Luddites used to break machines that were taking their jobs.

Newspapers publish news online for free, supported by advertising. When that fails, they try to introduce paywalls.

Television programmes exist to get viewers to watch adverts.

e-Books are more expensive than printed books.

CD prices are at the cheapest they have ever been.

It costs more for airport taxes than for flights.

If you buy your flight by a credit card, there's a fee that isn't a fixed amount, and doesn't depend on the amount of the transaction, but depends on how many people are taking how many flights.

The BBC can justify closing down radio channels because they are not popular enough.

The BBC can justify closing down radio channels because they are too popular.

Celebrity magazines exist - and perpetuate themselves by creating their own celebrities. Pap will eat itself.

Brief thoughts on the evolution of the dinner party.

In the 1920s perhaps we would have piled down to Squiffy's place in Kent for the weekend. During the day we would have enjoyed the grounds. Ffytch would have sat in the arboretum, composing poetry, and Grumpy Montmorency Cleeves would have made a fool of himself in an amusing event in the gazebo, leaving Calamity Mitford under the mistaken impression that he had proposed. In the evening, chef would have served us primordial soup, the cream of Scotland Yard.

In the 1950s we would not have had dinner parties. We would have had austerity instead. Austerity is not a good alternative to dinner.

In the 1970s the dinner party was in its heyday. We'd be invited round to Margot and Jerry's, and Margot would serve us olives ("on a stick, how unusual!") with our Cinzanos before we settled down to dine on Prawn Cocktail and Boeuf Bourgignone. We'd prepare dinner in advance, just to check that it worked, and we would serve our carrots from a hostess trolley.

By the 1990s Boeuf Bourgignone was terribly bad taste. If we were entertaining clients, we'd pop out for Novelle Cuisine. ("I couldn't possibly take two carrots, I'm on a diet.") The dinner party evolved in to the more casual "having friends round for dinner", which was a chance to show off the wall we'd had removed to create a kitchen-diner, so the whole mystery of food was transformed in to a social event.

In 2010, that is being replaced by a phenomemon lifted from television. The 20-somethings of my acquaintance don't have friends for dinner, they don't throw dinner parties, or casual soirees. They "do" Come Dine With Me. A group of friends visit each other in rotation, mark each other in secret, and presumably rifle through each other's underwear drawers.

Where next?

Oh.

In the beginning, was the universe. The universe was very big, very confusing, and full of things that people couldn't understand. Things like the sun, and seasons, and death, and all sorts of things that if you were to stop and think about them would make you basically sit in a field all day going "Ug".

So, early mankind made up stories that explained observed phenomena. The sun was drawn across the sky on a chariot, and if you didn't eat your porridge it might not come up. Death was a doorway to a greater truth, but killing people was wrong.

That's fantastic. That's the beginning of a code of laws, the beginning of science, the beginnings of community. It also lets people stop worrying about what it's all about, and start focussing on really important things like inventing wheels and printing presses and processed cheese.

It's also the beginning of specialisation. If you've got one man who knows how the universe works he can worry about making sure it keeps working, and you can make sure that there's still bread on the table. He doesn't need to worry about yeast, and you don't need to worry about the laws of physics suddenly changing.

There's scope for a healthy degree of debate between the two of you. You might suggest, perhaps, that maybe eating Wob-meat gave you food poisoning, and he might oblige by checking with the Gods and finding out that Wob-meat is unclean. And he may suggest that the Gods have said that bread should be made with sand rather than flour, and you might oblige by telling him that you tried that and it didn't work.

What there is, though, is a healthy respect for the fact that you are the expert in baking, and he is the expert in the universe. If you say that Wob-meat gave you food poisoning, rather than declaring Wob-meat unclean, he may issue divine guidelines on how to cook Wob-meat properly, and thereby appease the thousands of Wob-farmers he might otherwise put out of work. He's got a different perspective. A wider perspective.

Of course, information is the enemy of this sort of specialisation.

I don't care how much the chairman of the BBC gets paid. Nor should you. Because it is none of your business.

Oh yes, you pay your licence fee - a tax by any other name - and that makes the BBC accountable, down to the last paperclip, the last penny of your money that you have paid to fund your BBC.

You're entitled to demand the removal of Jonathan Ross, the reinstatement of 6 Music, to moan about too much sport, or not enough, or whatever the heck you want.

This is a fantastic degree of transparency and openness. But it's flawed and ultimately kind of pointless and destructive.

Say you're a private contractor, working in some field of technical expertise. You're brilliant at your job and you can charge £500 per hour for your time. You get hired, a lot. Do your clients have the right to ask what they are going to get for their money?

