We know, we know

Nothing like an MP for stating the bleedin’ obvious. M. Hiller, chairman of the public accounts committee, has described public sector pay as a ‘gilded staircase’ and she has noticed that it is fuelled by people awarding themselves more money because they have convinced themselves they’re worth it.
    No danger of Parliament banging some heads together and telling them they’re wrong, though.

Still hot

32 degrees Centigrade again at the end of the afternoon in the computer room yesterday, and that was despite a very chilly wind blasting anyone who dared to venture outside. I suppose that’s a tribute to the quality of the Mansion’s thermal insulation.

Man of Straw

Surprise! There is some secret state in league with dark forces and Jack Straw was lying his head off about rendition when he was Home Sec. But he was a Tony B. Liar crony, so what else do you expect?

Hot, ain’t it!

New world record: 32 degrees Centigrade in my computer room yesterday at the end of the afternoon. No wonder I was sticking to the keyboard and the mouse!

Pay the legal profession enough and they’ll do anything

The news that the Civil Partnership Act (2004) breaches the ’uman rights of mixed-sex couples, who wish to enjoy this lesser alternative to marriage raises an interesting possibility.
    How soon will it be before some judge declares that insisting on same-species partnerships also abridges ’uman rights?

Oh, for some USEFUL ones

Further proof that we have useless idiots in charge of the police – their leaders don’t want the government to make it illegal for Travellers to invade private property, or public land, and turn it into a rubbish dump.

Does anyone love the EU?

That’s apart from the Drunckers and the others making money out of it, of course. Switzerland is not happy about free, unchecked movement of labour from the EU. The Swiss People’s Party has collected enough signatures on a petition to force a referendum on the issue of the right of EU citizens to work in Switzerland, which should throw a cat nicely among the pigeons.

Attention all shroud-wavers

Some people do have to be happy – the creed of diversity demands it. But we’re sure you’ll understand if you’re not included as you wouldn’t appreciate it.

Just as dead

Whilst Prince William is laying wreaths in Palestine, is there any chance of one at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in memory of the terrorism victims who died there?

Rights – but not for everyone

An ex-footballer says he doesn’t like a female commentator’s shrill voice and he’s mobbed by the usual suspects. But a bloke is as entitled to a personal opinion/preference as any sour-faced harridan-git in these enlightened times, surely!

Wheels of glory

Much good cheer among the motor racing fans at the Mansion. The Forces of Evil Vettel got it wrong at the start and let Lewis Hamilton drive untroubled back into the lead of the drivers’ championship in France. And then the Aussie whinger went out on lap 1 of the IndyCar race at Road America in sunny Wisconsin. Some days, the Gods do smile.

Something else that sucks . . .

. . . is the NHS in Scotland, where operations are being cancelled because the management is unable to provide sufficient sterilizing facilities for surgical equipment. Just what exactly do the useless sods do all day?

BT Sport sucks

Much indignation among the Canadian football fans at the Mansion yesterday afternoon, when they settled down to watch Friday Night Football replays but got a second repeat of the Thursday Night match, which they’d already seen.
    No explanation on the BT Sport website, of course. The TV menu there was still showing the wrong programme information. Which is pretty pathetic if BT is supposed to be a communications company.

Damn diverse!

If the BBC really wants to score virtue points, it will have to replace David Dimbleby on Question Time with the daughter of a Pakistani bus driver.

Put the blame where it belongs

Amid all the Trump-bashing by the not-so-great and the not-all-that-good, has anyone got anything to say about the parents who breed children they can’t afford to support and then dump them on the charity of the American taxpayer?
    No? Surprise!

Further proof

The theory that ‘Idiots are in charge everywhere’ got a big boost from Exeter University this week. The luvvies there went into a meltdown apology after sending out an inspirational quotation by Field Marshall Rommel. Sounds like the vice-chancellor got worried that it would melt all the Snoflakes and deprive him of their 9-grand tuition fees!

Security for all

Mr. Druncker, the EC president, is making more waves over the post-Brexit Irish border. As he and his mates have been playing the terrorism card shamelessly, and the EU doesn’t want the UK to be part of current policing and security co-operation schemes, the time has come to call their bluff.
    Post-Brexit, no Irish citizens will be allowed to enter the UK on national security grounds, and any living here must leave before the end of March, 2019.
    Let’s see what old Druncker and his mates have to say to that!

Academic BS

‘Stonehenge was built using Pythagoras’ theorem two millennia before he was born’, I read in today’s paper. A couple of ‘experts’ have decided that one incarnation of Stonehenge included a rectangle marked by 4 stones, which forms a perfect Pythagorean triangle when split in half.
    But as the ‘experts’ go on to find perfect 3:4:5 and 5:12:13 triangles in landscape features separated by hundreds of miles, one tends to wonder why they don’t just blame it on ancient astronauts rather than a serious Greek mathematician.

Yes, common scum

Visions of Richard Littlejohn wheeling his Port-A-Shrine to the station where the three graffiti vandals (not artists) were killed, loaded with empty aerosols to sell to those creating a memorial for the dead pests. No danger of any of them paying to clean up their messes.

