Clever after the event

We've all done it. You put the phone down, and then you think of all the clever things you should have said. It was like that for me yesterday.

The phone rang with that strange caller ID that usually means it's a sales call from another country. I picked it up. 'Hello, this is Mark calling you from Windows...' Now, from his accent, 'Mark' was clearly not Mark - and unless Windows is a suburb of Mumbai, probably not calling from Windows. I hadn't had breakfast yet and couldn't be bothered. 'Sorry,' I said, very loudly. 'I can't understand you. It's a very bad line!' And hung up.

To give 'Mark' his due, he had perseverance. Five minutes later the phone rang again. 'Hello, this is Mark calling from Windows.' I tried the 'Bad line, can't hear you,' approach for a bit, but this got boring. 'What do you mean?' I suddenly said. 'How can you be from Windows?'

'Windows,' he said, 'the operating system you are running on your PC at home.'

Ok, now I knew this was a scam. There's a well known one going around where they claim your PC has a problem, it has contacted them, and all you have to do is pay £s on your credit card and they'll sort it out. I went into aggressive mode. 'You can't be from Windows,' I said. 'Windows isn't a company. This is a fraud and I will call the police if I hear from you again.' And put the phone down. Strangely, he didn't ring back.

But afterwards. Ah, afterwards. I started to think of what I could have done. This wasn't just some poor call centre worker doing a sales call, this was an out-and-out attempt at fraud. He was fair game for anything. I could have:

Said 'Hang on a moment,' the put the handset down and left him on the line. All morning.
Suddenly started talking in a nonsense language.
Or, my favourite, when he said 'the operating system you are running on you PC at home' I should have said 'Oh, you want to talk to Windows. Just a moment.' [Clicking noises off] Then in a robotic voice: 'Good morning, this is the Windows Operating System voice recognition package. How many I help you?' and conducted a conversation as long as he would let me, playing the part of a computer.

Oh how I would have chuckled. But sadly I didn't. Next time, however... Please ring back, Mark.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense

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