Yet Another Quaint Rural Custom

I had my first sight of the Croftend Lake this year. When I bought the Mansion, the estate agent did mention that an adjacent piece of land floods “every year” but assured me that my land is too high up ever to be under water. Croftend didn’t flood last year, but it has flooded rather well this year and the locals are celebrating by paddling about on it using bright-orange inflatable boats.

More Weather Fantasies

Yesterday, one of the staff came across a copy of the Daily Disaster from the last week in November. The paper was promising that we would have “the coldest winter for 100 years”. December, of course, has been mainly mild and wet, so it would be interesting if some weather expert to tell us how cold it will have to get in January and February of 2013 to make the prediction come true.

Life, but not as we know it, Jim

Despite being in deep trouble over the police Plebgate fit-up, and deeply unpopular with his staff, the boss of the Metropolitan Police, Hulk Hogan Hypen Howe, has been awarded a knighthood for his services to policing. Not because he deserves it but because it’s in his job description. Ain’t life wonderful!

Unexpected red stuff!

I’ve just had a very strange experience. I started typing, I realized that there was something soggy on one of my fingers and I saw red stuff on the “s”, “w” and “ctrl” keys. Then I spotted a small, front-to-back slit in the top of the third finger of my left hand. The puzzling thing is how I managed to cut myself between switching the computer on, letting it boot up and starting to type something given that there’s nothing with an obviously sharp edge anywhere in sight. It’s the sort of thing which would give my health & safety inspector nightmares – if I had one.

Customer unfriendly

Don’t you just hate firms which leave their phone system switched on as normal when the staff have skived off? One of my staff tried to ring an outfit called Bathing Solutions last Saturday. He got to the Service Dept. via a menu system and sat listening to a recorded message telling him his call would be answered as soon as possible until he realized that there was no bugger there.
     Same on Monday, Xmas Eve, no one there but Bathing Solutions didn’t have the courtesy to arrange a recorded message saying they weren’t there and informing customers with a breakdown when they might get a chance to talk to someone about getting it fixed.

Believe it or what!

Seen in the TV guide for yesterday: Bizarre ER: Featuring a man who accidentally barbeque’d his own buttocks!!! I think the “Really” channel deserves a question mark after its name!

So much for a non-political police force

The more you hear about the Plebgate (Plebs at the Gate?) affair, the more convinced you become that a gang of coppers fitted up the Tory chief whip with false statements and the top civil servant charged with an “investigation” didn’t, or couldn’t, do a proper job.
    I wouldn’t mind so much if it was equal opportunities fitting up by a police “service” brimming with diversity after 13 years’ training under new labour, but I can’t imagine these solid trade unionists doing it to a Labour chief whip.
    p.s. The boss of the Met., Mr. Hyphen-Howe, who didn’t cover himself with glory either, is up for a knighthood. Unless it can be deleted quickly.

Three Unwise Bozos?

How curious that 3 US Senators should complain about a film, which says information used to track down terrorist Osama bin Liner was obtained by torture, because they feel that the film will be factually inaccurate and misleading. Where have they been for the last century whilst Hollywood and its imitators have been rewriting history merrily and shamelessly? And usually to take the credit for British achievements.

Whoopee! We’re All Gonna Die!

It’s the Fin de Siècle of the Mayan Long Count today and the doom-mongers reckon we’ve had it. So look out your old Country Joe and the Fish LPs and play us out in style! Gimme and F! etc.

Alarmism In Action?

We were threatened with the Coldest Winter for a Century just a few weeks ago. Now, we’re in a mild spell with lots of rain and floods threatened. Is this another example of the Global Warming Swindlers at the Met. Office getting it wrong?

Lost touch completely

Dave the Leader is obsessed with same-sex marriage, which is a certain vote-loser. Meanwhile, Calamity Clegg is worried about multi-millionaire pensioners getting a free TV licence. Which adds up to about what? 6 people? 7 people? No wonder the country is still in the mess New Labour left it in.

Gone but still with a hand in our pockets

Over two million quid paid in hush money to a Libyan dissident who was handed over to the Gadaffy regime as part of a dirty deal done by Tony Blair, Abu Qatada getting the rent on his a half-million pound home paid for by the taxpayer because this spineless government won’t defy the authority conveyed to the ECHR by Blair’s New Labour gang, and Blair is raking in the dosh and living very high on the hog. Oh, for a revolution and a lamp post with a strong crossbar.

The slimy sleazeball!

Ed “The Wrong” Milibandit has sunk to a new low. He put an apology for New Labour’s total failure to control immigration in a speech, leaked it ahead of time to the news media, then didn’t actually read out the embarrassing apology when he did the speech. So now, he’s claiming he made the apology when he didn’t actually make it. How very New Labour.

One cheer for the police “service”

It’s not often that a copper gets a general “well done” these days because they seem to be either thugs or terminally PC, but the constabule who dared to invade a school nativity play in Surrey to tell the selfish parents to get their bloody cars off the pavement deserves a round of applause. Pity he’s not likely to go far in today’s police “service”, which frowns on initiative and common sense.

Always a doom-monger with a daft story

Now that fracking experiments are to continue, and doom-mongers are going on about methane coming out of the taps, someone has reminded us that the ancestors of the doom-mongers were saying that the North Sea would be drained (somehow) if the oil industry were to be allowed to operate there. Nothing like a spot of recycled doom before lunch.

It’s all about the dosh!

Why is Dave the Leader so eager for same-sex marriage? So the Treasury can collect £100 from pairs who went in for a civil partnership and now want to pretend they are married. New Labour left the country so broke that any old scam is worth a try!

Boot the Bulldog in the wallet at your peril!

Nothing like firing up the Great British Sense of Injustice to make a difference! Starbucks Coffee, doesn’t pay corporation tax, and Caffe Nero, ditto, are losing significant sales to Costa Coffee as the boycott of tax-dodgers takes effect.

H.M. The Queen embraces new technology

The big news of yesterday, after the death of Sir Patrick Moore, much-loved astronomer, was that Her Majesty will be doing her Xmas TV broadcast in 3D. Well, that should be a big thrill for the 8 people who have the technology and the inclination to tune in.

Definitely going to the dogs

When the great institutions crumble, the nation is doomed, runs the adage. Well, the police have gone down the slippery slope and it looks like the SAS is following the rest of the armed forces into contempt. We’re not normally allowed to know what the SAS is up to but the case of Sgt. Danny Nightingale did leak into the public domain. And now there’s an ex-SAS officer who has decided to sue the Metropolitan Police for arresting him with guns on the basis of non-existent evidence. Worse, he got zero support from the SAS Regiment. We’re definitely dog-fodder.

Zombie Tosh!

How do you prove we’re living in Zombie Britain? You assume that people have to change their job and where they live every 5 minutes, and if they stay in the same job and don’t move house, we’re stagnating and doomed and zombified. What a load of rubbish! What a self-fulfilling premise.

What goes around, comes around

I was amused to read the story of the self-publicizing cyclist who filmed himself being provocative toward motorists to get on TV, and who has now made a target of himself. The fun thing is that if someone does run him over, the police with have about 17 million suspects. Which should slow them down a bit!

You can’t help but laugh

Don’t you just love it when a politician gets to his feet intending to tell a big, black lie and accidentally shoots himself in the foot with the truth? And aren’t you glad it was Ed Ballsup who did it?

Unjust deserts

Someone else has gone to gaol for bashing a thief who, with 2 accomplices, was trying to steal quad bikes from his yard. Sometimes, the law is an ass and sometimes it’s interpreted by donkeys. And when you get a combination of the two, so much for justice.

Not me, mate!

So everyone in the country is expected to spend £10,000 per second today on hoovering up on-line bargains? Guess who’s going to be bucking the trend and not spending a single penny today. Because I can!

Stickability pays, but only a little in China

It’s amazing that the Chinese government let that couple in Wenling stay put whilst a motorway was built around them because they were offered £22,000 for a house which had cost them £60,000 to build. It’s rather sad that they had to accept a paltry £26,000. No doubt the difference vanished into some waxwork’s secret bank account. But at least they weren’t served tea laced with something radioactive and deadly, which seems to be the Russian government’s preferred solution for inconvenient people.

Never discard a dirty trick

One of the staff has pointed out the following to me:
The then prime minister, Tony B. Liar, took us to war in Iraq in 2003 on the lie that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction ready for use in 4-5 minutes. The Leveson Inquiry was launched by our current prime monster, Dave the Leader, on the strength of a false accusation in theGarudian against the now extinct News of the World.

Too well-mannered to get scarily angry?

How strange it is that the political creatures who are threatening to apply equality to laws to the Church of England to force it to make women into bishops aren’t doing the same to the management of other religions, e.g. Islam and Roman Catholicism. Maybe it’s time for the CoE to assert itself with an Inquisition or even some suicide bombers.

Wot cuts?

Next time some Chief Con. or Labour stooge starts banging on about “The Cuts”, try asking how the boss of the Metropolitan Police, Mr. Hogan-Hyphen-Howe, managed to blow £2,000,000 in just 6 weeks on “investigating” allegations of abuse made against the late J. Savile. Maybe he’s flying all the witnesses to be interviewed in a luxury custody suite at MickeyMouseland in Florida.

