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.