Don’t you wish he’d concentrate on something important?

Big laugh of the day, Dave the Leader of Britain being told off from all sides over his latest bit of control-freakery. He wants to ruin everything for Britain’s decent citizens by slapping a big tax on booze in the name of making people stop consuming quite so much. No worries about it being illegal under EU law, or that he’s taking cash out of the pockets of honest workers like the staff at the Mansion. No concern for the country’s really important problems. He just can’t resist the urge to do-goodery, which is the curse of all hack politicians.

Do as I say, not as I do?

I happened to see some WWE “wrestling” and there was a break in one of the ring dramas for a plug for the WWE’s anti-bullying campaign, which provoked general derision in the audience for an outfit which runs on institutional bullying – usually by a gang of 4 “superstars”, who spend more time posturing than actually doing anything resembling wrestling, and who are granted the right to do pretend beatings-up on everyone in the locker room without being ganged up on individually and having the crap beaten out of them with baseball bats. WWH for hypocrisy?

National treasure to national trash

It’s amusing to watch Sir David Attenborough being clobbered from all sides now that his story of cuddly polar bears has been outed as something filmed in a zoo rather than the work of a camera team working in the frozen North, which is soon to become the thawed north when the dreaded Global Warming gets it. It’s not quite on the same scale as a TV evangelist being caught with his pants down and the pockets full of cash stolen from his disciples. But it’s a start.

Well, I never did!

If you want to know the latest piece of totally daft research, look no further than the Daily Disaster. Today’s issue reveals that if you want to booze less, you should do your drinking when there’s no loud music playing. Presumably, people get reckless when they can’t hear themselves drinking. But in the absence of a din, they get embarrassed by the horrible slurping noises and don’t drink as much. No doubt it was taxpayer’s money which funded this latest revelation.

Pointless slogans?

Back in Blighty, just missed the storms and the sun is shining for a visit by my financial advisor. While studying one of the bits of paper he was waving around, I happened to notice that the motto of ING Direct is A decent way to do banking. Which started me doing a reverse test. Would any bank describe itself as an indecent way to do banking?
    Even the Northern Rock, and the Royal Bank of Scotland under Fred the Shred, wouldn’t have admitted doing business in a financially reckless and indecent way before they collapsed. So the motto is pretty New Labour: sounds as if it might be good but fails to stand up to close scrutiny.

Mine are okay!

In case anyone is worrying about my wind-farm investment while you lot in the UK are being blown to bits by freezing gales, windmills are being blown over and even catching fire and setting fire to everything around them . . . I phoned the manager from sunny Florida, and had a look at the actual wind farm via satellite through breaks in the cloud, and everything is okay.

Common sense is out of fashion

A recession is not necessarily a national disaster. If your income stops growing, a normal person [i.e. someone who isn’t Gordon Brown] makes sure that spending doesn’t exceed income, and even cuts down to leave a bit of a margin. Governments could do the same but, unfortunately, we seem to be permanently stuck with politicians and civil servants with no grasp of simple economics and no contact with the real world.

Blow winds and rack your whatever

I’ve just been having a look at my wind farm and the manager is highly chuffed with the way things are going. When there are gales blowing, the government pays him not to send power to the National Grid to prevent an overload, so he diverts it to his pumping station for a hydro-electric storage system. Which provides carbon-free (and therefore heavily subsidized) power when the winds don’t blow. Magic!

Another silly story?

According to the papers, we’re having the mildest November in living memory and it’s warmer in Shetland than Syria. So what did I come back to yesterday? Gales. Rain. Fur-coat weather. Just how gullible do they think we are?

What does the weather have in store?

A couple of local amateur expert forecasters reckon that we’re in for a tough time starting in the middle of December. They expect 16 weeks(!) of Ice Age cold with the temperature dropping to -25 deg.C or even -30 deg.C in places! But not the places where I’ll be lurking if things get that bad.

Well, fancy that!

It’s the little things that you notice that give you most pause for thought. Like the “mission statement/motto” of the Dutch bank ING Direct for its accounts in the UK: “A decent way to do banking”. Which implies that all other banks do it an indecent way. Which, given the state of some of them, notably Lloyds Banking Group and the Royal Bank of Fred the Shred, is probably true.

It was the worst of times, all right!

Good grief. Who does our prime monster think he’s supposed to be? A cross of the worst elements of Tony B. Liar and Gordon Effin Broon? One minute, he’s trying to get us into yet another foreign war on the side of the Good ‘Ol US of A against Iran. The next, he’s promising billions of pounds, which we don’t have because Gordon Effin Broon spent us into bankruptcy, to prop up Greece and the euro. Is there a Lee Harvey Oswald in the house?

You just can’t win!

Just back from a summit conference in southern climes, where it’s a bit warmer than England after dark. Arriving back in the vicinity of the mansion, I was rather dismayed to see a big black cloud hovering over it. All around the horizon, it was blue sky, fluffy bits of white cloud and the sun shining. But a big black cloud where I live. Sometimes, you suspect the universe has got it in for you. A conclusion a guy living on my route home must have reached.
     I noticed, while waiting for traffic lights to change, that he had covered his roof in solar panels. I also noticed that they were in shade because the guy across the road had a Leylandii hedge that looked about 30-odd feet tall! So the guy with the solar panels won’t get much output from them for about 5 months of the year. But I don’t suppose the cowboy who installed the solar panels mentioned this slight problem at the time.

Rapid problem solving

Isn’t it funny how Gadaffiye’s killer offspring and their minions are dying like flies “of their injuries”? If you hear a funny noise in the background, it’s wailing and gnashing of teeth by members of the legal profession who have been done out of a round-the-world cruise through not being able to defend the scum of the Earth at the taxpayer’s expense.

Gone, or is he?

Was that Gadaffiy who was hauled out of a storm drain and blown away? Or was it one of his doubles, as for S. Hussein, A. Hitler and all the other fallen despots and sources of conspiracy theories? The Internet will be buzzing with more of them for years to come and, no doubt, a few banker are now rubbing their hands over loot which won't be claimed.

To Be, or Crushed?

An acquaintance of mine reckons a fairly reliable bent dealer has offered him a painting called “Still Life with Candlestick” by Fernand Leger, which was stolen from the Modern Art museum in Paris last year. He’s quite into early 20th century Modern Art, and he doesn’t seem bothered about buying something that was nicked, but he got very suspicious when he read in the papers that one of the thief’s accomplices destroyed the painting just before he was nicked. Which just goes to show, you can’t rely on bent art dealers to be honest with the customers, these days.

The dying art of knowing where to queue?

One of the staff reported a curious incident, which occurred in a big store the other day. He went up to the checkout in the food hall and paid for his “5 items or less”, then the young lady on the till pointed behind him and told him that, actually, that lady was before him. My staffer looked over his shoulder and saw no one. Then he realized that the cashier was pointing at a woman standing a good three yards from the till area.
    “Actually,” he said, “I did wonder about that, but then I thought that if she’s standing right over there, she can’t possibly be in a queue for your till.”
    To which neither of the women concerned had an answer.

I think, therefore I am!

Just back from a very relaxing holiday where they have no embarrassing poor people (including the staff, who are well paid). Catching up with real life in the Daily Disaster, I discovered some more fascinating things. Like you don’t need to take anabolic steroids to become hugely muscular and powerful, all you need to do is eat lots of mustard. But only if you’re a rat, I found later in the article. And right next to it was the news that having a wash is also a powerful emotional cleanser, so if you’re feeling down, have a good scrub and you’ll feel a whole lot better. Natch, there’s a down-side. Washing can also “remove the residual influence of an earlier positive experience”. So Life appears to give you a choice of being clean in the bad times and stinky when times are good!

What a con job!

A bloke who had his van stolen tracked it down to a traveller site, went to the police and was told that the coppers were too frightened to retrieve what was left of the stolen van. Which shines a penetrating light on current police tactics.
    Some PR spiv has obviously told our chief constables that if they let their police “services” appear weak, feeble and totally useless, people will stop reporting crimes because it will be a complete waste of time.
    There will be some adverse publicity at first but, eventually, the apparent crime rate will drop and the Chief Cons will be able to say, “Look what big things we’re achieving despite the cuts.” [The cuts that haven’t happened yet, that is] And demand lots more dosh to get the crime rate down to zero.
    Will anyone fall for this shabby trick? The Coalition probably will.

All that money, not much delivery.

You have to wonder about NASA. They have all these tracking stations around the world, they get billions of dollars from the US taxpayer, but when it came to working out where the obsolete Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite would enter the atmosphere and (mainly) burn up, they didn’t have a clue. About all they were sure about was that it wouldn’t land on the good old US of A because God’s Country wasn’t under the track of the satellite.
    In fact, the only way they knew that the UARS fell into the sea (probably) was that no one tried to sue them for being hit by debris. Not that there weren’t a lot of people trying to help them out. Including all the people who claimed they’d seen bits of satellite landing in areas which weren’t under its flight path!

