Interesting new game

I have a black Bic ballpoint with no ink visible in the clear plastic tube. Its remaining life depends on how much ink is stashed in the opaque bit at the business end, and its output has developed the habit of becoming very faint; which gives me the chance to take bets on whether it has finally croaked or whether a spot of vigorous scribbling will revive it.
    There have been about a dozen revivals so far, so maybe next time?
STOP PRESS: Make that a dozen + 1.

Very perceptive lady

I noticed whilst reading an obit of Sister Wendy, the nun who became a TV art critic, that she wasn’t impressed by Damien Hirst’s pickled sheep and shark. “Not worth a second look,” was the opinion she expressed. Probably because she was too well brought up to describe the likes of Hirst and the unmade bed woman as being at the farty end of arty-farty.

Dastardly deed on the American football field!

Interfering with an official? in the Bears @ the Vikings match – that’s something you don’t hear too often. Sadly, the demands of TV advertising meant that we never found out which official was interfered with and what exactly was done. It got the Bears marched back 15 yards from the previous line of scrimmage, though, and left the viewers to exercise their imagination.

Future unaccomplished

It’s amazing what you see in old newspapers when you’re using bits of them scrunched up as packing. ‘Corbyn accepts May’s challenge to a TV debate’, for instance.
    Never happened.

The crowd got it right

Going through the non-wrestling bits of the WW’s Xmas Day Smackdown Life took just 38 minutes with a recording instead of the two hours of the original broadcast. No wonder the crowd was yelling, “This is Awful!” as the Bulgarian Brute sorted out the Nasty Jap.

Get it right, you useless lot

The ‘two-thousand and’ fad seems to be getting beyond a joke. How long will it go on? At least into twenty-nineteen. Next thing you know, we’ll find ourselves being assured that the battle of Hastings took place in one-thousand and sixty-six.
    Yet another failure by the education Blob. And the BBC, where it seems to be the house style.

GOBism** is no excuse

Being born in 1953 doesn’t disqualify Tom Utley of the Daily Mail from being able to use computers. If people a decade older than him can use them, it is because they have made the effort to understand them. Mr. Utley clearly hasn’t.
    ***Grumpy Old Bloke

No Sherbet, Sherlock!

“Tesco to offer in-store haircuts” read the headline. Well, they’ll have a hell of a job doing them on-line.

I wish

I have just installed what is promised to be the fastest version of the Firefox browser ever. All I can say is that it won’t have to go any at all to be faster than the clunky disaster area it’s replaced. It’s remarkable how good you can become at Freecell while you’re waiting for your browser to get something from the WWW.

Today’s debate

Is referring someone who’s posturing on TV in a patronizing, know-it-all way as ‘that S.O.B.’ – to dismiss him as Some Old Bloke (implying you have no idea who he is and you don’t bloody care) – worse than applying the conventional meaning of S.O.B.?

Useless piece of junk!

There was an amusing piece in today’s paper about people letting their Xmas be ruined because their Amazon gadget couldn’t talk to them due to too much traffic on the internet. Oh, the perils of relying on non-autonomous gadgets instead of staff!

Where are the spaceships?

I’m currently reading a large volume of ‘the best SF of the 21st century’ – well, the first dozen years of it. The editor’s choice of a lead story is a bit strange. It’s not really SF and it’s an extended whinge about the end of the British Raj in India, when Hindus and Moslems acquired the independence for which they had been agitating and celebrated it with mass slaughter of their neighbours.
    “Look what we’re doing now you’ve gone,” the story yells at the rejected British, “we’re butchering millions of people now you’re not there to stop us. You bastards!”
    It’s going to take a lot of recovering from that sort of start to a book.

Eggon face? Someone’s going darn!

The Gatwick airport drone might have been an imaginary flying object but the Sussex police farce is determined to bust someone. Their best bet would appear to be to get a regular customer to agree to have it ‘taken into consideration’ with a bunch of unrelated crimes.
    That way, it will be ‘sorted and case closed’; even if it isn’t.

It just gets worse

The bad zebras were out in Philadelphia yesterday, flaunting themselves on TV. The stocks there should have been pretty full of striped idiots after the Eagles’ match with the Texans for incidents like that uncalled facemask by the Texans and that pathetic roughing the passer embarrassment against the Eagles, which gave the Texans a touchdown.
    Why not use eye-in-the sky technology? The CFL does.
    And that DPI call, which gave the Saints a TD in the first quarter of their match, was dia-sodding-bolical.

Xmas cheer, not!

You can always rely on the Sunday Post to cheer you up. Today’s front page, for instance, is all about someone’s ruined Xmas. The someone is the boss of a firm which went belly up, leaving the staff without December’s pay packet. The boss is weeping about it in his $3M mansion in San Franciso, having jetted there after enjoying a final staff Xmas party.
    You couldn’t make it up!

The joys of history revisited

Oh, joy! Corbyn’s comic opera chancellor wants to give us national strikes once a week. Then it will be back to the good old days of Gordon F. Broon and the government trying to steal everything not nailed down, and trying to pull the nails out of everything that is.

The perfect excuse

There’s no point in investigating J-C Druncker’s hands-on approach to women, as Tory leadership hopeful A. Rudd wants. He’ll just tell the court he was so lubricated with free (to him) booze at the time that he didn’t know what he was doing. And get off.

Xmas Xhibitionism

Xmas is the worst possible time to go anywhere; as proved by the response to the wanker with the drone at Gatwick airport. Specifically, the response of doing bugger all and letting the twat get away with it for a whole day, and also with his freedom and the drone.

It’s a job to keep up!

A new twist to the Shop Early For Xmas theme – Boxing Day sales which open on December 23rd. Which means that Sunday shopping has to be respectable now. The only problem is knowing which are Boxing Day sales and which are Black Friday sales which haven’t ended yet.

Plus ça change again

The experts have been rewriting The Book of People Labels. Thus ‘jobsworths’ are now ‘self-promoters’, i.e. people who try to look incredibly busy and productive whilst doing nothing at all useful.
    Think politician.

Real World rules suspended

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn told a lie in the House of Common Criminals? BFD.
    He's a politician.
    It's what they do.

False friend

Celeb chef Jammy Olive is in line for a thorough swatting with a copy of the Trade Descriptions Act if he thinks he’s a champion for the planet, which doesn’t give a rat’s arse either for the creatures living on it or for the state of its surface.
    Our planet has been around for 4.5 billion years and it will be around for another 5 billion years until the Sun becomes a red giant and swallows up Mercury, Venus and Earth. No matter what Jammy and other posturing bugs do.

Dosh? What’s that?

The experts are at it again. They reckon we could be a cashless society in 15 years. Probably based on an assumption that the Tories will make themselves terminally unpopular, and Labour will win the next election and spend all the available cash, and as much as they can borrow, and leave behind nothing to show for it. Like they do.

Out of my orbit

I read: “TV’s Dom Joly” and I thought: “Nope, never heard of him.” And if all he has to tell me is that his snoring nearly gave him brain damage, I feel no sense of loss at all.

Didn’t win in

If the Packers can sack Mike McCarthy, no surprise that Man U. has shed Miserable Mourinho.

The Pittsburgh Punisher or Pounding the Patriots

There was a miracle in Miami last week. Now, one in Pittsburgh this week. Can’t wait for next week’s episode!

Unimpressive waste of effort

Is anyone even marginally impressed by claims that things such as frozen salmon fillets are ‘responsibly sourced’? Like anyone would dare to market irresponsibly sourced products and face the tidal wave of confected outrage following inevitable exposure.

Browns triumph at last

That was a striking performance from the Cleveland Browns last night to end their losing streak against the Denver Broncos. And, most important of all, when their head coach gets on someone’s case for making a blunder, the team can remind him that he nearly cost them the match with a ill-judged time out inside the last two minutes.

No sense in the USA

If an NFL team loses out in the race to the playoffs, why are other teams said to ‘win out’? Don’t they know that the opposite of ‘lose out’ has to be ‘win in’?

Humbuggers at it again

Predictably, the rail unions will be leaping out on strike over Xmas and some airline pilots will be joining in. But hey! Xmas is the world’s stupidest time of year to try to go anywhere. So sod ’em.

More cloth ears

It’s very easy to hear ‘social media’, particularly as uttered by some Americans when commentating on their football matches, as ‘sofa media’. Which also works quite well as it describes the home of couch potatoes.

Rivers In Flood

That was a brave decision of the LA Chargers; going for a win with a 2-point conversion instead of kicking a field goal and ending up 28-all with the Chiefs in Kansas after regulation time. The best Thursday Night NFL match ever? It certainly had an ending which was good enough to be the close of a CFL match!
    Can’t forget all those dodgy decisions and no-calls by the Zebras, though. They seem to be getting worse and worse as the season draws to a close.

Why does she do it?

Mr. Littlejohn of the Daily Mail offered a fascinating theory about the prime minister in his last column before his Xmas break. She’s a political masochist, who enjoys flying round Europe being told No! and being humiliated by the stroppy male** gits running foreign countries.
    The louder the No!, and the bigger the rebuff, the more she loves it. The theory certainly fits the observed facts.
    ** Angular Mherkle, being an east German, can be identified as male in this context.

Battling winter’s chill

What does the £200 Winter Fuel Allowance buy? One of my neighbours stretched it to 27 bottles of wine from two separate special offers and a bottle of Southern Comfort. Which will definitely keep the cold out.

Step One accomplished

How to sabotage Brexit: her supporters arrange a confidence vote on the Prime Minister by her party, making it look like her enemies were behind it, and win her a year’s grace before she can be challenged again. Which should give her ample time to let the Bremoaners win whilst blaming everything on the Leavers, before she swans off to the House of Lords.
    Sounds unlikely enough to be true!

Arrogance plus intolerance – what a charming mixture

Is the Chancellor, P. Hammond, a fascist or a communist with his talk of purging from the Tory party, everyone who doesn’t agree with him? And what does he plan to do? Round them up and machine-gun the lot of them for his personal pleasure?

Bin-boggler

Recycling is a complex and laborious business, according to a Daily Mail columnist. Paper & card in the blue bin, bottles and tins in the brown one, garden and food trimmings in the green one and everything else, and when in doubt, in the black one.
    It takes a dedicated nit-picker to make that complicated.

How to do politics No. 43

“The reality is . . .” from a politicians means that the listener needs to brace him/herself, because a HUGE and shameless lie is on the way.

New, but not necessarily better times

Comedians are reporting that they get a huge list of banned topics, to which they have to append an endorsing signature, if they want to perform at student events. Not a bad thing if it excludes looney lefties who think shouting: “Thatcher!” will bring the house down. But they probably get a special exemption under EU rules.

Bank bites unexpectedly

At the weekend, I ordered some stuff online from Sainsbury’s and booked a delivery for today. But this morning, my bank’s automated anti-fraud system was on the phone to say that it had refused the payment and, by the way, did I place the order?
    When I checked my emails, there was one from Sainsbury’s with a phone number to ring to get the order back on track. So I was able to get my delivery in the spot booked after some messing about. Who says shopping on the internet instead of doing it in person makes life simpler?

