Daft but enjoyable

E4 was supposed to be showing A Good Day to Die Hard last night but we got Die Hard 4.0 instead. Not that there’s likely to be much difference between them. I’d more or less completely forgotten what happens in 4.0 so I was able to enjoy all the daft stunts without knowing what was coming; like Det. McClane shooting a gunman out of a helicopter by smashing the top off a fire hydrant and later turning a car into a surface-to-air missile to shoot the chopper down.
    Totally mad, totally fun.

Let’s not bother about facts

No question, the death of that severely allergic girl on a plane was a tragedy. But cardiac arrest means that the heart has stopped. Which means that a defibrillator, which is used to restore a regular rhythm to chaotic heartbeats, is of no use if the heart is not beating.

Selective fairness

The Boy Beckham has got away with one. But if it was because of the negligence of the government department which failed to get his speeding fine notification to him on time, it’s whoever screwed up who should be getting the stick. But hey, responsibility doesn’t apply to the public sector.

More antisocial meeja hacking

Anyone daft enough to have put bank account and other financial details on FaceBook may have been hacked by (Russian?) bad guys. But the good news is that they have a grace period while the bad guys’ megacomputer trawls through the messages of 50-90 million FB customers in search of anything exploitable.

Brilliant Job

Someone at moonpig.com, the online personalized gifts firm, has been tasked with going through all of the orders to weed out those featuring pictures of the customer’s naughty bits. It seems there is a rise in this sort of request for cards at St. Valentine’s day, and women are as bad for doing it as men. Mr. Moonpig is reported to be resisting calls for him to introduce pop-up cards.

Take another week off!

Are we bothered that the Daily Mail’s proof-reader seems to be on holiday? Not if we can be treated to gems like the one in the latest Corbyn conference report. J.C. is reported to have ‘confplained’ about something, which clearly started out as ‘confirmed’ and nearly got to ‘complained’. But the new word deserves to survive to be used to describe any sort of whinge at a political party’s conference.

Buy me and try one

‘Greed is good’ will be out under a Corbyn government. ‘Theft by the state is good’ will be substituted – with the usual looney left suspects as the beneficiaries.

You’re never too iconic to be trolled

I was glad to learn that it’s only women over 19 who can’t use a backpack without getting their collar felt by the self-appointed Fashion Police. Mind you, someone wandering around sporting one which cost 400 quid deserves some stick.
    None of that for me – I got my backpack as a free gift with an order from my stationery supplier in an earlier phase of my life.

Collapsible Ben

The new NFL ‘roughing the passer’ definition is causing a lot of grief for defensive players but there is a case for trying to prevent star players, like Rodgers of the Packers, being put on the sideline with a broken collar bone. There is also a case for preventing players from dishing out wrestling clotheslines and blows to the quarterback’s head.
    But there should be a similar obligation on officials to be able to recognize bad acting, like Ben Roethlisberger’s dramatic, flag-drawing collapse in the Steelers’ MNF match with the Bucs. And I write this as an admirer of the Steelers, who cheers them on when they’re not playing my team.

Communication breakdown

I went to a clothing company’s website the other day but my size of the items I looked at was out of stock. Their response was an email: they’d noticed my visit and they invited me to check their website again or ring their customer services on a premium-rate phone number.
    I sent them a reply telling them my size is out of stock and that’s why I didn’t buy anything. Their response was another email offering me 10% off if I bought within 48 hours.
    I went back to the website, my size is still out of stock. So what good is 10% off something which they can’t supply?
    Some firms just don’t get it.

Notice me, PLEASE!!

Lord Forkbender, sometime Tony Blair flatmate and crony and the bloke who made a bog of the Millennium Dome, would like all drug use to be legalized so that Labour drug users and pushers are no longer tarred with the brush of criminality. Sounds like that pruning of the House of Frauds is even more overdue.

Keep it up

We seem to be doing very well for NFL matches on TV at the moment. The Saints in Atlanta was a cracker. So was the Chargers vs the Rams. And the Detroit Lions sticking it to the Patriots!