4x4 submarine

After the recent torrents of rain, our local rescue services have been begging drivers of Chelsea tractors to put their brain in gear before they do the same with their car. It seems that a lot of them think they can drive through anything, even stretches of flood that leave the top of the bonnet awash, and there are now lots of pictures on the Internet showing idiots who have come unstuck.

“The world, but not as we know it, Jim.”

3,400 Eurocrats are paid more than our prime monster – that’s paid not earn. A European Commission mouthpiece tried to justify this abuse by saying: “most of us are highly qualified professionals such as lawyers and economists”. But failed to explain why, with all these “professionals” in charge, 10% of the EU budget is lost to fraud, the auditors have refused to sign off on the EU’s accounts for 18 years in succession, and the whole system is rotten with corruption from top to bottom and a monument to wasted cash and opportunities.
No wonder most of the British electorate wants out.

Forward planning

The estate isn’t flooded but some neighbouring bits of land have vanished after the torrents of recent rain. Why’s that? Because my estate manager, whom I inherited from the previous owner, keeps our drains and ditches in good order and the local council neglects theirs. Possibly because its leaders think paying inflated salaries to an overblown town clerk and his minions, and what amounts to wages for councillors, is a better way to spend the Council Tax.

Lateral thinking

The attorney general – notoriously wet & weedy when it comes to dealing with unelected and unqualified Eurocrats – is allegedly worried that the EU court of ’uman rights will award compensation to criminals in British gaols if they don’t get the vote. In which case, our useless government needs to declare such payments “proceeds of crime” and confiscate them forthwith.

If only it were true!

The following is a quotation from an item on the SpaceDaily.com website today – with my italics:
   “The UK Space Agency is set to invest 1.2 pounds in some of Europe’s biggest and most lucrative space projects, providing the UK with increased leadership in a rapidly growing global sector and building on the British space industry’s 9.1 pounds contribution to the economy.”
    If only we could get away with dealing with the European monster so cheaply!!

Never the agent of his own misfortune

Lord Prescott of Jags blames damaging attacks in the newspapers for his failure to slide into a cushy number as a police commissioner. But 35 years of proving his uselessness at the taxpayer’s expense might also have something to do with it.

Is there no end to it?

The PCC elections might be over but that doesn’t stop the flow of cash going down the drain. The Electoral Commission is about to waste a few more millions on a pointless inquiry into the whole thing. But, of course, the public sector has to have its free lunches.

Just a reflex action

On the TV news: Israel shaping up to invade Gaza again and kill half the population. And then who pops up but Tony B. Liar. Zap! Off! I didn’t even wait to find out if he was doing his contribution from South America, where he seems to be bamboozling more cash out of politicians who think he can buy them popularity, or if he was anywhere near the Middle East, for which he’s supposed to be a peace envoy, although not much sign of that breaking out anytime soon.

Lessons no one will learn

The Police & Crime Commissioner elections contains lessons for the Coalition. Such as people want more democracy in areas that matter, like membership of the EU, and less waste on pointless frills. About the only bright spot in the waste of £75,000,000 is that 2-Jags Prescott didn’t get to bury his snout in the public-sector trough again.

Wonderful or just jammy?

Did the Serbic Swede score the greatest goal of all time against England? Hardly. His bicycle kick was just a boot at an unseen target that happened to go in – and he wouldn’t be able to do it again in a month of Sundays.

Nice to see they’re getting the job done

We have a government powerless to get rid of terrorists who are living off the taxpayer (along with their lawyers), we have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who thinks rewriting the law on marriage to include same-sex couples (or maybe even trios or more?) is more important than fixing the economy that New Labour ruined, we have ex-Labour MP M. Moran getting away with stealing £53,000 because she’s too depressed (about being caught?) to go to court to be gaoled or even fined and the berko in charge of appointing the MPs’ expenses watchdog is trying to stuff it full of expenses swindlers and stooges. Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?

Posturing Ankle-Biters

International companies avoid paying UK corporation tax with legal dirty deals, so what happens? Some stooge is hauled into the House of Commons to be moaned at and called immoral by members of an institution packed with thieves and expenses swindlers. All that happens is that the MPs get a chance to do some posturing but they actually achieve nothing at all. Which is just what we have come to expect.

Business as usual

The new D.G. of the BBC screws up after 2 months and heads off into the sunset with half a million quid of licence-payers’ cash and a fat pension pot. And, no doubt, he’ll be in some other overpaid public-sector non-job when the dust dies down a bit. How cosy things are in the leftie-luvvie world.

The Labour “not me gov” noises are deafening

The Director General of the BBC has been forced to resign for being useless – no doubt the fiasco of Prof. Cox and the foul-mouthed aliens had a lot to do with it – and former Labour ministers from the era of the Blair regime’s sexed up Iraq dossier are oozing out of the woodwork to say the present mess, which the BBC created with its false accusations of assaults on juveniles, is far worse than their mess, which involved taking the country to war on a deliberate lie and getting thousands of people killed.
And, of course, the BBC’s cohort of lefties is buying the party line. Hypocrisy will never go out of fashion.

Scrabbling for evidence

Having charged 5 Marines with murdering an Afghan terrorist, the government has suddenly realized that it doesn’t have a body. Which is why 120 soldiers, plus assorted CSIs and MPs, are currently lurking in the tribal badlands, looking for the body of someone whose name they don’t know – and who might not even be dead.

Bozo Broadcasting Company?

“You couldn’t make it up” to quote Mr. Littlejohn of the Daily Wail, but it seems the BBC wouldn’t let Prof. Brian Cox point a radio telescope at a newly discovered planet during a live broadcast on health & safety grounds. The Beeb was actually worried that the aliens would pick that exact moment to start effing and blinding – and in a language a British TV audience would be able to understand!

Blubbing his way to victory!

Just back from a quick trip across the pond. President O’Bummer is reported to have burst out crying before the result of the US presidential election was announced at the thought of himself in the job for 4 more years.
After the result was confirmed, 49% of the population also burst into tears for the same reason.

Non-essentials of modern life

Never bought a takeaway cappuccino or latte? Check.
Never watched the X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing or any TV soap? Check.
Never been to a karaoke evening never mind sung at one? Check.
Never been skiing? Check.
Never been to a McDonald's, Starbuck’s, etc.? Check.
Never done FaceTube or Ubook? Check.

When in doubt, resort to blackmail

The government has decided that the taxpayer isn’t going to pay out infinite amounts of benefits to maintain New Labour’s dependency client culture. But councils in London are trying to subvert the intention by pretending to ship all their poor people off to Wales, the North-East of England and other cheaper places to live in the hope that there will be an outcry and lots of cash for them. How very cynically New Labour!

Conspiracy theory going bust

The people who investigate UFO sightings are thinking of going out of business. They were expecting a flood of new sightings and hard evidence when access to the internet became widespread. But UFO sightings have dropped to a trickle over the last 25 years and all but a handful can be explained right away. So the UFOlogists are now ready to admit that maybe Little Green Men of Mars aren’t visiting us after all.

All flash and no substance

Have you seen that advert in which a bloke dives through the open doors of a car clamped on its side over a pool? The music is Hawkwind’s Silver Machine but what colour is the car? Oh, dear, credibility shot to shreds.

The way forward?

Following on from their triumph in the Commons over demanding a cut in the EU budget, the eurosceptics should be turning their attention to some unfinished business. When he was an advisor to Gordon Broon’s Treasury, Eddie Balls was involved in giving up part of Britain’s Thatcher rebate from the EU in return for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. As the CAP reform didn’t happen (and was never going to happen), the eurosceptics should now be agitating for repayment of all the money that the UK lost to this dirty deal and demanding an apology from Balls.

Some life left?

It was encouraging to see some Tories go along with a stunningly hypocritical Labour motion on telling the European Union’s greedy bureaucrats to get stuffed. Yes, a reduction in the budget until they can get the accounts approved by auditors – something which hasn’t happened for 17 years – is an excellent idea. Not that Common Europe is known as a home of excellent ideas. But the good thing to come out of it was signs of integrity and grit in a Tory party which has let the other lot get away with far too much.

Good idea, wrong reason

The new Tory energy minister has upset the Liberals by calling a halt to on-shore wind farms, which have been strewn around the country willy-nilly. He reckons they are giving other “green” projects a bad name and no one is listening to the complaints from people whose environment is blighted. But he doesn’t seem to have address the real issue of wind farms being built to generate subsidies in areas where the wind doesn’t blow much.
p.s. Further to my comments on 25th October, I have now finished Bad Boy by Peter Robinson and the tasering to death by a copper of an innocent pensioner in his own home is swept under the carpet, as it would be in real life.

Side-stepping a shambles

The previous owner of the Mansion was smart enough to get rid off the ash trees in 2009, when the members of the Horticultural Trades Association began to issue warnings. Knowing that New Labour would do nothing, and remembering the shambles over foot & mouth in 2001, he had them rooted out and replaced with a range of other species. Wise move!

What’s up with that?

There’s nothing wrong with a referee calling a footballer a “Spanish t**t” – it’s merely a descriptive label which distinguishes the player in question from the other t**ts on the pitch.

A weird bunch

Just had a first sight of candidates for our police commissioner, who will have to sit down with the police and create a plan of action, and oversee the police budget. Some of them have had top management experience, some experience with the police (e.g. by being one) and the courts (e.g. by being a magistrate), and some are just party hacks who have nothing much to offer but a party logo and the usual meaningless slogans.