Don’t tell the Beeb

According to the lunchtime news on BBC 1, the man arrested in New Zealand for the murder of a British back-packer cannot be named for legal reasons. But I already knew the name, having read it in my morning paper. So much for the Beeb as a primary source of information.

Go, Fins, Go!

Don’t you just love it when something weirdly horrible happens to the Patriots, the Armstrong Athletic of the NFL? They didn’t go all the way to Miami to lose, but that’s exactly what they did after a final desperate play which no one would buy as real in the script for a film.
    More Death To All Zebras in Dallas, though. That TD the Eagles were swindled out of with 3 minutes to go was a diabolical call. If not criminal.

Bloody tough leaves Up North!

Northern Rail reckons it can’t put on a decent train service because 10% of its trains are out of action following encounters with leaves on the line! Sounds like either the rolling stock is a bunch of Snowflakes or the leaves in the North are not to be messed with!

Science, but not as we know it, Jim

According to the Daily Mail science correspondent, China is sending a rover to ‘the dark side of the Moon’, which always faces away from the Earth. Although, quote – some light from the Sun does reach it – unquote.
    Like, during the 50% of the lunar month when the Moon is in that part of its orbit around the primary which places it between the Earth and the Sun?

A weird experience yesterday

The cat came charging in dripping wet yesterday afternoon, even though the sun was shining. When I looked out of a window, I saw that a bit of rain was still falling and there were hail stones lying around melting in the sunlight. There’s nothing like a spot of interesting weather to brighten up an otherwise routine day!

Sky vs technology? Technology loses every time

Being able to tell your TV box to record stuff for watching at a more convenient time; or to be able to speed through the adverts; is brilliant.
    What’s not so brilliant is those stoopid twats at Sky Sports starting things half an hour before the time in the TV menu, which the box uses to decide when to start and stop recording.

Mr. Lookalike

That picture of the US presidents, past and present, at the funeral of George H.W. Bush stopped me short with a moment of confusion. Who’s that bloke between Mrs. O’Bummer and Mrs. Clinton? I asked myself. It’s not Jeremy Corbyn after a shave, surely!
    Nope, it turned out to be old Bill ‘Slick Willy’ Clinton wearing a typical Jezzer miserable face. And looking very remarkably like him.

A crossword clue-inspired rant!

They’re not really Native Americans; except in the sense that everyone born in America is a native. They’re Earlier Occupants, immigrants from Asia who, like the white man and all the other colours, moved onto land vacated by the dinosaurs and occupied by the successors to the dinosaurs.

December Grot

Oh, joy! It’s the season of Grotty Grottos again. The best way to get publicity for a winter wonderland seems to be to grot it up for the papers and guarantee that you get noticed. What a weird world we live in.

Something else I’ve discovered

Soft-scoop ice cream doesn’t if you’ve just taken it out of a freezer at minus 27 degrees Centigrade!

A refreshing change

We got the first episode of Sue Thomas, FB Eye on the Alibi channel last night. Okay, she’s deaf and she had a hearing-ear dog as her gimmick, but what a relief to have a TV crime-buster with an intact family, who isn’t looking for a father/mother/brother who disappeared in mysterious circumstances as a perpetual plot device.

Blind benefit

How about that false start TD for the Chargers against the Steelers? But it did help to spark a remarkable Sunday late match with an extra-extraordinary finish with the LAC getting three chances to get the game-winning field goal right and the Steelers jumping offside every time.

Zebras Inaction

A blatant horse collar tackle by the Browns on the Houston Texans’ QB not spotted. Are the zebras keeping their flags in their pockets for Xmas as an early present for the lucky some? But how many mirrors have the Cleveland Browns broken? They must have used up a lifetime’s bad luck in that 3rd quarter drive with two frustrated touchdown plays.

Things they don’t teach you in school

How to eat dinner with a cat on your lap whilst watching the NFL on TV.

Clint’s Turkey

I watched the end of The Gauntlet the other day. That’s the film in which honest cop Clint Eastwood drives a witness in a hijacked bus with interior armour between ranks of corrupt cops whilst they shoot it to bitz.
    How come he’s going at walking pace? I asked myself. How come they don’t shoot out the tyres first so he’s no longer a moving target? How come no one on either side of the gauntlet was shot by crooked cops on the other side? And who paid for the millions of rounds of ammo used to perforate the bus and surrounding buildings?
    Pure ludicrosity! Maybe they should have shown this turkey a bit closer to December 25th.

Those were the days

I’ve just finished an old Inspector West book; number 34 in the series written by John Creasey. This one is set in the early 1960s and Inspector West of the Yard has to take a trip to South Africa. Where he and a local cop confront a breakfast consisting of white fish then a heroic combination of steak, sausages, two eggs and bacon, with more of everything on offer in case the initial helping isn’t enough. It’s a wonder they could get up and walk around after scoffing all that lot! But then, people were a lot tougher in the couple of decades following the war.

Here’s a thing

I noticed, when my broadband connection was acting up, than an elderly PC with lots of useful old software which would be a real pain to locate and install on a new one; assuming it would run with the later version of Windows; starts up quite quickly with no internet connection.
    I’ve got into the habit of switching it on 10 minutes before I need it and still finding the hard disk light glowing because the system is still messing about. Not so with no internet. And if I start using it and then give it an internet connection, it doesn’t start doing all the annoying stuff which slows it down when there is an immediate internet connection. And the antivirus program still does its update when it notices that the internet is there.
    Sometimes, we can find ways to make life a little easier; but not too often.

Strike back; you’re diverse too!

Something to say to anyone who looks a bit foreign who gets stroppy with you: “You bastard, you’re totally disrespecting my culture.”

Not bovvered

I’ve just realized – the looney left don’t have Rupert Murdoch around to slag off any more. Which may explain rather a lot.

Lost cause

Do I moan about the BBC Xmas TV schedule being mostly repeats, as is fashionable for the papers at this time of year? Nope. Mainly because if I want to watch TV, there’s lot of much better stuff on the 2 million (feels like) other channels beyond my TV box.
    All I’m likely to watch on the Beeb is the news, and that’s mainly history repeating itself rather than yer actual re-runs.

Time flies

How long does it take to do the two-hour version of WW Raw if you fast-forward through the fillers, adverts and garbage? I did this week’s show in 36 minutes without even trying hard.
    No wonder the crowd was chanting: “This is AWFUL!” during the Inconsequential Championship match. And how many more times are we going to have to put up with Finn Ballor versusing Baron Jeremy Corbyn? Enuf is more than plenty.

Taking the boss’s advice!

I was amused to read that Oakland University’s administrators have chosen not to arm their members of staff, as advised by President Trump, but they have issued hockey pucks to the staff and students, with which to bombard and discourage any mad gunmen who choose to invade the campus.

We’re all doomed!

The message from your government is that in the event of Brexit, things will get so bad that everyone in the country will have committed suicide by April 2020. Which should leave a lot of room in Europe for bogus asylum seekers, even if there are no British taxpayers left to support them.
    *** This message has been brought to you by the government’s Department of Despair ***

Towards a golden future world

Inanimate objects are the bane of human existence. They are always trying to do something inconvenient and/or stupid. Falling on the floor is their favourite trick. And if they can break, they will.
    A future society will create objects with a sufficient degree of awareness to understand that wilful stupidity is not acceptable and also understand that inconvenience will have uncomfortable consequences.

Enlightenment needed

A carpet firm sponsors quality entertainment on the Alibi TV channel, I am assured. So who sponsors all the rubbish? I think we should be told!

Something to make them think

The Treasury is playing politics again and telling us what terrible things might-just-possibly happen 15 years from now. In TV crime dramas, people are constantly being threatened with a charge of wasting police time. Maybe the time has come to create a new offence of wasting government time and taxpayer’s money, with huge fines as the penalty rather than a holiday in one of the drug resorts laughingly called Her Majesty’s Prisons.

How to keep the “people” happy

All we have to do is tell the idiots who are agitating for a “people’s vote” on Brexit that if they can get the Russians to pay for it, they can have it next May, after we’ve left the EU.

Down time

It’s bad enough not being able to use your computer because Windows is installing updates; but when your TV box spends 25 minutes doing the same – grrrrr! Good job I’d switched on for the TV news rather than the programme I wanted to record for later viewing.

What he said?

Quarterbacks on both sides of the border have rather weird HUT! chants. Mr. Cousins of the Vikings seemed to be going: “One-Eight Sunday Sucks!” last night!

Calgary gets it done at last

The Calgary Stampeders are usually the top team in their division and clear favourites for a Grey Cup win; but look where that got them last year against the Toronto Argonauts! This year was much more of a struggle. But they were able to build a lead and become World Champions of Canada fairly relentlessly in the second half of their match with the Ottawa Redblacks.

Sorry, mate, you’re out of luck

The Scottish government is planning to have no more than 5% of its customers living in fuel poverty by 2040. Which is rather rough on those chosen to be in the lucky 5%!

Bound to happen

“I thought we could nip to the wine bar for lunch.”
    “El Vino’s?”
“No, they’ve had to change the name because wine-making involves cruelty to grapes, according to a gang of plant rights activists. It’s called The Intolerant Vegan now.”

Things you wonder in front of the TV

Has anyone ever had enough time on their hands to calculate how much it would cost to give £2, £3 or £5 per month to all the charities which advertise on TV?

Time to come clean

Now that the Brexit deal has been done, maybe someone can explain why the EU is entitled to punish the UK for wanting to leave their club, the sole purpose of which is to prevent France from starting another war with Germany and getting its arse kicked for the fourth time in 150 years.

Fitting punishment

I have often though there should be a law against religious intrusion – inflicting unwanted views on other people with intent to causse alarm and annoyance. Looks like the inhabitants of that island in the Bay of Bengal, who greeted an intruding American missionary with poisoned arrows, have the same view.

You CAN have the best of both worlds!

The Prime Monster has told Jezzer Corbyn that there might not be a Brexit. She has also told the House of Commons that the UK will leave the EU on March 29th next year. Sounds like she’s switching between two virtual realities according to which suits her best at any given moment.

High-scoring poisoned chalice

After the highest scoring Monday Night Football match in NFL history, both teams will be 50% unhappy. The offences will be told by their coaches that they’re the bee’s knees for scoring over 50 points against the other lot. Meanwhile, the defences will be in the dog house for being crap enough to let the other lot score over 50 points past them.

DIY option

A lady was complaining in yesterday’s Daily Mail that she returned from her supermarket empty-handed because she couldn’t find any baked goods made without palm oil. Maybe she should have used the time she wasted on the supermarket run to bake the stuff herself using only ingredients she approves of.

The curse of championship

The Toronto Argonauts won the Grey Cup last year and didn’t make it to the playoffs this year. After what the New Orleans Saints did to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, it looks like they are equally doomed.

Parliamentary justice

Lord Grope feels cheated of justice. The woman who claimed he made an indecent proposal to her also feels cheated of justice. Thus the idea political state has been achieved – everyone is pissed off with the result.

If it works . . .

If a woman with a fake degree can work as an NHS psychiatrist unchallenged for 22 years, do we really need shrinks with degrees instead of chancers with the gift of the gab?

