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Oliver Cross: Comparison websites and favourite old people
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks comparison websites and his favourite old people.
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Comparing comparisons
My mother always used to shout at sales people who told her that she could save a fortune by switching to another utility supplier.
She would explain that prices in a free market where competing companies are selling exactly the same thing (which is why you never hear slogans like 'Southern Electric makes your telly work better'), prices would eventually even out.
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Actually, this is only true in cartel-free environments where consumers (or customers as we called them in the olden days) are fully informed, rational and willing to shop elsewhere. There is also the strange phenomenon, which I don't know that Adam Smith ever encountered, of customers acting upside-down on prices.
This applies in times when people have more money than sense (as I would, if I only I had more money) and means buyers actually choose the more expensive of two near-identical items because it's important to their self-image and sense of worth, which explains teenagers' trainers and probably much of Fortnum and Mason as well.
Anyway, I was thinking of my mother's competition theories this week because of the extraordinary proliferation of price-comparison sites, which you might think, because of the volume of people using them, would produce perfect cyber-market conditions.
Except that, as was explained to me this week by someone who understands these things, comparison sites all differ in subtle ways and really, if you wanted to make the most of them, you would have to spend tedious hours and hours doing statistical research and balancing things up and if you were thinking of going down that path, you might as well take up cricket. Here's a business plan: Give me a lot of money and I'll make a fortune by launching a website called comparethe comparisons.com.
My own view is that the Compare The Meerkat site, which is the most amusing advertising wheeze since Joan Collins and Cinzano, should take the top place, although I have no more idea then anybody else whether it will save you a penny and do people still drink Cinzano anyway?
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It's not a fine distinction...
Two of my favourite old people are Sir David Attenborough, 83, and the Rev John Graham, 88, both great entertainers.
Obviously not in the Tommy Cooper or Dolly Parton sense, but, as Marshall McLuhan said: "Anybody who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
Sir David Attenborough is a great educationalist; the kind of teacher who makes you regret that teaching is not a more respected profession – in some ways, because everything else depends on it, the supreme profession (discuss, preferably without moaning about long school holidays or the teacher who ruined your life).
And the wonderful thing is that, stuffed with honours, riches and fame, Attenborough still likes nothing better than teaching. He is doing a series of short talks on Radio 4 about interesting aspects of natural history and as soon as the programme starts you realise that you have to listen to it all because to do otherwise would be rude.
What shines through is his delight in passing on knowledge; he so wants us to know what he knows that he puts great effort and energy into constructing instructive and entertaining – with the emphasis on entertaining – radio essays when he could bobbing along on a yacht counting his royalties.
This Sunday morning his talk was on archaeopteryx, the feathered dinosaur which, because of the rise in a belief in 'intelligent design' as oppose to Darwin-ian evolution, has taken on, about 150 million years later, a new significance.
Attenborough told how the astronomer Fred Hoyle tried to prove that archaeo-pteryx was a hoax fossil because his anti-evolution belief was things changed due to viruses drifting in from outer space.
Similarly the 'intelligent design' lot don't like archaeopteryx because it looks like an intermediate biological species, which would tend to suggest Darwin might be right. But Attenborough was having none of that; his age doesn't lessen his teacher-like determination to tell the truth, good teaching having nothing at all with being cuddly or popular.
So he patiently explained why the archaeopteryx fossil could not have been a fake (which was a bit technical but a very good lesson in avoiding patronising over-simplification) and that archaeo-pteryx was indeed an intermediate species because it couldn't fly. So I ended up both entertained and told, which is remarkable value for the licence fee.
The Rev John Graham is a crossword compiler rather a teacher, although he's taught me quite a lot in crosswords for the Guardian, where he writes under the name of Araucaria, the botanical name for the monkey puzzle tree, and for the Financial Times, where he calls himself Cinephile, reflecting his love of films.
And Cinephile, as any fool knows, is an anagram of Chile pine, another name for the monkey puzzle tree and I think I need a lie down because my head's spinning.
The puzzling thing is that The Rev Graham doesn't set clues which involve obscure clerical garments or the names of long-dead politicians. He's bang up to date and sometimes strikes me as even rather too advanced for an aged gentleman.
Last Saturday, Lynne and I were flummoxed for some time (two days actually) by the clue: 'Zenith possibly for one mentally ready to achieve it' (2,3,4).
The answer was 'In the zone' (an anagram of zenith plus one) a modish term used by thrusting young executives to indicate that they are prepared for some challenge, and which neither of us had ever heard before. We had to ask to ask a 25-year-old to tell us what it meant because, of course, if you wanted that sort of information, you wouldn't dream of approaching an 88-year-old.
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Saturday 19 May 2012
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