Are some getting the message?

Girl who bashed a burglar with a cricket bat not charged with attempted murder!! Are some police officers finally getting the message that wilful stupidity on their part reduces their effectiveness in a society policed by consent?

What do the “experts” know!

According to the “experts”, people get grumpier in winter because of the longer nights. The “experts” think people go to bed earlier and get up later, and so spend lots of hours awake and wishing they could get to sleep. What utter tosh. Most people go to bed and get up in the morning to the same weekly pattern all the year round. So the increased grumpiness is just make-believe.

You can’t say we weren’t warned

I have just started Bad Boy – one of the Chief Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. Early in chapter 2, we learn that a copper tasered an elderly man in his own home because he thought his walking stick was a sword. The book was published in 2010. Naturally, the victim of the assault has a dodgy heart and dies for greater dramatic effect. But the Chorley Tasering on October 18th was clearly art translating to real life . I’m now waiting to find out if the police assassin gets the sack or it all gets whitewashed over, as in real life.

You just can’t win!

Our local eco-entrepreneurs have set up a badger reserve and they were planning to charge a fortune for offering shelter to badgers in peril of being culled. But the rotten government has gone and called it off until next year and done them out of an absolute fortune. Such is life.

Another money trail

We’re never going to hear the end of the Savile scandal now the lawyers have got some of the alleged victims to sue for damages. They’ll be getting cash, one way or another, even if their clients struggle to “prove” they have victim status, even by the lax standards of the civil courts.

New slogan – now, back it up!

The Tory party is now seeking to rebrand itself as the party of “Strivers, not Skivers”. Well, at least it’s a slogan which E. Milipede won’t be able to nick without generating universal derision.
p.s. No sign of Mr. M. doing anything about the rented home swindlers in his party’s ranks.

So, weird is actually normal?

Britain has enjoyed its weirdest spell of weather ever over the last few months, and the BBC has actually admitted that there is no evidence that it’s a result of Man-made climate change. Apparently, it’s just stuff that happens from time to time. Always has and always will. Is the fallout from the Savile Sleaze actually forcing the BBC into a rare spell of honest reporting?

Bye-ee!

Are we sorry to see the departure of A. Mitchell, friend of despots, donor of British taxpayers’ cash to despots, and general blot on the landscape? Not a bit of it. Do we give Eddie-baby Milipede any credit for the bozo’s departure? Not a bit of it. Now, the next one to go should be the stroppy copper who wouldn’t let him ride his bike through the Downing Street gate.

Watch out!

Anyone who has to go to Chorley in Lancashire should be on their guard. That taser-happy copper is still walking the streets and, no doubt, he’ll be one of the first to get the new, double-action tasers when they’re introduced.

The Law is a thug

A blind man was tasered in Chorley last Friday evening by a copper who thought his white cane was a samurai sword. The short-sighted copper concerned hasn’t been arrested or even suspended, which tells you everything you need to know about the Lancashire constabulary.
BTW: The tasered victim, who ended up in hospital, is lucky it didn’t happen in Cheshire because he’d have been pepper-sprayed there as an involuntary extra.

Sad but true

Gary McKinnon proved that the Pentagon had a computer system which could be hacked by any UFO obsessive. In a fair and decent society, he would have been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for service to the American people and the Yanks would have sacked everyone responsible for installing the omnishambles computer system. But fair play and decency don’t really count for much any more.

Sack the both of them!

The usual suspects are still droning on about what abuse the Chief Whip, A. Mitchell, hurled at a jobsworth copper, who refused to let him ride his bike through the Downing Street gate, which he had already used several times previously that day. The solution is obvious. Mitchell is clearly an appalling person, so he should be sacked. And the copper should be sacked for the same reason.

Excuse us if we don’t pay for it.

The courts are allowing admitted members of a Kenyan terrorist gang to sue the British government for compensation. Fine, I have no problem with that. Subject to a couple of conditions:
1. No legal aid funds from the British taxpayer should be made available for the case; the terrorists and their supporters should pay for the entire trial; and
2. No compensation should be paid to the terrorists, any award made by the courts should go to the victims of the terrorists’ gang.

After you, Claud.

The government has agonizing over putting British Royal Marines on trial for the alleged murder of an insurgent in Afghanistan. No agonizing was required. The government should go ahead with a prosecution; but only after – say 12 months after – regular trials of insurgents begin in Afghanistan and those responsible for bombings and murders start to receive appropriate sentences. If there is justice, it must be for all and it should always begin with those who cause the problem in the first place.

It’s always the cover-up that counts

200 coppers are being investigated over the Hillsborough disaster. Okay, the fans who were crushed to death are innocent of any wrong-doing, but it wasn’t police officers who barged their way into crowded enclosures with the result that people at the other end were crushed to death.

When will they get round to the real villains?

They’ve outed Jimmy Savile, Lance Armstrong has been stitched up good and proper, but when are they going to start on the likes of Tony Blair and his cronies? The ones who got thousands of people killed?

That’s a big help!

Don’t you just hate it when that screen comes up with a message saying Internet Explorer has hit a problem and will close down for your customer convenience, and Windows is looking for a solution to the problem. Then, after Windows has faffed around for a while, you get a message saying there is no solution to the problem, hard luck. Having a program that keeps crashing is bad enough, but pretending they can do something about it really rubs salt into the wound.

Thanks, but no thanks

The staff have been dropping hints, suggesting that I should run for leader of the Labour party as I live in a mansion, like Red Eddy Miliband. But I have countered by pointing out the lack of caviar and communist luvvies at my Mansion.
p.s. It's like something out of Monty Python: Captain Hook having his hook removed in a New York court because prisoners aren't allowed to have offensive weapons!

Good Riddance

So Captain Hook is finally on his way to the United States to face terrorism charges. Maybe the government should be considering charges against the lawyers who enriched themselves and the luvvies who approved legal aid for the Cap’n and his fellow suspects.

Probably

Seen in today’s Daily Disaster: someone wanting to know if anyone has calculated the carbon footprint of a Grand Prix. Given that it would be a total waste of time and effort, you can be sure that some academic on the Global Warming Swindlers’ payroll will have done it.

Let’s see if I’ve got this right . . .

It’s okay for leftie plebs to rant about “posh boys” and “toffs” because they don’t know any better, but it’s nokay for a jumped-up toff chief whip to call a pleb a pleb because you’d expect a toff to have the good manners not to remind plebs of their bottom-feeder status in society? Okay.

More tax & waste

Before Calamity Clegg starts grabbing even more money from the taxpayer, it might be an idea to stop the government wasting a large proportion of the money it’s getting now thanks to casual management and an attitude of “it’s only taxpayers’ money and there’s always plenty more of it.”

Storm in a teaspoon

The government is in crisis because a chief whip with a sense of entitlement as big as all outdoors swore at an obstructive, jobsworth copper, who wouldn’t open a gate for him? So does that mean all the serious problems; the economy, the lights going out because we don’t have enough power stations that work, the EU, etc.; have all gone away?

Surprise!!

I’m back from a short holiday somewhere sunny and exclusive to the news that our revered Prime Monster’s survey to find out what makes people happy has come up with an answer. The Office for National Statistics, which is supposed to do serious stuff like unemployment and inflation figures, has found that the more money people have, the happier they are. And wasted a big pile of taxpayers’ money in the process, no doubt.

Always someone on your back

Mitt Romney is in trouble for saying that he’s not interested in the 50% (or so) of American voters who don’t pay Federal Taxes because he doesn’t think they’ll ever take responsibility for their own lives. The revelation isn’t going to bring much comfort to the 50% of American voters who pay all the taxes, as both sides seem to be telling them that things are never going to get any better for them.

Any old excuse for a riot

“Thousands of suicide bombers are ready to give up their lives for the Prophet,” said a Taliban mouthpiece. Is it possible to respect Talibanism if it involves strapping explosives to people driven mad by their propaganda? And, apparently, the film which is being used as an excuse for rioting, arson and murder was lurking unnoticed on the Internet until some Islamist looking for offence stumbled across it. Talk about entirely self-inflicted wounds.

Just a thought . . .

I was looking at some Matt Olympics cartoons, which one of the staff had snipped out of the Daily & Sunday Telegraphs, and I started wondering. If it was right-on leftie Labour policy to abolish competitive sports, what were Tony Blair & Co. doing, inflicting an Olympic Games on us? Did they not get how anti their “rewards for all” culture it would be?

Things you didn’t particularly care to know No. 72

If you stow away in the landing gear of an airliner, you have only a 25% chance of reaching your destination alive.

Doing what comes naturally

There has to be a panic about something – that’s the rule today. A while ago, it was a panic that there would not be enough university places for everyone who wanted to plunge into debt. Now, having shoved their prices up, the universities find that they have lots of spare places. So, PANIC!!

Good for the BBC

The mutterings have died down somewhat after the fans found that the BBC iPlayer coverage of Monday Night Football works very well; and you can strap a PC to a flat screen TV if you want a BIG picture. The Raiders and Chargers fans are happy (Chargers fans happier because of the win) but the Bengals and Ravens fans are still waiting for the Beeb to make their match available. I gather that there needs to be someone standing by at the PC to drag the progress slider along at the breaks. That gets a 3-hour programme down by half an hour or so.

