Not a brilliant example

The police chief on Major Crimes inspecting a body in a blue overall with a big bush of hair unconfined? That makes sense.

Clothears rides yet again

The Guilty Feminist Podcast by Jessica Prostitute? The things you think you hear are always so much better than boring reality!

Well, maybe

Could it be that resistance to the Oxford vaccine is due in part to the soppy unconscious bias/acceptable bias training being required by the wonks in charge of many of the university colleges in that city? Sounds reasonable for the part that’s rooted in anti-white bias.

A molecule of good sense

The Now Show took a much needed poke at the government’s “roadmap”, which is really a timetable for leaving lockdown. Good for them.

There’s always a cute name for it

“Vaccine hesitancy” has been invented for all the people who think the plague vaccines are full of Bill Gates chips which will take them over. And other similar nonsense; a lot of it quite blatantly racialist, but never mind.

Who’s gonna do it, though?

Who’s going to bust the Merseyside coppers who drove a lorry around with a sign reading: “Being Offensive is an Offence” on the back of it? It’s clearly a hate crime of some sort. But I suppose that doesn’t apply to the alleged guardians of the law.

Devious Reaper

The NHS and their quango allies seem to be doing their level best to confect enough deaths from the plague to break the 200,000 ‘barrier’. No wonder the official plague deaths score has sunk into such disrepute. Will there be an inquiry and adjustment of the score? Some hopes.

Timely Exit

One of the main reasons why the EU’s vaccine roll-out is such a shambles appears to be a refusal to use the Oxford vaccine because it’s British. That’s how much they love us!

A step too far for some

Working from home appeals to some businesses. Having their staff in an office where they can ‘mentor’ them; and also keep an eye on them to make sure they’re doing something productive; appeals to others. It will be interesting to see how it all works out if and when we get the plague under control.

What sort of people are they?

Looks like Highways England is heading for a corporate manslaughter charge if it turns a stretch of the M6 into unsmart motorway, knowing that deaths and serious injuries will be inevitable.

Downing Diabolical

It occurs to me that the hair has become a deliberate distraction tactic for Boris. Get ’em concentrating on something utterly trivial . . .

“Phone’s ringing!”

“Dear customer, there has been an Amazon eye player on your Apple account”, or some such nonsense. Twice. They must be making money out of it if they keep trying this tired old scam.

Real racket

This unconscious bias thing seems to be the new Fascism. Especially if the training is designed to make people adopt all the biases which they are supposed to be unconsciously against when they start the course.
    To hell with neutrality, just get them to switch sides.

Pointless myth

Is the whole nation really going to stay up to 1 a.m. whenever Prince Harry and ’er indoors do their TV megawhinge? Or are we going to have something better to do, like sleeping?

Pointless number

Are we really supposed to be impressed by the news that 120,000 people have died of, or with, the Chinese plague.
    It just seems to be a perverse attempt to make Britain either a megavictim or a place where ‘the vulnerable’ are likely to live to an age where they become ready victims to a deadly virus.
    And what about all the people who were run over by a bus, and the like, within 28 days of testing positive for the virus? No attempt to separate them from the magic number, of course.

Do any lives matter?

The PM is all for keeping the brakes on until ‘the science’ lets him take them off. The people yelling for a faster unlocking don’t seem to be impressed by his argument that they’d be killing off people who won’t be vaccinated for one reason or another. And people who have been because it’s not 100% effective. In politics, it’s always least worst rather than best.

Vested & panted interest!

Who’s demanding an earlier opening for pubs than the PM’s plan? Former Tory leader Boozer Bill Hague, now a lord but when he were a lad, he used to scoff 14 pints of beer a day, according to the legend.

Flighty

How much notice need we take of the ranting headline? If the paper will be ranting about something completely different the next day, not all that much!

Not taking any nonsense

“What are we waiting for?” yelled the front page of yesterday’s paper. Answer: for people to stop spreading the plague quite so enthusiastically.
    Next question.

OAT & Games

Next step, a parlour game for when people are allowed to meet in gangs again. Take a Scrabble tile out of the bag and hope it’s not an X – Xenophobiaest Of All Time. Then what?

Ready-made plot

How do you do a rip-off of Jaws? Set it in Scotland and, as last night’s film did, substitute Nessie for a shark.
    Weren’t portable computers dead chunky in 2001!

Punctured wisdom

The old accusation that if your shoes squeak, that means you haven’t paid for them rather hits the rocks if only one of them has a squeak!

OATs all fired up

The OAT franchise seems to be growing, e.g. DOAT – Daftest. There’s also things like the Least, Mandelsleaziest, Nastiest, Poshest, Richest, Soppiest and so on. Something that could run and run.

