Category: Travels

Overpaid And Over Here

Behind Enemy Lines

So the BBC published the salaries of their top “talent” a little while ago. Surprise, surprise, men earn more than women for doing the same job. (As Mr. FM puts it, “Most of them are paid to read a teleprompter and are no more journalists than my dogs.”)

There’s a lot to be said about all this, but I’m only going to make a few comments.

BBC is funded largely by annual license fees paid by 95% of the British population — roughly $180 per annum per household — and the fees are collected with incredible ferocity. It’s not unfair to say that they’re collected at gunpoint, because failure to pay can result in massive fines and even imprisonment. Needless to say, therefore, people really bitch about wastage and, inevitably, bloated salaries unless they’re being paid to people of serious worth such as veteran nature documentary maker David Attenborough. Here’s a lesser-known example.

BBC Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, unsurprisingly, makes more than any of the others. While we Murkins might know Evans as the dorky ginger who tried (and failed) to fill the scuffed suede shoes of Top Gear‘s Jeremy Clarkson, Evans is a brilliant DJ, has had the morning radio gig for many years and has astonishing listenership numbers. (Radio is still very popular Over Here, mostly because the TV, all of it, is such shit.) If we translated Evans’s popularity into a Stateside comparison, he’d make more than Howard Stern did at WNBC in New York or Rush Limbaugh still does. While there’s the usual Wealth Envy moaning from the Labour Commies, not too many people are getting upset about Evans because frankly, he’s worth the money. Of course, there are some male presenters who, equally frankly, are not only overpaid but lucky to be employed at all because by any measure, they’re as shit at their job as the crap they have to present. But that’s not the biggest issue.

Oh no; it’s all about Teh Ladies (of course).

Now I’m not going to get into who are the better presenters (although I can’t see why, say, morning TV show male presenters shouldn’t be paid the same as their female co-presenters — they aren’t; men are paid much more). I haven’t watched enough BBC-TV shows to get an idea, because a.) I have a life and b.) all the morning shows are so banal that they make Good Morning America look like the aforementioned Howard Stern’s TV show, and I’d rather walk the Free Markets’ dogs than watch any of them. I will say that having watched a few, the wimmins are actually more entertaining than the men — unless they’re doing a girls-only show like Loose Women, which makes the American show The View (which is unspeakably bad) look like quality programming by comparison.

My final thought is that managerially speaking, the BBC are a bunch of morons. What they should have done was publish alongside the salaries both the length of tenure on the job — experience counts — and most importantly, the viewership / listenership numbers — it’s all about the eyeballs and earholes, folks. Chris Evans’s 9 million listeners dwarf BBC Breakfast‘s 1.5 million viewers, so that would explain the salary disparity there. (As an aside, I should point out that rival ITV’s Good Morning Britain, hosted jointly by the sexy Susanna Reid and the revolting Piers Morgan only gets 800,000 viewers.) Here’s Susanna:

And lastly, the whole BBC salary thing is a study of orange-and-apple comparisons — morning TV shows to, say, football shows — but I have to say, though, that I’m getting a huge amount of pleasure watching the oh-so sanctimoniously-PC BBC wriggle as they try to explain the “gender gap” in their executive wage scales. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of social justice warriors. The BBC also complains that they have to pay these salaries because they’re in competition for talent with the commercial media — except that the competition pays far less, on average, than does the BBC for like jobs.

Addendum: stats on Brit media are incredibly confusing: “peak” vs. “average daily” v.s “weekly” etc. I do understand them, having worked in advertising agencies for years, but I couldn’t be bothered with forensic accuracy. My numbers may be a little off, e.g. dated, but the relative scale of them isn’t, and I’m not a journalist so I have no inclination to spend hours of research on them when I could be cleaning my new Mauser. Priorities: I have them.

Saturday Morning, Again

Behind Enemy Lines, Food & Drink

Ah yes… last night.

Pretty much the same cast of characters (The Englishman and Reader John M. — Mr. Free Market had to stay late at work: celebratory drinks after some successful capitalist venture, no doubt), the same products of Messrs. Wadworth and Company, same wonderful fun, same pub. Same final result, of course.

Back when the skull-hobgoblins have finished their Happy Dance…

Footwear Fashion

Travels

Allow me to present an essential difference between boots as worn in the western U.S.A., and boots as worn in western Britishland:

Now let me explain why the ugly green ones on the right are not an affectation in These Yerrrr Parrrrts (as they call it here).

For most of my trip thus far there has not been a drop of rain fallen on my head. At least, not while I’ve been awake. So all my excursions have been dry, so to speak, and I’ve even been able to wear my Minnetonka moccasins (Kim’s go-to footwear) on a couple of shopping trips.

Then last night it rained — buckets, apparently — but I barely noticed it because I was sunk in semi-drunken slumber after Mr. FM and I had semi-indulged, so to speak. Today dawned bright and clear, but hidden underneath the oh-so green grass was… mud.

Good grief. It wasn’t just yer everyday sandy Texas mud; oh no, this was vile, clingy, chalky mud, the kind that needs not washing off but chiseling off if allowed to dry on the shoes. Anyway, after but a few steps in this stuff, my boots had completely disappeared into snowshoe-looking things of brownish gunk — it took the shoe boy almost an hour to clean it off (and if you look closely, you can still see a trace or two on the soles of my cowboy boots; I dare not tell Mrs. FM of this shortcoming or else the hapless youth will be flogged again).