Yeah, right!

One of the staff showed me an interesting story in the Daily Disaster yesterday. A couple of clowns were putting forward the proposition that Gordon Brown might just be the man to save the world from financial ruin. This is at a time when Eddie "He's Talking" Balls is claiming that HE was in charge of the economy when the Broon Beastie was the Chancellor and he was expert at bamboozling Gordon into doing what he wanted. So if Broon blundering at Balls' direction destroyed the British economy, could Broon blundering on his own unaided save the world? Never in a zillion years!

Planet Conference

They might be called Trivial Democraps but you kind of wonder how long the Tory back-benchers are going to stand for them slagging off the party that gave them a taste of power and blaming everything bad on the Tories and pretending they deserve the credit for anything good that happens. Can’t wait for the Tory conference to see how much reciprocity slips past good old Dave’s storm troopers!

Shot in the foot!

Well, you have to laugh. The banks have been moaning about having to separate their casino gambling division from the dosh belonging to sensible customers and telling everyone it’s totally unnecessary. Then some clown of a rogue trader sinks a Swiss bank with a £1,300,000,000 loss because he was able to beat their system and go crazy. Which leaves banks everywhere looking stupid. What a pity. Still, I didn’t have any cash in UBS, so what am I worried about?

Yeah, I’d pay to see that in 2012!

Hold the phone! The staff have come up with a new Olympic sport. During today’s gales, they’ve been hauling empty wheely bins to the top of a low hill and seeing how far the gusts take them. The world record at the moment is far enough into the lower lake to need a boat to rescue it.

Give the blighter a chance!

Why is it bad for Mayor Boris that he was in a camper van in the Rockies when riots broke out in London? Is he supposed to be psychic, or something? And what about the staff, whose job it is to know what’s happening on the ground because London’s mayor doesn’t have the time to hang around on street corners and wobble through all the social networking wastes of time?

Oh, dear!

Some of our local urban terrorists have come up with a good way to embarrass the council. They’ve posted an on-line map of potholes, and highlighted the fact that there are suspiciously few on the streets where councillors and overpaid council officials live.

No hiding place? Joke!

Where is the Gadaffy person hiding? Is he in a tunnel, or a sewer, or even in one of the irrigation pipes which bring water millions of miles from deep under the Sahara? That’s one of the advantages of being a dictator for as long as 42 years – you get the chance to put infrastructure in place to make it nigh on impossible for anyone to find you when the regime eventually goes tits up.

Keep the plebs in their place

Further to the last posting, another of the staff went hospital visiting in Stockport and was quite pleased to see a “Magic Bus” at the hospital stop – right up to the moment when he realized the driver was sitting on the back seat, not polluting his bus with customers until he was ready to get moving again. So there they were – half a dozen people eager to give Stagecoach money but kept hanging around beside the bus on a freezing cold, windy day. Hell of a nice way to run a business.

Tell us another!

One of the staff reported a new message on the electronic sign at our local station. It warns passengers that train doors might close 30 seconds before the advertised departure time. But what it doesn’t go on to mention is that most trains are just leaving the previous station at about this time.

Why would anyone bother?

You kind of suspect that someone throwing paint at vice president Clegg (“Not a big deal”, to quote the man himself) had to be a put-up job. After all, he’s such a colourless non-entity of a millionaire politician that it’s hard to imagine anyone getting worked up about him.

What a wonderful story!

My mind was still boggling over the electrician who was working in shorts when a high-pressure hose shot up his bum and nearly inflated him to death. What!!! Then one of the staff showed me the Littlejohn column in today’s Daily Disaster, which added a whole new dimension to the incredulity. As Mr. L. is fond of saying, you just couldn’t make it up.

It’s All Happening!

Just back from a quick Victory package holiday trip to Libya. The loot includes a genuine Gaddaffiy Xmas tree officer’s hat, 2 gold-plated plastic ducks and the top part of a gold-plated bath tap, a piece of fabric from one of the Great Leader’s personal tents and a bottle of water (now empty) with a bullet in it. The bullet fell from the sky after someone shot it off in celebration with enough force to penetrate the plastic bottle, which was lying on its side on a bench about two feet away from me . . .

Vintage? Fairly.

Happened to catch an episode of the WWF Vintage Collection last night, and I was surprised that the modern WW$ lets it go out. Mainly because the programme highlights just how boring non-entities the “superstars” have become. There used to be real characters in funny outfits in the good old days. Not any more. And shoving in a Cena/Jericho match from 2005 at the end was a swindle. That wasn’t vintage by a long chalk.

Brain in neutral?

“To respond to mob violence with mob justice is a terrible irony.” Is that another way of saying: “What goes around comes around”? Or, as it was in theGuardian, does it mean: “Society is to blame, free the Tottenham 297”?

Pots & Kettles

How amusing to see the usual suspects waxing lyrical about an “orchestrated cover-up” of the News of the Screws’ phone-hacking. What a pity they couldn’t manage to get so indignant about Tony B. Liar’s orchestrated cover-up of how he forced Britain into George W. Bush’s illegal war with Iraq on the basis of manufactured evidence. But that’s leftie democracy for you.

Pull the other one

So the Prime Monster is going to get tough with rioters and scumbags? We might believe him if he didn’t look like he’s built for bluster and then backing down if he’s challenged by both the scumbags and the left-wing establishment, which destroyed Britain’s moral fibre and seems intent on carrying on that process. And Eddie Baby Milibandit looks like he’d burst into tears if a rioter told him to F-off, so let’s not expect too much that’s useful from the Labour lot.

Play nice, boys!

It really is a hoot, watching Britain’s top coppers lining up to slag off Mr. Bill Bratton for being American rather than British and knowing about tackling gangs because he has a history of doing it in the good ’ol USA. I used to think that Mr. Orde was quite a reasonable copper, but it’s rather unnerving to see someone who had the IRA on his agenda turning all hissy. And just imagine how hissy the ACPO mob will get when someone mentions that Mr. Bratton has been advising British police “services” for the last 5 years!

Who’s to blame? If anyone . . .

The twits on *witter and the faceless criminals (and the faceful, shameless ones) on *acebook are to blame for the riots – it’s official. And it’s definitely not the Labour party, which gave us the ineffectual, morally cowardly police “service” we have today. Well, I’m glad that’s all sorted out.

A society that works!

Ken Livingstone, Horrid Harperson, Redward Milibandit and all the other Labour luvvies must be enjoying a warm glow right now as they watch their multicultural society in action. Or is that warm glow just a result of some rioter setting fire to their house/flat/grace&favour? Oh, well. What goes around comes around, innit?

A world gone mad?

You really have to wonder what’s going on when scum as far afield as Liverpool and Bristol start rioting and looting and arsoning to show solidarity with the notion that drug dealers in London have an absolute right to bear arms.

It’s all a matter of . . . what?

Calamity Clegg, our deputy prime monster, seems to have the hump about opportunistic violence. So does that mean he’s all in favour of something more organized? And what about all the Labour opportunists blaming riots all over London on “The Cuts” rather than their own party, which left the country bankrupt? Will you be preaching at them, too, Cleggie?

Alibi for everyone?

After a well-known local gangster was killed in a gunfight with the police, the “people of Tottenham” indulged in an orgy of rioting, arson and looting because “they don’t think the police are on their side”. If that is a valid excuse after what New Labour did to the police “service”, we can expect so see the whole country go up in flames!

Give us our year back!

There was an interesting piece in yesterday’s Daily Disaster. Someone had found a special edition celebrating the arrival of the 20th century. And I quote: “The special edition, price 6d, is dated December 31, 1900 – the world celebrated the dawn of the 20th century on the eve of 1901, rather than a year earlier. December 31, 1999, was the first time the convention changed.”

What the Daily Mail is really telling us is that the end of the 20th century was the first time we’d been landed with politicians like Tony Blair, who are to pig-thick to know that there are 100 years in a century, not 99.

Same book, different version

The reason I re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps is that I was missing one of the 5 Richard Hannay stories and I was able to buy all of them in a single-volume Wordsworth edition for £2, which is what it would have cost to buy just The Three Hostages on its own.

I was so surprised at how little I remembered of the ‘real’ 39 Steps story that I compared the complete version with the single-story version and found out something interesting. In the single story edition, the bad guy at the end talks about “der Boot”. But it’s “das Boot” in the Wordsworth edition; and anyone who watched the submarine series on TV knows that’s the right grammar. Which leaves me wondering where J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. got their wrong version of the text, and why there was a wrong version of the book floating about in the first place.

p.s. There’s also a chunk of text missing from Greenmantle in the Wordsworth 5-volume book but it’s there in the Wordsworth single-story book. How did they manage that?