Even 8 refs can’t get it right

The QB of the Hamilton Tiger Cats ran in to Ellis of the Ottawa Redblacks during last night’s CFL eastern final and Masoli head-butted Ellis. And that was a major foul on Ellis for roughing the passer, according to the 8th ref? That stinks and the guy who threw the flag should be in the stocks.

You can’t beat a good rant, no matter how pointless

Desperate Donny MacLeod of the Sunday Post is fed up with Brexit and the idiots in Parliament, Labour and Tory alike. “Now it is time to get rid of these Westminster numbskulls,” he declared.
    To be replaced by what?
    Nothing on offer from Donny.

Make your mind up time

Is the word ‘scone’ pronounced skon (rhymes with con) or skone (rhymes with stone)? Neither. Something with ‘one’ in its spelling should be called a skwon (rhymes with con).

A great idea

If people can be gender-fluid on a whim, and age-fluid if they think it will give them a better chance of a shag (until the potential shagee meets them), wouldn’t it be nice to be able to be tax-fluid?
    I hereby identify as tax-free, so no more income tax, VAT, council tax, etc. Well worth having.

Not trying, should do better

If the PM ever listens to anyone, the People’s Message is that we don’t particularly want to replace you but what we do want is for you to shape up and do a proper job of giving us the Brexit that was promised, not your sell-out to our enemies across the English Channel.

Waste of time

According to the label, a jar of pesto contains 47% basil, 5.4% Grana Podano and 1.65 pine nuts to a total of 54%. Which leaves 46% unaccounted for as regards the relative amounts of sugar, salt, EV olive oil, sunflower oil, egg white, preservatives, etc.
    All of which makes rather a nonsense of rules requiring accurate listing of ingredients.

Out of service (permanently, feels like)

Is it just me or has MicroSoft gone mad with updates this month? I’ve not noticed anything much going on for ages, but suddenly, I can’t use my bloody computers because of all these messages about configuring Windows for updates.
    And when I try to switch off, there’s a blue screen telling me not to because of all the up-bloody–dating going on. Maybe we’re just not supposed to win.

Be more practical

Why don’t the Premier League clubs just buy their outgoing boss a peerage? It will cost them a whole lot less than five million quid. Assuming the price hasn’t gone up too much since Tony Blair was prime minister.

One way to do it

The Christian lady in danger of being lynched by appalling Pakistani neighbours needs to hijack a plane, join a terrorist group or blow up a Tube train. That way, she will be assured of an offer of asylum from HMG.

More Zombie treatment

Yesterday, Cabinet ministers were wheeled into Downing Street one at a time and confronted with a 500-page document containing the prime minister’s suggested Brexit deal. They were told they had to read it on the spot and they couldn’t take a copy home.
    How much would they be able to gather to take to today’s full Cabinet meeting? Not enough to offer a sensible opinion, that’s for sure. Baffle them with bumf seems to be Mrs. May’s strategy.

Zombie Parliament preferred?

Moderate Tories – good. Brexiteers – bad. That’s the message today. Translation: the ‘moderates’, who will take whatever they’re given like good cannon fodder are preferable to people who have views and principles and can think for themselves enough to challenge the political Establishment. And exactly the same applies to Labour, as far as their ‘moderates’ are concerned.

A word in your lug, mate!

Note to the editor of the Daily Mail: the Tory MPs you accuse of sabotaging Mrs. May’s Brexit negotions are merely reminding our prime monster that they won’t vote for a sell-out and she should bear this in mind during her manoeuvrings.

Worthless assurance

Is anyone ever impressed to hear that something is ‘new to Alibi’ when we all know that the programme is old to all the other channels it’s been on?

Dodgy zebras out again

Personable foul; roughing the passer; when one of the Seasquawks tripped one of the Rams into a dive to the ground with the Squawks’ quarterback in the way? No foul. And that pissant penalty by an official who was too lazy to call a real foul on one of the Rams? No excuse for that. The miracle is that the Rams still won despite all the dodginess going on around them.

Massed rallies of hypocrites

Contrast all the pomp and ceremony of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, and the tributes to our veterans, with the persecution of those veterans still living by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, crooked solicitors and sections of the British government, and it’s easy to understand what the concept of DoubleThink is all about.

Sod security, there’s dosh at stake

You’d think an outfit with the juice of the Formula One franchise would be able to tell the Brazilians to build a circuit somewhere safe from scumbags with guns or no race there.
    The fact that nothing is ever done about this suggests that corruption runs very deeply within both parties.

Gadgets for all

Little kids get training wheels to help them learn to ride a bike. Vegans get trainers to help them to become vegans? What a wonderful world we live in.

If there’s a market for it . . .

I noted when watching WW Smackdown, and going fast-forward through the fillers, that the Irish lass-kicker, had ‘I AM THE MAN’ on her shirt. Could it be that the WW is about to set up a trans championship for the ladies? Another obvious addition would be the lovely young Japanese girl who seems to be called Oscar.

Blue is good now?

We’re heard quite a lot about how the blue light from mobile phone screens and tablets is bad for people. Next thing you know, doctors are saying blue light treatment is as good as taking tablets for getting high blood pressure down. Not so much you can’t win as you’re not supposed to.

Idle speculation

Vice-Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, Rtd., it said in the paper. ‘Rtd.’? Rented? Oh! What’s the going rate for renting an admiral? I asked myself.

A foodie fad too far?

Well, well! There are ‘white vegan trainers’ to be had. And, presumably, there are also black vegan trainers available on diversity grounds, and also appropriately coloured ones for Chinese vegans, Indians (Red and Asian), etc.

Clothears again

‘His Adolph life . . .’?? Was that someone on the lunchtime TV news accusing Prince Charles of being a little Hitler? Nope, it was ‘his adult life’ which didn’t come across clearly.

There’s a rule already

The commentators on the last regular season CFL match got quite agitated when Mr. Long, the punter for the BC Lions, faked being run into. They were calling for a new rule with a 15 yard penalty and maybe also a red card. But doing that is already covered by unsportsmanlike conduct.
    Well, it is in the NFL. Maybe the Canadians don’t have that rule because, being Canadians, they are never unsporting. Unless, like Mr. Long, they think they can get away with it.

More bias

The Electoral Commission, which is shedding officers because of an anti-Brexit bias, is going after the Brexit campaigners because they suspect Russian money was used in the propaganda campaign. No sign of anyone looking into the Bremoan campaign and the cash it got from George Soros, however. Could it be that some sorts of foreign cash are cleaner than others?

London’s dunce

Bad news: London’s bus driver’s son of a mayor reckons it will take a generation to end the plague of knife crime in his city.
Good news: Mr. Khan thinks a generation is only 10 years.

Remapping the capital

Crumbs! Half of the 150,000 Russians living in London are spies! If the government could gather the nerve to boot them out because of Putin the Poisoner’s criminal activities, that would do a fair bit for the housing shortage.

Dirty deeds, not only in New Orleans

Was that a first down the Rams got from their fake field goal play in their match with the Saints? Yup. Were they swindled by the officials on the field and the replay officials? Yup.
    Did Whitehead of the Green Bay Packers get the same treatment when he was evicted from the match against the New England Patriots for a nothing offence? Yup.
    Looks like all the idiots got to wear zebra suits on Sunday.

Take your pick

What would the miserable sods in the education Blob rather have – £400 million spent on schools here or the cash used to build a world’s biggest statue to rival the one built in India with British aid money? Say, of the Bash Street Kids’ poor old teacher.

Small measure of retribution

It would have taken a heart of stone not to have laughed as Valentino “the GOAT” Rossi fell off in the lead of the MotoGP race in Malaysia, alone and unaided. The Gods finally grotted on the man who got away with so much unpunished and maybe deprived him of his last ever chance to win a race? Could be.

Mirror image

Mad Mandy in the Sunday Post takes anther pop at President Trump today; probably not realizing that her condemnations can be applied to all politicians with extremist tendencies – Corbyn, Sturgeon, and also to pontificators with an agenda to push, like her good self.

A somewhat pathetic concept

It’s Responsible Gambling Week, according to a TV ad, which I glimpsed with the sound muted. Which means what? We have a licence to gamble like idiots during the other 51 weeks of the year?

Clothears is back again

Hawkwind may be on the new £50 note! Sounds like a great idea. They were a really good band.
    Oh! Hawking.

Wow! Really?

Anyone surprised that The News Quiz on Radio Four has been convicted of an anti-Tory bias? Nope? Thought not. The BBC is complaining that it can’t find right-wing comedians. But being unable to find left-whingers with a sense of humour would appear to be an even bigger problem.

Not exactly justice

“Law chiefs’ payout to DJ Gambaccini for sex slur” the headline read. Wrong. All the money comes from the taxpayer, not the law chiefs, and the disgraced director of public prostitutions is off to enjoy a fat pension and probably a few quangocracy posts.

End of the world as we know it!

An unknown sports minister resigns in a huff and that’s a crisis for the prime minister? Only in the minds of fantasists and newspaper editors who don’t live in the real world – or who are trying to convert the real world into their fantasy world.

Right men for the job

In the light of the currently fashionable move to support real policing, maybe we need to sack all the wimpy Boys In Blue and recruit some hard Men In Black, who’ll go after criminals and bin PC crap in favour of pragmatism.

How to get noticed

Can the police sink any lower in the public’s estimation? It seems unlikely if the chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council can get lots of publicity by stating the bleedin’ obvious, namely that the police should use scarce resources to tackle real crimes rather than inventing imaginary ones, recording non-crimes and coming up with endless excuses for not doing the job they’re supposed to do.

Smear Tactic

Boris Johnson went to Saudia days before the regime had a dissident murdered in Turkey. Connection? None.
    Which means that anyone pretending there is a connection for dodgy political reasons is a scoundrel.

Changing fortunes

John Sheridan, sometime commander of Babylon 5 and President of the Interstellar Alliance, has lowered himself to become president of Supergirl’s United States! We should be in safe hands, but what about that cloud of green Kryptonite fog which zapped Supergirl? Maybe not.

Putting the record straight

Good news that Lewis Hamilton is the F1 champion again. Now, the time is ripe for justice to prevail and for M. Schumacher to be stripped of the title which he gained by deliberately ramming Damon Hill’s car and doing Hill out of his first title.
    Schumacher was stripped of his season’s points total when he tried the same tactic on Jolly Jacques Villeneuve, so the precedent is there. And if justice prevails, someone who didn’t cheat to win might make it to the magic number of seven world championships.

Improper announcement

Is it a proper Budget if the Chancellor announces that he’s going to undo all the 'not living within our means any more' if he doesn’t like what happens over the Brexit deal with the EU? And can anyone take him seriously when the Prime Minister, his boss, says she’s not going to give up her end to the Gordon Brown austerity?

What’s wrong with Tuesdays?

I had a problem getting on the internet last Tuesday, then everything magically sorted itself out the next day. It’s Tuesday again – and I had more bother, which magically sorted itself out today. Maybe I should ask my broadband company for a 1/7th discount on what they charge me if I’m going to have aggro on Tuesdays.

Not very fair

I noticed that the bloke who did the rant at the awkward old lady on the Ryanair flight was still getting a lot of stick in the Sunday papers. But going from the newspaper account of their adventure right after it happened, she came across as obstructive, entitled and just as racialist as anyone else. But the rules are different for ethnic minorities, of course.