Calm down, guys!

There has been a lot of muttering among the staff about how difficult it is to find out who’s going to show the new season of American football and when it will be on. Apparently, Sky was pratting about with a deal right up to the last minute, with the result that the Sky Sports schedules in the TV listings magazines are up the creek. And the TV schedule on the Sky website is full of blank spaces, even though the menus on digital TV show complete programme lists. Sky would have us believe that it “believes in better”. From the mutterings around the mansion, it would have to try real hard to do any worse!

Perception is all

The time is what you think it is, not what it actually is. I looked at the clock on the wall beyond my monitor yesterday and asked myself if I had time to do something. “It’s not five o’clock yet,” I realized. So I worked away and worked away, and when I looked at the clock again, it was still only a couple of minutes before five. But my watch said five to six and the second hand of the clock was jerking at about twenty to the hour. Dead battery syndrome. And suddenly, it was later than I thought.

Bunch of chancers!

I see some Italians have got up a petition to demand that the French hand over the Mona Lisa portrait just because it spent a little time on show in the Uffizi gallery in Florence after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. So, according to these Eyeties, if you put a stolen painting on public display, it automatically becomes yours? Sounds like they’ve been left out in the Mediterranean sun for a while too long!

Re-education needed urgently

So Judge Bowers is being “investigated” for telling a court that burglars are courageous and jolly fine fellows, and shouldn’t be sent to gaol? No doubt he’ll escape without even a token slap on the wrist when he really needs to be made to go on a course – at his own expense – to teach him that showing off and attention seeking is inappropriate for a senior member of the legal trade.

A man of his word? Which one?

The prime minister thinks we’ll be impressed when he says he’s not going back on his promise not to have a 3rd runway for Heathrow. But we already know his promises are pretty worthless – the referendum on EU membership, etc. – so what makes him think anyone expects him to stick to his guns if it becomes convenient to break this promise, too?

And we know who’s to blame

The ’Elf & Safety Executive is moaning about a Cotton Wool Culture, which is eroding children’s freedom to play outdoors. As it was the ’Elf & Nazi gang which insisted that kids have to wear crash helmets and goggles to play conkers, and ripped all the climbing frames and roundabouts out of playgrounds, maybe wholesale sackings at their department would cure the problem.

Human rights for criminals only?

Terrorists, murderers and all sorts of foreign criminals are living off the British taxpayer because the courts say deporting them would infringe their ’uman bloody right to a family life. So why is the Home Office okay with chucking out John Tulloch, a university lecturer in his 70s, who has British parents and who was blown up on the Tube in July 2005? Could the Home Secretary’s decision to deny him the right to a family here be anything to do with his being white and respectable?

He made it look so easy!

Has Jenson Button lost it? Not on today’s form in the Belgian Grand Prix. Give him a car that works and he’ll drive away from everyone. Especially if some head-banger has a rush of blood at turn one in a race and takes out the hottest competition! Nice one, Jenson.

More hands in your pocket

Part of the job market is surging, so good news for the government? Not really, councils are employing lots more traffic wardens to screw stealth taxes out of motorists using parking regulations and other traffic laws.

Sasquatcharan Tragedy

It’s difficult to feel sympathy for the bloke in Montana, who tried to “startle” motorists by leaping out at them dressed as Big Foot – only to be run over and killed by successive close encounters with 2 teenage girl drivers.

The mind boggles. Again!

According to today’s Daily Disaster, NASA going to beam some rapper’s song “through the speakers of the Curiosity robot rover”, even though there’s no one on the planet to hear it. Sounds like NASA has fallen foul of some fast-talking spiv, who gave them such a great deal on the (totally useless) speakers that they were unable to say no.

A nice day out?

What do the Essex police do when they’re bored on a Sunday afternoon? Go on a lion hunt with helicopters and guns. So does the chief constable expect anyone to take him seriously the next time he pleads poverty and goes on about Tory cuts?
    p.s. The “lion” hunt was called off when the coppers decided that someone had seen a big pussy cat and over-reacted.

Where’s the proof? 2

Lance Armstrong hasn’t failed a drug test, so some guy, who hopes to get himself noticed by trashing the man who got the Tour de France noticed internationally, has assembled a gang of proven drug cheats to say Armstrong was one of them. So all the sensation isn’t about truth, justice and clean sport, it’s just some nobody trying to get noticed? Figures.

Where’s the proof?

Did Lance Armstrong used banned drugs and medical treatments to win 7 Tours de France? If he did, we’re entitled to an explanation from the US Anti-Doping Agency of how he managed to take hundreds and hundreds of random screening tests over many years and pass every single one of them.

A global firestorm? Pur-lease!

Bad photos of Prince Harry naked on the Internet? Well, that will keep the dirty deal they’re cooking up to keep Greece in the eurozone off the front pages for a while.

Whichever way you turn, they’ve got you

You start thinking you’ve heard it all and it’s time for Scotty to beam you up when you read that a bloke, who was talked into making a bogus whiplash claim by a firm of ambulance-chasers, is being pursued by them for damages because he backed out in a fit of honesty.

Hang on a minute . . .

“Paying more than £188?” (for car insurance) “20% of new customers paid less.” That’s what the car insurance advert in today’s Daily Disaster assured me. Which means that 80% paid more. So not very good odds of getting a better deal from this outfit, then?

What really caused the eurozone crisis?

Surprisingly, according to the BBC (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16290598), it was all down to the private sector borrowing recklessly when interest rates were low due to southern European countries joining the euro. And it was nothing at all to do with the governments of these southern European lying about their financial health, and the northern European countries ignoring the lies. Which leaves me wondering if the BBC is using Gordon Brown, the man who never made a crazy decision (apart from selling off Britain’s gold, and recklessly spending the money he got from stealth taxes), as a financial advisor.

Hottest weekend of the year? Really?

Apparently, a temperature reading of 32 and a half degrees at Cavendish in Suffolk makes yesterday the hottest day of the year so far. In Cavendish, which is hardly the centre of the universe. As it was cloudy and the temperature was around 10 degrees lower where we are, pardon us for not sharing the excitement.

So what does it have to do with us?

The geniuses in charge of the Metropolitan police are spending £50,000 per day on a platoon of coppers, who have surrounded the Ecuadorian embassy in London to arrest an Australien self-publicist and trouble maker if he dares to show his nose so that he can be extradited to Sweden and then be passed on to the United States, which wants to gaol him for a million years. He’s in the embassy only because Equador’s communist regime wants to wave two fingers at Uncle Sam, and the British taxpayer is expected to shove hundreds of thousands of pounds into the pockets of the legal trade to finance all this fun. Why do the morons running our country let things like this happen?

Pull the other one

What does everyone associate with Manchester? Rain. I happened to be there on business yesterday after seeing a warning of gales and torrential downpours on the weather forecast the day before. Okay, so it was bit windy, but not much. And in the afternoon, it went rather dark for a brief downpour. But nothing dramatic. So I suspect the awful warning was just the Met Office’s global warming agenda booting reality into touch again.

Ghost town time?

“Keep out of London for the Games” was the message Mayor Boris was pushing before they began, and the newspaper pictures of empty shopping streets confirmed that people got it. Now, I’m wondering if the people who used to go to London have realized that going there was just a bad habit and they don’t really need to do it in the future.

Is it over yet?

Here at the Mansion, indifference to the Olympics is, surprisingly, almost universal. There is a room, with a highly illegal set of Olympic rings on the door, for the benefit of hopeless addicts, but it has never been exactly packed out with cheering throngs. And with any luck, we should be able to return it to its previous purpose without having the Olympics Police battering the front door down to arrest anyone caught using an Olympic symbol without a licence.

You can’t win; but maybe you’re not supposed to!

On the one hand, Surrey police will beat you up and arrest you for not grinning at Olympic events. On the other hand, the Kommisar of the BBC reckons we’re enjoying them too much, especially when a British competitor wins a medal. Don’t you just wish the people in charge would make their bloody minds up?

The world agrees!

Standard Chartered’s shares fell in the wake of the NYDFS allegations but London Mayor Boris Johnson has fired off a counter-strike: he has accused the NY authorities of attacking a British bank out of naked self-interest and jealousy. And the bank’s assertion that Americans have no right to tell the rest of the world not to do business with Iran is also fuelling a backlash against the NYDFS and it seems to be helping to rebuild the SC share price.

Scare-mongering on an EPIC scale

The hysterical New York Department of Financial Services is accusing the Standard Chartered bank of laundering £16 BILLION of Iranian cash. SC is admitting to by-passing US sanctions on just £9 MILLION. So we're dealing with a HUGE credibility gap and, methinks, the Yanks do protest too much.

C’est quoi, ça?

The French are an odd lot. They were gloating, early on in the Olympics, because they had more gold medals than us. But now that the positions have been reversed, they’re busy accusing our cyclists of having “magic wheels”. What??!!

You can’t win by being a bozo

Surprise! It’s unBritish to treat the National Anthem as a sing-along. So anyone who stands in respectful silence is doing the right thing. But if the silence is to say “I’m Not English” or “I’m doing this to be naughty”, then the person doing it is a poseur and deserves to have bottles ‘n’ bricks hurled at them.

Have they nothing better to do?