Of course they do. They want some piece of technical knowledge that you either have, or can generate for them. You've obviously set your rate at one that you think fairly covers your costs, pays off some of your student loan and mortgage, has some contingency in it to cover the fact that as a private contractor you may not be working full time. You might have loaded it up a bit because you know the client is prepared to pay more for you. You might have rounded, or put in VAT at 17.5% when you're currently only paying it at 9%. At the end of the day, you are not a charity.

As long as the client is happy that the service received is worth the money that they have paid for it, everyone should be happy, shouldn't they?

They might not be. There might be a negotiation. Happens all the time. Cut a few quid off here, scale back a service there. All fair enough.

Never in a private business relationship does the client - who pays the wages - have a right to demand to know how that money is spent. They can't see how much you pay your PA, they can't see whether you've shopped around and got the cheapest energy provider to supply power to your office. They wouldn't expect to.

Paying for something does not give you an automatic right to control it.

I'll admit that there is a difference between a private contractor and the BBC - there are many - but the key one would be that the BBC - like the National Health Services and the Government - isn't in a competitive playing field. But the same principle applies.

Compare the benefit received to the price paid. Get that sorted first.

Freedom of speech is an interesting thing, isn't it. It's what allows you to sit in the privacy of your own home and say "Oh, I don't like Cormorants, they wet their nests", without the pro-Cormorant lobby breaking down your door and carting you away to the funny farm, there to be rehabilitated.

It is - like most concepts - hideously abused by some.

Just because you have something you want to say, it doesn't mean that I have to listen to it, agree with it, or give it any credibility at all. You have the right to say that you think that all children under the age of three should be shot. I have the equal right to say that you are a slavering idiot.

In the post-blog epoch, the place to get your rabid pointless message across to the masses is in the comments section of an online newspaper. It's brilliant. You don't need to justify your opinion, you don't need to read anyone else's comments, you don't even need to read anyone else's reply. You can just shout your meaningless shite into the ether, and because you are brilliant, everyone who reads it will come to your support. How brilliant is that?

It's not brilliant. It is, occasionally, funny, though.

I found myself teetering on the brink of doing it. On the BBC News web site, home of the deliciously random "Have Your Say" vitriol columns, where people with too much time and spare and unrelated opinions can persuade themselves that they matter. Hundreds of comments on a story that in itself was a report of a piece of research that reached inflammatory conclusions - possibly because they were the conclusions that it set out to reach. Yes, this country may have gone to the dogs, Have Your Say readers. However, by yapping away and thinking you matter, you are not part of any solution. Don't think that you are.

You do not represent the "moral majority". Yes, other people on the talkback agree with you - because the majority who disagree with you really don't think you're worth talking back to. You are a tiny yapping puppy in a big bucket full of them.

It's ironic that I am ranting about ranting, I know. I'm aware that by posting this online, I am in some ways just as bad as the "ban everything" brigade that annoy me so much. I know all that. But I'm not expecting anyone to read this. This is just for me, just for myself. Tell me how much you agree with me in the comments.

To close, though, a word from one of the wisest people I ever knew.

The right to freedom of speech does not include the right to be taken seriously.

In 1988, the most subversive programme on British television was Doctor Who.

In a thinly-veiled satire on contemporary society, The Happiness Patrol oozed on to our screens. Everything was sugar-coated, lift muzacked and synthetic. This, we were told, was good. Entertainment for the masses.

Sheila Hancock (mother of Tony and Roger) oozed Thatcherly charm as Helen A, devoted leader of the people of Terra Alpha, and not a thinly veiled political alligator at all. She loved her people, she just wanted them to be happy, and she was genuinely unaware of the stifling stranglehold she had on them. She didn't care about the little people. She saw the big picture.

Mind you, this was the story with some indigenous life forms whose lines were unintelligible, and a giant Bertie Bassett thrown in for good measure and not just to annoy confectioners, honest.

This, of course was what led to the downfall of Thatcherism and the dawn of the modern age. Or it would have done if Coronation Street hadn't been on the other side.

The other day, I was involved in a disagreement with a so-called "expert" who shouted me down, saying that seatbelts are indisputably safe for all toddlers and that parents of children with leukemia are "just a bit mad".

This is in the wake of a study that found a positive correlation between wearing seatbelts and childhood leukemia! Admittedly, the study has been discredited, but I've heard stories about parents taking their child to hospital in a car, wearing a seatbelt, and being told that their child had contracted leukemia. Coincidence? I don't think so.

This is another typical response from those bullies who don't want us to protect our children from leukemia. It is simply irresponsible to assert that seatbelts are appropriate in all cases, and to shout down anyone who disagrees as somehow educationally subnormel.