Feline indifference

The animal show at Wembley didn’t impress the cat. She slept through all of the Eagles vs the Jaguars; apart from a couple of trips to her personal snack bar and having bit of a wash.

Big and Arrogant

“If you don’t like these principles, I have plenty more,” as Groucho Marx more or less said in one of his films. Substitute ‘silly story’ for ‘principles’ and that’s what we’re getting from Russia, Saudia and now China, where the persecution of millions of Moslems in Xinjiang province is being waved off as anti-terrorism re-education.

Probably for the best

If China and the US go to war within the next 15 years over China’s thefts of intellectual property, as the former head of US forces in Europe fears, then we won’t have to worry about the latest scare from the Dept. Of Global Warming Fraud.
    If there is a superpower war, then those in the middle won’t care if all of our current coastal areas will be under water by 2080, as the DGWF predicts. Assuming there’s anyone left to care.

Gummed mildly

Is Lord Hain likely to take any notice of dispensed-with sometime attorney general Dom Grieve taking exception to his decision to naming business magnate Phil Green as a serial deployer of gagging orders? Given Hain’s history and Grieve’s insignificance, not really.

Power gap

Oh, dear! An expert has done some sums and calculated that the government’s plan to make all vehicles electric in a decade or so has a major flaw. The country’s power generation capacity will have to be stepped up to 11 times the current level to allow over 30 million electric cars to be charged up overnight.

Circus Acts

Clown Jewels? That sounds a remarkably apt title for the next WW Big Event. All we have to do is decide where the bigger clowns are – in the ring or commentating.

Just tell them to get lost

The ‘Irish border issue’ is a load of bollocks concocted by an Irish government which is desperate to be noticed and the EU. We should just tell them that if they want a border with barriers, it’s up to them to pay for it, build it and maintain it because we’re not getting involved.

None of this death nonsense!

One of these ’ere surveys has found that youngsters barely out of their teens think that marriage should be like a mobile phone contract – something lasting for 24 months tops with an option to upgrade to a better partner when the deal runs out.

A biscuit short of a barrel

No internet yesterday, so unable to rant about this: but do the PC pillocks on Radio 4's The News Quiz ever listen to themselves? Last week, one of the worthies started talking about the disabled then changed tack to differently abled.
    But differently abled means that if someone can’t walk, they can fly? Doesn’t it?

Gottle of Geer

I get what b-stars-d and f-stars are euphemisms for. But g-stars? Clearly, I have led much too sheltered a life.

It’s all relative

I mentioned DollarShave back in February after seeing the TV ad, which features a bloke being clobbered below the belt for a reason I have never gathered; mainly because I have never seen the ad without the TV sound muted. That ad is still running and, on reflection, I suppose its outcome is a lesser evil than being killed by the Russians or the Saudis.

Technology gap

Another of life’s weirdities – why can Sky Sports never get the sound synchronized with the pictures when the guys in the studio are pontificating on NFL Sunday?

Not that original, or necessary, after all

Portugal, which has lots of cork trees, isn’t happy about the trend to wine bottles with screw caps. Hence the wonderful invention of a cork with a screw thread, which gives an air-tight seal when replaced in the bottle. Clearly, no one there has noticed that the cork from a bottle of single-malt whisky does the same job very well.

Another Canadian triumph!

The Canadian Football League’s fans at the Mansion are all agreed that they’d like to shake the hand of the scriptwriter for last night’s match between the Hamilton TigerCats and the Ottawa RedBlacks. It was great right to the last minute, and then that last minute was absolutely outstanding! Lessons for the No Fun League to learn?

Another PR triumph

The Saudi regime’s story that the self-exiled journalist Jamal Khashoggi died in a fist fight at their consulate in Turkey has interesting implications. The sub-text is that he must have been a bit of a nutter if he’d taken on odds of 15 to one. If you’re a bad guy, try to make out that your victim is even worse?

Just a thought

Any chance of getting Putin the Poisoner or the Saudis to deal with our troublesome hate preacher and save the nation a fortune?

Scammer window of opportunity

Good news: banks are going to check the name of the payee of an online transaction as well as the account number and sort code.
Bad news: they’re not going to do before July 2019.

Diversity Rulz, OK!

One thing you can’t accuse the Daily Mail of is toadying to the Tories. 50% of the columnists think the PM is a hero and the rest think, and are allowed to say, that she’s total crapola.

The Patel Explanation

That was a brilliant defence offered by a guy who was caught with 19 stolen cars in his basement garage; he’s an honest businessman who was unlucky enough to have been done over by nineteen different crooks.

Apt comparison

I note with amusement that the disgraced Commons Speaker is being called a very good Squeaker in the same sense that the much MeeToo’d Harvey Weensteen is described as a very good film producer.

Answer to a Correspondent

“What happened to the state coach for the Squeaker of the House of Commons?” someone asked in yesterday’s Daily Mail. It’s parked up permanently as Berko’s head got too big to go through the door, mate.

No, thanks

5p on a bottle of wine to pay for alcoholics? Why not make them pay for their own treatment for a self-inflicted condition? That’s make as in a legal obligation as an alternative to making the rest of us subsidize them.

Not me, Gov!

Where would we be without rogue agents? That’s the kite the Saudi regime is flying for the disappearance of their estranged citizen Jamal Khashoggi, who went to the Saudi consulate in Instanbul on the same day as 15 rogue Saudi agents (October 2nd) and hasn’t been seen since.

Not thought through

This idea of getting postmen to chat up elderly customers to find out if they’re lonely, and refer them to local dancing, art or cookery classes if they are, sounds doomed to failure. In my experience, modern postmen just want to zoom round their walk in the least possible time to get the job done. Whilst the idea might appeal to some of them, I doubt the majority want to become amateur social workers.

Opportunities for advancement

If the Church of England has Very Reverend persons, wouldn’t it be great if the organization expanded the range of titles in the name of diversity? People could really relate to a Slightly Reverend or a Tolerably Rev. or even a Not Particularly (but tries hard) Rev.

Grave future world

Listening to part of Any Questions? Is 70 on Radio 4 yesterday, I was able to suss out the snowflake/millennial agenda. Their plan is to wait for anyone who knows anything about what happened in the 20th century to die off and then make their mess of things confident that there will be no one competent to challenge them, bearing in mind that all dissent will be trolled out of existence anyway.
    What sort of world will it be when it’s run by aged millennials who think that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations ruined everything so that they never had a chance? One shudders to think.

Window of opportunity!

This is a live-mike game (the Canadian Football League warns us) which is expected to offer plenty of opportunities for weirdos to be offended. Trade Descriptions Act, dude! The filters are so good that what is said tends to be very wholesome when it’s not downright incomprehensible.

Education needed

The most lost of lost causes has to be the global warming bunch telling everyone they can eat meat only once a week. That’s even more lost than the cause of educating people in their entitlements. Such as they are entitled to live within their means, they’re not entitled to breed children they can’t support and they are definitely not entitled to more than basic food and shelter at the expense of everyone else.

Incitement to illegality

Where the bloody hell is Tokelau and why is someone called Sybil Manqum, who has a cannabis shop, sending me emails claiming she can send me weed to smoke today which is legal in the UK? Sounds like either some sort of a scam or an invitation to get my collar felt by HM Customs.

A really useful gadget

It has been pointed out to me by the Mansion’s catering manager, who has taken charge of it, that the flexible ice cube tray can be used in precision cooking. Its 12 compartments hold either the juice of 2 average-size lemons or 4 limes. I bet whoever marketed the thing never thought of that as a bit of promotional puff.

Expanding the language

How about threeché as a description for something that’s a better gotcha than twoché?

Don’t get involved

How does one avoid getting fake texts from scammers pretending to be one’s bank? I’ve found not giving my bank a mobile phone number works quite well.

Gadget reincarnated from gadget heaven

Gadgets are usually tried out and consigned to a box or a cupboard when the fail to be brilliant. But looking through such a cupboard, I actually found a useful gadget. FOI! It’s a flexible ice cube tray. No, not something for making flexible ice cubes.
    When full of solid cubes of ice, lemon or lime juice, etc., the tray can be hovered over a suitable plate as a catcher and twisted to release the cubes cleanly and easily. Brilliant!

The great debate

Which is worse, BS of VS? Both bullshit and virtue signalling are the work of annoying creeps, who have too much time on their hands. Whatever happened to decent hobbies?

The enduring A-Team mystery

5Spike is showing episodes of the classic MacGuyver rival in which the guys are captured repeatedly. B.A. is strolling around wearing a king’s ranson in gold around his neck but not once do alleged BGs ever grab it off him when they have the chance. Are we really supposed to swallow that?

Un-pret for purpose

Britain’s endemic mistrust of foreigners is fanned by the fate of the sandwich chain with the foreign name, which is involved in two allergy response deaths. And even if they haven’t actually broken any rules, people can still feel entitled to their “told you so’s”.

A small mystery

Is Prince No. 2 taking the Mick? Or could it be that bearded Prince Harry has nothing at all to do with harrys.com, which does TV adverts for shaving materials?

Could do better

BT Sport TV seems to be in full SNAFU mode at the moment. It upset the motorbike fans on Sunday by making a bog up of MotoGP and it upset Canadian football fans on Monday by making a bog of covering last weekend’s early matches.

Just ignore the strikers, please!

London’s cosmetic mayor guaranteed that there would be no strikes on public transport during his turn in the job. The token immigrant bus driver’s son is now hoping that everyone will be too polite to mention that last Friday, the trains were on strike for the 15th time since he took office.

Yes, that could be it

Judy Murray, writing in the Sunday Post, came up with an interesting slant on the Manchester University students’ ban on clapping. Snowflakes can’t do it with a mobile phone in their fist, so what they’re really doing with their Al Jolson hands is waving their phones in the air. And letting muggers spot the best targets.

Not interested, mate!

Project Fear, it seems, is having a profound effect on the British public. Being exposed to the ludicrous lies spread by the Bremoaner Establishment has turned people off politics to the extent that their default setting is now: “I don’t believe you.” when a politician starts spouting.

The weird things you learn from reading

I am currently devouring Hoax by Edward Steers, a molecular biologist turned historian. In the chapter about Pearl Harbor, I learnt that the admiral in charge of the fleet there at the time of the Jap attack in 1941 was called Husband E. Kimmel.
    What sort of parents call their son Husband!!!

Technology gap

The Health Secretary wants GPs to send patients annoying text messages to nag them into changing an unhealthy lifestyle. What he plans to do about ancient Luddites who don’t have a mobile phone remains to be revealed.

Calm down, dears!

Expanding Heathrow airport by giving it another runway will lead to the total destruction of the entire planet, the protesters plan to tell a High Court hearing. They’ll have to be sure that the dottiest of dotty old judges is on the duty roster for their day in court if they expect to get away with that one!

Never going to happen

Apparently, snowflake millennials are coming to hate the grandparent generation because a lot of them are choosing to spend their savings and not leave it to trickle down to future generations. Wrong target, though. The cash no longer trickles because any the government doesn’t steal ends up going to care homes rather than the millennials.