Random thought

Who are all these aliens with masks and staring eyes on the TV who are ordering us to stay at home? Have we been invaded? We should be told.

Some improvement

I note that GOAT – Greatest Of All Time – has a rival in BOAT. Best isn’t quite up to the level of Greatest but being the BOAT is less pejorative than the association with ‘playing or acting the giddy goat’.

News to me

I had a helpful email telling me my Norton360 subscription has run out and reminding me to renew. A friend who was computing in the 1990s told me that Norton AntiVirus was the bee’s knees back then but he didn’t think an email address that was a string of numbers & letters @store.nnzfitness.com was likely to have anything to do with Mr. Norton’s outfit.

Oversubscribed

It would probably be a good idea to make charities declare as a legal obligation if they’re sending their staff for unconscious bias training. Which will tell us that they have more than enough cash and if we’re feeling generous, we should donate elsewhere.

No Wonder

There are lots of complaints that the VAR is ruining football. But when you realize that the initials stand for Vaguely Unsure Referee, all becomes clear.

Wrapping himself in the past; not a great idea

I’ve been reminded that Clement Attlee’s spell as prime minister wasn’t as wonderful as Sir Starmer makes out. Not for those who had to shiver through the winter of 1947 with Manny F. Shinwell in charge of coal production. And then there were all the troops stuck abroad after the war ended to further Labour’s imperial ambitions and delay independence in India.

The continuous sound of gunfire

Rambo vs John Wick in the Body-Count Olympics?

Pious political hope

“We want to get back to a world where we can travel easily and meet friends and loved ones freely.”
    How about those who want it to be even harder to meet unloved ones? What have the politicos got for them?

Tripe Eternal

Who comes up with these corporate slogans? The one on a set of temporary traffic lights was: “Keeping traffic moving”.
    By making it stop & start? Right.

NASA Rulz, OK

No doubt the system worked fine in tests before the mission was launched to Mars, but that jetpack flying crane that lowered the Perseverance probe to the surface, instead of making it bounce about like a mad thing, is definitely a scientific miracle.

Lose, lose

“Take the brakes off, Boris!” our Prime Minister is urged. But how soon will it be before we’re getting: “Boris, you took the brakes off, you fool!” from unaccountable pundits?

His choice

Is anyone bothered that we won’t see Prince Harry’s cheerful bearded face doing Royal things any more. Not really.

The Curse of Covid

You switch the radio on for a usual programme, the one before it keeps on going . . . what’s happening? Nothing much. You just switched on for a Saturday programme on Friday.

Another trough for the lawyers

Suppose the Boris Burrow; the road & rail tunnel linking Scotland and Northern Ireland; goes ahead. Suppose a future SNP regime in Scotland makes itself so annoying that the English let them split off from the Union. Will the English taxpayers get their money back when the new independent Scottish government decides that the tunnel is theirs?
    It will be the Suez Canal all over again.

Wonky judgement

Some academics have done a study and concluded that if you hesitate before answering a question, most people will think you’re lying. Which means that if you say the first thing that comes into your head without delay; no matter how stupid it is; you’re okay. And if you do some thinking and deliver a considered reply, you’re a liar. Wonderful!

Where’s it gone, then?

It can’t be said too often – a place for everything and everything in its place so that you have some small chance of finding it when you really need it.
    If some boffin ever calculated the fraction of a lifetime we spend looking for something that’s been moved, he probably dropped dead with shock at the amount of life wasted.

Where Ted Cruz got it wrong

He should have stood up to the whingers and told them that he might be a servant of the people but he’s not some sort of indentured slave and he’s entitled to some personal time with his family. And his being in Texas instead of Mexico wouldn’t have changed the weather or got the power grid restored any faster.

Yeah, right, Joe!

We’re used to politicians making stupid claims and expecting people to accept them. But for President Biden to claim there was no vaccine for the Chinese plague in the United States before he took office is pushing credibility off the edge of a cliff.

Over the top somewhat

Banning smoking indoors is okay as it doesn’t impose other people’s choices on non-smokers. But banning it on beaches as the Spanish government has done? Sounds like make-work for the coppers with Kerching! fine machines.

Messing up the environment

There’s a theory going round that the people who make a living out of confecting outrage; such as the people running colleges at Oxford university; are trying to turn what they call unconscious bias into conscious bias to give them even more things to moan about.
    Sadly, that sounds credible & true.

Hardly cultural

Do footballers go on special courses to teach them to speak in the present tense when the past would be appropriate? It is just so crazy that they keep doing it. And it’s particularly bad when their burblings are printed in the sports pages in all their glory.