The staff at The Mansion have been intrigued by the tale of a former SAS soldier, who won a buttock from Saddam Hussein’s toppled statue in 2003, and tried to auction it off last October. The buttock failed to meet its reserve price.
    Three months later, the ex-soldier was arrested after what passes for a government in Iraq demanded their “cultural property” back. A couple of days ago, the Derbyshire police gave up on trying to take the ex-soldier to court.
     So if you ever hear the police moaning about lack of resources, start wondering if the money they’ve spent has gone on anything useful.

More but less

Further to my comments about ING Direct (28th July), the Coventry building society is extending the bonus on its Poppy Online Saver account; but the new interest rate will go down from 3.15% to 2.8% and the bonus will last for 9 months instead of 12. So it looks like the banks and building societies are getting in a bit of stinginess in anticipation of the Bank of England base rate dropping below 0.5%. It’s a clear case of: “Screw the customers, they don’t have a better hole to go to!”

Something amazing!

Well! The Olympics do produce the odd surprise! Like a Chinese team playing to lose to fix their ranking in a group and doing it so badly that they got themselves disqualified. Along with two South Korean teams and a pair of Indonesians, who saw what the Chinese were doing and also tried to lose. Chinese teams trying to trying to make sure they don’t meet each other in the next round sure ain’t sport, but they’re used to getting away with it, apparently. Until now.

Same old, same old

Every time I pick up a paper, it’s full of new tragedies and broken dreams for Britain’s athletes. And pictures of more empty seats. And empty streets in central London because the civil service is “working” from home and woebegone tales of traffic chaos have scared off the visitors. Yet another aspect of the legacy of Tony B. Liar (and his missus). I bet the French are laughing their heads off. Still, we shouldn’t have to bother ourselves with bidding for another Olympics for twenty-odd years. Not that this minor consideration will stop the usual suspects demanding taxpayers’ cash for smooching the Olympics Mafia.

Believe it, or what?

Another curiosity from the Olympics World: we’re invited to believe that an athlete dropped his bronze medal in the shower, it broke and the rotten sons running the Olympics won’t give him another. But who takes an Olympic medal into the shower? And bronze is tough stuff; it doesn’t shatter like glass. Which leaves me wondering who’s making up this stuff to pad out the adverts in the newspapers?

Status confirmed – attendance not required

Typical, innit? The Olympics freebie squad – they know who they are – would kick up a real fuss if they didn’t get free tickets, and then they can’t be bothered to turn up on the day, leaving events full of banks of empty seats.

What do you expect from people who do only a fortnight’s work every 4 years?

I watched some of the Olympic bike race yesterday and I was surprised at how bad the coverage was compared to what ITV 4 did for the Tour de France. No time-gap info most of the time, and no sense of what was happening up and down the course.
p.s. One of the staff found out that the Olympic Broadcasting Service was in charge of the fiasco, not the BBC.

Getting there, but not quite

One of the staff had an interesting letter from ING Direct the other day. He is on his second bonus saving account with them, having closed the first one when the bonus ran out and the interest rate dropped to 0.5%. This time, they’re offering to keep the bonus going for another year to give him a 2-year deal – presumably, because it’s cheaper to hang on to an existing customer rather than to keep closing accounts after 12 months and opening new ones. The only snag is that they’re offering an APR of 3% when their current bonus account pays 3.24% and The Coventry pays 3.25%. So ING might just find they’re short of the mark by a quarter percent.

Brains well hidden

In January 2010, a guy whose local airport was closed by snow did a tweet saying he was going to blow it up if the operators didn’t get their act together. The boneheads at Doncaster magistrate’s court decided it was “a message of a menacing character” in May 2010 and slapped a fine plus costs on the prisoner at the bar. In November 2010, a crown court judge and a brace of magistrates dismissed his appeal, saying that the tweet was “clearly menacing”. It has taken until today, two and a half years after the event, for the Lord Chief Justice and a pair of judges to decide that the lower courts were talking tripe and allow another appeal.
     Which leaves us with two possible conclusions: 1. Everyone associated with the court system and the Can’t Prosecute Service up to the rank of crown court judge is an idiot; or 2. The system really is all about cramming dosh into the pockets of everyone associated with the courts, no matter how flimsy the pretext for doing so.

The Devil made me do it!

North Korea’s female footballers storm off the pitch when South Korea’s flag appears on a giant screen at the ground. Given all the checks that go on for these occasions, it invites the speculation that it was done deliberately. “This will annoy the buggers! I know I shouldn’t do it, but, what the hell? I just can’t resist it.” Could happen.

Why I got a tattoo at 170

Why the wife of former Liberal leader Sir D. Steel did it is obvious – she did it to get herself noticed and get her name in the papers. And the only cause for wonder is whether it is particularly ladylike to go in for this type of self-decoration.

Surprise! We’re good for something!

Our barmy bikers have won gold medals at the Olympics and world championships, but it takes a win in the Tour de France to put them on the map. So that’s Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome scoring a British 1-2 in the race and Mark Cavendish taking the sprint finish in his customary fine style. And even Jenson Button getting 2nd in the German Grand Prix because Vettel broke the rules. Oh, well, back to real life and strikers vowing to shut down the whole country as the Olympics loom.

One set of rules for all?

The world waits with bated breath. A German driver in the German Grand Prix broke the rules to gain an unfair advantage. Will he suffer a penalty, as would have happened in seconds if Lewis Hamilton had been involved, or will he get away with it because he’s not British?

Posturing for Britain!

Man of the people Davy Boy Cameron reckons he will be going to work on the Tube during the Olympics and none of his ministers can use a chauffeur-driven car and the VIP-lanes to get to the Games. If they want to go, they’ll have to use a bus or a train “like everybody else”. So if you can’t get on your usual mode of public transport because it’s full of armed ministerial guards, that’s why.

I vote the latter

“It’s a humiliating shambles, yes or no?”
(1) Someone getting to the truth of failure of G4S to fulfil its Olympics contract or (2) a bullying Labour MP trying to get himself noticed and on TV with a cute sound-bite?

What good did it do?

I happened to catch a BBC advert yesterday. Panorama was outing a couple who had dumped used tyres instead of recycling them and shot off to Mallorca with £15,000 profit. We were expected to be impressed by some clown of a reporter and his cameraman harassing the male perpetrator, who just ignored them and shot off in his car. So how was that not a total waste of licence-payers’ cash?

Broken and disconnected society

Schoolkids in Barnsley have been given lessons in which swear word to use in a particular situation. Which tends to reinforce the conclusion that schools will do anything to avoid teaching their charges the 3 Rs. Even worse, despite a deluge of complaints, the local council is denying there were any at all.
      “What did you learn at school today, son?”
       “Appropriate Swearing and Dishonesty, Dad.”
       “Getting you ready for a job in the public sector, eh?”

No chance of a refund, though

The Olympic geniuses (on time, on budget – well, wheels coming off and four times over the original budget) paid G4S the best part of 300 million quid to hire security guards for the Games. Result: gangs of school leavers are got the bag and body searches gig, and half the army in Afghanistan has been recalled to plug the gaps G4S failed to fill. So it would appear that G4S stands for Good 4 Sod-all.

Right time for this place!

If a bunch of burglars had been on the ball yesterday, they could have laid waste to the Mansion and no one would have noticed. What, with a MotoGP motorbiking around in Germany, a Grand Prix here at Silverstone, Indy cars at it in Toronto and the Tour de France biking into Switzerland, not a lot of attention was being paid to their surroundings by the staff.

Wrong place, wrong time

The staff were watching some motor racing at lunchtime yesterday. “Where’s that? It looks bloody wet,” I remarked. “Silverstone, qualifying for tomorrow’s Grand Prix,” I was told.
     I looked out of a window. The sun was shining and the sky was blue. Meanwhile, just a few score miles away, they were waving a red flag because even with “wet” tyres, the cars were aquaplaning.

Reality check needed

The West Midlands police grabbed a car, which they thought wasn’t insured, and dumped it in a pound. Two days later, they searched it and found a couple of guns; not automatic weapons; and a few bullets. Suddenly, the newspapers are making comparisons with the massacre in Bombay in 2008, which was organized by terrorists from Pakistan. So is this just the papers being silly, as usual, or cynical senior coppers dropping hints that we’re in deadly danger and the “savage cuts” should be booted into touch and they should be allowed to grab as much taxpayers’ cash as they can spend? When you take into account the Staffordshire force closing a motorway for 6 hours because someone was “smoking” an electronic cigarette on a coach, the choice is obvious.

Accentuate the positive, you blighters!

They’ve spent money in amounts that Gordon Broon could only dream of at CERN. They’ve spotted a new boson, they reckon. But is it the Higgs’ or God Particle? Well, that’s going to take a bit more cash to decide. It’s a bit like the Great Global Warming Swindle, the racket at CERN. The more money they’re allowed to chuck around, the more they need to extract.

Wilful misunderstanding?

The newspapers seem to have got their brain cells in a twist over the “HMD” message issued by the daughter of disgraced banker R. Diamond. Clearly, it’s an invitation to Hug My Dad – a not unreasonable request in view of the incestuously close relationship between bankers and politicians over the last decade.

Some days, the Universe gets it right

If it had to be either of them, Spain’s beautiful passing made them the more attractive champs of Euro 2012. Okay, so the passes ended up at a blue shirt a lot more often but at least someone had explained to the “forwards” that they needed to put the ball-thing in the net-thing, and get it done a bit sharpish. I just knew that ref was Portuguese before I looked it up. Some neighbours don’t get on and there has been a strong tradition of partial refereeing in this competition.

