Ordinary Gweilo

Congratulations to AFC Wimbledon.  Nine years ago, the Football League allowed the owners of Wimbledon FC to move the club to Milton Keynes.  The fans set up their own club, but they had to start in the Combined Counties League.   Five promotions later they are in the Football League:

AFC Wimbledon beat Luton on penalties to reach the Football League

As football’s reputation continues to be tarnished by soaring debt, political scandal and superinjunctions, proof is needed that the sport retains a soul. Step forward AFC Wimbledon. Under dark Manchester skies, the club formed by supporters for supporters produced a golden moment on Saturday, overcoming Luton on penalties to win the Blue Square play-off final and seal their place in the Football League.

"It only took nine years," bellowed the delirious fans in blue, moments after Wimbledon’s captain and top scorer, Danny Kedwell, had crashed in the spot-kick that gave his team a 4-3 victory following the 120 minutes of stalemate. The chant rose in volume and fervour from the end where the drama had eventually unfolded and told of the story that has captivated football romantics.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Luton fans.  Their club suffered three successive relegations – from the Championship through Leagues One & Two to the Blue Square Premier, in part because of points deductions imposed by the Football League for financial irregularities. 

An odd article in the SCMP about Cathay Pacific possibly introducing Premium Economy:

Cathay eyes roll-out for new cabin class

An option of 'premium economy' seats likely to be ready by end of the year

Anita Lam
May 09, 2011

The remodelling of Cathay Pacific's business-class seats is completed and the airline is hoping to finalise the roll-out of new "premium economy" seats by the end of this year. The new cabin class announced last year aims to offer an option for passengers wishing to trade down from business class – for reasons of cost-cutting – as well as those who don't want economy class.

Remodelling is completed?  But only a handful of planes have the new seating (as they confirm later in this same article), and I don’t think they’ll complete the rollout this year.

Details of the new seating configuration have not yet been revealed, but people familiar with the situation said the new seats would be 20 to 30 per cent larger than existing economy seats in terms of floor area. The cheapest seats of Hong Kong's flag-carrying airline are 44cm wide and rows are spaced 81cm apart in the economy section. With an enlargement of 25 per cent, the width and so-called seat pitch will be roughly 53cm and 1 metre respectively.

That will put the seats in line with, if not better than, the same class of seats offered by other airlines such as Virgin Atlantic and British Airways.

But this is all speculation -  "20-30% larger" is incredibly vague, and does anyone expect Cathay to offer anything very different to BA or Virgin?   Then there’s one of those stupid number boxes telling us the Premium Economy fare to New York will be between $13,200 and $82,000.  Well, yes, it probably will.  But more likely it will be in the range of HK$20,000 – HK$25,000.

Cathay Pacific chairman Christopher Pratt said earlier he hoped the new seats could be rolled out by next year to capture a clientele looking to trade down from business class, and those who don't want to be in economy class, because despite a return in passenger traffic and prices for business class, passenger yield had yet to return to 2007 levels.

At a ceremony to mark the reception at Boeing's delivery centre in Seattle last month of a 777-300ER – the third aircraft fitted with Cathay's latest business-class seats – the airline's chief executive, John Slosar, said four seats were cut to make the new product more spacious. But he said the sacrifice in space would be rewarded by a higher loading.

The reviews I have read say that the new seats don’t provide any extra space, but just a different configuration.  However, the SCMP reporter has no doubts:

A test of the new business class cabin by a South China Morning Post reporter confirmed that it is not only wider but also more comfortable than the cabin it will replace, particularly its sleeping configuration, which is more spacious.

The new seats enable passengers to look out of their windows without the need to turn their heads at a right angle, and the two middle seats are angled towards each other, allowing travelling couples to be closer. Passengers wanting more privacy can use a cabin door equipped with a mirror as a partition.

Attention is also paid to finer details.  The new seats have a recess at their base which may be used as a step to help smaller air hostesses and passengers to load and unload luggage from their overhead racks. Small lights next to the recess are intended to alert cabin crew during take-off and landing that the seats have not been fully restored to the upright position.

OK, the steps are a clever feature, but where's the objectivity?

Cory Doctorow in The Guardian (How do you persuade people to pay?) on the muddled strategies of the entertainment industry:

The seemingly straightforward act of purchasing a good or service is fraught with mystery […] and the complexity is multiplied by purchases in the digital world. In the physical realm, there’s real danger in taking a good without paying for it (you might be arrested and sent to jail); in the digital realm, that danger is much lower. So much lower, in fact, that the majority of media that changes hands online does so for free and without authorisation.

This fact has occasioned much hand wringing, hair pulling, and legal manoeuvring, and a great deal of rhetoric about why the public "should" buy stuff they can readily get for free.

This rhetoric is often muddy and confused, and at odds with the strategies deployed by the companies and individuals who employ it. For example, the ads shown before film exhibitions and DVDs warn that pirate DVDs are of poor quality and may not play back reliably. At the same time, the manufacturers of DVDs have been going to ever-greater lengths to degrade the quality of legitimate video purchases – lengthy, unskippable adverts; arbitrary geographic playback limitations; even the mandatory installation of "anti-copying" software that hijacks your PC to stop you making an unrestricted copy of the movie.

[..]  I often hear from parents who download unauthorised cartoons for their kids because the DVDs come with long, unskippable (or difficult-to-skip) adverts, the worst of which deploy "pester power" tactics intended to get kids to nag their parents to buy something. As far as these parents are concerned, spending money gets them a product that much worse than the free version.

Well, indeed, and in Hong Kong we often get noisy and irritating propaganda messages that are supposed to persuade us to buy legitimate DVDs.  Whereas the illegal download cuts straight to the chase. 

I notice that Disney are now marketing something called “Easy DVD”.  Could this be a step in the right direction?  I don’t know, because it is only available in Chinese – and if I read the label correctly it is only in 4:3 format so it doesn’t look promising,