A good question? Not really.

“Who does J.K. Rowling think she is?” the new Radio Times asks. Well, she probably thinks she’s a highly successful children’s author, whose name the RT will use shamelessly in a bid to be noticed.

Heads, he loses

His party seems to be disappointed because giving the Milibandit a nose job didn’t fix his voice and make him sound dynamic. But they don’t seem to have spotted the down-side, namely that the clearer his speech becomes, the sooner people will realize he’s spouting total tosh and the quicker they’ll begin scoffing.

Hollywood Fraud

I’ve just finished re-reading The Thirty-Nine Steps and it was a real revelation. My mind has been so thoroughly polluted by the film that Mr. Buchan’s real story unfolded in completely unexpected directions, even though it can’t be more than a couple of years since I last did this slim volume. Not a bad thing from the entertainment point of view, but they really should have called the film something else because it’s so little like the story in the book.

Isn’t the Libyan NHS brilliant!

Abbie M’Grahi, the Lockerbie Bomber, was sent home with cancer and 3 months to live by a New Labour government eager to do a trade deal with Pres. Gaddaffiy. Two years later, he’s still alive, making TV appearances and embarrassing the British politicians who let him go. Miraculous, or what!

Thanks a bunch, Dave!

Our new all-singing, all-dancing, not-new-labor prime monster thought it would be a brilliant wheeze to do a national happiness survey to find out what people want. The results are now back and, surprise! What makes the British people happy is having good health, good family and other relationships, a decent job, a decent local environment and good education for their offspring. And what makes the British people unhappy is a posturing prime monster blowing TWO MILLION QUID of their money on such a waste-of-time survey.

It’s all go today!

What a day of racing! A British winner of the German GP – Lewis Hamilton – and a British winner of the last stage of the Tour de France – Manx Mark Cavendish – who is also the first Brit to win the Green Jersey competition. And Cadel Evans became the first Aussie to win the Tour itself. There’s a chance of a British win if the Scottish Dario Franchitti can do the business on the airport circuit at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. But it will take a major miracle to get a British win in the MotoGP event at Laguna Seca in California at the end of the day.

Just sour grapes?

theGuardian was full of itself when it was publishing diplomatic material hacked by Mr. WikiLeaks. So why the faux high moral tone about phone-hacking by the News of the Screws? Sounds like theGroaner has the hump because it didn’t think of it first.

Time to be daring

It seems clear that all of the candidates to be the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police are tainted by the stain of Blairist political correctitude and in hock to the Murdoch organization like Labour (including the blessed Redward Milipede) and the Tories. So the only solution would appear to make it an honorary post and award it to someone the people can trust. My nomination would be Prince Charles.

Odd goings on in France

Is it just me or are there more crashes in the Tour de France this year and more severe ones? Some of them are down to rank bad discipline on the part of the organizers. There is no excuse for motorbikes and TV cars crashing riders off the road. But apart from the odd dozy spectator, what’s causing the rest? Could it be something to do with Global Warming?

Still in the swamp

Isn’t it cheering to see every politician whose sleazy behaviour and abuse of office was exposed by any of the newspapers queueing up to get the press regulated so that they can get away with it in future. And how fitting that much of the pontificating is going on in the House of Commons, where systematic and organized theft from the taxpayer was allowed to go on for years, and still continues to a somewhat lesser extent even now.

Moral Swampland

Gordon Broon is a fine one to chunner on about people consorting with known criminals. How many Labour MPs were sacked and sent to gaol for stealing from the taxpayer? And how many of these known criminals got away with it? And what about Gordon’s cheerleading for an illegal war started on the basis of manufactured evidence by the New Labour government he was part of? Yep, you’re a fine one to talk about known criminals, Gordon.

A rather peculiar revenge

How odd that the people taking the biggest pops at the defunct NotW are the ones whose bizarre and disgusting lives were exposed by the News of the Screws. Or are they so desperate to be noticed that they don’t care that the other papers will take the chance to rake over the muck one more time in the name of providing context for the sordid celebs’ rants?

The First & the Last

Just back from watching the last ever space shuttle launch. Having seen the first one by accident 30 years ago – they were a couple of days late with the launch and fell into my window of opportunity – I thought it would be a good idea to do the last one by design.

No. 135 wasn’t as impressive as No. 1, which had a white-painted external fuel tank instead of a nasty old “rusty after being left out in the rain for a couple of years” finish. The first 3 launches looked like proper spaceships instead of refugees from a scrapyard.

Pass the hypocrisy pills, Mary!

The Labour party cosied up to the banks and they went crazy with their customers’ money. The Labour party cosied up to the Murdoch organization and the News of the Screws hacked into every voicemail account available. Now, we get Labour’s war criminals, guys who lied to the country to start an illegal war, pontificating about how they have the answer to it all, and look at me, I got away with it, by the way. Will the same standards be applied to the criminals at the News of the World? Joke!

What nice people!

What is it about cycling that brings out the worst in those involved? You get contestants guzzling drugs supplied by the team pusher and getting themselves overloaded with red blood cells, and officials distorting the results with wilfully perverse rulings that lack a leg to stand on. And they dare to call this a sport!

Mug me, please!

I was innocently reading my Sunday Telegraph yesterday when I came across a brilliant offer. Renewable Energy Bonds paying an A.E.R. of 8%! Wow! Then I read the small print. Woe!

The bonds can’t be traded and they can’t be redeemed for at least 4 years. Worse, the company offers no guarantee that it will ever pay any interest. Even worse, the company doesn’t even have to give you your money back. And they call it an “ethical investment”.

Just common sense, really

It would appear that the government took steps to stop the anti-nuclear lobby from turning the disaster at the power station in earthquake-prone Japan into silly scare stories aimed at the British nuclear programme (such as it is). Sounds like good government to me; something which has become fairly unknown after 13 years of Bliar & Broon.

That’s it out of the way?

I got rained on again today, so that’s the summer heatwave over. And is it remotely reasonable for anyone to be excited just because Gravesend got to 90 deg.F? I don’t think so.

Come on, Tim!

There’s a picture of Andy Murray, the Scottish tennis player, on the back page of the Daily Disaster today and he’s got his gob shut!!! What was it? Superglue? Staples? Stitches?

Big talk, big smokescreen

The NATO commanders who say they’re trying to kill Gaddaffiy are being rather disingenuous. They have no idea where the old Libyan terrorist is hiding so they’re shooting off missiles at where they think he might be. So it’s more hoping to take him out rather than actually trying.

Is there no end to it?

Loads of Olympics tickets went to foreigners from Europe, instead of the British people who are paying for the whole racket, and it will cost £750 million to cancel Edinburgh’s disastrous tram system but “only” £700 million to finish it. Clearly, the people who learnt project management under New Labour and financial management under Gordon Brown still haven’t been sacked.

Pull the other one

Britain is gearing up for a 90 degree heat-wave this weekend, according to the Daily Express. But they got the forecast from the same Met Office that forecast a Barbeque Summer, which never arrived, and predicted the winter just gone would be mild. Which explains why I’d just been rained on when I saw the front page of the Daily Express and I’m not planning to go anywhere without an anorak.

Nice one!

Nice to see that Bulgarians have a sense of humour as well as a talent for making extremely drinkable white wine. Whoever it was who repainted the figures of one of the Soviet era monuments to oppression as super-heroes has done the world a favour, even if it got up the noses of the Russians, who have yet to admit that their brand of communism was just as poisonous as anything exported by Mr. Hitler. And who gave us the umbrella assassin? Oh, yes, it was the Bulgarian KGB, inspired by their mentors in Moscow.

Tell ’em anythink!

I had a travel agent trying to tell me that the price of cruises during the 2012 Olympics has gone up by 30% already and it could go up a lot more as the dreadful day of the opening ceremony approaches. Which left me wondering how one of his rivals could offer me a 15% reduction on a cruise deal as a staff outing. I guess it’s like most things now, like double glazing; the price is how much you can get for what you’re selling.

More equal than others

Funny how “equality” for the sexes always goes one way, especially when it comes to the state pension age. Men retiring at 65 and women retiring at 60 used to be “fair”. But everyone retiring at the same age isn’t repairing an injustice against men, it’s a crime against women.

Reputations

Strange how they work. K. “Fattie” Clarke has a rep as a sound Chancellor, who created a flourishing British economy, which Gordon Broon trashed. And yet he’s also to blame for stopping the French from wrecking the euro in 1993. Broon, on the other hand, is the man who pissed Britain’s wealth up the wall and left nothing to show for it, and maxed out the national credit card to fund his reckless spending spree. And yet he stopped Tony B. Liar from taking Britain into the eurogroup. Proving that there can be a boil on the most perfect bottom and a sweet-smelling flower growing in the most noxious swamp.

