Winter 2010, London

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Pamplamoose

Pomplamoose has got to be my favorite YouTube 'meme.' Their cover songs are fine, but I find their videos oddly irresistable. Maybe it's because music is such a mystery to me, watching it be created is just fascinating. Anyway, they just did a new collaboration which I think is great:



Here's an example of their regular work:

A White Christmas, but at what cost?

Bets are now on that it will be a white Christmas in England, but the severe weather we've been experiencing all month has had quite a toll on the economy:

• On Saturday, only 16 of 650 planes departed Heathrow, stranding 400,000 passengers.  On Sunday, most flights were cancelled, and the airport says it will take 5 days to get back to normal.  However, the next four days are calling for snow, fog, sleet, and rain, all with freezing temperatures. (Jessica is stranded in Chicago, and I wish her godspeed coming home.)
• 20% of trains were delayed or cancelled due to snow.  When I went into central London on Saturday, every tube line had partial closures and/or severe delays.  (Most of the problems were where these trains ran overground.)
• The AA (equivalent of the AAA) reported up to 1,500 hours calls per hour, with 28,000 callouts on Monday, nearly 3 times normal.  Tailbacks (traffic jams) of 6-8 hours on the major highways are not uncommon.
• As England doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, we also don't have "Black Friday."  The Saturday before Christmas is generally the busiest shopping day of the year, but this year footfall was down 24% over last year, despite the economy improving.

Meanwhile, the UK Transport Secretary said he was "seeking scientific advice to decide whether heavy snowfall was likely to be a regular occurrence in Britain," in order to justify investing in more infrastructure.  Genius.

P.S. Sunday night dropped to 16F (-9C) in London.  That would normally just be an academic fact, as I wouldn't be stupid enough to venture out into that kind of cold.  However, for a long and complicated set of reasons, I had to go out to do some gardening and get a pizza.  Not quite sure what I was thinking.

Why can't all presentations be this cool?

Here are the actual slides.  (37 seem to have been lost.)  Google Docs includes a 'slideshow' option but you can't change the speed -- obviously it was significantly sped up for the video.  Still, very cool.

Life of a blog post

Just to prove I have ADHD, consider this: Yesterday's blog post started with the thought that tea bags contain way too much tea.

A single tea bag can easily produce 3 cups of tea (if judged by color alone).  And it can do so in less than a minute.  Yet I remember from "Angela's Ashes" that the mother steeped the tea leaves for five minutes.  So I wanted to know if tea drinking had changed over the years, but I never found an answer for that.

Instead I got a brief history of tea from the UK Tea Council.  They also included an 'FAQ' with some very interesting facts:
- Per capita, the largest tea drinking nation is Ireland, followed by Britain.  (I'm not sure where China fits on the list.)
- Brits drink 165 million cups of tea per day, compared to 70 million cups of coffee
- 98% of Brits spoil their tea with milk
- All tea comes from the plant, Camellia sinensis (although there are 1,500 varieties of that plant).
- The only difference between green tea and black tea is the amount of oxidation that occurs, which breaks down the tea leaves and turns them black.
- Tea was rationed in the UK during World War II.
- In 1953, Tetley introduced the tea bag.  Today, 96% of tea is from tea bags.

The Tea Council also had a grisly account of tea smugglers that make today's drug cartels seem pretty soft.  It also noted that when William Pitt the Younger reduced the tea tax in 1784, he made up for it by increasing the window tax.  (There was also a brick tax.)

From there, I got to reading about the East India Company, which lost its monopoly in 1834.  Faced with competition in China, it turned its attention to cultivating tea in India, and within 50 years tea imports from India where greater than those from China.

Competition among tea traders also ushered in the 'tea clippers,' fast sailing ships meant to get from London to China as quickly as possible.  They could travel at 20 knots (23 mph), compared to 5-6 knots (6-7 mph) for most cargo ships.  Even so, the return journey took over 3 months, often longer depending on the winds, and when the Suez Canal opened in 1869 -- shaving 7,500 miles from the journey -- they could not compete against the bigger and more reliable steamships.

(I also noted with pride that the clipper ships were pioneered in Baltimore, where they were used to outmanoeuvre the British blockade during the War of 1812.)

1869 was also the year the US trans-contintental railroad was completed, followed the next year by the Indian trans-continental railroad, making the world a much smaller place.  Prior to that, only a handful of people had circumnavigated the globe, with journeys between 2 and 9 years!  In 1873, however, Jules Verne wrote "Around the World in 80 days," which was actually possible.
(The book included an elephant, but the balloon was strictly an invention of the movie.)

