One of my bugbears is dysfunctional packaging (in the UK), which appears to be a large percentage of it.

For some reason (and I have no idea what has changed to initiate it) certain packaging has become almost impregnable to the average unadorned human being (hands, teeth, feet etc). Flimsy plastic wrapping is now something a superhero could be proud to use in their fight against crime. Try opening for example a plastic bag of sugar, herbs, nuts or anything other than certain snack foods (a few of which are still designed to be opened with just our hands) and you will need tools; a knife or a pair of scissors, a hedge trimmer maybe. Because if you manage to open them by hand and don't give yourself a hernia in the process, then the bag will split (presumably in order to punish your precocity) and the contents will spill all over the place, often dramatically. A result I call CSE (contents spewing everywhere).

Ok fine I have scissors in the kitchen, so I use them. But the way the bag has been designed - folded and glued - means that it is not possible to do a clean cut straight across or even a clean straight cut of a corner, unless you are a origami expert twice removed (some dishwasher salt bag designers please take note). So the top or corner is now zigzagged shaped, which means that pouring anything out of it involves, yes you guessed it, 'contents spewing everywhere' again. Ok, so I quite like the bottom of my dishwasher covered in salt crystals ... looks kinda festive don'tya think?

Or ... bags of sugar which are so full that to cut below the top glue line means (unless you have a steady hand, good eyesight and are really careful) 'contents spewing ... ' yeah I think you get what I mean. Then they add insult to injury and include that useless large piece of sticky tape, which is <sarcasm type="extreme">really handy</sarcasm> for you to stick down the top after opening, even though the bag is so full that it bursts open a few nanoseconds later; then when the bag becomes more comfortably empty the tape loses its stickiness anyway.

I am beginning to think that packaging designers are just taking the proverbial ... Ok maybe a tad paranoid, but I wouldn't be writing this if it was just an occasional occurrence; because just lately it appears to be that too many packaging items have some sort of dysfunction. It's a trend of sorts. I'm sure that there are all kinds of security, health & safety and other reasons that it happens - but it still annoys the heck out of me, because it just feels gratuitous or badly thought out.

Anyway here's just a few initial items on my personal aggravation list:

• Juice cartons, you know the hard to open, cardboard/foil/plastic/whatever combination cartons which are practicably unrecyclable and will only pour anything if allowed to gurgle-slop and then more often than not 'spew contents everywhere'. I've lost count of the amount of times the plastic ring-pull security seal thingy has snapped off, so that you cannot open them without some kind of electrical equipment and a sort of grim determination.
• Sugar, herbs, nuts for cooking etc or anything that has that horrible stiff plastic wrapping and is glued up the whazzoo (in order I presume to stop people opening them in the store, wandering around whilst snacking out and perhaps doing a little shopping in the meantime). Thus trying to open them by hand (as previously mentioned) almost always results in CSE (contents spewing everywhere) in your kitchen and possible starvation if you are in the 'field' caught short without a Swiss knife, machete or ice pick to hand.
• Wine bottles with foil tops, that have no tab to help peal them off, although it is one way to spend an almost Zen-like and rather thoughtful afternoon pealing off the foil top, micromillimeter by micromillimeter. Just keep a packet of plasters handy (... if you can open them that is ... sob).
• Milk bottles (plastic), those with foil security tops that occasionally are overglued and just will not come off, resulting in ... once you do get them off and before calling emergency to treat your dislocated shoulder, more blooming CSE!
• Teabag boxes, with that flimsy plastic outer covering that is fiddly to open and peal off ... piece by piece by ... and then you have to 'unseal' the cardboard box underneath anyway (whereby you learn that paper/cardboard is actually strongest at the perforations). But I guess the plastic outer cover stops damage to the teabags when the packets fall in water; which could be handy if you keep them say in the shower stall instead of the cupboard, or the delivery lorry drivers forget to batten the hatches in a rainstorm, or a 100ft tidal wave ...
• Crackers, you know the 'fragile' ones that come in micron thin plastic wrapping which affords zero protection against percussion damage. In fact my guess is that this wrapping creates a minus protection factor (anti-packaging!) ... in other words crackers in this stuff are more likely to be damaged than if they were completely loose. Then they have that <sarcasm type="major">handy</sarcasm> tab you pull to guillotine the top off ... which works only when the moon is full and you aren't in any kind of hurry.
• Any kind of packaging which is that spongy, soft plastic wrap (the type that your bread comes in), or other types of flimsy plastic that you screw up and put in the bin ... but then quietly unwraps itself over the next few minutes to a size that is actually larger than it was beforehand; thus defying several laws of physics in the process. This causes an inverse square mass issue inside your bin, necessitating the use of heavy items in order to weigh down the plastic 'explosion' and make room for anything else.
• Margarine tub lids, a fiddle to get off, almost impossible to put back on, without specialist equipment, so that they 'click' properly. Which means you make a grab for the marge in the fridge and the loose lid flips off ... you lose your grip (in more ways than one I might add) and the tub somersaults impressively into the air ... it lands on the floor with a splat (and we all know which way round it lands) and results in another major CSE event.
• That stupid, useless and aggravating push-lock-plastic-strip thingy (don't know the official name ... don't care). On certain packaging you have a plastic strip on the inside of the opened edge, which when pressed together grips and seals the package opening (hahahahahah - if only) like a zip.  As you can guess by my maniacal laughter they just hardly ever and I mean ever work, ever, ever, ever! Arggghhhhhhh ... [takes deep breath] ...

