Warning: May Contain Mild Sherlock Spoilers.

So tonight – I'm typing this Sunday night – at the cluster we made a "democratic" decision that we would watch Sherlock.

Well, I say democratic…¹.

*I* liked it.  Comparisons with "New Biological Formula Doctor Who" are inevitable, given the writers/producers – and they're certainly there; focusing on the "companion" getting to know the "mystery" hero was the big theme here, as indeed it was in "Rose", the first episode of the New Who. Not necessarily a bad thing.

One innovation – is it an innovation? I've not seen it before – is how to get round the pressing problem of "Why isn't TV like real life in that out there everybody's staring zombie-like into their phone?" by having important messages, etc float as words on the screen. It cuts out a lot of the dialogue as normally one character would have to vocalize what they'd just read.

They then used the same trick, though, to "signpost" Sherlock's train of thought; when he came to a conclusion about a character, the word he thought of appeared next to the character on the screen. That was much less satisfactory, I must say.

Top billing, though, goes to Mark Gatiss' Mycroft, a large performance of old-style creepiness – though you're encouraged at first to think villainy – which managed to be both evocative and repellent at the same time [and, as such, makes anyone who enjoyed The League Of Gentlemen smile.]

It's not the most bitchenly amazing piece of television ever, sure. But it kept everyone absorbed and entertained and did its job well.

[I was going to go on to a bad bit of television, which is Family Guy's unusually [for them] pisspoor take on trans- issues from last Sunday which I only just got round to seeing today, but frog it. Complaining about Family Guy just seems wrong; you put yourself on the same side as a bunch of USA morons and nutjobs². I'm just putting it down to a bad week.]

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Old Bit Of A Film That's Been Stuck In My Head All Day: Repossessed, in which Leslie Nielsen's priest is at the hospital talking to a doctor;

"How's the flu epidemic, Doc?"

"Just as bad. *sighs* We've had three new cases brought in today."

Which is, of course, the cue for a workman to walk across the back of the shot holding a stack of three boxes, all of which have "FLU" stamped on them…

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Anyway, with the "main event" of the evening over, people are starting to drift off elsewhere whilst I type, and it seems so far like nobody will require overnight close supervision³.

This means I can usually just hang around for a few hours to make sure everyone's settled themselves before catching a bit of sleep myself. They know to poke me with a stick should they need me.

Some of this time until I get to sleep will be spent on Drop The Dead Donkey on 4oD – thanks for alerting me to its reappearance, Max; some of it will go on the inevitable paperwork; and quite a lot of it will be standing next to the kettle with a jar of coffee ready to pounce as soon as it goes "click".

I love nights. I just wish they'd put CBeebies on 24 hours a day…

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Today's Big Question: How do you get yourself to stay awake at night when you have to?

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1 Vote was conducted according to principle of "It's not how people vote, it's who does the counting that's important" – Josef Stalin. Ironic that it took a south-eastern part of the USA half a century later to confirm this theory. [Also see footnote 2, tho.]
2 I would like to make it clear that I acknowledge that the USA has no more morons and nutjobs per capita than any other country. It's just that for various reasons we notice them more.
3 Basically: if anyone else is awake, I have to be. Doesn't happen that often, but it's fairly crucial when it does.

This posted is entitled "Things People Expect Me To Like But Which I Actually Don't, But Please Don't Hate Me For Any Of The Below."

1. Bikes. People look at the riah, the occasional bit of leather, and some of my music collection, and put two and two together to make me a motorbike enthusiast.

And, yes, I like the look of bikes, and to some extent the look of bikers. What I'd never actually do is ride one.

This can mainly be traced to the fact that my one experience on motorized-two-wheels, aged sixteen on Bill's 50cc round the Romford ring road, ended with a, shall we say, altercation between myself and Mr. Twunt In A Volvo on a roundabout. It was at that point that I vowed that should I ever meet a Volvo driver again, I'd do so only with an iron cage around me, thanksverymuch.

2. Tattoos. For much the very same reason as #1 – it's supposed to go with that heavy metal part of my image. Well – maybe this was more of the case twenty years ago, when it was more associated with rebellion of whatever sorts. They've become much more mainstream since, and are now about as rebellious as Dairylea.

