The Crazy Frog and Other Lessons in Modern Awareness

As the years advance and the brain seems to be begging for “early retirement”, so the need to stay mentally alert and in touch with modern trends becomes more imperative. “How can they afford to advertise like that?” demands the wife (bless her) as the hugely irritating Crazy Frog does its “beh-ding ding ding” ring-tone thing on TV.

It had me a bit foxed for a while until the Sunday newspapers pointed out that people buy the froggy ring-tone for the sheer, irritating awfulness of it and that “froggy turnover in the UK alone has reached £10million and is still rising”. The beauty of the operation is that there are no middle men - your Asdas, Tescos and Amazons don’t get a look in – you just download the “beh-ding ding ding” to your handset and you pay your money via your mobile phone bill. Fortunately for the wife and I, we have a suitably irritating ring-tone response. The Ranting Nappa’s multi-decibel snoring is being recorded – not just for posterity, but for conversion into an even more irritating ring-tone than the Crazy Frog and will be marketed for SMS download in the near future.

Keeping the brain active depends also (as has already been noted) on doing mental puzzles like Sudoku. The numbers game craze has gone completely loony however with this weekend’s Telegraph answering last week’s Daily Mail’s twelve-face Sudoku with a multi-dimensional “Rubik’s Cube” Sudoku puzzle involving no less than nine interlocking layers.

Accordingly I’m back to crosswords and was embarrassed to find a word – DECALOGUE – which was the only possible answer and yet I had to go to a dictionary to find what it meant. As you know, gentle reader, it is a term used to describe the Ten Commandments and I shuddered to think what my Mum (bless her) would think of me for not knowing that. On Saturday evening I met up with her at a family gathering and was much relieved to find out that not only was she unsure of the word, but mercifully her elder sister - my Great Aunt Chelmsford (bless her) - was equally puzzled by “Decalogue” as well.

Other recent findings have been a wine-making expression “Green Harvesting” which is sorting out the men from the boys with the 2004 Bordeaux vintage. Weather conditions in the year perversely meant that although huge quantities of grapes were harvested, these included a lot of poor quality fruit which needed to be thinned out by expensive student labour which not all vineyard owners were prepared to employ.

And then there are “Scovilles” – the units to measure the “heat” of a chilli. The index was pioneered in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville and this is mentioned in a pleasing Spectator piece about different chilli pepper types by Aidan Hartley who is considering turning his Kenyan farm over to chilli growing. He concludes that a good thing about chillis “is that elephants – which routinely raid our vegetables – fear and loathe them”.

Grey Day Miscellany

A grizzly, dank, rainy day – much of which was spent re-packing boxes and angrily counting books against a big exhibition order which arrived in a parlous state from DHL. Why I bother…rant, rant.

Depressed at the news that John Wiley (big mega-US publishing house) has taken over Sybex, one of the few remaining privately owned publishers in my line of business. I like several Sybex UK employees (one is a very good friend) and worry that their jobs are on the line.

And I have to take up Sudoku again (having only just hurled it aside because everyone is so much better at it than me). Apparently it is very good for people of my advanced years as it keeps the brain active and (according to the Mail on Sunday) also keeps Parkinson’s Disease at bay.

I’m nearly half a stone down on this GI diet that everyone is doing (the one with the traffic lights). I’m pretty confused though, as beer and red wine are okay but alcohol is banned. Seafood is a “green light” (hoozzay!), and grilled steak is fine too. The wife (bless her) says that pistachio nuts are fine but the type that I stocked up on in France last weekend are “red light” as they are salted. Rats!

When in France I started to pen the “Ranting Nappa’s Guide to Small Business Survival” but got bored when I reached the chapter on Business Plans.

I watched some of the Premiership/Championship play-off matches on TV and, while sympathising with the plight of the elder brother (bless him), felt that the it’s a pretty stupid system as all the teams looked and played “championship” rather than “premiership” football and the winners will almost certainly come tumbling down again at the end of next season.

On the subject of football I can only cry “Play up the Arse(nal)” next weekend. Those Manchester United “supporters” are still getting on my nerves. At least they still have a team to support. The whole idea is to back a team through “thick and thin”, but no-one has pointed that out to the self-pitying United fans.

