Solemnity is a thing of the past

We had a young lady do a very American rendition (in style) of the anthem before the German Grand Prix today. And she was immediately followed by faux Russian meercats larking about in an advert. Sucks all the dignity right out of the occasion somehow.

Vanished fad?

I was listening to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue on the steam wireless today, and the answer to one of the games was Gluedo, and that set me wondering why we never hear about glue-sniffing any more. At one time it was all the rage. But teenagers, eh? They’re probably all sniffing coke now.

Only 1,760 yards away from the point

Scottish Labour wants to scrap the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act because 98% of the 287 people charged last year were male and half were under 20 which, the Labourites claim, is because the Act “targets” young working/shirking-class men. They don’t seem to get that these are the people who cause most of the trouble at football matches and the Act is doing its job.

Real stats and sheer tripe

There are statistics which are relevant to our lives, like the number of wards your local hospital is closing (1 in the case of Stepping Hill, Stockport, where one of the staff has family) and the number of staff being shed (350 at Stepping Hill) and the number of bank branches being closed locally (1 this month where the staff member’s family lives).
    And then there is information that might be accurate but which is just plain useless. Like the news that charging 5p for a supermarket plastic bag last October will reduce the number of plastic bags handed out per year by 6 BILLION.
    Okay, that piece of information is mildly interesting but some government stooge couldn’t resist adding that 6 BILLION plastic bags weight the same as 302 blue whales or 313,853 sea turtles or 3.13 MILLION pelicans. How strange that the stooge didn’t tack on how many useless government stooges making pointless calculations at the taxpayer’s expense have a total weight of 40,801 metric tons.

Some choice!

We can’t let Trump the bigot win, sez Hillary Clinton. But would anyone in his/her/its right mind want the corruption and calamity that she offers?

Wobble, wobble, wobble

As soon as EdF decided to go ahead with the new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point, the new prime minister threw a wobbly and it is now going to be reviewed in the autumn. Hinkley Point has a budget of £29 billion but it is untried technology and it could cost the taxpayer £50 billion after the usual budget over-runs and it will sell electricity to the nation at TWICE the going wholesale cost.
    The Sizewell B reactor cost £2 billion to build (it was finished in 1995) and has almost one-half the planned output of Hinkley Point. It would make more sense to build 3 reactors to the tried and tested Sizewell B formula at an inflation-adjusted cost of £3.5 billion each. But 40-odd per cent more power than Hinkley Point could supply for £10.5 billion is probably more sense than the government can handle.

No wonder they’re called Banksters

Banks used to be reputable institutions but Mr. Mainwaring of Dad’s Army would be out on his ear today. A. Osorio, the current figurehead of Lloyds Bank, which is taxpayer-supported after failing, tried to blame the closure of 200 branches and shedding thousands of staff on the Brexit vote. Then the bank was obliged to admit that the decision to reduce the business was taken months ago, and it was really a consequence of 2 factors which had nothing to do with the referendum.
    The main cause was the disastrous decision to take over the failed bank Halifax Bank of Scotland as a favour to then prime minister Gordon Brown, who was worried about losing Labour votes in Scotland. That merger tipped Lloyds into failure and a taxpayer bail-out. The second reason is the fact that banks have been encouraging customers for years to use the internet and mobile phones for their banking instead of expensive branches.
    But the Remain whingers will use any old excuse to pretend that they were right and everyone else was wrong.

The last should be first

Labour leadership hopeful Owen Smith has ONE good idea in his list of 20 policy pledges. Predictably, it’s No. 20: End the scandal of fuel poverty by investing in efficient energy. [my italics] But is he up for the inevitable confrontation with the Warmists in his party?
    The rest of his manifesto is just envious socialist BS and leaves the choice between Corbyn and Owen looking like Citizen Smith [that’s the Freedom for Tooting Wolfie, not Owen] vs Chairman Mao.

Half the story

THE FACEBO said the big, black headline at the top of the page. “What the hell is that?” I wondered. “Is it anything like a placebo?”
    But I was just looking at the left-hand page of a folded newspaper and when I spread its wings, the full headline read: THE FACEBOOK JIHADIS. So no new word invented.