"Tattoos are stupid people's way of telling you they're stupid without them even having to open their mouths" – Victor Lewis-Smith

But my main beef is with their permanence. Temp ones are fine – but scarring your whole body for life when the way of the world is that everything changes seems to me particularly…

Artist's impression of what most tattoos look like.

To ram home the point by taking it to its logical extreme; I wonder if anyone who thirty years ago was mad on Gary Glitter is still glad they had the tattoo to say so?

3. Bob Dylan. Given that my mp3 collection starts in the sixties and includes some of the wave of the revolutionary music which came at the time, plus how to the upmarket media the man is a God and can do nothing wrong, a lot of people think I'm a fan. I'm not. He wrote one amazing song ["Blowin' In The Wind"], one good pop song ["Mr. Tambourine Man"], and spent the rest of the past forty years nasally whining to no good purpose.

3a. Whilst we're on the subject of that era of music: The Velvet Underground provided a shitty excuse for a thousand crap 80s-indie bands to just think "clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang" was a decent guitar riff, and by the way "Venus In Furs" is just a bunch of unconnected cliches – give me "Penguin In Bondage" any day.

3b. Also loved by the media set, but not by me: Joanna Newsom is just a woman wittering randomly with a harp. It's not even good random wittering in a Björkian or GoddessTori-like manner.

4. Twitter. [I recently bit the bullet and signed up. It's not that I'll post there, but I'm following others - if you use it, let me know so I can follow you. And anyway, the gorgeous Miranda Hart's on it. Squee.]

I like the idea of a 140-character limit for such micro-blogging; it encourages concision. But please, if your message is more than that, use another medium. This applies particularly to those who are writing more of a blog post than a tweet, meaning I get twentyish tweets from them in thirty seconds, which are actually shown in the wrong order and is just a pain in the bum to read.

To them I say: WordPress.com is free, reliable and you can link to your bonzerly amazing blog post in just 20 characters using a redirection service. [Which I'm about to do when I finish this.]

5. Slap. Despite my tranny tendencies, I actually never wear make-up, with the exception of a bit of toenail polish sometimes. This is partly because I don't like the look of it even on women let alone myself, partly because even when I did try applying it I ended up looking like a sociopathic Armenian clown, and partly because you smell and look like you've rolled in and out of a chemical factory. Overapplication, in the air stewardess or clown sense, actually makes me feel physically nauseous.

[picture removed because I wanted to be sick]

5a. Similarly: one of my jobs in my youth was electroplating, in which I handled a lot of dangerous chemicals [luckily I wasn't depressed at the time, given the amount of cyanide that I had to lug from lorry to plating plant]. Your clean scent is a good thing, and hiding your personal odour may or may not be necessary; but if your expensive perfume reminds me of nothing more than tipping 2,000 hinges into a pan and pouring vitreous fluids over them and leaving them to cook for a couple of hours, it's not a good thing.

6. Blog posts which do nothing but sodding complain.

What? ….Oh.

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Today's Big Question: What do people think you should like but you actually secretly want to screw up into a ball and throw into an incinerator?

"Does the paranormal exist? I've noticed there's a definite area of my kitchen that's several degrees colder than the rest of the room. …I called an exorcist, but he said it was just my fridge." [Paul Merton]

The overarching topic of the moment is the broken fridge. After a couple of, how shall I put this, hurried visitations to Mr. Khazi – neither prompted by any of the usual foods which irritate my irritables – I wondered whether there may have been other causes.

Putting two thermometers into the fridge [just in case one wasn't calibrated - what, me, paranoid?] and leaving them there for several hours produced a reading of 10C [50f], when it should be at most 5C [41f].

I turned the knob up to full. Still 10C.

I switched the fridge off, defrosted it fully [which produced a lot of this entry's title], cleaned all the gunk out from underneath, switched it back on, and waited 24 hours for it to get back to working temperature. Which turned out to be 10C.

The fridge is part of the supplied "fixtures" of the flat, so I phoned my landlord's representatives. They sent round Aaron, the local electrician. He took one look, said "yeah, it's buggered, cheaper to get a new one than fix the thermostat" then went away.