Too cute for words

If the exam board is called something as crass as Eduqas, it comes as no surprise to learn that it bogged up ‘listening’ French and Spanish exams by getting the spoken information out of sequence with the questions.

Isn’t cat logic weird?

They know that pulling a partly open door with a paw will open it wider. But why don’t they just give it a good yank instead of doing just enough to sque-ee-ee-eze through a tiny gap?
    Maybe it’s a feline desire to create a sense of mystery and leave humans thinking at a cat could never have got through that tiny gap.

More cloth-eyes!

It said ‘Home Office Minister’ but the light was bad and I read it as ‘Some Office Minister’ at first. Which tends to sum up most of today’s politicians. Most of them are total nonentities of the ‘who he/she/it?’ category.

Foot-shot

Don’t you just love it when someone like Laura Bush, wife of George W., sounds off about the children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents in Texas, only to be told that it was a bill passed when her husband was president that made entering the US illegally a misdemeanour and the separation is what the law demands? And nothing to do with President Trump.

Today’s daft corporate slogan

‘Beyond Office Supplies’ was seen on a van belonging to an outfit called Zen, which was parked on the pavement, delivering supplies to an office. But beyond? I don’t think so.

The infinite, and pointless, spread of diversity for its own sake

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with an all-female cast presented as if played by a bunch of convicts! What will the BBC’s next bit of dotty diversity be? Hamlet as played by a bunch of Islamists who are about to go out on a killing spree?

Consequences? Nah!

One wing of the Glasgow School of Art was wiped out by a fire in 2014. Now, the whole building has been reduced to just a shell as a £35 million restoration was approaching completion.
    Fires at the end of such a project are a known hazard. How many people will get the sack for allowing this one to wreck what was considered one of Glasgow’s iconic buildings? My guess is none.

Fun in Barcelona

The Catalunya MotoGP race was a real demolition derby, with crashes all over the place, Rabat going off into the gravel with his bike on fire! and only 13 finishers. It was a pretty boring win for Lorenzo but the guys behind him did more than their level best to keep the crowd entertained.

Pointless qualifier

Watching the Eskimos facing up to the Blue Bombers, with lightning thrown in!, we got the inevitable player statistics. Including quarterback sack numbers. But who else, other than a QB, is ever sacked?

Hold the front page? Naaah

Putinstan 5, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 0. A record home team win for a World Cup opener.
    How much did that cost?

Don’t you just love Thursdays?

What the FK are you doing, you stupid bloody machine?? I have things I need to do.
    Working on updates. 74% completed.
    Do not turn off your computer.

Statistics, and trivial stats

Polluted air in the North of England could be reducing life expectancy by 6 months? B!F!D!

Yes, idiots are everywhere

The things some coppers will say to get themselves noticed! Like the deputy chief con. of S. Yorkshire, who claimed that England football fans who carry a national flag could come across as imperialists and cause antagonism when surrounded by Russia’s state-sponsored football hooligans.
    That’s only England fans who are the imperialists, of course, not the fans of any other nation.

Foreigners are just weird

What does the Spanish FA do when the head coach of their national team is appointed the new boss of Real Madrid? Sack him two days before the team has its first world cup match (against Portugal).

A year of significance

The Office for National Statistics has declared that the unemployment rate of 4.2% is the lowest  since records began 47 years ago. Which invites us to ask what was it that happened in 1971 to  make the government suddenly decide to make a guess at the unemployment rate something which it needed to know? Answers on a PC to the usual address.

Not a nice man at all

What a slob Patrick Jane, a.k.a. The Mental Case, is. He gets a brand-new couch from the FBI and what does he do? Wipe his mucky boots all over it. The scumbag!

Simplified baking

Mary Berry might chuck all the base ingredients for a cake together in the mixing bowl, but if you’re mixing by hand with a fork, it’s actually easier to incorporate the flour if you mix the butter with the sugar first and then add the flour.
    And if the butter is straight from the fridge, à la Berry, use a knife to chop it into the sugar before you finish the job with a fork.

Ministry of Scumbags

I see the Daily Mail is claiming a victory for its campaign to get a safe haven in the UK for Afghan interpreters who are at risk of being murdered by the Taliban.
    It just a shame that the scumbags at the Ministry of Defence, and the politicians in charge of them, can’t do the decent thing unprompted and without a boot up the backside from a national newspaper.

More to shout about in Texas

The Texas 600 is a swindle as the number is kilometres, not miles. But there was a guy leaping out of a car on fire on lap 7, and the Aussie whinger blew it; unfortunately, taking out another driver on his way to bash the wall. Shame about Wickens being taken out by a ‘racing incident’ with Carpenter. Cudda bin another win in his rookie year. But it was to be Cool-Hand Dixon’s night.

Nothing much to shout about

The shouty bloke on the Sky Sports F1 commentary team had a bit to do on lap one of the Canadian Grand Prix. Then it was back in his box until he tried; and failed miserably; to make the procession seem a bit exciting at the end.