Clotheyes again

A quick glimpse of the screen left me thinking that the lead character in the current version of S.W.A.T. is played by a guy called Sheman, which explained why he/she thinks a tofu stir-fry is the catering bee’s knees. But, in fact, the currently blackened and demoted Steve Forrest character is played by a guy called Shemar, which totally ruins the idea.

New words for the modern world

1. Streamhorning - streamlining a shoehorning, tight-squeeze job
2. Grossdresser – a bloke in a pale pink frock with vivid green stripes
3. Hookertitute – a person who shags a big wheel in the industry to get a meeja job of some sort

Heading for a fall

The EU won’t buy her Chequers Plan for Brexit. Neither will the DUP, enough of her own party to sink it and all of this country’s parties who aren’t the Tories. So what does the prime minister do? Go all defiant and say everyone else is wrong and it’s “my way or the highway”. Strong and stable, stubborn or just plain pig-headed?

New attention-grabbers’ venue

You’re a previously successful fraudster who wants a bit of attention. Your visa is about to run out and you need some sympathy. What do you do? Head to Salisbury, pretend to be poisoned and claim that the Putinocracy is out to get you.

Pointless packaging puffs

“Real Lancashire Eccles Cakes containing pure butter” it sez on the wrapper. But is anyone likely to buy a product containing impure butter?

Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me

With biogs of Denis Norden in today’s papers, a small salute to the creator of the above phrase with the ludicrous story that a Corbyn aide with dodgy credentials has been refused a House of Commons security clearance for obvious reasons. This, he is claiming, is evidence that MI5 is plotting to prevent a Corbyn-led government. Nothing wrong with that guy’s imagination and a fine example of a me-centred universe.

The Germans have a word for it . . .

. . . or we could provide one. The appetite of foreigners for our language has created Franglais in France and Denglisch in Germany. Going the other way, one of the staff came up with Mischungskrachtel to describe a work of fantasy fiction in which the characters have the names of real people who are celebs or currently in the news. Like that book about the porn actress and the president called Trump.

It’s the way he tells them

You go to all the trouble of releasing your punch line to get max. coverage in the meeja. Then you make a bog of the performance. That’s why on-line dictionaries are now adding a note to their definition of hubris: “See Vince Cable, Brighton, 2018”.

More Sound & Fake Fury

Go sober for October? Well, it has a rhyme to it. But what if you never drink enough to get yourself pissed? In October or any other month, like most people? The slogan becomes just typical N.U.L. BS.

Nothing happening

Silence is a much undervalued commodity. And much to be enjoyed in small doses, especially when it’s quiet enough to hear the clock ticking and the cat snoring.

Definitions for Today

An ‘expert’ is someone who will excomplicate when you need him to explain.

Too rude?

The Daily Mail has a feature page, to which readers send jokes and Wordy Wise suggestions; slightly modified words with a new meaning, e.g, alcoprop = Dutch courage. One of the staff came up with ‘whores de combat’ meaning ‘tarts with attitude’ after a trip to France. But she didn’t send it in as the Mail is a family newspaper.

The name says it all

You come across some weird names in American football. North of the border, in Edmonton, there’s a star player who rejoices in the first name of D’Haquille but everyone calls him ‘Dook’. Whether or not that sounds anything like what his weird parents intended when they entered him for a ‘Give the Kid a Weird Name’ contest is a matter of conjecture.
    South of the border, in Kansas City, one of the coaches has an even better name. When the match commentators give the offensive co-ordinator for the K.C. Chiefs a name check, it sounds like Eric The Enemy. Which is a moniker which combines a job description with menace effortlessly.

Wheels to come off

The government is threatening Amazon with a Cardboard Tax because of its habit of sending small items out in a HUGE box with a mass of paper padding inside. The stated aim is to raise cash for local councils which are struggling with their pretence of doing recycling.
    How sad everyone will be when the tax gets though Parliament and Amazon redoes its packaging policy and no cash is raised. But the taxpayer ends up having to pay for more civil servants to administer the cash collection process which doesn’t collect any cash.