It was also interesting that England went from taxing tea as a luxury, to excluding it from sales tax, considering it a necessity.  I tried to find a list of similar items exempted from VAT, but could not find anything consistent, but that led me to another court case in cakes. 

I mentioned years ago that cakes and biscuits were taxed differently (and apparently chocolate-covered biscuits are also taxed differently than regular biscuits) based on a court decision that about Jaffa cakes.  In 2008, Marks and Spencer won a 12-year legal battle with the tax man over their Chocolate Tea Cakes, which were originally classified as chocolate biscuits but have now been reclassified as cake.  The interesting bit, though, was that M&S was allowed to keep the £3.5 million (about US $7 million at the time) refund.

We're talking about tax paid by the consumer -- not by M&S!  So even if the tax shouldn't have been collected, it's not clear why M&S gets to keep it.

As for my original issue, I found there's about a teaspoon of tea in a teabag, there are actually 3 grades of tea bags (whole leaf, fannings (or broken leaf), and dust), and everybody else in the world thinks its disgusting to re-use a tea bag.  I still think it's wasteful, but I'm probably not going to abandon tea bags; I will just start a compost pile at the new house.

Oh, and I found instructions for a tea bag rocket to try at home. I hope Jessica's not reading this.

A lesson to be learned from tea

When tea finally reached England around 1650, the Brits took to it with enthusiam.  However, the East India Company had a government monopoly on imports outside Europe, and so they kept prices artificially high.  In addition, the Crown imposed heavy taxes on this 'luxury import,' starting in 1689 with a near-ruinous 25p per pound!  (It was reduced to 5p per pound 3 years later.)  Even the American colonists had an issue with the taxation on tea.

As a result, by the late eighteenth century, a remarkable organised crime network was importing as much as 7 million pounds annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million pounds!  The cheaper tea ensured it became a drink of the masses, but the illegal tea was not subject to any quality control and so was often adulterated, using leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried. If the colour was not right, anything from sheep's dung to poisonous copper carbonate would be added.

In 1784, aware that taxation was creating more problems than it was worth, the government slashed tax from 119% to 12.5%, cutting the cost of tea in half. Smuggling stopped virtually overnight.  (Unfortunately, it was too late for the Americans.)

In 1964, the British government abolished tea duties entirely, and today it is considered so essential it is even exempt from VAT (sales tax).

White Christmas

Of course, a white Christmas in London is defined as a single snowflake falling on the roof of the London Weather Centre in the 24 hours of 25 December.  At least, that's how the bookies define it. The capital has only seen snow on 13% of Christmas days since 1950, but that doesn't stop thousands of people from putting a 'flutter' on it.

Two weeks ago -- before the earliest snow fell in England for 29 years -- the odds of a white Christmas were 6/1, meaning a £100 bet would pay £700.  Today that bet would only return £450.  Today's forecast is for another artic blast, and so the odds will probably drop even further.

You can also bet on the number one song for Christmas.  That is usually the X Factor winner (the equivalent of American Idol), although in the last few years people have conspired against them, buying Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and Rage Against the Machine.  Unfortunately, this year the conspirators have selected a song of silence -- seriously, a four minute track of musicians in the studio not playing.  While I think that is very English, I also think it doesn't have a snowball's chance of winning.

And if you're a little more adventurous, you can bet that the lowest recorded temperature in England will be beaten, the Thames will freeze over, or that Big Ben will fail to chime due to being frozen solid.  The odds of the latter is 100/1 but, worringly, the odds that the temperature will drop below -26.1C (-15F) are just 16/1.

Petrol

An article indicated petrol (that's gas to you) in the UK could go to £1.24 per litre next year.  Let's see, there's 4.54 litres in a gallon, and the current exchange rate is $1.58 to the pound, so that works out to $8.92 per gallon.

Anybody have any complaints about US gas prices now?

Tomas the builder

Even though we haven't bought it yet, Jess and I had an appointment at the new house with a builder (contractor to you).

Ostensibly, we just wanted a quote on a few items the surveyor (inspector to you) had highlighted, including the entire electrical system.  In reality, though, it was an excuse to start talking about a house extension.