Something he doesn’t do

Someone should tell the editor of the Daily Mail that the words ‘Putin’ and ‘shame’ don’t belong in the same sentence. As long as he has J. Corbyn on his side, not to mention all the Corbynites at the BBC and the likes of the North Korean newsreader Fuk Jon Sno, the Russian gangster boss is fireproof.

The magic of memory

“This memory was epinephrine encoded.” Sounds very scientific and meaningful but what it boils down to is just: “This is what I want to believe is true.”

Infiltration?

Do we have Russians running the Metropolitan police? The response from its bosses to the murder of PC Keith Palmer by a terrorist nutter at the Houses of Parliament has a lot in common with the not-me-gov response of President Putin to the GRU’s attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Truth bites

Yes, it’s true, men did invent physics. Mainly because society was structured such that women had lots of other things to do with their time. The boo-hoo buggers at CERN and other research centres might not like it, but that’s the way it happened.

All gone!

There is no more piss to take after Boris Johnson told his gathering on the Tory conference fringe that he can do humility. Still, he raised a huge laugh. And people were ready to queue up to watch him do his act, which is more than the Bremoaners on the main drag can claim.

More clothears

It sounded like a guy on the TV said ‘piece of crap’. Twice. Turned out he was doing a promo for a BBC podcast by the former(?) footballer Peter Crouch – I got that from reading what was on the screen. Where do they get these people?

Don’t believe everything a fanatic tells you

Nothing is impossible with God, eh? Has Luke 1:37 ever tried unsugaring a cup of tea?

Learning Process

Who sez TV ain’t educational? I never knew there were so many Canadians in the FBI until I watched some episodes of Sue Thomas F.B.I. Eye.

A lifetime of servitude

We were wondering how many years that USAF pilot would have to work without wages to settle his dept to society after gaining the dubious honour of being the first to crash an F-35 fighter. But no one had any idea how much he’s paid, which made calculating how long it would take to pay off $100 million a bit of a problem.

Getting away with it

Three penalties committed by the Patriots on one play during the 2nd quarter of their match with the Dolphins. Only 10 yards lost when it would have been 30 in Canada. Maybe a change of the rules south of the border is called for to punish a group bad attitude?

Daft but enjoyable

E4 was supposed to be showing A Good Day to Die Hard last night but we got Die Hard 4.0 instead. Not that there’s likely to be much difference between them. I’d more or less completely forgotten what happens in 4.0 so I was able to enjoy all the daft stunts without knowing what was coming; like Det. McClane shooting a gunman out of a helicopter by smashing the top off a fire hydrant and later turning a car into a surface-to-air missile to shoot the chopper down.
    Totally mad, totally fun.

Let’s not bother about facts

No question, the death of that severely allergic girl on a plane was a tragedy. But cardiac arrest means that the heart has stopped. Which means that a defibrillator, which is used to restore a regular rhythm to chaotic heartbeats, is of no use if the heart is not beating.

Selective fairness

The Boy Beckham has got away with one. But if it was because of the negligence of the government department which failed to get his speeding fine notification to him on time, it’s whoever screwed up who should be getting the stick. But hey, responsibility doesn’t apply to the public sector.

More antisocial meeja hacking

Anyone daft enough to have put bank account and other financial details on FaceBook may have been hacked by (Russian?) bad guys. But the good news is that they have a grace period while the bad guys’ megacomputer trawls through the messages of 50-90 million FB customers in search of anything exploitable.

Brilliant Job

Someone at moonpig.com, the online personalized gifts firm, has been tasked with going through all of the orders to weed out those featuring pictures of the customer’s naughty bits. It seems there is a rise in this sort of request for cards at St. Valentine’s day, and women are as bad for doing it as men. Mr. Moonpig is reported to be resisting calls for him to introduce pop-up cards.

Take another week off!

Are we bothered that the Daily Mail’s proof-reader seems to be on holiday? Not if we can be treated to gems like the one in the latest Corbyn conference report. J.C. is reported to have ‘confplained’ about something, which clearly started out as ‘confirmed’ and nearly got to ‘complained’. But the new word deserves to survive to be used to describe any sort of whinge at a political party’s conference.

Buy me and try one

‘Greed is good’ will be out under a Corbyn government. ‘Theft by the state is good’ will be substituted – with the usual looney left suspects as the beneficiaries.

You’re never too iconic to be trolled

I was glad to learn that it’s only women over 19 who can’t use a backpack without getting their collar felt by the self-appointed Fashion Police. Mind you, someone wandering around sporting one which cost 400 quid deserves some stick.
    None of that for me – I got my backpack as a free gift with an order from my stationery supplier in an earlier phase of my life.

Collapsible Ben

The new NFL ‘roughing the passer’ definition is causing a lot of grief for defensive players but there is a case for trying to prevent star players, like Rodgers of the Packers, being put on the sideline with a broken collar bone. There is also a case for preventing players from dishing out wrestling clotheslines and blows to the quarterback’s head.
    But there should be a similar obligation on officials to be able to recognize bad acting, like Ben Roethlisberger’s dramatic, flag-drawing collapse in the Steelers’ MNF match with the Bucs. And I write this as an admirer of the Steelers, who cheers them on when they’re not playing my team.

Communication breakdown

I went to a clothing company’s website the other day but my size of the items I looked at was out of stock. Their response was an email: they’d noticed my visit and they invited me to check their website again or ring their customer services on a premium-rate phone number.
    I sent them a reply telling them my size is out of stock and that’s why I didn’t buy anything. Their response was another email offering me 10% off if I bought within 48 hours.
    I went back to the website, my size is still out of stock. So what good is 10% off something which they can’t supply?
    Some firms just don’t get it.

Notice me, PLEASE!!

Lord Forkbender, sometime Tony Blair flatmate and crony and the bloke who made a bog of the Millennium Dome, would like all drug use to be legalized so that Labour drug users and pushers are no longer tarred with the brush of criminality. Sounds like that pruning of the House of Frauds is even more overdue.

Keep it up

We seem to be doing very well for NFL matches on TV at the moment. The Saints in Atlanta was a cracker. So was the Chargers vs the Rams. And the Detroit Lions sticking it to the Patriots!

Clotheyes again

A quick glimpse of the screen left me thinking that the lead character in the current version of S.W.A.T. is played by a guy called Sheman, which explained why he/she thinks a tofu stir-fry is the catering bee’s knees. But, in fact, the currently blackened and demoted Steve Forrest character is played by a guy called Shemar, which totally ruins the idea.

New words for the modern world

1. Streamhorning - streamlining a shoehorning, tight-squeeze job
2. Grossdresser – a bloke in a pale pink frock with vivid green stripes
3. Hookertitute – a person who shags a big wheel in the industry to get a meeja job of some sort

Heading for a fall

The EU won’t buy her Chequers Plan for Brexit. Neither will the DUP, enough of her own party to sink it and all of this country’s parties who aren’t the Tories. So what does the prime minister do? Go all defiant and say everyone else is wrong and it’s “my way or the highway”. Strong and stable, stubborn or just plain pig-headed?

New attention-grabbers’ venue

You’re a previously successful fraudster who wants a bit of attention. Your visa is about to run out and you need some sympathy. What do you do? Head to Salisbury, pretend to be poisoned and claim that the Putinocracy is out to get you.

Pointless packaging puffs

“Real Lancashire Eccles Cakes containing pure butter” it sez on the wrapper. But is anyone likely to buy a product containing impure butter?

Infamy, they’ve all got it in for me

With biogs of Denis Norden in today’s papers, a small salute to the creator of the above phrase with the ludicrous story that a Corbyn aide with dodgy credentials has been refused a House of Commons security clearance for obvious reasons. This, he is claiming, is evidence that MI5 is plotting to prevent a Corbyn-led government. Nothing wrong with that guy’s imagination and a fine example of a me-centred universe.

The Germans have a word for it . . .

. . . or we could provide one. The appetite of foreigners for our language has created Franglais in France and Denglisch in Germany. Going the other way, one of the staff came up with Mischungskrachtel to describe a work of fantasy fiction in which the characters have the names of real people who are celebs or currently in the news. Like that book about the porn actress and the president called Trump.

It’s the way he tells them

You go to all the trouble of releasing your punch line to get max. coverage in the meeja. Then you make a bog of the performance. That’s why on-line dictionaries are now adding a note to their definition of hubris: “See Vince Cable, Brighton, 2018”.

More Sound & Fake Fury

Go sober for October? Well, it has a rhyme to it. But what if you never drink enough to get yourself pissed? In October or any other month, like most people? The slogan becomes just typical N.U.L. BS.

Nothing happening

Silence is a much undervalued commodity. And much to be enjoyed in small doses, especially when it’s quiet enough to hear the clock ticking and the cat snoring.

Definitions for Today

An ‘expert’ is someone who will excomplicate when you need him to explain.

Too rude?

The Daily Mail has a feature page, to which readers send jokes and Wordy Wise suggestions; slightly modified words with a new meaning, e.g, alcoprop = Dutch courage. One of the staff came up with ‘whores de combat’ meaning ‘tarts with attitude’ after a trip to France. But she didn’t send it in as the Mail is a family newspaper.

The name says it all

You come across some weird names in American football. North of the border, in Edmonton, there’s a star player who rejoices in the first name of D’Haquille but everyone calls him ‘Dook’. Whether or not that sounds anything like what his weird parents intended when they entered him for a ‘Give the Kid a Weird Name’ contest is a matter of conjecture.
    South of the border, in Kansas City, one of the coaches has an even better name. When the match commentators give the offensive co-ordinator for the K.C. Chiefs a name check, it sounds like Eric The Enemy. Which is a moniker which combines a job description with menace effortlessly.

Wheels to come off

The government is threatening Amazon with a Cardboard Tax because of its habit of sending small items out in a HUGE box with a mass of paper padding inside. The stated aim is to raise cash for local councils which are struggling with their pretence of doing recycling.
    How sad everyone will be when the tax gets though Parliament and Amazon redoes its packaging policy and no cash is raised. But the taxpayer ends up having to pay for more civil servants to administer the cash collection process which doesn’t collect any cash.

Half-assed, more like

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life was a title spotted in the latest catalogue from bibliophilebooks.com. £18.99 reduced to 7 quid.
    Here’s another worthy under the illusion that the human race needs to change its ways to preserve the current range of diversity of the planet’s residents. Surprise! The planet isn’t some sort of conscious entity!
    There’s nothing which can care whether the Earth is a frozen ball of ice or a greenhouse hot-house. But try telling that to the zealots.

The Road to Feck & Burn

According to one of his mates, the Corbyn recipe for Britain is to encourage the feckless to steal from the feckful to fund a luxury communist revolution. Quite what will happen when they’ve blown all the cash and no one will lend them any more has yet to be disclosed.

Retired and gone to seed

Was that really ‘bow down to the king’ Triple Haitch on WW the other day? That bald old bloke with a beard? Crumbs! How are the mighty gone to waste. (waist?)

It’s all about the money

Oh, dear. The Archbish of Cantab takes a pop at Amazon and the other multinationals like Google, calling them tax dodgers and avoiders of social responsibility, only to find that his employer has huge investments in them and that’s something he should know about because he’s on the investment committee.
    Then there’s the conspiracy theory about the ERG in Parliament having a secret slush fund. Maybe the Russians came up with that one.