Some days, the Universe just isn’t working

If it had been on the ball yesterday, a passing flock of pigeons would have unloaded on the posturing, shirtless Italian Mohican, who’d just put a goal past Germany in the other Euro 2012 semi-final, assuming he was some sort of statue. Now, that would have been a totally brilliant piece of TV!

Hubris Rulz: Hell, Yeah!

Posturing is something which the British can’t abide. So we took extra pleasure in watching Ronaldo boot the ball over the bar from a free kick after doing a full measure of posturing for the TV cameras. And his decision to take his penalty last to make himself the hero of the hour – except that Spain had already won before his turn came round – simply priceless!

All part of the job

The Queen has had to shake the hand of lots of repellent characters in the line of duty, so giving an IRA boss the privilege will be nothing new. But maybe she does what today’s Daily Disaster recommends; wear gloves and burn them afterwards.

It’s the way they tell ’em!

Why did the Syrians shoot down a Turkish F4 fighter aircraft this week? Apparently, they thought it was a UFO and it was only after they’d pulled the trigger that they remembered that Turkey still uses planes left over from the Vietnam war.

Seen it all before

Anyone else get the feeling that we’ve been here lots of times before? Allegedly popular comedian J. Carr; certainly a financially successful one; shoots himself in the foot by having a go at Barclays Bank paying 1% tax and then it’s revealed that he does the same himself. Worse, his father thinks he’s a little shit. Is it the old flagging career, public enemy No. 1, redemption and even greater success story being played out yet again? Yawn.

Dozy sod!

Not, it wasn’t the post denying him in extra time in the first half of Czechs vs Portugal, you stupid bozo of a commentator. The post remained perfectly still at all times and Ronaldo kicked the ball at it rather than the goal. He was denied a goal only by his own inability to kick the ball toward the net, not by the post leaping sideways to get in the way. Isn’t there an international treaty which demands the instant execution of a football commentator who does the “denied by the post” cliche? If not, why not?

Foiled again!

A normally reliable member of the staff has informed me that the BBC soap about doctors has been bumped by Ascot and tattoo’d ladies this week. So we’ll never know if they went on strike, and knowing the weasels at the BBC, there will be no mention in future editions of whether their medical heroes thumbed their noses at the taxpayer.

Well, will they?

Apparently, there’s a soap about doctors on the Beeb after the lunchtime news. So, given that the BBC is over-run with right-on lefties, will their docs be on strike tomorrow? The nation waits with bated breath.

Alarm bells ringing

I’ve just been watching a slow-motion replay of the events leading up to Spain’s “winning” goal in their match with Croatia and it’s blatantly obvious that Navas was offside when Fabregas passed to Iniesta. Which leaves me wondering if it’s possible for the officiating to be that bad without involving corruption.

“Wait till you see the replay and your phone starts ringing.”

An American footballer of my acquaintance used to say the above to officials who made particularly bone-headed decisions. That German ref definitely won’t be doing the final of Euro 2012. Nor will his “assistants”. That Spanish goal against Croatia was definitely offside. But hey, we’re used to “bush-league” reffing now, and there seems to be zero quality control of the people doing it.

Peculiar priorities

ITV had the football matches tonight, so what did they put on the main channel, ITV 1, which is in the ratings war with the BBC? Portugal vs useless Holland. Denmark vs Germany, the match likely to be a bit lively, was stuck away in Digital Heaven on ITV 4. Looks like someone in the programming department blew a fuse.

I guess they’re used to being swindled

Russia had the same record as Greece, they gathered the same number of points but they scored more goals. And yet they were sent home from Euro 2012 to face the wrath of the KGB. But just as we in Britain associate “swindle” with anything to do with Europe, I suppose the citizens of a country where V. Putin has self-appointed himself dictator-for-life are used to getting a rough deal.

How do they get away with it?

The latest hobby at the Mansion is spotting refs who won’t be doing the Euro 2012 final because they let foreigners commit assault and battery on England’s players. There’s that Italian bloody ref for a start. And that guy from Croatia will be next to him in the bar, thinking if only he’d done his job properly . . .

Is it really news if it’s only previews?

Today’s Daily Disaster seems to be even more strewn than usual with non-stories – ones in which the Prime Monster “will say” this or the Work & Pensions Sec. “will announce” that. Which suggests that political speeches, and reporting the same, have become redundant. Just blast off a copy to the news meeja, and put one on the Internet, and that’s the business of the day over and the Minister is free to get on with fiddling his expenses.

It can be done, you know!

For the information of the twits who keep going on at Princess Kate for not wearing a completely new outfit every time she goes out – it is actually possible to wear a pair of shoes more than once. I’ve actually done it. And so have lots of other people, apparently.

Doing what comes naturally

People have been commenting on the lack of “black” faces and evidence of people from the ethnic minorities turning out for the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations. Which tends to suggest that the minorities turn out only when bribed to do so, and underlines the contrived nature of all national public occasions at which they are abundantly represented.

Had they lived . . .

Having witnessed the grotesque spectacle of Alastair Campbell chairing Have I Got News For You, I can’t help wondering if the BBC would have been cool with inviting the likes of S. Hussein, M. Gaddaffy and O. bin Laden along to joke about their crimes against humanity.

Say What!?

I was just idly watching the box when I saw an internal advert for an upcoming programme called The Science Behind God’s Retribution. Only on Discovery! Apparently, it’s a prog full of imagined things (which might have happened but probably didn’t), for which an imagined deity can be blamed, and, no doubt, there will be a set of talking heads trying to get inside the imaginary deity’s head to explain how the imagined event was made to happen. Totally, but stoatally, bonkers!

Unintended Consequences?

I was amused to read that the young lady warder who’s been sent to gaol for getting too pally with the inmates at her former place of work has both her father and her boyfriend in gaol, which will make visiting difficult. No doubt she got the job in the first place under some daft New Labour diversity programme.

Usual Suspects at it again

It would appear that members of the communist community; the Grauniad and the Beeb to name but two, have been slandering the government again. They even dragged Johnny “Two Shags” Prescott out to play the pantomime horse for them and go on about “labour camps”. And all that was at the back of it was that some job-seeker stewards for the Jubilee were on the wrong end of a short transport cock-up. How desperate the usual suspects are getting for something to moan about.

Seen or not?

Is there any real difference between watching the transit of Venus across the Sun’s disk “live on the Internet” through the night and waiting until the next day to see the whole thing in a few minutes rather than 7 hours? Neither experience involves actually going out and looking at it for real – which wasn’t an option in Britain anyway.

There is an “off” switch, you know

There’s an amazing amount of moaning going on about how bad the BBC’s coverage of the Jubilee events has been. The newspaper journalists pretend it had an awful fascination and they couldn’t stop watching because it was so bad. So nothing to do with having space to fill up between the adverts, then?

You definitely can’t win!

Yesterday, it was freezing cold and chucking it down with rain, so they had the 1066-boat Jubilee regatta on the Thames and made the poor old Queen stand around on her barge for 4 hours. Today, the sun is shining and it’s quite warm.

Sounds fair enuff to me

Our resident linguist has just pointed out that “gift” means “present” in English but “poison” in German. Similarly, “LOL” are the initials of “Laughs Out Loud” in nerdspeak but they are also the initials of “Lots Of Love”. So his point was that anyone who laffed at Cameron after translating his English text message into nerdspeak is an idiot.

Gordon Bennett!

The nation will, no doubt, rejoice to hear that there is a Sue Morris on the public payroll. As head of supplier management at Joint Workplace Solutions, a division of the Treasury, it’s her job to issue email memos to staff at the Cabinet Office and the Treasury telling everyone that they broke rules devised by the Health & Safety Nazis when they put up Jubilee bunting. According to Ms Morris, the bunting had to be removed and on no account were staff to climb on chairs to do it themselves. Senior members of the government had to be wheeled out to overrule the woman but, no doubt, her bonus status won’t be affected.

Give someone else a chance!

People have asked me if I bought a ticker for today’s £92 million Euromillions lottery. I got one of the staff to print up some cards with 3 responses:
1. How could anyone hope to be that lucky twice in one lifetime?
2. I haven’t spent that last win yet.
3. I’ve pretty well doubled the original win with spivvy investments, e.g. windmills, so I don’t need another £92 million.

Not British Enough for the Daily Disaster?

One of the staff left a copy of today’s Daily Mail in range, so I flicked through it. One thing that struck me was that the dull, processional Monaco Grand Prix was won by an Aussie, the British driver Lewis Hamilton was 5th and it got a two-page colour spread. But the Indianapolis 500, which was won by Scottish driver Dario Franchitti for the 3rd time, got no mention at all.

Rhetoric vs Real World

When Nick Clegg starts banging on about social mobility, is old “Calamity” thinking about getting a 63-stone teenager moving through walls and shifted around with a gang of coppers and paramedics in attendance at a cost of thousands of pounds to the taxpayer?

It all evens out in the end?

There seems to be a strange sort of levelling process going on in Greece. People are stashing all the euros they didn’t pay in taxes under their mattresses and there’s an epidemic of burglaries as the country’s criminal community takes advantage of an opportunity and puts the cash back into circulation.