What’s the excuse?

Why can ITV3 show episodes of Hercules Poirot in the correct 4x3 ratio on a widescreen TV but the same episode on ITV3+1 is spread out across the full width of the screen and you have to reset your TV from 16x9 to 4x3 to watch it as it was intended? Sheer bloody idleness or awkwardness.

Cancel, cancel, cancel

Quick, get complaining! Confederate flags in an episode of Midsomer Murders last night!

Daft question

Was Dixon of Dock Green the Met’s first gay policeman? No, he was a character in a TV series, not a real copper.

Say what you mean, you rotters

Aren’t they disgustingly mealy mouthed in Hollywood. Tomb Raider, Tomb Invader – what they really mean is grave robber.

Medical mystery

A bit of a drippy nose when I ventured out of the house when it was freezing out. Now it’s warmer, I have a good dose of cold symptoms; bunged up & sneezing all over the place.
    Can it be too cold for you to have a cold until the weather takes a turn for the better?

Death on four wheels

Something you learn from watching “ChiPs” on Forces TV is just how flammable and dangerous American vehicles are. The smallest shunt is enough to set them on fire as a prelude to a massive explosion.

Wouldn’t dream of it

“Don’t let Reptile Dysfunction make you impudent!” the half-heard TV ad seems to urge us.
    No, of course not.

Certain winner

I hear that Donald Trump has nominated Poisonous Pelosi for the Tiresome Old Broad of 2021 award. I do so want that to be true!

Land of the not-so-free

The Dukes of Hazzard is being shown on weekend mornings on Forces TV, I gathered in passing. It might be okay here but can it be shown in the US with all the confederate flags on show and the cancel culture there? Probably not.

Compounding the shambles with inaction

If the Scottish government's quarantine arrangements for travellers are a shambles on the day before they're due to start, what is the point of airport bosses writing to Wee Burney's lot? They need to be on the phone, yelling at someone.

Seriously overblown

What’s the big deal about the 11th hour? After your elevenses, you still have lunch, the afternoon, an evening meal and the evening’s TV to go. Definitely no need to panic.

Not hard enough on their credibility

We keep on hearing the ‘working hard’ cliché from the UK and devolved governments but is there any other acceptable way of working if they’re getting cash from the taxpayer for doing it?

Odd choice

Why would anyone think a film called Lady Chatterley is something for Valentine's Day? Unless they're weird, of course.

Not fooled

Does calling a government modelling groups Spi-M give it credibility? Or do most people still associate its output with Spi-N and political garbage?
    Probably, the latter.

Crystal ball say no dice

Have the clouds parted, allowing some common sense to shine through? That’s one interpretation of the government’s decision not to issue a set of rules for holiday travel in the summer as no one knows what the state of the pandemic will be then.

Maturity value

There’s a pictorial feature in Wednesday’s Daily Mail showing the celebs who have leapt aboard the Mail’s laptops for schoolkids bandwagon. And my reaction to most of them was: ‘Is that him (or her) or his grandpa (or grandma)?’
     I suppose they didn’t use young ‘celebs’ in case no one had heard of them.

Not what we need to know

We’re being told that everyone over 70 in Wales has been ‘offered’ a chance to have a shot of a vaccine for the Chinese plague. Strange that the first minister there isn’t letting on how many of them chose not to be vaccinated. Possibly to avoid embarrassment?

Don’t do it and be excluded

A vaccine passport is no more discriminatory than having official pieces of paper showing that you’ve paid your income tax. Why should the rest of us be made to suffer because of the inconsiderate few?

They’re all doing it

While in power, the Democraps in the US will be following the Chinese and Russian way of dealing with opponents rather than pretending to set a standard for the rest of the world to aspire to. Which is either terribly pragmatic or just pathetic.

It has to arrive for most of us

U-Day – the day in the life of someone who is paying attention when you realize how useless the rest of the world is. Or maybe it should be UC-Day –Uselessness Confirmation Day.
    Because the young tend to think everything is useless if they don’t get their way 100% of the time, which is rather too subjective.

Wishful thinking

Scanning Wednesday’s paper for bits I missed, I was reminded that the lead was an interview with Leon Brittan’s widow over the confected abuse charges made against her husband by gaoled fantasist Carl Beech and ungaoled Labour deputy leader Tom Watson and the role of the police.
    “So NOW will heads roll?” asked a headline. Not in the Metropolitan police, which seems to be as rotten at the top as Police Scotland. No mention of that happening on the BBC news, either.

