I don't possess a mobile phone and I don't plan to have one in the future. When I see other drivers babbling away into their mobiles (cell phones to Americans), my blood boils with rage because to me it is like junping into a car when your veins are coursing with alcohol after a session in the pub. It is just as irresponsible and there have been many cases of fatal or near-fatal road accidents caused directly by thoughtless mobile phone use.
But this isn't what I really wished to gripe about in this post. What I want to rant about is mobile phone masts. They seem to be mushrooming all over the place - great big ugly poles that are an ugly blight on our cityscapes and countryside. And because we live in a competitive, enterprising society it seems that different mobile phone companies have to throw up their own masts - thereby massively increasing the number of masts that assault our vision and uglify our surroundings.
I hate them and I wonder, just in aesthetic terms, why they can't start incorporating phone masts into new buildings or running them up the side of existing tall buildings like lightning conductors.
This is to ignore another latent and worrying issue with mobile phone masts - namely,what are they doing to our long term health? I sometimes walk by masts and hear electronic humming emerging from the associated and equally ugly control boxes. Why? What is that humming doing to passers by? Do profit making companies like T-Mobile, Orange and O2 give a damn about the nation's long term health? Ithink not. All they are after is filthy lucre and they'll twist and turn like the operators of the Sellafield Visitors' Centre to deny that there are any health issues with mobile phone masts. Profit is everything to these people.
I am thinking of visiting Osam bin Laden's mates in northern Pakistan to get some lessons in terrorism so that I can form an underground rebel group whose mission will be to fell as many mobile phone masts as we can. We'll be called The PML (Phone Mast Lumberjacks), bringing back a more peaceful, private world to provide sanctuary from the endless cell phone babble and prevent brain cancers.
He's a Phone Mast Lumberjack, and he's OK....he sleeps all night and he works all day.
ReplyDeleteI thought PML was "Pissed Myself Laughing" (in modern parlance!!)??
ReplyDeleteAs for Mr. Laden, I imagine he may well be sympathetic to your cause, particularly because all the videos I have seen of him feature him using one of them massive house brick sized mobile phones, and o2 are refusing to give him their free 12 monthly upgrade cos he won't give them his address to post it to!!
FoX
Your name reminds me of living in Guisborough, England years ago. I loved the Yorkshire Pudding's and pints of cider and black. :)
ReplyDeleteNice blog! I enjoyed my visit.
Couldn't agree more. Talk about a blot on the landscape. I also hate electricity pilons.
ReplyDeleteAll this to avoid embracing technology? Me thinks he doth protest too much. haha I do feel your plight in the whole "design" thing, though. When I drive the countryside, looking for great photo opportunities, the ever-increasing above-ground utility and telephone poles tend to foul up the prettiest sights. The price we pay for convenience, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteWith you 100% on that one, at least here some of them ( Not All) are disguised as trees.
ReplyDeleteThere is a great oppertunity to turn them in to bits of urban art...... no scratch that, most urban art is crap.
Not sure you need lessons from terrorists. A good sharp hacksaw should do it.
ReplyDeleteI'm from the USA and called them mobile phones for the longest time. I don't know when they changed it on me. One day I said "I need to charge my mobile.." and my friend said "You mean your cell phone?" When did that happen?
ReplyDeleteYou need guys with axes? Heck, we've got them by the handfull around these parts in Oklahoma. Guys with power tools just itching to come to the aid of any one with a gripe against any athority and/or high-falutin' company!!
They might be drunk....
Hey, check out this piece of industry pap serving as news on morning TV here in the US about clever ways to disguise cell phone towers. Notice they only go to this trouble in the "nice" neighborhoods. If you neighborhood is aesthetically unpleasing, brain cancer all around!
ReplyDeleteCell Phone Towers in Disquise