You couldn’t make it up

Apparently, people who wish to protest about Mr. DinnerJacket ‘winning’ rigged a presidential election in Iran a couple of years ago have come up with a brilliant scheme for showing their disapproval. Instead of marching along roads and getting in everyone’s way, while making themselves an easy target for thuggish security forces, they just flock to the nearest big city and wander around on the pavements.

The illegitimate regime and its riot police can see that there are lots more people in town than there should be, but they have no way of telling who belongs there and who’s a protester. And it drives them NUTS!

What a letdown

I always thought the Indy car series was a proper sporting event, like Formula 1 pretends to be when it’s not doing favours for Ferrari. But that fiasco at the Texas Speedway this Sunday just gone has opened my eyes. Franchitti won the first race but there was a DRAW for grid positions in the 2nd race. As a result, Power, one of the top “championship” contenders, started at the front of the grid and Franchitti was shoved to the back.

As a result, Power notched up his first ‘win’ on an oval track, because his main rival started at the back, and he’s way out front in the points standing. So it would appear that the Indy Car series is just like American TV wrestling: “sports entertainment” not the real thing. What a let-down.

p.s. Congratulations to Jenson Button on beating the unbeatable Vettel in soggy Canada.

Wet ain’t always bad

Nothing like a few puddles to shake things up; as in today’s MotoGP race at Soggy Silverstone, which is half-way between Birmingham and London, according to the map I looked it up on, so no wonder it was raining if I was being rained on, too!

Lap 9 was the one which changed everything. First, the championship leader, Mr. Lorenzo, went flying through the air when his bike stood on its nose and went everywhere. Then the man they love to hate, Mr. Simoncelli, who is all elbows and not much brain at this stage of his career, hit a huge puddle and slid for MILES!

So that was Mr. Stoner 1-all in DNFs with Lorenzo and out in front in the championship, and poor old Colin Edwards, broken collar bone and ribs all busted up, inherited 3rd place and a chance to be on the podium as his reward for not giving up. What a wonderful day.

Bloody Hell! What a carry on

I tried to comment on a news story on a website yesterday but the censor wouldn’t let me add my contribution because there was a rude word in my attempted posting. But where, you dozy bastard censor??!! After much reading and re-reading, I eventually realized that the censor was choking on my use of “constitutes” Why? Because it’s got TIT in it. Well, effin ell! Just as well the discussion was about the attorney general’s decision to go along with the Bliar regime’s cover-up and not have an inquest on Dr. Kelly, the Iraq weapons expert. Imagine the frustration if the topic for discussion had been Arsenal FC. Or Scunthorpe!

Of course, equality is unfair!

Women live longer than men and they retire 5 years earlier than men, from the point of view of the state pension. Have men been up in arms about this? Not at all loudly. Has the Equality Mob at the European Union been threatening sanctions to governments which discriminate against men? That's a joke. But as soon as our government starts doing something about the pension system being unfair to men, it's "an assault on women", according to Labour wimmin like Mrs. Balls. Who don't feel obliged to declare a vested interest.

Against the evidence

We keep hearing dire stories of the world going into meltdown due to Global Warming – so why is it so bloody cold right now? After all, it’s supposed to be Flaming June. And another thing; the papers have started going on about hosepipe bans. But it’s raining every day around here and my estate manager reports that all lakes and ponds are filled up to full capacity. So could we maybe invest in another gang of experts? Some who can get things right once in a while?

Self-interest to the last, or what!

Congrats to Andrew Pierce of the Daily Disaster for revealing that the last question asked in the House of Lords by the newly gaoled Lord Taylor was: “What plans has the government to give prisoners the vote?” No doubt he was hoping to extend the voting privilege to gaoled MPs and Lords to allow them to contribute to democracy and to continue to be eligible to claim a virtual attendance allowance even though banged up at Her Majesty’s Displeasure.

Pointless posturing

The Yanks announce that they’re going to treat cyber attacks on their country as the equivalent of conventional warfare and start shooting when someone tries it. Then the news comes out of a huge Chinese assault on Google and Yahoo email accounts held by US and South Korean govt. workers. Are the Agents of Evil in the Orient now living in fear and trembling? Sure, they are!

Rotten to the core and beyond

The general roar of silence when the English FA proposed a postponement of the FIFA leadership election says it all. Looks like a total boycott of their sponsors’ products would be a good idea. So that’s nothing at the mansion from, bought with or using Coca Cola, Adidas, Emirates Airlines, Castrol, McDonald’s, Sony, Hyundai, Budweiser, et al. No doubt FIFA will continue on its usual rotten way, but its sponsors won’t be getting any encouragement from me and mine.

It’s not just here, it’s EVERYWHERE!

Judges here are always proving they don’t get it. But the same seems to be true in Serbia. Ratko Bagitch’s solicitor seems to think it’s a brilliant delaying tactic to put his appeal in the post, but if it’s not before the court, it doesn’t exist and there’s no reason for the Serbs’ legal system to hold up his despatch to The Hague for trial. But, of course, the tactic is working because the judges fell for it.

And another thing; if the guy is too weak and feeble to travel to the Netherlands, why not just dispense with the trial and go straight to the firing squad? It will save a whole HEAP of money.

If there was ever a day for a cull of judges . . .

. . . it has to be the day after the Court of Appeal let a burglar out of gaol because being there breached his ’uman right to enjoy the company of his family at the expense of the ’uman rights of the people he steals from.

Tit for Twat

So the Serbian government has finally handed over the war criminal Ratko Bagitch after sheltering him for 16 years, and it expects a reward. How about leaving that terrorist nation’s application to sponge on the western part of the European Union in the mailbox for 16 years before even looking at it?

Whoops! Missed slightly

If Americans didn’t exist, you’d have to invent them. Like the character who worked out, from adding up numbers in the Bible, that the world would end at 6 p.m. last Saturday. And got lots of fellow Americans to waste millions of lovely dollars on donations to his organization. Retired civil engineer Harold Camping did it once before, in 1994, he did it again this month and he’s going to do it again in October because, apparently, he got his sums wrong and the end of the world will start on Trafalgar Day. Or not.

Welcome to the Silly Season

The worst things happening in the world are British judges getting upset because people beyond their jurisdiction are ignoring them, police forces are telling us they have no money then blowing tens of thousands of pounds on tiger hunts with soft toys as the prey, the BBC is still making up stories about Mrs. Thatcher, like she told people to get on their bike and go and look for work when it was Norman Tebbit who said that was what his old dad did (with an implied invitation to go ye and do likewise), and Pres. O’Bama is pretending he’s Irish.

Fate Worse Than Death?

“GP rapped for talking about God with a patient” You see a headline like that and start thinking; “Cruel & Unusual Punishment, or what!” And it leaves me wondering for how long the General Medical Council had the poor sod chained to a wall, being bombarded with rap music.

Too big for their boots

Judges are stereotyped as doddering, old and out of touch with the real world. This view is reinforced by their delusion that they can redact Twitter, which is in San Francisco and not subject to British law, and abolish Parliamentary Privilege to stop MPs and Lords blowing the whistle on super-injunctions, and also abolish reporting what’s said in Parliament.

Attack of the crazy wimmin (and their stooges)

It was like pretending that giving someone a Chinese burn is the same as stabbing someone with a bloody big knife. Yes, they’re both assault but one is “common” and the other is “with a deadly weapon”, and the courts dish out a different (but generally inadequate) sentence for both. So when the Labour party’s mongrels started trying to chew Justice Minister K. Clarke’s Hush Puppies for saying everything labelled rape isn’t the same, the whole concept of justice was devalued by their petty party politics and political correctness. And if anyone needs to make an apology, it’s the Milibandits for being so full of humbug and out of contact with the real world.

How useless can you get!

I never saw the last 2 episodes of Stargate SG-1, Season 10, because Sky tried to mug Virgin Media about 4 years ago and was told to get lost. So I watched episode 19 on Sky Two on Monday and episode 20 last night. Then the announcer said they were going go right back to the very start of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Next thing you know, the TV was going “previously on ST: DS9 . . .” and the audience was going, “How the hell can there be a previously for the first ever episode of a brand new series?”

Well, quite easily if those idiots at Sky start off with part 2 of a 2-part pilot.

Which is something to remember next time Sky pretends to offer a quality TV service. But, I suppose, if Sky is going to be crap, it might as well make a proper job of it.

Security scenario

They were commenting on TV on the number of cops and crash barriers on Dublin’s main street for the Queen’s visit, and the lack of people. But given that the Irish Republic contains as many guns and bombs as Chechnya, and terrorists get a fairly universal blind eye, it’s no wonder Her Maj was kept well away from the natives. Especially as the Irish are broke and dependent on the not quite as broke British taxpayer for handouts.