Back in the box now, Diane

What does Diane Abbott do when no one has noticed her for ages? Go Silly Season Plus and pretend that British immigration policy is just like Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in the 1970s.

They’re at it again

Was it okay for Boris Johnson to use his prime ministerial suicide vest metaphor? Yes, if it made a lot of outrage junkies make even bigger fools of themselves.

Blame it on the Yanks, yeah!

That’s an interesting theory: Britain shares its language with the US and it has caught the American obesity plague. But European countries where English isn’t spoken are less susceptible to American advertising and have less obesity.

Unwanted bargain

“Save 60% on a stainless steel soup maker”
    Okay, but just how tasty is stainless steel soup?

First rule of painting

As soon as you apply white paint to an exterior surface, some stoopid little black insect will land on it and get stuck.

News at a distance

From across the room, the headline looked like “Soup and snake diet on the NHS to reverse diabetes”. On closer inspection, it was ‘shake’ not ‘snake’, which is much less fascinating.

Border divide

Watching the Packers squeak a home win over the Bears in the first week of a new NFL season, I was assured by CFL fans, was like watching the Eskimos hosting the all-conquering Stampeders, but in reverse.
    The Pack overcame a 20-0 deficit to win 23-24. The Esks went 28-48 up and managed not to throw the victory away and eventually won 42-48.

That’s amazing!

I’ve always thought ‘wiseacre’ was an archetypal American-English word. But according to yesterday’s Daily Mail, it dates back to 1595 and well before English arrived in what is now the US. You live and learn.

First rule of DIY

No job involving the use of sharp tools may be completed without a blood sacrifice.

Absent Icon

It was strange to be watching Sky’s NFL show with no Kevin; mainly because he’s no longer with us at a rather young age. That Grim Reaper – she don’t care who gets took. Not too impressed by the magic bean-counters but if they can persuade people to pay them good money, good luck to them.
    Ah, the luxury of 4-down American Crunch.

Dickheads at BT Sport

It’s 12 minutes past midnight and the CFL fans are on the edges of their seats because the injury-hit Banjo Bowl match in Winnipeg is inside the 3 minute warning, and the Roughriders are leading the home-team Blue Bombers by 29-27.
    Then what happens? The dickheads at BT Sport start showing the next match instead of staying with this one to the finish. Having let the programme before the CFL match over-run into the CFL time slot.
    No excuse. The fans extremely very disgruntled today.

One wrecker assesses another

Tony Blair, who hijacked Old Labour with his New Labour project (and ran the country into the ground) is worried that Jeremy Corbyn’s hijacking of the Labour party will do the same. Which rather ignores the lesson of history, namely that Labour always wrecks things then scuttles off into the bushes until the Tories have done some repairs.

More crunch in America

Oh, dear! The NFL season is upon us as well as what’s happening in Canada, which doubles the amount of gridiron football the addicts have to watch. Time to get a refresher on the jargon; first and lunch, second and tea, third and supper, fourth and pontoon. Or something like that.

Get out of that!

That was a great put-down the Russians got from our man at the UN when they moaned about not being let in to the Novichok poisoning investigation. “You don’t recruit an arsonist to put out a fire, especially if it’s one he started.”

Long overdue payback

5Spike keeps doing promos for a new series about a gang of Vikings during reruns of the A-Team. Can’t see the attraction, myself. They were just Scandinavian scumbag thieves and murderers, and the first thing we need to do when there’s a working time machine is go back and drop a few nukes on them.

Veracity quibble

“Home cooked food served daily” says the sign in front of a pub which I pass frequently. But is it really cooked in someone’s home rather than in a kitchen attached to the pub?
    “Here cooked food” is what the sign should say.

Sick TV

Spotted in last night’s TV menu for Sky Arts: “The Last Laugh. The dilemma of using the Holcaust as a topic for humour.” Which raises the obvious question: “Why would you want to?”
    Unless you’re a Corbynite and you feel it’s compulsory, of course.

Getting away with it

The two GRU agents who carried out the Novichok attack in Salisbury in March have been named and pictured. But as Russia won’t extradite its criminals, they’re probably working on their memoirs, looking for a movie deal and expecting an easy life on the Putin’s gravy train as MPs in the near future.

Sub-prime

Is anyone impressed by a firm that calls itself 1st Class Something? Well, they would, wouldn’t they! Or does it acknowledge that there might be market opportunities for a 2nd class service? Such as: 2nd Class Valets – we don’t make much of an effort but it will look okay and we’re cheap.
   Could work with the right marketing strategy.

Now, we know

A member of the party’s national executive committee has the explanation for the anti-Semitism row, which is embarrassing Labour a little bit. It has all been made up by Trump fanatics in the Jewish community!

Graceful exit

Would it not be a good idea for 70+ actresses who complain that they can’t get a decent job any more, e.g. Maureen Lipman, to opt for a dignified retirement plus occasional TV appearances to remind everyone of their glory days?

Post Brexit fishing quotas

Another of my associates cracked this during a very productive dinner party: The government should offer one-year licences to fish in British water, with a renewal option, to British firms which use British boats and British crews and pay British taxes in full.
    The licences should be on a ‘use it or lose it’ basis, which would prevent companies which don’t actually catch fish from selling quotas to foreigners. Any unused quotas would be factored in to the conservation calculations used to set the following year’s quotas.

Deft definition

Here’s a good one for an offence junkie, courtesy of one of my associates: Someone who parades around with her tits wobbling like twin jellies to attract attention, and then throws a major wobbly if anyone looks at them.

Wrong colour, mate

SNP vice-boss K. Brown would be well advised to change his name if he thinks he can build an economic case for an independent Scotland. No one is going to take a Scots politician called Brown seriously on financial matters after the shambles created by his namesake, New Labour’s Gordon F. Brown, when he was Chancellor and PM.

100% wrong

“This program may contain coarse language that could offend some viewers. Discretion is advised.”
    This miserable disclaimer before CFL live-mike matches completely misses the point. Valour should be advised, not cowardly discretion.

Tell ’em anything. They might just believe it.

You’re a bloke dressed in female clothing and you’re tooling around on a skateboard wearing a blue wig. Suddenly, you attack a female jogger. What do you tell the court?
    “I thought I was attacking David Cameron.”
    Yes, that would work!

No way period

London should have had the Crossrail scheme last year. The city’s long suffering commuters will be lucky to get it before next year’s Xmas. And yet the government is still hell-bent on going ahead with H2S and claiming it can be done on time and on budget. La-La Land.

No way forward

In the 1990s, councils were closing schools because there weren’t enough children to justify keeping them open. In the 2000s, Labour opened the flood gates to migrants and now, there aren’t enough schools.
    More proof that when here today, gone tomorrow politicians do something, they always make things worse for everyone else.

Take heart!

Iceland’s victory in the two decades of cod wars with Britain is being offered as a source of encouragement to our battered fishermen. Iceland’s fishers have prospered since then, and ours can do the same post-Brexit and following freedom from the EU’s grabbage. That’s the theory of it, anyway.

He said, he said

Frank Field, one of the few bastions of decency in the Labour party, has baled out. He was a total rotter and he quit before we could give him the push, sez the mouthpiece for his constituency party. There’s never a shortage of slime and someone to sling it in politics. Which makes the news that on-line abuse of politicians is on the increase no surprise. There’s nowt like anonymity for putting lead into the pencil of those with an imaginary grievance.

Brownian finance

Wonga goes wonky? It seems incredible that a company with a million customers paying interest on loans at up to 6,000% APR could go belly up. But it’s amazing what you can accomplish if you try hard enough.

More fake news

Shop prices are rising for the first time in 5 years? Really? My housekeeper tells me this is total bollocks. She can produce receipts showing that they’ve been creeping up and up relentlessly for ages. Five pee here, fifteen pee there. There has definitely not been a 5-year pause.

Their stupidity, our money

When is racial and sexual discrimination okay? When the government want to recruit female Asian and black firepersons in the name of diversity and at the expense of available and competent white males.

Social nicety

If you see someone wearing a ‘pronoun’ badge, turn round and walk away. Not getting involved with that sort of person always makes sense.

“That guy taco on one, right?”

What percentage, I wonder, of the TV audience can get anything out of a live-mike CFL match? Are there enough zeros to go between the decimal point and the number ‘1’? Probably not.

Not terrifically funny, but true

When is a hate crime not a hate crime as far as the police are concerned?
    When it’s anti-Semitism perpetrated by a card-carrying member of the Labour party.

Sporting barrel-scraping

Little League World Series baseball on BT Sport? Who’s going to watch that apart from the parents of the kids involved and paedophiles?

No worries, mate

Deposed SNP leader Alex Salmond has found himself on the wrong end of some MeeTooery. But he’ll be okay. Police Scotland are investigating and they are known to be not much cop.

Pointless record broken

A fine example of having more money than sense – paying $340,000 for a bottle of Japanese whiskey. But, not doubt, the auction house in Hong Kong appreciated its commissions.
    The big problem for the buyer is what to do next. Put the bottle on the mantlepiece to show it off or booze it with some mates to show off an easy come, easy go attitude.

Racing dead loss

No racing at Silverstone; the riders thought it was too dangerous. And the Belgian GP wasn’t up to much after the mayhem on the first lap. But it does help to have some Sunday papers to read when there’s nothing much happening on TV.

Even more thinking time

Oh, the suspense! Will there be any MotoGP today with big puddles on the track at Silverstone and conditions unsafe right now? All we at home can do is sit in front of the TV with a cup of tea and wish the rain away.

Thinking time

No internet for a couple of days doesn’t stop you thinking. Mr. Virgin’s engineer gave me a new hub whilst discovering that there was a problem with the external infrastructure, which would be fixed last night as it was a priority one matter. As a result, we now need to do some resetting of all laptops which connect to the hub wirelessly.
    Which is where the thinking comes in.
    Hi-Fi is a well known abbreviation for High Fidelity. But Wi-Fi? Shouldn’t it be Wi-Ne if it refers to wireless networking? But whoever decided to trademark Wi-Fi instead might have thought that Wi-Ne sounds too close to something to do with whining, and opted for a less loaded sound.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”

No VM internet on Friday or yesterday, but I can still comment about yet another Grenfell Tower fraudster being hauled before the courts, as reported in Saturday’s paper. Whenever that happens, the name is always foreign, which suggests that we need to be a lot more selective of the quality of immigrants. And to be more rigorous about chucking out the disreputable ones who are already here.

Nature finds a way

Good news for the Millennial Snowflakes – they’re not going to have to save up for their old age because they won’t have one. Apparently, their unhealthy lifestyle means that their ranks will be thinned to manageable proportions by diabetes, heart attacks and strokes at middle age.

Had to happen!

One of the MeeTooers who slagged off Harve WeenSteen has had to pay hundreds of thousands of bucks to a young male actor for MeeTooing offences. Pots & kettles, come away!
    Rejoice! The Universe does have a sense of humour after all.

Diversity is . . . Insanity

It had to come to this eventually – the pillock in charge of the magistrates’ union demanding more criminals in the ranks of the judiciary in the name of diversity. Where’s the colonel from Monty Python when you need him?