New ain’t necessarily better

With MicroSoft trying to thrust Windows 10 on us, we’re being told a lot of tripe about the Windows operating system, especially by “I.T. professionals”, who sit on the sidelines, sneering at “Luddites” who have been using PCs successfully for 25 years or more whilst maintaining continuity of their work, often despite the ministrations of the I.T. guardian angels.
    From a user’s point of view, Windows wasn’t worth having until version 3.1 came out, and even then, DOS word-processing and graphics programs were far superior to any Windows version. In fact, the DOS version of WordPerfect 6.2 runs quite happily on a 20-year-old P90 and it will do pretty well anything the current Windows version can manage apart from the obvious improvements like creating PDF files.
    Windows 95 was a radical shift in the design and all versions up to 7 were just tinkering with that layout. Then the system went horribly wrong. Windows 8 tried to make the organized environment of a working PC look like a cheap copy of a mobile phone screen. So is it any wonder that the remaining faith in Windows went . . . out the window?
    Thus people assume that Windows 10 is just more MicroSoft bloatware, full of gadgets that 99.999% of the users will never use or need and just a revision to get Windows back looking like a continuation of W95. Users will be left wondering if their trusty old software, for which they paid good money, will actually run on the new version, or their still-working gadgets will stop working for lack of a driver program.
    It’s all a matter of trust and continuity, and these are commodities in rather short supply when it comes to “upgrades” to Windows.

Energy rip-off

The bloke who has been in charge of a two-year investigation into gas and electricity suppliers for the Competition & Markets Authority has decided that their profit margin should be no more than 1.25% “because they don’t make the stuff”. British Gas and SSE, margins 7% and 6.2% respectively, are reported to be outraged by this conclusion. But is there any chance of the May government giving them anything to grouse about?

Great sporting ideas?

Whilst watching the Hungarian Grand Prix yesterday, the issue of handicapping came up as the Mercedes team cruised to another 1-2 finish. The best suggestions were that Seb Vettel should have his mother in the car to give him a big slap every time he says the f-word on the radio and Nic  Rosberg should have Nikki Lauda in his car to tell him he's the fave driver in the Merc team when he gets depressed because he doesn’t look like winning.
    Later, when the finish of the Tour de France was on and the commentators were going on about the lousy state of the roads in Paris, our experts thought that creating lots more potholes might make the endless circulating a bit more interesting and challenging for the riders.

Smart meters? How stoopid do they think we are?

Do we really need “smart” meters from energy companies? The BIG selling point is that they do away with estimated bills. But that’s not a problem for anyone with an internet connection. When the energy company needs meter readings, it sends an email and the customer provides the readings at the website. Simple.
    And there’s the issue of the technology. Things used to be built to last; washing machines, cookers, gas boilers, even meters. But will a “smart” meter with easy-to-go-wrong electronics have a life measured in decades?
    No, the only reason why companies want “smart” meters installed is so that they can change the tariff during the day and hold customers to ransom because successive governments have failed to ensure continuity of supplies, particularly for electricity, but also for gas storage.
    Inevitably, for the customer, “smart” means swindle.

Epic fail, mate

If you’re going to make up silly stories, it does help if they have a façade of credibility. So how strange that the McClusky bloke, the figurehead of the trade union Unite, thinks anyone will believe his latest silly story: that MI5 is organizing the threats and bullying and brickings of Labour MPs who have failed to buy into Leader Corbyn’s vision of “kinder, gentler politics”.

You started it, mate!

The new prime monster, Theresa May, has chosen to following in the tracks of Tony B. Liar and New Labour as far as burying bad news is concerned. Some thirty reasons for public discontent were zoomed out on the last day before Parliament went on its summer hols to ensure that there could be no immediate holding to account. And the government's attitude seems to be that this is what Labour made into standard operating procedure, so any complaints from them are just hypocrisy. Which is fair enough.

What is Merkel’s problem?

The iron lady of Germany keeps banging on about full, free movement of EU citizens as if she’s scared that Britain is about to put an end to it somehow. But we’re getting out of the EU, love. We don’t care if you keep on having full, free movement within the EU (or don’t) because we’re not going to be part of it.

Who Cares Who Wins?

The only thing anyone knows about the current Labour leader, J. Corbyn, is that he has a long history of disloyalty to his party, having voted against its position some 600 times over the years. Even less is known about the man picked to challenge him for the leadership in preference to serial self-publicist A. Eagle. The rival, a Mr. Smith, describes himself as “normal” and he’s offering exactly the same “We’re against it!” agenda as Corbyn only in a shinier wrapping. So it doesn’t really matter which of them wins.

Not as smart as they pretended to be

The International Monetary Fund has been forced to admit that all the dire warnings about Brexit, which were issued as part of departed Chancellor G. Osborne’s contribution to Project Fear, have turned out to be completely off the mark. A spanner wasn’t thrown into the world’s economy, the wet hens have stopped flapping and the IMF’s management is now being dismissed as a bunch of clowns. Which leaves me wondering how the figure head, Ms Lagarde, is getting on with her court case. Is she still facing a spell in an orange jumpsuit?

No one learns from history

What was the cause of the monumental banking crash in 2008? The American government gave its citizens the civil right to a mortgage, even if they couldn’t afford to service it, and set up two giant mortgage companies to hand out the cash. Then spivs put some shiny packaging around the toxic loans and flogged them off to thrusting bank executives who had no idea what they were buying. So when the “mortgages for all scheme” hit the buffers, the wheels came off the world’s banking system. And it’s happening all over again.
    Have you seen that Halifax TV advert, in which Top Cat gets a mortgage because it’s “no problem”? How is an alley cat going to repay a loan like that? Who else with no hope of repaying the loan is getting one from the Halifax? It’s all happening all over again.

