The Very Top Five Carnival

Welcome to the December 1, 2009 edition of the top five carnival.

I'm doing a carnival. Hurrah. And magically there were five entries which I liked (And I do things in fives, as you know), so here they are:

emancave presents 5 Must Have Android Apps for Guys! posted at e-ManCave.com, saying, "Top 5 Android apps for men and most of them are silly and humorous."

Tom Kent presents Top 5 Funny Animal videos of all time! posted at GFX-Core Blog, saying, "Just a post I put together including what I think are the top five comedy animal videos ever" (edit: The link to the post doesn't work, just scroll down the main page to find it)

Engelbert Hudson presents Top 10 Celebrity Pets: Famous Cats and Dogs posted at Online Veterinary Technician Schools. (edit: ten's not five, y'know, but go on then, just this once...)

jerklogic presents Top Five Annoying Shoppers posted at Jerklogic, saying, "Top five annoying shoppers and the the stupid things they do that make our shopping experience, well, memorable."

JL 4 Media presents 5 Effective Listening Barriers posted at Live Life to the Fullest, saying, "Effective listening is not about the words having delivered, it requires more than hearing the sounds transmitted. We should listen for meaning and we can do this by focusing on the people and not only on words."

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Very Top Five… Ways to be a good driver.

Being a good driver is all about perception. I don’t mean how you perceive the traffic around you (that’s basic stuff for losers who don’t have sweet rides), I mean how you perceive yourself.

Here’s a quick way to see if you consider yourself a good driver: When you look in the rear view mirror do you just see the boring boring boring traffic behind you? Or do you flicker yourself a cheeky grin that says “Look at you, you own this road and you know it. Yeah. I would definitely make love to you, if only I could, right now over this dashboard.”

If you perceive yourself to be a good driver, nothing that goes wrong is ever your fault, any mistakes made are surely not yours; any problems are out of your control, since no one else could have dealt with them any better than you. Even if the court disagrees with you, at least you’d know the truth, like a warm glowy squirmy thing deep in your heart where the guilt should be. You’re too good a driver to cause an accident, after all. That's just common sense.

Would you feel liberated to be so good at driving that as soon as you start the engine you instantly know that there is no one out there with better reactions, greater skill or a deeper knowledge of driving and therefore no one more deserving to be on the road then you?

To attain this level of triumphant vehicular majesty, read on:

5. Assert your dominance over other road users:

Let people know that YOU have to be somewhere NOW; drive up close behind them and be ready to rip past as soon as they drift even slightly closer to the kerb.

Or are you waiting at a red light for that foolish old lady who chose to begin crossing near the end light? Give granny a blast of revs to keep her moving smartly along and edge forward a bit to let her know that if she’s not off the crossing as soon as the light goes green that she’s getting shunted, wheelchair or not.

Accelerate into corners like they do on the racing on the TV. If your passenger politely asks you to stop because it’s apparently ‘uncomfortable’ and they are worried it ‘might be quite dangerous’, give them a reassuringly contemptuous sneer and let them know that the rotational acceleration creates sufficient down-force to stabilise the vehicle. That’s just basic physics, which they might know if they’d paid more attention in physics classes instead of moaning about how ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘quite dangerous’ physics is. If they find it uncomfortable, you can drily quip, they can try walking in the rain and see how comfortable they find that. Or they can belt up and belt up.

Intimidate cyclists into the gutter; either get behind them as discussed above or barge past them, giving them just enough space to get knocked into a ditch, like they deserve. They have no right to be on the road anyway. Get a car, you carbon-neutral hippy, or get off my roads. You’re the sole reason our roads are congested, going all slowly like that and slowing the rest of us down. And congestion means pollution, you fool. It’s because of you that all the polar bears are melting.

4. Get an air-horn:

Horn: Do you get it when you sound yours?

As all good drivers know, the immediacy and importance of your grievance is in direct proportion to the loudness of your horn. ‘Drown out the rest, air-horns are the best,’ as the well-known rhyme goes.

Or maybe go one up and get a siren. You’ll feel like a highly trained emergency driver, with lightning reactions. And as we all know, feeling like a successful driver makes you automatically better. That’s just basic psychology, which you’d know if you’d paid more attention in psychology classes instead of moaning about how ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘quite dangerous’ psychology is.