Not so wonderful

Speedster Usain Bolt is going to make a new career with an Aussie football team? Good luck to him and yah, boo to the boo-hoo-buggers who claim it’s just a publicity stunt. Of course, a bit of the steam went out of the ‘pleased for him’ when I learnt that it’s to play football football, not Aussie Rules.

Surprising fact

I never knew that the Labour party runs courses in anti-Semitism. But that does explain why so many of them are so good at it.

Small clarification

In actual fact, Jammy Oliver’s Jerk Rice is nothing to do with Jamaica. The ‘jerk’ refers to the likes of sari-wearing MPs of Jamaican descent who are stoopid enough to go on about cultural misappropriation.

A self-perpetuating cycle

“Poverty is man-made and it can be unmade” is the virtuous quotation. Unfortunately, as soon as some of it is unmade, along come more unfortunate, or just downright feckless, people to make more of it. It’s the closest humanity has come to perpetual motion. But it does provide lots of job security for the virtue professionals.

Not exactly a big deal

Scotland’s Fave Newspaper had a major Scottish criminal to put on the front page today. James Ward has been put of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Now 65, Ward has been on the run for 6 years after his scam involving investment in non-existent precious metals went belly-up.
    If they ever catch him, the Feds hope to recover millions from him to pay court costs. But as his scam involved just $350,000, it sounds like only lawyers, court officials and Feds will make any money out of it. And it doesn’t say much for the FBI’s standards if someone who didn’t stroll off with MILLIONS can end up on the Most Wanted list!

Laziness or back-scratching?

What is the point of telling us the total number of years in gaol a gang of criminals collected? Especially if they all didn’t receive the same sentence. It’s just idle and pointless journalism. Of which there is a lot about.
    The same could be said about a judge pontificating that the criminals’ scheme was sophisticated and well thought out when there wouldn’t have been much point in trying it otherwise. Unless it’s the judiciary trying to puff up the police by creating the impression that they were way smarter than the crooks.

Fun to come

We can look forward to a spot of vigorous entertainment when the Silly Season ends and the political loafers come back from their extended, taxpayer-funded hols. Nigel Farage, the spiritual leader of UKIP, is going on a national tour to expose the lies and evasions offered by the PM and her Bremoaner pals as they plot to sabotage Brexit and frustrate the wishes of 174 million voters.

We’re supposed to be surprised?

Online betting firms make their money from people who are hooked on gambling and they aim their pitches and free gifts at this type of person. Captain Obvious is in the room again.

More stupidity

Jeremy Hunt used to have a fairly good reputation when he was the boss of the NHS. His move to the Foreign Office to replace Boris Johnson seems to have unhinged him, however, if he really believes that a no-deal Brexit will be something the country will regret for generations!
    But maybe he’s forgotten that Snoflakes have an attention span of 7.3 seconds.

Silly Season Staple

One gets the impression that the news media would be really stuck for something to put between the adverts were it not for the drunken brawls of sportsmen and the opportunities they generate for lengthy moralizing and faked indignation.

Serious offence

Corbyn is in real trouble now! A man of the people staying at a Five-Star hotel during his jolly in Tunisia in 2014? The bastard! The class traitor!

Oh, the agony!

On thing this country never seems to run short of is drama queens, who claim they’re going to be forced to leave the country if something terrible happens. Like Brexit being followed by the collapse of British society as we know it (won’t happen) or anti-Semitism becoming compulsory if Jeremy Corbyn becomes the prime minister of a fascist-left government (won’t happen).

Soviet Warming

The latest conspiracy theory is that the Russians are responsible for all the melting of Arctic ice and the stranded polar bears (aaah!). Apparently, the Putin People want to build military bases in the thawed areas as a basis for claiming new territory and the exploitable natural resources that go with it.
   Sounds very credible!

A spot of seasonal weather

The Corbyn witch hunt has been aggrandized to a storm in a bathtub, but he still has nothing much to worry about. Especially if his chief witch-hunters are the PM of Israel and the chairman of the Conservative party, neither of whom is exactly unappalling.
    And the BBC is still on his side when it takes a break from prosecuting its witch hunt against Boris Johnson.

The worst of all possible worlds

Whoever came up with that ‘Diversity is Strength’ slogan for garments worn by CFL players, coaches and staff was obviously in it for the money rather than the sense.
    Diversity is everyone walking up to the line of scrimmage and doing their own thing rather than what a coach told them.
    Diversity is 8-stone men, and women, playing linepersons and some kid who wants to be a star pretending to be a quarterback.
    Diversity is a shambles rather than the best of the best competing, and not something many people would pay good money to watch.

A new law for human society . . .

“For every witch hunt, there is an equal and opposite witch hunt”
    The one against Boris Johnson for failing to appreciate the bhurka is balanced by the one against Jezzer Corbyn for appreciating Palestinian bad guys too much.

Not enough space to fill!

I’ve just been reading about someone with a weight problem, who casually announced that he’s lost 9 stones – and he’s still got a bit to go before he’s at his ‘ideal’ weight. After a quick calculation, I found that if I lost 9 stones, there would be just a skeleton left. Which leaves my mind boggling about the size of the bloke before he started his diet!

Space-filler

You put your newspaper down for a minute and the next thing you know, there’s a cat sitting on it, having a wash. Further proof that cats are psychic.

Yah, boo to you!

After reading Mad Mandy’s column in today’s Sunday Post, it would be easy to imagine her dressing up in a bank-robber burcow outfit. Not to show solidarity with women oppressed by male Islamists, of course. Rather as an expression of female hatred for Boris Johnson for being right and having lots of popular support.

Virtue flags flapping cynically

“Rough sleeping has become a visible sign of a society failing people” is the message from Labour, which is in opposition and anxious to buy the rough sleeper vote with other people’s money by giving them fixed abodes.
    This view deliberately ignores the validity of the converse, namely that a lot of rough sleepers are people who refuse to engage with society. But then, when did facts have anything to do with politics?

Let Darkness Fall

I’ve just realized that I have missed out on a generation of illumination devices. I still have a fair stock of the now banned incandescent light bulbs, bought cheaply when newspapers were doing stunts against the ban, for those places where a light is needed infrequently but reliably.
    I have a much bigger stock of compact fluorescent light bulbs; bought at silly prices like 10p each when the manufacturers were trying to bribe us away from incandescents.
    I should have gone on to halogen bulbs, but I didn’t and it’s too late now because the EU will ban them at the end of this month. Bring on the next brilliant idea and I’ll probably ignore that too.

Tokenism without end

It’s time for a non-white star to play James Bond, allegedly. Sounds like we’re in for a huge epidemic of tokenism. If there’s a black Bond, there has to be an Asian one. And a Chinese Bond. And a woman. And someone from the BLT ‘community’.
    A couple of centuries hence, no doubt, someone will rediscover Ian Fleming’s books and shock the world with a white, male, hetero Bond.

Scum risen

Oh, dear. The Tories are turning into Labour. The big problem is that the people at the top of the party are no more Tories than Tony B. Liar was Labour. They have no political principles or ethics, they are just chancers, like Blair, Osborne and Dave, who are in politics as a stepping stone to meeting people with lots of loot so that they can Mandelsleaze them.
    The PM, unfortunately, doesn’t feel able to get a grip. As with Brexit, she is hiding behind the sofa whilst her minions stage a proxy burka war aimed at kneecapping Boris Johnson.
    Oh, for another Tory leader with a fraction of the stature of Maggie Thatcher.

Sir Buggeroff

Having got his knighthood, Britain’s richest man is off to tax-free Monaco with his £21 BILLION fortune. Could it be that he’s worried about a Labour government and a Labour chancellor trying to buy votes with his loot? He has form for sticking two fingers up to Labour on tax matters when Gordon F. Broon was the prime monster.

Rewriting the cultural code

When is a video game a work of art? When it contains Nazi symbols, such as swastikas. The regulatory body responsible for entertainment software has created the exemption so that video games don't fall foul of the ban on the display of anti-constitutional symbols in Germany and they can contribute tax revenue to the state.

Nothing to see, move along

You can tell it’s the Silly Season when someone like Margaret Hodge is passed off as a saint and the virtue-signallers in the Bremoan camp erupt when Boris Johnson unleashes some home truths about a cult costume and just repeats what other Tory grandees have said about burqs in burqas in the past.

Surfing the Bubble

A gang of criminals, who were importing Albanian illegals in leaky boats at £5.5K a head, saw their customers as sources of cash only and they weren’t bothered about ’elf ‘n’ safety, an indignant immigration minister complained.
    But they’re criminals. Only an idiot politician would expect them to behave like decent people. In their criminality.

It seems so obvious

In Stitchers [20:00 Syfy Channel, weeknights], why don’t they give Kirsten a bathing cap to keep her pony-tail out of the water in the Stitching tank?

Do not apologize, Boris!

He’s right, our former Foreign Sec. Women in a burka or a similar shame costume do look like letterboxes and they do look like bank robbers. And people wearing fancy dress should expect to be noticed and commented on if they stand out from the rest of society. Freedom of Speech, and all that. We’re not a Moslem state yet.

Cart before horse?

I’ve only ever seen this TV advert with the sound turned down but people are getting their heads shaved by the MacMillan cancer charity. But wouldn’t it make more sense for them to pay not to have their head shaved?

Don’t remind me

The Calgary Stampeders were wearing the numbers of famous past members of the roster during practice at the weekend. One of them got to wear the number of a certain D. Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock of WWF fame, who had a fairly unhappy time in Canada, according to his book of memoirs, and didn’t make the team. But I suppose he’s not bothered about that now.

Unacceptable ignorance

Oh, dear, what has happened to the education system in Scotland? Judy Murray, mother of Andy and a woman in her 6th (?) decade, admitted in yesterday’s Sunday Post that she has only just recently found out why Edinburgh is known as Auld Reekie. The price of decades of neglect by Labour then a decade of the SNP: Scots who know nothing of their heritage. Sad, really.

Out of the line of fire

A very entertaining morning’s motorbiking in the Czech Republic, which seems to be in the wrong part of southern Europe, as far as the heatwave is concerned. Spain is frying but Brno was cloudy and getting cooler, and they were actually wondering about rain (none arrived) before the main race of the day.

Not terribly reliable

It’s pretty much a summary of the character of the British weather. We’re supposed to be having a heatwave but it does get a bit grey and cool at times. Not today, though. It’s warm and sunny; well, most of the time.

Evil-free zone

“He’s not a messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy,” his mother said of Jesus in the famous biopic. Similarly, Osama bin Laden’s mom would have us believe that he was a shy boy and a good man. Which just goes to show that mothers are from another planet.

It’s true, no lead is safe!

That was an amazing Thursday Night Football match between the struggling World Champions of Canada, the Toronto Argonauts, and the east division leaders, the Ottawa Redblacks. The Argos were 34-14 down after 11 minutes of the 3rd quarter and looking dead and buried. But they fought back to 41-42 with 1 second left of the 4th quarter. Magic stuff in the CFL.

Keeps the conversation going . . .