Red, Blue, North, South…

We English are, in the main, a factious and unprincipled bunch. We are famous for loutish behaviour, the ability to go to war with just about anyone without always checking on the reasons (Edward III and Tony Blair particularly come to mind), for treating foreigners as lesser mortals from another planet, our kindness to dogs and cats, a general fondness for sport, and a series of assumptions such as “an Englishman’s home is his castle” and “there’ll always be an England”. There is a North-South divide, and a Red-Blue divide, and most Englishmen remain loyal throughout their lifetimes to a political party (“my family has voted labour/conservative for as long as I can remember”) and to their chosen football team (the older brother – bless him – is a notable exception to this rule).

Now regular readers of this blog will know that the Ranting Nappa does not support Manchester United or their fans. But, as a former scarf-wearing/season ticket-carrying/cup final-experienced supporter of the late Wimbledon FC, I might be expected to show some sympathy and support for the plight of the followers of what is arguably one of the best teams in the country (excepting two London clubs who are in a league of their own, and one Merseyside club which is getting better by the minute). Mr Glazer’s acquisition of Manchester United may not end up as being the total calamity that some Talksport Radio commentators and most fans predict, but it will almost certainly lead to change – both in the club’s fortunes, and maybe in the structure of the Premiership.

Last Tuesday’s match (Manchester United’s last home fixture in the Premiership this season) against Chelsea was en encapsulation of Englishness. Here was the North-South divide, here was the Red-Blue divide, and both teams had points to prove. It was a hugely entertaining match with Chelsea having the lucky breaks (if that’s what you call Tiago’s brilliant goal which caught commentators, Jose Mourinho, most of the spectators and the Manchester United goalkeeper all by surprise) and victory by a margin of three goals to one.

When the final whistle blew the players were pretty courteous to one another (many being team-mates on their various national sides), and the Chelsea players left the pitch. Sir Alex Ferguson however rather gallantly kept his players back in order to applaud and thank their supporters on this, the last full appearance of the year at Old Trafford. Sadly for the Manchester United players most of the “fans” had already left the stadium and there were vast areas of empty seats for the team to acknowledge. Maybe with so many of these “fans” burning their season ticket re-booking forms Mr Glazer will be able to attract some more loyal and worthy new supporters.

Winners and Losers

First it was squash, then it was Sudoku. I must have been in my early twenties when I was completely trounced on the squash court by the then elderly Dr Bobby Wright. My humiliation was such that I don’t think I’ve picked up a squash racquet since. The good doctor is now in his nineties and has very poor eyesight, but I have no doubt that if I challenged him to a re-match the result would be the same.

I was reminded of that game of squash last weekend when I met up with my sister and the younger brother (bless them both), and was surprised to find that they are both much, much more adept at Sudoku than I. So good, in fact, that I’ll have to find another pastime, especially as the younger brother does the “Fiendish” Sudoku in “two cigarettes” (around 15 minutes), while the sister criticises him for annotating the squares with possible numbers (rather than carrying them in his head). I was still struggling with “Gentle” and “Moderate” Sudoku games and reckoned that completing one of those in two or three days was a not inconsiderable triumph.

The gathering of members of my family was because of a party being held in Wimbledon as part of a summer-long series of celebrations to mark my sister’s (forthcoming) historic second term of marriage. Here were great friends from our past and it was heartening to see them again. Many were curious about my failed business ventures and relocation to deepest West Sussex. Rumours were also spreading about my “blogging” activities (“What’s a Blog? Why Nappa? And what does he Rant about?”).

But it took the brazen-ness of the Irish to put matters into a refreshing new perspective: “Well, your business was doomed from the start wasn’t it; those stupid computer books – no-one wants to read those things – it couldn’t possibly succeed”, declared my old pal Francis O’Toole, who I hadn’t seen for several years. “And what is more, it is all to the good, because of course you can now make pots of money out your lack of success. Just sign up as a professional after-dinner speaker and people will listen in wonderment to how you almost made a success out of such a damned silly idea – seven and half thousand pounds a time I shouldn’t wonder, and maybe more.”

Fortunately my business advisor (bless him) was out of earshot during this tirade, and now that I am safely out of range again, I will admit that Frannie’s idea, though fanciful, does betray a certain elegance. I don’t think however that the after dinner fees will roll in automatically, and so I have decided to write a memoir to fall somewhere between the “Humour” and “Business” sections of your local Waterstones so that I can be referred to as author of the best-selling “How to Make a Complete Arse Out of a Successful Business” or something similar. However I’ll have to complete the other masterwork (my French-English Dictionary of Fish) first…