With your air-horn blasting you will become a more proficient driver. It’s like magic. You are a wizard of the road, and your horn is your magic wand. Squeezing it blasts decibels of sorcery into the ears of the goblins who want to take your pointy wizard’s hat off you. (The hat is representative of driving prowess in this metaphor.)

3. Pimp your ride:

Paint bright stripes on your car and put huge speakers in the boot – it just makes it better. It won’t make you better, but people will associate you with amazing driving and give you sufficient space to work your skillz.

Insurance companies put their premiums up for modified cars, but that’s nothing to do with reduced safety; those pencil-pushing Volvo drivers are just jealous of your sweet-ass ride and are trying to punish you for you being better than them.

As if you needed any further proof that pimping your ride makes you a better driver and your car safer, consider this; Why would you spend so much money on it if you were only going to go out and have an accident? That’s just basic economics, which you’d know if you’d paid more attention in economics classes instead of moaning about how ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘quite dangerous’ economics is.

2. Make like a canal barge, and bounce:

Speaking of crashes, have you ever seen any dented canal barges on the roads? No, of course not, and that’s because they’ve found a brilliant new use for tyres. What they do is hang a garland of them over the side so no harm befalls them if they happen to nudge the edge of the canal, another barge, a canal lock or a drowning man batting with shameless futility at the sides of your mighty ship as it slips effortlessly over his kayak. That’s just basic canal etiquette, which that drowning man would have known if he’d paid more attention in canal etiquette classes, etc.

So why not use overhung tyres on your car’s body? Obviously you’ll never be so stupid as to cause a collision, but what if some idiot parks too close to your usual spot outside the shops and you give him a little shunt through no fault of your own, the idiot?

In fact, is that parking space just a little too tight? Well, that’s no longer a problem; gently nudge the other car, sliding it out of your space, back into the road where it would have parked if you’d been in your space, like you always are. Your rubbery dangly new friends will protect your paintwork throughout.

Worried about getting a puncture? It’s no longer a problem when you have sixteen spares. Such protection means you can be constantly relaxed, maybe stick a bit of Bryan Adams on, and let the road’s dangers melt away to an inconsequential background.

1. Don’t get insurance:

Have a little faith in yourself. You’re a good driver, right? And good drivers don’t have accidents, so why bother with insurance at all? It’s just another pointless tax on good drivers to subsidise bad ones. It might be against the so-called law, but since when did you let The Man tell you how to drive your car?

Remember the insurance dodgers’ motto: “I’m never going to crash, and saved a ton of cash.”

And when you go to prison for insurance fraud and dangerous driving you’ll wish you’d paid more attention in not-getting-raped-in-the-showers classes (which can be uncomfortable and quite dangerous).

Very Top Five... Twin Cities

Twinned city agreements (also called sister cities) are designed to foster international cooperation, by which I mean give town officials a pleasant place to play golf and relax for a week whilst on their yearly ‘culture mission’. And you can’t do culture without margaritas.

Most cities will have one or more sisters. The will to foster international links with as many cities as possible is as strong as the desire to have more than one yearly free holiday courtesy of public funds. Also, you get to make signs with your city's name on them in big writing, and 'twinned with some other city' in smaller writing underneath, showing what a cosmopolitan hub you are.

Most cities have realised that these are the essential points of the sister city agreement (Fancy sign, golf holiday), and keep quiet about it in case anyone notices. However, some five cities dared to stand out from the crowd. It may be that they have an unusually large number of twins, or twins in strange places, or have totally missed the point of twinning altogether, but all of them stand out in such a way that makes them as great a twin as Romulus was to Remus. (i.e. quite willing to beat your brother to death with a shovel if it means that it's your name that gets to go on the sign.)

Let’s tee off…

5. London, UK

There are 46 places named after London. This is because in the past the British investigated new lands with nothing but a map, a pink marker pen to illustrate which parts of the map now belonged to the Empire, and several thousand cannons just to make sure that the surviving natives agreed with the man with the marker pen.

Despite this, nowhere called ‘London’ is also twinned with the real London. This is not because these lil’ Londons have never suggested to their eponymous big bro’ that twinning would be a jolly good idea, but because London has always refused these twinning requests.