Anyone who says “Hi, guys!” to mixed groups has to desist as it’s not inclusive enough, sez the Gauleiter of Greetings.
    In future, those who use the expression must say, “Hi, guys!” to include those who think the greeting has evolved to embrace women as well as men, and tack on a “Yo, scumbags!” to include the miserable gits who think it hasn’t. [And claim that’s dramatic irony and therefore okay.l

Corbyn has a point? (Surely not!)

Labour’s leaders appear to have a problem with the policies of Israel’s sociopathic leaders rather than Jews in general. The contrary position appears to be that if some regimes persecuted some Jews in the past, then all Jews should get a permanent free pass.
    Spot which view is less reasoning.

Non-news

We’ve had real news, fake news and now we’re getting what looks to me like non-news. Okay, the Manchester Arena bomber was born here of Libyan parents, who went back there. And he had to be rescued by the Royal Navy when things got sticky in Libya. But all this stuff about the rescue in the papers just looks like needless nit-picking.
    He was a nutter, who killed a lot of people, and now he’s a dead nutter. And experience tells us that all the nit-picking won’t identify the next lethal nutter in line.

Not that hot

We’re supposed to be in the grip of another heatwave this week, but it is definitely chilly and breezy outside. I suppose that’s what they call ‘fresh’ – which is a very fine apology word!

More pots and kettles

MPs are accusing the charity sector of having a culture of denial, indulging in complacency which verges on complicity and believing that protecting the good name of the organization takes priority over abuses by the staff.
    All of which applied equally to the accusers, whose ranks are full of expenses swindlers, bullies and sex-pests, and who have a finger permanently pressed down on the ‘cover-up’ button.

Imperfect world

The Oxfam Experience tells us that the charity sector, and that includes the United Nations Organization, is run by men who think that the best way to put cash into a disaster area is to keep the local sex workers in full employment, and by pantomime dames with a Ph.D. in turning a blind eye.
    But if they get the job done . . .

Just plain wrong

We get some serious rain after a fairly long dry spell and you just know what the water companies will say. Yep, it’s the wrong type of rain. Next thing you know, they’ll be telling us they missed their targets for fixing leaks because they’re the wrong type of leak.

Great idea

Now, there’s a think tank which lives up to its description! I mean the one which came up with the idea of using the overseas aid budget to deport migrants who have no right to be here.

Strange expectations

“On a low income, it’s hard to be healthy; fresh vegetables are expensive,” said a lady quoted in Saturday’s Daily Mail. Utter garbage. People don’t cook dinner any more (they get carry-outs) where she lives because they’re too bloody lazy to make the effort.
    Note to the author of the article: a bag of supermarket salad doesn’t really count as ‘vegetables’.

Fair dos for the taxpayer

Is it reasonable to pay migrants in detention centres no more than £1/hour for cleaning, painting and other maintenance duties? Actually, yes, if they’re not contributing a red cent to their board and lodging.

Not a brilliant effort, really

The longest eclipse of the moon of the century started before moonrise, which was pretty much at the same time as sunset, which meant that the eclipsed moon rose into full daylight. That has to be rank bad planning on the part of whoever organizes these things. Good job there was a lot of wind blowing the clouds along when they got in the way.

Natural advantage

Another good thing about having some grounds attached to your residence is that you can have a fairly clear horizon. Which is why I’m expecting a small invasion of neighbours tonight to watch the eclipsed Moon rise with no inconvenient buildings in the way.

Can’t wait

What a wonderful time we’re going to have in the future when Parliament bans all activity during hot weather. We’ll all be able to sit around watching old TV shows on the internet all day. And then worry about starving to death because all the shops have been forced to close and the larder is bare. And the taps have run dry because no one is allowed to fix burst water mains.

Careless fingers

People who have names with convincing typo potential:
1. Oily Robbins.
2. Scumas Milne.

A severe attack of the supraliminals

Did Britain’s newspapers really need to tell us the country is melting. It’s not news. Those in the south are experiencing it, those elsewhere know it’s not true. Why can’t they tell us something we don’t know? Some new news. That would be good.

Cat update

Later on yesterday, one of the gardeners reported finding two visiting cats sheltering from the rain in the gazebo. One at either side, of course, to avoid infringing on the other cat’s territory.

Everybody panic ’coz of the weather!

Meanwhile, we have someone’s black-and-white cat taking refuge here to avoid the rain.

Natural justice vs political BS

Two ex-British jihadis end up in the US facing either the death penalty or GTMO. Nothing wrong with that and all the boo-hoo buggers who have a problem with it need to be either ignored or laughed at and reminded that these characters have been stripped of their British citizenship, depending on how annoying they get.

Some 'comes around'

Am I delighted by Vettel's catastrophe in the German GP? More surprised that the Universe doesn't hate Lewis Hamilton quite as much as I thought it did. And grateful that the same Universe rained on a grand prix and turned it from a dull procession into something with a bit of life in it.

Clerihew Four

Michel Barnier
Will never get a Hip, Hooray!
While he’s a block in the road
With his head stuck in dick mode.

So much for education, education, education

Are there really people around who need to be told the difference between a lunar and a solar eclipse, as the person who wrote the article about the lunar eclipse on Friday tacked on at the end of the piece in today's paper? If there are, the Blob and the Labour party deserve a Nobel Prize for services to dumbing down.

A bit wonky

‘A mostly dry day with just the small chance of an isolate shower’ was the weather prediction in today’s paper. It has been drizzling all morning. But the gardeners appreciate it.

Now you come to mention it . . .

That bloke who spotted that a departures board written in Welsh looked like something cobbled together by a dyslexic was spot on. Having seen the picture, I agree. It does!

Clerihew Three

Theresa May
But if she actually will, no one can say.
As for her principles and red lines,
They have many more varieties than Heinz.

May we please just Brexit?

All that pratting about by the government at Chequers and the ministerial resignations was for nothing. EU say No!

Well, I never

I was shocked to learn that we have an Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Taxpayers’ money is actually being spent on telling people how to misuse drugs! Shocking!
    And if the advice is coming from civil servants and quangocrats, it is bound to be rubbish, which makes the abuse of the public purse even worse.

Potted Philosophy

Or what people talk about in pubs. The opposite of the mythical concept of the mangina has to be a shenis. Which leads to the question of which would be more popular at a theatre near you: The Mangina Monologues or The Shenis Serenades?

Lest we forget

The Greatest General of All Time nearly got himself blown to smithereens on this day in 1944. But he was spared because the assassin didn’t have enough courage of his convictions to pull the pin when he was standing next to Mr. Hitler.

Some choice

Ban the work of Kipling because he was racist. Replace it with work by MBPs. How is that not equally racist?
    Ah, but Kipling’s was bad racism and this is good racism, especially if the person responsible is an MBP.

Yes, your ears do deceive you

Baroness Hutin? Who she?
    It’s a BBC newsreader’s version of Vladimir Putin, Clothears!

Clerihew Two

Jean-Claude Juncker
Couldn’t get any druncker
But if the taxpayer’s buying
He’ll keep on trying.

Weird lot, these Yanks

The things you learn from casual reading! According to a court in Maryland in 2006, mooning is a form of expression protected under the constitutional right of freedom of speech. Which leaves me wondering what the judges had been smoking as mooning is performed at the opposite of end of the body from the organ of speech.

Vested interest

Is it fair to point a finger at Libyan coastguards if some migrants refused to board their ship when intercepted on the way to inflict themselves on Europe? Of course, not. But if the people doing the finger-pointing are making a living out of the refugee trade, their opinion is hardly unbiased.

Something to grab you!

With a title like Bermuda Tentacles, how can anyone resist this 2014 film, which is sure to be a totally daft sciffy creature feature. Great fun, but no mention of the fate of the idiot who chose to send the US president’s plane through the Bermuda Triangle in a violent storm, which had to be treason.

A word in your Clerihew

Vladimir Putin
Doesn’t believe in shootin’.
When he wants someone dead,
It’s poison, not a bullet in the head.

Pseuds only, pliz

‘Pre-owned’ – how is that somehow superior to ‘secondhand’? Except to people who like to kid themselves that they’re getting something special that’s not availably to the peasantry.

New broom looking to sweep out inherited trash?

Having hacker and fugitive J. Assange occupying a room in your outpost for 6 years is proving too much for the residents of the embassy of Ecuador. And he’s costing his hosts lots of money; even more than the Metropolitan Police Farce! As a result, the new president of the country is trying to arrange a way of getting rid of him.
    You’d think Assange would have had enough of it by now and he’d do them the favour of digging an escape tunnel!

Unreasonable expectation

Isn’t there something rather illogical about his constituents telling ‘shamed Tory minister’ A. Griffiths to do the decent thing? He’s a proven rotter with no moral compass, which means that ‘the decent thing’ is the last thing he’d do!

YOU can fool none of the people none of the time, mate!

The Prime Minister would have us believe that the country will be left with no Brexit at all if her MPs gang up on her and thwart her brilliant plan. But it is excruciatingly obvious that her only plan is to thwart Brexit. Which means that no matter what her MPs do, it won’t make a scrap of difference.

Plus ça change . . .

It used to be the News of the Screws that did the dirty vicar/MP/whatever stories. Now, it’s the Monday edition of the Daily Mail making up for uneventful weekends.
    p.s. “It’s draining my battery.” Is that some sort of modern euphemism?

You berk, Jezzer!

That old fool Corbyn has called for the Tory Government to step aside if it cannot deliver something approaching an intelligent relationship with Europe. I’d like to invite him to step aside if he cannot deliver something approaching an intelligent relationship with reality.

Boldly gone turkey

I watched the last half hour of that 2013 Star Trek film on Channel 4 on Saturday night. [BTW: is it me or did it go dark incredibly quickly during that half hour?] OMG! What a load of cobblers.

Some CFL fans are looking cheerful

Okay, the Eskimos beat the Argos by the odd rouge. But a win is a win and there are no more points to be gained for winning by more than one point. Even if it is over the World Champions of Canada.

Department of useless knowledge

How do the Swiss government know that 100,000-150,000 Swiss citizens get through around 5 tons of cocaine per year between them? It gets boffins to measure the content of benzoylecgonine, one of the metabolites, in waste water and make a guess. I suppose producing this sort of statistic is a living, and maybe a bit more interesting than some.

Life chugs on regardless

Despite all the posturing by has-beens, hypocrites and nobodies, Donald Trump is still President of the United States of America. Imagine their amazement on discovering that no one took any notice of them (and try not to laugh).

Game of Throwns

“Ah wer thrown,” said the accused when asked why his evidence had changed since the police interview. “There wer two on ’em, one asking another question as I wer trying to answer the last one. If owt has changed it’s coz Ah wer thrown the first time.”
    “And that, Milord, is the case for the defence.”

Don’t know when you’re lucky, mate

A Ross Clark got a full page in yesterday’s Daily Mail to moan about being denied a hernia op on the NHS even though he’s paid thousands of pounds in income tax. Given the number of women who have complained to the Sunday Post about the havoc created by faulty mesh implants, maybe his doctor is doing him a favour!

More hoop merchants

A charity is getting excited because one-third of primary school kids haven’t been taught to ride a bike. Something which I never did. In fact, I didn’t do 6 of their top 10 essentials for childhood and it never held me back. But I doubt the control freaks want to hear that; they just want kids jumping through their hoops.