Unfortunately here the story has been interrupted by the three-day holiday weekend, so I'm spending it devoid of refrigerated food content. Cue tin cans of everything.

Add to that the problem that come Tuesday it's not just a case of them ordering a new fridge to be delivered to my doorstep – it's an "integrated" fridge, part of a fitted kitchen; it has to be hard-wired in by Aaron – I wouldn't be allowed to touch it even if I wanted to.

So it looks like it may be a few days before I'm able to have a cheese sandwich without having to throw away the 90% of it I won't use afterwards. Okay, with the shops in my little town, the cafe, and some good friends, this is not exactly a disaster – it's totally copeable. It's just a right royal pain in the 'arris, that's all.

Although less of a pain in the 'arris than eating food that's been kept slightly warm for several days.

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Advance notice/warning that there's a new naughty story to be released, which is just getting its second proofread, hopefully as I type. Watch this space.

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Other things running round my brain this Saturday night:

* Not watching the Eurovision Song Contest. When it used to be one crap singing contest a year, it was something special, worth both loving and taking the piss out of. Now we have six sodding thousand "talent contests" on telly, from X-Factor to Britain's Got Embarrassing to Dorothy to Who's The Best At Pretending To Be Bea Arthur On LSD [note: yes, I made that one up, but I've copyrighted it so no nicking the idea, Sky One]. Why celebrate the "bad" when the bad has become the norm?

* Dinner with someone bitchenly amazing, this Thursday. If the sodding fridge saga doesn't intervene.

* Is that really Nicola Bryant, the woman who was Peri [companion to Doctors Fifth and Sixth], fleetingly in the John Lewis advert? [Yes, I found after much frame-by-frame research.]

* On which note… CELERY SQUEE!!! [This is a reference to the latest Who episode, which I won't further explain so that I don't give away spoilers.]

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Today's Big Question: Which household device*, appliance or gadget would you least want to give up? Why?

* note: this does not include "personal entertainment devices in phallic forms".

Various Mini-Updates:

Job: The 20% deal is all done bar signing my name to it. Having got over the initial "omigod, I'm gonna spend the rest of my life living off fish fingers and 19p Aldi soup" phase, I've entered the second section of "coping with change"; thinking of how to construct the necessary alterations in a positive and constructive manner.

The main saving that needs to be made – and various bits of motivation including this are leading up to this – is that I need to give up nicotine.

This is not something I can do straight away – for various reasons I need to get medical permission before I embark on this – but it's certainly something I can work on at the minute in terms of getting my strategy and my mindset prepared for when it actually happens; say, a month's time.

This may all sound like a pathetic addict putting off the day of reckoning, but the fact that I'm seriously contemplating this change is, in itself, progress. I am, of course, no stranger to "addiction recovery" – it's now the best part of two decades since first realizing I had to stop drinking at some point – and I know that my way is the only way to do this. You can't force any addict to give up [unless you utterly isolate them 24/7 for years and years] – you can only set the conditions in which recovery can be allowed to happen. And I think the time may soon be ripe…

Stomach: Since the bout of food poisoning pre-Xmas, and the splurge of food which the festive season always brings, I've been a lot more careful about what I put into my digestive system. And it's paid dividends. Apart from a small tempestuous event on Saturday evening – which I'm putting down to some dodgy veggiesausages – things have been brilliantly quiet on this front.

The main "loss" has been that I've cut out curries. Yes, yes, I know, it's surprising that this particular addiction has gone unsated for six weeks, but it's actually been easier than I thought.

One particular aspect of the change in diet has been the addition of a daily "bio-yoghurt" pot. Opinions on these differ wildly, and of course my subjective perceptions of their effects are invalid as evidence; the fact that they've coincided with a calm period in my digestive system may be entirely accidental or placebo. Bottom line, though; if you're not concerned about the amount of sugar syrup put into the things – and, luckily, sugar is not an addiction of mine – I figure it's at least doing no harm to put a small amount of sickly-sweet yoghurt in my system every day.

Saucy Writing: Something is brewing. It's not ready yet, I can't even tell what it is yet, but I can feel it there…

February: Always the "joker" month – it's either brilliant or crap. This year, apart from that one "down" day, it's been good so far – although one never knows what's around the corner, natch.