Can you tell what it is? Well, maybe.

Today’s Daily Telegraph website events include a promise of some pictures from a book published by the Cloud Appreciation Society. The book is called Clouds That Look Like Things and there’s a picture of a cloud on a mountain behind Cape Town to illustrate the point. The cloud is supposed to look like a UFO but it doesn’t exactly get you biting your legs off to see more of the same. Never mind, buy the book.

Floatation or Flotation?

The newspapers can’t agree on the description of the launch of Facebook into the world of stock markets. But they can agree that anyone who paid $38 for the shares was mugged. And let’s face it, one thing the world ain’t short of is mugs.

Believe this and you’ll believe anything

The law against people turning their front garden into a tip “will be worded to protect home-owners from over-zealous council officers patrolling the streets, looking to make money by issuing on-the-spot fines”. Doesn’t say anything about battering a sense of proportion through the skulls of jobsworth zombies, though. Which needs to be done to the police, while we’re at it.

Not Bovvered!

Should we be worried if it’s true that the world is going to Hell but Dave the Leader is doing a lot of relaxing and playing games on his computer? Not if we remember that things always get worse when politicians get meddlesome and start trying to fix things.

You really couldn’t make up something dafter

Did you hear the one about the Ministry of Defence sending a River Police boat to harass a private motorboat on the Thames because the owner’s kids had called it Bin Laden 1 and the dolts at the MoD though it was a threat to security at the Olympics?

Better Luck Next Time

Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Nothing! A big sense of disappointment for all those who gathered for the launch of the private enterprise Falcon 9 rocket, which was supposed to take supplies up to the ISS and dump tiny samples of ashes from people like Scotty of Star Trek in space. The computer aborted the launch because it didn’t like what one of the engines was doing. But the good news for SpaceX is that the rocket didn’t explode, like some of NASA’s early attempts, and they can try again in 3 days’ time.

Nice one, Big G!

I reckon God is trying to tell the new pres. of France something if M. Hollande was soaked to the skin during his triumphal parade and his plane was struck by lightning on the way to meet Kanzler Merkel of Germany.

Big-time self-loathing?

M. Hollande, the new French president, says he “dislikes rich people”. So does that include all pretend socialists who have a property empire worth well over one-million euros? Like, well, François himself?

Done up like a kipper. Again.

There’s an infinite number of ways you can be screwed. Lewis Hamilton seems to be experiencing all of them in Formula One. He set the fastest time in qualifying, he didn’t have enough fuel to get back to base and he was stuck at the back of the grid when you are dropped just 5 places for swapping out an engine. If that’s fair, I’m the king of Argentina.

So what should they have done?

Hearts are bleeding about a man with dementia being tasered by the police so he could be hauled off to hospital. But imagine the outcry if the coppers had been forced to get the job done with nothing more technical than batons ‘n’ boots ‘n’ fists.

Anyone would think their economy wasn’t in meltdown

What exactly is the point of the Spanish government kicking its toys out of the pram over a visit to Gibraltar by Prince Edward? Is their tantrum going to change anything? No. Do they have vastly more important things to worry about? Yes. But hey, you can’t expect a government to keep its mind on the job in hand, can you?

How many cheers does he expect?

And is it possible to deliver a negative number? We have been told that Tony B. Liar is busting a gut to return to British politics because he has lots more to say. One thing he hasn’t said yet is where he plans to start his next war for fun and his profit.

The Bozo Tendency is still winning

If you work at Scotland Yard, you can’t use the words “blacklist” and “whitelist” any more. You have to use “redlist” and “greenlist” instead as it’s “more appropriate language in a professional, police environment”. So if you were ever wondering why policing in Britain no longer works, it’s because they’re churning out this sort of crap instead of doing too much tracking down of criminals. Which is, like, dangerous, man and contra-indicated on 'elf 'n' safety grounds.

You can’t give up what you never had

The election results in France and Greece yesterday are being spun as oppressed people giving up on austerity and voting for lots of lovely tax and spend. But they haven’t actually had any austerity yet. Which means that spongers expect to get even more cash from the only countries which actually contribute to the EU’s coffers – us and the Germans. It’s at times like this that you wish that you had a prime monster who can summon up the courage to say Boo! to the EU monster.

They can’t do that!

No more wind-turbine Toryism to make Dave popular enough be be re-elected? Anyone would think there’s something wrong with paying lots of taxpayers’ cash to rich people with wind farms for the privilege of posturing on the world stage and waving worthless Green credentials around.

What a F.A.C-up!

The F.A. Cup has kicked off at 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon since way back into the 20th century. Then along comes some over-blown tosser who decides to change the kick-off time to 5:15 p.m. in the early evening just to get himself noticed. Sheesh!

Date check okay? So what’s going on?

There it is in the Daily Disaster, Tony B. Liar has hired a spin doctor as a first step to getting himself back into British politics. Presumably, as Lord Liar of Baghdad. First thing you do, check the date at the top of the page. Surprise! It’s not April 1st. Surely the old fraud can’t be serious about having things to say to his British subjects. Especially when the only talking he should be doing is from the dock at The Hague during his trial for war-crimes against humanity.

No quite so unanimous

How amusing to note that the Labour MP who got Mr. Murdoch condemned in the Commons report has a book to plug and he’s also a former hit-man for Wee Gordie Broon, who has never forgiven Mr. Murdoch for ditching him. So all the sound and fury, as usual, signifies nothing more than self-publicity and a bitter man’s revenge.

Deja vu all over again

A bunch of MPs have decided that Rupert Murdoch “is not a fit person to run a major international company” and he showed “wilful blindness” to phone hacking. So should Murdoch be worried? Well, swap “Tony Blair” for “Rupert Murdoch”, “government” for “international company” and “Iraq's weapons of mass destruction” for “phone hacking”. And then remember what happened to Blair. [Clue: nothing.]

Ho, hum

So there are technology addicts who don’t talk to other people face-to-face for days at a time, “researchers” have found. Do we care if they don’t? No. Do we think the “research” was worthwhile? No.

Out of one pocket or another

The BBC is asking itself whether politicians should be paid for spouting party propaganda and promoting themselves on BBC shows. But if the Beeb decides to drop the payments, you can be sure that the politicians will still go on radio and TV, and their expenses claims will get even higher.

Exhibitionism rules, nokay

What do you do if you fail your HGV driving test? Apparently, you pretend to be a suicide bomber, you demand your money back from the company that ran the training course, you give hundreds of office workers in neighbouring buildings the afternoon off and you let the police wave their guns around again. Welcome to the aftermath of the entitlement culture and Blair’s Britain.

Hypocritical doesn’t come in to it

How sick-making to see Milipede Labour getting all sniffy about members of the government getting too close to big business. Especially as it was the rule when Tony B. Liar and Gordon Broon were in charge. But then, honesty, truthfulness and doing the decent thing seem to be alien concepts in politics.

So do we panic, or what?

The Office of National Statistics sez we’re in a double-dip recession. But are we? The ONS had to indulge in the same amount of guesswork as you get on an average Time Team show to make its case. And after letting Labour sound off in the Commons (and hope we forget who caused the mess in the first place), the ONS has admitted that its “recession” conclusion could be reversed because it made a Really Big Guess about the state of the construction industry. So it looks like the “recession” is a minor technicality and not something anyone should worry about.

And Another Thing . . .

Roget seems to have come from a very peculiar family, and he’d have been right at home in the US import crime drama Bones, in which FBI Agent Booth doesn’t have a relationship with the emotionally crippled pathologist Brennan – she thinks that every case can be solved just by looking at the bones and the soft tissue is irrelevant. And she works with a collection of similar weirdos. Roget’s lack of empathy would have put him right at home in that bunch.

Haven’t we done April 1st already?

One of the staff showed me her copy of the Daily Wail just now. There’s an article on page 32 about a company which has stuck a USB port on an old-fashioned typewriter (allegedly) so it can be used with a computer, pad or whatever. What a load of utter tripe!

Consistent performance, anyway.

I’ve just finished reading “The Man Who Made Lists”, a biography of the creator of Roget’s Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall, who announces that he’s an American in the style of his writing, making a trip to the end flap of the jacket unnecessary. One thing that struck me was that the information that the Royal Institution went from hero to zero in Roget’s lifetime (in the 19th century) – just as its older brother, the Royal Society, did in the 20th century. The R.S. used to be very highly respected 20 or 30 years ago. Now, it’s just a temple to the Great Global Warming religion and as discredited as the R.I. was 150 years ago.

Wrong Target

I see the Royals have upset the Daily Disaster by taking advantage of the Great Windmill Subsidy Bonanza. But if you’re looking for someone to blame, and the government insists on wasting our money on such crazy scams, then it’s the out-of-touch Liberal millionaires who pushed it through Parliament who are responsible for the scandal, not the people getting some of OUR OWN MONEY back by taking advantage of the scam.

Hang on a minute . . .

Am I alone in thinking there’s something a bit off about Liverpool “celebrating” (to quote a lady on the BBC’s North-West Today) the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic? Or are they just celebrating all the profit people are making out of the souvenirs?

