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!