No V-Day cards or presents will be sent this year; and CarolineDay will, hopefully, be spent pootling around Knorwich with S. wetting ourselves over too-expensive shoes before going back to New Look, which has thankfully cottoned onto the size-9 wide-fitting affordable but doesn't-look-like-stereotype-lesbian market.

Plankton: PLANKTON!!!

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Today's Big Question: What "change" are you currently contemplating?

The "Pie Fallacy", And Why It's Important.

I don't have a lot of visitors here chez poisson – partly because my house is far too small for holding parties or accommodating more than two at the most for anything more than an hour without tripping over each other, and partly because, I'll admit, I tend to keep my place as my escape from the universe, rather than my window on the universe.

That said, when the bloke arrived from the Office for National Statistics yesterday afternoon, I thought I'd better let him in. They're the people who do the once-every-10-years census, due again in 2011, and since efficient governance in part relies on efficient information1 I feel it's my civic duty to participate in their data collection, subject to the usual privacy caveats.

I sat the bloke down with a cup of tea and he worked through a questionnaire on his laptop. After the usual demographical questions [age, gender3, religion, education, income] it became clear what they were collecting data on; firstly, people's attitude to "road pricing" in the UK, and secondly, people's attitude to mental ill health and the workplace, as set against – say – people's attitude to another disabling condition, chronic back pain.

He smiled as he learnt that the second was my "home territory", something I worked directly in towards the start of the last decade, and the questions – should employers be more sympathetic to / more supportive of / less quick to fear mental health conditions – got easy answers [generally along the "things have vastly improved, but there's still some way to go" kind of lines.]

The former was more problematic.

The main question: "Do you think road pricing [charging motorists by their mileage on busy routes] is a good idea, assuming there's tax reductions elsewhere to offset it so generally you'll end up paying the same amount?"

Ooooh, there's one for the Ben Goldacre "I think it's a bit more complicated than that…" category. I put forward my view, that of "generally it's an okay idea, but you have to use the carrot of decent, fairly convenient, and above all affordable public transport alternatives along with the stick and not just hope a new tax will sort out congestion by itself [because it won't: see London], and in rural areas like this you may as well forget it. And that's a gross simplification of all the issues of actual implementation that the idea of road pricing would bring up, and I could go on for a long time yet."

"Ah", he said. "All I've got is a scale of one to ten."

I shrugged and told him to put six.

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Many moons ago, when I was doing the stats part of my degree, I talked about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data.

The former gives you a nice number ["54% of respondents in East Anglia were not hostile to the idea"] that you can use in a soundbite, and such data is crucial in things like evidence for medical interventions.

Qualitative, however, which is where the bloke would have written down my whole answer and not just ticked a box, gives you a plethora of people's responses, but no numbers. Someone has to sift through the whole data and spot trends, impressions, caveats, themes, rather than just feed the lot through a computer. The results they give are less hard data and more of a point in the general direction of which way the wind is blowing – often, though, showing things that quantitative data doesn't because you didn't think to ask the question in the way it's been answered.

To give you an idea of what I mean, consider the two approaches to this question: what's your favourite sort of pie?

The Quantitative approach to this question will give you some lovely numbers which you can put into an impressive-looking graph, something like -

[Yes, you guessed it; this is a pie chart. Badum-Tish!!!]

This may be useful, but as I've argued elsewhere, certain corporations [both public and private] seem to think that just because apple is the #1 pie, it's the only pie worth pursuing, and were they in charge of the baking and leisure foods industry you'd all get would be a bog-standard individual apple pie; if you wanted anything else, tough titty.

[The industry I can think of most prone to "the pie fallacy" is UK commercial broadcasting4 - just because reality shows and endless "talent" crap look like the biggest slice of the pie, doesn't mean that's license to fill your networks with them 24/7 to the exclusion of anything else that requires more than one brain cell.]

The Qualitative approach to the question, however, gives you no lovely picture to aim at; instead you'd get a long report on "UK Attitudes To Pies And Pastry-Topped Products" which would be very thick and dull to read, but – crucially – doesn't have that "killer data" you can leap on, instead possibly containing a paragraph along the lines of "43. Although the trend was for 'Apple' to be the most-mentioned pie when people were asked to name their favourite, there is no clear trend of pie preference and many respondents expressed their satisfaction with the range of pies available to them at most retail outlets."