The World’s Worst Timing!

Heard on TV last night: JetTo (that’s what it sounded like) holidays to Turkey from only £199!
Well, that was a TV advertising budget wasted!

Above and beyond

The investigation into the monumental cover-up of doping in Russian sport, conducted by a Canadian lawyer called Richard McLaren, has found that Vlad the Putin’s KGB was responsible for tampering with urine samples to swap out the druggie ones. Can you imagine the scene in the next Bond film if MI6 becomes involved in this sort of malarky?
    “Pee into this, Bond,” M ordered brusquely.
    “This is not what I joined the service for,” 007 complained. “And would you mind turning your back?”
    “Really, Bond,” M returned with her most annoying smile, “since when have you been shy about whipping out your todger for a lady?”

More than meets the eye?

Whilst that might not have been a staged coup in Turkey, it certainly looks like the president is using it as an excuse to get rid of anyone who doesn’t think the sun shines out of his bum. Like the judiciary. Which is quite cunning, really. First you get the judiciary to lock up the Press and your most vocal opponents on bogus charges of insulting the president, then you arrest all the judges and prosecutors! And as a further twist, President Erdogan is meeting President Putin next month to get advice on how to stay president/PM for life and what to do with billions of dollars of sequestered loot.

Coup attempt in Turkey ends in disaster

President Erdogan is hell-bent on recreating the Ottoman empire with himself as the Islamost leader; a Stalin- or Putin-style ruler with the power to lock up or kill anyone who disagrees with him. The military officers who made such a small and ill-organized power grab were probably trying to check Erdogan's Islamist agenda in the hope of getting into the EU and onto the gravy train faster. Turkey is now even further away from satisfying the basic conditions for membership, and heading in the wrong direction. Which isn't such a bad thing, really, with Erdogan turning himself into Turkey's version of Vlad Putin with the support of his own version of Momentum.

Death From Space

Comrade Putin’s air force is planning to build a hybrid bomber, which will run on jet fuel in the atmosphere and methane and liquid oxygen on the edge of space. He is hoping that the world will believe that it will be able to reach any point on the Earth within 2 hours with a cargo of nuclear weapons. Yes, it does sound like a great way to waste a lot of Russian taxpayers’ cash to let Vlad do some posturing, and the chances are that he’ll be history long before someone decides that the plan just won’t work.

The initiative is with the terrorists

Yesterday’s attack in Nice underlines the uneasy truth that no one can be safe with nutters about. It doesn’t take bombs and guns to kill a lot of people. Just one lunatic in a heavy goods vehicle.

What next?

We seem to be on a bit of a roll at them moment. The campaigns to ditch the EU, David Cameron and George Osborne have all worked. It’s getting quite difficult to keep the ditch-them list adequately populated!

90 tons of goaded beef

Did the bull-killer Victor Barrio deserve a “hero’s send-off” at his funeral? Given that the “duel” with the bull is heavily rigged in the human’s favour, and no one put him in the firing line, probably not. The guy who was killed during this year’s bull-running in Pamplona didn’t get a hero’s send-off.
    But need we be bothered by any of this? Probably not. Messing about with bulls might be part of Spain’s cultural and artistic heritage but it doesn’t go on anywhere else in the EU. Which means that some Eurocrat has worked out how to abolish it in the name of harmony and homogenization and grey EU dullness, and the plan is whipped out of its drawer every time Spain goes to the EU with its hand out after some economic catastrophe just in case . . .

Political Hypocrisy

J. Trickett, Labour’s “election co-ordinator”, the Trivial Democrats and a few other odds and sods are claiming that we should have an immediate general election because, in Trickett’s words, it’s crucial that the country has a democratically elected prime monster. Silly man. The PM is the leader of the majority party, and whether or not he or she is elected democratically is a matter for the party, not the electorate at large.
    And does anyone remember a general election in 2007 when Gordon F. Broon replaced Tony B. Liar?

A wonder of the world

Britain has given much to the rest of the world, but something which no one else seems to have adopted is our method of achieving the peaceful eviction of a political figurehead over a couple of days. In the case of David Cameron, he was expecting to cling on until September and have a final political jolly on the world stage at the beginning of the month. But a spot of backstage backstabbing will see him evicted from Downing Street tomorrow. Much more civilized that the bloody revolutions elsewhere.

Masochism Tango

Andrea Leadsom decided that she didn’t want to be on the receiving end of scumbags trashing her life and lying about her for a couple of months, so it will be Prime Minister May at one bound, and Dave will be ditched sooner than we could ever have hoped.
    Angelica Eagle, on the other hand, is desperately in need of attention, which is why she is ready to face the slings and arrows of outrageous reporting and stand for the labour leadership on a ticket which consists only of not being J. Corbyn.