Not even one bean, never mind a hill!

Lib-Dem millionaire & govt. minister C. Huhne is denying he put his points on someone else’s licence to avoid a driving ban. But all the Labour MPs in gaol for expenses fraud, who have probably had early release on some pretext by now, assured us that they had done nothing wrong. So how much is a politician’s word worth these days?

When do I get to use the bloody thing?

The thing I’ve noticed about the new notebook (not laptop because you can’t put it on your lap because that blocks the ventilation holes on the lower surface and sets fire to your lap) is that it’s forever downloading updates. So I’ve found the best thing to do with it is plug it in half an hour before I want to use it, switch it on and leave it to its own devices until it stops messing about.

Simply Not British

Do we really need some woman warbling the National Anthem at us just before the Cup Final? Do we really need other English football matches played on the holiest of holy days? It’s time to slap some heads at the FA and the Football League, and keep on slapping them until the bozos in charge of English football get some sense knocked into them.

Well, that’s something that doesn’t happen very often!

Fancy that, a rogue regime chickening out of a chance to assert itself with more barbarity. The Iranians have “postponed” the planned blinding of a criminal by dripping conc. sulphuric acid into his eyes. And having seen what the criminal did to the woman whom he showered with acid, one can feel only that he deserved some reciprocity and the Iranians’ chicken-heartedness is to be condemned.

Someone grown a set at last?

The Sentencing Council, strangely, has decided that burglars should go to gaol instead of being left at large in the community to commit more crimes. Even more incredible is the fact that the council is mainly populated by judges, who are notorious for being dotty, old and completely out of touch with real life. Has someone killed all the New Labour judges and replaced them with clones programmed to protect the public? If so, a knighthood is in order!

Don’t you just hate . . .

. . . free software that doesn’t work? I tried to install the Acrobat Reader version 10 on the new laptop, but when I tried to run the installer, it kept telling me some other program was trying to install, which wasn’t true, and I never did get it to work. What are those useless sods at Adobe doing, wasting my time like this?

Was it all worth it?

The most noteworthy things to come out of the elections are:
1. Scotland has an AV system which was built to make sure that no single party can ever gain a majority, and yet the Nats beat the system.
2. Northern Ireland has an AV system which takes 10x longer than anywhere else to do the count, presumably costs 10x more to get the job done but fails to deliver representatives who are 10x better than those elected elsewhere.
3. The British public actually saw through the AV con job and didn’t buy it.

Things I nearly bought today (but didn’t)

I almost bought a copy of the latest WordPerfect for the new notebook (not laptop as you can’t use it on your lap without setting fire to yourself).. Then my “Irwin sense” kicked in and I did some price comparison. And found that an American would pay fewer dollars (currently 1.6 to the pound sterling) than I would pay pounds sterling for the same piece of plastic. So I decided to recycle an old copy of WordPerf from a retired computer and raise two phantom fingers to that bunch of rip-off merchants Corel, who think British customers should pay 80% more than their American buyers for the same product. And you can’t dismiss that much of a difference by blaming it on the VAT.

Are we supposed to be psychic, or what?

I’ve just taken delivery of a new laptop and, in the absence of Irwin, the resident expert, I followed the instructions and got it going. It was only when I’d gone through all the set-up procedure and found the instructions for using the laptop on the desktop that I learnt that you’re supposed to charge the battery fully before you use the computer to avoid damaging it. So I went back and re-read all the English sections of the booklets and leaflets in the box, and there’s not a mention of that anywhere. So how are you supposed to know?

Like as if

So Bin Laden holed up in a fortified camp 30 miles from Islamabad and on the doorstep of Pakistan’s main military college, and the government and its “Intelligence” services suspected nothing? That’s the distance from the centre of London of Aldershot, Chelmsford, Gillingham, Horsham, Luton, Maidstone, Southend on Sea, Stansted or Tunbridge Wells.

I know our security services can be pretty crap at times but can you imagine Mr. Laden getting his modern castle past the jobsworth ’elf ‘n’ nazis of some Home Counties local council’s planners? And surviving assaults by the gang which harasses people who don’t have a TV licence?

What a load of rubbish Windows 7 is!

I did a reboot of my computer yesterday and found I’d lost my internet connection. Trying to diagnose the problem using the alleged software tools provide was a complete waste of time. So I tried another reboot. But Windows 7 failed to restart and went into a long diagnosis process, which got nowhere. Then it offered me a number of options, including seeking on-line help, which would have been difficult without an internet connection.

So I ignored all this, switched the computer off and restarted it. It booted up okay, and it seemed to be working – apart from no internet connection. Then one of the staff mentioned that the cable TV wasn’t working. Which explained my lack of broadband. But didn’t explain why Windows 7 fell over and started thrashing about aimlessly and helplessly.

When I mentioned it to Irwin, he just pulled a face and muttered something about effing bloatware. So I’ve decided not to bother asking MicroSoft what went wrong as they probably don’t know.

Not so clever after all

We have one disappointed IT guy at the mansion. Irwin buys a lot of stuff on-line from Misco.co.uk and he saw a good deal on a laptop on Thursday. When he checked the delivery dates, he saw Saturday, today, was still on offer despite the world shutting down for the royal weeding yesterday, so he ordered one and told everyone that Misco is a really together company, which can slot things in to windows of opportunity.

The website guaranteed delivery between 7:30 and 12:00 on Saturday. So Irwin got up early to be ready for a delivery lorry sneaking up the drive at 7:31. Did he get his laptop? Is Misco a together company which has a jump on the rest of the on-line businesses . . ? No. It’s just another gang of optimists with a website which writes cheques that the company can’t cash.

p.s. The best royal weeding souvenir? Got to be the Chinese-manufactured mugs with a picture of Prince Harry on them, and he’s labelled “Will” rather than “Wills”. If you’re going to get it wrong, do a proper job of it!

Calm down, you poseur!

“Calm down, dear!” should be deployed whenever attention-seekers get into a paddy [Whoops! Irish racialist remark? Surely not!] about some imagined crime against political correctness. It should be applied loudly and with maximum patronizing effect to max out the target’s embarrassment. And if applied often enough, it might even make the Balls person explode from synthetic rage and do the world a favour.

p.s. No surprise to hear that the Eagle woman reckons she’s been patronized “by better people than the prime minister”. She has the sort of self-righteous air of entitlement which positively demands it!

Back At You, Buster

Huhne, the Lib-Dem millionaire in charge of windmills, seems to think that if a politician says something which another politician thinks is a lie, then the perpetrator can be hauled into court. But he doesn’t seem to have grasped that, if there is a law which makes it illegal for a politician to tell lies, he could end up in court himself on a permanent basis. Which would probably be quite good for the country, having him inactive in court, as politicians always bog things up when they start trying to do things.

Further poor-quality Opposition

The country’s hopes that Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition isn’t a complete bunch of tossers, as successive sets of Tories have been, have been crushed. All that Bully Balls can manage to moan about is the Prime Monster’s plea for the Labour loonies to “calm down” in imitation of the Michael Winner insurance adverts. But given that Balls was a partner-in-crime of G. Broon when he was crippling the British economy and spending all of our reserves, it’s unlikely he’ll ever have anything worthwhile to contribute to Britain’s success.

Wot Next?

The latest demand from the multiculturalists is that people who can’t read English should be allowed to serve on juries. And if they get that, no doubt the wreckers will be ranting about the need to get people who can’t speak English (at all, as opposed to natives doing it very badly) onto juries. Because judging a person’s fitness for a job is discrimination. And if we adopted a sensible attitude to that, all the multiculturalists would be cut off from the public purse.

It’s obvious, really

Why haven’t Blair & Brown been invited to the Royal Weeding, to the fury of Usual Suspects? Well, Blair would have tried to take it over and make the day all about him so he can sell himself some more. And Brown would just have glowered at everyone and been an enormous wet blanket. And Blair would probably have sent the Queen a bill for his time.

Desperation Move

Failed prime monster G. Broon has been reduced to taking an advisory job with the World Economic Forum. The man who caused the last financial crisis thinks he’s the right bloke to head off the next one. The job is unpaid, which shows just how much the WEF thinks of Gordo’s talents. But he does get a staffing allowance of £750,000, so maybe he can sneak himself a job on the side as the tea boy.

The mind is still boggling!

Judge Eady has issued an injunction covering the whole world, and lasting to the end of time(!), about the bad behaviour of a TV “celeb”. Which has to be the ultimate ego trip and a total waste of the taxpayers’ cash spent on the court time. After all, why would any other country take any notice of him?

And what was it that stopped him from injuncting our entire galaxy or even the whole universe? Maybe a niggling fear that people might think he’s dotty and old?

