Quick – pass me a bucket!

I like a nice burger. And every couple of weeks I treat myself to a Suprême Cheese from Quick – the French/Belgian burger chain that knocks McDonalds into a cocked hat.

A couple of weeks ago I got back from my Quick lunch and found I couldn’t concentrate at all. I felt fine physically, but my head was all fuzzy and I simply couldn’t read a brief I got that afternoon. I remember thinking about what I had for lunch and wondering, idly, if it could be responsible.

And then yesterday it happened again, exactly the same.

So I don’t think I’ll be having my lunch at Quick again – at least if it’s on a work day.

An irritating whine at an ad agency. Who'd a thunk it?

I have a new computer at work. Thinking about it, it’s the first time since I’ve been working as a writer that I’ve had a new one. It’s an IBM, and it’s very nice. Except for one thing: it’s making a very high-pitched whine that is driving me and my colleagues (and probably every dog in the 8th arrondissement) nuts.

I know it’s not interesting, but it’s looming large in my life this morning and I thought I would share it with you.

I like this story from the Guardian in the UK.

The picture of health

Until quite recently, and unless you were genuinely very sick, you could often wait over a week to get an appointment with a doctor in the UK. For most people, of course, that meant that they were either recovered from or struck down much worse by their illness, of they'd have to suffer the pain of an ear infection or ingrowing toenail or whatever for ages before it was swiftly and simply rectified. Not really an ideal situation.

The problem was that you don't have to pay anything upfront to see the doctor. So people assume it costs nothing - and they tend to go to the doctors when they might, for example, be better off going to the pharmacist. And every surgery has people that are regularly going to see the doctor essentially because they don't really have anyone else to talk to. Which is sad, but it's not really the best use of time for someone that should really be prescribing the drugs that make people better.

When we lived in Sweden the system was quite similar, but very different. You paid SEK60 (about ?6 or £4.50) to see the doctor. Which isn't a huge amount of money (and is refunded if you can't afford it), but is enough to make sure you think twice. And the effect is remarkable, because you tend to be able to see a doctor the same day.

And in France, it seems the situation is again better. I'm not actually a part of the French system, as I'm covered by health insurance from my employer. But essentially it works in quite a similar way. Doctors here are private. So you go, and you pay for your appointment. There's a fixed fee that the state will reimburse you for, which is what most doctors charge. But if you go to see someone that charges more - like our Canadian doctor who presumably takes advantage of the fact that a lot of her patients are expats on deals like ours - you pay the difference. So everyone is provided with a good level of cover and you have the choice to pay more out of your own pocket if you want to. Which to me seems the best way to manage a healthcare system.

The system means there are loads of appointments, you can see a specialist more or less straight away, and things like test results are available in days instead of weeks - since the labs are private and they're rewarded for their efficiency with more custom as doctors recommend them.

To me, the French system seems ideal - a true Third Way (as Mr Blair would put it). But there is one strange thing about health care in France. I don't know if it's a direct result of the system
or just a thing with the French. But there are a hell of a lot of pharmacies here. If I stand at our front door I can see five. I think I'm within easy walking distance of twenty or so - and there are even half a dozen on the Champs Elysées, which is the most expensive retail space in Europe.

So obviously there is money to be made dispensing drugs here!

Right product, wrong market?

I’m a bit of a radio junkie – and a speech radio junkie at that. I think I mentioned here a couple of years ago that I once found myself on my way out for the evening in Singapore listening on the bus on my walkman to a 30 minute documentary about the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel (as you can imagine I am a whizz at parties). So you can see how deep my affliction is…

As you can imagine, one of the main uses to which I put my broadband connection at home (and sometimes at work) is the Internet feed from BBC radio. It’s really cool to be able to listen to British radio. But the disadvantage is that it’s restricted to the computer speakers. Which means no listening in bed, in the bath or in the kitchen – three of the places that for me, are the best places to listen to the radio.

Which is where the BT Voyager Digital media player comes in. It’s connected to your computer by means of a short range FM connection (the sort you use with wireless headphones), and it means you can play your Internet radio (and your MP3s and CDs) in any room in the house. Fantastic! So now I have radio all over the house.

It has its problems: first of all it’s a bugger to set up radio stations that aren’t specifically linked to it on the web. You have to find out the stream url – and the BBC in particular seem very cagey about giving them out, hiding them behind all sorts of evil scripts and stuff that a fumbling amateur like me has no chance of cracking.