Half-assed, more like

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life was a title spotted in the latest catalogue from bibliophilebooks.com. £18.99 reduced to 7 quid.
    Here’s another worthy under the illusion that the human race needs to change its ways to preserve the current range of diversity of the planet’s residents. Surprise! The planet isn’t some sort of conscious entity!
    There’s nothing which can care whether the Earth is a frozen ball of ice or a greenhouse hot-house. But try telling that to the zealots.

The Road to Feck & Burn

According to one of his mates, the Corbyn recipe for Britain is to encourage the feckless to steal from the feckful to fund a luxury communist revolution. Quite what will happen when they’ve blown all the cash and no one will lend them any more has yet to be disclosed.

Retired and gone to seed

Was that really ‘bow down to the king’ Triple Haitch on WW the other day? That bald old bloke with a beard? Crumbs! How are the mighty gone to waste. (waist?)

It’s all about the money

Oh, dear. The Archbish of Cantab takes a pop at Amazon and the other multinationals like Google, calling them tax dodgers and avoiders of social responsibility, only to find that his employer has huge investments in them and that’s something he should know about because he’s on the investment committee.
    Then there’s the conspiracy theory about the ERG in Parliament having a secret slush fund. Maybe the Russians came up with that one.

Back in the box now, Diane

What does Diane Abbott do when no one has noticed her for ages? Go Silly Season Plus and pretend that British immigration policy is just like Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s.

They’re at it again

Was it okay for Boris Johnson to use his prime ministerial suicide vest metaphor? Yes, if it made a lot of outrage junkies make even bigger fools of themselves.

Blame it on the Yanks, yeah!

That’s an interesting theory: Britain shares its language with the US and it has caught the American obesity plague. But European countries where English isn’t spoken are less susceptible to American advertising and have less obesity.

Unwanted bargain

“Save 60% on a stainless steel soup maker”
    Okay, but just how tasty is stainless steel soup?

First rule of painting

As soon as you apply white paint to an exterior surface, some stoopid little black insect will land on it and get stuck.

News at a distance

From across the room, the headline looked like “Soup and snake diet on the NHS to reverse diabetes”. On closer inspection, it was ‘shake’ not ‘snake’, which is much less fascinating.

Border divide

Watching the Packers squeak a home win over the Bears in the first week of a new NFL season, I was assured by CFL fans, was like watching the Eskimos hosting the all-conquering Stampeders, but in reverse.
    The Pack overcame a 20-0 deficit to win 23-24. The Esks went 28-48 up and managed not to throw the victory away and eventually won 42-48.

That’s amazing!

I’ve always thought ‘wiseacre’ was an archetypal American-English word. But according to yesterday’s Daily Mail, it dates back to 1595 and well before English arrived in what is now the US. You live and learn.

First rule of DIY

No job involving the use of sharp tools may be completed without a blood sacrifice.

Absent Icon

It was strange to be watching Sky’s NFL show with no Kevin; mainly because he’s no longer with us at a rather young age. That Grim Reaper – she don’t care who gets took. Not too impressed by the magic bean-counters but if they can persuade people to pay them good money, good luck to them.
    Ah, the luxury of 4-down American Crunch.

Dickheads at BT Sport

It’s 12 minutes past midnight and the CFL fans are on the edges of their seats because the injury-hit Banjo Bowl match in Winnipeg is inside the 3 minute warning, and the Roughriders are leading the home-team Blue Bombers by 29-27.
    Then what happens? The dickheads at BT Sport start showing the next match instead of staying with this one to the finish. Having let the programme before the CFL match over-run into the CFL time slot.
    No excuse. The fans extremely very disgruntled today.

One wrecker assesses another

Tony Blair, who hijacked Old Labour with his New Labour project (and ran the country into the ground) is worried that Jeremy Corbyn’s hijacking of the Labour party will do the same. Which rather ignores the lesson of history, namely that Labour always wrecks things then scuttles off into the bushes until the Tories have done some repairs.