Which is a very different piece of evidence to have at one's fingertips when debating and arguing a case.

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Sorry about all that. Ahem. Back to the subject.

A quantitative answer to the question of road pricing may be convenient for bureaucrats and politicians, but – like much public policy – fails to address consequences, to fully capture people's concerns, and to be able to tell how that other crucial bit of good governance – good implementation – will affect which way the political winds blow.

I'm concerned, then, that my being put down as "six" on the "do you like road pricing?" scale will turn out merely as being in the "fairly positive" percentage of a report, perhaps used as evidence that public opposition to a scheme may be softening, ready to drop on the desk of whoever becomes Transport Minister after this year's election.

Perhaps time for a stiff e-mail or three.

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Today's Big Question: What's your favourite sort of pie? [Feel free to answer this question in a qualitative manner.]

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1 One of the arguments the revolutionary far-left people I know use is that whilst you can change the politicians, unless you change the Civil Service bureaucrats the status quo will endure2 and the same basic mistakes will happen. Seeing what a mess the Tories made of big IT and data management projects, followed by what a mess the Labour lot made/are making of big IT and data management projects, specifically NHS electronic data, and exactly how much good money has been thrown after bad over the past two decades, gives me quite a bit of sympathy for this view.
2 Cue this. [Sorry.]
3 I decided to cut a long story short and answer "male". I'm not sure he would have had a "genderqueer" box.
4 Though the BBC aren't immune either. "Hey, let's follow the inane dance contest at the end of last year with an inane dance contest at the start of this year!"

Snow Day.

[Well, snow nights if you want to be pedantic, given that it was yesterday evening I was due to work, but told not to bother trying to drive in.]

I haz new shoes, courtesy of my good friends S & C, thus -

- so it's unlikely I'll be venturing out for the rest of the day…

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Also in the post the other day, courtesy of the ubergorgeous Zo;

The art of the euphemism, along with that of the innuendo, are the parts of my language I've always most enjoyed – particularly, of course, if one can combine the two for scatological effect.

Much of this love for the coarser end of the language comes from childhood heroes like Kenneth Williams, himself a master at the loaded phrase.

It's also part of a reaction against the London culture I grew up with, which eschewed euphemism in favour of direct – usually over-direct – speech, loaded with terms the late Mrs Whitehouse would have had a heart attack over.

In my teenage years, it soon became apparent that in this context swearing lost its meaning through mindless repetition [kind of like that famous version of an Alexei Sayle song [warning: serious swearing on this link]] and that the best way to make an impact was to invent a suitable euphemism instead; the best contribution I made to my peers' language was how going for a shit became having an Ivana [rhyming slang, trump -> dump].

I doubt that one appears in this volume – and its publication date of 2000 means it'll miss some of the euphemisms that are part of the zeitgeist as I type – but at least, unlike Viz's Profanisaurus, it won't be filled with circular references that euphemise the euphemisms.

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The earliest euphemism I can remember using, as a playground taunt at an early age, was "your mother wears army boots".

This choice phrase, whose origin is probably in black US culture from the 1930s, long long before "yo'mamma" was a childish Internet forum stipend, I think may also have been an example of homophobia – coming from the same direction as "she wears 'comfortable shoes'."

Certainly we were unaware, at least consciously, of any such meanings at the time – in the late 1970s these things were still very much taboo – but at least, unlike the casual mindless use of gay for "bad" now, showed a little creative thinking in whoever coined it.

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As taboos change, so do the euphemisms. Not all of them are fun. One nasty one that's crept into the language, warping a perfectly useful word, over the past few years is any reference to the "indigenous British" – used by white supremacists to try to claim some form of entitlement to their ludicrous ideas.

Despite that, it's still a dynamic and inventive area of language – and there's always room for more. So for today's big question what I want y'all to do is try and invent a new euphemism, which may well sweep the nation [just like the Mudshark did].

You don't have to say what it's for – part of the fun will be guessing. I'm going to suggest "the giraffe wants to go for the highest leaves", "he often says 'ooh, she's about my size'", and "he's got shares in Flora margarine".

Over to you!