There are more examples I'm sure, but I think I've just blocked them from memory.

So [another deep breath] every time I see a <sarcasm type="global" class="of its own">handy</sarcasm> 'pull here to open' message or tab on any type of packaging: I grit my teeth, gird my loins (at least I think I do as, like Terry Pratchett's Rev Oats, I'm not entirely sure how you do that) and make a mental note of where the knives/scissors/chain saw ... tissues/soap/biohazard suit are located ... I'll let you know how I get on.

Su

Most people probably don't need further reasons, but for the undecided among you, consider these:-

1. Allegations by BP's deepwater rig partner Andarko Petroleum who have openly accused the company of being "reckless". James Hackett, chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum, said it was considering "contractual remedies" for what the company has described as BP's "gross negligence or wilful misconduct" over the spill.
2. BP's increasingly desperate attempts to stop the flow of crude oil following the rig explosion have demonstrated a total lack of workable disaster / contingency planning.
3. Thanks to lax US and UK laws (allegedly watered down by oil-industry lobbyists), BP was permitted to operate the rig without the use of safety devices such as the acoustic switch blowout system. This fail-safe device costs a half a million dollars to implement, but BP appears to have decided that this was an unnecessary expense. Yet another legacy of the Bush/Cheney administration.
4. While people died and others continue to risk their lives to contain the disaster, BP top dog Tony Hayward swanned off on a rich-boy's yacht race.
5. Instead of gratefully accepting their help and focusing on the problem at hand, BP's lawyers attempted to gag fisherman volunteering to help with oil spill clean-up efforts, by forcing them to sign away their right to free speech, from holding BP harmless for any accidents that might occur, and requiring them to give the oil giant a month's notice before filing any legal claims.
6. Despite preliminary estimates of a cleanup cost running into billions, along with BP's average net earnings of close to $20bn per year for the last 3 years, sailing-boy CEO Tony Hayward has decided to proceed with dividend payments, before the cleanup costs can even be properly estimated.
7. BP has a poor environmental and safety record that dates back for decades. It was named by Mother Jones Magazine as one of the "ten worst corporations" in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records. Between January 1997 and March 1998, BP was responsible for 104 oil spills.
8. In recent years, BP has been implicated in a number of gas price manipulation scandals. Detailed allegations by federal investigators that BP traders illegally manipulated propane prices in 2004 and formal charges brought against BP by the Oklahoma Attorney General left BP executives squirming and red-faced, but did little to change their ways.
9. On the local front, BP has a long history of always being the first to increase fuel prices at the pumps and the last to reduce them - so much so that fuel price increases are refereed to in New Zealand as: "the BP subsidy".
10. At the same time, BP have demonstrated that they don't give a damn about their forecourt customers and have managed to take the last remaining vestiges of "Service" out of the "Service station" by mumbling something incoherent about health and safety laws, without being able to quote chapter and verse when pressed. This has even extended to one station refusing to assist a disabled driver and ordering him off the forecourt for apparently "creating a safety hazard".

Seen enough? Join the boycott

The only thing that governments and corporate interests still fear, is public opinion.

Today is the 100th birthday of Jacques Cousteau.

Few men have led lives as rich and full as his was; naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher, Cousteau studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the aqua-lung and pioneered marine conservation, sharing his fascination of oceanic life in all it's rich and diverse forms with the world, in the reams of film he and his crews produced and broadcast around the globe for over 50 years.

Through these oceanographic and cinematographic campaigns, Cousteau became a passionate and outspoken conservationist who was able to leverage his worldwide fame to promote the idea of the Earth as a limited and fragile environment that needed to be preserved. He was able to explain the ideas of biodiversity and the often fragile links in the eco-chain in a way that the average viewer could appreciate and understand. Cousteau was also the only non-politician to take part in the 1992 Rio Summit.

Cousteau occasionally became a key figure involved in direct action in the eco-cause. In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was scheduled to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the French Atomic Energy Agency (CEA). They argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. The CEA also claimed that there was little circulation - and therefore no need for concern - at the dump site located between Nice and Corsica, but public opinion sided with the oceanographers, including Cousteau, who repudiated the claims. Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide and popular support and the train carrying atomic waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and was eventually forced to return to it's point of origin.

Cousteau was also rarely afraid of courting controversy. In November 1991, he gave an interview to the UNESCO courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. As he grew older, his views became understandably more pessimistic and somewhat misanthropic: An ideal planet, he apparently confided to Yves Paccalet, would be one in which humanity is limited to 100,000 people who are both educated and respectful of nature.

Despite the much-publicized family conflicts (culminating in at least one lawsuit) which chipped away at the persona known and beloved by the public, Cousteau's greatest single legacy is the kind of underwater adventure films he is synonymous with - a genre that has never been more popular and continues to thrill and fascinate people the world over.

Cousteau's death in June 1997 (aged 87) left an impressive legacy which included more than 120 television documentaries, over 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.

Je vous remercie Monsieur Cousteau a partir de de plongeurs partout. Votre don a une valeur enorm.