Justice still doesn’t work

Why doesn’t Britain chuck out Alky Ida terrorists like the Frogs and the Eyeties? Basically, because the average British burrocrat is a petty-minded, dick-headed bungler, who delights in enforcing stupid rules in the most obstructive way. And because the dick-heads at the Home Office and the Min. Of Justice thrust zillions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash into the pockets of lawyers, who deserve to be deported along with their clients. Sorted.

Justice doesn’t work (like that).

Will Tony B. Liar really be sued for rendering a Libyan on the terrorist list to the Gadaffy regime for torture? Will Jack Straw end up in the dock beside him? Sadly, only in a TV movie.

British Enterprise!

The nation’s aircraft carriers are a fine example of government in action. We won’t get any until about 2020, British labour isn’t getting a look-in, and when we do get them, only one will be brought into service (the other will be mothballed) and it won’t have any planes. Until now.
    The government's latest BIG IDEA is to dig up 20 Spitfires, which were buried in Burma after the war to stop the natives getting their hands on them, and give the new British fleet some purely ceremonial fighters. If they’ve been refitted into Seafires by the time the aircraft carrier opens for business.

Energy efficiency?

I thought I won the jackpot when my EuroMillions ticket came up, but renewable energy is the real deal. The Estate is now self-sufficient in electricity, and the good thing is, the government will pay a £25 subsidy on top of every £15-worth of electricity supplied to the national grid. And the subsidies keep on coming whether or not the wind blows; and also if it blows so strongly that the turbines have to be switched off. Welcome to the future!

You think?

A “Think Tank” reckons that having bank holidays costs the country £19 billion per year. But what would happen if we didn’t have bank hols? The national workforce would be grumpier, skivers would take more “sick” days, unions with enuf muscle would get another 10 days tagged on to annual leave and if any extra money did flow into the national coffers, the government would waste it.

Creative Journalism at its best!

I was amused to read in my favourite blog that the git who got in the way of the Oxo-Cam boat race has been charged with public petulance. Yes, that about sums it up.

Too dim to be free?

You have to wonder at the intelligence of the Brazilian drum smuggler (alleged) who changed into his wife’s clothes to get out of prison but was busted at the nearby bus station because he couldn’t walk convincingly on her high heels. His missus brought spare clothing and a black wig to the prison visit. Why couldn’t the bloke have told her to bring a pair of flat heels, too?

How to beat the hosepipe ban continued

41. Open your grounds to the public but charge the blighters £100 a head to get in.
42. Organize a sporting event on the main lawn at your Mansion but call it off through lack of interest.
43. Set up a car-washing business but charge customers £100 a time.
44. Start a small fire and over-react in spades.

Good luck, mate!

Dave the Leader reckons he’s going to let GCHQ snoop on everyone’s emails, does he? It will be interesting to know how he gets on with my encryption system, which is advertised as: “not so much totally uncrackable as too expensive for any government to crack”. The same sort of idea applies to the proxies used by staff at the Mansion for Internet access.

Balancing Act

You have to wonder at the misapplied ingenuity of politicians. In the spirit of “we’re all in it together”, the chancellor has decided to bung more VAT on cold champagne served in restaurants and other public places (but not the Palace of Westminster thanks to generous subsidies from the taxpayer), and he thinks that will repair the damage done by putting VAT on hot pies & pasties. What a plonker!

Beating a drought

It would appear that you can’t use a hose- or other pipe to fill a swimming pool without facing a huge fine, but you can use a tap and a bucket. But filling up a fish pond with a hosepipe is okay. So the answer to the problem seems to be to put a couple of fish in the swimming pool and say it’s a fish pond with lots of elbow room, to which humans have access. Simple!

Give him an “E” for Enterprise

The proprietor of the local village bakery has suggested to me that I might care to buy a modest microwave oven and leave it in his shop for the benefit of customers who want hot pies, rolls, pastries, etc. He’s worried that the 20% VAT slapped on Hot Food in the Budget will affect his sales, and he expects that he will have to leave almost everything fresh-from-the-oven to cool because his customers won’t pay the unnecessary tax. Admiring the cheek of the fellow, I’m inclined to go along with his notion!

A whole lotta nuthin'

I was just thinking, why would anyone give £250K to the Tories? You got a peerage for your money under New Labour. But dinner with Dave? That sounds like a job for a psychiatrist for anyone who thinks that's value for money.

What have I been doing other than not blogging?

Well, one activity which has featured very prominently in the last fortnight is my Things Campaign. Given that the government is run to a disproportionate degree by Liberals, who are very liberal with everyone else’s money but their own, I’ve been converting my assets into Things, which can be dropped off the radar conveniently so that whatever profit or loss I take on them should I ever need to convert them to cash will be my business and mine alone. I reckon I’m providing more than enough cash to the economy through existing taxes, not to mention all the employment I’ve created, that I am entitled to make myself Liberal-proof. And the beauty of it is that, if done well enough, there’s not a damn thing the Liberal millionaires like Clegg and Huhne can do about it.

Amazing how long it takes to do a “simple” deal

The museum, it seems, was in a tearing hurry to spend a legacy before its time limit ran out, and the Picasso filled the bill nicely. But when it came to actually putting a signature on a cheque (or rather, doing an electronic money transfer), their expert got a severe case of the hesitations. Which my expert cured by making him think we wanted to call the deal off because there was another buyer on the horizon.
    In the event, I’ve acquired a handsome profit on my original purchase price, even after my expert and the taxman combined will have an arm and a couple of legs off me. All in all, it’s been an interesting and entertaining month, rather than a couple of weeks, and a fascinating look into the world of high-power art purchases.

Where have I been?

Unloading a Picasso, is the quick answer. Following my sudden elevation to the ranks of the filthy rich some 18 months ago, I was let in on a sure-fire brilliant deal. The latest of a long line of aristos was eager for some ready cash and he had a couple of 1920s Picassos, which his father had treasured but which he had never rated. After seeing them, I didn’t blame him.
    Naturally, my first thought after the approach was that maybe someone was setting me up to be ripped off, that I was about to be sold the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. After appropriate checking, I decided to take a punt on the “least worst” of them, but I actually ended up buying both of them.
   To my surprise, I was approached at the end of last year by an American museum, which was desperate to acquire what I consider to the more horrible of the pair of Picassos. And I’ve spent the last couple of weeks looking over my expert’s shoulder while the buyer’s experts checked my provenance. The deal is supposed to go off at the weekend. More after that.

Unintended consequences

How typical that one of Labour’s wimmin should get the Top Totty guest beer banned from the bar at the House of Common Criminals. And how heart-warming it is to hear that the publicity from Kate Green’s fit of charmless PC pique has left Slater’s Ales struggling to meet the demand for this product.

The gall of the no-hoper

A. Salmond, leader of the Scottish parliament, would like his country to become independent; but not so independent that the Bank of England won’t have to bail out the Scots if Salmond does a Gordon Broon and spends his nation into bankruptcy. “Independence, but not as we know it, Jim.”

Grab, grab, grab and nothing in return?

Vince Cable, who used to have a reputation as a bit of an economist before he took office and blew it, would like a Mansion Tax in the next budget, which will make him very popular with Tony B. Liar (unless his charities own all his extra homes). Mr. Cable is very good at saying how much his new tax will cost the victims but not a word on who gets the money or what the victims get in return for their cash.

The last person in the world you’d want to be . . .

. . . has to be the captain who ran his cruise liner aground off an Italian island. His character is being well and truly assassinated right now with routine tabloid libels and the testimony of unreliable witnesses, and he seems to be a man who was able to be in several places at once, but who is just in one place – gaol – right now.

Bummer! What else is there to look forward to?

Looks like we’ve had the best news story of the year in January. It seems a gang of thieves spent six months digging a Great Escape-style tunnel from a railway embankment to an ATM at Fallowfield in Manchester, and robbed it successfully. Only they got away with a lousy six grand rather than the expected £20,000. Not much of a reward for all that work.
    Furthermore, a similar plot to rob the same ATM was foiled over four years ago when a workman chanced upon the “Mole Gang’s” tunnel. The police are wondering if it was the same bunch both times. If it was, their effort to earnings ratio took a further nose-dive.

See how easily our problems are solved?

Greedy Bankers To Face Jail, read the headline in today’s Sunday Disaster.
    “If they make greed a criminal offence,” remarked one of the staff, “they’ll need 650 more prison places for MPs.”
    “What about Lord Mandelsleaze and Tony Blair and all the other fat-cat luvvies?” said one of the drivers.
    “What they need to do is round up everyone who’s grabbed in the last 20 years, especially Fred the Shred, and lock them up in a hanger on the Ark Royal.”
    “And tow it into the middle of the Atlantic and sink it?”
    “Right!”

The wonders of racialism

Labour MP Diane Abbot is allowed to get away with institutional racialism toward white people because 1. She’s a woman; 2. She’s from a group of non-white racial origin or aspirations (and therefore ineligible for racialism as of right); 3. She has a history of being allowed to get away with racialist remarks and so why should anyone start picking on her now? 4. She has a history of attention-seeking.

Something else to look out for!

Landowners with a fair number of trees on their property in my area have been warned to be on the lookout for rogue tree surgeons. It seems that when we get gales, as at the moment, these characters arrive on your doorstep with dire warnings of the havoc which can be caused by old, weak trees, and offer to do a survey of your trees at a very reasonable rate. The next thing you know, they want a few grand for felling several “unsafe” ones to give you “peace of mind”. Nice work if you can get it!