More crunch in America

Oh, dear! The NFL season is upon us as well as what’s happening in Canada, which doubles the amount of gridiron football the addicts have to watch. Time to get a refresher on the jargon; first and lunch, second and tea, third and supper, fourth and pontoon. Or something like that.

Get out of that!

That was a great put-down the Russians got from our man at the UN when they moaned about not being let in to the Novichok poisoning investigation. “You don’t recruit an arsonist to put out a fire, especially if it’s one he started.”

Long overdue payback

5Spike keeps doing promos for a new series about a gang of Vikings during reruns of the A-Team. Can’t see the attraction, myself. They were just Scandinavian scumbag thieves and murderers, and the first thing we need to do when there’s a working time machine is go back and drop a few nukes on them.

Veracity quibble

“Home cooked food served daily” says the sign in front of a pub which I pass frequently. But is it really cooked in someone’s home rather than in a kitchen attached to the pub?
    “Here cooked food” is what the sign should say.

Sick TV

Spotted in last night’s TV menu for Sky Arts: “The Last Laugh. The dilemma of using the Holcaust as a topic for humour.” Which raises the obvious question: “Why would you want to?”
    Unless you’re a Corbynite and you feel it’s compulsory, of course.

Getting away with it

The two GRU agents who carried out the Novichok attack in Salisbury in March have been named and pictured. But as Russia won’t extradite its criminals, they’re probably working on their memoirs, looking for a movie deal and expecting an easy life on the Putin’s gravy train as MPs in the near future.

Sub-prime

Is anyone impressed by a firm that calls itself 1st Class Something? Well, they would, wouldn’t they! Or does it acknowledge that there might be market opportunities for a 2nd class service? Such as: 2nd Class Valets – we don’t make much of an effort but it will look okay and we’re cheap.
   Could work with the right marketing strategy.

Now, we know

A member of the party’s national executive committee has the explanation for the anti-Semitism row, which is embarrassing Labour a little bit. It has all been made up by Trump fanatics in the Jewish community!

Graceful exit

Would it not be a good idea for 70+ actresses who complain that they can’t get a decent job any more, e.g. Maureen Lipman, to opt for a dignified retirement plus occasional TV appearances to remind everyone of their glory days?

Post Brexit fishing quotas

Another of my associates cracked this during a very productive dinner party: The government should offer one-year licences to fish in British water, with a renewal option, to British firms which use British boats and British crews and pay British taxes in full.
    The licences should be on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, which would prevent companies which don’t actually catch fish from selling quotas to foreigners. Any unused quotas would be factored in to the conservation calculations used to set the following year’s quotas.

Deft definition

Here’s a good one for an offence junkie, courtesy of one of my associates: Someone who parades around with her tits wobbling like twin jellies to attract attention, and then throws a major wobbly if anyone looks at them.

Wrong colour, mate

SNP vice-boss K. Brown would be well advised to change his name if he thinks he can build an economic case for an independent Scotland. No one is going to take a Scots politician called Brown seriously on financial matters after the shambles created by his namesake, New Labour’s Gordon F. Brown, when he was Chancellor and PM.

100% wrong

“This program may contain coarse language that could offend some viewers. Discretion is advised.”
    This miserable disclaimer before CFL live-mike matches completely misses the point. Valour should be advised, not cowardly discretion.

Tell ’em anything. They might just believe it.

You’re a bloke dressed in female clothing and you’re tooling around on a skateboard wearing a blue wig. Suddenly, you attack a female jogger. What do you tell the court?
    “I thought I was attacking David Cameron.”
    Yes, that would work!

No way period

London should have had the Crossrail scheme last year. The city’s long suffering commuters will be lucky to get it before next year’s Xmas. And yet the government is still hell-bent on going ahead with H2S and claiming it can be done on time and on budget. La-La Land.

No way forward

In the 1990s, councils were closing schools because there weren’t enough children to justify keeping them open. In the 2000s, Labour opened the flood gates to migrants and now, there aren’t enough schools.
    More proof that when here today, gone tomorrow politicians do something, they always make things worse for everyone else.