However, London has to be seen to be making foreign friends these days, to make Britain look less insanely imperial. People look to London to set the British example due to its tremendous influence, particularly in the UK, since one in five people in Britain would say that they live in the Greater London area. (Actually they wouldn’t. They’d say “Why the fack d’you care where I’m facking from? Fack off.”)

Anyway, London has twinning agreements with New York, Moscow, Berlin, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur and Kuwait city. This seems like a good number, but London has also got so called ‘friendship agreements’ with 18 more cities. Friendship agreements are awarded to places with which, although London wants to be associated with them, it doesn’t want to go all the way. This is similar to when someone breaks up with you and says “Hey, I still want to hang out with you, but let’s be friends, yeah? Cool? Cool, I’ll ring you. Don’t ring me; I’ll ring you. I promise.”

4. Keighley, Yorkshire, England

Keighley is a medium sized town whose claim to fame is that they started the whole twinning thing back in 1905 with Suresnes in France. They didn’t really get the hang of things straight away though, and in 1920 claimed to have ‘adopted’ Poix-Du-Nord. This talk of adopting another town sounds vaguely patronising, and if there is anything the French hate it is being patronised (Probably because they are annoyed that they didn’t get the chance to do it first).

3. Coventry, England

Gosh, these English towns are getting a lot of mentions, aren’t they? They seem to have a problem with just picking a couple of nice places to play golf. Coventry bucked convention by not only picking a flamboyantly ostentatious twenty six twins to twin with but also has a strange understanding of the word ‘nice,’ believing it to being synonymous with ‘had the shit bombed out of it.’

Coventry itself was bombed quite severely during the Second World War, so it feels some empathy with its brothers-in-bombing. Among its twins are Dresden (Razed in 1945 by 4000 tons of allied bombs), Sarajevo (besieged for 4 years in the 1990s and smashed by surrounding tanks) and Stalingrad (Twinned with Conventry in 1943 a few months after the Battle of Stalingrad, where 2 million Soviet and 800,000 Axis soldiers died in a massive campaign to seize the city, which ended with the city being mostly destroyed.)

Coventry has developed a kind of deranged solidarity with its woebegone fellows (probably because they got brain damage from all of those bombs). It does bill itself as the city of peace and reconciliation, but maybe it’s all a ploy so that no one can say the arrangement is just for the benefit of a few officials’golfing holidays. And besides, these bombed cities are among the most interesting places to play golf. They’ll certainly have a lot of new bunkers.

2. Baghdad

Poor Baghdad; Although nine cities are listed as twins for Baghdad on Wikipedia, none of these are reciprocated on the apparent twins’ own pages. These supposed twins include London, who doesn’t even include Baghdad as one of its many ‘friends.’

This is surely rather disappointing for a city which, for hundreds of years, was the largest in the world and was also once the centre of science, culture, and medicine (But not golf, tellingly). Throughout its history angry men have repeatedly turned up and set fire to it, from the Turks and Mongols at the start of the last millennium through to the most recent incursions at the start of this one.

On the plus side, it can surely only be a matter of time before Coventry extends a cheerful invitation of twinning on some bomb-scarred notepaper.

1. Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Until recently, Dubai was a few shacks and some hardy farmers traipsing around in the desert. Then one of them pointed out that while farming sand is still as hard as ever, it may be easier to encourage other countries to take this sticky black stuff that just pours out of the ground off our hands. Then whoomph, insta-propserity.

For Dubai, bigger is better. Bigger buildings, bigger hotels (with bigger bills), and a much bigger list of twins than any one else. Dubai has thirty one twin cities, and has amassed them in a timescale quicker than it takes Coventry to say “Excellent, Baghdad is on fire. Fetch the official humourous novelty bomb-shaped invitation envelopes.”

Dubai's twins include loads of global big-hitters, such as Moscow and Geneva, but also some rather curiously small places like Dundee in Scotland, which does rather suggest that the Dubai planning authority used a strange technique to pick its new twin; looking up the index of an atlas and picking the town next on the list after Dubai.

Dubai is a relatively new face on the world stage, and is quick to make new friends. That’s the spirit! Except, I expect that it’s spirits that might be the problem, because as soon as the other cities’ mayors actually visit and realise that Dubai is an alcohol free emirate, they’ll rapidly cool on the whole idea. What fun is a round of golf on your free holiday if there aren’t any mojitos in the clubhouse afterwards?