Clearly, one needs a different kind of boot out here, so Mr. FM took me “wellie-shopping” at an emporium known as “Countrywide” which caters to the farm- and country-folk. And this was how I knew I was in Hardy Country.

You know how in Shepler’s Western Wear stores there’s an entire section dedicated to cowboy boots of all shapes and styles? That’s Countrywide’s policy towards Wellington boots (as rubber rain boots are known in Britishland). Yikes. And just like cowboy boots, wellies range in price from $100 a pair to $500 — and Mr. FM pointed out that “bespoke” wellies can demand still more than that.

I decided to go for fit over price: my sturdy calves (“more like full-grown bulls”, as my old dad once said) have given me trouble with tall boots all my life — but wonderfully, the wellies which fit me best were a “budget” brand which cost me only about $120, and are the ones featured in the pic above.

As for the bilious color of the things: Mr. FM assures me that hunter’s green is by far the most popular shade out in the field, as evidenced by this picture of his hunting party*, taken last year. Note the overwhelming choice of footwear:

So that’s okay, then.

*The bloke on the left (shirtsleeves rolled up, tieless and not wearing wellies) is apparently Lord Freddie Someone-Or-Other, whose family was given permission to be thus casually attired by the King, back in 1800 or something.

Prison Work

Travels

While driving through the Cotswolds last week, Mr. FM and I stopped off for lunch at a place intriguingly named, “The Old Prison”.

The cop shop was on the other side:

While eating my ham ‘n three-cheese panini sandwich in the little restaurant, my eye happened to catch sight of this commemorative sign:

Try as I may, I cannot think of a reason why this excellent form of prison work should not be introduced into our modern U.S. prisons. Think about it: it keeps the inmates busy, keeps them fit, keeps them out of mischief and, for those interested in such trivia, it’s a completely green source of energy.

And speaking of energy, here’s a quick pic of Mr. FM’s little conveyance which had carried us up into Gloucestershire:

Not very green, of course; but then again, I’m not one of those who are interested in such trivia.

Interesting Option

Travels

Harking back to my post about winning the Euromillions lottery Over Here, I saw this little piece of real estate, which would give one a serious option when it came to housing:

A historic Scottish castle that boasts lake views and comes complete with two islands is on the market for £3.75million. Glenborrodale Castle has 16 bedrooms as well as a walled garden, a gate house and an impressive 133 acres of land. The baronial home, on the idyllic Ardnamurchan peninsula in Lochaber, Scottish Highlands, was built during the early 20th century and looks fit to feature in a Hollywood fairy tale blockbuster or period drama.

I should point out that these pics were taken in the summer. I suspect that come the Scottish winter (the very definition behind the expression “witch’s tit cold”), it might look a little different.

Still, looks like there’s lots of room for a decent rifle range and a clay pigeon range withal. Not that I would ever consider spoiling the place’s heritage with such an undertaking, of course.

 

Holes In The Ground

Travels

Last October, The Englishman and Mr. Free Market had planned a joint visit to the U.S., but only Mr. Free Market made it over The Pond. The Englishman’s excuse for not making it was that he was going to be looking in a hole in the ground. (Mr. FM’s acid comment: “Nothing wrong with looking at holes in the ground, as long as there are dead Socialists at the bottom.”)

Well, this is the hole that The Englishman was talking about:

…and he took me there earlier today, after a liquid lunch [he added unnecessarily]. Here are my pics, taken at ground level:

The trapezoidal outline is the “inner wall” that was probably the outer wall of the barrow — basically, a wooden structure covered with earth and turf, wherein, the newspaper article runs, the dead were buried.

Here are a couple pics of some of the people excavating the site:

Actually, as The Englishman pointed out to me, the “burial ground” thing could be a load of nonsense, for the simple reason that as of today, no human remains have yet been found. The structure could equally have been a communal living area or shelter — but as the digging progresses, there may well be prehistoric bodies discovered further down.

It makes sense that it’s a burial site, by the way; in Neolithic times, dwellings were generally placed closer to rivers or lakes, and this barrow is at least a quarter-mile up from the nearest stream. Also, the dirt mound which surrounded the barrow had the trench on the inside, and not the outside (which would have made it a defensive fortification around the barrow).

I have to say that generally speaking, this kind of stuff holds absolutely no interest for me whatsoever. I like history (i.e. written accounts of events and people) and not prehistory (which has no such accounts). The problem is that I love listening to experts talk about their area of expertise — it can be a glassblower, a gunmaker, a liquor distiller or someone who’s spent forty years studying Shakespeare’s sonnets — and along with The Englishman, who is very knowledgeable about all this prehistory stuff, I also met Jim Leary and Amanda Clarke (see the article) who are heading up both this dig and a nearby one (which we visited too). It’s impossible not to be excited when people like these talk about finds they’ve made which could completely change our understanding of this hitherto-unknown time.

Of course, all this was made still more enthralling for me when we passed this building on the way home — a Saxon church built around the time of Alfred The Great:

It’s long since been converted into a house, and I just hope that the owners appreciate its heritage.

And on the right is The Englishman’s Land Rover Defender (full pic below):

Of course, we’re not allowed to own such exquisite vehicles because of OSHA (no “side-protection”, or some such nanny-state bollocks), but don’t get me started on that tangent.

As with so many days I’ve spent here, it was perfect — and I’m going to do it again, somewhere else.

Oh, and of course, I’ve been remiss in not showing the place from which we started off the day’s activities, The King’s Arms in the village of All Cannings:

This is an historic site for me, because it’s where I was first introduced to Wadworth’s 6X Ale.