a small boat and sail them around underneath the dish. I can't imagine why. Because the line "I once went sailing with the British Ambassador underneath the world's largest radio telescope" is one hell of a conversation starter.

The Distribution Of Drivers As A Function Of Speed

It is surely impossible to have enough posts about the driving behaviour of Puerto Ricans, so here is another one. The graph below shows how many drivers spend most of their time at a particular speed, with zero being whatever the speed limit happens to be.

The green area on the left covers about 50% of all Puerto Ricans, who insist on driving very slowly but, as if to compensate for the automatic safety benefit this could bestow, not at all carefully. In classic Puerto Rican fashion, these people place no value on their time or the time of anyone else unlucky enough to be caught behind them.

On the motorway this manifests itself as the Puerto Rican roadblock, a common occurrence where two cars drive alongside each other at exactly the same speed, regardless of the number of people behind them or how fast everyone else is going. Lane discipline might as well be the Loch Ness Monster over here.

The green area on the right also covers about 50% of all Puerto Ricans, who, in classic Puerto Rican fashion, just like driving really really fast, everywhere. And they don't compensate by driving more carefully, because if you're ahead of them they tailgate with extreme prejudice . The idea that something unexpected might happen apparently being a wholly novel concept.

Puerto Rico : A Hispanic Oddity

Puerto Rico can be justly praised for a great many things. Having a solid educational system, efficient public institutions and a carefully thought-out public transport network are but a few of the many, many virtues it doesn't have.

My particular favourite of the island's various enchanting nuances is its corrupt milk industry. Milk is produced locally, presumably to avoid the expense of having to ship it in. Except that tropical grass is extremely poor in nutrients, so grain must be shipped in to feed the cows instead. Which, naturally, requires government subsidies to make it profitable... although it seems what the subsidies actually pay for are the palatial houses of the dairy farmers. I should also add that milk is about 5 times more expensive than root beer.

There's just something wonderfully endearing about a country with a  corrupt milk industry.

Then, as I've mentioned previously, there's the water authority. 4 miles from here, you'd be lucky to get water 3 days a week. Apparently this is not so bad provided you have a large cistern that can fill up whenever the water is working. The ironic thing is that my neighbourhood currently has more water pressure than you'd ever want to see outside of an episode of Mythbusters.

Water pressure is not to be trifled with

This is not normally the case - in fact I often don't get much more than a trickle myself. So it came as a great surprise one morning to turn on the tap and have water spray across the kitchen and see the tap physically jerk upwards. Something inside it even went BANG. Whatever it was hasn't gone BANG since, so is presumably broken, but never mind.

The other bizarre feature of the water industry is that if you dig your own well, legally you don't own the water that comes out of it. So, if you play by the rules, the water industry will charge you for the water you took out of the ground at your own expense. However, you can at least collect rainwater for free - unlike in Colorado.

The electrical authority has quirks of its own. Fortunately, they're not known for the crazy amount of service interruptions that plague their dihydrogen monoxide counterparts. Sure, there are more power cuts here than in most developed countries, but not enough to really worry about. No, the issue here is that the electrical bills are slightly higher than they need to be, so that churches actually get it for free. Thievin' bastards. Why I've half a mind to write a letter to Richard Dawkins.

Thou Shalt Covet Thy Neighbour's Electricity. Covet it good  I say !

One other thing I learned recently deserves to be reported, though it isn't the kind of thing I would normally write about because it's genuinely sick. A few years ago, the authorities embarked on a campaign to reduce the number of stray dogs. I'm not a fan of culling animals, but in this case it might be justifiable. Their numbers are high and most of them are clearly disease-ridden and starving. To try to domesticate them would be an exercise in futility, and take money and resources the island simply doesn't have.

Unfortunately, many pet dogs that happened to be on the street at the time were rounded up during this program. They were not humanely euthanised. No. They were thrown off a bridge.

Al Gore Can Go Screw Himself

Well, he can. Literally. In the most physical sense of the word. With whatever perverted product he prefers, if necessary. Even if his job really is to help Stephen Hawking protect the space-time continuum, for all I care he can go and take a running jump into a pool of his own faecal matter.

This tyrannical Vice President famously won a shiny trophy (OK, it was a Nobel Prize) for a moderately inaccurate power-point presentation about some tap-dancing penguins... no wait, that was Elijah Wood... or maybe it was Morgan Freeman... but I digress. My point his that he can take said trophy - I'm assuming the Nobel to take the form of a little statue of Alfred Nobel himself, possibly holding a stick of dynamite and grinning happily - and use it as a suppository.

Actually, I wouldn't much dispute the basic message of An Inaccurate Truth. Indeed, some of the most noted skeptics have now been forced to conclude that the Earth really is warming. That's skeptics, people, not deniers - those are entirely different beasts. Deniers are the kind of people who should be put on a small smelly island somewhere, along with the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and Six Day Creationists. Skeptics, in contrast, can be safely taken to the pub for a drink.

You see, now that all reasonable people accept that warming is occurring, the cause of it is irrelevant. If we had infinite quantities of coal, or there was no other way to generate electricity, then it might make some difference if our C02 emissions were dangerous or not. But we don't, and there are. So there are really only two options.

1) Carry on burning fossil fuels. Which is fine* if in fact this doesn't cause global warming. Until we run out, and then we are truly up faecal matter creek without a canoe. And if it does cause global warming, then we'll just reach said creek quite a lot sooner.
* Except for all the other nasty associated  environmental damage, like oil spills and open-cast mining and the truly awful effects of fracking.**
** This seriously needs a less hilarious name.

No fossil fuels = no Port Talbot = WIN

2) Stop burning fossil fuels. If warming is real and caused by humans, then at the very least this limits just how far up the proverbial creek we get. And if it's not caused by humans, then we've still prevented all the other downsides to fossil fuels and switched to energy sources that will last forever  (and this includes nuclear fission by the way - breeder reactors are more than capable of producing enough fuel to last us billions of years), and will likely become a hell of a lot cheaper over time.

So, if the remaining skeptics are right, and humans are not causing global warming, then we still have to stop burning fossil fuels eventually - and the sooner the better. If they're wrong, then we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. Either way... well, you get the idea.

Which might make you wonder why I started this post with a vitriolic attack on Al Gore, the patron Saint of Lowering C02 Emissions. Well... I don't actually want the poor bugger to engage in self-copulation, or do something unfortunate with his Nobel prize. Heck, his alarmist movie is probably the only way to convey to the more thick-headed people that there really is a problem, and we should jolly well do something about it. In fact, well done that man !

Unless he tells me to save energy by not using my shiny new air conditioner. Because if the survival of a few waddling tuxedo-wearing movie stars (i.e. penguins) depends upon me living in a constant 35 degree heat and therefore having to collect my own sweat in buckets, then so help me God I'll go to Antarctica and finish off the feathery bastards myself. They'd do the same to me if they could.