The Wiki Man

Of all the strange behaviours of the rich, owning horses long struck me as the most bizarre. A horse, when you think about it, is a hopelessly unsuccessful attempt to combine a pet with a form of transportation. So whenever anyone mentioned that their daughter wanted a horse, I always recommended they bought a Range Rover and a kitten instead. The two would cost much less to run, and provide far more in the way of utility, pleasure and companionship. Or at least that’s what I used to think. I always loved cats and thought horses rather stupid. But then it dawned on me: cats have effectively hacked us. The relationship between a horse and a human is a reciprocal one. They perform useful work and we supply them with food and shelter. It’s a straightforward business deal.

Now that most taxi drivers use satnavs, should ‘the Knowledge’ be abolished? Shouldn’t we ditch the requirement that all London black cab drivers spend several years acquiring an insanely detailed knowledge of London before obtaining a badge? In cabbie folklore, the model for the Knowledge was first suggested by Prince Albert. True or not, there is something German about the notion that every tradesman should have a qualification. And the test is teutonically stringent: more than 70 per cent of applicants fail or drop out. It demands that the prospective driver memorise 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks within six miles of -Charing Cross.

Whenever I return to my old university, I am always struck by how incredibly focused, purposeful and studious everyone seems to be. It fills me with despair. It’s hard to tell the difference between a university and a business school nowadays. Where are all the hippies, the potheads and the commies? And why is everyone so intently serious and sober all the time? ‘Oh, it’s simple,’ a friend explained. ‘If you don’t get a 2:1 or a first nowadays, employers won’t look at your CV.’ So, as a keen game-theorist, I struck on an idea. Recruiting next year’s graduate intake for Ogilvy would be easy. We could simply place ads in student newpapers: ‘Headed for a 2:2 or a third? Finish your joint and come and work for us.

An ardently left-wing friend of mine is travelling over from Thailand next week to look for a private school for his daughter. My email to him was short. It read ‘Charles Darwin 1, Karl Marx 0’. Nobody among the sharp-elbowed middle class ever allows his political convictions to override the pursuit of a good education for his children. They will pay or move house or, if those two approaches fail, rapidly reawaken a long-dormant interest in Catholicism. One reason for this inconsistency is explained in four words by the evolutionary theorist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, by common consent the world’s leading expert on ants. His simple observation on Marxism was ‘Beautiful theory. Wrong species.

You will be scandalised by the suggestion, of course, especially those of you who spend several hours every week drinking it, reading about it or discussing it. But most wine is actually rubbish. I’ll let you off the hook if you drink wine only with food. But wine drunk on its own is often a terrible drink, usually consumed for appearances’ sake, or because the drinker lacks the confidence to complain, or for want of any alternative source of alcohol. Our judgment of wine is also notoriously flaky — influenced as much by the appearance and weight of the bottle as by its contents. One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as ‘undrinkable’; another won a double gold medal.

If I stand on the forecourt of Euston station tomorrow morning, I will be able to get to Manchester by high-speed train in 20 years, one hour and eight minutes. That’s only 19 years, 364 days and 23¾ hours longer than it took me last month. But at least we know that 17 June 2033, the day earmarked for the opening of the London to Manchester High Speed Rail service, will be a nice, sunny day. As the inaugural train pulls out of Euston, it will travel under clear blue skies until the train reaches Birmingham (scattered clouds: chance of precipitation 20 per cent). We know this, because, of course, we can forecast the weather 20 years in advance. Well at least we should be able to do this, since economic forecasters can clearly predict the demand for travel 20 years ahead.

In 1964 Harold Wilson was so afraid that a scheduled election-night broadcast of Steptoe & Son would cost him at least a dozen marginal seats that he successfully pressured the director-general of the BBC to postpone it. There are plenty of ways to manipulate an election, short of stuffing a ballot box. Another example is here, from 1938: This ballot paper crudely follows the advice of Dr Josef Goebbels, that ‘the most effective form of persuasion is when you are not aware you are being persuaded’. Translated, it reads: ‘Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938 and do you vote for the party of our leader, Adolf Hitler? Yes. No.

‘Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. And never sleep with a woman whose -troubles are worse than your own.’ These were Nelson Algren’s Three Rules of Life. You may have noticed a few more ‘rules of life’ appearing recently. After years of our being advised to drink some forgettable number of units of alcohol every week, a new rule seems to have emerged: ‘Don’t worry much about how much you drink but do abstain from alcohol completely for at least two days in seven.’ The hottest diet of the moment, sometimes called the 5:2 Diet, lets you eat freely except for two days of fasting each week. Other diets focus on total abstinence from carbohydrates, especially sugar.

The city of Granada is notable for several things. Most visitors go to see the Alhambra, or for a strange procession during Holy Week interesting chiefly for having provided fashion tips to the Ku Klux Klan. Judging by its Wikipedia entry, it is also home to Europe’s most eccentric twinning committee: its twin towns include Aix-en-Provence, Freiburg, Marrakech and Sneinton, a suburb of Nottingham whose attractions extend to a moderately interesting windmill. Its other distinction is that it is the unfriendliest place I have ever been. Granada’s hospitality industry seems to have improved little since 1936, when locals celebrated the return of Federico Garciá Lorca by shooting him and dumping his body by a road.

I don’t want to defend Chris Huhne, I really don’t. Apart from anything else, I have always thought the country would be better off if all Oxford PPE graduates were simply imprisoned immediately, instead of the present inefficient system where we wait for them to commit a crime first. This would save us from being ruled by people who wanted to be politicians at the age of 17. But no newspaper has yet pointed out that the speed camera which caught Chris Huhne was not just any old speed camera. From what I have found online it seems to have been the long-notorious ‘Site 050’ camera at the M11 at Chigwell, just beyond the point where the speed limit on the motorway drops from 70mph to 50. The camera was installed in 2000.

The award for the most hideous TV moment of 2012 goes to NBC — and their coverage of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. ‘Apparently there’s going to be a tribute to someone called Tim Berners-Lee.’ ‘If you haven’t heard of him, we haven’t either,’ giggles co-anchor Meredith Vieira. Then, with no evident irony, ‘We could look him up on the web.’ The recognition given to inventors is a strange thing. It isn’t helped by the fact that, with rare exceptions, they are not the most telegenic of people, putting their efforts into inventing things rather than explaining them.

In a now famous 1993 paper the economist Joel Waldfogel attempted to calculate the economic deadweight-loss caused by giving Christmas presents. His argument was that money spent by a gift-giver on a present would usually have been better spent by the recipient, since the recipient would have a better idea of his own needs and preferences than the person choosing the present. Waldfogel’s most generous estimate rated the ‘efficiency’ of a Christmas present no higher than 90 per cent — so the typical gift was about 90 per cent as valuable as if you had given someone an equivalent amount in cash and allowed him to spend it on himself. He calculated that every year in the United States alone billions of dollars of value were squandered through the exchange of presents.