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.