It took me a day and a half to crack it, but google is, as always, your friend. By downloading some very dodgy application I managed to work out the url of the Radio Five Live stream (it’s http://wmlive.bbc.net.uk/wms/radio5/5Live_int_s1?MSWMExt=.asf if you’re interested) – just at the point that Samantha was about to start screaming at me (when I have a problem like this I can be more than a little obsessive).

So now I have everything I need, and I can listen to the radio in the bath. It's fantastic. But the fact I got this thing for £100 instead of the advertised price of £160 (which sounds very much like a stock clearance to me) set me wondering. I mean, if you’re in the market for UK digital radio stations in the UK, you’d buy a DAB radio, right? You get excellent quality audio without it having to be tethered (however loosely) to a computer, there’s no fannying around with the buffering delays that make Internet radio sometimes a bit hit and miss – and there’s no problem with the Internet rights that mean I have to get my live football scores off the BBC website on a Saturday rather than on the radio. And since a DAB radio costs about £70, the maths alone tell you why this product is being so heavily discounted. Who, exactly, is going to buy it?

The answer is – people like me. Instead of trying to sell it to people in the UK to listen to British radio stations, they should be selling it to expats. There are huge numbers of Australians, Kiwis, Americans, French, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and a whole lot more in the UK that would love to listen to radio from home, and who would love the flexibility of this Internet radio as much as I do.

So all BT have to do is advertise it to them. There are lots of ways of reaching expats. Here in Paris, for example, there’s an Anglophone magazine called FUSAC – and I bet equivalents exist for various communities in London. You can deploy banners on expat websites and - thanks to IP address identification you could advertise on foreign websites being accessed from the UK. So you could advertise it right on the sites of the radio stations these expats are listening to. I’m convinced that this is the market for this product, but I wonder if BT is?

Porn Star names

Do you remember that game you uised to play on slow afternoons at work a few years ago? It was to find your porn star name. What you do is combine your first pet's name with your mother's maiden name, and that's your porn star name. Good for a few giggles.

I was always excused. Not only because my porn star name is crap, but also because my real name apparently sounds like a porn star anyway.

And that's sort of true, it seems. I was looking for the details of some award I won a few years ago on google, and I came across this.

It appears my namesake is the hero of a racy romantic novel. I think we can guess the demographic by the fact he's a NASCAR driver...

Well, we had a lovely weekend - we went to Stockholm for the first time since we left three years ago.

It was a bit weird, as I'm sure you can imagine. It felt in one way that we'd been away for a hundred years - and in others that it was just last week. We caught up with some old friends which was great - and of course bought some of the Swedish things we've missed - like Dumle, bilar, Kalles caviar and jordnuts ringar.

Obviously some things have changed. The department store NK had smartened itself up a lot, and there were a few new places like Debenhams of all things that made Stckholm, unfortunately, increasingly like everywhere else. But there was one big difference that showed us what the Swedes have been up to while we were were away.

Everywhere you look there are prams and strollers full of small children. The Swedes have been making babies - and lots of them. But then with a pretty deep recession they're only just climbing out of, and 18 months' free time off for new parents, you can't really blame them.

And it's these babies who'll be paying people my age's pension funds before too long...

Yasser Arafat ruined my lunch

I became an unwitting victim of the Middle East crisis (is the Middle East ever out of crisis?) last week. I know one of the BBC correspondents here in Paris vaguely, and every month or so we have lunch. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life when you have a job like that that occasionally the news agenda takes over, and our latest lunch date was called off as Arafat arrived here to die in a military hospital somewhere outside the city. Actually, if you believe Reuters, he’s already dead.

I wonder whether things will get better or worse after Arafat?

It's curious, but I feel strangely unmoved by the election result. Obviously I'd have been happier if the other guy had won and everythign, but if Bush won by 3,000,000 or so votes on a record turnout, then who am I to argue? After all, you get the government you deserve.

And there are a few chickens that should come home to roost over the next few years (like that budget deficit that will sink the dollar some time soon) that could well make this one a good one to lose for the dems. I mean - how long are teh Americans going to put up with the situation in Iraq, for example? And I think there'sll be a hell of a fight over things like abortion over there.

It all promises to be quite interesting. And if you're a liberal American, as scary as hell.

This is from salon

Then there are the dirty tricks which have been cropping up all over the country. In Milwaukee today, Election Protection reports that African American voters received automated phone calls reminding them to vote on November 3. In Ohio and Michigan, automated phone calls allegedly from the Teamsters Union have been directing people to the wrong polling places. In Tuscon, Arizona, Arnwine said, calls telling people to vote on November 3 were traced back to the local Republican party.

Admit it: you're not surprised.