Confused dotcom? Simples!

March 8th is both Shrove Tuesday and International Women's Day. So let's combine the two and get women to cook their men pancakes.
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I'm told the smug consumer geek Martin Lewis regularly Googles both his own name and the words 'money expert' to see who's talking about him. He'll have a busy week this week then. Regarding the EU ruling on male-female insurance policies, he supplied the following quote to The Sun as 'My View':

WHAT is supposed to be pro-fairness is likely to end up being anti-consumer.

Don't expect men and women's prices to meet in the middle. The biggest hit will be on car insurance costs for under-40s. Women will also face hikes in life insurance costs.

Men will likely be hit on private medical insurance. Many will suffer in retirement due to worse annuity rates - Martin Lewis (The Sun, March 2nd)

In The Scotsman and Guardian he was quoted as: 

But Martin Lewis, creator of MoneySavingExpert.com, believes banning the use of gender for car insurance is sensible: "With car insurance I think there is some logic to this ban – gender price differences are based on behaviour. Why should one man pay more because others behaved badly? Would we allow the same to happen based on racial differences?" (Guardian, March 2nd)

It must nice to be able to be so many things to so many people.

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Regarding all this insurance stuff, I had dinner this week with some senior sorts from the industry. They paid up without any hassle - so it obviously wasn't Sainsbury's Insurance then.

But they did tell me some interesting stuff about this law that says companies cannot charge women less for car insurance premiums than men simply because men are a much greater risk.

Forget all the talk of men paying less and women paying more. Underwriters are a sneaky lot and they will find a way to retain the balance - ie: get those who are most likely to have a crash to pay the biggest premiums. And this is how they will do it.
They will ask a series of questions, much more detailed than the forms we currently have to fill in, to establish a lot more detail about occupation, lifestyle and personality.
Remember, they are not allowed to charge you less for being male and if they charge more for people who answer yes to  'do you have bollocks' and 'do you pee standing up' they will be caught out by the equality police. But they can load premiums for, say, apprentice mechanics, plumbers and others trades people where 90 per cent of the young workforce are male and lower them for secretaries, human resources and Arsenal defenders, where most of the workforce are girls.
If you fill in questions that reveal you play cricket, drink bitter, and smoke a pipe then they will guess that, with the exception of perhaps, female vicars, you are male and thus load your car insurance premium.
Likewise if you tell them your favourite films are Top Gun, Dirty Dancing and Sex In the City II they will assume that a) you're female and b) you have no taste but that this means c) you're less likely to wrap your pretty little heads round the steering wheel coming out of the Blackwall Tunnel on a Sunday night.
Talking of which - do you know why so many footballers crash their Ferraris? Its because the wall is never moved back far enough for their liking. Anyone who gets this joke will face a hike in their insurance and anyone who doesn't will get a discount from Sheila's Wheels.
Confused.com? You won't be.
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Puerile behaviour continued: Asking followers to send me refreshing examples of not behaving like grown ups a teacher friend of mine - who shall remain nameless because she moulds impressionable young minds who deserve to be protected - went on a training session to learn sign language.
Picture the scene. A deaf person makes a sign and the teachers have to shout out the word or the phrase. The session ends and the deaf person scratches their ear and the teachers shout out a word or phrase. The deaf person waves at them to stop, and they shout out something else. And so it continues!
Mind you, I've always had some sympathy for signers after BBC News 24 sacked a woman during a news report on the floods in Cockermouth last year.
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It says something about the standard of education today. When Downing Street hired that moggy to catch rats at Number Ten a bunch of students were caught protesting with placards reading 'No to Tory Cats'.
You couldn't make it up. Except I just did.
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The new iPad is thinner and lighter. No wonder they got Steve Jobs to launch it.
Shutting down....Solly