Vital plot device

They also serve who are just hissy gits. That was the message of last night’s premiere Hunter-Killer (2018). Even if the hissy git is the admiral in charge of the US fleet or the XO of the submarine that’s going to save the world from a nuclear war, there just has to be a hissy git who is proved wrong big time.

St. Massacré vs Cabbage Cove

Imagine the carnage if they sent Mrs. Jessica ‘Murder, She Wrote’ Fletcher on holiday to the Death In Paradise island! The body count would make a Rambo film look restrained.

Get a grip, mate

Attention, the editor of the Daily Mail. In fact, there is no ‘£10 million barrier’. Nor are there barriers @ £1 million or £100 million. Except in your imagination.

Real life is never as good as imagination

Watching an episode of Hercule Poirot featuring the bad guy trying to escape in a biplane of some sort, and crashing, the registration letters on the fuselage caught my attention.
    And left me wondering if there was ever a plane with the tag G-ARGH, which would have been highly appropriate for the plane in question.

Highly resistible

Would you want a congestion relief preparation made from natural sea water full of dolphin pee, as the TV ad suggests? Me, neither.

Moral compass wonky

The panto in the US Senate puts the current president and his party in the same box as the Burmese military, the Chinese and Putin, the Pants Poisoner. Anyone you’re afraid of, lock them up.

Well off target

There are naive people suggesting that the nation should invest its lock-in billions in bonds and the government should give them a decent rate. But that’s not what the Chancellor wants. He wants the cash spent, in circulation and available to be taxed from every angle to help him fill the huge Brown Hole in his accounts.

Far from home; and everything

You have to laugh when the English DI does his Agatha Christie-style explanation to a crowd of suspects at the end of the episodes of Death In Paradise currently being repeated on Alibi.
    It’s the only option because the DI’s fantasies are diabolical in the extreme, and clearly nothing to do with real life.

A measure of stickability

More recycling, another headline: “Are we heading for a calamity?” Well, yes, of course we are. The newspapers are always telling us we’re heading for one. And yet, here we still are.

Maybe there should be a siren

What is it about Americans and fridge doors? What sort of weirdos just leave them open when they’ve taken something out and close the door eventually as an afterthought? Weird.

Education on-going

How do you spell the Welsh for Wales? I wondered when confronted with a crossword clue.
    They don’t have spelling in Wales, I was assured. Just collections of consonants stuck together in a fairly random order.
    Which explains a lot.

Sounds reasonable

A cottage hospital – is the same as a dolls’ hospital only for cottages? A thought that struck me whilst watching the Midsomer Murders on Saturday evening.

Heil Profit!

“We have a responsibility to make The Planet a better place to live in”, the TV ad tells us piously. Then the hard sell starts for an inferior electric car, which costs more than a car using hydrocarbon fuel and has a very limited range. So much for responsibility.

Torture for the millions

Good grief! What did they do to America The Beautiful and the Fredonian national anthem at the Super Bowl last night!

Mind on the job

Bit of a come-down for the Pro Bowl – Hawaii to Vegas. But if they manage to hold it next year, maybe the players will be able to focus on the job in hand instead of lounging about on a beach. As long as they’re not worried that their WAG is blowing a few of their millions in a casino.

A modern dilemma

Dear Ask-A-Guru, the Super Bowl is on 2 different TV channels. Should I record both of them in case they have different scripts with different winners?
    Dear Client, better to be safe than sorry.

Well, they are trying

“In the dead centre of the Island of Relevancy”. Full marks for coming up with something rather good to the WW scriptwriter. 0/10 for relevancy to the real world, though!

No box left unrecycled

Remembering there’s a world shortage of cardboard due to all the online deliveries, they must have scoured the whole of Florida to fill the Tampa Bay stadium with an artificial crowd to bulk up the real one yesterday.

Sad but true

It’s difficult to see how rugby players with dementia symptoms can extract cash from the rugby league authorities. They chose to play the game. No one held a gun on them. The legal trade lining its pockets again?

Different strokes

Apparently, some people are keeping their Xmas lights on until lock-in ends and others are doing it until everyone there has been vaccinated.

They all do it, apparently

I note that Garfield, the cartoon cat in the Daily Mail, has walking on the keyboard of his slave Jon’s laptop on his to-do list. So it’s not just something the Mansion cat does to get my attention.

p.s. Garfield has a laptop. Does Jon ever walk on his keyboard to get his own back? Fair’s fair.

Make up your own story

“Designer worn by Meghan” caught my eye whilst recycling old newspapers. Which left me wondering if an association with the hate figure Meghan makes the designer’s alleged crime more serious or it’s another pop at her.

Out of mind

Did I clap for Sir Tom Moore on Wednesday? No – mainly because I didn’t know we were supposed to. And neither did anyone else @ the Mansion. We seem to be finding the outside world fairly irrelevant during lock-ins.