What’s wrong with the police? It’s everywhere!

The Florida police busted a 16-year-old kid, who robbed and killed 2 British tourists who ended up in the bad part of town. Then they let the kid go because it was his first offence! So how many people do you have to kill in Florida to trump a first offence?

The Mind Boggles

Just when you were thinking politics is a yawn, along comes the resignation of the leader of Liverpool’s Liberals in a cloud of election fraud allegations. He says he witnessed his son signing up to be a candidate for next month’s council elections. The son says he never wanted to be a councillor, he wants to be in the RAF instead and the signature on Exhibit A is someone else’s.

All of which conjures up a vision of the Liberals getting a stooge elected, the stooge calling the Leader “Dad” and the Libs hoping no one realizes he’s an imposter.

They say Liverpool is a very weird place. Looks like “They” got it exactly right!

The Death of SF

There has fallen into my clutches a copy of “The New SF”, which is described as an anthology of “modern speculative fiction” from 1969. And it’s just crap. The “fiction” is just words thrown onto the page and not very interesting sets of words at that. The “authors” make little or no attempt to tell a story. They just expect the reader to fall over in amazement at their cleverness. No wonder all the British SF mags, like New Worlds, died off at this time.

How did they get away with it?

What went wrong with science fiction in the 1960s? I’ve just been looking at “The New SF”, an anthology of “modern speculative fiction” from 1969, and a bigger load of tosh you would be hard put to find!

The “fiction” is just words thrown at the page, and not very interesting sets of words. No attempt is made to tell a story, presumably because that would be “old-fashioned”. No wonder all the British SF mags like New Worlds died off at this time.

It’s only our money

You might have been wondering why the police force costs so much. Well, take the case of the sentry, who shot two officers (allegedly, one fatally) on HMS Astute at Southampton. The perp was detained at the crime scene in possession of the murder weapon. To sew up the case, all the police need are 3 or 4 eye witnesses and some forensics, mainly ballistic. Two days’ work tops for the whole deal.

But what are the Southampton police planning to do? Question scores of people, which will take weeks or even months, to “build a case”. And by the time the Can’t Prosecute Service and the lawyers have finished faffing about, a couple of years will have drifted by before there’s any danger of a trial. And they say the British justice system is the envy of the world. Only by people who make money out of what passes for justice.

Tripe, Dave, and you know it, you grovelling bastard!

Britain ain’t responsible for “many of the world's problems”. Britain might have exploited colonies in the past but they’ve had more than enough time — 60-odd years in the case of India & Pakistan — and more than enough British taxpayers’ cash to put everything in good order. And if our former colonies are a mess today, that’s down to the thieves and bunglers running them. Britain’s not to blame and Dave deserves a big slap for talking down his country when he gets back from junketing abroad, trying to buy friends with our money.

They were probably skiving at the time!

MPs who voted them through Parliament are now playing the outrage card over arms sales to foreign tyrants. But, I guess, hypocrisy is the common currency among the Pals of Westmonster. And if we hadn’t sold those weapons to the tyrants, our neighbours would have So better that the British taxpayer got the benefit,

WTF??!!

I got these unhelpful messages when I clicked on a Google pop-up:

“This Help Centre is not currently available in your language. However, you can select another language from the "Change Language" drop-down menu at the bottom of the page or download Google Toolbar, which can instantly translate websites in 42 languages.”

And:

“The information you've requested isn't currently available in your language, but you can select from the list below to view this help topic in another language or download Google Toolbar, which can instantly translate websites in 42 languages.”

Does this mean Google has sold its website maintenance contract to Indians or a Chinese outfit and English is no longer a permitted language?

That Cameron isn’t very good at PMQs

When the wrong Milipede asked him if police front-line services will be cut, yes or no, Cameroony should have said:

“That all depends on the Chief Constables appointed under New Labour. If they cut responsibly, then the answer is no. But if they behave like Manchester, and other Labour councils, and start their cuts at the front line to play politics with their customers, then the answer is yes. And would the Leader of the Opposition like me to remind the House that it was the Labour party which spent all the nation’s money and maxed out the national credit card?”

Clarification Needed

Harold Wilson, the useless Labour PM of the 1960s, always tried to pretend that he came from humble beginnings and he used to be too poor to have shoes. But Harold Macmillan (?) put him in his place by remarking that the only time H. Wislon was without boots was when he was too big for them.

It has been reported that the prime monster’s director of strategy is prone to chair meetings at 10 Downing Street in his socks. Could it be that Stevie Hilton is also too big for his boots?

You kinda expected it, didn’t you?

I was amused to see some guy on the BBC lunchtime news yesterday claiming there were 2 million people on the “great march for democracy” in London and they were the majority. (So the other 68 million people in the country don’t count?) I kept waiting for an on-screen caption saying: “another moron from the planet Idiot” – in vain.

No surprise that while the Wrong Milipede was lecturing a crowd on behalf of the party which wrecked the British economy, gangs of thieves and vandals were wrecking West End shops, banks, hotels and other handy businesses.

Don’t Panic!

The contractors are hard at work refurbing my nuclear bunker in case “Japanese Radiation” hits these shores? No, they’re not! It’s just the windmill lobby panic-mongering again.

Is Gadaffiy a target?

Dave our Leader and the Generals seem to have fallen out on this issue but let’s be practical about it. If he were a target, they probably couldn’t hit him anyway so it all becomes highly academic.

Déjà vu all over again

While listening to reports of the G’duffi banging on about how everyone loves him and he’ll die for his country and everyone else in Libya will do the the same, I was struck by how much the same, all routine dictator-rant is. In fact, I can imagine Gordon Brown doing the same routine for his cronies right up to the moment when the people overthrew his regime. Which kinda blunts the impact of G’duffi’s ravings – imagining him as just another Gordon Brown on the way out.

Well, he’s been and gone and done it

It was always a toss-up between whether the Tories would abolish the armed forces right away because there’s no money to pay for them or sneak in one more war before everything closed down. Call Me Dave the Leader has been busting a gut to get to grips with Libya. And now the stooges at the United Nations have given him a chance. No doubt the British, the Yanks and the French will do all the work and the Germans will sneak in and bag all the decent contracts for rebuilding when the shooting stops.

Any old excuse

The anti-nuclear lobby and the Global Warming Swindlers are using the Japanese earthquake as a reason for banning all nuclear power generation. But the Japanese reactors seem to have survived in remarkably good order after one of the most powerful earthquakes on record. And Britain is not in severe earthquake zone. And how many windmills would survive an earthquake and tsunami strong enough to put a nuclear reactor in trouble?

Usual suspects inaction

Have you ever noticed that the councils which squawk loudest about being short of money are the ones at the top of the list when it comes to failing to collect local taxes? Like Manchester, which is busy cutting “front-line” services to preserve the pay of town hall staff, councillors and all the“diversity monitor” non-jobs, and which fails to collect 10% of its council tax whilst most other local authorities managed to get north of 97%.

Labour, of course . . .

Just a thought . . .

On which day will the millions of people, who pay for early retirement and gold-plated pensions for public-sector staff, stage their strike in protest at being ripped off by the government and the public sector unions for years and years?

Life 3:16

People are entitled to hold opinions. Other people are equally entitled to embrace such opinions or discard them because they are silly, offensive or downright harmful. This applies to all opinion sectors, including politics, the weather, religion, matters of taste in the arts & literature, the acceptability of sexual deviations, the education system, priorities in society and everything not nailed down, like man-made global warming.

p.s. Yesterday was both Ash Wednesday and National No Smoking Day. Which genius came up with that combination?

Interesting thought . . .

Who will police marches by the police in protest against the abolition of their Spanish practices perks? Will members of the public be invited to dress up in riot gear and bully them a bit? And ride police horses and “kettle” a mob of them if they look like becoming unruly? Turn about is fair play, after all!

Guardian of public morals or just a publicity-seeking ball & bat?

Labour MP C. Bryant has been shooting his mouth off about Prince Andrew’s “inappropriate” friendship with an American billionaire paedophile, who also includes Mandelsleaze among his mates, but nothing said about that.

Lest We Forget, Bryant’s only claim to fame is that he put pictures of himself in his underpants on a homophile dating website. So he’s hardly a person of substance. But it does show how desperate some bits of the meeja are to sleaze Prince Andrew if they’ll give air-time to the likes of Mr. Bryant.

More cash into the pockets of the legal profession

Does anyone really think Jacques Chiraq will have to pay a fine and/or go to gaol for all the money he stole when Mayor of Paris? According to reports, he’s not going to be inconvenienced by the court too much as he has a room where he can go for a lie down if he starts feeling a bit dodgy. And, no doubt, he can sneak off somewhere else while he’s supposed to be in his room.