Apropos of nothing

Watching TV adverts with the sound muted can lead to some really interesting manufactured juxtapositions when you can't tell when one ad ends and the next starts. Like a caption for HSBC followed by: Real People, Real Hair Loss, Real Stories.

Which is the true Internet Generation?

Is it:
a) the people who grew up with no knowledge of life Before Internet and who presume, in their youthful arrogance, that the internet belongs to them and no one over the age of 35 is aware of the existence of the internet, never mind knows how to access it? or
b) the people who created the net and the people for whom it was created, who have spent 40-odd years watching it grow and develop?
Bearing in mind that category a) people need of safe zones to avoid being confronted with views which contradict their cherished preconceptions and they visit only the parts of the internet which support those preconceptions, it could be argued that they are much too wimpy to lay claim to anything as complex as the internet and never likely to invent anything themselves.

Has Lauda lost it?

We got a rush of strange accusations about Lewis Hamilton, and Nikki Lauda telling us the shunt at the end of the Austrian GP wasn’t Rosberg's fault, even though the commentators and, more importantly, the stewards blamed Rosberg. Then, a day later, Lauda did a U-turn and denied everything. Spit the bones out of that! Or do we just assume that Lauda had a big  bet on Rosberg to win the race and it’s sour grapes because Lauda lost his deposit?

Pointless information

One of the questions to the Answers to Correspondents column in the Daily Mail asked: “Have physicists ever attempted to calculate the total number of atoms in the known universe?”
    The obvious answer is: “No, because the best guess would be just that, a guess, and knowing the exact number wouldn’t really do anyone any good. There would have to be lots of further information, like the distribution of atoms over the range of stable elements, and the distribution of matter within the universe, before the speculators would have much to get their teeth into.”

Propaganda prize

There has to be some sort of International Spiv Award that we can give to old Carney, the Gov of the Bank of England, who did a tremendous amount of doom-mongering and talking Britain down when he should have been focussed on stabilizing the economy in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
    Before the vote, he claimed the sky was going to fall if we dared to vote for Brexit. He’s now pretending that if the sky doesn’t fall, that’s entirely due to him and nothing to do with the fact that the sky was never going to fall anyway. Spiv City, or what?

Nigel Farage gets his life back

Having campaigned with UKIP since 1994 to get Britain out of the embrace of the vampire squid which is the Europeon Union, it’s now a case of job done following his success in the referendum. So Mr. Farage has quit again as UKIP leader and he means it this time. Which is rather a shame as he’s one of the few politicians with a bit of character to him. So it’s off into the sunset with tremendous thanks from the Ditch Dave campaign, and the nation, ringing in his ears.

One back at you, Part II

Debbie McGee could also have pointed out that Paul Daniels wasn’t a millionaire when they got married. Unlike Mr. Hook.

Can’t get over that Euro 2016 match!

That much-hyped match between Germany and Italy was like, well, watching England playing . . . . England. And that penalty “shoot-out”. Trade Descriptions Act, or what? What sort of proper footballer can't even aim the ball at the net from the penalty spot? It looked so like Angular Merekat and Signor Berlusconi (or whoever) did a back-stage stitch-up, decided Germany would win on a coin-toss, and the players were having a laugh to express their dissent. Someone get on the phone to the Guinness Book of Records for an entry to the most pathetic penalty shoot-out of all time category.

One back at you

The passing of the writer and comedienne Caroline Aherne has prompted endless repetition of her Mrs. Merton question to Debbie McGee asking what first attracted Debbie to the millionaire magician Paul Daniels. Elsewhere, in countless other parallel universes, Debbie countered by mentioning that it could have been the same thing that attracted Caroline Aherne to the millionaire pop star Peter Hook.

What’s up with that?

Jeremy Corbyn said individual Jews and Moslems can’t be held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government and Islamist terrorist gangs like IS. Nothing wrong with that.
    He also said that Jews can’t be assumed to have a view on Israel any more than Moslems can be assumed to have a view on the actions of terrorists who are using a misinterpretation of Islam as an excuse. Nothing wrong with that either.
    It would appear that the people trying to be offended by Mr. Corbyn aren’t aware of how stupid some of their attempts to be offended make them look.

Just as well
    1st July 2016

The Daily Mail is trying to create a major back-stabbing, blood-letting conspiracy over the Tory leadership contest, but when you read what the correspondents have to say about Boris Johnson, as opposed to the hysterical editorial guff, it’s clear that the guy is not prime minister material and Michael Gove is. Or even Theresa May at a pinch, even though she’s a bit of a Dave clone in attitudes and she’s certainly no Maggie Thatcher.