 

Their choice

Members of ethnic minorities are more at risk from the Chinese plague than the rest of us but they’re refusing to have a vaccination because they were developed in countries where there is a white majority and they were tested mainly on white people.
    Here’s another to add to institutional and structural racism; suicidal racism!

Experimenters’ paradise

Virologists must be having a great time these days, mixing doses of different vaccines just to see what happens. It would be nice to think that all this experience will let them do in the next killer plague in a couple of months. Sadly, life ain’t like that.

Ow! Ow!

I’m thinking of changing my name to Claude. There’s nothing like letting a cat sleep on your lap for getting your knees Monet.

A bit of a strain

There was an episode of Poirot on last night featuring a wasps' nest. These days, sod the humans, but there’d be a caption saying no rotten horrible wasps were harmed in the making of this epic.
    And were we really supposed to believe that the bloke who tried to destroy the nest didn’t notice it was tap water in his can, not petrol? Really?

Varied Entertainment

Poor old Edge of the WW. He looks like the ghost of the ghost of Xmas past. Alexa would have to be twins to do those quick changes on a real live show. Shame the VEINS bloke hasn't been binned. Apex pain in the backside.

Get out of that!

Online order to Postscript Books placed on Tuesday. I was told it would get Hermes 3-5 day delivery. Imagine my surprise when it arrived on Thursday. Well done both firms.

A dead giveaway

Had a phone call from a woman with an Indian accent. She claimed she was from BT and she wanted to protect me from scam calls ‘for the rest of my life’.
    She got quite annoyed when I refused to tell her the name of my bank on personal data protection grounds. Mainly because my phone service isn’t from BT.

What a difference a day makes

On Monday, it was sunny and quite light still @ 5 p.m. and I was thinking the days really are getting longer. Yesterday; rain, gloomy and back to dark at the end of the afternoon. Oh, well.

Good grief!

How desperate would you have to be to spend your afternoon watching prehistoric, pre-widescreen episodes of Coronation Street? Does the scale go that far?

NOT helpful

Calling the old, original plague ‘classic covid’ when writing about a mutant strain makes it sound almost desirable, like a classic car.

Pushing the envelope shamelessly

Something that caught my eye in the TV guide – there's a channel called Comedy Central and at 12 noon, the A-Team is on. What?!?!

Oh, Agatha!

A million dollars in Liberty Bonds going across the Atlantic on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary with Hercule Poirot in attendance. But the guy from the bank leaves the bonds in his cabin to be stolen while he plays cards with swindlers instead of the ship's strongroom?
    Credibility blown to shreds.

Another wonderful TV ad

“Flash! speed bonks!” -- the latest in quickie sex?

Confected disasters?

What is it that people like former BBC pounder John Humphreys do to their unfortunate computers which disables them regularly? I switch mine on, I use it and I switch it off. Day after day after month after year. And it works without needing any help from a teenage genius.

No great loss

The ‘researchers’ who have been confecting silly stories about Donald Trump, such as he’s been working for Putin the Poisoner for 40 years, are facing mass redundancies. No one is interested in silly stories about President Biden.

Why we’re in a deep hole

There’s something lacking in the world today – true grit. All we have instead is gangs of snoflakes whose instinct, on encountering adversity, is to give up, blame someone else and demand compensation. No wonder The Planet can’t wait for them to go extinct.

Everyone should have one

“Right, I’ll go and switch the Adolph on, see if any bugger has sent me any junk emails,” a friend said at the end of a phone conversation.
    “The Adolph?” I said, baffled.
    “Yeah, it’s yer actual Cockney rhyming slang; Adolph’s Hooter, computer.”
    Weird bunch, these Cockneys!

Things I didn’t know

Reading the biography of Charles Schulz at the end of a collection of his early Peanuts cartoons, I was baffled to read that they were comic-strip koans about the human condition. What? Turns out that koans are Zen Buddhist puzzles designed to make people think and the biographer was being cute.

Things you didn’t remember

DCI Tom Barnady’s successor and relative used to be an unrelated Jack-the-lad gardener and murder suspect in The Garden of Death case of Midsomer Murders. And he was looking rather raddled and unsmooth back then.

Sense of proportion wonky

Someone needs to mention to Andy Murray’s mum that there’s a world of difference between 94% of UK residents saying they’ve consumed some alcohol in the last year and a nation of hopeless drunks.

Sympathetic vibrations?

Someone who’s had a first shot of the plague vaccine reported that his left upper arm felt sore a couple of days later. More so than the right arm that got the shot of vaccine!