No, he stands as much chance of going to gaol for theft as Tony B. Liar does for his war crimes.

Falls Over In Amazement

You have to wonder about the qualifications of a Governor of the Bank of England who says he’s surprised to find that all the big banks think about is making an instant profit and they’re not bothered about swindling their customers. It’s what banks do, Merv! Always have, and always will unless they’re regulated tightly enough to impose a small measure of honesty.

Scroungers’ Charter

Prescription charges in England are going up by 20p/item in April to £7.40/item and the English are moaning about it. Don’t they realize that Gordon Brown spent all our money and maxed out the national credit card? And the money to pay for free prescriptions in Wales and Scotland has to come from SOMEWHERE?

Blood Brothers?

Are our prime monster and Mr. Gaddaffey related? You’ve got the one raving from his bunker in Tripoli that the Libyan people love him and they’d never let Alky Ida terrorist infiltraitors separate him from the billions he’s stolen from Libyan oil revenues. And you’ve got the other raving from his bunker in Downing Street about imposing a “no-fly zone” over Libya when he’s planning to abolish the RAF. Meanwhile, the Yanks are shaking their heads in the background and going, “Nurse, he’s out of bed again!”

It’s a funny old world, and no mistake.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

Is it just me, I asked my financial expert, but why would anyone who's not Sky want to buy Sky News? Especially if it loses 20 million quid per year.

Simple, he replied. If getting rid of the TV news is the only way Rupert Murdoch's organization can take over Sky, then he's going to be willing to pay the running costs of Sky News for the new owner, and then there's scope for exploiting a gratitude factor. So are you interested in going into the TV news business?

Maybe . . .

The point is . . .

To the clown who wrote to theGrauniad to point out that the BBC World Service’s spending on its broadcasting in Hindi amounts to two and a half pence per listener, that’s not the point. The point is, no matter how much the price per listener, it still adds up to £300,000 of OUR MONEY being spent on educating foreigners at a time when Gordon Brown has plunged the country so deeply into debt, it will take a generation to dig ourselves out of the Brown Hole.

Now, if the world’s 12 million Hindu listeners to the BBC World Service were all prepared to chip in two and a half pee per head and relieve this burden on the British taxpayer, the service could be retained. But if they won’t, forget it.

Maybe they have a point!

One of my mates put all the protests and riots in Northern Africa and the Middle East into pretty good context. Imagine what it would be like here if Tony Blair had been Prime Minister/President 4 Life for 40 years because he’d bought the services of the British armed forces and the police. No wonder all those Africans and Arabs want something, anything, different in the way of misrule.

An unusual road block

Bob, yesterday’s driver, got us stuck at a very interesting road block when he took a short cut. We went down the middle of a typical side street with cars parked on both sides. Then we arrived at a bloody big lorry parked in the middle of it. We actually got out of the car to take a good look at the obstacle, which clearly wasn’t going to budge.

It turned out to be a sort of do-in-yourself concrete delivery lorry. There was a big load of sand on the truck bed and a cement mixer with a control panel tacked on at the back. We watched a guy dump a load of concrete into a wheelbarrow then push some buttons on the control panel for the next guy.

The machine loaded up another drumful of cement mixture into the mixer, churned it, and the next guy dumped it into his barrow and started the cycle over again for either the first guy or a third guy. They wheeled 4 barrowloads of concrete into a house through the front door while we watched. Then the lorry drove off and we, and the queue behind us, were free to get on with getting to where we’d been going.

Enlightened Empiricism

Why's old Cameron getting bent out of shape over dotty old Euro-judges giving rapists and paedos a bogus 'uman right? So what if they're allowed to appeal against being on the Sex Offenders' Register for life. All he has to do is let them appeal, but at their own expense, not on legal aid, and paying the full costs for the proceedings and the Crown's legal contribution, and then tell them, "No, piss off."

Irwin

It All Comes Back To The MoD And Lying Politicians

If there were any justice in this rotten world, the twat at the MoD who sacked a bunch of long-serving soldiers by email would also get the sack; by email. But, no doubt, the twat’s New Labour appointed bosses will just double the twat’s bonus.
   And I see the Iraqi defector at the heart of the WoMD story is now admitting it was a lie. Well, he had lots of company in that lie – G.W. Bush, Tony B. Liar, A. “Dodgy Dossier” Campbell, G. Broon and everyone else involved with the whole New Labour regime, pretty much. And anyone who tried to expose the lie – Andrew Gilligan, Dr. David Kelly, et al – was silenced.

Irwin

And Another Thing

What we need is a ban on professional black racialists wasting huge amounts of taxpayers’ cash on trying to stop people using “jungle drums” and other common phrases. Confiscation of all assets, cancellation of all ’uman rights and immediate deportation without appeal to Zimbabwe or North Korea would be an appropriate penalty.

Irwin

Not at your expense, thanks

I switched on the TV news to be confronted by Trafalgar Square full of bodies with a bunch of wogs ranting at them from big screens. Something to do with getting rid of President Mubarak of Egypt, apparently. But the point is, these bloody wogs were having their party at our expense, and quite a lot of expense, judging from the number of copper in circulation.

Gordon Brown has invested the nation’s wealth down the pub, pissed it up a wall somewhere and maxed out the national credit card. We can’t afford to waste borrowed money on do’s like this for ourselves, never mind a bunch of foreigners. So next time, would the magistrates kindly tell the visiting junketeers to get lost when they ask to borrow Trafalgar Square, and if they invade the square anyway, would the government kindly have the bottle to set the army on them and squish a few of the cheeky sods with out two remaining tanks to drive the message home.

Thank you so much.

Small World Champs

Seeing some of the victorious Packers brandishing TV wrestling-style world championship belts puts the whole thing into perspective. They’re champions of a competition in which only US teams can play, so their “world champion” status has about as much validity of that of a TV sports entertainer, whose “championship” applies to a world which exists only in the minds of the scriptwriters, the actors and the more deluded spectators.

On the flight back, I considered setting myself up as Mansion World Champion – Number One in a Field of One. And then I remembered I’d be stealing the slogan of MAD magazine. And I’d be letting down everyone who expects me to be Nothing If Not Original.

Money for . . . what’s worse than old rope?

Cruel and unusual punishment, or what! Those squawking females at the Super Bowl. Which had an audience of about 63 bodies at the Mansion, excluding ’Is Lordship, who was actually in Arlington, Texas, watching it – and not in the car park after paying $200 to gleg at a big screen. No, he was in one of the best boxes. Natch.
   The woman doing “America, The Beautiful” had microphone distortion as a partial excuse for the noise she was making. Apparently, the woman doing the American national anthem got the words wrong. We were all too busy cringing at what was assaulting our ears after they fixed the microphone problem to notice.
   Will she have to cough up half the fee for bogging things up? Probably not.

Irwin

Alternate City

Irwin has been busy again. He’s been collecting up the alternate histories of WW 2 by trawling through my library and ordering some new stuff. So there’s Harry Turtledove’s “aliens + WW 2” side by side with more academic stuff about how the Germans might have won if the dice had rolled some different numbers.

I’m working my way through a new acquisition called Hitler Triumphant at the moment and it looks like good stuff – complete with bogus references mixed in with the real ones. Old Adolf comes to even more of a premature sticky end in some of the stories, so it’s not 100% triumphant. So when I run out of Sherlock Holmes stories not by Sir A. Conan Doyle, I now have a new area of alternatives to go at.

Window of Opportunity

I’ve put some cash into what seems like an excellent money-making venture – “I was there” tours to Egypt. Crazy? Not really. There seems to be a huge pool of people who have a need to be at an historical event. One as big as the fall of the Berlin Wall. So a mate of mine – ex-army, of course – has put some packages together and he seems to have the bodyguards and documentation side of things well sorted out.

In a few years’ time, Ned’s customers will be able to bore the pants off others at dinner parties and come up with proof positive of how they were there, on the spot, when Egypt’s Mubarak dictatorship was washed away by a popular revolution. Roll on the next one!

Lost Cause?

Is it worth bothering with the actual Pro Bowl match any more? Playing it the week before the Super Bowl, instead of the week after, means that no one from the SB teams will be in it – no Steelers or Packers this year – and the guys who just couldn’t be ersed because they’re too rich to be bothered about $25,000, or $45,000 for a win, won’t be there, either. Maybe it would be better to pick a couple of fantasy teams and just leave it at that from now on.

They just don’t get it

Gadaffy, displaced a king in Libya, became ruler for life but pretends he’s not the new king of Libya. Mubarak, thinks he’s entitled to be president for life of Egypt, and sacking his government will deflect a discontented population’s attention away from their main problem, namely him. What a funny old world it is, and no mistake!

