Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

Mortgage lending figures dropped sharply in January, as the BBC article covering it here reports, and it has been in the news for a while. The joys of the recession, eh?

However, a couple of weeks ago, mortgages were in the news for an entirely different reason. A very surreal reason.

Four people are facing jail because of an £8 million mortgage fraud, where the group seem to have “bombarded” a number of different companies with claim after claim after claim. It doesn’t seem real, somehow. It’s a little like something out of a James Bond film or something. Quite strange to think that, actually, it was happening just down the road in Essex.

And it got me wondering: just how easy is it to do something like that? To continually apply for mortgages or remortgages from Nationwide, or any of the other big establishments.

I suppose it’s fair to say that, with mortgage forums that are set up to discuss borrowing money, it has become easier to find markets.

The internet makes everything easier. You can do anything from broadcast your music, to selling your property or home quickly for cash on the internet. And in many ways, it’s a wonderful tool.

But, like many wonderful tools, it can be exploited. It amazes me that they were able to apply for 33 fraudulent mortgage applications. And it amazes me that, considering it looks like it was only two companies they pestered, they weren’t found out sooner.

I am very pleased that it’s the weekend. Although perhaps not quite as pleased as the dog, who, somehow, knows when Friday rolls around, and has an extra spring in her step all evening.

The week has been busy, to say the least. Too hectic, in places, and it means I have found very little time for writing, or reading, or dabbling in graphic design. I’ve found very little time for anything, in fact: the days seemingly blurred into one, long grind. But it’s the weekend, and at the weekend I am automatically happy. And so is the dog. Somehow, she knows when I have time off, and it pleases her immensely that there is more time for long walks.

I have found time to catch up on the healthcare news in America, though, after a friend pointed it out to me earlier in the week. And it makes me very happy to know that we have a National Health Service, here in Britain. Almost as happy as my dog is at the prospect of Saturday.

But with the NHS comes a certain amount of problems, because people take advantage of it. The Times recently ran an article on this, which you can find here.

Even in this country, though, there are thriving private healthcare programs. There are websites that provide a formidable array of quotes on family health insurance, and it pays to have a quick browse every now and then, if you’re in the market. And there are other options, too: many banks provide life insurance protection schemes.

And let’s not forget Zurich health cover or the award-winning BUPA healthcare, but at least with BUPA it accommodates people from all over the world.

Now it’s approaching four o’clock, and I am being convinced to go for a walk. The dog’s timer is spot-on, as always.

I felt so tired this morning that I was groggy.

Running on probably four hours sleep – and maybe less – I wanted nothing more than to go back to bed. Such is the price of watching American football in the UK: it is on late at night, and if you watch it, you feel it on Monday morning.

But this was the NFC championship. This was the spectacular, the peculiar battle between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. Last night, enthralled, I knew I could deal with the tiredness to watch this.

I picked up a paper, before I got on the train. The Times. Mostly to try and wake myself up, I think, but it’s nice to have something to do for twenty minutes or so. I leafed through it. And I was struck by one of the stories inside it. Apparently, our schools are planning to spend thousands of pounds a year to unfilter and re-filter You Tube.

Currently, it’s blocked at schools. You can’t go on it – there could be something offensive on there. But teachers want to use it as a tool to help children learn, because it’s wealth of videos can be helpful for that sort of thing. So they plan to unblock it, and spend all this money on ensuring there are no comments visible.

What?

Have they forgotten what it’s like to be a kid? You don’t care if you read something profane in a comment. In fact, if you do, you probably think it’s cool.

And if it’s blocked, you can just watch it or read it when you get home.

It just seems like an absurd waste of time and money. It seems so pointless. Haven’t we got better things to spend our money on than this? Give £10,000 to help Haiti … this You Tube censoring is just pathetic.

I have one of these smart phone gadgets, with all the fancy-but-generally-pointless applications on them, and earlier on today I was fiddling around with a new app; a metal detecting app. I was curious, was wondering whether it works or not.

Because whilst you can waft it around keys or scissors or some other metal object and it seems to do something, it is just as likely to do nothing at all. It is mostly a green bar that fills up when there is something it recognises as metal, or doesn’t fill up otherwise.