Some children have an allergic reaction to peanuts. Most don't. Does that mean you feed peanuts to all children? Of course it doesn't. In fact, most schools have banned peanuts. So, by analogy, we should also ban seatbelts. And watching television, reading, crossing the road and

Do you see what I did there? I took two unrelated concepts - one of which is a safety measure, and one of which is a tragic illness, put them together and - hurrah! - I look like an idiot.

Link : I'm not a scientist.

It seems today that all we see is violence in movies, and death on television. I've been to the cinema twice in the last week, and both times the movie showed a broken world, post-apocalyptic and bleak. And I've not even seen The Road, which is supposed to be even worser than those.

All very gloomy and doomy. Even Being Human is looking more drama than comedy - although a show in which one of the main characters is dead is either going to have serious overtones or be a Classic comedy. Then I get home to the horrors of Haiti. There is a definitely dark vibe in the air.

Fortunately, I am enjoying Glee. A show about life's great shallownesses, a show that while being partly Ugly Betty has a good chunk of Pushing Daisies and even Ugly Betty when it was at its most camp.

I'm hard-pushed to guess at the target audience for Glee, though. It's too cynical to be aimed at the Disney Market, and too camp and cutting to be aimed, really, at anyone other than Gay Men in their 30s to 50s. Not that I'm complaining about that...

I'm sitting waiting for my KimChi when she comes in.

- Look at this, she says.

I know I've said before that I won't go to my local chinese takeaway since they ripped out the soul, changed the menu, and put up a barrier so you can't see the chefs smoking and making the special sauce. They do Chinese, Korean, Thai and Malay food, and the Korean stuff is actually pretty good. So fried KimChi it is. But I digress.

- They're old, and they're overcooked, she goes on, ripping open the bag and dumping it unceremoniously on the counter. The cheery Korean chap looks at them. I can't work out his expression. She is looking around, possibly looking for an ally. I hunch over and make myself look small.

- Chips are cheap. You don't serve bad chips. And I went all the way home and had to come all the way back.

They take away the chips, and she sits down to wait.

- Check your food, she says.

I consider this. There's something very odd about buying chips from a Korean takeaway, particularly as they're slightly more expensive than the chips from the chip shop next door. Also, this place is famous for cocking up Chinese food, so their understanding of chips is likely to be even more random. I decide that my food will probably be fine.

And anyway, the last thing I want to do is take any advice from someone wearing pyjamas, slippers, and a cheap fake-fur coat.

Your home smells funny.

This is because of the dog, or the farting, or the baby sick, or the natural world creeping in to your hermetically sealed living capsule. You need the artificial natural smell of meadows, or pumpkins, or white tea and lily, delivered in to your home in puffs of chemistry, possibly with a changing light show and how about a magic little tune to let you know that a corner of your room now smells of something that might be orange blossom.

It's a multi-gazillion dollar industry probably, with new products squeezing themselves on to the market. The consumer - that's you, spraying frantically to cover up the fact that the dog has farted on the baby - has now realised that one smell is not enough - you get bored! And so, we now have air fresheners that change scent every forty-five seconds from chocolate to burning casserole to ck1, just to keep your home smelling fresh.

We need these products because we live in a world without fresh air, where opening a window lets the good air out, and where we have to keep all of our waste indoors because we don't have enough space for a compost patch as our gardens have been sacrificed for a range of six brightly-coloured waste bins (one for paper, one for glass, one for bodies, one for toenail clippings and so on) - which are collected fortnightly on an arcane rota known only to the air freshener companies.

Of course, most air fresheners don't get rid of smells, they just mask them. That's what the air freshener companies tell us, and they've been making this stuff out of long-chain hydrocarbons and waste from the petroleum industry for long enough that they've got to know, haven't they? So we now get products designed to kill nasty smells and the new second-generation version that covers up the new, fresh air, with the scent of lemon on a Tuesday. Aren't we lucky.

It's a multi-dollar industry, but one that nobody actually needs, so we've got to catch the youth market. Teach our offspring that the natural thing to do after a smelly poo is to push the ugly plastic sticky thing that's ruining the paintwork in the bathroom to release a puff of chemicals to cover up the other chemicals that have come out of your bottom. And then to complain to your mother, whose lips don't move in time with her words.

Your home smells funny. It always has done, and probably always will. And there's no doubt that artificial pseudopear and pseudojasmine can cover up the really nasty fart after a really good steak. But if you need a scented home with a smell that changes ever four seconds then you're either a nasally-retentive chemical addict or you should maybe consider finding a more long-term solution to the smell in your home. Clean.