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.