And it got me thinking – with the app store for iPhones and Android devices so thriving, is there anything that there’s not an app for?

Apparently the answer is no. There is even an app for translating your baby’s crying and screaming. Allegedly, this app, if you hold it up to your distressed baby, will tell you if it’s hungry, or just plain pissed off.

It sounds an awful lot like my metal detector. And as such, probably doesn’t work. At least very well. But, for all my criticism, there does appear to be a certain amount of research to back up the apps claims. Research suggests, for example, that the pitch and frequency of a baby’s cries can indicate as much as health problems.

Whether it works or not, we’ve certainly come a long way in a short amount of time – it doesn’t seem that long ago that I was fiddling around on a phone that was just a … well, phone.

I didn’t realise that, on average, our young, new drivers had so little experience, so few lessons. When I came across this piece, I read with some interest. Apparently there has been a study undertaken to show that quite a few young drivers feel unprepared for being unleashed on the road. Many of them have only had up to 30 hours of practice, whilst it is recommended you should have 45 hours of training – in addition to 22 hours of private training.

Suddenly it’s not so surprising that car insurance companies provide such steep quotes for fresh-faced, recently passed drivers.

And yet, many people find it outrageous that companies can charge so much for insurance. It can, in a lot of cases, be huge amounts of money. Rarely, though, do we see it from their perspective. Car insurance companies are increasingly losing money on injury claims, with “bloodthirsty lawyers” always looking to squeeze out extra revenue. Not to mention the amount of claims which will be unjust, falsified, or completely fictitious.

We live in an age of cheap deals, where there are a number of websites that specialise in beating your last quote, and digging up the very best offer. People want their car insurance quotes to be delivered quickly, cheaply – and again the insurance companies will be under pressure to compete, to lower their prices. Again, the car insurance companies will be losing money.

There are plenty of websites that aim to give you plenty of compensation for accidents and injuries, too. Personal injury claims lawyers who offer no win no fee deals, but strive to win something, anything – even if you haven’t been hurt in the first place. You have your own personal injury calculators, too. It really is a different world these days, developed over the last twenty years or so.

A world where the legal profession is blended with our lives and our cars more than ever. But is it really for the best?

There is a general impression, when it comes to illegally downloaded music, that it hurts the music industry. But according to the Independent, there has been a study undertaken that shows that the people who download music illegally, and admit to doing so, are also the ones who spend the most on music.

Why? Perhaps the music that is downloaded convinces them buy the album… perhaps the internet allows them to hear and download music that they wouldn’t have otherwise listened to, that they can they go out and buy. Perhaps it’s just the fact that the people who download music illegally are also the biggest music fans. But regardless, it follows that banning them from the internet, and cracking down on them, and doing everything it’s possible to do in order to stop them downloading music will actually have a negative effect on the music business – quite the opposite to what these people would like to achieve.

I must admit, although it’s not something I would just think about out of the blue, I’m not overly surprised that this is the case. But I also don’t think it will change their approach: their hammer blow will reign down on illegal downloaders, whatever the consequences.

I just thought it was an interesting story to start the weekend with. And hopefully it should be a pretty fantastic one – it’s certainly set up to be. Why? One reason: NFL playoffs. Even though the games get shown pretty late over here, they’re no less of an event: we’ve got in the beer, and the crisps, and all manner of junk food to sit down and just enjoy the occasion.

Both games tonight should be interesting ones… and both are rematches of games from last week: the Bengals against the Jets, and the Cowboys against the Eagles. Somehow, I don’t think the result for either game will be like what we saw last time the sides met, either.

Basking sharks are now breeding in the waters in Scotland, according to this piece. It describes, quite nicely, how the sharks swim nose-to-tail during courting, and makes it all sound very pleasant and wonderful – but the fact is these are sharks in our waters, and that’s an idea I’m not hugely fond of. In fact, as much as I’m intrigued and interested by the piece, for in a way it is quite nice – in another, it is quite scary.

I watched Jaws when I was younger, as I’m sure lots of people did, but ever since, I’ve had a thing about going out into the sea. The sort of thing where I just don’t really do it. Even though I know it’s very, very unlikely that there will be a shark in the sea, right there where I am, right when I am swimming, it’s the thought that it could happen that puts me off.

