Archive for February, 2008
Car valuations: websites are a waste of time
Thanks to the internet, we consumers are better informed than ever. A great example is the price of cars: we can use all kinds of websites to get an accurate picture of what a car’s worth, so the days when dealers could offer a derisory figure are long gone.
Unless the car valuation sites are bollocks. Which they are.
A random example: a year-old, low mileage Volvo coupe/convertible. After taking spec and mileage into consideration, What Car says it’s worth £23,855 as a trade-in. Parkers pretty much agrees. Go to a dealer with those figures and they’ll laugh hollowly. Glass’s Guide, which dealers use, says £19,000 at best, £17,000 on average.
That’s nearly seven grand of a difference. And Glass’s Guide is the trade bible, so if it says seventeen grand that’s the most you’ll get. And yet other price checkers suggest you’ll get six, seven grand more than you’ll get in real life. Which makes their valuations utterly worthless.
The moral? If you’re buying or selling a car, Glass’s Guide is the only one worth looking at (it’s £3.50 a report, but unlike the free services it’s actually right). The information provided by other sites is free, sure, but in this case free means completely and utterly inaccurate.
Are there other free finance sites whose data isn’t worth the no-money they charge?
REM are doing a European tour this year
Might be an idea to join the fanclub at REMhq.com if you’re interested: dates announced Monday, fan club tickets go on sale Wednesday.
Mike Giggler is hanging around the Daily Mail website
It’s a perfect Daily Mail story*.
Time travel could be a reality within just three months, Russian mathematicians have claimed.
They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.
And then John from London makes the perfect Daily Mail comment.
Salvation for our country at last! Can we please take it back to 1950!
* Although if the experiment is successful and the time machine is invented, surely the headline should say “Time Travel became a reality in three months”?
[For non-Private Eye readers, Mike Giggler is the name of the bloke who sends hilarious one-liners to newspaper comment pages]
…and this is where we keep the corpse
An estate agent was showing a would-be buyer round a house when he stumbled across the owner hanging dead inside a wardrobe.
More Eels: live CD/DVD only available at gigs
Eels are putting out a new live CD/DVD, which for now will only be available at gigs:
Gone were the violins, cello and viola. In their place was a motley crew of unrecognizable men in flight suits rocking with a fervor and abandon never before seen.
If you attended one of the 2006 EELS live shows, you know what we’re talking about. E, The Chet, Knuckles and dancing security guard Krazy Al took the world by storm - and now you can relive it all in this concert film DVD and live CD - packaged together - from the best seat in the house: the best seat in YOUR house. How hard did they rock? Your DVD player is not malfunctioning. The camera is shaking from the sheer pressure of Knuckle’s thunderous kick drum. Really.
Oh no! Mr. E has lost his blanket!
Squander Two recommended that I check out the BBC programme In The Night Garden, which is aimed at young babies. And he’s right, it’s brilliant - but something about it has been nagging me for a while, and I’ve only just realised what it is.
The main theme tune sounds like Eels. Not “a bit like Eels”; I mean “every time I hear it I’m expecting E to start singing about death and cancer and stuff”.
You can hear the theme here (link goes to a YouTube parody, which is basically the theme with some added drums) and a very similar Eels track here (Windows Media format).
Mucking about
I’m trying to find a better way to present the worryingly large amount of content on this here blog, so I’m experimenting with various WordPress themes. Apologies in advance if I break the entire website.
There’s no evidence for it, but it’s a scientific fact: the woman who makes lights flicker when she’s sexually aroused
Street lamps flicker when she passes, TVs change channels when she walks into a room and she sends electronic clocks haywire.
Debbie Wolf claims she is one of Britain’s growing army of “sliders” - people who believe their presence causes havoc with household appliances, radios and light bulbs.
Her bizarre abilities, dubbed by paranormal experts “Street Light Interference” syndrome or SLI, don’t just make life a nuisance for Debbie, they have earned her international fame.
…Sceptics say SLI is purely wishful thinking and coincidence - and has yet to be demonstrated by Debbie or anyone else in a controlled laboratory experiment.
But if Debbie and her fellow “electric people” are proved right, scientists will have to re-write all the known rules of physics.
If the only proof you need to get a story like this printed is your own-say so, perhaps we should sell our own real-life spooky stories to the Mail? I’ve instructed my agent to see what they’ll pay for “The spooky speccy Scot who can make magic monkeys fly out of his arse”.
Microsoft makes Yahoo an offer it might refuse
Microsoft to Yahoo!: Here’s 44.6 billion dollars. Let’s hook up!
Update: a good piece in the Guardian covering the problems such a merger might cause.
The Times: spamming sites and social networks
Yesterday, I discovered that The Times (UK), a well-respected newspaper owned by News Corp., is involved in an extensive campaign to spam social media websites with links to Timesonline.co.uk articles.
Part two. A post by Tom Whitwell, Times Online Communities Editor:
 I was banned from Metafilter, quite correctly. I was posting under false pretences, and I deliberately ignored the terms of service. I’d have liked to apologise for that, but I didn’t get a chance, because I was banned.
Anyway, of the 15 or so posts I put up, the majority got significant numbers of positive comments, a handful of favourites and in a few cases compliments in the comments. I posted them because I read Metafilter, and I thought that people would enjoy the stories.
Is that so bad?
Full discussion on MetaFilter…