As I mentioned before, the house is a bog standard 1930's semi-detached with a tiny, dated kitchen.  It originally had a small living room and dining room, but the owners had removed the dividing wall and made it one long room, although the dining area was quite dark.  Our idea was to add a few feet to the back of the house, put in a lot of glass to lighten it up, and open the wall between the kitchen and dining room.

Of course, the first thing the builder pointed out was that everything we wanted to move was structural.

Fortunately, although I never heard of this in the States, it's quite common here to insert a 'reinforced steel joist' and remove the supporting wall.  Of course, it's not cheap.  And we are talking about three of them.

So now we're waiting for the builder to come back with a quote.  Of course, we'll completely change our plans -- I've already changed them twice today -- but it's quite exciting to be looking at photos and talking about what we want to do. 

When the quote comes back and we have to deal with the reality of compromising to meet our budget, that probably won't be as much fun.

Entitlement culture

The UK (and indeed, all of Europe) has a much worse entitlement culture than the US, although for the life of me I can't figure out why.  Is it pent up frustrations from the middle ages?  Or perhaps a competitive environment where politicians tried to 'outpromise' other countries?  Whatever the reason, every day there is a front-page article talking about why the government should, is, or will be gifting money to some obscure group, and how upset people are that the government isn't giving more.  A few of the results from the past week:

- A recent survey of 10 UK secondary schools (grades 7-12, approximately) found that 337 students said they had carried out some level of "personal care" of someone in their home "some of the time" over the previous month. Extrapolating from that, the survey concluded over 700,000 children in the UK are caring for their parents.  Children's Minister for England said it was "shocking" that child carers did not get the support they needed or the recognition they deserved."The Care Services minister (I didn't even realize there was such a position) then announced the government would make £400m available for carers' breaks over the next four years, and the

- I read a heart-rending article about a father who, after his daughter was diagnosed with cancer, successfully campaigned for students to receive "employment support allowance" (ie unemployment benefits) if illness forced them to suspend their courses. It seemed perfectly reasonable...until I found the issue hinged on the word 'suspend' -- since benefits are based on income, and a student loan is considered income, if the student quits school she is entitled to disability benefits, but if she only 'suspends' her studies then she still has access to the student loan, and therefore was denied additional benefits.  Suddenly this seemed quite silly.

- Students have been protesting increases to school fees for about a month.  Two weeks ago, about 2,000 (out of 50,000) protesters split from the march to surround the Conservative Party HQ, smashing windows and lighting fires. 58 people were arrested and 14 people hurt during the four-hour stand-off.  What could cause such chaos?  The UK government is proposing raising the tuition cap from £3,290 to £9,000 a year. That's still less than a public college in the States, and the government will pay the entire amount as an interest-free loan which would not have to be repaid until the student had graduated and was earning £21,000 per year.  (A graduate earning the median £31,323 per year would repay £77/month.)

- Workers on the London Underground have organised four strikes over the past two months, crippling public transportation, to protest cuts of up to 800 jobs, claiming the cuts would seriously impact safety.  Management notes the 800 jobs are for cashiers which have been replaced with automated ticket machines, and they aren't even firing anyone, just not replacing them.

But that still pales next to France, where labor unions have organized six nationwide strikes over the past two months, with between 1 and 3 million demonstrators.  This has cost that country nearly US $500 million per day; public transportation has been reduced, motorways have been blocked, refineries have been disrupted, leading to a national fuel shortage, and students have built barracades around 400 high schools. And what is the social injustice that has caused such an uproar?  The government has raised the retirement age from 60 to 62.

London is beautiful

The snow, which has shut down most of the UK over the past 4 days, finally came to London.  Of course, I'm watching it on TV -- I'm not crazy enough to actually go outside!  The thermometer is not expected to go much above freezing for the rest of the week.

But even through the window, the city really comes into its own, with large gossamer flakes blowing lazily about, giving the city a clean, white sheen.  I know at some point I will have to venture out, but I will be prepared--thermal underwear, multiple layers, a warm coat and scarf, possibly even a hat.  Fortunately, the Indian takeaway is just a block away.

Winter in England is not like New England -- snow is usually fairly mild, it rarely gets below freezing, and when there is heavy snow, most people have the good sense to stay home.  Last year, the heavy snow caught the local councils off guard, and they did not have enough salt to grit the roads.  This year, they assure us that won't be a problem, but it is a worying start to winter--snow hasn't fallen in November in 29 years.

The Met Office has predicted a 'dry and mild winter' -- but then again, they said the same thing last year, which turned out to be one of the coldest winters on record.

Winter officially starts tomorrow.