Turn about is fair play

The SNP reckons putting off holding an independence referendum until they think they can win it would be a good idea. Which means that it would be only fair to give their opponents the right to hold yet another referendum when they think they can win – to make it the best of three.

You live and learn

A Labour MP reckons it’s Dickensian for the Lord Provost of Glasgow to swan around in a Rolls-Royce limo. They had Rolls-Royce cars when Charles Dickens was around, then?

Why, aye!

The Daily Mail is getting a new editor, who’s called Geordie Greig. What wasn’t explained is whether that’s really his name or he’s notoriously from Newcastle.

The right of reply

Don’t you just wish that when some scumbag journalist yells a cheeky question at a minister in Downing Street that he/she would turn round and yell: “If you’re going to talk like a twat, wear a silly hat.”

Just an offensive affectation

Is it sexist to object to female tennis players shrieking and screaming through their matches? Not at all. It’s biology. Women have higher-pitched voices than men on the whole (that’s real women) and their shrieks are more piercing and would normally be taken as a sign that they’re in deadly danger and in need of help; usually from some big, strong bloke(s). So no wonder they’re upsetting when they’re done just to put the opponent off.

Belgian doctors are great!

When a woman found herself stuck with a gym contract she couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be likely to use, she got her doctor to write her a sick note to get out of the contract. And when the gym shopped the doctor to his professional association (the equivalent of the GMC here), they ruled that the doctor had acted in the best interests of his patient and had done nothing wrong.
    How brilliant is that!

The bruvvers, united . . .

Has Labour’s Brexit strategy spit the party? No, way! The management of HM’s Opposition has created such a mess that every faction of the party hates what is on offer and the whole party is united in opposition to the mess.

Cant from Khan

Labour’s mayor of London, the token bus driver’s son, is big on moans about reductions in the police budget. But he never seems to have anything to say about why there isn’t as much cash sloshing around. Probably because he was cheering Gordon bloody Brown (Labour) on when he spent the nation into bankruptcy.

Rights & Merits

Lawyers playing the race card seem to be getting a lot of TV exposure in the coverage of the Grenfell Tower inquiry. There’s a lot about the divide between rich and poor, but not a lot about what the clients of these taxpayer-funded characters have done to deserve the right to pick the pockets of people with more than they have. But that’s how the politics of envy operates.

Nothing for free

It looks like a brilliant bit of technology in the advert: a watch which is powered by light and never needs to be fed a new battery.
    Except for one thing.
    My watch spends its daytime life up my sleeve, so when would one of the brilliant new ones ever see enough light to charge it up?
    One of my watches is a 1970s Seiko self-winder, for which a gadget to rock it back and forward at night was (may still be) available for those people who don’t move about enough during the day to keep it wound up. Maybe the brilliant new light-powered watch needs to be put next to its own little night light when the owner is asleep to make sure that it has enough juice to keep going through the following day.
    Maybe that’s a brilliant new business available to some entrepreneur: flogging such night lights.

Danger! Pace car driver!

Well, there we all were, lined up to watch the second IndyCar race at Detroit but what happened? The clown in the pace car smashed it into the wall at 70 mph while leading the cars from the pits on to the track for the start. So it was talk among yourselves for 34 minutes while they swept up the bits.
    Whoever made the decision about cautions did a very sensible job during the race. Drivers who managed to unscrew a screw-up were allowed to do it under green-flag racing. Could Mr. Rossi be related to the pace car driver? He certainly blew it big time on laps 64/70 and gifted what looked like his win to RHR.

Danger! Wildlife!

You’d think all the crowds and the noise would send wild animals in the area looking for cover but not in Italy. A crazy hare (not knowing it’s June not March) did its best to wreck today’s Moto3 race at Mugello by scooting across the track and avoiding the leader’s front wheel by millimetres. Not quite as dramatic as Kornfeil’s save a couple of weeks ago, but getting there!

Nothing new under the sun

What would the film world do without Jaws? There are tons of films in which the shark is replaced by tornadoes, a swarm of piranhas, a volcanic eruption and GKW. Which leaves me wondering: Which film’s plot did Jaws rip off? Answers on a PC to the usual address.

Who?

I’ve heard of five of the Vogue list of the world’s 25 most influential women. Is this a record?
p.s. Two of them because of whom they’re married to.

There are idiots everywhere, unfortunately.

There’s some idiot Quick Crossword setter who thinks the answer to Treacle (6,5) is Golden Syrup. Obviously an idiot who doesn’t know that treacle is dark enough brown to look black and it comes in red tins, whereas golden syrup is a golden yellow colour and its tins are green.

No, it isn’t fair

Why is it okay for women to ogle half-naked men and not vice versa? Because wimmin think the rules are different for them and they will be for as long as men let them get away with their sexism. Maybe they should be renamed the unfair sex.

Let’s not be blunt

Anyone who tries to ban pointed weapons, like pencils and ball point pens, is going to end up stabbed so many times that the pathologist won’t be able to count all of the holes.