And until now, I have always had the slight consolation that there probably aren’t sharks in our waters. But now it’s more probable that there are absolutely tonnes of them!

If it’s true that fish have table manners (which, in itself, is a bit more of an appealing idea than sharks swimming around in the sea near me), then maybe that trend extends all the way to their flesh eating, gigantic brothers of the ocean.

Then again maybe not. Call me a wuss, but I’ll just have to avoid swimming in the sea for a while, I think.

Have you heard of the naked scanner?

Neither had I, until today. But I was browsing the news earlier, and came across this article on the BBC’s website – the scanner is being tested in Manchester airport to speed up airport security checks, and reduce the hassle and time-consuming nature of being individually checked by guards, and having to take off your belt, your shoes, and your jacket, etc. Which all sounds rather wonderful.

The problem, of course, is that it produces a naked image of yourself, and transmits it so someone in a remote location somewhere nearby.

I suppose people are complaining because of the notion of a big brother society, where we can be watched and seen and tracked in all manner of places, all over the country. This is a step too far. It’s like something out of James Bond, like those glasses he had in a recent movie that allowed him to see through women’s clothes.

But is it, really? Sure, you can argue we live in a big brother society. These days, CCTV cameras are pretty much everywhere – I even saw one in the cinema the other day, not outside, but inside, by the escalators – is that not more worrying than being seen in black and white, for the briefest of moments, at an airport?

And then there’s GPS vehicle tracking – another invention that means you can pretty much be followed everywhere. Someone can find your vehicle, and follow it in real time on a computer screen, and track you down.

I think I would be more worried about the radiation from the scanning device in Manchester than being seen sort of naked. They say it’s only a minute amount, that you’re safe for thousands of trips through the scanner, but that’s not the point: I still don’t want to subject myself to that. And let’s not forget this is airport security we’re talking about. I would rather fly safe in the knowledge that I’m not about to be blown up, than worry about being seen naked.

When it comes to the big brother stuff, there are far worse things than being seen in a black and white image somewhere. Something like RFID tracking (imagine buying a product and having a chip in it so people can track where it goes!) is probing more worryingly into my privacy, I think, than the naked scanner.

But maybe that’s just me.

Well, mince pies have been eaten, booze guzzled. But most importantly, I’ve spent time with people I haven’t seen for a while. Indeed, some friends I haven’t seen in over a year, because after university everyone followed the road that lead to their ideal job, or at least a job in the vague direction of their ideal job, and more often than not this meant leaving the area and going to a city somewhere. So it has been nice seeing them, exchanging stories, catching up.

Ultimately, Christmas is about family, about spending time with the ones you love, and even if you can only do it briefly in some cases, and not properly in others, it’s nice all the same. So it was especially good to see my grandparents, and my auntie, who is not often in the country.

But one of the main reasons I wanted to write this piece is because I’ve found quite an interesting news story here, on the BBC website. It is about chimps, and is particularly interesting because it comes after an episode of Life, narrated by David Attenborough, which focused on primates, and was really very good. In that, we saw how they use different tools and techniques to break open food.

Here, though, apparently that extends to cleavers: they’re chopping up food into more manageable chunks with blades. I just thought it was quite a charming story. And, after all, why shouldn’t monkeys celebrate at this time of year, too?

I’m sitting here having a good lounge around, and despite feeling very tired, I can’t seem to summon up the energy to go up the stairs and into bed. Instead, I’ve been doing a bit of messing around on the internet. Browsing randomly, and watching You Tube, and generally lazing about. And in doing so, I’ve come across this: a story about a deer, which decided to wander into a hotel.

It begins, quite humorously, I think: “A video has been released of a deer wandering into a hotel lobby in China on Tuesday” – but then, just when you’re picturing a beautiful deer on an incredible mission, perhaps tentatively sipping its drink, or wandering around in a timid manner, it explains, very abruptly, that it was then shot.

I suppose it’s the quickest, easiest, and safest way to deal with such a situation. But I still found it quite funny how abruptly the theme of the piece changes. Perhaps I’m just tired enough to find humour in some strange things.

Regardless, I hope the adventurous deer is now safe and sound back in its favourite forest.