And now we’ve got A. Campbell, New Labour spin doctor and war-monger, expecting people to feel sorry for him because someone’s nicked a couple of bikes from his shed. Obviously, no one has told him that bad things happen to bad people. But not often enough.

Olds, Not News

Is it news that supermarkets have been pumping bacon full of water? Not to anyone who’s ever opened a packet of supermarket bacon and had to pour the water in it down the sink. There’s obviously not enough protesters being killed by the regime in Egypt to fill up the newspapers.

And another thing. Who’s going to want pills made out of red grape skins, which are supposed to stop heart attacks and cancer and all sorts of other stuff, when you can get the antioxidant stuff in bottles of wine in a much more palatable form?

No new? Good!

Watching the lunchtime TV news today, I was struck by all the non-news stuff padding it out. Like some soldier in Afghanistan dialling the wrong number and leaving a personal message on the wrong woman’s answering service.

Is that the best they can do? I asked myself. And then I realized that maybe we’re safer if there’s nothing newsworthy happening around the world. Because the worst disasters always start with some idiot doing something that seems like a great idea at the time.

Further To Yesterday . . .

The Association of Miscellaneous Sexual Deviants is being allowed to feature its members in school exams, thanks to a grant from the Training & Development Agency for Schools, a New Labour quango. The AMSD-oriented questions include the likes of:

MATHS: If two transvestites can dig three holes in two hours, how many holes could they dig if they weren’t wearing frocks?

GEOGRAPHY: If two lesbians try to ride their bikes across Africa, in which country are the bikes most likely to be stolen?

Tony “Education, Education, Education” Blair always wanted a legacy. I wonder how chuffed he is with the one he got?

Govori, “Nyet!”

This whole phobia thing is totally out of control. You get stupid politicians [tautology, Ed.] telling people they can’t be xenophobic, by law, when what they really mean is they don’t think you should have the right to be disgusted by the disgusting habits of other people – mainly foreigners.

So the proposal is on the table to ditch “phobia” and go for a simple “nyet” instead. Islamophobia is out and Islamnyet is in for people who want nothing to do with murderous faux Islamicists. Likewise, homosexnyet for those who don’t think homosexualists deserve special rights, and xenonyet for people who don’t want to be forced to have anything to do with the weird customs and diet of foreigners in their own country.

I think you get the picture – just say, “Nyet!” when confronted with “xenos” and demand your human right to have your own preferences respected by intolerant minorities and petty burrocrats.

Restricted Vision

We don’t get fogs like the ones we used to get in the 20th century. The fogs last Thursday were so-so, but I remember one in the late 1960s or early 1970s because everyone got to go home early from work on that day. And you could walk faster than the buses were crawling along. There’s not been another like it since (where I’ve been, at any rate). Probably something to do with Gorbal Warming.

Scamotage

Those bl’Indians are still at it. “This is Mary,” says a voice with distinct Indian accent. “Am I speaking with Mr. Halloran?” He was the previous occupant of the Mansion but you don’t complicate things by denying it. Then she’s off into a spiel about how she’s a MicroSoft certified computer expert and your computer is downloading buckets of malicious software from internet, which is going to destroy all your data.
   When you tell her you’ve got an antivirus program to detect malware and a firewall, she takes no bloody notice and insists you switch on your computer so she can direct you to some perfectly normal part of the data logging system, which she insists is proof that your PC has more nasties than you can shake a stick at.
   If I’ve got nothing much to do, I generally mess the bl’Indian about with questions about where the bad stuff is coming from and protests about my data being stored on-line and checked constantly to make sure nothing terrible is happening to it. You can also give them a hard time about not showing a number to the caller ID system, which any reputable company is legally bound to do if it wants to operate in the UK.
   Another good way to waste the bl’Indian’s time is to ask them to explain how they know your computer is downloading nasties – which program is sending reports to them despite an expensive firewall. Then you can tell them you’ve been on holiday for a month so your computer hasn’t been doing anything so what makes the bl’Indian think it has?
   Then there are the excuses for not switching your PC on. A neighbour’s using it because I’ve got the fastest broadband in the street. We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and we don’t believe in computers. The motherboard went and you’re waiting for them to get you a new one. If the bl’Indian gets away with having less than 10 minutes of his/her time wasted, you’re not trying!

Irwin

Spreading the load

Do I have it in for Yanks? Absolutely! Do I love everyone else? You gotta be joking!
   Take the Aussies for instance. The Land of Oz is full of Global Warming Swindlers and also one of the world’s biggest exporters of coal, creating a self-perpetuating circle of buckets of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and the swindlers moaning about it.
   Queensland has its fair share of GWS, who are obsessed with drought. Water is a precious commodity to be reserved and conserved at all costs. So when the Wivenhoe dam started filling up after buckets of rain, what did A. Bligh, the state’s prime minister, do? She only ordered the dam operators not to release the trapped water in a controlled fashion.
   And when the water level got to inches from the top of the dam, they had to send a humongous amount of water down the river and it was good night Brisbane. So if anyone living in the area wants to know where to send the bill for a wrecked home and ruined possessions, the office of A. Blight would be a good place to start.

Irwin

The Yanks are an odd lot

Their fearless leader, President O’Bummer, has spent the last eternity trying to make himself popular by slagging off BP and accusing this Anglo-American company of being 100% British and a symbol of everything that’s wrong in the world.
   But BP’s main crime against humanity is that they were daft enough to employ the American company Haliburton to do some seabed cementing in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Yanks made a total bog of it.
   Feeling unloved, BP does a deal with the Russians for a go at Arctic oil and suddenly, the Yank politicians are up in arms again and accusing BP of treachery and being unAmerican. But if you’re as two-faced as the average Yank politician, I guess it all makes a sort of sense in a weird way.

Irwin

Thought For The Day

’Is Lordship is off on his travels again, so he’s asked me to provide a little something for his fans. How about: “Extinction is Nature’s way of increasing life’s diversity and adapting it to changing ecological conditions.”
   It’s something to tell the chuggers next time they come at you with “Save the polar bear” or a similar scam.

Irwin

All things to all climate “scientists”

I’m currently half-way through Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe by Fred Warshofsky, which was published in 1977. It seems that back in the 1970s, climate scientists were worried about fine particles in the atmosphere, produced by nations burning fossil fuels for power generation and torching forests, and emissions from jet airliners, sending the world into an ice age. 30 years later the Global Warming Swindlers are telling us that exactly the same processes are causing catastrophic heating of the Earth because of the carbon dioxide released. Has someone rewritten the laws of physics but we haven’t been told about it?

The book also notes that there were huge rises in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the middle of the 20th century at a time when global temperatures were dropping. The conclusion was that it’s not possible to prove cause and effect in a system as complicated as the Earth’s climate, which also depends on what the Sun is doing. Something else that’s been rewritten in the last 30 years, mainly by people who expect us to believe the garbage that comes out of computers with garbage-generating software.

Dawn? What’s that?

One big advantage of living the Mansion lifestyle is that you’re not bound by time conventions. So you can stay up half the night watching American Crunch on TV and get up at the crack of noon the next day.

Who would have thought the spluttering Seahawks would knock off the Saints, even with home advantage in a stadium built to maximize crowd noise? And what started as a defensive battle in Indianapolis: who’d have thought the Jets would win the battle of the field goals to knock off the Colts and make sure that neither Manning has a shot at a Super Bowl ring this year? That was definitely worth staying up half the night for!

Oh, Soddit!

It’s the ultimate leveller. You can be as poor as a person with no money and nowhere to live or as rich as . . . well, me. The one thing we always have in common is that we can both be laid low by a stinking, rotten cold, which feels it doesn’t want to go away and leave you in the lurch.

The universe can be a shockingly egalitarian place at times.

Value for money? What’s that?

You really have to stand and stare, gobsmacked, at the job New Labour has done on local councils. They can’t get their dustmen to do their job, or if the dustmen are willing to work, the council’s ’elf ‘n’ safety nazis come up with a reason why they shouldn’t. But as the bin bags pile higher and higher, it’s not beyond the powers of local authorities to send out their enforcement squads and threaten residents with a big fine for putting up lost cat posters. And as for putting a stop to ripping off motorists with parking fines, or abolishing New Labour red tape, both of which our blessed Coalition government says it wants to do . . . In the words of the prophet, “Like that’s going to happen.” Not unless we introduce a Ministry of Pol Pot and start re-educating our local burrocrats.

Congratulations!

We have done very well to get though the last month, apparently, because it was the coldest December since 1890, even though there was twice as much sun as normal and only half the usual amount of rain. Which probably means there will be drought regulations in force before the end of this month! The temperature in central England remained stubbornly below zero, averaging -0.6 deg.C, and on 10 nights of the month, the temperature at places around Britain fell to -18 deg.C. No doubt global warming will get the blame somehow.